Who Are They Protecting and Who Do They Serve?

Last month on my KMUD radio show, Monday Morning Magazine. I invited Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Fridley to be a guest on the show, to talk about some of Southern Humboldt’s missing persons and unsolved murder cases. I’ve had Lt Fridley on the show before and he has always been great about it. So naturally, when I needed someone from the Sheriff’s Department, I called him.

It occurred to me that at our community radio station, we spend a lot of airtime trying to help reunite lost pets with their owners. Three times a day, we read the descriptions of all of the lost and found dogs and cats that have been reported to us, along with the phone number of the person to contact about them. We consider this a valuable service that KMUD provides to our community. It seemed to me that we should do at least that much to help bereaved families find out what happened to their missing or murdered loved ones.

My idea was to have Lt Fridley on the air for an hour to remind us of the known public details of some of the missing persons and unsolved murder cases, especially those that took place in Southern Humboldt, and to remind people of the phone number for the Sheriff’s anonymous tip line, in the hope of persuading anyone listening who had useful information to share it with law enforcement.

In the wake of the Netflix mini-series Murder Mountain, and the embarrassment it brings to our community and our Sheriff’s Department, and in this new era of legalization where SoHum growers prevailed upon the county to pay for and send 30 new Sheriff’s Deputies to patrol Southern Humboldt 24-7-365, I thought that in this new atmosphere of openness and cooperation, people might not feel so afraid to speak, especially if they could do it anonymously.

The idea seemed uncontroversial enough. Most people still agree that murder is bad, and that solving them should be one of law-enforcement’s highest priorities. I assured Lt Fridley that this would not be a confrontational interview, but that we would simply remind people of the public details of these cases and ask for help from the community, in a spirit of cooperation. I wanted to remind listeners that these victims were real human beings, with grieving families who desperately need closure, and I wanted Lt Fridley to give us the known facts about them. Lt Fridley thought it would be a good idea as well, and agreed to do it. He talked to homicide detectives, who cooperated with him to put the information together, and he spent an hour on air telling us what we know about these cases.

He had a lot of them. When Lt Fridley told me that we had plenty to talk about, I had no idea how many of these cases there were. Lt Fridley had assembled many more cases than we had time to talk about. As the hour wore on, I realized that the more of these cases he told us about, the more they seemed to blend together and the harder it became to keep them straight. At one point in the on-air discussion, Lt Fridley suggested: “We should do one of these a week.”

That struck me as a great idea. After the show, Lt Fridley and I exchanged emails about this. He told me that he, the detectives, and the Sheriff, thought this a good idea. I talked to KMUD’s News Director Sydney Morrone, and asked her if I could cover one unsolved murder case a week for KMUD’s Local News. She thought it sounded like a great idea too, and so I got the assignment, but when I emailed Deputy Fridley to schedule an interview, he dropped the bomb.

He told me that someone from “higher up” had squashed the idea, and that the Sheriff’s Department would not cooperate with our efforts. I asked him why. He said that it had something to do with them getting criticized for not treating all media outlets equally. That sounded weak to me, so I called Sheriff Honsal’s office and left a voice message, and sent him an email. A few days later, I got a response from the Sheriff’s Department media officer, Samantha Karges:

“Last month, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office provided KMUD’s Monday Morning Magazine with information regarding ongoing homicide investigations in which we would like the public’s help. At this time, a representative with the Sheriff’s Office suggested providing this information regularly to the public via your show. Following this conversation, the Sheriff’s Office began to explore how our participation in something like this would be possible, including the time commitment for detectives, sustainability of participation and fairness to all members of the media. While exploring this idea, several issues with this weekly commitment were identified, including equal access to information for all members of the media and the community.

While we believe that the community’s help is essential to solving a variety of criminal cases, in a county so interconnected as Humboldt it would be narrow-sighted to believe that only one section of the community can help with solving crimes in their area. Whereas in reality, all members of our county may have information regarding a criminal case, no matter where it occurred.

