Mendocino County Today: Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022

Rain Chances | Homeless Shelter | High Alert | Loyd Ballew | Stained Glass | Host Al | Rabies Clinic | School News | Pet Anita | CoCo Raise | Salmon Creek | Ukiah Dispensary | Hay Harvest | Covelo Investigation | Town Hall | Elk Roadside | Free Lunch | Pomo Land | PGrrr&E | Police Reports | Honeymoon Fighters | Yesterday's Catch | Ed Notes | Romanov Ball | Ukraine Defense | Bird Wings | Live Music | Puppetshow | Dr. Strangelove | Revolutionary Women | Disconnected Politics | Dream Bowl | Marco Radio | Ukraine Flag | Visionary Neumann | Pretty Smart | In Ruins | Jeanne d'Arc | Holding On | Resistance

RAIN CHANCES will persist through much of the day for a good portion of the area, with Lake and southern Mendocino counties remaining mostly dry. Additional precipitation will be possible through late in the upcoming week, with the heaviest amounts across Del Norte and northern Humboldt counties. (NWS)

UH OH. President Vladimir Putin has put his nuclear deterrent forces on high alert, blaming NATO leaders’ “aggressive statements,” according to the Associated Press. The order paves the way for Putin to use nuclear weapons, which of course would lead to devastating consequences for all of Europe. Putin gave the order on Sunday, asking his defense minister to put the nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty,” according to the A.P. “Western countries aren’t only taking unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, but top officials from leading NATO members made aggressive statements regarding our country,” Putin said. (AVA News Service)

PETE BALLEW

Loyd “Pete” Ballew, age 93, of Piercy, passed away on Tuesday, February 15, 2022. 

He was born on September 8, 1928, in Oakwood, Arkansas, the son of Jasper Ballew and Dixie Corene Abbott Ballew. He is preceded in death by his parents; one son, Randy Ballew; and several brothers and sisters. 

Pete was a truck driver and the hardest working man that his family ever knew. He took care of his wife and children with the most care he possible could. He loved music and was a talented musician being able to play any instrument, but the banjo was his favorite. He was an excellent wood worker and took great pride in keeping his car clean and his yard manicured. He will be greatly missed by all that knew and loved him. 

He is survived by his wife of 73 years, Vera Juanita Ballew of Hot Springs; three children, Judy Ballew Rone of Hot Springs, Vince Allen Ballew of Boonville, California, and Amy (Darrel) Kelley of Hot Springs; three grandchildren, Cheryl (Fred) McClard of Hot Springs, Dale (Angie) Hamilton of Donaldson, and Dixie (Michael) Miller of Ukiah, California; five great-grandchildren; six great-great-grandchildren; one brother and sister-in-law, Eugene and Patsy Ballew of Hot Springs; his grand-dog, Roxie, who he called Puddy Dog; his special daughters at heart, Tina Beckwith and "Chigger"; several nieces, nephews, extended family members and a host of wonderful friends. 

Funeral service 10:00AM, Saturday, February 26, 2022, with Bro. Roger Smith and Bro. Dale Hamilton officiating in the Smith Family Funeral Home, Hot Springs. 

Interment in the Oakwood Cemetery. 

Visitation Friday, February 25, 2022, 5:00PM-7:00PM. 

Pallbearers are Greg Terry, Jessie Godwin, Nathan McClard, Nick McClard, Ryan Hamilton, Darrel Kelley, Wesley Hamilton and Randall Nicholas. 

Honorary pallbearers are Dr. Kyle Roper, Mike Coupe, Tommy Baker, Ricky Ballew and Ralph Hamilton. The family would like to express a special thank you to Lake Hamilton Health and Rehab, especially Marissa, for the excellent care they gave to our loved one. 

WANTED: A PLACE TO LIVE...

HI MY NAME IS AL and I'm 62 years old single no dog no cat. I live in a 20ft motorhome and I am trying to find another place to live for me and my motorhome being I have to move from where I am living right now. I had injured my shoulder in the past and now it's giving me trouble that worries me that has me seeing the doctors. I am in need of another place to live and to recover from my hurt shoulder, a simple place to live a little while longer. I can pay some rent. Help... 

707-409-4147

Al Nunez <allymotocat@gmail.com>

NO COVID IN AV SCHOOLS

Dear Anderson Valley Community,

I am pleased to report that the Wednesday pool testing results returned negative for the entire district. We have implemented twice a week testing post-holiday break, but we will be scaling it back to our original once a week on Wednesday beginning the week of March 7. We will evaluate conditions as the data indicates.

---

I am sure you have been following stories in the media that new California guidance will be coming out next week that may affect masking protocols in schools. We have not received any pre-notice from our Public Health Officer relating to what the changes will be. As always, we follow the guidance of our Public Health Department. As we receive information, we will forward it to you. Please continue to follow the existing guidance until we have an official policy change from Public Health.

Louise Simson

Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

Cell: 707-684-1017

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Anita is very friendly with people and walks nicely on leash. This young beauty knows sit, lay down and shake. But—Anita’s all time favorite thing is getting belly rubs! Anita can be a little reactive when meeting new dogs, and she should be the only dog in her new home. Anita is 2 years old and 77 pounds. For more about Anita, visit mendoanimalshelter.com 

While you’re there, check out our canine and feline guests, our services, programs, events, and updates. Visit us on Facebook at: facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter

For information about adoptions, please call 707-467-6453.

GIANT PAY RAISE FOR COUNTY COUNSEL CHRISTIAN CURTIS re-proposed by Supervisor Williams

Agenda Item 5b, March 1, 2022: 

“Approval of Employment Agreement Between the County of Mendocino and Christian M. Curtis to Serve as County Counsel for the Term of May 19, 2020 through May 18, 2024, Including Compensation and Benefits Effective March 6, 2022 in the Amount of Three Hundred Twenty-Seven Thousand One Hundred and Forty-One Dollars ($327,141.00)/Annually [including benefits] (Sponsor: Supervisor Williams)”

According to the attached proposed salary agreement Curtis’s base salary would increase to $193,266 per year. The last time the raise was proposed back in December for $192,136, County Counsel Curtis mistakenly put it on the consent calendar and then the Board mistakenly tried to correct it later in the meeting resulting in our Brown Act violation notice which, after the County conceded was valid, postposed Curtis’s raise. When the Brown Act violation was acknowledged, the County hired a $375 per hour San Francisco attorney named Amy Ackerman, to first handle the Brown Act complaint and response, then to prepare this new raise proposal. 

TO SUMMARIZE: the County’s top (non-law enforcement) lawyer who is responsible for giving Brown Act training to other County officials violated the Brown Act in agendizing his own exorbitant raise, then when the violation was noted, the County hired an expensive Brown Act attorney to re-propose the raise because the person they propose to give the raise to was not trusted to properly re-agendize his own raise. Note also that the County Counsel’s office, which is running substantially over-budget for this point in the fiscal year, was ordered to pay for outside counsel for the Sheriff regarding a conflict of interest which prevented him from advising the Sheriff in regards to an illegal attempt to combine the Sheriff’s computer with the County’s computer, has incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside legal fees to defend the County in wrongful termination cases, and has produced only two published opinions for the Supervisors in his two years as County Counsel. (He may have produced more, but the County Counsel’s office says they are not at liberty to say if others have been written due to attorney-client privilege.) The only reason offered for the raise the last time it came up was that Mr. Curtis’s salary wasn’t sufficiently high enough above his Assistant County Counsel’s salary. Apparently because they’ve obtained that $375 per hour outside attorney, last December’s proposed dubious provision to connect the County Counsel’s salary to 15% above his own subordinate’s salary in perpetuity is not in this current proposal. The “department fiscal review” of this particular agenda item is signed by one Christian Curtis, County Counsel. The cost of the raise is of course unbudgeted, but Supervisor Williams’s agenda item — the same supervisor who frequently questions certain expenditures by asking what has to be reduced elsewhere to cover them — only says, “Department will work with EO Budget Team if a budget adjustment is needed.” Although Sheriff Kendall was threatened with personal liability for overruning his budget, no one has ever mentioned applying that same standard to the substantial overrun being incurred by the County Counsel’s office, an overrun which will be increased by the approval of this obviously unwarranted raise. (Mark Scaramella)

* * *

SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS also wants to discuss “multi-family housing” in unincorporated Mendocino County on Tuesday.

