More on those historic mercury mines of Marin (the short version)

A rather long note bene: Since I went through so much grief the other night trying to save my old 2020 mercury mine blogpost from Google Blogger AI censorship bots, in desperation I took screenshots of the original post and reposted it on my artist page on Facebook. I also made a very truncated version (below) for the Facebook group, California History as I was afraid the information I had worked so hard for was going to be forever lost. 

The original mercury mine blogpost had its inception Labor Day weekend when I was hiking San Pedro Ridge in San Rafael. We were still in Covid sequestration, and to keep my sanity, I wrote many articles I might not have other otherwise written. 

In this case, I wrote a stub that didn’t go anywhere, no real leads, and then I delved into it again in December 2020. I discovered that I was in over my head with the material, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t finish the blogpost—partially because I couldn’t find the discrete information I needed. 

And also, I thought I didn’t have the chops to figure out how to present the material. Why a writer, suffering from dyslexia, is a writer is a mystery, but there are many of us out there. It’s not like I’m earning any money off my writing. I’m not getting paid for any of this. I write because I have to.

I suspect my writers’s block, or rather, my revisionist block, was due to the fact that it was too big a subject. The more information I uncovered, the more of the post grew. I was in over my head. I despaired. It was an albatross. But the only way out was through. 

Sometimes I think I can’t write my way out of the paper bag. or, that I don’t have the intellectual  chops. This time I was in one colossal kevlar-lined paper bag, but I persevered. It was probably one of the most challenging blogposts I have ever written. 

My Night Train to Moscow post (which began as an email), my redhead, pacer, bees, and daffodil blogposts also gave me some serious writer’s grief, but at least the posts weren’t banned by Google. 

I face enough unwarranted censorship from Facebook for writing bad similes, or thinking outside the box. I sure don’t need this kind of grief from Google either. I expected better from Google. (Google fail.) I feel betrayed.

The other day, when I made another stab at revising the original blogpost because of a Facebook post on the old mines in Lost Marin, I finally made some serious headway—only to have Google Blogger take it down and literally trash my blogpost, then reinstate it—some 30 times. When Google takes down a blogpost, you can’t even see it. It just disappears into the ether. No warning. Poof! Gone.

A while back, Google suffered a serious systemwide matrix glitch and took down multitudes of my innocuous posts—only to reinstate them later but I had to physically find my blogposts in the trash and then reinstate them. Before that, I didn’t know that Google had previously removed some of my other posts. Sadly, some of those posts are lost forever.

Thinking it was an email spam, I ignored the red warning label Google had slapped on my posts, and I lost my Juanita Musson memorial post, plus others. I reasoned, how could a memorial post be considered spam? It was not logical, as Spock might have said. But it was for real, only I found this out in arrears. 

I was able to salvage some of the removed old posts from first drafts that I had stashed elsewhere, but not all. Not Juanita in the bathtub. I despaired thinking I had lost all my revision work on the mercury mine post. I was 12 hours deep into it. So, of course I fought furiously to save my post, and to get it reinstated. Again and again.

Now I’m afraid to make any further changes on my original mercury mine post for fear of triggering the AI bots. Google no longer adequately warns you that it is removing posts. It no longer uses the red banner. And it took a long time for a Google warning to show up, explaining what the reasons were for banishment: violating community standards.

Google warned I was violating community standards, but it didn’t specifically say what. I had no idea. Googling it did not elucidate or shed any light on the subject. So, I kept removing images, revising, checking on all my links, and nothing worked. I wasn’t over quoting anyone, and it was my own intellectual property, not to mention, photos. And all the graphs I used were from publicly funded agencies, therefore within fair use parameters. I couldn’t remove the ban. I despaired.

A Google email eventually appeared, claiming this time that I was violating community standards by promoting or selling controlled substances. Huh? How is a blogpost on historic mercury mines even remotely considered to be promoting a controlled substance? Maybe it was the word “mine” itself that triggered the bots. So, this post below is a test of sorts.