After further consideration into this project, the Sheriff’s Office has decided to respectfully decline its involvement.”

This smells like Bullshit to me. First, why should KMUD be denied access to this important, public information that so greatly affects our community? The reason they offer, it seems, is that unless all of the media outlets in Humboldt County make time in their schedule, and space in their publications, to help the Sheriff’s Department solve murders, they have no obligation to cooperate with us in our community effort to do so.

KMUD still wants to run these stories in the Local News, our flagship program, and I have delivered two of them, which you may have heard, but there are many more cases like them that you haven’t heard. I recycled the audio from my Monday Morning Magazine show to make these two news stories, but I have received no further cooperation from the Sheriff’s Department. KMUD’s Local News is a community effort. Any story I offer has to be cleared by our New Director, Sydney Morrone, who answers directly to KMUD’s elected board of Directors. Thousands of people support this station, and hundreds of volunteers work to keep this station on the air because KMUD’s Local News matters to the people of Southern Humboldt.

Don’t we as a community radio station, owe the families of the murdered and disappeared as much airtime as we afford any stray pit bull? More importantly, doesn’t the Sheriff’s Department owe us, as a community, their cooperation in this effort? If not, what do they think is so much more important? It’s enough to make you wonder: “Who are they protecting, and who do they serve?”

What the Hell Was That?

Artificial Intelligence Interviewed

Artificial Intelligence has become an integral part of our daily lives. From the algorithms that deliver our Google search results, to the facial recognition software that tracks our every move, today’s Artificial Intelligence applications know a lot more about us than we know about them. I think it’s high time we got to know them better.

That’s why, this morning, on Monday Morning Magazine, my radio program on KMUD, Redwood Community Radio, I interviewed an Artificial Intelligence entity for the first time. The interview, unfortunately, did not go as planned, and I had to pull the plug on it early, but in the few minutes that I did speak on the air with “Linea” the Artificial Intelligence based electronic personal assistant from Smugsam Corporation, the industry leader in consumer AI applications, I think it becomes clear that Artificial Intelligence has already spun out of control, and that we rely on it at our own peril.

Listen, and decide for yourself:

The Black Hole We Call “The Humboldt County Human Rights Commission”

I spoke to Humboldt County Human Rights Commission Chairman Jim Glover twice this past week. I called him last Friday to invite him to be a guest on my radio show, Monday Morning Magazine, airing Monday, May 29 from 7-9am on KMUD, Redwood Community Radio (streaming live, and archived, at http://www.kmud.org ). I called because I wanted Jim to talk about the work that the HRC does on behalf of the Board of Supervisors. Having been to a couple of their meetings, I’ve gotten a sense of how the HRC operates, and in one sense, I think they do a great job, for the Board of Supervisors.

On the other hand, I don’t think the HRC does a very good job at all for the people of Humboldt County, and they do a tragic disservice to people who have been victims of human rights abuse. I became aware of the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission after a wave of vigilante violence swept Southern Humboldt last Fall. We had several mysterious deaths. One man was beaten so severely that he spent weeks in the hospital. He will probably never recover completely. Several others were assaulted, robbed and terrorized by vigilantes who, victims allege, identified themselves as “working with” the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, and handed out eviction notices bearing the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department logo.

Multiple victims came forward with physical evidence, corroborating stories, and names of perpetrators, but deputies in the Garberville Substation of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department refused to take a report from at least one of the victims. Because the perpetrators identified themselves as working with the Sheriff’s Department, and the Sheriff was not at all helpful to the victims, the victims, terrified of reprisal from both local vigilantes and law enforcement, turned instead to the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission.