Item 5c) “Discussion and Possible Action Including Approval of Direction to Staff to 1) Determine Public Interest in Increased Housing, 2) Determine Where They Want It, 3) Determine Whether They Will Accept High-Density Multi-family Structures, and 4) Propose General Plan Updates Necessary to Realize Private Industry Development. (Sponsor: Supervisor Williams)”

This item, of course, will go nowhere, but the discussion might be interesting nonetheless.

UKIAH PLANNING COMMISSION OKS PERMIT FOR CANNABIS DISPENSARY NEAR CITY HALL

Concerns raised about AA/NA meetings nearby

by Justine Frederiksen

After addressing concerns regarding the proposed location’s proximity to meetings for people recovering from substance abuse, the Ukiah Planning Commission Wednesday unanimously approved a permit for a cannabis dispensary to operate in an empty building on Seminary Avenue near City Hall.

“At some point, (cannabis) needs to be somewhat normalized,” said Commissioner Alex de Grassi, explaining that while he had “no objections to a dispensary being downtown,” he was conflicted about it operating at 195 Seminary Ave., “because there is an (Alcoholics Anonymous) and a (Narcotics Anonymous) facility kitty corner to the site (at 292 Seminary Ave.), and we saw a lot of letters from people very concerned about the proximity to that facility.”

City Planning Manager Jesse Davis said that while there was nothing currently in the city code that would prohibit a dispensary from operating so close to recovery meetings, “it is still something that we can address through the annual review process, and present to the Zoning Administrator if there are concerns about these (AA and NA) facilities being impacted by the cannabis operation.”

Davis added that there are city code restrictions related to dispensaries operating near a residential rehabilitation facility, but the location on Seminary Avenue did not qualify because the use was temporary.

When asked to respond to de Grassi’s concerns, permit applicant Dylan McGinty, who also owns the building, said he has tried to be very respectful of the area. He said he did not plan to put “big, obscene marijuana pictures” on the building, and had picked a name that “didn’t scream we sell cannabis,” describing his choice of “Local Roots as easily being mistaken for the name of a food joint.”

McGinty admitted that he does have concerns about being close to those meetings, but just as he “can’t force someone to go into the store and buy cannabis, I can’t force them not to go into it” as long as they are over 21 years of age.

He also acknowledged some of the “stigmas” surrounding cannabis, “that it is the ‘gateway drug,’ and that cannabis is a lazy drug,” but he described himself as “a cannabis user who is also very successful,” and that ultimately it is up to each person in recovery to decide whether or not they will enter his store and buy cannabis.

“At the end of the day, I cannot control who is over 21 that goes into the retail store. But I can do my best to not make it so publicly known that this is a dispensary,” he said.

Chairwoman Laura Christensen said she also was concerned about the dispensary’s proximity to meetings for people recovering from substance abuse, but much less so after the board’s discussion.

“If (people) choose to stay in recovery, they choose to stay in recovery,” Christensen said. “If they are swayed to not be in recovery because there is a legal business across the street, that’s not our responsibility as the Planning Commission. They also probably drove past numerous liquor stores and bars to get to their meeting, as well.”

When describing himself and his business, McGinty said he was “born and raised in Mendocino County,” and that his company first received a cannabis permit in 2016, and “for the last six years we’ve tried to ride the wave through the market, and figure out how to get our product to retail.

“What we’re trying to do is create a platform and a store that isn’t just beneficial for us as farmers, but also (allow) other farmers to get their product to the local customers,” he said, adding that as “far as I know, only two other dispensaries in the area are locally owned. It takes a lot of money and time to open a dispensary, so it’s something that a lot of us farmers and regular citizens of the county don’t have the time or the money to do.”

As to the concerns raised by some that the dispensary was very close to Alex R. Thomas Jr. Plaza and the “family-oriented events” hosted there such as the ice skating rink and Pumpkinfest, McGinty pointed out that plenty of adults also attend events at the plaza where plenty of alcohol is served and consumed, but those activities did not seem to attract the same scrutiny.

He also said it was ultimately the responsibility of parents to warn their children about drug use, which he also argued that kids were exposed to far more readily online now than on the streets.

“I think kids these days learn far more from what they see online than what they see out in the world,” said McGinty, describing himself as a parent. “You learn more from video games than what you see down the street.”

Several people addressed the commission during the public hearing, most of whom were in favor of the project, arguing that it would bring in much-needed revenue to the city and provide local cannabis farmers another avenue for selling their product.

Monique Ramirez of the Covelo Cannabis Advocacy Group urged the commission to approve the permit, describing her group as representing “many small cultivators that are licensed in our county, and having another opportunity to sell cannabis to a dispensary is what we need right now, (when) many small farms are struggling to stay afloat.”

The commission voted unanimously to approve the permit.

(Courtesy, the Ukiah Daily Journal)

DEPUTIES AND DETECTIVES GATHERED IN COVELO CONDUCTING ‘ONGOING INVESTIGATION’

Covelo locals are reporting that there are multiple Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office deputies and detectives near the corner of Hopper Lane and Crawford Road. Much of the investigation seems to be centered on a trailer. MCSO’s Captain Greg Van Patten confirmed an investigation is ongoing in the area but “can’t share any details at this time.”

mendofever.com/2022/02/26/deputies-and-detectives-gathered-in-covelo-conducting-ongoing-investigation/

ONE OUT OF THREE’S NOT BAD

Who: Senator Mike McGuire, Supervisor John Haschak, and Sheriff Matt Kendall

What: Senator Mike McGuire’s Northern Mendocino County Town Hall

When: Wednesday, March 2nd at 6:30 pm

How to attend: RSVP today by clicking here! After you RSVP, we’ll email the call-in number and video livestream link.

Questions about the Town Hall: Email or call us at 707-468-8914.

FREE FOOD PHILO (formerly known as Love to Table) is distributing meals in town to those in need. We cook nourishing meals using produce from our farm and others, and would love to offer you a warm lunch on Monday Feb 28. If you could use a home cooked meal, or have a friend in mind who would, please call or text Arline Bloom (415) 308-3575, who will head up distribution in town.

~ This week’s menu ~

• Meat Chili
• Cornbread
• Garden Salad
• Plum Jam Bars

Thank you for letting us be of service. For more information on Free Food Philo / Love to Table, check out: https://unconditionalfreedom.org/love-to-table. Our meal this week is made possible with donations from New Agrarian Collective, Big Mesa Farmstead, Sonoma County Meat Co., Sierra Nevada Cheese Company, Central Milling

PG&E's WAR ON TREES in Northern Sonoma County and now Hospice too. 

by Gary Murray

We have lived on our family's ranch since the early 1900s, 5 miles SW of Cloverdale, our Home Town. We have no neighbors next to us. It's peaceful and so quiet till THEY COME. Then nothing but CHAINSAWS and CHIPPERS and more CHIPPERS. And it seems like the last 10-11 years we get a visit from PG&E's Tree Trimmer in January. They were doing just enough to say they were here on our place.

Each year it is a different crew. And God knows where they are from. Usually from a different Country and cannot speak English, let alone they cannot READ. Over the years they bring these huge trucks with a CHIPPER the size of a TANK and just as loud as a TANK.

I've told them over the years NO CHIPPERS; they have no place to turn around period. I have made signs coming up our paved road: NO CHIPPERS. And besides no ENGLISH, they cannot READ EITHER.

