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Mendocino County Today: Monday, Jan. 16, 2023

Calm | Navarro Bridge | BOLO Pinola | Creekside Concerns | Broken Bridge | Bales Support | Eagle Nest | Community Chorus | Blue Lakers | Water Retention | Navarro Estuary | Spanish Class | Dog Adoption | AV Events | SS Pomo | Ed Notes | SF Harbor | Regrets/Caravello | Yesterday's Catch | Forgot Mask | Raskin Travels | SF Piers | Other Freds | Cormac Joke | Develin Sisters | Stehr About | WSJ UFOs | Fools Folly | Humboldt Tracks | Extreme AOC | Gold Hunter | Jan. 6 Reports | Driftwood | ER Trip | Clipper Trip | What Then | SS Sequoia | Beauty Trance | Magic Ball | Ukraine | Ultimate Airbnb

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COLD AND CALM WEATHER will persist through most of the week. Wednesday has the only chance of light rain and snow, mostly restricted along the North Coast. (NWS)

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Navarro River South towards Navarro Bridge (by Jeff Goll)

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BOLO!

Anthony Pinola, a Mendocino County resident with a rap sheet dating back over a decade, is currently sought by the Sheriff’s Office for assault with a deadly weapon. Last known to be in Gualala, he reportedly fled north on Highway 1 today and authorities consider him armed and dangerous.

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WILLITS CREEKSIDE CABINS SINKHOLE UPDATE

Mendocino County Public Health is investigating concerns for the health and human safety of the residents at Creekside Cabins and RV Resort resulting from the large sinkhole that emerged on December 30, 2022. The sinkhole made the driveway impassible and has eliminated the only point of access or egress to the group of people living there. As a result, County Public Health has concerns about whether septic tanks have been reached for required monthly processing and whether there has been appropriate garbage disposal and retrieval. Releases of waste from septic tanks and overflowing garbage can contaminate superficial water and lead to waterborne bacteria. Exposure to and ingestion of contaminated water can result in infections, skin rashes, gastrointestinal illness, and other infectious diseases. The lack of access may also impair the ability to replenish oxygen supplies for some who need it, to maintain electrical appliances, to shop for necessities, to safely travel to school or work, and to receive emergency attention by first responders, fire, or ambulance. 

The County Health Officer has concerns for the health and safety of the residents and the environment and is continuing to investigate and monitor the situation with County Code Enforcement.

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Rio Dell bridge crumbles as flood waters rise in 1964.

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IN DEFENSE OF ALICIA BALES

Ms. Polkinghorne and the KZYX Board --

Thank you for your response regarding Ms. Bales.

I realize that confidential personnel matters can't be publicly discussed, but I write to express my concerns regarding the recent events at KZYX.

I believe that the termination of Alicia Bales represents a wrong turn for the station, and will only lead to significant deterioration if not out-right failure of the station.

To be clear, Alicia and I have worked alongside each other for nearly three years during the coronavirus pandemic, and have a rapport that is apparent to anyone that listened to our show, so I may be perceived as biased. However, our collaboration has always been in furtherance of the program, and I have consistently found her to be well prepared, professional, and highly competent. I am confident that she is the single critical individual who has kept KZYX functioning over the last several years. Her dedication to the station and its mission is absolute. Ms. Bales' termination represents a failure of the board to supervise the management of KZYX, and will almost certainly result in significant harm to the station.

I fear she has been terminated because she is opinionated, vocal, and competent. This is intolerable in this day and age, and I am certain that if she were a male, this would never have happened.

I don't hold these opinions in isolation. In multiple conversations with individuals throughout the county, the consistent response has been one of shock and disappointment, typically accompanied by an exclamation that Ms. Bales represents a true commitment to the station and its programming.

I urge you and the board to correct this mistake. I am, of course, happy to talk to the Board in a public session regarding this error.

Drew Colfax, MD JD

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REDWOOD COMMUNITY CHORUS - LOOKING FOR SINGERS

Do you enjoy singing?

Would you like to join a fun Community Chorus?

The Redwood Community Chorus is beginning its next session. We meet Tuesday evenings in Mendocino for 2½ hours to learn a wide variety of beautiful music - which we'll present to the public at a May concert.

If you've sung before - or you'd just like to consider adding the joys of singing to your life, please think about joining our chorus. No experience necessary. Come next Tuesday as a guest to see if this would be a good fit for you.

Please call Chorus Director Jenni Windsor for further details: 707-889-2293 [or email: jenniwindsor707@gmail.com]

Rehearsals are at Mendocino Preston Hall (next to Presbyterian Church), Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:30 pm; sponsored by Mendocino College ($12 one-time fee).

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Blue Lake School, 1912

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KEEP IT IN THE LAKE

If Lake Mendocino’s overflow spillways are in proper working order (not like Oroville Dam) and safe to use, I suggest holding back as much water as the dam will safely hold to prevent unnecessary flooding. I’ve lived through several floods in Guerneville, which eventually caused my family to lose our home.

When Lake Mendocino was almost all but empty a few years back, our bureaucracy could have moved a lot of the silt buildup improving its capacity to hold water. Throw me under the bus for this radical idea, it’s been done before.

Ken Solbakken

Santa Rosa

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Navarro River East from Route 1 (by Jeff Goll)

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CONVERSATIONAL SPANISH CLASS Starts Next Wednesday

Hola:

There is beginner Conversational Spanish Class starting next week, Wednesday Jan. 18th at Coast Center of Mendocino College located in Fort Bragg. This is an hybrid class that you can join in-person or through Zoom.

Class meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 6:00 to 8:10 PM.

You can enroll in mendocino.edu or go directly to Coast Center located in Fort Bragg, take a left on Del Mar Drive, south end of Ft Bragg.

Questions? Email to loreto@mcn.org or call 707 813 4046.

Thank you for your time,

Loreto Rojas, Spanish Instructor at Mendocino College

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WINTER DOG ADOPTION EVENT at both Mendocino County Animal Shelters.

Head over to mendoanimalshelter.com to meet our adoptable dogs. If you see a dog or three you would like to meet, you can begin the process online by filling out an Adoption Application, then calling 707-467-6453 in Ukiah and 707-961-2491 in Fort Bragg Shelter, to schedule an appointment to meet your dog. There are oodles of wonderful dogs waiting patiently for their new homes!

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ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE Events Calendar

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SS Pomo, Mendocino Coast

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ED NOTES

TECHNO BLUES. Our Ukiah-based e-mail provider, Pacific, has disappeared on us, and everyone else apparently. It's happened before. This time Pacific has been missing for more than two days, meaning lots of you trying to communicate with us are unable to get through, also meaning our Mendocino County Today morning newspaper will be pretty thin Monday morning.

PEOPLE keep telling me to dump Pacific. I don't want to. I've been with them from their beginnings. Our beginnings, too, on-line. Probably a consequence of age, but I don't like change, and loyalty has always seemed a primary virtue, in me, in others, but I could tell you some perfidious tales, not mine, or not mine too often over the years, but me in relation to treacherous others. It's a shock to discover someone you considered a friend, turns out not to. We all have those stories. So, inconvenient as it is, I'm sticking with Pacific unless I find out that they took the whole weekend off while all their customers were left hanging.