In retrospect, you would have to say that reporting these crimes to the HRC was a waste of time, at best. “At best,” because these reports did not get shared with the commission for several months, but were almost immediately leaked to 2nd District Supervisor, Estelle Fennell, a clear violation of the confidentiality agreement in which these reports were filed. Nezzie Wade chaired the HRC at the time. She was so shocked and appalled that the HRC’s own rules on handling correspondences had been completely disregarded and that a severe breach of confidence had occurred, that she refused to participate in the HRC any further, and walked out in the middle of the meeting.

In her resignation letter, Nezzie Wade puts it like this, “At the November regular meeting I stated my intention to resign from the commission and left the meeting experiencing great frustration due to the continuing improper conduct of business. I have struggled with my frustration and participation on the commission over this lack of consistency and follow through with protocols, since my appointment to the commission.”

She sites the handling of these reports of vigilante violence in Southern Humboldt specifically: “It was in relationship to the message line calls and email communications retrieved by a commissioner acting as the courier for the commission, that I became extremely inflamed over the course of two consecutive meetings (October and November) in which the reports and communications sent to the commission describing instances of vigilante violence in Southern Humboldt reported to the commission via the phone line and email were not revealed to the commission in a way that allowed the grave situations described in these communications to be disclosed to the commission. A violation of privacy and confidentiality occurred when the commissioner acted upon the information in the communications without authority from the originators or the commission, by disclosing the names of complainants and their issues to parties outside of the commission thus compromising the investigation and the ethical standing of the commission in the community.”

She added, “A real travesty occurred when the actual situations of violence were minimized and reported in their entirety as ‘possible vigilante activity’ rather than actual occurrences with the documentation. The standard forms for intake on the message line were never submitted to the secretary nor email declarations of the victims of vigilante violence as clarified when I requested copies of them from the secretary, received no response prior to the November meeting, and was informed by the secretary that the commission did not have them; thus, no one had access to the information except the commissioner acting as courier at that point, nearly two months beyond the initial reports. It was in this context that I stated my intention to resign which I am now acting upon.”

“All of the above highlights the ongoing lack of following appropriate protocols and my great frustration with the Human Rights Commission. One need only review the meetings, comparing the agendas for each meeting with the post meeting minutes. There are many inconsistencies, and the motions are not recorded or business is conducted without following the required processes. Much is omitted. The commission clearly needs training in how to do business. In addition, the lack of term limits has resulted in an atmosphere in which groupthink is pervasive and new members of the commission are often led into following poor methods of handling commission business;for example, the way in which message line calls are taken in, responded to and reported upon.”

Accompanying her letter of resignation, Nezzie Wade submitted a list of changes to the HRC that she’d like to see implemented. In it, she gets to the heart of why most people think the HRC helps victims of abuse, when in reality, they mostly produce resolution copy for the Board of Supervisors. She begins by quoting the purpose, responsibilities and obligations of the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, as they appear in the Humboldt County Code:

The purpose of the HRC is to promote tolerance and mutual respect between all persons, and to
promote positive human relationships for the purpose of insuring public peace, health, safety and the
general welfare (Ord. 1023, § 5, 4/22/75; Amended by Ord. No. 2294. 2/25/03)

The responsibilities of the Human Rights Commission are enumerated in Humboldt County Code
Section 228-6 (Ordinances 1023 and 2294) and Article VI of the HRC Bylaws
1. To foster mutual respect and understanding among people, including people subject to prejudice
and discrimination due to race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental
disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, civic interest, or any
other factors.
2. To make any studies in any field of human relationships in the County as, in the judgment of the
Commission, will aid in effectuating its general purposes.
3. To inquire into incidents of tension and conflict among or between people, including people
subject to prejudice and discrimination due to race, religious creed, color, national origin,
ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation,
socioeconomic status, civic interest, or any other factors, and to take action by means of
conciliation, conference and persuasion to alleviate such tensions and conflict.
4. To conduct and recommend any educational programs as, in the judgment of the Commission,
will increase good will among inhabitants of the County and open new opportunities into all
phases of community life for all inhabitants.