In 2020 here they come in January. With this huge truck and Chipper. No place to turn around. So they did their job. Came up our road and got off the asphalt and took out a 3-foot by 21 foot section of our road. Does not seem like a lot, but our road to our home is only 10 feet wide.

When backing and off the pavement now they took out our 48 year old Fig Tree we planted when we built our home. In doing so they also backed over my Great Grandpa's walk behind a steel plow he brought when they settled in Anderson Valley and Yorkville in 1855 from upstate New York.

Needless to say, I was PISSED-OFF. They finally got it turned around. And I let them know I was not happy. They finally got it. I was mad. They also figured out that I wanted to talk to their Boss. OK OK they said. Boss Coming and will be here in one hour. He is just leaving Fresno now.

Yes, Fresno, one hour. Now they can't figure out time. More like an 8-9 hour drive to Cloverdale. I'm still waiting for them. That was 2020.

If you are a Logger in Sonoma or Mendocino County you have to jump through major hoops to get a permit. And then sometimes it is denied. Yet if you want to Clearcut for PG&E, no problem. Or Clearcut for a Vineyard, no problem. With the vineyards we get all the chemicals that wash off into the Russian, Navarro, Garcia, Alder, Eel Rivers… We should have the world's best STEELHEAD fishing here in our backyards. But no. Back in the 60s and 70s the rivers were loaded with trout and steelhead. The Russian River is no more. We have not seen anything like what's coming in 2021 for us. OMG.

In June of 2021 here they come. Five [5] College Students working the Summer together. They were have a gay old time, Laughing, taking breaks, then lunch, and more laughing. They were here for a week and then gone one day. Not saying they were done, but just left.

None of the Tree Trimmers let you know they are here. You just hear the saws and CHIPPERS going.

This has been a NIGHTMARE to say the least. From June 2021 to Dec. 27th 2021 we had these crews on our Ranch. Most days were from 6:30 a.m. till after 5:00 pm 6 days a week and some days till noon on Sundays. They told us we had 85 trees that had to come out, PERIOD.

In the end there were well over 100 trees. It's like they clearcut the area on both sides of the line if it were to fall.

What they did was beyond belief! They even told us trees that were close had to come out. We had a few trees that my wife's Grandpa planted back in around 1900. And we were told they had to come out as they were dying. When in fact they were not at all but a healthy oaks.

We now have messy piles of logs all over our next to our home. We have piles of wood. I mean piles. They said they’d be back in Jan 2022 to take care of it all. We are still waiting. We told them we would keep some of the logs for firewood and they left us spray paint to mark them.

But the mess they have left is not right. Over the 6 months with all this heavy equipment coming and going, 2 of our culverts are giving out, I have signs saying NO CHIPPERS, YET THEY STILL COME.

We have found where they were smoking on our property and left the butts for us. Along with water bottles everywhere, besides taking our Asphalt Road out. They took a 43 old Fig tree we planted when we built our home. My Grandpa's steel plow he brought from upstate New York as they made their way West and settled in Cloverdale, Yorkville and Anderson Valley. My other Grandparents were some of the first settlers to arrive in Anderson Valley. My Great Great Grandparents were the Murray Family and my Great Great Grandmother's maiden name was Anderson, as in Anderson Valley. What an honor for me.

I have stepped in their HUMAN WASTE they left for me. They broke 3 of our gates coming into our place. One other they just cut the fence then drove in breaking off the 8x8 post I had in place. They had a huge bag of garbage and I told them they needed to take that. They did all the way to Dutcher Creek Road and then put it in our trash can. We are allowed one bag a week. After they left in December I found two more bags of their trash in my Boat. So now I'm three weeks behind in trash removal. I have my pick-up parked at the barn. I didn't use it much but I needed it. So I backed up and my tailgate fell off.

WTF! GET OUT! And they took out my right rear bumper and taillight. 

One night in August we came home late to find our main gate was locked. Which was fine. BUT THEY LOCKED US OUT COMPLETELY WITH THEIR LOCK. Of course, we have no key for their lock. So I had to drive into town and bought $78 worth of tools from Ace Hardware. We had no tools with us. Plus I'm not able to walk up to our home. We got in, but after $78 later. The next day I let them know what went on. They were all smiling so I guess they did not know what I was saying.

I have yet to let PG&E know what their crews have done. They have no respect for the land or us. One Saturday in July we had 7 — yes 7 — different tree crews in here. Out of all of this there was never a Boss on site. Other than the one that would be here within an hour as he just left Fresno. 

Just when you thought they were done another inspector would come. Oh, here is more to take out. We did have a PG&E Foreman on site in August and signed them off that all work was done. Only to find out the next day, not so.

My Father-in-Law and Mother-in-Law built their home back in 1946 just after the War. Their house can be seen from ours. In 1946 PG&E would not bring power to here until the home was done. Every board in that home was hand cut by them. 

So when it came time for PG&E to bring power they only would bring it to the hill above their home. But first they had to get the line from their home up to where PG&E would hook them up. Back then we could use trees as our poles. They found the best trees possible. And they got power.

Up to 2021 there was never a problem. So the tree trimmers that were here in 2021 decided to trim one big Oak. They did and it killed the tree. That mistake cost us over $5,500 to get a new line in. There was nothing wrong before then.

This has been a nightmare for us. The coming and going of all these crews. To name a few they were from Orland, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Ft Worth, El Paso, New York State and the Bronx, Kansas City, Billings, Elko, Reno, LA, Portland, Salem, Carson City, Eureka, Fortuna, Salt Lake and Twin Falls to name a few.

Just when we thought it was over and could not get any worse it did.

The Chippers have been gone since Dec 2021. PEACE at Last? 

NOT. 

AND ARE WE PISSED OFF NOW. 

My Mother-in-Law was 101 years young in September and Cloverdale [where we live] gave her a party at our Senior Center here in Cloverdale. Our Chief of Police picked her up in Cloverdale's police ATV and drove her all around. SHE WAS SO THRILLED.

She was going strong for 101 years old until 3 weeks ago. She fell hitting her head very badly. She spent 8 days in Kaiser Hospital in Santa Rosa. She was released with the Help from Hospice. We thought she would recover but she never did. We wanted her home and with the help from Hospice we made her comfortable. But she was declining and went into a deep sleep last Thursday. 

Then on Friday we heard a loud noise. WTF! Yes it was tree trimmers at it with the CHIPPER. I WAS BY HER SIDE WHEN I heard this. AND SHE OPENED HER EYES TO ME as if to, say go get them. 

These West Sierra Tree trimmers were told not to come over to our place PERIOD. They were at our relative’s ranch across the road. And she told them directly: DO NOT GO OVER THERE. But they did. No respect for us, my Mother-in-law and hospice. They just don't get it.

Here is my Mother-in-Law in a deep sleep and dying. Only to open her eyes as if to say go get them. AND I DID. They never had the balls to check in with us. They just drove up and started CHIPPING. They were chipping the logs that we hired a few guys to get them off of the hills and for firewood.

Again none of them spoke English. They could tell I was pissed and wanted me to write down my name and phone number so an English speaking person could contact me. I'm still waiting.

It is impossible for me to think that we had Hospice here with us then. Yet they never even let us know what they were doing. I had to hear it first as did my mother-in-law. 

I HAD THE BEST MOTHER-IN-LAW in the whole WORLD and I mean that. She died at 9:30 pm Friday night with us by her side. Let’s hear it for pg&e and the tree trimmers. Hospice or not to hospice — we must get the job done. 

What next?

Thank you

Gary N. Murray

Cloverdale

GET A ROPE

On Wednesday, February 16, 2022, a Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputy was dispatched to make contact with a concerned parent regarding sexual abuse of their (9) nine year-old child which reportedly occurred over the previous year in the 45000 block of Meadow Lane in Laytonville.

