We enter the holidays with plans of get-togethers with family and friends, company parties and year-end celebrations. There will be an increase in traffic with old man winter knocking at our door. Based on past performance and statistics, the anticipated driving under the influence fatality rate is expected to run in the 40-percent range.

What, do you ask, can a person do to reduce that statistic? There are several things that can be done.

The designated driver approach is one in which someone in the group is in charge of the transportation. Treat him/her good by supplying the designated driver with all the soda or other nonalcoholic beverages they desire.

Call for a taxi or friend to pick you up or just plan on spending the night at the place you are drinking at.

And, by all means, don’t get into the vehicle if you know that the driver has been drinking.

Our holiday exhortations not to drink and drive are repeated annually, even though they may seem monotonous and ritualistic. This plea will be made anew every holiday period because the decisions reached by each individual driver counts for so much.

The highway is a community in itself, particularly in California, where our major roads are constantly occupied, where activity never ceases, and where unwise and thoughtless behavior results in undesirable consequences.

Sometimes the consequence of driving after drinking is drowsiness, because alcohol is a depressant. That form of sleepiness is not so easily overcome, except for the obvious – don’t even start out or let the sober designated driver take over the vehicle.

This is not meant to be a gloomy message, but we all see enough suffering every holiday season that need not happen if we all do our part.

Please think about judgment and choices this season as your life may depend on it.

Also, let us remind everyone to activate your headlights during inclement weather for everyone’s safety.

Wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday season and see you in the New Year.

Lance Mino and Adam Garcia are California Highway Patrol officers. Team DUI is a group of local agencies – including the CHP – and individuals dedicated to fighting drunk driving and underage drinking in Lake County.

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I think that those who are carrying this jihad of hatred – from both sides – cannot be deterred from their paths by words. The direction of this civilization is toward increased terrorism and suffering. Only a complete change of direction will carry us off of this path toward the whirlwind. Modern civilization is enamored with its toys and successes, never examining what price has been paid in human life and destruction for those achievements.

Many of our common citizens recognize deep down that our culture is slipping from its pretentious moral high ground toward a decadent society consumed with violence and the desire to preserve its luxury and status at any cost. Institutional Islam seems intent on keeping its mouth shut while fanatics twist the teachings of their great Man of Peace into exhortations to sacrifice innocent life in suicidal acts of resistance against their age old religious enemies-both Christian and Hebrew. The cycle is endless, with centuries of history to drive it.

I have a quote for you to think about as I babble on. "Morality relates not only to the actions of human beings toward other humans but toward the entire planet as an integrated living being." I suppose that this is the major difference between the three great religions descended from Abraham and the rest of the indigenous world.

The concept of guilt at birth, which teaches that death, violence, and tragedy are unnatural conditions, and the belief in judgment, punishment, and reward has created an absolute fear of death in some, while encouraging acts of violent sacrifice in others – the two bloody sides of today's coin of terrorism. Both sides court war, not only in revenge, but in the misguided belief that in causing death one can prevent future deaths. Life by the sword.

I'd like to present another view of morality – centered around a Native concept – that the entire earth is a living being. Every physical form upon it is comprised of the same elements moving and interacting. Earth, fire, air, water, rocks, trees, animals, and human beings. Indigenous peoples consider all these forms to be alive for differing purposes in our global family. The rock does not speak because that is not its purpose. Human beings have our own purpose. But Indigenous people do not ascribe to humanity any superiority or greater value than our environment – because we could not sustain our lives separate from it. If we depend on it, how can we be superior to it?

We are asked to possess three characteristics: respect for Creation, responsibility to act in the best interests of Creation, and gratitude for that Creation. We do not perceive natural violence and death as punishment, but only a mysterious addition to Creation that is, for the moment, beyond the reach of our understanding.

Each moment the sun eats and transforms or kills hydrogen that has taken millions of years to form. On earth death allows for the building blocks of creation to take new forms. When a species suffers extinction there is often an explosion of new life in the areas previously inhabited. Indigenous people rever Creation. I'll say that again. Indigenous people rever Creation. It is all sacred. Every act, every word, every motion of humanity as well as the earth and all our relatives are part of a sacred related family ceremony. Just as the sun eats the hydrogen without remorse, so we are eaten and give back our spirits to Creation. We view death as a natural process. We grieve for our losses, as do any humans, but we know that the basic elements of creation are everlasting and cannot die. No guilt, no blame .

