No One Survives When They Are Dead

[UPDATE Below] Pre-legalization hype and sick commentary on Ernie's blog.

What is written in this newspaper's so-called opinion may be true from a certain point of view. If it is, then it is an absolute obscenity!

When I read this Sunday's latest from the Times-Standard's, As It Stands: “Why Humboldt County will survive marijuana legalization” it made me sick. This is how the tentacles of corruption's insidious infecting, rotting disease permeates and destroys the very fabric of civilized, law-abiding people and their social order. You, and I am talking to all supporters and complicit business people, can put a pretty dollar face on this corpse you call “legalized marijuana,” but you can't change the fact that is a rotten, “corrupted” filthy cadaver to anyone and everyone that comes near it or touches. However these enabler's want to have it today, these criminals never ran away from any system. Stancliff contradicts his own statements listed blow in bold italic. The simple truth is POT, or marijuana, or “Granddaddy Purple,” or more true to it's real nature: “killer buds” is NOT legal. These people ALL, from the least to the greatest, are criminals. Everyone, starting with the “discriminating users, those that support, does business and profits from these criminals and their “cannabis industry” are complicit in their crimes. They pervert the sanctity of our communities and our democratic social order.

The generational legacy of POT is indelibly cast within this society and its filthy disease is the universal corruption manifest in the mob rule, anarchy, and as reported here how the “end justifies the means.” This writer white-washes these criminal's lifestyles as something acceptable and even extraordinary by calling these so-called farmers, “pot pioneers,” as “back-to-the-landers” – something respectable, a positive contribution to the community. When you read what the newspaper and this guy have to say you get the impression that these people are good, decent, family loving, land loving, benevolent foundations of whatever community they live in. They were just 40 years ahead of their times and just now all the rest of us are only catching up to their inevitable “new reality” – they freeloaded on all the rest of us taxpayers.

One of the pillars of Humboldt County, Supervisor Mark Lovelace, heads up “a task force” to “define regulatory issues surrounding grows.” Then there is something called “Humboldt Medical Marijuana Advisory Panel formed to “organize growers, businesses and employees” naturally doing what such people do right out in public.

Notice how this writer normalizes generations of outlaw activities:

Everyone has to wait until the new rules are laid out. I don't see that as a roadblock, just the settling in of a new reality. Keep in mind, marijuana has thrived in Humboldt County for decades. The culture it's created is woven into the very fabric of our communities. [Emphasis added]

What allowed for decades of this corruption?

There's no place in the United States with a longer, more complex relationship between the public, marijuana growers, law enforcement and merchants. Legalizing pot is the final destination on a road that has had many detours since those first “back-to-the-landers” planted seeds in our fertile soil.

This writer says finally:

“As it stands, independent spirits are common behind the Redwood Curtain, and their marketing ability will come through when Californians are legally allowed to partake of pot.”

The minor technicality called “legality” was only a small bump in the road for these “common” farmers manifesting their “independent spirits” alright. That independence led to HOW MANY DEAD BODIES buried in hills “behind the Redwood Curtain”? No one knows how many countless people were given an ignominious burial after a bullet in the brain. That's one of the dirty little secrets Dave Stancliff or any other ingratiating panhandler wants to confront, let alone talk about.

Stancliff's amoral justification for all the dead bodies is explicit when he says:

I believe Humboldt County will adapt to legalization because its economy needs pot revenue, and has for decades. There has always been an unspoken alliance between growers and business owners. It's an economic factor in keeping the local economy afloat. Jobs have been scarce, and few pay better than trimmers, since the decline of the lumber mills and fishing. [Emphasis added]

An "econmic factor" that has inundated businesses with tax free cash. That's why those of us that pay HIGH taxes as a consequence are justified in making sure these complicit enablers make up the difference. Once it's legal they can, for the next 40 or 50 years, repay all they owe by paying all their profits back in taxes.

We know that criminals begat criminals. What then did the children learn from their parents openly doing business with criminals? Did they learn that when the law sets the speed limit at 55 MPH that they could drive any damned speed they thought they could get away with? What happened as a result when their wanton lawless actions caused other innocent people death and destruction? Were they dealt with and held accountable for their crimes? Or did everyone pass it off as just some kind of unavoidable “accident”?