An initial report was taken documenting the allegations and the investigation was turned over to the Sheriff's Office Investigations Bureau (Detective Unit).

During the next several days Sheriff's Detectives continued the investigation and identified the suspect as being Wilmer Jack Mitchell, 38, of Laytonville.

Mitchell was identified as having recurring access to the child and evidence was discovered which identified multiple acts of sexual abuse beginning in 2020 and continuing through February of 2022.

Based on the information discovered, Sheriff's Detectives believed there was sufficient probable cause to arrest Mitchell for 288.5 PC (Continuous Sexual Abuse of a Child Under 14 years of Age).

On 02-24-2022 at about 3:00 PM, Mitchell was located in the Ukiah area and arrested. Following the arrest, he was booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was to be held in lieu of $200,000 bail.

Anyone with information concerning this investigation or Wilmer Mitchell is asked to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Tip-Line at (707) 234-2100 or the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Dispatch Center at (707) 463-4086.

========================

THE MOST USUAL OF THE USUAL SUSPECTS

On Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at approximately 1:23 A.M. Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputies conducted a traffic enforcement stop in on a motorcycle operated by Yecson Delaherran-Rivera, 38, of Ukiah, in the area of North State Street and Gibson Street in Ukiah.

During the traffic stop, it was determined the motorcycle had altered registration and it was stolen out of Santa Rosa, California. It was also determined Delaherran-Rivera had two misdemeanor warrants for his arrest out of Mendocino County.

Delaherran-Rivera was placed under arrest on the listed charges and for the arrest warrants.

During a search of his person incident to arrest, suspected methamphetamine and a methamphetamine smoking pipe was located. Delaherran-Rivera was also placed under arrest for possession of a controlled substance and possession of controlled substance paraphernalia.

Delaherran-Rivera was booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was to be held in lieu of $27,500.00 bail.

MIKE GENIELLA:

My thoughts are scattered on a cool, gray Saturday morning. I meant to stay local and write about the sentencing of the so-called “red-bearded burglar,” and offer up remarks on the approval of yet [another] cannabis dispensary in our community. I also planned to share musings about the leadership changes ahead for Mendocino County government, and how District Attorney David Eyster is poised for a fourth term, only the second time in local legal history.

Another time.

My mind today is scrambled by what is going on in Ukraine, and how the brave people of that nation’s capital of Kyiv are still resisting despite being outmanned and outgunned. I was deeply moved by the photo of a young Ukrainian couple who hurried up their wedding, and then grabbed their weapons to help defend their homeland.

CNN reported that Ukrainians Yaryna Arieva and Sviatoslav Fursin rushed their wedding and got married to the sounds of sirens blaring the Russian invasion. Straight after their wedding, they both joined the local Territorial Defense Center to help efforts to defend their country.

These “patriots” are taking to the streets to help their fellow citizens repel Putin’s invaders. They are not whining about Covid restrictions, or vaccination requirements at cross border crossings between the U.S. and Canada.

Locally, we bitch about the landscaped bulb outs on Ukiah’s newly completed downtown street improvement project, saying they make the turns onto side streets cramped and rubber marked.

We gawk at low water levels in our reservoirs, but there are folks who continue to leave sprinkler systems on in local orchards and vineyards for winter frost protections.

Those situations pale in comparison to what is going on in Ukraine today, where outmanned forces are holding on to their capital after resisting an overnight onslaught.

Ukrainians woke up Saturday morning to find their city transformed by war, according to the New York Times.

”There were sandbags in the streets, burned-out cars, and lines at sites distributing guns. The metro had stopped running, its stations now used solely as underground bunkers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the fate of the nation is ‘being decided right now.’ He posted a video of himself at daybreak Saturday, unshaven, on the capital's streets appearing resolved to remain in Kyiv even though Western officials have warned that Russian plans to capture or kill him.”

Hillary Clinton, in some quarters the much-reviled former Secretary of State who won the popular election count but lost the Electoral College vote to Putin sympathizer Donald J. Trump, wrote this week that she believes the fighting in Ukraine is more than just another war halfway around the globe.

It is a democracy vs autocracy battle, Clinton contended. The Atlantic magazine, which published Clinton's essay on the subject, used this introduction:

”Ukraine is one flash point in a larger global struggle between democracy and autocracy — one that stretches from the steppes of Eastern Europe to the waters of the Indo-Pacific to the halls of the U.S. Capitol.”

Here is the link: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/republicans-ukraine-putin-xi-trump-democracy/622898/

May the freedom fighters prevail in Ukraine.

CATCH OF THE DAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2022

BRAYAN BUENROSTRO-CORONA, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

SETH COSTA, Redwood Valley. Stolen vehicle, attempt to keep stolen property, burglary tools, probation revocation.

DORIS FRAZIER, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.

DANIEL GARCIA, Ukiah. DUI.

CHRISTOPHER KEYSER, Ukiah. Concealed dirk-dagger.

RITA LAVENDUSKEY, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

WILMER MITCHELL, Laytonville. Engaging in three or more acts of substantial sexual conduct with child under age of 14 for not less than three months.

JESUS RODRIGUEZ, Ukiah. Forge/alter vehicle registration, paraphernalia.

VICTOR TINAJERO, Ukiah. Domestic battery, battery with serious injury, damage to communications device.

JALAHN TRAVIS, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

ERNESTO TOSCANO, Fort Bragg. Assauilt with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, criminal threats.

LEONARD WILLIAMS SR., Covelo. DUI, suspended license.

ED NOTES

AT WHAT POINT does endless summer become oppressive? For me, early January 2022. 70 degrees on the valley floors, mini-blizzards up in the hills. A North County old timer tells me the recent snows at the higher elevations — upper Spyrock, the Pinches Ranch — knocked down thousands of trees. “There have been bigger snows but they didn't knock down nearly this many trees,” he said.

REMEMBER that old Cold Warrior, George Kennan? He came out of retirement to correctly deplore Bill Clinton's support for pushing NATO east: “I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. NATO expansion was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and ill-informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. We are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime." Enter Putin and the Gangster State.

WATCHING the coverage of Ukraine over the past three days, I've been surprised how many of the experts are clearly winging it. Thus inspired, I'll wing it myself from the global affairs desk here in Boonville, secure in my ignorance that I know at least as much about Putin and his invasion of the Ukraine as Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow. 

IF UKRAINE can hold off the Russians for another few days, Putin, assuming he hasn't gone nuts, will have undermined his own murderous kleptocracy at home in Mother Russia where many influential and everyday Russians have publicly opposed the invasion. Any puppet regime Putin might install will have sabbed itself, unable to justify the suffering Putin has inflicted on Ukraine. And Putin can't possibly occupy Ukraine because it's too big. Signs that he's beginning to crack are Putin's gratuitous threats Friday aimed at Sweden and Finland that he'd attack them if they joined NATO. Even Putin's Chinese soul bros abstained from supporting him in Friday's UN vote. Poor Old Joe's puppeteers are playing it just right, I'd say, but if Putin has gone full Queeg and attacks one of the NATO countries, this catastrophe will become a mega-catastrophe, a full-on Black Swanner with unpredictable but dire consequences. (Wolf, Rach, how'd I do?) 

THERE, THERE, my dears. NPR's cringe-worthy story aimed at helping Americans “stressed” by the unfolding Ukraine crisis prompts the ava to offer free hugs to any KZYX member who needs consoling.