DOES IT even need saying that the CalTrans and County road crews have again done a remarkable job keeping our highways and biways open?

ALL-PRO TIGHT END George Kittle tweeted Thursday night that he had been without power “going on 4 days” — making him one of tens of thousands of Californians still without power due to the recent storms.

WOKE ME WHEN IT'S OVER: The University of Southern California's School of Social Work has published a letter saying it will remove the word 'field' from its curriculum and practice and replace it with the word 'practicum' instead. The move is meant to reflect 'anti-racist' values, but some have argued that it insults the intelligence of the people who it is addressing. 'This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,' the letter read. 

“Language can be powerful, and phrases such as 'going into the field' or 'field work' may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”

Houman David Hemmati, a board-certified MD Ophthalmologist and PhD research scientist, tweeted: 'Today, @uscsocialwork sent out this letter announcing that they will no longer use the word "field" (as in "conducting field work") because it's perceived as racist. Is this with merit or empty virtue signaling?'.

Interim dean of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, Vassilios Papadopoulos, sought to clarify the situation. He told Fox News Digital that he understands the decision was made by the Office of Practicum Education 'out of a desire to more accurately describe its work'. 

He added: 'Because the Office is not an academic department, its name change was not subject to a formal review process. The university does not maintain a list of "banned" or discouraged words. As an institution of higher education, we will continue to use words - including the word "field" – that accurately encompass and describe our work and research, while also continuing our efforts to create a more inclusive and welcoming environment for all.' 

Responding to the announcement that the word 'field' will be removed by that department, one Twitter user wrote: 'For someone who spent more than 7 years at USC with 2 graduate degrees from this institution, I am so embarrassed at what's happening there. I wonder how much of my money they spent on coming up with this amazingly useful change.'

Another commented: 'Wow, I went to USC and never thought it was particularly woke. Of course that was 10 years ago now… and I didn't study social work.'

A third tweeted: 'Are they still going to have baseball and football fields?' 

Last year, the University of Washington issued an IT inclusive language guide that aimed to cut out 'words that reflect racial or other discriminatory bias,' covering the full woke spectrum. 

'Mantra' was among the problematic words highlighted, as many people in the Buddhist and Hindu communities hold this term as highly spiritual and religious. 

The phrase 'no can do' was also listed, as it is apparently an imitation of Chinese Pidgin English, dating from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries - an era when Western attitudes towards the Chinese were markedly racist. 

Stanford University published a similar index of 'harmful language' last year. One of the words considered harmful was 'guru' as the term is a sign of respect in Buddhist and Hindu traditions. 'Brave' also appeared on the list because the University considered it to perpetuate the stereotype of the 'noble courageous savage'. 

Stanford University also said it wanted to swap the word 'American' with 'US citizen', as the former 'often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas (which is actually made up of 42 countries)'. 

THE FAMOUS ARTIST, Charles Surendorf, had a son that lives in Comptche who built a vault in his house for dad’s artwork. Surendorf senior was a contemporary and friend of local block print artist EmmyLou Packard who did famous prints of Mendo and Dor Bothwell, a Mendo artist. He had a studio in Columbia (Ca) and when state parks bought the whole town and demanded everyone dress like old timers Surendorf refused until he was evicted by the state. Herb Caen was a good friend of his. Surendorf loved stirring the flames of discontent 1906-1979.

AMONG THE MANY THINGS I don't know much about, count art, especially local art. Always admired the paintings of Olaf Palm and James Maxwell, and from what I've seen of it, I like Virginia Sharkey's abstracts. My all-time faves are my late friend Frank Cieciorka’s landscape paintings of Southern Humboldt, and Peter Allegaert’s Goodbye Mendo paintings, and I feel fortunate indeed to have known Joe Cave well enough when he lived in Boonville to have him gift me a large oil of a vista off Peachland Road. 

ON A CHILLY JANUARY AFTERNOON in San Francisco, at the top of a long flight of wooden stairs leading down to Baker Beach, the cold and rain having excluded the usual exhibitionists who destroy the stunning natural visuals, I look out at the Marin side of the Golden Gate and think of Weldon Kees, poet and original beatnik, who had driven to the Marin end of the bridge on Monday, July 18, 1955, parked in the view lot, walked out onto the bridge and jumped. Another writer, MFK Fisher, said she'd always fought off an urge to hurl herself over the side whenever she was walking mid-span. Me too, and I'm not suicidal, and not that these random memories are relevant to the rest of this personal geography, but like most people I can't stop what runs through my mind at certain sites, and this is what first runs through mine whenever I see that inimitable bridge.

As does my most vivid bridge experience ever when I was on driving across the bridge with my father one afternoon in 1952. As the fog howled through the Golden Gate, the hood of my father's lime green junker of a DeSoto cab he’d bought for 100 bucks complete with jump seats between the driver and the princely plush leather of the rear thrones, suddenly flew up and over the side of the bridge. "Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed. "Did you see that?" Couldn't have missed it, pop. 

In another memorable commute the old man had run out of gas on the bridge on his way to work, then he ran out of gas again on the bridge on his way home. "You again," the tow truck driver had said. "I think you just set a record, buddy." A few years later, as a not so keen teen, I sped across the bridge from Marin to San Francisco one night with a carload of hilarious classmates, and right on through the 25-cent tollgate without throwing the 25 cents in the collection basket, careening on into the Marina where a small army of cops jerked us out of the car, shoved us around, righteously yelling that we were "a bunch of little assholes," wrote the driver a huge ticket, took our names, confiscated the car, and told us to get the hell out of their sight forever. "Or else." Or else what? Even then sanctions were mild to non-existent.

The Indians said that San Francisco Bay was once a great inland lake secured at its narrow Pacific mouth by a continuous land mass from Marin and San Francisco out to the Farallones. The Indians said a lot of things, most of them ignored or dismissed as myth, but on both sides of the Golden Gate the fractured geology seems to confirm the Indians' long memory of a stupendous earthquake that opened up the Golden Gate to the Pacific, and it is fact that in 1880 to make the Golden Gate safely navigable a huge rock, perhaps the last remnant of the ancient, single landmass that joined Marin and San Francisco, was dynamited out of the channel, its obstructing remnant more evidence that Marin and San Francisco once were one.

And I think of everything else the bridge means to me, all the times I've crossed it, and the time I crossed it and kept on going north to Mendocino County, the least chronicled area of all of the United States, where I went on living, mostly, for the rest of my days.

But today, looking across the narrow mouth of the bay from Baker Beach, I can almost smell the acacia sweetened air of the lambent, late winter Corte Madera where, when I was a child, immigrant Sicilians raised cows in their backyards and white Russians shared their home brew vodka with their neighbors. The Sicilians called the Russians Molotov and the Russians called the Sicilians Mussolini, and they all belonged to a volunteer fire department that threw a big 4th of July drunk and barbecue after an inter-departmental water fight between the Corte Madera and Larkspur volunteers with their firehoses washing each other down Magnolia Avenue. "Negroes" and "mongols" were not allowed to buy or even rent property anywhere in the county except in Marin city, the Sausalito shipyard suburb that came with World War II. 

And Mount Tamalpais, the serene green sentinel looking down on the accelerating events beneath it, as always, eternally indifferent.