That fact that these people are not accountable and held liable does not make any of them good, decent or right.

[UPDATE :: Friday, June11, 2010]
“Cannabis experts and activists holding marijuana health and safety forum in Southern Humboldt” - That's "health and safety" for “Chemistry, The Economics and the Politics.” That's what they'd like everyone to think. Read the complete article to the end and you will find out that it's all about "BIG MONEY."

Who are these “Cannabis experts and activists”? Lets see who Danna Tamm identified: “pot activists, growers, officials and members of the business community.” Lets not forget also: “The Garberville Veterans Association is co-sponsoring this presentation.” That should make everyone feel good.

The statement that identifies the corruption of illegal marijuana growing, selling and using that says it all, is this:

“Custer (Charley Custer of the Humboldt Medical Marijuana Advisory Panel) said he hopes this conversation will help the local industry develop a plan for regulation, so that when policymakers are ready to address the issue, there will already be a plan in place.”

“In addition, he said other officials in California have already begun looking at how the marijuana industry can be transformed into a big money industry. And Humboldt needs to catch up, Custer said.”

“LOCAL INDUSTRY”? Makes it sound like legal industries like the “Timber Industry” or the “Fishing Industry.” “Big Money – Sounds like something you'd hear in a casino. When the criminals suddenly get respectable, guess who the losers are?

--Joe

Ernie Branscomb and Publican Justification

OR: Everything Is About Something Different


When I first moved back to Humboldt County and started up my blog here, I first became interested in what was going in Southern Humboldt. There were three primary bloggers, not necessarily in this order of preference, but: 1) Ernie Branscomb – Because I knew the name and family and there was some history. I had some trouble placing him until I found out he is younger than I am. While he may know me, I certainly had no interest in him back then. Probably because he hasn't changed one whit in over 50 years.

2) Redheaded Blackbelt – Kym Kemp, because she lives up Salmon Creek and seemed to be more broadminded and accommodating than most.

3) SoHum Parlance II – Eric Kirk. He seemed knowledgeable and served a good counter-point to Ernie's word-worrisome litany.

I remember the first time I commented on his blog, I asked him if “he had just crawled out from under a rock"? Ernie, as a would-be local historian manages to put his rather biased point of view on what he says is supposed to have happened in the Eel River Valley. His blog caption says, in part: “Dedicated to remembering how it was “back then”, and Tales about the Eel River Valley, and the wisdom of the people that live there.”

Be assured, I'm not saying that what Ernie says, per se, is not true. Nor am I saying that his perspective is not true. If nothing else, Ernie is, most of the time, rather informative. But then again, neither am I saying that he is HONEST in everything he says, either.

His latest litany that caught my attention was: “Anna Hamilton, Friend Of Us” where he really struggles with the truth.  Here he struggles with his longtime part as an independent businessman concerned about the viability of his local community and how he perceives it's degeneration caused by the influx of criminal “hippie” pot or marijuana growers taking over Southern Humboldt. This wasn't the first time he's broached that subject and how he moralized his part in it and why he had to do business with these criminals.

Regardless of how Ernie and all his supporters, including all the longtime local and not so local businesses and business people, that would like to justify decades of amoral conduct and behavior, not to mention the serious social consequences of their acts in support of their perceived success, reality has caught up with Southern Humboldt. That's not my observation, that's Ernie's.

That leads to something Ernie said that stuck with me for several weeks; something I never knew and if I did, had put it on a shelf somewhere. This is what he said:

The flood gates opened, and there was no stopping it. The loggers and ranchers tried spraying to get rid of the “hippie weed” that they grew here. Out of that futile attempt, the environmental movement took over the north coast. The “Back to the landers” claimed all kinds of rashes and birth defects caused by the spraying. Some claims were real, and some were bald face lies that worked just as well, because nobody questioned the thought that “chemicals had to be bad”. (Emphasis mine)

My family had property in Southern Humboldt when this so-called “weed” spraying took place. Fortunately, during the years when this spraying took place everyone was gone. I say “fortunately” because most all the neighbor's suffered severe health problems afterwords. What we were told, however, is that the spraying was to knock down the hardwood so that the confer money trees could grow. If it actually was as Ernie says, then the crimes of Vietnam were brought right back to the North Coast all justified by lies. When you consider the long term residual effects of contaminated vegetation, soil and water on everyone's health, making money off of pot may have come with a rather expensive price tag.