The sacred permeates the lives of Indigenous Peoples because it is perceived to be inherent in every earthly form and movement. This is not simply an intellectual exercise but a deep emotional attachment to Creation. To be very frank, some of our Elders predicted these circumstances would occur because of the seemingly selfish preoccupation some societies have with considering humanity as the preferred species rather than as an integral equal part of a whole earth entity.

But there is a difference between the mysterious order and purpose of natural destruction in Creation and the willful, contentious and calculated violence of human beings purposely disturbing and destroying the very relationships that should give their life meaning, purpose and joy. My uncle believed that it was the fear of death, the fear of judgment, the fear of loss, the very selfish fear of personal extinction that leads to all the dangerous and destructive vices and proclivities men practice. Certainly, as there is the light of love, there is also the darkness of hatred. And for every other good and noble virtue we find a counterpoint of darkness.

We can feel no gratitude, no appreciation for the beauties and lights of our lives without the potential to suffer the other. As the volcano pours its lava into the villages below, we are assured that someday flowers will sprout in the enriched soil of that destruction. That is what separates natural violence from the violence of men. Natural violence will always result in new creation. But the horrors men put upon each other do not guarantee that from those horrors new flowers of great beauty will sprout. The Power of Creation can not be reproduced by Man.

In our family we think that it is part of man's purpose in creation to search for a balance between fate and choice. Our nature and potential is malleable. It can be chosen and altered. We live in the bubble of America while the rest of the world struggles for the basic necessities of life. To raise the standards of the world to our level we would have to speed up the harvest of these resources six times or find six new planets to plunder.

The truth is that we have created a world of fantasy which pretends that we can continue this lifestyle indefinitely while 75 percent of the rest of the world is lacking nutritious food, shelter, or a safe place to sleep. It is a myth that there are enough resources for them to raise their standards to our level, even if the entire world modeled their systems after ours.

Today, the designs of small and powerful groups of men spin out of control thrusting us away from balance and toward destruction. It is part of our purpose to attempt to divert this course, to point toward beauty and gratitude, and away from revenge and violence. But those who have chosen war and conflict will not be convinced or changed.

As my friend Clayton says – they are the people of ruin, everything they touch they ruin – that has become their purpose. In America, one would expect that a people experiencing such plenty would be overwhelmed with gratitude for our many blessings and overflow with compassion. For our leaders to act with attitudes of arrogance, superiority and a willingness to exercise a violent spirit can only lead to our losing those blessings. Meaningful change can be led specifically by people who demand that the moral principles of our spiritual heritages be applied without compromise to the principles of the republic. Lip service and rhetoric only increase the danger. Our foes are all the dark vices embodied in the greed and corruption of the men of power around the world.

Our hope is that gatherings of like minded neighbors – will encourage a willingness to endure sacrifice for change.

This gathering is the only means in which power can be taken back into the hands of common families. We need not share exactly the same perspectives and beliefs, only agree that our goal is not to loose unnecessary and unjustified evils upon the world merely to preserve a standard of living that it will be impossible for the rest of the world ever to share.

The noise we make must be heard above negotiations, even above the bombs. I'll end with this quote:

"Goodness does not thrive in the absence of evil. Selfishness, small vices and jealousies dominate mankind in those times. True goodness only emerges in the threat and presence of Shadow -- nestling in the crook of its arm, whispering in its ear, until the Shadow goes mad and men relinquish their fears to cry once more for compassion and the creative spirit."

James BlueWolf is a artist and author. He lives in Nice.

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In March of 2007, my department released a report on our Web site containing select crime statistics from the 2006 calendar year. Eight months later, there were two articles published in a local newspaper about these statistics that lead to confusion and concern for many of the good citizens of our county. I have since been invited to interview for a third article - intended to correct the first two. However, I have determined that it is most appropriate for me to decline that invitation and present the correct information directly to the public.

BACKGROUND:

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office is the largest law enforcement agency in the county and it has primary jurisdiction for general law enforcement in the unincorporated area. We receive a significant amount of support and assistance from a number of other law enforcement agencies including the California Highway Patrol, the Clearlake Police Department, and the Lakeport Police Department. Neither our department nor any of theirs could operate without the assistance of all others. I am constantly grateful for that mutually supportive relationship.

TERMINOLOGY:

Incident Numbers: The Lake County Sheriff’s Central Dispatch is the primary public safety answering point in the county. Every time a citizen in our county dials 911 from a land-line telephone, the call rings into our dispatch center. In addition to providing law enforcement dispatching services for our own department, we also provide contracted dispatching services for the Lakeport Police Department and for all but one of the county’s fire protection districts.