By 1970, the symptoms of the last illness were becoming clear — class and race warfare, drugs, random violence, the seemingly endless war on Vietnam, feral children, bad feeling everywhere. Name your pathology, it was up and running by 1970, busting on upfield, eluding all its old tacklers, straight arming convention, galloping along through the gathering dark. By 2007 there was another endless war underway and new, more ominous symptoms of the rolling collapse joined the old ones — water shortages, mysterious plagues, geologic cataclysms, civil strife, fire and ice.

I wanted out and north I went, all the way to Boonville, to Mendocino County, the big empty where the remnant Indians had begun their ghost dances in 1870, and what they saw coming was a great cataclysm that would shake the earth free of the white people who didn't know how to live on it, and the great god Taikomol would bring all the Indians back to life for a great restoration of the true people of the earth, while the people who had brought the great sickness down on these true people and their abundant earth would be gone.

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San Francisco Harbor, 1851

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WE BEGIN 2023 WITH ‘UHH, SORRY’

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

I wish all my several readers much happiness in 2023 and at the same time beg forgiveness for my behavior at the AVA’s annual New Year’s Eve Party. 

My actions was inexcusable, although none (or at most only a few) were genuinely illegal or require consultation with a lawyer, much less law enforcement. So please don’t. Seriously.

I begin with humble and heartfelt apologies to the students and teachers at local Ukiah elementary schools who labored diligently, and with great skill and dedication I might add, in their efforts to make Christmas a little merrier for refugee Ukrainian children. The gift wrappings alone would have gladdened many hearts, and I stress my sorrow for their loss and destruction.

All those fabulous gifts? Poof! Gone! Very upsetting, let me assure you.

It occurred during my ill-advised “Magic Disappearing Christmas Tree” act, which I shan’t repeat, ever. And it looked so easy on the Penn & Teller TV special.

Further apologies to anyone offended by my crude, boorish impersonation of Joe Biden during my standup comedy routine. Nothing funny about those stricken with Alzheimers, dementia, senility, Parkinson’s Disease, memory loss, bowel control, or lack of motor coordination. 

It was also inappropriate to suggest Mr. Biden continues to “sniff” women’s hair, fondle them in Senate hallways, or remember their names. Or his.

Next, allow me to admit I was wrong, wrong, wrong! to attempt to persuade my completely honorable colleague, Brenda, to “dress up like gifts so we can get laid under the tree.” Especially since she works in payroll.

It was the gin talking, and to show I’m serious about making changes in 2023, my New Year’s resolution is to switch to a more expensive brand.

The gin had been artfully concealed in the eggnog so it’s also responsible for my rantings about contrails, genetically modified foods, the Battle of Little Bighorn and whether the Walrus was Paul. The nog-heavy regurgitations several hours later were disgusting, and I trust my advance payments at Master Cleaner dry-cleaning shop on South State Street will cover stains and damages.

Lacing brownies with hallucinogenics and mild sedatives was not my idea, nor did I provide the additives. My friends within the Hell’s Angel Garden and Social Club have persuaded me to decline identifying potentially culpable parties who may have been involved.

In a related and equally embarrassing event, I wish to make clear all my efforts to raise bail for Mr. Sam Banks-Friedman were to be understood as humorous, and that plans to give the money to the previously mentioned Hell’s Angel Community Services organization were never discussed. Speculation that proceeds would fund couriers in the narcotics trade is misleading at best. 

In any event, and at my request, much of the money has been recovered. Forgiveness on the part of those whose bank accounts were hacked would be greatly appreciated, and in fact insisted upon by my parole officer. Thank you.

My karaoke performance was inexcusable, and I would like to state on the record that adapting a rap song to the “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” parody was an utter failure. The cheap, vulgar lyrics were furnished by my old pal Pat Walsh, who requested anonymity. 

Finally, in the spirit of reconciliation and healing, let us give thanks no animals were harmed in the writing of this column.

To The Darkroom

I was startled and saddened by the recent death of Stephen Caravello. 

We met in Ukiah’s 1970s swampy mess of those who called themselves “artists” but might as well have decided they were accountants or astronomers. I sized Steve up as the lone experienced talent in the crowd. Competition was not stiff however, with others being dilettante poseurs, amateur frauds and worse. Some wore berets.

It may have been the first time in history that people who called themselves “artists” didn’t know a palate from a palette or which end of the paintbrush to grab. Steve Caravello, armed with plenty of photo and darkroom savvy under his belt, stood out like a mighty oak in a lot full of weeds.

We worked on plenty of projects together from our days and nights at the Mendocino Grapevine to his providing artwork for one of my books. Steve was brilliant and creative while simultaneously reliable and serious.

But he was more than my media accomplice. Steve was a well-rounded man, funny, articulate and able to talk politics, cars, music, books or baseball, despite being a Yankee fan. He was my friend.

Stephen Caravello was old enough to have seen it all, and young enough to hate being left out of anything. He demanded inclusion in whatever his family was up to.

Which leaves us to wonder what he makes of his current situation. 

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, January 15, 2023

Akin, Barrales, Bettega

THOMAS AKIN, Boonville. Cultivation of more than six pot plants, armed with firearm in commission of felony, failure to appear.

FERMIN BARRALES-GONZALEZ, Ukiah. DUI, resisting.

JEANIE BETTEGA, Vallejo/Ukiah. Smoking-injecting device, paraphernalia, failure to appear.

Buenrostro, Day, Golyer

MARCOS BUENROSTRO-CORONA, Ukiah. DUI.

MICHELLE DAY, Dinuba/Ukiah. Stolen vehicle, paraphernalia.

PAUL GOLYER, Ukiah. Saps or similar weapons.

Goss, Gouber, Gregory

JOHN GOSS, Laytonville. Controlled substance-narcotics for sale, paraphernalia, loaded concealed weapon.

JACK GOUBER, Ukiah. Trespassing.

DESNEIGES GREGORY, St. Helena/Ukiah. Burglary, vandalism.

Nelson, Pardo, Pyorre

EVAN NELSON, Ukiah. Battery.

DARIC PARDO, Covelo. County Parole violation.

ERICA PYORRE, Fort Bragg. DUI.

Tirevold, Villalpando, Zeeb

SCOTT TIREVOLD, Eureka/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

NOEL VILLALPANDO, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

DAVID ZEEB, Salinas/Ukiah. Narcotics-controlled substance for sale, stolen property, paraphernalia.

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DOWNWIND FROM KRAMER

by Jonah Raskin

A cold snap roared into Florida just when I arrived for a vacation and wanted sun and heat. Rain accompanied the cold. I'm downwind from Tommy Wayne Kramer. That's not news. I’m always downwind from him, whether he’s in Ukiah or North Carolina where he happened to be for Christmas. I guess the AVA has reporters on the East Coast as well as the West Coast. I'm still in Florida, Vero Beach to be precise, on an island that's accessible by a bridge or two from the mainland that crosses over a body of water known as Indian River. It's no river at all but rather a lagoon. I’m the houseguest of a friend who divides her time between Vero and Norcal, winter in Vero and summer In Norcal.