THE LAST SPECTACULAR BALL IN THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN EMPIRE…

In 1903, the Romanovs, Russia's last and longest-reigning royal family (1613-1917), held a glorious and lavish costume ball. It was to be their final blowout, and perhaps also "the last great royal ball in Europe"...The party took place in the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, in two stages, on February 11 and February 13, 14 years before Czar Nicholas II's abdication (on 15 March 1917), on the 290th Anniversary of Romanov Rule...The outfits were based on the era of Nicholas II's favorite past Romanov Czar, Alexei Michailovitcz (Alexei the Quiet, the second Romanov Czar), who symbolized pre-Westernized Russia in the 17th century...The entire imperial family, Tsar Nicholas II as Alexei I, the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna as Maria Miloslavskaya, all dressed in rich 17th century attire...

PUTIN SHUNNED BY WORLD as his hopes of quick victory evaporate

Russian troops facing fierce resistance as Germany abandons its postwar military stance to supply arms to Ukraine

by Emma Graham-Harrison in Kyiv, Peter Beaumont in Lviv, Andrew Roth in Moscow, Philip Oltermann in Berlin

Vladimir Putin was facing growing international isolation and the prospect of pariah status on Saturday night as long-term allies dramatically turned against him following the invasion of Ukraine, and western nations planned further decisive military and financial action against Moscow.

As his hopes of a quick victory evaporated in the face of fierce resistance by Ukrainian soldiers and armies of citizen volunteers, Russia’s president was deserted by his key ally, China, and had his ultimatum demanding Kyiv’s surrender defiantly brushed aside by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

In perhaps the most striking development, Germany announced on Saturday night that it would supply Ukrainian troops with 1,000 anti-tank weapons as well as 500 Stinger missiles from its own military reserves.

“The Russian assault on Ukraine marks a turning point,” Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said, signalling a major shift in his country’s postwar military stance. “It threatens our entire postwar order. In this situation it is our duty to support Ukraine to the best of our ability in its defence against the invasive army of Vladimir Putin. Germany stands closely on the side of Ukraine.”

Significantly, the German government was also said to be bowing to intense pressure from Britain, the US and Canada to ban Russia from the crucial Swift banking payments system after repeated appeals from Kyiv for the west to do so. Sources in Berlin said German ministers’ views were shifting on the issue and they were actively discussing measures that “would hit the right people”, having previously resisted, partly because of fears that a ban would affect the flow of funds to aid agencies in Russia.

In further blows to Putin, Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, long seen as friendly towards Moscow, abandoned his support, saying he would back all EU sanctions against Russia, while Turkey was reported to be considering blocking the passage of Russian naval vessels into the Black Sea.

As a global diplomatic outcry intensified, Russia’s defence ministry ominously announced it was ordering “all units to advance in all sectors” as it accused Ukraine of refusing to negotiate. And in a desperate attempt to restore a positive narrative in the information war, the Kremlin banned street protests and restricted access to social media such as Facebook. A growing list of Russian celebrities and influencers announced they backed global efforts to stop the war.

Having held off Russian forces for two nights, morale in Kyiv remained high among Ukrainians of all ages and from all walks of life, as many queued to take up arms. Many also gleefully shared videos of unarmed civilians rushing into the road to stop advancing convoys and fearlessly berating Russian soldiers about why they had come to Ukraine. Around the country, Russian forces were not confirmed as having control of a single major city, while Zelenskiy remained in Kyiv and told Americans who offered to evacuate him: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”

Adding to the sense of crisis enveloping the Kremlin, the US said it would send a further $350m (£260m) of military assistance to Ukraine, taking its total for the past 12 months to more than $1bn; Nato moved more troops and weaponry to eastern member states bordering Russia and Belarus; and a sporting boycott mushroomed, with Russia facing a ban from motor racing and Poland refusing to play a World Cup football game. YouTube barred the Russian state-owned media outlet RT and other Russian channels from receiving money for advertisements that run with their videos.

Opposition to the invasion also spilled over into the UK’s Premier League football programme. At the game between Manchester City and Everton, the Everton players came out draped in Ukrainian flags while Manchester City wore shirts bearing the words “No War”.

The head coach of Chelsea, which is owned by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich – who last week was named in parliament as one of 35 oligarchs and “enablers” of the Putin regime – even suggested that he would be “happy to lose” Sunday’s Carabao Cup final against Liverpool.

“Given the situation, that we have a war, this is simply not important enough,” said Thomas Tuchel. “It unfortunately will not help, but, if it would, I am happy to lose the match.”

On Saturday night, Abramovich announced he was handing “stewardship” of the club to the trustees of its charitable foundation.

In London, the Ministry of Defence announced that Challenger 2 tanks and armoured vehicles from the Royal Welsh Battlegroup had arrived in Estonia from Germany, with further equipment and about 1,000 troops following over the coming days.

The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said the aim was to stop invasions of Nato member states: “Alongside our Nato allies, these deployments constitute a credible deterrent to stop Russian aggression threatening the territorial sovereignty of member states.”

On Saturday, Russian advances on major cities, including Kyiv, appeared to have slowed or ground to a halt. Ukraine’s defence ministry claimed Russia had suffered more than 3,000 casualties and that many other soldiers had been captured.

UK and other diplomats said a decision by China to abstain rather than back its ally Russia in a UN resolution on the invasion was being viewed as a huge victory for the west. Beijing called on both Moscow and Kyiv to find a negotiated settlement.

Ukraine’s health minister reported on Saturday that 198 people had been killed, including three children, and that more than 1,000 others had been wounded since the Russian offensive started before dawn on Thursday with massive air and missile strikes and troops forging into Ukraine from the north, east and south.

Among the Kyiv buildings hit in the latest wave of Russian strikes was a high-rise residential building. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, posted an image showing a gaping hole in one side of the building and damaged apartments on several floors.

(Guardian of London)

“ALMOST EVERY LITTLE OLD SALOON use to have 3 or 4 or 30 musicians and nowadays you put a damn nickel in a bastardly slot… and you got your music—but have you got as much real old red blooded fun? I doubt it. I like real people better. Put them back to work.”

—Woody Guthrie

DR. STRANGELOVE

Movie Review by Dwight Macdonald

With this comédie noire Stanley Kubrick clinches his title—one I conceded him years ago—to Best of Show among our younger directors and why stop there? Also Boldest. Of the great nightmare he has made a lafforama that leaves one with a painful grin on the face and a brassy taste in the mouth.

The story is from Peter George’s Red Alert and is similar to that of another, better-known novel called Fail-Safe, so similar that the authors and publisher of the latter have settled out of court a plagiarism suit brought by Mr. George. A crazy American general sends a squadron of nuclear bombers to get in a first strike at Russia; after frantic efforts and unspeakable confusion, the Ameri­can President manages to recall or have destroyed by the Russians all but one; this gets through and drops its bomb, which triggers off a nuclear death belt the Russians have secretly contrived; the picture ends with the world due to follow shortly. Very funny. What the autopsists call risus sardonicus.

It is amazing that the screenplay (by Kubrick, Mr. George, and Terry Southern—and from what I’ve read of Mr. Southern, I’d guess he is responsible for most of the dialogue and many of the more outrageous touches) should be faithful to this grim outline and more than faithful, you feel they really enjoyed their work. It is amazing that Kubrick’s direction should leave no satirical punch pulled: he gives us a Walpurgisnacht of folly and madness in which the principal actors are American generals, an American President and his Cabinet, and a German atomic wizard in their employ; and in which every sacred idée reçue of the cold war—from mother and ice cream to The International Communistic Conspiracy—is me­thodically raked over with a barrage of satire. It is even more amazing that Columbia Pictures Corp., a perfectly respectable American business enterprise, is distributing this preverted, to borrow from the script, travesty of the American Way of Life (and, of course, Death). As I write, the film has not been publicly shown. The repercussions may be interesting. Or, possibly, not: we have a way of defusing critics by agreeing with them—“I’m glad you asked that question.”