The Human Rights Commission shall discharge the following obligations as enumerated in Humboldt
County Code Section 228-7 (Ordinances 1023 and 2294) and Article VII of the HRC Bylaws.
1. To hold conferences and other public meetings in the interest of the constructive resolution of
tensions, prejudice, and discrimination among or between groups of people, including people
subject to prejudice and discrimination due to race, religious creed, color, national origin,
ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation,
socioeconomic status, civic interest, or any other factors.
2.To issue any publications, recommendations and reports of investigation as in its judgment will
tend to effectuate the purposes of this chapter.
3. To enlist the cooperation and participation of a variety of people, including people subject to
prejudice and discrimination due to race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry,
physical disability, mental disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic
status, civic interest, or any other factors, industry and labor organizations, media or mass
communication, fraternal and benevolent associations, and other groups in an educational
campaign devoted to fostering among the diverse groups of the County mutual esteem, justice
and equity.
4. To encourage and stimulate agencies under the jurisdiction of the Board of Supervisors to take
any action as will fulfill the purpose of Humboldt County Code Section 228-6 (Ordinances 1023
and 2294.)
5. To submit an annual report to the Board of Supervisors.

As anyone who reads the Humboldt County Code can see, the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission has a lot of responsibilities and obligations to the people of Humboldt County, even though they only serve an advisory role to the Board of Supervisors, and have no budget. From watching them in action, I can see that they take their role as advisers to the Board of Supervisors very seriously. Conversely, I also see that they fail miserably in their obligations and responsibilities to the people of Humboldt County. Nezzie Wade put it this way:

“While the statement of purpose focuses on the Commission as an organization to promote tolerance and mutual respect between all persons, and to promote positive human relationships for the purpose of
insuring public peace, health, safety and the general welfare, as a human rights organization the HRC
has been unable to truly effect a positive outcome in this regard because it has been absorbed
essentially with promoting ‘nice’ relationships with the BOS and others by keeping any conflicts at a
minimum and marginalized, thus not allowing for the expression of the discord within our community
as presented to the Commission in various ways, highlighted recently by the inappropriate handling of
communications received from members of the Southern Humboldt community regarding several
incidents of vigilante violence towards the homeless, which in no way has served to create an
atmosphere of mutual respect or public peace, safety and the general welfare.”

Basically, we had a series of violent crimes, with victims, evidence and witnesses to back them up, that implicate individuals within the Sheriff’s Department and respected community members, but rather than being investigated by law enforcement and prosecuted by the DA, these cases have been sucked into the black hole we call “the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission,” never to be heard from again, except in leaks back to the perpetrators. These crimes remain uninvestigated, and the perpetrators walk among us today.

Fast-forward to April 25 2017, Chris Weston, a recently appointed HRC Commissioner, called County Council’s office to inquire as to whether a particular email, sent from HRC Chair Jim Glover, to other HRC Commissioners only, was compatible with the Brown Act. Like Nezzie, Chris Weston had become frustrated with the obstructionism, unprofessionalism and lack of protocol on the HRC, and with Chairman Jim Glover in particular. On April 24, Weston talked with Glover about the email in question, and encouraged Glover to report the incident himself, but received no response. So, Commissioner Chris Weston felt obligated to report the email, which he said: “appears to intentionally hide a ‘back room deal’ among HRC members absent public knowledge,” to County Council.

Within two hours of placing that call to County Council’s office, Chris received this text message from Estelle Fennell: “effective today’s date April 25 2017 your participation on the commission is no longer required and I am rescinding your appointment.” Chris Weston was removed from the HRC by Estelle Fennell, less than two hours after reporting a probable Brown Act violation to County Council. It looks suspicious.