The house has 11 bedrooms. I’m in the back of this sprawling house with palm trees all around and most of the houses in this neighborhood are not occupied, except for two weeks of the year I'm told.  Actually they’re not houses, but mansions and not really mansions either, but monsters that look like hotels for the elite. This time of the year Vero is home to snowbirds from cold climes who come for the sun. I met some of them at the Saturday open-air farmer's market where I bought chard and garlic and beef, which I cooked and ate while watching the 49ers beat Seattle.

Florida is another country. At a meeting of nature lovers no one was under the age of 70 and no one but me wore a hat. The audience members were all white, as were the speakers. I saw one Black person at a grocery store yesterday. I'm told there is a Black neighborhood. Latinos do the yard work for the rich people.

I’m here for today and tomorrow and then I fly to Mexico to visit more Norcal friends who fled from rain and cold two decades ago and who blend in with their Mexican neighbors. So I’ll be way downwind from Kramer and in yet another country and keeping an eye out for stories for readers of the AVA who are stuck at home.

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San Francisco, 1850s

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FRED GARDNER writes:

A new edition of Franz Kafka's diary has just been published in English. The New Yorker review mentioned that Kafka's close friend Max Brod, who compiled and edited Kafka's diary after his death, had concealed his foibles.  That's why the name Brod rang a bell when I got this email on January 11:

From: Doug Brod

Subject: Interview request for SF counterculture book

Hi Fred, Doug Brod here. Hoping this note finds you well. I'm the former editor-in-chief of SPIN magazine, currently an editor at the Toronto Star, and the author of the book They Just Seem a Little Weird: How KISS, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz Remade Rock and Roll (Hachette, 2020).

I'm now working on my next book for Hachette: It's a cultural history of Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan, a project that has long been a passion of mine. Which is why I'm writing. I understand you had dealings with LaVey in the '60s and I'd very much like to interview you.

My goal is to tell the story of Anton LaVey and the Church and place them in the context of the times, investigating their origins as well as their impact on the occult and esoterica-pop explosions of the '70s, the so-called Satanic Panic of the '80s, the alt/underground culture of the '90s, and social and philosophical attitudes of the present day.

A New York native, I'm now based in Toronto, and my schedule is very flexible. Looking forward to connecting.

All best, Doug

I replied:

Doug, you are mistaking me for another Fred Gardner, a journalist who wrote for the Berkeley Gazette in the 1960s. I did not know of his existence, or had forgotten about the coincidence by 1995, when I urgently needed to learn something about him (because he had purportedly done something that my leftist friends and acquaintances considered execrable). I'm on the road now but when I get home I'll see if I can find "The Other Fred Gardner" folder in the garage.

I'm a NYer, too, and didn't move to CA until '66. My wife is from SF. In the early '60s she was a secretary at a somewhat hip ad agency. She recalls that Anton Lavey moved in the same social circle as the ad men she worked for. Also, that he was a member of the musicians' union — the only registered calliope player in the Bay Area! Some old-time Local Six members might remember him.

Fred

PS  Are you related to Kafka's friend and editor Max Brod? That would be the icing on the cake that is your email!

My effort in 1995 to get the facts about the other Fred Gardner so that I could prove that I wasn't him is a bizarre aspect of the Wanda Tinasky fiasco. At one point I turned to Ray McGrath, a detective with whom I had worked at an agency run by Jack Webb. Not the Jack Webb who played a detective in Dragnet (and who, incidentally, had begun his acting career in San Francisco) but the retired SFPD officer who ended up owning a bar on Geary Blvd, "Ireland's 32." Our Jack Webb said that having the same name as the Dragnet star had led to a promotion because "the brass loved it that every time I made a pinch it would mean a story in the newspapers."

Note to Ray McGrath:

Do you know Dylan's great song "I and I?"

I and I, in creation where one's nature neither honors nor forgives. I and I, one says to the other no man sees my face and lives…

I want to hire you to find a man named Fred Gardner who wrote for the Berkeley Gazette between 1962 and '67. That's basically all I know about him. The Gazette was a daily that went out of business c. 1970. They took a lot of material from the wire services and didn't give many bylines. I spent a couple of dark, dismal hours looking through old Gazettes on microfilm at the Berkeley library on Kittredge and came up with 5 FG stories, one of which has a co-author. I also got the names of some former reporters and editors.

Here's why I want to find him. As you know, I've been in a dispute with Bruce Anderson about a book I compiled that was revised and published by him and an associate named TR Factor. In October or November '95 I sent Bruce a detailed account of the work I'd done on the Tinasky book asserting my right to finish the job.  His letter of reply consisted of nothing but a xerox of an old government document about a meeting in November '67 between Gardner of the Gazette, a man named John Raymond who worked for Ramparts, and two local SF FBI agents with whom they apparently hoped to curry favor. As you'll see from the document, which is attached, Gardner and Raymond knew that an upcoming Ramparts expose about some CIA training program, was fraudulent, and that Warren Hinckle and Bob Scheer were going to publish it even though they knew that the author's claim that he had been through the program was false. (It's been over a year since I looked at it, I'll pull it when I'm done drafting this…)

For a second, as I glanced at the document, I wondered, "Why is Bruce sending me this old bit of trivia?" And then I realized: He thinks I'm that Fred Gardner! And he thinks he has something on me so damning that he can rip off the Tinasky book with impunity!

First I called Mary Miles, the cartoonist, who has had her own falling out with Bruce. "Oh yeah," she said, "He sent me a copy… I was gonna tell ya…"  Sure she was. Must have slipped her mind.

Then I called Cockburn, who had made it clear he didn't want to get caught in the middle in my dispute with Bruce. He apologized for not having discussed the document with me when he'd first seen a copy, which was back in August '95. He said, "Oliver Stone's people were doing research for the Nixon movie and came across it and gave a copy to Scheer, who was quite troubled by it…" Alex also told me that Warren Hinckle had given a copy to Bruce Anderson's nephew, Robert Mailer Anderson, and that Hinckle was 'waving it all over town.' Fechhemier told me that Hinckle had sent Lipset a copy, and that Lipset had sent Herb Caen a copy. Great!  My reputation as bitter madman who said all those bad things about our wonderful movement would now be replaced by 'Didn't you hear he was an agent?' I told Cockburn that he should have notified me about it if he thought it was untrue and confronted me if he thought it was true — as a matter of principle, let alone friendship. The squire said he was sorry and that he knew he'd handled it badly. (While all this is going on I'm trying to wring out of him the few thousand dollars he's owed me for a couple of years, and he and his well-to-do girlfriend are building a stable on their spread across the river.)

I called Marianne Hinckle, who remembered John Raymond from the early days of Ramparts. She thought he was still in SF or had recently moved away. She said she first saw the document at a party for Warren in the summer of '95. Bill Turner, who had requested Ramparts-related documents under the Freedom of Information Act, had turned it up and was showing it around at this party… So I guess Hinckle had a copy and Scheer had a copy as of that summer, and they both never knew or had forgotten that there was a Fred Gardner on the Berkeley Gazette. Scheer lived in Berkeley, but he was a Chronicle reader and he was more interested in international than local affairs (even though he ran for Congress. His constituency was "the Cuban people.") If anyone should have remembered that there was another FG it would have been Frank Bardacke, whom Cockburn consulted for tactical advice. But I can't blame Bardacke too much because I hardly remembered the other FG myself.