Dr. Strangelove is a machine constructed to deliver the maxi­mum punch. The intercutting throughout of the American plane’s progress with the “meanwhile back at the air base (or the President’s war room)” sequences, for instance, is beautifully handled for suspense, and the plane’s theme song, When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, is exactly right in its cockiness and its outdatedness. But it is Kubrick’s direction of the actors that I most admired: he has made them into commedia dell’arte grotesques, but grotesques that take off from a solid foundation of what one un­easily recognizes as our everyday American reality. Peter Sellers, as the President, is disturbingly right: a reasonable, decent little fellow who just wants to live and let live, but who is trapped in the madness of his military and scientific sorcerer’s apprentices. As, his first call on the “red” or “hot” direct phone to the Soviet premier when he stalls, like a wife telling her husband she has wrecked the car, until he finally has to come out with it: “Well, Nikita, you know, the fact is, something very peculiar seems to have hap­pened. …”

But the heart of the film is the military grotesques, and I wonder if Kubrick, even with Columbia Pictures behind him, will get away with it. (If he had only included J. Edgar Hoover!) The two lower-echelon types are stupid, illiterate cornballs. Colonel “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn) is convinced that the British Group Captain Mandrake—the only sensible military type we see—is either a spy (“What kind of fancy uniform is that?”) or a “prevert” (this must be Terry Southern) and warns him, burp gun in hand, as Man­drake enters a phone booth to call the President: “If you try any preversions in there, I’ll blow your head off!” The commander of the fatal plane, Major Kong (Slim Pickens), is a dim-witted Texan who rises to his big moment when the attack signal comes through: “Ah ain’t much of a hand at makin’ speeches, boys. . . .’’ He then exchanges his helmet for a cowboy’s Stetson, and ends riding the bomb down like a bronco, flailing it with his hat and yelling “Yippee!” The two generals are stupid, illiterate, cornball and crazy. George C. Scott as General “Buck” Turgidson, liaison between the President and the military establishment, gives his best performance to date; he is really a “character” actor, and Kubrick pushes him all the way: such mugging—he has more facial muscles than Lon Chaney! But this is just technique, though always nice to see some in American movies. The great grotesque is Sterling Hayden as the loony general who launches the attack. He is a certifiable madman—there might be some difficulty in committing Buck Turgidson—who orders the bombing as a last resort against “the Communist conspiracy to sap and impurity our vital body fluids” via the fluoridization of American water supplies.

I have never thought much of Mr. Hayden’s acting, but he is very good here, so good as to be more than a grotesque: he is mad but human; one never knows quite what to expect next and so one has a certain empathy. This suggests one of my two criticisms: there are no overtones. All the characters, except Mr. Hayden, roll smoothly along their predestined satiric tracks. It will be objected that the style of the film is abstract satire and that human overtones are therefore not to be expected. Granted, but this brings me to my second objection: there is too much repetition. As, the scenes in the plane: one can have too much of twisting of knobs and readings of dials, even though the satiric point is the contrast between the precision of the means and the lunacy of the ends. There is also too much repetition of character: these are, rightly, comic-strip people, every man in his humor, but since humors are invariable and so incapable of development, there is a loss of interest if they are repeated too much. Yet they must be repeated—that’s part of the joke, too. I recommend the study of Moliere, who in L’Avare, Le Misanthrope and Tartuffe also manipulated fixed, static characters like General Turgidson, but who knew how to tread the narrow path between too much and not enough. Falstaff is the other kind of comic character, fluid and changing as life and so never weary­ing because each repetition is not quite the same. Hayden is no Falstaff, but the germ is there. And if Kubrick-Southern had been more of a Moliere, their film would have been better. Though it’s quite good enough for these times.

Esquire, February 1964

Correction: I am informed, by Reliable Sources, that I overesti­mated Terry Southern’s contribution to the script of Dr. Strangelove, specifically that he came in only in the last few weeks, after it had been put into pretty much final shape by Kubrick and Peter George. He added some nice business and some fine touches, but his collaborators were more important than I’d thought. (Mr. Southern’s literary personality is so distinctive that his collaborators tend to be blanked out: Candy is treated by the reviewers as if it were his work alone although the title page clearly states that Mason Hoffenberg is its coauthor.) I was also wrong, as Mr. Brown of California noted in the May issue, about the movie script being faithful to Mr. George’s original novel, Red Alert. I meant the movie was as uncompromising as the novel, which I hadn’t read but had heard about, but I hadn’t realized that Kubrick had con­verted a “serious” message-novel into a black comedy whose mes­sage was all the more really serious, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, for being transposed into the mode of grotesque satire. My apologies to Mr. Kubrick.

Esquire, September 1964

REVOLUTIONARY WOMEN, SPAIN, 1937

WHO SAID THIS?

Both the Republican and Democratic establishments warn their megadonors and the public that allowing the other to take political power will disrupt civil society and prevent America from becoming great again. The GOP screams that antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement will destroy white America and will result in a civil war. The Democrats counter that Trump and January 6 type “insurgents” will dissolve social peace inside the United States, provoke counteractions, and thereby lead to civil conflict. Social peace, each side insists, requires political war to defeat the other side. Neither side glimpses the absurd contradiction of its claims.

Which way U.S. politics will go depends less on the two parties or their disconnected rhetoric. What matters far more are the actualities of U.S. capitalism as the U.S. empire continues to decline and U.S. capitalism’s accumulated problems worsen. These latter factors will determine how the public views the parties’ disconnected policies. Today’s inflation offers an example of this. As a further slap in the face of the U.S. working class who have dealt with two years of economic crash plus the health catastrophe of COVID-19, inflation and the rising interest rates aimed to stop it will ultimately shake capitalism and shape politics.

How many angry working families will now sympathize with a politician who offers big changes versus a politician who offers “stay the course”? The business community wants inflation stopped. The responsive Fed will thus resort to quantitative tightening and raising interest rates. The responsive Biden will applaud the Fed. Those Fed actions can and likely will threaten jobs. So Biden must choose between the electoral risks of inflation versus those of job deterioration. That is the risky dead-end “choice” that the problems of capitalism will dump on Biden. And if 2022 proves to be the year when capitalism’s crisis breaks into the explicit open, will most Americans tilt toward Trump-type fascism or the “democracy protection” offered by the Democrats to protect themselves from capitalism’s crisis?

Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascist solutions to crises in their nations’ capitalisms did not end well. Yet today’s leading U.S. capitalists seem not to know or care about historical precedents. They continue to perform their disconnected politics comfortably, oblivious to the imploding capitalism and the resulting damage to Americans. In that, they resemble the upper classes in Russia (up to 1917), in Germany (up to 1933), and in Italy (up to 1922). The most important questions thus become whether or not and how soon a new left can emerge that targets capitalism per se, proposes an alternative system, and charts a transition to this alternative system.

FIRE IN THE HOLE.

"Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood; stop up the access and passage to remorse that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose."

Here's the recording of last night's (2022-02-25) Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA): https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0477

Thanks a lot to Hank Sims for all kinds of tech help over the years, as well as for his fine news site: https://LostCoastOutpost.com

And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which provided about an hour of the above eight-hour show's most locally relevant material, as usual, without asking for anything in return. Though I do pay $25 annually for full access to all articles and features, and you can too. As well as go to KNYO.org, click on the big red heart and give what you can. Also email me your work on any subject and I'll read it on the radio this coming Friday night.