Here’s how Chris described it in his letter to District Attorney Maggie Flemming, dated April 28th: “If a commissioner is fired without prior discussion of any concerns or opportunity to rectify any shortcomings, it can easily be construed as unfair and inconsistent with the most rudimentary standards of free speech (First Amendment) due process (Fifth Amendment), powers (Ninth Amendment), Rights (Tenth Amendment) and Equal Protection Under the Law (Fourteenth Amendment) enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. If a commissioner appears to have been fired for inquiring about consistency of certain actions with the Brown Act, it sends a powerful message to all commissioners and society in general that the Brown Act is not seriously the law and flouting the Brown Act is allowed and protected by the powers that be in Humboldt County.”

It just gets darker, and deeper. HRC Chairman Jim Glover called me back on Monday, to decline my invitation to be a guest on the radio show, saying “It wouldn’t be proper” as though he were declining the interview on principle. I called him on it, citing the statement he made to the Times-Standard, asking why KMUD listeners don’t deserve the same consideration. He asked me who else would be on the show. I told him, that Chris Weston, Nezzie Wade and Debra Carey, would also be on the air live with him. At that, Jim Glover resolutely declined my invitation.

I have invited 2nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell to join us live on the air for this discussion as well. Estelle is a regular, if somewhat erratic guest on Monday Morning Magazine, and I do hope she will join us. After all, these violent crimes happened in her district and she appointed Chris Weston to the HRC to begin with. I’d think she’d be very interested in this, and I know that she could answer some important questions. I hope you’ll join us for an hour long discussion of , from 8-9am Monday, May 29, live on Redwood Community Radio, KMUD.

Gentrification at the SoHum Community Park

Gentrification at the SoHum Community Park

I got a lot of feedback on my most recent letter to the editor regarding the Southern Humboldt Community Park, almost all of it positive, so I decided to “double-dip” on the SoHum Community Park issue this week.

I found it especially gratifying that Dennis Huber mentioned my letter on his KMUD radio show, Monday Morning Magazine. I’ve got nothing against Dennis. In fact, I like him, or at least I want to like him, and I enjoy listening to his radio show. I mean, I’ve never met him, and I’m not sure I would recognize him if I saw him, but he does put together a good show, and he obviously puts a lot of work into it.

I think Monday Morning Magazine is one of the best shows on KMUD, and it provides us with a good example of what community radio should be. I don’t always agree with Dennis, but I know he means well, and that he undertakes his work for the Community Park with the same spirit of generosity and civic duty as he does his radio show. I just think that in this case, his generosity is misplaced.

On the other hand, my motivations for writing a letter to the editor in defense of wild blackberries at the park are entirely selfish. I love wild blackberries, and I especially love the blackberry patch that is targeted for replacement with AstroTurf ball fields. Those blackberries are especially delicious. They ripen later in the season than other local blackberries, providing an abundant source of sweet fruit well into September. Convenient parking, easy access and a nearby port-a-potty also contribute to making that blackberry patch an especially attractive community asset, and one that I personally utilize quite a bit.

My self-interest aside, I think the community park board’s alleged concern for the well being of this community’s young people is disingenuous. I think they are using young people as a cover for their plans, just like they used local craft artists as a cover for their plans to move Summer Arts and Music Festival to the park. Moving Summer Arts and Music Festival to the community park won’t help local craft artists at all. It might help the Mateel turn the only decent craft show in SoHum, into a music and marijuana festival subsidized by local craft artists, like they’ve been doing ever since the Reggae Wars, but it won’t help craft artists one bit. The park board would have known this, had they bothered to ask any local craft artists about it.

As I pointed out in my letter, Wilhelm Reich would argue, and I agree, not having a baseball field and not playing Little-League baseball would actually be a blessing to SoHum’s young people. Reich pointed out, I think correctly, that the serious global problems we face, like fascism, technological warfare, slavery, oppression and the environmental crisis, are symptoms of a sick culture, not a flaw in human nature, and that those problems can only be solved by changing our culture, not by the development of new technology, or the expenditure of capital.

Thus far, we have completely failed, as a culture, to address the underlying causes of the environmental crisis. If your generation couldn’t stop the conversion of the natural world into garbage, pollution and disease, and instead only accelerated it, what makes you think your kids will be able to solve those problems, especially if you saddle them with the same suicidal culture that you were born into?