There are 2 John Raymonds listed with information, one, a reverend on Turk Street.  I think Marianne told me John Raymond had become a reverend but I'm not 100 percent sure. Marianne is currently out of town. I called the number and got a man's voice on the answering machine. He sounded like he was about 60, which would be about right.

I think you should call Raymond and ask him if he knows the whereabouts of the Fred Gardner who used to work for the Berkeley Gazette. [Paranoid fantasy: maybe Raymond lost track of the other FG after the '67 ploy, picked up an AVA c. 1990, and thought I was his old pal!]  If he asks why, tell him the truth.

Alternative approach: tell him you want to show him a picture of a man named Fred Gardner, bring him a picture of me in the '60s and find out if it's the same FG who worked for the Berkeley Gazette.  I could even accompany you. The fact that he won't recognize me can go in your report.

Plan C: Tell him you're writing a history of Ramparts. Arrange a meeting. Arrive with the document and ask him to tell you the background and how it played out and whatever became of the other Fred Gardner?

From Doug Brod 1/15/23:

A-ha! That is indeed the Fred I was looking for. Sorry for the confusion...And alas, as it happens, my great-grandfather was the other Max Brod (from Russia), not Kafka's editor. I believe we've come full circle.

PS 2023: Nowadays, if our names aren't very unusual, we can Google our namesakes. Among the many Fred Gardners there's a British Frank Sinatra impersonator and an African-American artist from Texas whose paintings are really good. Here's one called "Southern Snow":

* * *

CORMAC SAYS….

Judge: (To Mickey Mouse) So I understand you are seeking divorce from your wife Minnie Mouse because of her mental illness.

Mickey Mouse: That's not what I said. I said she was fucking Goofy.

Joke is from Cormac McCarthy's new book The Passenger. I highly recommend it but highly recommend that you read McCarthy's Stella Maris first. The two books are related. Stella Maris is like a prologue to The Passenger.

Re. Comment Section: Over the years, I've come to like Marmon more than I used to. I have never disliked him — as I do certain other commenters, but seldom agreed with him about anything. Now I often agree with his comments. Also, he is usually respectful to other commentators and has a conscience.

I hate Trump and the Republicans but hate them less than I hate Biden, Harris, Obama, Pelosi, and the other shit-libs that now call themselves the Democratic Party. Where have Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and William Fulbright gone?

Siempre adelante.

Louis Bedrock

* * *

The Develin Sisters, Eureka, 1910

* * *

SATURDAY IN UKIAH

Following morning ablutions at the Building Bridges homeless shelter, checked LOTTO tix across the street, and then walked in the rain to the co-op, enjoying a caprese hot sandwich and coffee. Exited, and ambled on to the hospice store, discovering a small size rudraksha seed mala displayed with the costume jewelry. Paid $4, and then went to the library chanting Om Aim Hrim Klim Chamundaye Vicce. Now sitting at a public computer, fingering the old rudraksha mala while enjoying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4JhIuJtInA

I'm ready! Contact me if you wish to perform extreme spiritually sourced direct action on the planet earth, for the purpose of destroying the demonic and returning this world to righteousness. Thank you.

Craig Louis Stehr, craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

* * *

UFOs NO (Wall St. Journal) via Steve Heilig:

* * *

PATRIOTS OR FOOLS?

Let a man meet a bear robbed of her cubs, rather than a fool in his folly. — Proverbs 17:12

by Stacey Warde

The classic definition of a fool is someone who believes in a lie, who lives their life according to fables and unfounded claims, who refuses to acknowledge truth, all of which eventually result in their own or someone else’s ruin.

Fools are not to be trifled with; they are supremely dangerous — better to come across a bear robbed of her cubs than to meet a fool in his folly, says the author of Proverbs. They pose a real threat to the health and well-being of the community with their loud, false, and vociferous claims.

They bear false witness and malign others to further their own ends, and refuse to bend their hearts or minds to truth despite all the evidence, and willfully submit themselves (and those within their circle of influence) to eventual disgrace and humiliation. A wise person seeks to heal and mend, to build and create rather than malign and destroy.

There’s no peace or rest with fools; only calamity. They set their sights on the destruction of all that is good. Their goal is to demolish and tear down. They haven’t any plan or clue on how to make things better, only on how to destroy, disrupt, and divide. Their words — often rhetoric that has no basis in reality — are full of poison and misrepresentations of the facts, which don’t matter to them at all.

I’ve been no less a fool myself on many occasion, believing lies, getting angry at imagined slights, lashing out unintelligently, living in the fantastical world of magical thinking, holding fast to half-truths and trinkets of reality, concocting stories out of whole cloth, indulging in speculation, rumor, and hearsay, supporting lost causes. Over the years, however, and in spite of my own follies, I’ve gained more respect for wisdom and understanding because these, at least, are much less likely to end in disaster — for individuals as well as the larger community.

I’ve learned to think critically, parse truth from fiction, because I believe that these are the mature and responsible ways to behave as a citizen, because, let’s be honest, as even the Bible says, wisdom is more to be desired than folly. What is the nature of wisdom?

I’ve learned that wisdom, the rightful use of knowledge, brings life, more to be treasured than gold; wisdom and the actions derived from it are in accord with nature and are more likely to result in the good that promotes healthy community and constructive dialogue. Folly, living and believing in a lie, leads to shame, villainy, and death, as we’ve already witnessed and continue to witness among those who claim falsehoods as their guiding light.

So, here we are, a nation apparently half full of fools, on the heels of a global pandemic, still believing a lie, still clinging to villainy and the threat of armed resistance, still stupidly thinking against all the evidence and sound reason that Democrats stole Election 2020, still spuriously claiming that covid-19 is “just a flu,” despite the million victims in the US who have died from the disease, still holding up a false god (any politician, not just Trump) as their Savior, ad nauseam…. How sad, how really truly sad, that folly, maliciousness, and shameful, willful ignorance have become the hallmark of a “patriot” in the U.S. These so-called patriots now call good evil and evil good, promoting acts of violence such as we saw during 2020's January 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol with blessings from the Biggest Fool of all.

I’ve had conversations with well-meaning friends and individuals who believe that we ought not to judge or criticize the wayward fool, that we ought ourselves to remain neutral in the false hope that we might turn their hearts towards what is true and lovely. Rather, these friends have argued, we ought to remain open to conversation or intelligent dialogue with people who have succumbed to the lies and ignorance of, say, shadowy figures or movements like the Pillow Guy or QAnon. I say that’s bunk. Holding out hope for a fool is wasting your time. Better to tie an 800-pound rock around your neck and jump into a lake. Leave the presence of a fool and let them wallow in the sewage of their own delusions. You’re better off without them. Save your gifts and talents for those who will listen.

And, at the risk of ignoring my own admonition to move on from the presence of fools and being maligned by false witnesses and sundry other misinformed individuals, if you are one of those people parading their folly in the streets, carrying “stop the steal” signs, claiming in ignorance and against all evidence or reason that Trump won the election, thumbing your nose at covid-19, defying science and public health guidelines, all I can say is, Just stop! Don’t be a fool. Don’t go down in history as someone who based their life on a lie. Stop trying to subvert our democracy. Stop minimizing the pain and suffering of those who have died from covid-19. Call yourself tragically misinformed, or claim the moniker of fool, but don’t flatter yourself by calling yourself a “patriot.” There’s no virtue or wisdom in such a specious claim. You, who ignorantly believe and willfully spread these lies, are no patriot.

