Mendocino County Today: Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Hot Interior | Jumper Restrained | Which Beach | T-Posts Wanted | Museum Job | Dad Fun | Tilted Pole | Quilt Show | Ribbon Cutting | Haapanen Garden | Authors Event | Whitesboro Breakfast | 1898 Outing | Sales Tax | Osprey | Sideshow Candidate | Comptche Schoolkids | Mental Money | Flower Bucket | Kill Numbers | Amanda Sarowski | Ed Notes | FB Finns | Hotel Mendocino | Yesterday's Catch | Rich Warriors | Steph Trophies | Ukraine | People Suffer | Increasingly Obvious | Sophisticated Psyops | High Price | Stupidity | Tactical Pillow | Don/Ron | Rearview | Sparks | Island Friends | People Dying | Electric Cars | Bumper Strip | Growing Wrath | Mainstream Press | Nixon China | Dogfight

TODAY WILL BE THE HOTTEST DAY OF THE WEEK across interior northwest California, and a dome of high pressure aloft will keep conditions hot and dry through the weekend. The immediate coast will stay seasonably cooler, with light onshore breezes. Patches of marine layer clouds will develop this evening and linger into Thursday morning, otherwise expect mostly sunny days to continue. (NWS)

YESTERDAY'S HIGHS: Yorkville 103°, Boonville 102°, Ukiah 101°, Fort Bragg 71°

BOONVILLE WEATHER FORECAST (walk slow and drink a lot of water)

FORT BRAGG POLICE OFFICER SAVES WOMAN FROM ATTEMPTED SUICIDE off Noyo Bridge

On Tuesday, June 21, 2022 at approximately 10:30am hours this morning several persons called police dispatch to report a female adult attempting to crawl over the bridge railing of the Noyo Bridge. 

Fort Bragg Officers as well as Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department personnel responded and observed an adult distressed female with one leg over the bridge railing. 

Arriving officers contacted and began communicating with the female victim. Fort Bragg Police Officer Padraic Ferris approached the female victim from behind, while she communicated with initial arriving officers. Officer Ferris was able to rush towards the female victim grab her around the waist and safely pull her away from the railing to the pedestrian walkway. 

The female victim was then transported to the Mendocino Coast Adventist Hospital for a mental health evaluation. 

This action of Officer Ferris, and all of the officers/deputies on scene, prevented the near death of this distraught female, I commend them all for their swift action! 

If you are in crisis or know of someone who might be in crisis please call the crisis line at (855) 838-0404, someone is at this number 24 hours 7 days a week, or call the Fort Bragg Police Department emergency phone at (707) 964-0200 we can provide a live person to speak to or resources. Please remember your actions effect so many other persons so at least allow us to listen to your crisis to provide a positive outcome. 

John Naulty, Fort Bragg Chief of Police June 21, 2022

WHERE IS THIS? (photo by Chris Calder)

PARK VOLUNTEERS NEEDED: Until we can build our new fenceline, we need to establish a “temporary” fenceline. Anyone have extra T-Posts they could loan the AV CSD to hold up temporary fencing at the new parking area for our local park? I’ve got a post driver and zip ties but will need 10-15 more t-posts to establish a safe perimeter around the parking area. Got resources to help us build the permanent fenceline? Know someone who does? Please reach out and let us know as we welcome all the community support we can get in improving our local park! Have other ways you’d like to help? Please, don’t hesitate to reach out. (415) 713-3833 elizabeth.martha.jensen@gmail.com

THE CITY OF UKIAH: We are hiring for a Museum Curator of Collections and Exhibits! For more information or to apply, please click the link: https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/cityofukiah

ERNIE PARDINI: Someone asked me the other day if I disliked taking care of my dad in his old age. I said “of course not. After all he did for us growing up? I remember my dad taking my brother and I swimming every Saturday during the summer. He would drive us down to the Greenwood rd. Bridge and stop right in the middle of the bridge. He got a big kick out of tossing my brother and I over the rail into the deepest part of the swimming hole. It was so much fun! Especially after we got the sack untied."

FORT BRAGG QUILT SHOW this weekend, Saturday 10-5, Sunday 10-4

Quilts, dazzling quilts - vendors- demonstrations - Raffle Quilts - Raffle Baskets

$7 admission good for both days

Chestnut and Dana Sts Fort Bragg

Our 36th annual show "sew whimsical"

Come and enjoy

REDWOOD WASTE SOLUTIONS: We are hosting a Ribbon Cutting alongside the Mendocino Coast Chamber of Commerce & Visitor Center at our new Fort Bragg office! We will have drinks, hors d'oeuvres, a raffle, and lots of fun. Please join us on Wednesday, June 22nd, from 5:00PM-7:00PM at 325A E Redwood Ave. Fort Bragg, CA 95437.

MALCOLM MACDONALD: Authors Event, Thursday, June 23rd

I will be part of an authors event in person at Gallery Bookshop on Thursday, June 23rd at 6 p.m. Of course, I will be promoting my new book, Mendocino History Exposed. Come to get your copy and hear some of the back story of the "tire baby," the outlaw shooting horse, and the two gun-toting desperadoes depicted on the cover of Mendocino History Exposed.

Writers John Liles and Barbara Quick will also be included in the program, so you are getting a three for one deal! 

Gallery Bookshop is located at the corner of Main and Kasten Streets in Mendocino.

WHITESBORO GRANGE PANCAKE BREAKFAST IS BACK!

Is your mouth watering for some yummy pancakes? Well what a happy coincidence - Whitesboro Grange monthly Pancake Breakfast makes a comeback this Sunday, June 26 from 8AM to 11:30 AM. Adults $10, children 6-12 $5 and kids under 6 eat free. You get a pancake stack, eggs, ham, orange juice and coffee. Don't miss it - it's the social event of the season. Be there or be square!