An incident number is generated in our computer system for every 911 call that our dispatch center handles. (It is the first call that triggers the incident. Subsequent calls reporting the same incident do not generate additional incident numbers.) There are a variety of other ways in which an incident number can be generated in our dispatch center’s computer system. Every time a citizen reports an alleged crime, or a missing person, or a coroner’s case, or a stranded boater, etc., another incident number is generated. There are a variety of ways that our patrol deputies initiate incident numbers also; each time a deputy stops a motorist for a traffic offense, or serves a restraining order, or arrests someone for a warrant, another incident number is issued.

There are countless examples of how a citizen’s call into dispatch, or how a radio broadcast from a deputy or police officer, can generate an incident number.

In 2006, there were 45,668 incident numbers issued in our computer aided dispatch system. It is important to note that there may have been multiple telephone calls and radio broadcasts associated with every single one of those incidents. Over the course of a year, if you combine all of this with the thousands of phone calls and radio broadcasts that are unrelated to an incident number one can easily understand why we praise our dispatchers for their multi-tasking skills.

Reports: Deputy sheriffs write reports related to suspected and confirmed crimes as well as reports that document information for non criminal situations. To reiterate, all written reports are important documents but not all of those reports pertain to confirmed or suspected crimes.

In 2006, the Lake County Sheriff’s Department wrote 5,694 reports.

Uniform Crime Report: Each California law enforcement agency is required to report “Part 1” crime data to the California Department of Justice. Since 1931, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been collecting that crime data from the states. The data is detailed in the federal Uniform Crime Report (UCR) which includes clearly defined index offenses to assure that all agencies are reporting data on the same type of offenses. In other words, the index offenses assure that all agencies are comparing “apples to apples.” There are two subcategories of offenses within the index: Personal Offenses and Property Offenses.

The eight index offenses (“Part 1” crimes) include:

1. Homicide

2. Forcible Rape

3. Robbery

4. Assault

5. Burglary/Breaking and Entering

6. Larceny/Theft

7. Motor Vehicle Theft

8. Arson

The aforementioned news articles compared the UCR data from the Clearlake and Lakeport Police departments against my department’s total incident numbers. We were not requested to provide our UCR data for 2006. When determining the average number of crimes per thousand residents, it is incorrect to suggest that the crime total is divided by 1,000. Rather, the proper method is to divide the total crimes by the total population served.

For calendar year 2006, the following information was reported for inclusion in the UCR:

Lakeport Police Department: 226 total index offenses

Incorporated Population: 5,234 (divided into 226 = .0431792)

Average 43.1 index offenses per 1,000 residents

Clearlake Police Department: 815 total index offenses

Incorporated Population: 14,877 (divided into 815 = .0547457)

Average 54.7 index offenses per 1,000 residents

Lake County Sheriff’s Department: 1,635 total index offenses

Unincorporated population 45,889 (divided into 1,635 = .0356294)

Average 35.6 index offenses per 1,000 residents

Our department’s countywide totals by index offense for 2006 are as follows:

1. Homicide: 4

2. Forcible Rape: 15

3. Robbery: 18

4. Assault: 758

5. Burglary/Breaking and Entering: 393

6. Larceny/Theft: 433

7. Motor Vehicle Theft: 4

8. Arson: 10

While these data do provide an accurate accounting of how many of those specific index offenses occur in each jurisdiction, that data alone does not aid in declaring any one community more or less safe than any other. There are countless variables to consider and each one can be a separate course of study.

It is worth repeating that the UCR data does not include all crimes reported to law enforcement agencies. One will note that many crimes such as vandalism, drug offenses, public disturbances, public intoxication, and DUI do not appear in the UCR data sets. We will continue to include all crimes reported to our department in future annual reports as these data give the public a view of issues of importance in their communities and it also helps to explain what occupies much of our time.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Lake County is a wonderful place to live and raise a family and the men and women of your Lake County Sheriff’s Office are working hard to keep it that way.

Rodney K. Mitchell is Lake County's sheriff, coroner and Office of Emergency Services director.

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On Dec. 8 the Executive Committee of the 11,000-member Sierra Club Redwood Chapter proposed that mussel containment become a top priority for the California Sierra Club, as advocated by Sierra Club Lake Group Chair Victoria Brandon and Chapter Delegate Paul Marchand.

At the Water Managers Forum held in Lakeport on Nov. 30, Cobb area district water manager Robert Stark called an infestation of these mussels in California waterways "the catastrophe that hasn't happened yet": it would devastate their ecological balance and dramatically impair their recreational value, while imposing a grievous financial burden upon water companies and other organizations that rely on surface water sources to meet community and agricultural needs.