(I am not trying to bite the hand that feeds me. If it wasn’t for Guy Kawasaki’s evangelical support of Google Blogger, I would not have delved so thoroughly into the new medium of cyber-writing. It all began innocently enough, I had lost some of my earlier poems to ASCII gibberish, and decided to put them online. Then I discovered I could back-post my work. One thing led to another. MySpace was no longer cutting it. It was a grand liberation to be free of the physical page. As it is, I now have 5000 blog posts. I must admit, I feel betrayed by Google at this point.)

See, during one of those rare moments, when I could actually re-access my ephemeral albeit temporarily reinstated mercury mine blogpost, I took screenshots of it and posted it on Facebook so I wouldn't lose my work completely. I also made a truncated version for a Facebook group I belong to, California History. I have previously taken several of my blogposts and revised (shortened) them for the group. 

Then I realized that the revised post I wrote for California History  is also a separate entity. New work. Probably closer to what I had hoped to originally write. It’s posted below. Now watch, Google Blogger will ban this blogpost too. Don’t worry. This time I have a link to someone who works at Google and I will complain mightily. How’s that for throat-clearing? Are you still there, Dear Reader?

Historic mercury mines in the North Bay (below is a truncated version of my original post. Click on the link/title for full post and research notes).

When I was a child, I was fascinated by my uncle’s old mining survey maps of Bolinas Ridge and Mt. Burdell dotted with old cinnabar (and copper) mining claims. Curiosity got the best of me.

Our red California earth is oftentimes a sign of the presence of iron /hemitite, or cinnabar (Remember Napa’s Silverado Mine on Mt. St. Helena, made famous by Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1884 novel, The Silverado Squatters?)

There are several historic cinnabar mines in Northwest Marin, including four at the Gambonini Ranch, near Solajoule Reservoir, some sites on Mt. San Antonio, and also on the ridges above Novato. The old mine shafts on San Pedro ridge in San Rafael seem to be gold claims. But where there’s gold, there’s cinnabar.

During the Gold Rush, cinnabar ore mined in California, for mercury, was originally used for silver and gold extraction. The crushed ore was processed in high-temperature smelting ovens. 

Those unstable leftover cinnabar tailings are what has caused the mercury runoffs into our watersheds, including in the San Francisco Bay—destroying one of the most fertile marine ecosystems in the world.

There are numerous historic cinnabar mine tailings throughout Marin and Sonoma counties, some that have also added to the high mercury levels in several of our reservoirs, including Bon Tempe, Solajoule, and Nicasio reservoirs and their drainage watershed, Tomales Bay. 

The fish warning signs that rim several of our reservoirs serve as a grim reminder that mercury poisoning is cumulative. Tomales Bay in Northern Marin County has higher mercury levels than San Francisco Bay—and it’s not from naturally occurring cinnabar deposits, as the mineral mercury oxide is inert unless it’s been heated and extracted.

According to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), there is an fish advisory or warning that Nicasio and Solajoule Reservoirs contain methyl-mercury, as does Bon Tempe Reservoir on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, which once hosted several historic mines, including mercury, copper, gold, and even a nickel mine.

I assume that the rest of the Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD) reservoirs (our drinking water supply) also contain trace amounts of some form of (inert) mercury too as they’re all downstream of Bon Tempe dam and empty into each other, exiting via Kent Lake into Lagunitas Creek that drains into Tomales Bay. 

Naturally occurring mercury oxide does not enter the food chain the same way manmade methyl-mercury does. But at the Nicasio Reservoir methyl-mercury pollution is significant enough to trigger OEHHA advisory warnings about cumulative mercury poisoning from carp, sunfish, black, and large-mouth bass species (apex predators such as bass contain the most cumulative methyl-mercury in their systems). 

Why Nicasio? It doesn’t butt up against any known mercury mines, it doesn’t share the Solejoule Reservoir watershed to the north where there’s also an OEHHA advisory warning for black bass and crappie.) Why am I mentioning Solejoule? because in 2000, it became a Superfund cleanup site.

In a nutshell, in 1964, a PG&E subcontractor, Oakland-based Buttes Gas & Oil (BG&O), ran a lucrative open pit mercury mining job at Gambonini Ranch near Walker Creek in northwestern Marin. 