Wendy Meyer <wbmeyer56@gmail.com>

THE SUPERVISORS voted 5-0 to pursue a scaled back fire-only 1/4-cent sales tax proposal Tuesday afternoon, following an unprecedentedly contentious discussion which saw Supervisors Gjerde and Haschak staunchly supporting it and Supervisors Mulheren and McGourty sticking by a combined 3/8-cent combined water and fire services tax proposal. In the end Supervisor McGourty concluded that he “felt betrayed” about the vote. More tomorrow. (Mark Scaramella)

The tax discussion opened with Supervisor Gjerde presenting this Memo (which included extensive attachments supporting his point): 

Date: June 21, 2022

From: Mendocino County Supervisor Dan Gjerde

To: Mendocino County Board of Supervisors

RE: Are Mendocino County funds paying for polling and political consultants?

Agenda Items 3P & 6A, expenditures and activities of Inland Water

With adoption of the FY2021-2022 budget, the Board of Supervisors consented to increase Mendocino County contribution to the Mendocino Inland Water & Power Commission (Inland Water) from an annual transfer of $25,000 to $50,000.

Question #1: Does the FY2022-23 budget include $25,000 or $50,000 to Inland Water?

A request for public documents reveals that in September of 2021 Inland Water’s Chair, Janet Pauli, signed a contract for political polling and consulting services. The contract is attached to this memo and shows Inland Water commissioned a poll testing public support for a parcel tax to finance what Inland Water’s minutes throughout 2021 and 2022 have called the “PVP Ballot Measure.”

The contract is attached, along with a summary of the pollster’s questions and findings. In summary, the attachments show polling services by Godbe research were estimated at between $28,650 and $31,450. The contract also includes another $30,000 to political consultant NBS. In fact, the contract identifies Phase 1 of the PVP Ballot Measure costing $76,450. Phase 2 of the contract, which was to include three “Informational Mailings” and digital media produced by TBWBH political consultants was to cost an additional $98,491.

Question #2: What is the total Inland Water has paid, or will pay, to Godbe Research, and to political consultants NBS and TBWBH?

Inland Water’s minutes of April 14, 2022 report, “Potter Valley Project …PVP ballot measure – Pauli discussed the need to move to a sales tax funding source that would be put on the ballot by the County Supervisors. There is a very short timeframe to get it on the November ballot. Supervisor McGourty is working with the IWPC and the consultants to try and put the process together.”

Question #3: What is the involvement of Inland Water, and their consultants, in the Board’s sales tax?

SAKO WONDERS: “I don’t get it. Trent James has 4,330 Youtube subscribers, and Trent’s Youtube video about Mendo’s chomo, Bailey Comer, alone gets 16,052 views, but Trent only gets 837 votes.”

---

FARMER GIRL REPLIES, and then some:

“Mr. Sackowicz, the answer to this is simple. In the US we had the circus which was considered family entertainment. However, we also had the sideshows. This was the secondary production.

Some people who went to the circus also would swing by the sideshows. Many of the sideshows were off limits to women and children. However, people still paid good money to see the bearded woman, the alligator skin boy, the monkey girl or some other anomaly.

I think people had an urge to see these things out of a morbid curiosity.

But at the end of the day it was just curiosity, not love or respect that drove this industry.

Trent James became the sideshow in our county. People liked watching the tattooed man spew whatever half cooked ideas he had. The people who were already predisposed to hate the police had a platform to stand on and say, “Look I was right all along!”

When he decided to run for office he was asking people to move from morbid curiosity into Holy Matrimony. Face it, not many sideshow performers were asked for their hand in marriage.

It was at that point people began asking him questions, real questions. They wanted to look behind the curtain. When we began looking, we suddenly saw anyone who asked him hard questions were shocked by either his total lack of ability to answer or the fact that anyone who had a different view was shouted down by he and his cronies.

Trent James was in Mendocino and was asked about the Sheriff’s Department Budget. His answer was he didn’t know anything about it and would need to get it through a public records request. At that point I simply left the meeting. I have seen the budget multiple times because it’s posted online. I quickly realized he was a sideshow act, not a real candidate.

Later, he and his friends began a smear campaign against a business who decided they didn’t want a sideshow in their building and asked he not perform there. This was their right. True to form, a Facebook post was sent out from the Trent camp asking people to boycott them. This only caused greater support for this business and less people to be impressed with the sideshow. Not to mention, he alienated everyone who supported that business the moment the Facebook boycott came out.

Anyway, the sideshows started declining in the 1930s as people began seeing them as exploitative and lacking in dignity for the performers.

Doctors also began to diagnose and treat some of the diseases that had caused the deformities. The final nail in the coffin was the rise of television, which allowed people to stay at home and watch other forms of “lowbrow” entertainment. Now we have the internet and that has degraded us even further.

Lastly, I would like to say anyone who would attach their horse to your cart is doomed from the beginning. Just saying, but I think he would have gone further without your support. Not trying to be cruel, simply calling it as I see it.”

NEWSOM: $7.8 MIL TO MENDO FOR MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES

The nation is experiencing a mental health crisis. Today, California announced $518.5 million in grants to help provide services and housing options to those with severe mental illness or substance abuse problems, including for those who are living on the streets. The latest funding will help Governor Newsom’s CARE Court proposal, taking a new approach to homelessness and taking stronger action to get people off the streets and into a place where they can get the care they need.

The funding will provide treatment beds for more than 1,000 people at a time, plus behavioral health services for many more. It is part of a $2.2 billion effort to expand mental health housing and services across California, especially for people experiencing homelessness.

The Governor announced the latest grants during a meeting with families who have loved ones dealing with serious mental illness, many of whom have been homeless.

“The crisis on our streets is at a breaking point. Too many Californians are struggling with mental illness and substance abuse, and many of them end up on our streets. We need to change the way we deliver help to those who need it, and these grants are an important step in changing our approach to homelessness and serious mental illness,” Governor Newsom said. “California won’t look away any longer; we’re helping our fellow Californians now. That’s the California Way.”