Of European origin, quagga mussels entered the Great Lakes in ballast water in the 1980s, and have subsequently become widespread in the eastern United States, where they clog intake pipes, destroy motors, turn mooring lines into razor blades, and monopolize so many nutrients that fish and other forms of aquatic life starve. Direct repair and maintenance costs top $100 million annually. No practical method of eradication has yet been discovered.

They were found in Lake Mead in January 2007, and subsequently in other parts of the Colorado River drainage and several unconnected reservoirs in San Diego County, with recreational boaters believed to be the primary transport agent.

In October, legislation sponsored by Yolo Assemblymember Lois Wolk (AB 1683), provided the Department of Fish and Game with the authority to inspect, decontaminate, and if necessary to quarantine boats, other vehicles (eg trailers and seaplanes), and marinas, and to delegate these sweeping powers to other agencies – but without the budgetary increases needed for effective implementation.

The Redwood Chapter wants the Club to urge California government to take decisive action to keep the mussel invasion from spreading throughout the state. Specific recommendations include: exercise by the Department of Fish and Game of its AB 1683 powers to quarantine mussel-infested waters or to impose mandatory decontamination on boats and other vehicles leaving those waters, with whatever funding increases are necessary to enable the effective performance of this mandate; inspection of boats and boat trailers for mussels at the state border, with mandatory decontamination if necessary; joint action with Nevada, other affected states, and federal agencies to establish containment methods; and design and implementation of a comprehensive campaign of public information.

The Chapter expects to present a resolution including these recommendations to the Regional Conservation Committee of the California Sierra Club on Jan. 20, 2008.

Victoria Brandon is chair of the Sierra Club Lake Group.

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Some have suggested that Caltrans re-route the traffic through the downtown area making the main street through town one way. If nothing else, this would provide more space for parking. But, is more parking space really the problem?

While the parking space available in Middletown needs improving, I do not believe that alone is Middletown's problem. Middletown needs to promote itself better.

The fliers for the town are out-of-date. For example, the wine tasting room featured on the Middletown brochure is now a candy store. Nevertheless, even if the brochure was up-to-date, I doubt that would be enough to make traffic want to stop and shop in the town.

Something more forceful and dynamic needs to be done. Middletown needs digital signage. For that matter, all of Lake County could benefit from digital signage. But, let's start with Middletown – the gateway to county.

For months, the Middletown Area Town Hall has been talking about digital signage as a means to draw more attention to the local merchants. You could have one outdoor sign adjacent to the Middletown sign at the north and south end of the town. These signs would alert drivers to what the town has to offer them BEFORE they enter the town. Being dynamic, these signs would change just like a slide show on a computer screen. One sign could tell you a lot about the businesses that are on the main street and the planned activities in the town.

Please be advised, digital signage does not simply work its magic along the highway. It can work its magic along a storefront and even within the post office bulletin board via a flat screen LCD monitor. If you have ever ventured into the Clearlake Wal-Mart and been back in their TV section, you have witnessed digital signage at work. No, that was not a commercial network TV station all those TV sets were featuring. That was digital signage – a computer program all those TV sets were running.

Digital signage even works its magic on the Internet. Want proof? See what Kevin Comora, president of Vizicast Multimedia, created for Middletown the last time he came for a visit. Visit www.sftv.com and play the video link, “Middletown USA.” Just be sure to download the "powered by Scala" plug-in before you play the link. Otherwise, it will not work.

Lake County, as reported by this publicationi, want to record meetings with a webcam and place them on the Internet. Well, what the county should do is edit that video BEFORE placing it on the Net. Research has shown that most people do not want to listen or watch anything on the Internet that requires more than 30 minutes of their time. The idea of placing a hour or two-hour session of a Board of Supervisors meeting is definitely a mistake.

But, put up just the highlights? That might work very well. And, digital signage via a program like Scala InfoChannel Designer provides the way to get that done. That is the digital signage software used by more businesses around the world than any other. It is what makes kiosks work in hotels. It's what you see in modern shopping centers and airports.

Lake County has three Visitor Information Centers. One is in Middletown at the Calpine Visitor Center. One is located in Lucerne and one is located inside the Lakeport Regional Chamber of Commerce Office. Well, a touchscreen multimedia kiosk would do wonders for providing up-to-date information about what Lake County has to offer its tourists in all those locations. Want to find a good restaurant or hotel? Just press a button on the touchscreen and you get to see all your options.

What is really awesome about this is that one system can run an unlimited number of screens. Each screen could be running the same multimedia program or one uniquely its own. The same could also be said for Web sites.