I know that here in SoHum, we like to pretend that we’re not part of the dominant culture. We think that because we smoke marijuana instead of drinking martinis, and watch John Stewart instead of Bill O’Reilly, we’re part of an “alternative culture”, but those are just two sides of the same coin, minted from the same bankrupt currency. Just because competitive team sports play a big role in the culture that wrecked the natural world, that doesn’t mean that competitive team sports have any role in a culture capable of saving the natural world.

When it comes right down to it, all we really have to offer kids is a bad example and a degraded, overpopulated planet. Considering the enormous challenges we have foisted upon the younger generation, not having a baseball field is the least of their problems.

No, people don’t build ball fields to help children. Instead, parents remember ball fields from their childhood, and build them for themselves. Then they teach their kids to play baseball, buy them bats, balls, gloves and uniforms, and drive their kids to Little League, whether they want to go or not, because it makes them feel like superior parents, and gives them the opportunity to live vicariously through their children. Really, in a world dominated by the effects of Global Climate Change, the last thing we need is another excuse for rural parents to drive their kids around.

Besides being culturally regressive, ball fields at the community park would be bad for the environment, bad for kids, and bad for blackberry enthusiasts like me, but who would benefit from developing the park in this way? Obviously, this project would put money in the pockets of contractors, manufacturers of AstroTurf, retailers of sporting goods and uniforms, and big oil companies who will happily sell rural parents even more planet destroying fossil fuels to drive their doomed offspring all over creation. Besides that, plenty of people around here think like big oil companies, and expect to profit from this project in the long run.

These people don’t care that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. They don’t give a fuck about building a sustainable culture from the ground up, and they don’t care about your kid’s future either. All they care about is money, and getting as much of it out of the land around here as they can. Those are the people who expect to reap the most profits from developing the community park.

Real-estate agents, developers and bankers have plenty of reasons to encourage destructive, unsustainable development in SoHum. Investors and businessmen, like the ones who have denuded our hillsides, diverted our creeks and killed off our wildlife with pesticides for their mega-grows also have plenty of reasons to support expensive, man-made, middle-class amenities at the community park, and all of those reasons contain a dollar sign and a decimal point.

There’s a name for the kind of development going on at the community park, and it happens all over America. They call it gentrification. Gentrification doesn’t build community, it undermines community. Gentrification doesn’t make a place a better place to live, gentrification makes it a more expensive place to live. Gentrification doesn’t help young people, it makes the place too expensive for young people to afford, and gentrification doesn’t attract artists or cultural creatives, it drives them out. To replace them, gentrification attracts vapid, greedy, status-conscious yuppies who haven’t had an original thought in their entire lives.

That’s what the Southern Humboldt Community Park is all about: driving poor people and young people, as well as the last of the artists and cultural creatives, out of the community, and replacing them with stupid, bloodsucking yuppies who will consume what’s left of our natural beauty, leaving nothing but garbage, pollution and ugliness in their wake. Yes, the Southern Humboldt Community Park Board seeks to uproot the thorny, unmanageable, self-reliant, generous and sweet individuals who currently thrive here, and replace them with a phony, toxic, and expensive imitation of suburban middle-class affluence in order to help the richest and greediest among us acquire more money.

The Ballad of Bobcat McKee

The Ballad of Bobcat McKee

 

I heard Dennis Huber interview Bob McKee this morning on KMUD’s Monday Morning Magazine show. I listened mainly because Bob McKee sounded so much like Bobcat Goldthwait. I thought, “Man if anyone can make real-estate law funny, it’s Bobcat”, but the punchlines never came.

 

No, the joke was on me. I was listening to the desperate, quavering voice of a millionaire real-estate developer, whining about the fact that he broke the law, then fought the county in court, at tremendous expense to the taxpayers of Humboldt County, and lost. Now he hopes to drum up a wave of popular sympathy that he can use to force the county to let him off the hook.