But in 1970, when the price of mercury fell, BG&O pulled up stakes and left the open pit mercury mine tailings exposed to the elements behind an earthen dam that epically failed during a series of fierce storms in 1982—which dumped ungodly amounts of leached methyl-mercury into Tomales Bay. More than in San Francisco Bay! 

BG&O had leased the land from Alvin Gambonini’s father from 1964 to 1970, never disclosing to the Gambonini family the potential dangers involved with the toxic heat-processed mine tailings to extract the mercury, or that the leftover toxic mercury particulates leach out of the rock tailings whenever it rains. (I wanted to ask, what about all the cows?) 

BG&O never sealed the four mines, nor capped the tailings. It took nearly two decades for the EPA to discover the mishap. It triggered a $3 million Superfund cleanup in 2000. 

Back to Nicasio Reservoir. The methylmercury is coming from somewhere. Not from abandoned mercury mines upstream that I know of, or from the isolated Solejoule Dam which empties into Walker Creek. Question is, from where?

However, some of those old red earth mine sites really were manganese, or hematite, a type of iron, not cinnabar—like the Sausalito mine, and the prehistoric hematite site on Mt. Burdell. Inert red dirt. Sometimes a red rock quarry is just a red rock quarry. Just don’t eat the fish.

Google Blogger keeps flagging and taking down my mercury mines post

I thought Facebook AI bots were bad, apparently Google Blogger also is using the same idiotic AI bot workforce. Are they in cahoots? I was revising an old post from December 21, 2020 that I had started working on when I was staying one summer on Aquinas St. in San Rafael—it took a long while to gel. 

When I hiked up San Pedro Ridge, I could see the characteristic telltale red earth—which piqued my curiosity about mercury mines. I banged out a rough draft, then, later, I began to research it and ran into multiple dead ends. It seems no one has ever written an overview of mines in the north bay.

I have worked on this particular blogpost intermittently since 2020, due to a lack of stamina and a lack of information, and suddenly the post was flagged after being published for four years. Hindsight? I thought it was photos or graphics that was triggering it. Not. 

No, my violation of community Standards was: Regulated Goods and Services policy. “Regulated Goods and Services. Do not sell, advertise, or facilitate the sale of regulated goods and services. Regulated goods and services include alcohol, gambling, pharmaceuticals, unapproved supplements, tobacco, fireworks, weapons, or health/medical devices.” 

DEAR GOOGLE: Huh? You mean my writing about historic mines goes against Google’s policy of portraying regulated goods and services? How so? Just because the military once used mercury, then deregulated it, doesn’t mean I am facilitating selling something illegally. Maybe it’s the word “mines” that is triggering this flurry of censorship flags. Of course Blogger doesn’t tell you what it objects to.

I must be getting onto something significant. Nothing like raising the interest of a journalist to do more investigation. Am I willing to go down with the ship for my writing? You betcha. Mercury plays a huge role in California history from the gold rush to the Cold War. I write in order to learn. I didn’t know enough about the historical background of mercury mining, so I sat out to teach myself by writing about it—only to get slapped in arrears (pun intended) by Google. 

Well, the good news is the erroneous flag forced me to rewrite portions of the blogpost, so at least it’s finally in a semi-finished format. Alas, no writing is ever truly finished. I did change the title from Mercury Mines in Marin to Historical mercury mines in the North Bay to include Sonoma County as it shares many of those mine sites near Petaluma.

Thinking it was the graphics that caused the flag— Google doesn’t tell you why it flags a post—I went back and researched all my sources, trying to figure out why the blogpost was flagged. But my sources were from publicly, funded agencies and organizations, I am not breaking copyright. Besides, there’s this thing called fair use. 

What a horrible way to force a rewrite. And the hours of undo stress the Google flag caused because I couldn’t fully access my post (or changes) in order to save it off-line. I am increasingly unhappy with Google. Their parting email shot: “We encourage you to review the full content of your blog posts to make sure they are in line with our standards as additional violations could result in termination of your blog.” They brought weapons to a tea party. Shades of 1984 and Doublespeak. 