But, there's more. The software program can be used to create wonderful multimedia DVDs to be included in Lake County's press kits. Last year, Lake County's Department of Economic Development sent a press kit to Roger Ailes, chairman of the Fox News Channel in support of a letter-writing campaign by Middletown High School students geared to bringing Fox News to Middletown for "Middletown Days."

While the campaign proved successful – Fox News sent correspondent Adam Housley to speak at the parade – there was no dynamic signage DVD in the press kit. Instead, it simply included a CD with PDF's on it. A dynamic signage DVD would have been much more impressive.

This Saturday, during "Christmas in Middletown," inside the Middletown High School Multi-Use Room, between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., Kevin Comora returns to educate the local business community on digital signage and what it is capable of doing for them. Since Lake County's Board of Supervisors has proved funds to give Middletown new lights downtown, I think the time has come to give the county NEW marketing resources.

There is currently a moratorium on billboard signage in Lake County. But, according to District 1 Supervisor Ed Robey, there are no rules on the books regarding digital signage. Why? Because Lake County's signage rules have not been updated for 20 years!

Well, I think the time to bring digital signage to Lake County has arrived. What do you think? Before you form an opinion, see digital signage in operation up close and personal this coming Saturday at "Christmas in Middletown." I think this amazing technology will impress you.

Lamar Morgan lives in Middletown.

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Middle Eastern patriarchies, which had the greatest influence on western civilization, further enshrined obedience as the highest virtue, in this case obedience to a God to whose access they alone declared holding the unique formula. In practical terms that meant submission to the Temple, the Church or the Mosque that were said to exclusively represent divine authority on earth, and that indeed shared, along with the State, tyrannical powers over the populations that had the misfortune of living within their reaches.

It appears to be the curse of all cultures called civilized, even the Aztecs, to have been pathologically obsessed with ideas of conquest, of dominant power, and of the submission and control of the populace under the authority of single rulers or governmental institutions, and in many cases of religious figures and dogma.

No other cultures but the West and the Middle East have historically so successfully used religion as a tool of domination, of coercion, of the breaking of individual will to serve and benefit the various kingdoms and empires whose aims and actions certainly never spoke of humility, but which were on the contrary driven to reign over the world by any means, rationalizing their arrogant and all-too-often abominable transgressions by, ironically, pretending, with the sanctioning of religious institutions, to represent "God's will" on earth.

The idea of submission or obedience as a fundamental necessity for spiritual salvation consequently never applied to the rulers, to those who assumed power over the people and who indeed had to be deified, to be made to rise to the elevated and grotesquely inflated positions of god-king, god-emperors, to be made to embody divine powers, so as to be free to exert tyranny over their own people and those they conquered.

Humanity has not yet completely cleared its own psyche of centuries of such conditioning, and considers questioning authority a daring act, when it is in reality a baby step in the vital process of reclaiming spiritual sovereignty, of restoring the integrity, unity and wholeness of the soul.

People still believe that submission to authority is the foundation of civilization, and are culturally programmed to think that without a fear of the law, without the threat of coercion, they would "revert" to chaos, to anti-social behaviors. They are trained to think that civilization rose out of chaos, of anarchy, of savagery, of barbarism, and that anything that threatens it would recreate such conditions.

Yet were not most so-called primitive cultures more orderly, united, stable, harmonious and grounded in timeless traditions than present societies, which are becoming ever more chaotic, unbalanced, diseased, divided, oppressive and unsafe? Nothing seems to produce chaos more surely than civilization, that is to say coercion, because living under the authority of another or of an institution or government, a person automatically learns to associate freedom with destructive behavior, precisely because freedom means expression, and expression means the ability to release what becomes, under such abnormal and unnatural conditions, prevalent emotions: anger, fear, resentment, rage in extreme cases.

Living under pressure, the civilized mobs periodically release such pressures illegally by participating in riots, in occasional bloody revolutions, and legally in global wars in which their barbarism is unleashed with the blessings of the State and of religious authorities and finds full expression, after which they are made to ponder their own inhumanity, and to welcome ever more control, ever more coercion, ever more "civilization", because told to fear themselves, to completely distrust what is defined for them by religion and science to be a degraded and brutal human nature.

This is why all major wars lead to ever greater losses of individual liberty, to the expansion of bureaucracies, to greater governmental and institutional powers, and to the greater power of those whose immense wealth place them in positions of extreme influence, and who marvel at the ease with which they can manipulate the willingly submissive and self-destructive masses.

Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.

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