A patriot doesn’t resort to arms in defiance of just laws, or try to destroy what is good; a patriot fights for liberty from real, not imagined, oppression. A patriot isn’t blind or foolish, or a subscriber to QAnon, or a follower of imbecilic claims by people like Mike Lindell (and the list goes on…) who says he has evidence of liberal malfeasance but has only offered evidence of his own delusions. A patriot defends the right to vote, demands that all votes be counted (once, twice, three times, it doesn’t matter), not the right to add or subtract votes at whim.

Let wisdom and reason, not folly, be your guiding light. Our republic, and the blood of those who sacrificed their lives to preserve it, demand nothing less.

Stacey Warde writes from his home in Mendocino County where he studies and trusts in the words of the wise.

* * *

RR Bridge Construction, Essex Humboldt, 1912

* * *

EXTREME AOC

Editor,

Why is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez considered to be extreme?

She answered:

I believe in Medicare for All, aka guaranteed healthcare in the United States.

I authored the Green New Deal, and believe tackling the climate crisis will take a much more massive and serious mobilization than what we're doing now.

Although I am a Democrat, I operate independently from either party's establishment. So I am willing to challenge my own party's leadership and, when necessary, break from the party line.

I do not believe in late stage capitalism or that prioritizing the extreme pursuit of profit at any and all human/environmental costs will save us. I believe in cooperative economics and cooperative democracy, aka democratic socialism.

My campaign is funded by grassroots, small-dollar donations and I accept $0 in corporate money (the average donation to keep me in office is around $16).

I believe that ICE, an agency that was just formed in 2003 during the Patriot Act era, is a rogue agency that should not exist.

I am the youngest woman in U.S. history to be elected to Congress. I was a waitress. I am Latina. I come from a low income background and am one of just a few working class people who got elected to Congress. That makes a lot of classist, ageist, misogynist, and racist people mad.

Tom Wodetzki

* * *

Gold Hunter, 1849

* * *

AND ON THE SIXTH OF JANUARY…

by Larry Bensky

And so it came to pass that on the sixth of January, 2023, two years after the demonstration/riot/failed coup that caused millions of dollars in property damage, six deaths and countless injuries on Capitol Hill, hundreds of thousands of copies of six books, all of them titled “January 6 Report,” began to flood bookstores and delivery trucks around the world.

“The world” now is very different from “the world” on which “bombshell” books based on Washington hearings landed previously: Pearl Harbor, Organized Crime, Watergate, 9/11, Iran-Contra and the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, among others.

The major difference being that you no longer have to have a physical copy of books that were rushed into print about those historic events. You can now read book length versions on a screen. And, while the books each cost around $25 each to buy, the virtual texts are free, if you have a reliable internet connection.

The other main difference is that in the January 6 tomes, only a total of 27 pages, out of 734 in the Celadon/Macmillan edition, are original. The other 707 pages are public property. This compares to the first similar event, the 1951 Kefauver “Committee to Investigate Organized Crime” book, where transcripts totalled 11,000 pages. I brought home with me from Washington, where I anchored radio broadcasts of the Iran-Contra hearings, at least twenty books whose total pages I never counted.

But as unwary purchasers of the five “January 6 Report” books now being published will quickly discover, the current shorter books are nevertheless no more accessible than their historical predecessors.

For “January 6,” there are nine prose sections written by Committee staff. These comprise barely 200 pages. Most of what’s in them has been preceded by a 255 page “Executive Summary.” The other three-quarters of these heavy tomes are footnotes and citations. In other words, a waste of paper, and your money, if you buy what you think is a readable book.

The other major problem with the “Final Report” is that it’s dull.  Such spark as came in the televised hearings is missing. Print is never as dramatic as live presentations, of course. And these particular visual presentations were assembled from both live witnesses and edited tapes by a television executive with decades of doing such work for major networks. Nevertheless, the hearings lacked “setting, character, and plot,” says Harvard Professor and New Yorker critic Jill Lepore (“The American Beast,” New Yorker, January 26, 2023). For example, “there is very little suffering” in the book length report, Lepore notes. And not much in those professionally, and expensively, produced televised sessions.

But there was, in fact much suffering on January 6th. In the Capitol building, people were slipping in blood, howling in rage and pain. People desperately trying to reach their families or their offices shouted and sobbed into poorly functioning cell phones that had never been adapted to work in the thick walls and twisting corridors that had often been remodeled. Terrified members of Congress and their staffs, and poorly prepared and commanded police, suffered through what many felt were the last moments of their lives.

No matter how much or how little you may choose to read in the January 6 report books, or how much or how little you may have chosen to watch the thirty hours of live televised hearings, you’ll probably have come away with the feeling that the whole sick, sordid, violent mess was the fault of one man, Donald Trump.

The idea on the part of the Committee’s guiding mentalities, Congress members Bennie Thompson, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren, was that Trump was responsible and guilty for what went on. And that if that idea was hammered home enough, he would forevermore remain an ex-President, with no hope of regaining his previous, or any other, post, in government.

But it would be premature, and foolish, to conclude that such an end has been assured. Trump went into the hearings with a 42% national approval rate. As they ended with a burst of attention to the report’s publication, he was at just under 40%. An insignificant decline. And one which leaves the always establishment media, led by the New York Times, writing oceans of babble about how Trump’s fiefdom, the Republican Party, can be restructured and reformed into a ”responsible” government entity. Something that would seem to be impossible to be accomplished when more than half the Republican elected officials, in Washington and statehouses, believe, without evidence that, as Trump continues to state, the last elections were “stolen.”

It is often remarked that political fortunes can change quickly. And that popular based movements can develop rapidly as well. So probably one should evaluate “The January 6 Committee Report” on its predictive implications, rather than its well documented, if narrowly focused, analyses.

Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, Rochester N.Y. and Charlottesville are among the many U.S. cities where groups which came together to storm the Capitol on January 6 had been active. Their members are among the 900 people already convicted of various crimes in connection with January 6. But they also continue to have loosely organized and sporadically inter-communicative presences, thanks to cynical unregulated opportunists with supposedly “liberating” virtual communications operations like Elon Musk and Marc Zuckerberg.

People in these groups live in communities with police and sheriffs departments, district attorneys, city attorneys, and F.B.I. offices. But you will search in vain in the “January 6 Committee Report” for any evidence that prior to that date coordinated communication was done or is now recommended to be done among these law enforcement offices to monitor people who may be arming themselves, circulating false information, maintaining secret funding accounts and threatening and harassing elected officials, from school boards and city councils to state legislators.

Not until page 500 of the “January 6 Committee Report’s 724 pages do we encounter significant focus on much other than President Trump and his minions. The report picks up the story of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and Q Anon when there were already thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people influenced by them and smaller groups. A grand total of five pages (with 25 pages of footnotes) is devoted to the background, ideology, and previous activities of violence-prone groups. Most importantly the interaction of such groups with law enforcement, the military, and churches is entirely absent. The equivalent would have been to conduct the Watergate Hearings without discussing Republicans. Or the events of 9/11 without reference to Middle East governments. Or the Iran-Contra scandal without analysis of the Reagan White House.