The Governor’s meeting in Sacramento with members of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) included families who are caring for loved ones struggling with behavioral or mental health disorders and could be helped by CARE Court. The Governor heard their stories and talked about the historic actions that California is taking to address this crisis.

CARE Court will provide Californians suffering from untreated schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders with community-based treatment, services, and housing, and is intended to serve as an upstream intervention for the most severely impaired Californians.

“Governor Newsom has NAMI’s full support in getting CARE Court across the finish line,” said Jessica Cruz, NAMI CA CEO. “We’re here today to show our commitment to providing help, hope and health for those affected by serious mental illness by supporting initiatives like CARE Court which will provide much-needed help to Californians who need it most.”

“CARE Court has the potential to change the lives of thousands of families across the state,” said Harold Turner, Executive Director of NAMI Urban Los Angeles. “Organizations like NAMI urgently need this support so we can quickly begin helping our loved ones who are struggling with untreated mental and behavioral issues.”

Governor Newsom meets with NAMI CA

The awards announced today are delivered through the Department of Health Care Services’ (DHCS) Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program (BHCIP) Round 3: Launch Ready grants. In all, $2.2 billion was provided by the Legislature and the Governor to construct, acquire, and expand behavioral health facilities and community- based care options while investing in mobile crisis infrastructure.

Grants were awarded in the following counties:

• Alameda County – $18,405,122
• El Dorado County – $2,852,182
• Humboldt County – $4,170,560
• Kern County – $3,138,065
• Los Angeles County – $155,172,811
• Madera County – $2,035,512
• Mendocino County – $7,711,800
• Monterey County – $3,558,670
• Nevada County – $4,458,799
• Orange County – $10,000,000
• Placer County – $6,519,015
• Riverside County – $103,181,728
• Sacramento County – $30,553,889
• San Diego County – $30,874,411
• San Francisco County – $6,750,000
• Santa Barbara County – $2,914,224
• Santa Clara County – $54,074,660
• Solano County – $14,332,411
• Sonoma County – $9,751,915
• Stanislaus County – $33,369,900
• Yolo County – $12,500,000

Recipients of BHCIP Launch Ready grants include cities, counties, Tribal entities, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations statewide that serve target populations. Additional information on BHCIP Round: 3 Launch Ready awardees is available at BHCIP Grant Award Information.

The next round of funding will include more than $480 million focused on Children and Youth behavioral health issues. Awards will be made this fall. For more information about these grants, as well as other BHCIP rounds of funding, please visit the Improving California’s Infrastructure BHCIP grant information.

DEAD DOG AND THE ANTHROMORPHS

To the Editor,

Bruce Anderson's "Off The Record" column, "Dead Dog Chronicles," is truly off the record, as it is devoid of any actual facts regarding wildlife management in Mendocino County. Instead, Anderson relies exclusively on the word of former USDA Wildlife Services trapper Chris Brennan ("Dead Dog"), who has spent the past two decades slaughtering wildlife in our County.

Much of Anderson's column is devoted to Brennan telling us what a great guy he is and how he spends much of his time helping poor injured wild animals. But the actual facts taken from Wildlife Services' own records tell the true story of what Brennan has been up to for these past many years. Below is a partial list of wild animals killed by Wildlife Services trappers in Mendocino County between the years 1997 and 2017, as reported in the County's Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) on Wildlife Services released in June of 2019:

Mountain lion 181 killed, 2 freed

Black bear 261 killed, 8 freed

Coyote 4,119 killed, 4 freed

Bobcat 112 killed, 22 freed

Gray fox 235 killed, 37 freed

Opossum 233 killed, 33 freed

Raccoon 868 killed, 47 freed

Spotted skunks 22 killed, 2 freed

Stripped skunks 1,287 killed, 9 freed

Squirrels (various) 65 killed, 0 freed

*Note: Wildlife Services trappers don't even report the hundreds of non-target wild animals and domestic dogs and cats that suffer and die in their indiscriminate traps.

As can readily be seen by the kill numbers above, coyotes are the main target animal of Wildlife Services trappers, and the County's now terminated contract with Wildlife Services was largely a taxpayer subsidy for ranchers. The fact is, Wildlife Services isn't in the business of wildlife rescue, as Brennan would have you believe. The Wildlife Services wildlife management program is called, "Integrated Wildlife Damage Management" (IWDM), and its primary function is to kill wild animals that cause property damage.

Brennan's account of the County's new non-lethal wildlife management program that is being set-up to replace Wildlife Services is wildly confused. He seems to be laboring under the delusion that Mendocino County has contracted with the Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue (a private non-profit) for wildlife rescue services. The fact is, injured wildlife in Mendocino County are transported by citizen volunteers down to Sonoma County for life saving treatment since Mendocino County doesn't have its own wildlife rescue facility. While wildlife rescue is a much needed service here in Mendocino County, it is not within the purview of the County's new non-lethal wildlife management program, which is basically designed to protect peoples' property from wildlife damage by using non-lethal methods of exclusion.

Mendocino County is presently in the process of contracting out for a wildlife exclusion technician who will work with County home owners on-site to exclude small wild animals (raccoons, skunks, squirrels, etc.) from damaging their property using non-lethal methods. The County is working with non-profits such as Project Coyote and the Mountain Lion Foundation to work with rural dwellers on how to exclude large wild animals (lions, bears, coyotes) from damaging their property, also using non-lethal methods. To dispense immediate answers on what to do when human/wildlife conflicts arise, the County is now in the process of setting-up a hotline telephone operator who will be fully trained in non-lethal conflict resolution.

Anderson attributes Brennan's nickname "Dead Dog" to city people moving to the country who are naive about dangerous wild dogs roaming the hills, but this is just another pseudo legend. I personally know long time County residents who have publicly accused Brennan of shooting their dog right in front of them and their children. Anderson got one thing right, Brennan does relish the nickname "Dead Dog," going so far as to name his ranch "Dead Dog Ranch" and to hang dog skulls on his fence posts.