As an old logger, spraying timberland to overcome the supposedly negative effects of timber harvesting seemed justifiable. Justifiable, that is, until reports of serious health maladies and other environmental disasters and loss started cropping up. To use herbicide spray on land to attack pot growers like some North Vietnamese insurgency in unconscionable. We're not talking about someone “ being overrun by a crowd of long-haired militant people bent on “taking back the land for the people.” We're talking about our own families and children; yours and my American born neighbors. When you consider that “hippie loving” Judge all these hypocrite do-gooders tried to get rid of with the police sabotaging him and the community as well, everyone, including Ernie Branscomb, might just consider the fact that it took a judge like Charles Thomas to stop defoliant herbicide spraying. Someone that actually cared about all the people and the actual community he was responsible for protecting. Branscomb and his ilk made sure such a judge never made back to Southern Humboldt.

So, all you folks inhabiting Southern Humboldt, chafe and squirm all you want, you brought all of this upon yourselves. Ernie would like everyone to think, as he tries to split hairs, that there are “bad apple” pot growers just like there are “bad apple” politicians, judges, cops and local business people. As far as this Report is concerned, everyone that did business with these criminals is complicit in their crimes. They are in fact, collaborators and enabler's and deserve the same sanctions.

Now to his honesty, he says:

After the “Back to the Landers” became established, and became ingrained, they started openly growing marijuana, to the point that they were walking all over the local people, I personally had a grower tell me, as a merchant, that I should “just plain kiss his ass, because if it weren’t for people like him, I would just plain dry up and blow away”. I always thought that was particularly unfair, because he, and people like him, drove the local people that we used to depend on out of here, and killed all of our local industry, making local merchants almost completely dependant (sic) on them. (Emphasis mine)

The pot growers most certainly did NOT kill the local industry. That nonsensical re-write is Ernie Branscomb trying to justify why he supported and enabled that criminal element while trying to come off in the community as a law abiding citizen supporting by-the-book law enforcement and good moral and social values. Local industry WAS timber with some ranching. Most of the timberland was owned by timber companies and ranchers; NOT loggers per se. When the timberland was devoid of timber THE local industry and the people that supported that industry either left or found another way to support themselves. The ranchers explicitly satisfied their need by subdividing and selling their logged off property to all the so-called “hippies” from Southern California. Most of them after selling their homes only had enough money to buy the land and build some sort of home, but had no way of supporting themselves. Then you had the returning Vietnam Veterans finding themselves in a similar situation. Most all were familiar with marijuana and thought to advantage themselves of that burgeoning market in Southern CA and elsewhere.

Brancomb has had ample opportunity to repudiate his part in decades of double-dealing in Southern Humboldt. None exists here; only his vain attempt to justify and excuse, i.e., lots of “squirming”. Then there's his description of what was done to “try to stem the tide.” Nothing he talks about doing required any sacrifice from him or any of his fellow local business people. The one thing that was required of each and everyone one of them, that would have given the local police and judicial enforcement a chance to do their job, local “hippie loving judge” aside, was NOT done. What they tried to do was sit on the fence and whine about “squirming.” They are all responsible for the decades of fomenting the amoral criminal society that has spawned in their current reality. Legalizing pot won't do anything about that. But, then true to Ernie's nature, and many others of his ilk, what do they worry about? The positive social effects of legalizing pot?

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Here is a link to Kym Kemp's latest on this issue that I considered when writing this commentary:
Grieving the Change

Here is her latest April 1 posting: The Future of Cannabis in Northern California–Mendo’s Marijuana Organizers Hold their own WAP Meeting

A quick scan of Eric's latest on SoHum Parlance II didn't produce anything he's had to say.

Here are a couple of links of herbicide spraying and their effects:

http://science.jrank.org/pages/1391/Chemical-Warfare-Use-herbicides-during-Vietnam-War.html

http://www.gmasw.com/ao_note1.htm

http://www.umaine.edu/mafes/elec_pubs/techbulletins/tb192.pdf

Long term effects:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/3/2/the-effects-of-herbicide-use-in/

[Picture Source and link]

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--Joe