This is not a call for “unleashing” law enforcement. History has shown that when restraints, minimal as they usually are, disappear or are weakened, the oppressed are further oppressed. And the greedy benefit further from the pain of the needy. (Think Native Americans and African-Americans as prime examples.)

Can one nevertheless have hope, if not faith, that those in a position to do so will now take January 6, 2021, as a big, flashing warning sign?

Larry Bensky can be reached at LBensky@igc.org

* * *

Driftwood pile at Seaside Creek Beach (by Jeff Goll)

* * *

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Earlier this year I got my arm ripped open by a pit bull – and it was my own fault. After wrapping my arm in bloody towels, my next door neighbor drove me to the ER. I was in line for a few minutes and the person ahead of me seemed to be in fine shape and it made little sense to me why he was there. When I stepped up next I didn’t say a word but just pulled the bloody towels aside and showed the lady behind the glass window what the inside of my arm looked like. I was a bit in shock and a bit unsteady, but together enough to wait a few minutes in line. After she saw my arm a minute later a door opened ten feet away and they told me to step inside. They put me in treatment right away, I got attention before everybody else, maybe it was because I had an actual emergency.

* * *

* * *

LOUIS BEDROCK writes:

Crumb’s epiphanic artwork recalls this poem by William Butler Yeats:

—His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. ‘What then?’

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. ‘What then?’

All his happier dreams came true –
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
poets and Wits about him drew;
‘What then.?’ sang Plato’s ghost. ‘What then?’

The work is done,’ grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost, ‘What then?’

* * *

SS Sequoia, built in Fort Bragg in 1898

* * *

THE SYMBOL OF THE END OF THE WORLD and the failure of human relations is a big dull party in both La Notte and La Dolce Vita. But I don’t understand how these film artists can think they are analyzing or demonstrating their own—that is to say, our own, emptiness by showing the rich failing to enjoy a big party. Whose experience are they expressing—or is the party just an easy photogenic symbol of modern life that is being loaded with meanings it can’t carry? 

I suspect many Americans are attracted by this view of fabulous parties, jaded people, baroque palaces; to an American who works damned hard, old-world decadence doesn’t look so bad—all those desperately unhappy beautiful people, surrounded by champagne, lobster, dance orchestras, and a wide selection of gorgeously dressed sex partners to be had for the lifting of an eyebrow. Forgive me if I sound plaintive: I've never been to one of these dreadfully decadent big parties (the people I know are more likely to give bring-your-own-bottle parties). And isn’t it likely that these directors, disgusted though they may be, also love the spectacle of wealth and idleness, or why do they concentrate on these so empty and desiccated rich types? If the malaise is general, why single out the rich for condemnation? If the malaise affects only the rich, is it so very important? As usual, there is a false note in the moralist’s voice. 

These movies are said to be “true” and “important” because this kind of high life has been observed (gossip columnists assure us that they have been eyewitnesses); do the people who read the gossip columns get so much vicarious pleasure that they think they’re living it? Here we are in an age of increasing mechanization and dehumanization—with the trends horribly the same under both capitalism or socialism, with no relief in sight, and people go to Fellini's and Antonioni’s Marxist-Catholic-Hollywood glamour parades and come away carrying the banner that fornication is the evil of our times! And whom do these directors pick to symbolize the victims of materialism: the artists—just the ones who escape into freedom. I'll admit that I once knew an apparently bored artist, a famous composer, born wealthy, who said to me, “The days are always two hours too long for me.” I wanted to hit him with a poker because the days are always too short for me and I am always trying to prolong them by staying up half the night. But I decided that he was using his boredom as a come-on—a lure so that people would want to fascinate him, to awaken him from his sleeping beauty trance. 

— Pauline Kael, ‘I Lost It At the Movies’

* * *

* * *

UKRAINE, SUNDAY, 15TH JANUARY

Last fall, as Ukraine won back large swaths of territory in a series of counterattacks, it pounded Russian forces with American-made artillery and rockets. Guiding some of that artillery was a homemade targeting system that Ukraine developed on the battlefield. 

A piece of Ukrainian-made software has turned readily available tablet computers and smartphones into sophisticated targeting tools that are now used widely across the Ukrainian military. 

The result is a mobile app that feeds satellite and other intelligence imagery into a real-time targeting algorithm that helps units near the front direct fire onto specific targets. And because it’s an app, not a piece of hardware, it’s easy to quickly update and upgrade, and available to a wide range of personnel. 

US officials familiar with the tool say it has been highly effective at directing Ukrainian artillery fire onto Russian targets.

The targeting app is among dozens of examples of battlefield innovations that Ukraine has come up with over nearly a year of war, often finding cheap fixes to expensive problems. 

Small, plastic drones, buzzing quietly overhead, drop grenades and other ordinance on Russian troops. 3D printers now make spare parts so soldiers can repair heavy equipment in the field. Technicians have converted ordinary pickup trucks into mobile missile launchers. Engineers have figured out how to strap sophisticated US missiles onto older Soviet fighter jets such as the MiG-29, helping keep the Ukrainian air force flying after nine months of war. 

Ukraine has even developed its own anti-ship weapon, the Neptune, based off Soviet rocket designs that can target the Russian fleet from almost 200 miles away. 

This kind of Ukrainian ingenuity has impressed US officials, who have praised Kyiv’s ability to “MacGyver” solutions to its battlefield needs that fill in important tactical gaps left by the larger, more sophisticated Western weaponry.

While US and other Western officials don’t always have perfect insight into exactly how Ukraine’s custom-made systems work – in large part because they are not on the ground – both officials and open-source analysts say Ukraine has become a veritable battle lab for cheap but effective solutions.

“Their innovation is just incredibly impressive,” said Seth Jones, director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has also offered the United States and its allies a rare opportunity to study how their own weapons systems perform under intense use – and what munitions both sides are using to score wins in this hotly fought modern war. US operations officers and other military officials have also tracked how successfully Russia has used cheap, expendable drones that explode on impact, provided by Iran, to decimate the Ukrainian power grid. 

Ukraine is “absolutely a weapons lab in every sense because none of this equipment has ever actually been used in a war between two industrially developed nations,” said one source familiar with Western intelligence. “This is real-world battle testing.”

For the US military, the war in Ukraine has been an incredible source of data on the utility of its own systems. 

(CNN)

* * *

For Sale, Nothing Down, the Ultimate Airbnb, Elk

20 Comments

  1. Professor Cosmos January 16, 2023

    Re screenshot of Holman’s latest op Ed (all studied to help address psych distress):
    Holman Jenkins of the WSJ, Julian Barnes of the NYT, Steven Greenstreet of the NY Post, Mick West retired video game creator in Sacramento are today serving as comfort blankets for those having difficulty with the growing realization that we have an ET presence here. Mick West, btw, seems to be realizing that this might actually be real..he’s aware of the reporting about people in special access programs coming out in classified settings to testify thanks to NDAA provisions freeing them of NDAs and classification. Holman Jenkins seems the most anguished among this group.