Truth is, Brennan takes pleasure in killing defenseless animals, and that is why he is reviled by most people up here in the North County. Why are you trying to rehabilitate his reputation, Bruce? Is this the guy you really want as your BFF?

Jon Spitz

Laytonville

ED NOTES

THE HORRORS TO COME may not involve the orange monster. The rightwing Brit pundit, Piers Morgan, points out elsewhere here this today that a lot of the big fascist money — the Koch bros etc. — are shoveling mounds of cash to Florida governor, Ron DeSantis who, when you compare the two, Trump and DeSantis, DeSantis comes off as the far more plausible of the two. He’s very smart, articulate, big military vet credentials, a true son of the working-class still paying off his student loans who has not enriched himself in office — and totally wrong about everything. Or impeccably right about everything, depending on your political perspective. But if the Trumper moneybags are jumping the Trump ship for a more effective hard right candidate, Trump is probably in trouble.

THE DEMOCRATS? A bad joke that gets less funny by the day. Some of their out-of-it-leaders are actually talking about a second term for Biden! But who else do they have? Newsom maybe, but can’t think of anybody else. Newsom might be able to beat Trump, which would be an interesting contest, not only because of the grotesque fact that Newsom’s ex-wife, the shrieking nutcase, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is Trump Jr’s girlfriend, but with millions of people seriously hurting from unchecked inflation, the Democrats, who won’t do what’s necessary to check it, are finished. Newsom is aware that the country is in big trouble, which puts him ahead of much of his party.

EVEN NIXON went to wage and price controls when his re-election was threatened by an inflation much milder than this one. Biden should freeze prices and slap immediate sanctions on the oil companies. But Biden’s puppeteers seem to have no idea what to do about anything, from inflation to the war in Ukraine they’re funding. 

BAD IDEA, GAV. Giving Mendocino County nearly $8 million mental health dollars is like handing one of those no limit American Express cards to a 12-year-old. At least half that money will be grabbed by Redwood Quality Management Company, aka Mr. and Mrs. Schraeder, a private business. The rest will be a kind of non-profit feeding frenzy among the multi-agency “Continuum of Care.” The county’s mentally ill will not be helped. 

REMEMBER MEASURE B? The untreated, “non-reimbursable” mentally ill were going to be taken off the streets and out of the bushes and rehabbed. There was even an oversight committee appointed to make sure the sales tax source of Measure B funding would be prudently spent. But the money, so far, has gone to two wildly overpriced buildings, and the walking wounded are still out there.

OF COURSE Mendocino County funds a climate change committee which, so far as I’m aware, has done nothing but gab and turn in their travel reimbursement chits. How about this? Persuade the Ukiah City Council to ban lawns, beginning with the lawn at City Hall. Convert that sucker to cactus and other low-to-no maintenance vegetation. Or, better yet, to truly lead by example, how about a vegetable garden tended by the city manager and his over-large office staff? Then, once the City of Ukiah has demonstrated that they are at least aware of climate change, lobby County officials, beginning with our lead law enforcement officer, DA Eyster, to convert his lawn to… well, desert. 

THE DA might be a hard sell. He’s a hardcore lawn guy, but otherwise seemingly rational. But if the Climate Change Committee carefully explains that we’re in crisis mode, or should be, as an influential public official the DA’s got to lead by example! A softer, more effective follow-up strategy might be something along the lines of, “Look Dave. Giving up your lawn will spare you a lot of anxiety. No more rushing to your big picture window at all hours to check the lawn for dandelions and gophers. Big cash savings on chemical outlays. Reduction in water bills” and so on. Get cracking, Climate Change Committee.

HOTEL MENDOCINO

On a dark coastal highway, dead bugs in my hair
Strong smell of roadkill, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a traffic light
My butt grew heavy and I had to poop, I had to stop for the night

Innkeeper in the doorway, though the smell made me gag
And I was thinking to myself, “This could be Mendo or it could be Fort Bragg…”
Then he picked up a flashlight and he showed me the way
I heard voices from a water tower and I thought I heard them say

Welcome to the Hotel Mendocino
Such a funky place (such a funky place)
Such a grungy space
There’s plenty of room at the Hotel Mendocino
Any time of year (any time of year)
Book it online here

His mind is whacked on gummies
Hes got THC-CBD blends
He's got a lot of rich rich tourists that he calls friends
Now they walk by Big River, despite the tsunami threat
Some walk to get exercise, some walk to get wet

Welcome to the Hotel Mendocino
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
Theyre livin' it up at the Hotel Mendocino
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
What a pair of thighs

Spiders on the ceiling, water with no ice
We are all prisoners here, we took our own bad advice
And in the hotel dining room we gather for the feast
We fight the bug with mask and vax but we just can't kill the beast

Welcome to the Hotel Mendocino
Such a funky place (such a funky place)
Such a grungy space
There’s plenty of room at the Hotel Mendocino
Any time of year (any time of year)
Book it online here

Last thing I remember, I was was running for my car
I had to book a cruise ship to the Seychelles or Zanzibar
“Forget it,” said the innkeeper, “wiping his nose on his sleeve,
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

— Holly Tannen

CATCH OF THE DAY, June 21, 2022

ERNESTO DIAZ-HERNANDEZ, Ukiah. DUI.

SEAN FLINTON, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

MARY FORD, Ukiah. Domestic battery, use of tear gas.

SALVADOR LOPEZ, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

TRINIDAD MAGDALENO-PULIDO, Ukiah. Domestic battery, cruelty to-child/infliction of injury.

KYLE OWEN, Rancho Cotati/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JASON REED, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.

AMANDA SIZEMORE, Willits. Controlled substance, marijuana for sale with priors, unlawful possession of tear gas.