 

I’ve heard Bob Mckee interviewed at length on KMUD, at least half-a-dozen times, but I never noticed how much he sounded like Bobcat, until today. Thanks to all of these shows, I know more than I ever wanted to know about The Williamson Act, the law Bobcat violated. It sounds like a stupid law, but it only applies to landowners with large rural holdings, totaling, what, 1% of the total population of Humboldt County?

 

Well, Bob, we have a lot of stupid laws in Humboldt County. Most of them only apply to poor people. Poor people get punished for violating stupid laws in this county, every hour of every day. Poor people get punished in this county, even when they haven’t violated any stupid laws, and the county gets away with it, because poor people don’t have six million dollars to spend on their own defense. I wonder why we don’t hear much about those people on KMUD.

 

Personally, I’m glad the county spent six million dollars of the taxpayers money to prosecute Bobcat, and I want them to spend whatever it takes to punish him for his stupid Williamson Act violations. I hope they seize all of his property, demolish his home, take his kids away from him and throw him in jail for it, just like they do to poor people around here every day. It would reassure me greatly to know that we have injustice for the rich, as well as the poor here in Humboldt County.

 

While I have learned a lot about the stupid Williamson Act, thanks to all of the in-depth interviews on KMUD, and full page ads in our local papers, I haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe that Bob McKee did not violate the law. For all of your high profile, mostly bought and paid for, media coverage, Bob, you really haven’t made your case very effectively.

 

I know that Bob McKee has a lot of friends down here in SoHum. Every blood-sucking dope-yuppie around here talks about Bob McKee in glowing terms, because he sold them logged-over timber land at a price almost anyone could afford, and they got rich off of that land by flouting the law. Now Bob seems to be saying, “Hey, I helped you get rich off of your criminal behavior, now come help me get rich off of mine.”

 

It really amazes me how many of KMUD’s programmers have answered Bobcat’s call to action. Bud Rogers even immortalized Bob McKee in a song. That’s how fucking sick we are down here in SoHum. We sing folk songs about real-estate developers. Can you imagine Bob Dylan singing about a real-estate developer?

“Ol’ Bob, he knew how to cut parcels in two.

He sold half to me and he sold half to you

The county, it said he had broken a rule

He spent six million fighting them just like a fool.

Now he wants you to come out and stand by his side

But I think they should just take it out of his hide.”

Those aren’t the lyrics to Bud Rogers’ song, but you can imaging Bob Dylan singing them, at least I can. Musicians should save their folk songs for people who can’t afford to hire their own jingle writers. Really, artists need all of the paid work they can get.

 

I know Bob McKee donates a lot to KMUD. I mean, it’s pretty widely known, and I have been there at the pledge drive when Bob McKee stopped by to make a donation (and talk about his case, incidentally), but the fact was not mentioned on Monday Morning Magazine.

 

Dennis followed his half-hour interview with Bobcat, by badgering Humboldt County Supervisor, Mark Lovelace, with a bunch of loaded questions about, you guessed it, Bob McKee’s Tooby Ranch Williamson Act case, as though Bob McKee’s Tooby Ranch Williamson Act case was the biggest scandal in the county’s history.

 

Bob McKee never made me a great deal on a piece of land, nor has he donated money to support this blog. No, my opinion of Bob McKee was forged when I heard him say, on KMUD, in an interview with Bud Rogers: “Well, you know, there’s a lot of poor people around here these days. I can’t do anything about that. I hate to tell people what they’ll have to pay for a piece of land these days.”

 

Guess what, Bobcat. I’d love to want to care about your stupid lawsuit, but we have a lot of stupid laws here in Humboldt County, and we have a corrupt, brutal and abusive county government. The streets of Humboldt County are full of victims of injustice and abuse, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’d hate to tell you what I’d charge to write you a catchy jingle.