I wonder who in Facebooklandia flagged my post? I had posted it in a Lost Marin group hoping to get more leads and help with revising my post. It looks like my link and post was removed. 

I am reminded how poet Ron Silliman was harangued by Google and his poetry blog was taken offline because someone had flagged it— And Google would not divulge which particular post was considered offensive or why it was breaking community standards. At least I knew which post was the offending post. Small mercies. I also now make an archive of my writing.

• 
  

  

  Dear Google, have you any idea how many times you have flagged this post within the past 24 hours and how many times you have reinstated it? Shall we go for an even 30 tries? Every time I make a correction on a typo you flag it take it off-line again. It takes me upon average of five attempts to contact you before you reinstate it. Will it hold?

  
  
I finally resorted to taking screenshots and posted them on my Facebook artist page in order to preserve my blog post. I think that 30 attempts to remove my blogpost is a bit excessive on Google Blogger’s part.

Educating the Imagination

Maureen Hurley on Censorship
McCarthy in the Classroom?

Censorship has always been present in the classroom. As teachers and teaching writers, we are used to choosing which poems are appropriate for the end-of-the-year anthology, which story we will have a child revise for Parent Night. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s true. At its most harmless, censorship can operate to maintain equilibrium and respect. But since Columbine, and even more prevalently after the events of September 11th, censorshop and subtle forms of censure have begun to hinder educators in their efforts to teach creative writing.

One California teacher I spoke with expressed her concerns that school administrators (in conjunction with the courts) are gradually becoming the “thought police” of student writing. Write a scare story or a dark poem, and go to jail. The case of California student George “T.” is a compelling example. A San José Supreme Court appeal case this fall will test First Amendment rights when the court decides whether or not the 15-year-old student’s dark poetry constitutes a crime. The bizarre case of George “T.” is not an isolated one. Since Columbine, there has been a rising number if iuncidents in which school authorities and courts have arrested children for their art.

Homeland security and jingoism have only exacerbated the pressures on teachers. Since the war in Iraq began last winter, censorship has played out in myriad ways. One writing teacher in the Bay Area told how a colleage at his high scholl prohibited any student discussion that was critical of President Bush’s policies. The end result? A host of student poems containing retaliatory pro-war rhetoric. On a similar note, another teacher said her principal objected to the idea of student peace songs being a part of their annual spring concert, for fear that some parents might object.

While I have not encountered outright censorship in California schools, I noticed something more subtle occuring in my own writing residencies—in a word, self-censorship. For two year now, I have found myself walking on eggshells in order to assure school administrators that I am “safe.” But my students are scared of terrorism and war, and naturally their concerns emerge in their writing. And it is not merely fear they express, but pacifism. I have frequently been caught in the double bind of wanting to please school administrators on the one hand, and on the other— wanting to offer a safe haven for students to express themselves.

During the course of research for this article, I discovered that I was not alone. Several writing teachers expressed an almost palpable fear, an unspoken code for teachers not to mention the “unmentionable.” And while these fellow educators assured me that they were not being censored, their actions spoke louder than words. With the exception of one teacher who plans to retire this year, not one would allow their names to be used in this article, for fear of future repercussions from both their school administrators and from parents in the community.

Censorship; Art or Obscenity, The Paper, Jul 12, 1990

David Eisner on Mapplethorpe NEA and censorship

Yesterday, at the California Confederation of the Arts conference in San Jose, I was taking photos of David Eisner on the NEA panel on censorship and controversy, and he was so insidiously sweet—almost primping for the camera. I wanted an engaged photo and when he refused to answer a question—how much does the government spend on art versus the military budget—like a good politician, he prevaricated. So I yelled at him to answer the question—and then I took his photo. He and I had a stare-off. I got the enemy to drop his cute little mask just for a second. Unveiled, he glared at me with pure venom when I flashed the photo.

Eisner was steadfastly ignoring me as many people do, assuming the photographer is a non-entity, or a non-person. Brainless. He looked at me is if I were violating some unwritten code of conduct. Maybe I was. Ken Larsen said a good photographer will engage his or her quarry anyway he or she can. He wasn’t concerned, and noted that Eisner wouldn’t address any of my questions. Eleanor, from Artists in Corrections said, oh, you were editorializing a bit there. But she and I have jumped into many of fracas when no one else would, so it was more of a pat on the back than a reprimand.

When they opened up the panel for questions from the audience, there was a stampede to the open mic. Many angry artists and arts administrators vented. Portent of things to come. All this because of the Mappletorpe controversy.

When Eisner got graphic, describing the photos in detail, someone yelled, You really like those photos don’t you? Homoerotic phobia. Jackie Baas of the U. C. Art Gallery, said, you have to see the work in perspective, 150 photos, it’s a retrospective. These so-called offensive photos amount to less than 10% of the exhibit.

Eisner’s hard line was that there should be no NEA funding at all for art. He said, let artist just do what they want (no censorship) on their own dime. Does the public taxpayer have the right to dictate what is art? What qualifies John Q. Public, or Jesse Helms, for that matter, to dictate what is art? We are about to lose what few rights we have when these insidious bills get passed. 

Over and over, the CCA panelists Pat Daverra and Chuck Mark said, don’t let them put language into your mouth. They’ve won the battle. It goes back to definition. The outcome depends upon some concerted fighting from the arts communities.

I brought 30 copies of my article on the Rohnert Park gallery censorship of a photo of a young naked child in a meadow—a photo taken by her mother—which quickly disappeared. It was too bad that I didn’t have copies to give to the panelists, Pat Daverra and Chuck Mark, and Charles Christopher did receive copies. When censorship begins, it knows no limits, and erodes our freedoms. If this takes a hold, where will it stop?

Keynote speaker, Isabella Allende said, the moral majority has burned books just as the Nazis did in Germany. Books don’t burn easily. It takes them a very long time to die.

11/19

• Censorship; Art or Obscenity, The Paper

JESSE RIDING SHOTGUN DOGGEREL

JESSE RIDING SHOTGUN DOGGEREL

Doggerel, catteril, it's the same to me

whether bad verse exumes dead poets societies

or politicians show too much interest

in exposing moral pejoritives. The body pests

are in danger of becoming cockroach battilions

censoring Raid cans in the name of titillations.

Hart Crane had trouble licking

stamps underwater while picking

on suicide as a means to an end of—

Well, that part is censored verbiage—

Mapplethorp syrup under the bridge.

It's the same to me whether or not

police poets piss in the pot

or that god is dog and evil is live—

It's all done with with mirrors.

Jesse Helms has more than that in arrears.

Pass the dog bisquits, please comply.

It has everything to do with ergot on rye.

Way to go. Don't you know, Dude,

they say he feels wrong—

like a dog eating cat food.

2. You're down on your knees
trying to appease the wicked flesh.
The next time you decide to kick ass,
to lick what you see as brass fascism,
remember your kennel is made of glass.
Rescind your transgressions and your sins.
You're caught between a rock and a hard place,
it wasn't the rabbit who won the race,
with Jesse at the helm, a national disgrace.
A scandal you haven't got a handle on
for running on and on at the mouth.
You bet your sweet ass I am.

1989? 90?
Jesse Helm/NEA censorship scandal July 1989
repurposed from Doggerel

DOGGEREL

Doggerel, catteril, it's the same to me

whether bad verse exumes dead poets societies

or politicians show too much interest

in exposing moral pejoritives. The body pests

are in danger of becoming cockroach battilions

censoring Raid cans in the name of titillations.

Hart Crane had trouble licking

stamps underwater while picking

on suicide as a means to an end of—

Well, that part is censored verbiage—

Mapplethorp syrup under the bridge.

It's the same to me whether or not

police poets piss in the pot

or that god is dog and evil is live—

It's all done with with mirrors.

Jesse Helms has more than that in arrears.

Pass the dog bisquits, please comply.

It has everything to do with ergot on rye.

Way to go. Don't you know, Dude,

they say he feels wrong—

like a dog eating cat food.

1989?