BRIAN SKAGGS, DUI, suspended license for DUI.

FOR THE 2021 SEASON, the Golden State Warriors held a $178 million payroll pre-tax and $170 million in luxury tax payments, totaling over $346 million in payroll. They’ve led the NBA in spending in four of the last five seasons. So trends indicate that Warriors owner Joe Lacob won’t shy away from spending big again. With existing contracts, the Warriors have $171 million on the books pre-tax. By their own standard, there’s room to spend.

— Shayna Rubin, Bay Area News Group

UKRAINE, TUESDAY, JUNE 21

AS TUESDAY, 21 June, draws to a close in Kyiv and in Moscow, here are the key developments of the day:

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland visited Ukraine for discussions with Ukraine's top prosecutor on suspected Russian war crimes. Garland is launching a war crimes accountability team, which will share expertise in forensics, evidence collection and legal advice. He says the team will play a key role in ongoing war crimes investigations. The U.S. is already sending money to Ukraine to help the country gather, preserve and analyze evidence of suspected war crimes, including the killing of civilians. Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova says the country has identified more than 15,000 potential Russian war crimes.

Ukraine's parliament and various government agencies are working in overdrive to adopt European-style standards, including approving the Istanbul Convention on gender-based violence prevention. A summit later this week will consider Ukraine's European Union candidacy.

A U.S. citizen was killed fighting in Ukraine. The State Department said Stephen Zabielski died in Ukraine but wouldn't elaborate on details. According to an obituary in The Recorder newspaper, Zabielski died on May 15, at age 52, while fighting in Ukraine. He is at least the second American confirmed killed in the Ukraine war, following Willy Joseph Cancel, who was killed in April.

Russia says two Americans captured fighting for Ukraine won't be protected by international law from possibly facing the death penalty. News reports last week said the two former U.S. service members were captured in the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin acknowledged them this week, and spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said they wouldn't be covered under the Geneva Convention because they're accused of being mercenaries. Earlier this month, three other foreign fighters received death sentences in a court in Russian-backed separatist territory in Ukraine.

Russian Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov's award medal sold at auction for $103.5 million, which Muratov is donating to UNICEF to help Ukrainian refugee children. The sale price is a record for a Nobel medal. Muratov, a founder and editor of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was jointly awarded the Peace Prize last year with Philippine journalist Maria Ressa. Novaya Gazeta was shut down in March, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine.

MORE AND MORE ARE SEEING THE REALITY

German TV is admitting what’s become increasingly obvious: the West is in denial that Russia has all but won its military conflict with Ukraine.

“I am afraid we are now faced with a situation where we now have to face an uncomfortable truth,” said journalist Wolfram Weimer last week. “And that is that Russia has won this war.”

 “Now, our chancellor is working with this language template: ‘Russia must not win this war. Ukraine must win,’” Weimer continued.

“I’m just wondering where this is headed politically, because in fact Russia has practically conquered the Donbas in just a matter of a few days. The area gains are huge, they are about as big as Holland and Belgium put together. The land connection to Crimea is there. That means, how is Russia supposed to lose this war now?”

Weimer went on to say that Ukraine “does not have the strength” to militarily fight Russia despite receiving billions of dollars of weapons and assistance from the West, and that Russia is “also winning the international game of sanctions.”

ALL YOU NEED TO DO to kill leftward movement is flood the information ecosystem with enough confusion about socialist and anti-imperialist issues that it becomes impossible to hold a lucid position on them without copious amounts of research. Few are willing and able to do this.

It's easy to sit back and judge people for believing propaganda and failing to push for real change in adequate numbers, but if you look at the vast quantity of sophisticated psyops distorting everyone's picture of the world it's very understandable there's so much confusion.

As long as only a small minority of people have the willingness and ability to put in long hours to try and understand what's going on, it will remain easy to manipulate all leftward movement into impotence or complicity. Something very, very big is going to have to change.

— Caitlin Johnstone

THE AGE OF STUPIDITY: From Johnson & Biden to Putin and Xi Jinping

by Patrick Cockburn

The role of stupidity in determining the course of history is often underestimated by historians. They neglect it as too crude and shallow a factor to be the cause of crucial events, preferring to unearth more sophisticated and intellectually respectable explanations. Calling a leader “a fool” may be pervasive as abuse, but is seldom accepted as the underlying reason for a calamitous decision.

This is surely a mistake. “Never lose your sense of the superficial,” said the newspaper publisher Lord Northcliffe and his advice applies as much to historic trends as it does to daily news. Yet pundits like to feel that they are digging deeper than a personal failing, and seldom focus on plain and simple stupidity as the reason why leaders make unforced errors.

This kind of individual inadequacy is not equally present in all periods and it may be that in some eras the scope for chronic blunderers to do damage is higher than in others. It was certainly high in 1914, for instance, when dim-witted leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm 11 in Germany, Tsar Nicholas 11 in Russia and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy were making the decisive moves leading to a European war that more intelligent leaders might have avoided as being much against their interests and putting at risk the future of their regimes.

We may now have entered a similar period when powerful political leaders are more foolish and incapable of coping with crises than their predecessors. Looking at just the events of the last 12 months, I have drawn up a league table of actions by four national leaders which suggests that they are a bigger fool than anybody had imagined.

The most disastrous decision in Russian history

Vladimir Putin inevitably comes first because on 24 February he took the disastrous decision to invade Ukraine, having convinced himself that a Russian army of inadequate size would easily topple the government in Kyiv and the Ukrainian army would meekly surrender.

Experts explain this piece of idiocy by pointing to Putin’s isolation in the Kremlin, reliance on ill-informed advisors who were really servile courtiers, and a genuine fear that the moment was passing when Russia could stop Ukraine moving into the orbit of the Nato countries.