    • Harvey Reading January 16, 2023

      Ho, hum.

  2. Marmon January 16, 2023

    “The White House just announced that there are no LOGS or information of any kind on visitors to the Wilmington house and flimsy, unlocked, and unsecured, but now very famous, garage. Maybe they are smarter than we think! This is one of seemingly many places where HIGHLY CLASSIFIED documents are stored (in a big pile on the damp floor). Mar-a-Lago is a highly secured facility, with Security Cameras all over the place, and watched over by staff & our great Secret Service. I have INFO on everyone!”

    -Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

    Marmon

    • Marshall Newman January 16, 2023

      The difference being that Biden immediately turned over his secret material upon discovery and Trump spent more than a year trying to avoid doing so.

      • Marmon January 16, 2023

        Trump: Had declassification authority
        Biden: ZERO declassification authority

        Trump: One SECURE location
        Biden: Multiple UNSECURE locations

        Trump: National Archives was aware
        Biden: National Archives wasn’t aware

        Yes, there’s a difference.

        Marmon

        • Marshall Newman January 16, 2023

          No President can declassify top secret material by “thinking it”, despite the former President’s assertion. And Mar-a-Lago is NOT a secure location, again despite the former President’s assertion.

          • Marmon January 16, 2023

            No vice president can declassify top secret material. Was Obama aware that Biden was stealing classified material? As far as sitting Presidents having unlimited discretion to declassify at will, that will be decided by the Supreme Court, not CNN.

            Marmon

            • Harvey Reading January 16, 2023

              LOL. Even CNN might do a better job of “judging” than the moron fascists on the high court. The latter idiots would have to pray to an imaginary being on the issue before deciding. Kavanaugh (sp?) might also have to strong arm some college girls in order to help him decide.

            • Chuck Wilcher January 16, 2023

              Wait a minute. According to Trump, the FBI planted those top secret documents in Melania’s under wear drawer right before he declared them declassified and after he swore they weren’t there at all.

              It gets confusing.

  3. Lazarus January 16, 2023

    RE: Pacific Internet

    I, too, have been with Pacific Internet from my online beginnings. They, at times, have issues, but during office hours, they generally answer their phone. And if they don’t, they have always called me back.

    The email situation you wrote of has been an ongoing issue for months. I have suspected that the problem emulates downstream somewhere, i.e., from the myriad of servers through which the data travels.

    We’ve all experienced a piece of mail lost for several days/late, and eventually, it miraculously gets delivered.
    I have no way of confirming, but I also suspect they pay a fee for the myriad of servers the data uses. And at times, those providers have issues that adversely effects everyone upstream, which may or may not be the fault of Pacific Internet; it’s complicated.

    But I also believe Pacific Internet is slow to confirm when there is an issue. Customer service would get significantly improved by a simple message that “we’re having a problem” getting placed on their answering service as soon as possible.

    When frustrated by Pacific Internet’s outages, I’ve asked friends and family about other internet providers. Unfortunately, the reviews aren’t great for anybody. It seems everybody has issues. And the biggest of the providers seem to be the worse.

    I’m sticking with the Pacific Internet. Generally, an actual person will answer the phone or call me back.
    Be well,
    Laz

  4. Chuck Artigues January 16, 2023

    It seems that Stacey Warde definition of a fool, matches my definition of many people who say they believe in the god of the bible. I am happy to define myself as a heathen.

  5. chuck dunbar January 16, 2023

    “ED NOTES–WOKE ME WHEN IT’S OVER”

    This distorted, even deranged, focus on words like “field,” is a useless distraction from whatever real work to help real people in need is at hand.

    I remember, working in CPS in the County, when certain administrators (some without any CPS field experience) would rebuke us for speaking bluntly and sharply with clients who were endangering their small children when they, for example, were using methamphetamines and other drugs that vastly screwed them up. These admin folks wanted us to be more respectful and positive.

    Our response was something like this: ” We’re working out in the real world and must give clear messages that folks will actually pay attention to” like this: “If you keep using meth, we will be taking your children away! You have to stop!” And, of course, then we’d talk about steps to help them stop using and recover. Out in the field–pardon me–it was a rough world that our bureaucracy sometimes could not grasp.

  6. k h January 16, 2023

    My home internet is Pacific. I hang in there because I don’t want to deal with ATT or Xfinity, and the constant upselling and increasing charges and terrible customer service they offer. But Pacific does seem to have more and more problems lately. I’d love to hear from them about what’s going on. People understand when small local companies have problems. What becomes frustrating is no communication.

    I appreciate that someone answers when I call, or gets back to me if I leave a message. I don’t have to wait hours on hold. I have been with them since 1992. I want to support local companies. Pacific has always been good about technical support. I had to gave up on them for my business account though.

  7. Marmon January 16, 2023

    The machine is DONE with Biden. What do you think will happen to him next?

    Marmon

  8. Dick Whetstone January 16, 2023

    MCN has always provided excellent support. I switched to Starlink for connectivity as soon as it was available and it has been totally trouble free, as well as super fast.

    • Marmon January 16, 2023

      Starlink Rocks

      Marmon

  9. Marilyn Davin January 17, 2023

    Re USC’s School of Social Work’s “woke” decision to replace “field” with “practicum:”
    This really takes the cake. “Field” brings to mind an image of black slaves toiling in the fields of yore? Elitist? If anyone can find just one in ten randomly selected folks capable of credibly defining “practicum” I’ll spot them an extra-large latte at a coffee place of his or her choice.
    BTW, has anyone informed the NFL of this mighty blow to racism? I doubt that its athletes will be playing on their practicums anytime soon.

  10. Debra Keipp January 19, 2023

    Use Ukiah Wireless and stay engaged with internet. They’re the best. In fact, up on Mntn Vw Road they brought in a drone to find best area to install antenna, which also provided service to six more homes down in the canyon below. Helpful, respond to calls, and come up with solutions to fix problematic internet connections.

  11. Debra Keipp January 19, 2023

    Ditto, to Drew Colfax on the unfortunate firing of Alicia Bales. When I first heard about it, I reflected on the KPFA days when Pat Scott strode around in her riding boots giving those she wanted off the station, “the kiss of death”. It was an ominous time for the station, and the beginning of the end for Pacifist radio with the advent of NPR-ization. I ask myself, “What would Nicole Sawaya do?”
    Alicia has a great radio voice and the ability to spontaneously inspire listeners. When I hear Marty drone on, it reminds me of someone on qualudes – in particular, Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Is that the dialect from Colorado? Must be.

  12. Debra Keipp January 19, 2023

    I tuned into W. Dan’s community commentary program where Marty Durland and one of the board members couldn’t really answer most of the questions presented to them regarding the firing of Alicia Bales and the politics involved. It was way limp. Alicia’s programming couldn’t have been any worse than having to listen to W. Dan’s self-aggrandization of himself and his new wife’s veterinarian business on the KZYX airwaves. And others who used the station as if it was their personal-own such as listening to the squeeky, whiny voice of Linda DragonHaus speaking on air in support of her Cloud Inst. non-profit.

    Alicia was inventive, present, showed up for events in the community, and knew her stuff locally. So much for Marty Durland.

    Just remember: Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyrany.

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