BESIDES ALL THAT at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but nonetheless worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together. Such as:

Doctor Who theme as Belgian jazz. In the middle-late 1990s I had an early version of a program called Band In A Box that you could use to generate music. The jazz default setting sounded just like this.

https://tinyurl.com/DoctorWhoThemeAsBelgianJazz

Dinner mit Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski und Christine. This is very close to how the people these actors are portraying really are in real life --or were; Klaus Kinski died in 1991.

https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/02/my-dinner-with-werner_0857887364.html

And if you want to be able to demonstrate the claim that you taste metal and feel all buzzy and weird when a satellite goes overhead with its cell-phone antenna's surveilling rays trained on you, you'll need to memorize all their schedules for the full nocebo effect and authentic exaggerated righteous tone when you cry out in the grocery aisle, "See? See? Don't you feel that?" Ready, set, obsess:

https://www.makeuseof.com/ways-to-track-starlink-satellites/

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

THE REAL LIFE AND TIMES OF THE SCIENTIST WHO INSPIRED DR. STRANGELOVE

by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Call me Johnny, he urged the Americans invited to the wild parties he threw at his grand house in Princeton. Though he never shed his thick Hungarian accent, von Neumann felt that János—his real name—sounded altogether too foreign in his new home. Beneath the bonhomie and the sharp suit was a mind of unimaginable brilliance.

During a life cut short by cancer, von Neumann laid the foundations of quantum mechanics, founded modern game theory, helped design the atom bomb, drafted the blueprint for every modern computer from smartphone to laptop, and with Klári Dan, his second wife, wrote the first truly useful, complex programs ever to have been executed.

Von Neumann’s machine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton would spawn the first generation of modern computers worldwide including the IBM 701, the company’s first commercial model, and his refusal to patent anything helped birth the open source movement. But not content with computers that merely calculated, he proved during a lecture in 1948 that these information-processing machines could, under certain circumstances, reproduce, grow, and evolve. Even on his deathbed, he wrote lectures comparing computers and brains that built a bridge between neuroscience and computer science for the first time.

Fearing a catastrophic third world war, von Neumann supported a pre-emptive strike against Stalin’s Soviet Union. He changed his mind but not before becoming one of a handful of scientists who inspired Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. The caricature has overshadowed his astonishing achievements, prescience and impact, which have been all but forgotten.

“He died so prematurely,” his friend, the mathematician Stanisław Ulam, said, “seeing the promised land but hardly entering it.” Some sixty-five years after von Neumann’s death, we are just beginning to glimpse his promised land ourselves.

Over lunch in Los Alamos in 1950, Enrico Fermi suddenly asked his friends, “But where is everybody?” Everyone burst out laughing. Fermi had been thumbing through a copy of the New Yorker and come across a cartoon blaming the recent disappearances of dustbins on extraterrestrials. The “Fermi Paradox” is the name now given to the conundrum of why the human race has not made contact with any alien species despite some estimates suggesting they should be legion in our galaxy. Thirty years later, Frank Tipler “solved” this paradox. Given that at least some intelligent beings would be expected to develop self-replicating machines, Tipler asks, and the billions of years such von Neumann probes would have to crisscross the galaxy, why has there been no trace of one detected in our solar system? His conclusion is that human beings are the only intelligent species in the cosmos.

Von Neumann thought we were alone too. Shortly after Hiroshima, he had remarked semiseriously that supernovae, the brilliant explosions caused by massive stars collapsing in on themselves, were advanced civilizations that “having failed to solve the problem of living together, had at least succeeded in achieving togetherness by cosmic suicide.” He was keenly aware of the various ways in which his work might ultimately contribute to humanity’s undoing. In coining the term “singularity,” in conversation with Ulam, von Neumann imagined a point ‘in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue’. Whether that would be in a negative or positive sense remains a matter of debate: thinkers have variously speculated that an artificial superintelligence might end up fulfilling all human desires, or cosseting us like pets, or eradicating us altogether.

The cynical side of von Neumann’s personality, shaped by his scrapes with totalitarianism and made famous by his transitory enthusiasm for preemptive war with the Soviets, often yielded to a softer face in private. “For Johnny von Neumann I have the highest admiration in all regards,” said neurophysiologist Ralph Gerard, a contemporary of his. “He was always gentle, always kind, always penetrating and always magnificently lucid.” Shy of revealing too much of himself, his good deeds were quietly done behind people’s backs. When a Hungarian-speaking factory worker in Tennessee wrote to him in 1939 asking how he could learn secondary school mathematics, von Neumann asked his friend Ortvay to send school books.

Benoît Mandelbrot, whose stay at the IAS had been sponsored by von Neumann, unexpectedly found himself in his debt again many years later. Sometime after von Neumann’s death, prompted by a clash of personalities with his manager at IBM, Mandelbrot went looking for a new job—and found that the way had been made easier for him. Von Neumann had spread the word widely that his research could be of great significance—but was very risky. “He may really sink,” von Neumann warned them, says Mandelbrot. “If he’s in trouble, please help him.”

Which of these was the real von Neumann? “Both were real,” Marina says. But the dissonance between them confused even her, she admits. Beneath the surface the two facets of his personality were at war. Von Neumann hoped the best in people would triumph and tried to be as magnanimous and honorable as possible. But experience and reason taught him to avoid placing too much faith in human virtue.

Nowhere is the tug-of-war between the cool rationalist and kind philanthropist more evident than in von Neumann’s remarkable meditation on the existential threats facing humanity in the decades to come. Published in June 1955 in Fortune magazine, “Can We Survive Technology?” begins with a dire warning: “literally and figuratively, we are running out of room.” Advances in domains such as weaponry and telecommunications have greatly increased the speed with which conflicts can escalate and magnified their scope. Regional disputes can quickly engulf the whole planet. “At long last,” he continues, “we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the earth in a critical way.”

Long before climate change became a widely discussed concern, the essay shows von Neumann was alert to the idea that carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and oil were warming the planet. He favored the idea of coming up with new geoengineering technologies to control the climate by, for example, painting surfaces to change how much sunlight they reflect—quite likely the first time that anyone had talked about deliberately warming or cooling the earth in this way. Interventions such as these, he predicts, “will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done.”

Von Neumann speculates that nuclear reactors will rapidly become more efficient and held out hope that mankind would harness fusion too in the long term. Automation would continue, he predicted, accelerated by advances in solid-state electronics that will bring much faster computing machines. But all technological progress, he warns, will also inevitably be harnessed for military use. Sophisticated forms of climate control, for example, could “lend themselves to forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined.”

Preventing disaster will require the invention of “new political forms and procedures” (and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988, arguably embodies one attempt to do exactly that). But what we cannot do, he says, is stop the march of ideas. “The very techniques that create the dangers and the instabilities are in themselves useful, or closely related to the useful,” he argues. Under the ominous heading “Survival—A Possibility,” he continues: “For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.”

There is, as he puts it, no “complete recipe”—no panacea—for avoiding extinction at the hands of technology. “We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.”

(Adapted from The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton. Copyright 2022 by Ananyo Bhattacharya. lithub.com)

IN RUINS

by James Meek

As I wandered around Kyiv for seven days, leaving, it turned out, in the last daylight hours of its existence as a ‘normal’ city, I was trying to remember a passage from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. I found it today, at home, more ominous than I remembered:

No one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

‘Ruins’ is an interesting word, since in the modern world, in peacetime, buildings are seldom allowed to reach the ruined stage, even after a natural disaster. They are either repaired, fall quietly derelict, or are demolished. Only war makes ruins. It is as if Austerlitz (the thought in the book is his) is saying that eventually all large buildings will be consumed by war. As if war were the overarching reality. And, indeed, it is striking how many commentators in the west have described Vladimir Putin, since he invaded Ukraine, as ‘detached from reality’, when he is not detached from reality. He is reality. We are the ones detached from the reality that Putin is real and his real armed forces are really killing people, and we really aren’t doing much to stop him, because we really are not prepared to send our children, or other people’s children, to die. And Putin really is.