After spending 22 years in power, the Russian leader suffered from arrogance and over-confidence in his own judgement, but a more intelligent man might not have lost his grip on reality and taken what will probably be remembered as the most disastrous decision in Russian history.

Biden’s lack of foresight

Joe Biden’s foolishness is of a different kind and mostly centres on his making vague and over-optimistic promises to produce results that he cannot deliver. He gives the impression that the White House can solve problems that are at least partly outside its control, such as the calamitous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, though this was largely the consequence of Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban in 2020 to withdraw US support from the Kabul Government. It was the US military who mishandled the details of the retreat, but it was Biden who took the blame because he had not foreseen the rout that was likely to happen on the ground in front of the television cameras.

This habit of over-promising and under-performing is equally true of Biden’s domestic agenda, giving American voters an impression of feebleness and ineffectuality. In the Ukraine war, there is a strange indecisiveness about whether Biden wants the war to end with the successful defence of Ukraine or the total defeat of Russia. On top of this there is an inability to calculate how far economic sanctions against Russia will shape the US politics. Thus the administration was this week scrabbling to prevent the Europeans stopping the insurance of tankers carrying Russian crude, a measure that will provoke a rise in the price of oil and further doom Democratic Party hopes of holding either House of Congress in the midterm elections.

Xi Jinping became a victim of his own success

China succeeded in suppressing the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic with well organised lockdowns, but then failed to use the time gained to vaccinate the population. Repeated lockdowns are now squeezing the economy and reducing growth without bringing an end to the pandemic any nearer.

As with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the weakness of lockdowns compared to mass vaccination as a means of controlling the Covid-19 virus should have been obvious to Xi Jinping, but he became the victim of his government’s initial success in combatting the pandemic which Beijing is trying to repeat in different circumstances.

As for Britain, commentators slide away from describing Boris Johnson as a nincompoop, instead praising or denouncing his political skills in surviving the shambolic consequences of his years in office. In reality, all the nationalist leaders in the world, from Trump to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have stuck like limpets to their office by fair means or foul.

The foolishness of slogans replacing policies

But at the heart of the Johnson years in Downing Street there is a profound foolishness with slogans replacing policies, contempt for legality and a shambolic approach to government. Targeting the Northern Ireland protocol and sending asylum seekers to Rwanda are aimed at recreating the old pro-Brexit coalition in which English nationalism combines with anti-immigrant feeling.

This is a government that feeds off crises of its own making which it hopes will divert attention from its latest scandal and failure. Raw gobbets of nostalgia are served up to stimulate memories of supposedly better times, but over-all there is a lack of seriousness exemplified by Johnson himself and his cabinet of mediocrities, opportunists and fanatics.

Some may say that those who are pilloried as stupid are simply acting in their own selfish interests, but this is demonstrably not true of Putin, Biden and Xi Jinping. A more convincing argument is that the perception that leaders today are of lower quality is a mirage; their predecessors were just as bad, but could conceal their incompetence because they did not have to take such weighty decisions.

It may also be that we live in a period, like that before the First World War, when leaders commonly beat the nationalist drum and foolishly welcome unwinnable conflict at home and abroad as a way of securing their own grip on power.

But one should not lose sight of the simple notion that there are a lot of stupid leaders in the world who are all the more dangerous because they cannot make a sensible decision, even in their own interests. This was true of Saddam Hussein – in some ways an intelligent thug and in others a complete idiot – who launched wars against Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 that any child shining shoes in the streets of central Baghdad could have told him would bring disaster and kill millions. As a German politician remarked of an earlier conflict, it is “difficult to know where the stupidity ends and the crime begins.”

Further thoughts

I have always been interested in pure stupidity in history, believing it to be a quality that intelligent people shy away from and underrate, often thinking that this is too crass and simple-minded an explanation for turning points in history. But great events do not necessarily have profound causes.

I think I first got the idea from my father Claud Cockburn who made this point about the dangerous stupidity of the Nazis about whom he knew a lot, having fled Berlin a day before Hitler became German Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

He moved to London where he started up an anti-fascist newsletter called The Week six weeks later. This little publication flourished and in time Claud came to be regarded as the centre of all anti-Nazi intrigue in London by the German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop who became Hitler’s Foreign Minister in 1938.

Claud wrote that “the fact that he thought so [that Claud was the centre of anti-Nazi opposition]– that he could be such a fool as to think so – helped to give me a measure of the Third Reich which could employ such an ambassador […] What was terrifying about this man was that he was a damn fool – and could only have been employed by a regime of basically damn fools, who could blow up half the world out of sheer stupidity.”

Not that Claud needed further evidence about the evils of the Nazis, which he had witnessed first hand in Germany. As for their ambassador in London, he wrote that “a satisfactory thing about Herr von Ribbentrop was that you did not have to waste time wondering whether there was some latent streak of good in him somewhere. He was all of a piece – and silly into the bargain.”

Beneath the Radar

The degree of racial division in the US never ceases to amaze and depress me. The politics of crime is inextricably intertwined with the politics of race and they toxify each other. News reporting on mass killings and gun ownership often underplays or misunderstands this but note this particularly grisly incident.

Cockburn’s Picks

This is a fascinating piece by Ryan Grim in the Intercept about how progressive groups in the US crippled their own effectiveness by internal strife at the very moment when their causes are under attack from the advocates of regressive legislation. This self-destructive trend has spread to Europe and has done much to discredit progressive organisations and publications.

(Patrick Cockburn is the author of War in the Age of Trump (Verso). Courtesy, CounterPunch.org.)

MEMO TO REPUBLICANS: It’s time to dump The Donald and run with The Ronald

by Piers Morgan

President Donald Trump recently issued his fourth official statement about me since our controversial interview two months ago.

(The one where he didn’t like me telling him I don’t believe he had the 2020 election stolen from him.)

“Piers opened STRONG with me,” Trump sneered about my new TV show, “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” “then ‘died.’ He now only draws flies.”

It made me chuckle because a) I’m still alive, b) the show’s going great (give it a try on Fox Nation), and c) Trump’s fierce loyalty to friends is only matched by his comically obsessive trash-talking fury if you fall out with him.

But there was also an irony about his statement.

At the risk of further incurring his wrath, if anyone is drawing flies right now, it’s Donald Trump.

The once-omnipotent GOP beast bestriding the American political world like a paw-crunching King Kong is now seeing his stranglehold over the party ebb away faster than the infamous gorilla tumbled to his demise from the Empire State Building after being shot by US Navy planes.

And the same foe is proving to be the deadly weapon again now, in the form of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a US Navy war hero who advised SEAL Team commanders in Iraq, and who still serves with the US Navy Reserve.

DeSantis was awarded the Bronze Star medal for meritorious service, and his boss, Navy Capt. Dane Thorleifson, who commanded the SEAL Special Operations Task Force West in Fallujah, said of him: “He was super smart, articulate, resourceful and a positive part of the staff. I relied on him heavily.”

DeSantis then became a federal prosecutor, serving as a special assistant in the US Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida.

He isn’t just 35 years younger than Trump, he’s more eloquent, focused and organized, going about his business with military-style planning.

He’s also more serious, which is a good thing, but as he showed with his “I welcome support from African Americans” quip after Elon Musk said he was leaning toward supporting him, he can do charm and smart humor when he needs to.

In 2017, when he was president and DeSantis was running for governor, he tweeted: “Ron DeSantis is a brilliant young leader, Yale and then Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida. He loves our Country and is a true FIGHTER!”

He is, as Trump’s about to find out.

SPARKS

by Dan Carey

Strike a match?  Jump back!

Will there be a spark initiating a cascade, a rebellion, a realignment?  Will it even matter?  A Fluxus of purgation? Can weak minded pseudo- lefties ever get it straight? Can right winglets out to blindly wreck the world in their own image, with the sauce of your apathy, make it a better place?
You won’t stop them with puny little protests in the streets (not to say you shouldn’t try, but that’s not the half of what’s required)
You won’t stop them with letters to the editor
You won’t stop them with shouts and incantations or especially, even better ideas
They have guns.  They will use them.
Bullshit gerrymandered politicians elected by misled fearful masses
will be ready to roll over you and you and you and all you love and all the order you think you love
BTW, cops won’t be there to save you.  They will be too busy bustin’ heads, like they’re programmed to do, all according to your governments business model

How can a house built to be divided stand?

Meanwhile Gaia Burns (for now)
Meanwhile oil companies thrive
Meanwhile Lockheed and the mega MAGA war beast affirm global annihilation, no exact date, but soon.  Soon
Meanwhile in the interregnum, stupidity prevails.  As usual.
You won’t stop them with kumbayas
You won’t stop them with logic or reason
Too much bloody water flows under all the bridges of our world
Righting half the wrongs could take a million years
Will it be abortion and the Corrupt Supreme Court?
Will it be gas prices or do you just have gas in your mind?
Will it be black lives matter or not?
For f*** sake all lives “matter”!  Yet mother nature doesn’t give a rat’s ass about even one of them
These are cheap manufactured shadows passing in an afternoon, an eyeblink, a sad, fading moment as an entire bank, yea, an entire veritable wedgie of black swans lands on us all

Gaia aint woke.  She never slept!

The wrongs of the last 15000 years will not be corrected with legislation
The closed end death religion of capitalism will Eat you.  Alive.  It’s nature’s way, in case you hadn’t noticed.  About the only natural thing about capitalism is it’s obedience to cascading failure.

One day, sooner than you think,  the Earth will be silent
There will be no more human voices, high jets, screams
There will be no more human flatulence and strife
Only wind whistling through ruins, eroding one concrete grain at a time, and the susurrus of waves rinsing shores
There will only be the quiet slow decay of all our toxins, cigarette butts, dioxin and furans and so many more nameless tortured-alphabet concoctions
And a million years or 10 down-the-line, when the radioactivity has subsided, when the forever chemicals have finally broken down
When the quadrillions of plastic particles, countless as the sand grains of all the worlds beaches, finally uncouple and become something else, malleable, reincorporated,
New creatures will have grown, grown and emerged and flourished and swarmed in the tiny interstices we left unviolated and new ones that emerge
Because we didn’t have time to do a truly thorough whack job on the earth
From abyssal volcanic smokers will emerge new survivors
From the mycelium that pervade the entire surface and lithic depths of the Earth will come new forms
From cockroaches and bacteria and algae and rotifers will emerge new beings
Perhaps to reinvent trees perhaps to reinvent butterflies perhaps to reinvent a new pervasive Sun-drenched system, a nuanced trial version somewhat like what existed before we came along and prematurely announced we were boss
Know the star-birthed elements we are formed of will recombine, will find new manifestations beyond infestation, as the resonance of karma reharmonizes our tiny speck of matter floating through the Durga we call now

Oh, the spark will come, rest assured. Empires and even universes all pass…You won’t hear it, but in a flux of fractal Lagrangian numbers, your cells may feel it, soon, if they haven’t already
Make your peace with this universe, though it really, really doesn’t care.  It just let’s itself try and try again.

PEOPLE DYING, A COVID EXCHANGE:

Judy Vidaver wrote:

Subject: Time to Wake Up Folks

“1200 adults died in three months; the FDA knew, and 3700 women lost their babies in just the rollout of the mRNA vaccine … You've got to understand that these entities are not responsible to the American people anymore. They're wholly-owned by entities like Pfizer, which is a global corporation with close ties to China.” — Dr. Naomi Wolf

* * *

Marco McClean here. 

In the middle of millions of people getting sick and hundreds of thousands of people dying because of /not/ being vaccinated, some people got sick around the time when they finally got their shot, and Naomi Wolf, who has gone crazy/unreasonable in other ways besides this, too, attributes their sickness, and anything else unpleasant to which the flesh is heir, to being vaccinated, which, you know, takes awhile to bring immunity and sometimes doesn't, but it's clearly the way to bet.

Just one of your and Naomi Wolf's problems of faulty reasoning is this: What you're doing is like only counting people who died in car accidents who just got their driver's license renewed last week. “Look at how many people got their license renewed and then less than a week later someone without a license at all crossed the center line and killed them, therefore testing and licensing caused their death, and people should try to solve car accidents with massage and astrology and aromatherapy and Chinese herbs and voodoo, you know, the wisdom of the ages, the old lore from before the patriarchy. And think about it, sheeple: who's making money selling licenses and brakes? That's right, the people who make licenses and brakes! Wake up!/

Speaking of which, meanwhile, Judy, you and plenty others like you were touting magical cures by means of hydroxychloroquine and black mushroom ointment and overdoses of vitamin D and pounds of vitamin C, and claiming the whole disease adventure was started deliberately by one cackling supervillain in a lab to give himself some job security. Before covid you and your friends were against all vaccine science. You jumped on the bandwagon of people who thought vaccines cause autism, which they didn't and don't. Yez were claiming the /polio/ vaccine was unnecessary because, look, polio just /went away anyway/ in the years after we got the vaccine. Really, it boggles the mind how stupid that is. I thought you all must be kidding but you weren't.

Hmm. It's weird that Dr. Naomi Wolf, whose doctorate is in English literature, didn't notice and point out that you need a comma before folks in your subject line. Andrew Wakefield /was/ a real doctor, but they took his credentials away for trying to make money by getting potentially millions of people killed. He faked up a study showing existing vaccines cause autism --they don't, see above-- so he could cash in on his own brand of vaccines. You can look it up.

‘LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT’

by Herb Caen

It still seems to be a popular bumper strip — “America, love it or leave it!” — and it sticks in the craw as well as to the chromium. Along with its gag writer's glibness, it has an oddly non-American ring, stern and dictatorial, the words of a zealot. Actually, it was originated by a gag writer, Walter Winchell, who used it first in his column circa 1940 when he was campaigning against the German-American Bund. “Love it or leave it” — patriotism reduced to a Tin Pan Alley rhythm. A far cry from the warm words of welcome inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” Along with the bumper strip goes the inevitable tiny American flag affixed to windshield or window — decalcomania as a way of life. “It's like hiring Madison Square Garden to announce that you love your wife,” said the New Yorker about this form of patriotism. The melting pot has grown cold.

“Patriotism is dead in America,” publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr. lamented one recent night to a group of us. “They think it's corny or something.” He's an American and the rest of us are “they,” and anyway, it turned out he was talking about nationalism, not patriotism — the kind of nationalism that has wracked Europe twice in half a century: “These little countries still have their pride, their people will stand up and fight.” Another World War II veteran nodded vigorously. “He is right,” he growled. “I really worry about our country. It's the kids, damn ’em. You think they'd stand up and fight the way we did?” For a draftee, he was talking pretty big.

The message of the bumper strips, the Hearst message, is clear enough beneath its simplemindedness: “My country, right or wrong.” An American even more celebrated than William Randolph Hearst Jr. had this to say about that and about a war:

“An empty phrase, a silly phrase… each must, for himself alone, decide what is right and what is wrong, in which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot think this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may… Only when a Republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.

“This Republic's life is not in peril. This nation has sold its honor for a phrase… The stupid phrase needed help and it got another one: 'Even if the war be wrong, we are in it and must fight it out; we cannot retire from it without dishonor.' Why, not even a burglar could have said it better.” 

So wrote Mark Twain in 1901. He was discussing the United States occupation of the Philippines while anticipating a Vietnam. His closing quotation is remarkably apt: “An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war.”

Fred Dutton, one of a tiny band of courageous people still remaining on the UC Board of Regents, said something that should be graven in stone: “A society that hates its young has no future.” This is not to say that the young are not difficult and demanding. “What do they really want?” an anguish parent asked one night, wringing his hands, as though the problem could be quantified.

What they want is what they're not getting: honesty, straight answers, an end to the war psychology, a feeling that something real is being done about the real problems inside this country. Sometimes the generation gap seems as impossible to bridge as the credibility gap that caused such erosion in American life. As Lyman Bryson put it: “The younger generation thinks intelligence is a substitute for experience, the older generation thinks experience is a substitute for intelligence.” In the long run, if there is one, intelligence should carry the day.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO DESPISE the mainstream western press too much, in my opinion. They're paving the way to destruction and dystopia just as much as the plutocrats and politicians. They whine that the public hates them, but really the public doesn't hate them enough.

— Caitlin Johnstone

OMNIPRESENT EYE

by Patrick Wright

It is a cold, clear morning, and the soldiers gathered at the airfield are singing “The Three Main Rules of Discipline” as an American jet labeled “The Spirit of 76” lands and taxis over to its appointed resting place. A hatch opens to reveal President Nixon. The former red baiter blinks before launching himself down the ramp slightly ahead of his wife who is wearing a scarlet coat. China's prime minister, Zhou Enlai, begins to clap as the Americans descend. After pausing to reciprocate, Nixon steps onto the tarmac and walks towards his welcoming host for the first of many carefully held handshakes.

That is more or less what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, February 21, 1972. It's also the opening scene of John Adams' opera 'Nixon in China,' which premiered in Houston in 1987. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman understood, a bright lit performance with carefully staged arias as well as often repeated choruses and, as Nixon never forgot, a vast audience of television viewers in America.

Having successfully launched the show that Nixon himself would shortly call “The Week that Changed the World,” the Americans boarded a motorcade that swept them through Tiananmen Square to the Diaoyutai, a secure compound of modern villas built on an ancient site known for its lakes, groves and blossoms.

(London Review of Books, August, 2007)