But Austerlitz isn’t entirely right, either. Peace is just as real and potentially permanent as war. One of the consequences of Putin’s imposition of his bleak psychic condition on Ukraine is that, while Ukrainians are able to remember how peaceful Kyiv was before Putin began bombing it, to westerners unfamiliar with and previously uninterested in it, a city dragged into war can seem defined by it: as if war were somehow its natural state. As Katerina Sergatskova, the editor in chief of the Ukrainian news site Zaborona Media, pointed out in a tweet on the second day of the Russian onslaught, it isn’t. ‘Today is super shiny in Kyiv,’ she wrote. ‘It feels like it’s a fake sun, not our sun that we used to see. Like somebody took the real world from us, and now we are in a fake one, on the other side of a black mirror.’ If there’s a shred of comfort against my gnawing feeling that I should be in Kyiv still, it’s that the memory of the city I hold is at least of that better real world, where war still seemed ridiculous, absurd, fantastical.

My hotel was close to Bohdan Khmelnytsky Square, and I often crossed it. It’s ringed by outsize buildings. One of the things about peaceful cities that makes them peaceful is the way they contain markers of old wars that have been contained and sterilized, as if reminders of ancient conflicts, made pretty for tourists and flâneurs, can never break free of the leash holding them to the past and snarl out into the present. There’s the blue, white and gold baroque tower of St Sophia, the more recent exterior of a cathedral whose interior is a thousand years old, evidence that Kiev founded Russia rather than the other way round (Putin sees it differently, although he very much sees it). St Sophia’s was ruined by war, by Mongols and Poles, then repaired, then nearly destroyed by zealous Bolsheviks.

From the other side of the square you can see down Volodymyrsky towards St Michael’s golden-domed monastery. The original was razed in the 1930s, in the high atheist period of Stalin’s rule, only to be rebuilt, as close as possible to the destroyed baroque version, in the 1990s. The last time I went past it, a few days ago, it had hoardings outside with the photos of thousands of Ukrainian service people killed in the war in the far east of the country, four hundred miles away. Yet even that, even when I was expecting a Russian invasion any day, didn’t affect my sense of being in a peaceful city. Even when I stood and listened as a group of veterans of that war, standing by the wall of the dead, prayed and rallied each other’s spirits in the face of the bigger war we were anticipating, they seemed to be moved by something that had happened long ago and was now made safe. The complete absence of war preparations in the city, from the lack of tank barriers to the neglect of shelters, helped maintain the illusion. It was said the city authorities didn’t want people to panic, but perhaps it was more basic; perhaps, for themselves as much as for others, they couldn’t bear to break the spell.

On one side of the square is the block of flats where Oxana used to live with her parents, her grandmother and their cat. Oxana was my first interpreter in Kyiv in 1991, when I barely spoke a word of Russian, let alone any Ukrainian. She was a brilliant simultaneous translator, and brilliant and funny generally – is, not was; she is an academic now, living in the US. She was the granddaughter of a senior official in the Soviet Ukrainian government, so the family had certain privileges. She’d also been one of the stars of her school’s Kalashnikov-stripping team, able to disassemble an automatic rifle in thirty seconds, I think her time was. Before I learned Russian I was dependent on Oxana to tell me what was in the newspapers, what they were saying on TV, what signs meant in the immediately post-Soviet world.

Those years saw the beginning of thirty years of low-level derision and contempt from Russia towards Ukraine’s pretensions to statehood, but it didn’t occur to me to think of Kyiv itself as threatened by Russia (except that if it was going to be threatened by anyone, it would be Russia). The main threat to the city and the country then seemed to be that it was poor, badly run, dilapidated, and these things were getting worse. But it was also a city of relaxed amiability, full of bright funny people, where a man would come to your door selling a liter jar of black caviar for twenty dollars, where you could take the Metro to the beach and the markets were piled high with fresh coriander and home-made cottage cheese. Peace seemed an unchangeable state.

Which was strange because, geographically, war wasn’t that far away. I dragged Oxana, with justifiable reluctance on her side, to the front line of the conflict between Slavs and Moldovans in Transnistria, just next door to Ukraine; we got there in time to meet the grim and theatrical Russian general, Alexander Lebed, who had flown in with troops. The troops are still there. The summer before I met her, Oxana had taken her holidays with university friends at a resort in Soviet Abkhazia, on the Black Sea coast; one day when we were watching the Russian TV news she turned from the screen to tell me that war had broken out there between Abkhazians and Georgians. Years later I would go there while it was under attack. Abkhazia is now an unrecognized Russian protectorate.

In a way, the lesson of this is that we were naive, that Kyiv itself was never going to be allowed to be normal and peaceful, that the Russians would come eventually. More than a hundred people died during the Maidan revolution in 2014; at the time, although it didn’t happen, it was perfectly rational to predict that President Yanukovych would call on Russian troops to protect him, and they would come, and crush the rebels. But that line of thinking takes you back to the notion that Kyiv, and Ukraine as a whole, are somehow doomed to sporadic outbreaks of war. That Kyiv, and Donetsk, and Kabul, and Baghdad, and Belgrade, are infected with the incurable disease of war; whereas London, Melbourne and Zurich are either immune, or cured. Even within the first list, as writers like Nabih Bulos point out, there is a distinction: ‘I’ve covered so many wars in the Middle East,’ he wrote, ‘and the difference in the level of empathy and attention compared to what you see regarding the war in Ukraine really gives one pause.’

It was pretty nice in the middle of Kyiv before the war arrived. It was even better in the summer; it’s a very green city. Even twenty years ago I remember a friend telling me how people coming down from Moscow for a break would say it was like a resort. The threat of war, combined with the complete absence of war, seemed to legitimize bourgeois indulgence. I discovered a rich red wine from Odesa, Kolonist. The night before I left I was in a bar on Yaroslaviv Val, drinking Kolinist with Andrei Kurkov while he told me the vineyard’s history. He’s been writing a series of crime thrillers set in the years of the first Ukrainian republic, after the First World War.

There’s an error here, a temptation to identify ‘peace’ with prosperity and comfort, and a rather limited form of it at that. Kolonist isn’t cheap; nor is the coffee in the slick joints around Yaroslaviv Val. In Kyiv as a whole, and even more in Ukraine as a whole, there are still many poor people. It is an unequal society. Russia is also unequal; Russia, too, has its hipster reservations in its big cities. They have coffee and nice wine in Russia too, as they do in China. On the far side of my invasion, Putin promises, you’ll have pretty much the same life as before. Thousands of people will be dead, and thousands more will be locked up, and thieves and murderers (in suits and ties) will be in charge, and we’ll shuffle the pack of billionaires a bit, but the damaged buildings will be repaired or replaced, like in Grozny – no ruins! – and you’ll still be able to buy nice things, and go to night clubs, and get good wifi in coffee shops, and speak Ukrainian if you must. The bourgeois will still be bourgeois and the poor will still be poor and everything will still be a bit corrupt. You will get over the war, and forget the pain, and your shallow consumerist lives will go on as before; and if your shallow consumerist lives consist of sitting in wine bars complaining about how shallow your consumerist lives are, well, that’s fine too, as long as you don’t really want to change anything.

This proposition for Ukraine is obviously ghastly, but also terrifying for the western world: if the fundamental obstacle to a transition from a democratic capitalist peace to an authoritarian capitalist peace is not the nature of the peace, but simply the nature of the transition – if the transition is one short bloody war, or one rigged election – everyone’s in trouble. But I don’t think it is. The peace and prosperity of Moscow is built not only on repression and raw materials but on predictability and stagnation. The peace of Kyiv before the war was nervous, dynamic, unpredictable. Full of obvious mistakes – as an actual democracy is bound to be. Full of people who strongly and openly disagree with each other, and have hope of having more political power – as an actual democracy is bound to be. Full of fearless bitching about how useless the president is – as an actual democracy is bound to be. Full of people who’ve zoned out of politics altogether – as an actual democracy is bound to be. I was never sure whether the unpreparedness of Kyiv for what was probably coming was carelessness or denial, but I think it is quite clear now that it was courage.

"I KNOW. IT'S ALL WRONG. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something."

"What are we holding onto, Sam?"

"That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it's worth fighting for."

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers