Mendocino County Today: Monday, June 12, 2023

Near Normal | Haul Road | CRV News | Presumed Dead | Guard Rail | Ed Notes | AV Appeal | Cloud Nine | Shade Trees | Neon Frostie | Homeless Inc | Ridgewood Ranch | Benjamin McMurtry | Bragg History | Yesterday's Catch | Rescue Pacifica | Kafka Story | Cats | Tassels | Joe Nuxhall | Crawford Closes | Close Quarters | On Photography | Electricity Addiction | Simple Algebra | Hillary & Donald | Tough Business | Trump Case | My Boxses | Ted Kaczynski | Never Enough | Resist | Parker House | Ukraine | Shipping Out

ISOLATED TO SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS are expected once again this afternoon and evening across the interior. Drier conditions are expected to develop by Wednesday. Near normal temperatures are forecast through early this week, followed by a period of above normal inland temperatures late week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): You'll never guess....... 53F under foggy skies this Monday morning on the coast. A lot of rain made it into Mendocino County yesterday afternoon but I did not see any here. Maybe a bit less fog later this week then another low pressure arrives next weekend to continue our current pattern.

RECYCLING NEWS?

Editor,

Awhile ago was mentioned in your paper the approval of a mobile refundable bottle recycling unit of some variety? Any news on this or its whereabouts? 

Thnx.

ED NOTE: See Sunday's MCT.

AUTHORITIES SEARCHING FOR MAN PRESUMED DEAD After Falling Down Mendocino Cliffs and Soon After Washed Away

Multiple agencies are scouring the coast near Mendocino Headlands State Park after an intoxicated man reportedly stumbled down the area’s cliffs yesterday evening and was later washed away by waves.…

mendofever.com/2023/06/11/authorities-searching-for-man-presumed-dead-after-falling-down-mendocino-cliffs-and-soon-after-washed-away/

ED NOTES

MY SIG OTHER is a devoted fan of The View. If I make the mistake of commenting on the show she invites me to keep on walking and to mind my own business. Soooooo, I didn't see Tim Scott defend his fellow Republicans’ record on race issues after Joy Behar (who looks like Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie) slammed Repugs for “disgusting” rhetoric about black children in America. 

SCOTT, a Republican, and the only black Republican senator, complained that the show was cutting to commercial breaks every time he attempted to rebut the shrieking hags that comprise Behar's amen chorus. Among other insults, Behar said Scott “wouldn't be a Republican if he really understood race issues in the U.S.”

THE SENATOR, who remained calm and gentlemanly rather than leap for Behar's throat, tried to explain that “One of the reasons why I'm on the show is because of the comments that were made, frankly, on the show — that the only way for a young African American kid to be successful in this country is to be the exception and not the rule. That is a dangerous, offensive, disgusting message to send to our young people today — that the only way to succeed is by being the exception.”

BLUE JAYS pitcher Anthony Bass was released last week for “sharing” an anti-LGBTQ2S+ video. Bass's unemployment commenced the day after Bass said he stands by his “personal beliefs” just over a week after apologizing for sharing an Instagram story encouraging followers to boycott Target and Bud Light over the support they showed for the LGBTQ2S+ community.

IN OTHER WORDS, ballplayers aren't permitted by their employers to express political opinions on this, the most sacred of the sacred subjects.

IN THE GOOD old days when marijiuana was illegal and everyone got paid and the Northcoast's rural economies were cash-flush, the pot industry was initially damned as the work of “hippies.” Which it was, kind of, genius hippie botanists having developed our famous, and then famously lucrative export crop. But in reality darn near everyone was in on it, including leading “straights” who partnered up with “hippies” to sharecrop on the “straights” land. By the early 90s, however, the authorities began to claim that Mexicans had become the dominant dope producers. Nobody's ever done a formal ethno-survey, but until legality, marijuana production was an inter-racial business.

I REMEMBER being startled in, I think, '96, reading in my international edition of the Manchester Guardian (the Guardian plus a couple of pages of LeMonde and several pages of the Washington Post) that “In Mendocino County, Mexicans are estimated to control more than 80 per cent of the illegal (marijuana) crop.” The piece cited the Guardian’s Christopher Reed as the source of this mythical development at ground zero of the Emerald Triangle and went on to quote a Humboldt County cop named Cobine about how the pot fighters were arming up to beat back an invasion of imported Mexican pistoleros. All nonsense of course, but handy to law enforcement’s ongoing quest for more money to fight non-existent menaces like pot, and also convenient to xenophobes in their efforts to blame Mexican immigrants for everything that scared them about contemporary American life.

GRAND OPENING OF CLOUD NINE ART GALLERY

Who: Barry Marshall, Featured Artist

When: First Friday, July 7, from 5-8pm

Where: 320 N. Franklin Street, Fort Bragg, CA

Come see the newest gallery in town with work on display from seven accomplished artists. Our Featured Artist for July is Barry Marshall, award-winning impressionist fine art painter from Carmel. A former gallery owner in Carmel and Pacific Grove, Barry would now like to devote his time and energy to painting the natural beauty of the Mendocino coast.

On First Friday, July 7, from 5-8, you will have a chance to meet Barry and some of the other artists of Cloud Nine Art Gallery. Light refreshments served. Admission is free.

UKIAH IS COOL?

To the Editor:

“That Was Cool” was a great article by Justine Frederiksen the other day. It was about how some kids are opting to stay in town. Years ago a local writer had an article in the Boonville newspaper. In it he described—I’m paraphrasing now—how ugly and hot Ukiah was. He was kinda right. But it’s not his grandfather’s Ukiah anymore. Lots of shade trees were planted 20 years ago which have matured adding greenery to the forested hills surrounding us. As for jobs—almost every business in town is looking to hire. Yet you still frequently hear complaints about everything—real or imagined. Working men and women work—bottom feeders gripe.

Sunther Smith

Ukiah

UNLEASHING THE ZOMBIES

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

Many of today’s social ills can be traced to, and laid at the doorstep of, well-meaning intellectual dwarves who were naive, smug and opinionated. In other words, the boomer generation.

I know. I’m one. Things we thought obvious turned out complicated, and the simplistic solutions we advocated created more problems than they solved.

Take marijuana. Please.

Or the homeless swamp. Our leaders keep shoveling money into it, hoping to drown the recipients in programs, funding, free housing and drugs, thinking maybe they’ll disappear, or at least go to Nevada.

How’s that strategy lookin’ so far?

We lose sight of reality: the seeds that sprouted this many-headed homeless monster were planted by us. California started the big weed patch when it forbid new home construction for low and moderate income families.

An exception: Government-built “affordable housing” projects, multi-story petri dishes that cultivated and nourished crime, misery and poverty.

At about the same time, Californians came under the collective delusion that the mentally ill really weren’t mentally ill. Our view, and it quickly became prevailing wisdom, was that inmates at places like the Mendocino State Hospital in Talmage were just free-spirited eccentrics.

They were merely out of step with conformity which translated into the occasional social faux pas like wearing mismatched socks or whistling on the bus.

And for these sorts of transgressions they were all locked up and given lobotomies. We railed at the injustice. Beguiled by dishonest rhetoric and sentimental lies, we began to advocate for a new brand of treatment for the mentally ill.

Our leaders in Sacramento listened and acted.

On a parallel track, Hollywood and other dispensers of mass culture began to depict mentally ill people as harmless. Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in both book and movie, made clear who were the good guys and who were evil tyrants who enforced capricious rules and dispensed electroshock punishments.

The book “Flowers for Algernon” was renamed “Charley” as a movie and its most memorable scenes were of a cheerful, childlike, middle-aged man on a children’s swing at the park. “Rain Man” gave us the winsome Dustin Hoffman as a befuddled but competent fellow who was a real good driver. Forrest Gump.

So California’s legislature passed the bipartisan LPS Act; Governor Reagan, imagining the aroma of budget savings, signed the bill into law. Doors swung open at Mendocino Hospital and others around the state unleashing an army of zombies onto the streets. We were surprised, weren’t we, when those mentally ill ex-inmates proceeded to sleep on park benches and doorways, defecate in parks and sidewalks, drink, take drugs and do violent things?

We should not have been surprised that street drugs, exponentially more powerful and plentiful than in our day, exacerbate mental problems. But most of us were indeed startled to be told by social workers that the homeless are victims in need of our respect and our resources, but none of our rules and responsibilities.

Homeless, Inc., advocates warned us that expecting someone help clean up the kitchen after dining (for the hundredth time) at Plowshares is demeaning. Work “dehumanizes” an unsheltered victim, strips them of their free will and robs them of their dignity. This idiotic bullpucky ignores that hard work is ennobling and feels good, and that the lifestyle of some homeless individuals inconveniences and endangers the lives and freedoms of the rest of us.

And having learned nothing from the disasters of emptying mental hospitals, Governor Jerry Brown unilaterally “cured” prison overcrowding by releasing felons back to the streets. The influx of jailbirds has brought more disease and violence to the cities.

Yet as filthy, mean and miserable as our streets and cities have become via policies cooked up by those we hire to solve problems, the worst is yet to come. An echo from medieval times has sounded.

Plagues and diseases not seen outside the third world in hundreds of years now haunt the streets of America: Typhus, tuberculosis, Hepatitis A, dysentery, shigella and other horrors are making a comeback. Remember, this was all created and carried out by our elected representatives. Remember, this won’t get better.

So listen up when politicians and Homeless, Inc., advocates tell us we need to spend billions more to staunch the wound they opened 50 years ago. We need a lot more money to buy the homeless more hotels, give out more needles, provide more meals and programs and shelter and shopping carts and job training.

In the meantime let’s get to work on a tsetse fly vaccine.

Another component to this homeless mess is that we’ve made it lucrative for so many nonprofit agencies, social workers and program administrators who will not relinquish their easy income without working levers and pulling strings in Sacramento.

Tom Hine is in North Carolina at the moment if you’d like more advice. TWK is in his imagination.

DUNCAN JAMES WRITES (commenting on Marshall Newman’s brief history of Yorkville):

I’m always interested in Yorkville since my great-great grandfather Benjamin Franklin McMurtry died there in “Rancheria Valley, County of Mendocino, California,” “in the morning of January 7, 1859,” according to probate court records in Alameda County, California. At the time of his death he was 29 years old. I am not sure how long he had been in the area but on December 7, 1858, he had signed his will that was witnessed by J.A. McGimsey, J.E. Hankins and J.B. Samez and a part of the probate court record.

On August 25, 1916, his son Leslie Bailey McMurtry became the owner of the Van Arsdale Ranch, presently a portion of it is known as the Ridgewood Ranch.

YOUTH WANTS TO KNOW

Dear Editor,

Having read David Giusti’s 5/21/23 letter in the AVA I am convinced it was actually written by one of the muppets. Among the many assertions made by Giusti, one of the most bizarre is his incessive claim that General Bragg was not a racist slave owner. My knowledge is limited to what I was taught in high school. Would the esteemed Editor be kind enough to enlighten myself and the readers on Bragg’s history? Does Dave raise some legit points on who Bragg really was? Do the proponents of Fort Bragg’s name change have it all wrong?

Alan Sonny Crow

Vacaville

ED REPLY: General Bragg was indeed a slaveholder, and from all reports an unpleasant, argumentative dude, at least according to General Grant. Bragg was also considered the least competent Confederate general. How Bragg's name came to be attached to the lonely, isolated fort on the Mendocino Coast seems to have been a nice bit of butt-nuzzling by an Army lieutenant named Horatio Gibson, who'd served under Bragg during the Mexican-American War. “Hell, I'll score a few points with Bragg, who's a connected guy, by suggesting that that obscure military presence we maintain to hell and gone up the coast be named after him. I prefer Fort Gibson but who cares anyway?” That was in 1858. Fort Bragg had been established to protect Indians against the first-wave white settlers, single men, among them many criminals, who enjoyed Mendocino County because it was large and lawless. More than a century later, a small band of virtue signallers, led by a retired professor who either doesn't know or doesn't care, has advertised the untrue version of local history by claiming that the soldiers at Fort Bragg were Indian killers, which is not true.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, June 11, 2023

RAMON ALCAZAR, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-under influence.

MANUEL BELTRAN, Hopland. Leaving scene of accident with property damage, no license.

MICHAEL BRANNON II, Marysville/Piercy. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

CHAD HAKE, Willits. Burglary tools, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

DANIEL HODGES, Arcata/Laytonville. DUI.

KENNETH LOYD, Carmichael/Ukiah. Sexual battery by restraint, under influence.

JESUS MALFAVON-SANDOVAL, Ukiah. Controlled substance.

GEORGIA MILLSAP, Willits. Suspended license for DUI.

OMAR ORTEGA-QUIROZ, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

MERLIN PETERS, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

MEGAN ROBERTS, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

SAMUEL SANCHEZ, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)

KRISTOFF SUBA, Laytonville. Domestic battery, explosive materials. 

JEFF BLANKFORT:

ATTENTION TO THOSE IN THE SF BAY AREA! Rescue Pacifica will be having a press conference and rally at KPFA on Thursday, June 22 at 12pm noon where a demand will be made that Ian Masters, a cult figure formerly on KFPK in Southern California and a defender of Israel be removed from his daily weekday programming slot at KPFA as well as condemning the pro war programming in the station's news department. This is not a matter of suppressing free speech but of not opening the airwaves to those who endorse the mainstream media line of defending Israeli apartheid.

I will be there to present a rundown of Pacifica radio and KPFA's sordid history of suppressing criticism, let alone mentioning of Zionism, and its hiring of Israeli government employees as its correspondents on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Pacifica's resistance to letting them go when I learned about it and demanded their removal. It's another ugly story illustrating the Zionist penetration of the "Left" that has been largely been suppressed.

AT 40, FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was walking through a park one day in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her. The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter “written” by the doll saying “Please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures.” Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.

During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable. Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin. “It doesn't look like my doll at all,” said the girl. Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: “My travels have changed me.” The little girl hugged the new doll and brought the doll with her to her happy home. A year later Kafka died. Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written: “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.”

ED NOTE: Doubt this happened but it's a nice story.

MEOW

by Gregory Hays

Tigger was my wife’s cat, found as a stray and passed on to her by a cousin when he was about a year and a half old. He lived with her in Boston, before we met, when she was working at a big law firm. On Sunday nights she would order in from an Italian restaurant and they would sit on the sofa and watch The Sopranos together.

When my wife moved down to Virginia Tigger came with her, accommodating himself (after some initial friction) to my dog. In his youth he had had glorious golden fur, which became stringy and oily as he aged, owing in part to a thyroid condition. In his last years he suffered from dementia, sundowning as humans do. We grew used to finding him sitting in the exact center of the kitchen, yowling vigorously at no one. His death was devastating to us both; for days afterward we found ourselves bursting into tears without warning.

Cyrus came to us from a former colleague of my wife’s. He was a black cat and we often tripped over him on the dark linoleum in the kitchen. In his younger days he had been known to creep up on his first owner, the colleague’s future husband, and drop on him suddenly from above, like a feline version of Cato, Inspector Clouseau’s manservant. When someone in the family developed an allergy, we agreed to adopt Cyrus; my wife flew down with him from Boston to Richmond, an experience that terrified him. Before our daughter was born I took a lot of afternoon naps, and Cyrus used to join me on the bed, sleeping alongside me with his paw placed gently over my wrist.

His successor, Darwin, was passed on to us by a friend who was moving to New Orleans after a divorce. She had inherited him from her father, who had adopted him from a shelter. There he had been known as Ty and was regarded by the staff as “standoffish” (a claim we found hard to believe). Like Tigger he was an orange cat. Swaggering and imperious when we first knew him, he became increasingly stiff and frail in his old age. But he retained his love of chicken, and of sitting in cardboard boxes, and still enjoyed eating the dog’s food, in front of the dog, with his three remaining teeth. He died the summer before last while we were in New England; our cat-sitter arrived one morning and found him lying dead in a sunbeam, having suffered a stroke or heart attack overnight.

These creatures lived with us for years—in Tigger’s case, virtually his entire life. All were indoor cats, so their activities were on full view. Yet their inner lives remain an enigma to us. We loved them, but we do not know whether they loved us in the same way, or even liked us. We do not know how they conceived of us. As caregivers and protectors? As mobile can openers? As larger, less competent cats? We do not know what their thoughts were like at all.

Such ignorance is unsettling. It is more comforting to imagine that cats are pretty much like us: smaller, furrier humans. Vet techs are insistent that our cats regard us as parents. (“We're going to give Mom some medication for you.”) Doting owners refer to their cats as “fur babies.” There is a long history of representing cats as quasi people. An Egyptian papyrus from the second millennium depicts a cat with a shepherd’s staff herding geese. Medieval manuscripts show cats playing musical instruments. The success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats suggests an apparently boundless appetite for cats singing show tunes about their expertise in human professions (burglary, conjuring, piracy). There is a large market for cozy mystery novels with cat detectives.

Yet when the boundaries are blurred too far, we become uneasy. Stage productions of Cats merely gesture at felinity, with leotards, fur, and garish makeup. The result is campy, not frightening, except perhaps to small children. The 2019 film of the musical tried to make its all-star cast more catlike, using computer-generated imagery. The process stranded the actors in an uncanny valley, trapped between two species like the monstrous hybrids of Dr. Moreau. Audiences were creeped out and the movie flopped. We want to believe that cats are like us; we are uncomfortably aware that they are not. 

(New York Review of Books)

ON JUNE 10, 1944, AT CROSLEY FIELD, JOE NUXHALL, at 15 years, 10 months and 11 days, becomes the youngest player in major league history when he pitches two-thirds of an inning for the Cincinnati Reds in an 18 – 0 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals. After being called in the ninth inning into a 13-0 rout, he manages to give up 5 walks and 2 hits before Bill McKechnie takes him out. The Cards tie a league record by stranding 18 runners in the most lopsided shutout win in the National League in 10 years. The loser at the end of the day is Bill Lohrman.

Nuxhall will stay in the Reds organization for over sixty years, becoming best known as the voice for the team’s radio broadcasts.

GIANTS’ BRANDON CRAWFORD TO BROTHER-IN-LAW GERRIT COLE: ‘I have a better ERA’

by Ron Kroichick

Shortly after he pitched in a major-league game for the first time in his career, San Francisco Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford was asked if this might lead to a conversation with his brother-in-law, New York Yankees pitcher Gerrit Cole.

“I have a better ERA,” Crawford said matter-of-factly.

He’s not wrong.

Cole has 137 wins and 2,020 strikeouts in his career, but he can’t match Crawford’s 0.00 ERA. That will serve as a playful point of pride for Crawford, who threw a scoreless ninth inning Sunday to punctuate his team’s 13-3 win over the Cubs at Oracle Park.

The crowd of 36,842 loudly savored every moment of Crawford’s unexpected, 20-pitch outing. He wobbled early — throwing six consecutive balls while walking one batter and allowing a bloop single — before he settled down and retired Christopher Morel (fielder’s choice grounder), Ian Happ (flyball) and Trey Mancini (foul popup).

Thus did Crawford — a four-time Gold Glove winner, three-time All-Star and two-time World Series champion — achieve one of his career goals. He long ago pitched regularly at Foothill High in Pleasanton, then made three appearances on the mound at UCLA.

Before Sunday, he had appeared in 1,600 major-league games but had played exactly one defensive position. He’s a shortstop, plain and simple, but like many position players he daydreamed about stepping atop the mound in the big leagues.

Crawford, 36, good-naturedly shared his ambitions with manager Gabe Kapler the past three-plus years, without seriously lobbying. Then, in the top of the eighth Sunday, Kapler asked Crawford if he would take the ninth. He agreed, then hurriedly threw five or six warm-up pitches in the batting cage.

“I always give pitchers a hard time about it not being that hard,” Crawford said. “I think I proved today that it’s not. They probably don’t love that I have a zero ERA, because I’ll continue to give them a hard time about it.”

This wasn’t the typical position-player-on-the-mound outing, with lobbed pitches. Crawford threw the ball competitively, routinely hitting the high 80s with his fastball and once reaching 90 mph.

Giants catcher Blake Sabol said Crawford shook him off a few times, to throw a slider and sinker; Sabol told NBC Sports Bay Area, “I’m going, ‘OK, so I guess we’re mixing right now.’ I kind of embraced it after that.”

When Crawford returned to his locker after a brief postgame workout, he found the game ball and a laminated copy of the lineup card resting on his chair. Nearby, rookie Casey Schmitt — who was a standout closer at San Diego State — smiled widely when asked about his teammate’s outing.

“He was dirty,” Schmitt said. “That was super cool to see.”

(sfchronicle.com)

FIFTH MARINE DIVISION EN ROUTE TO IWO JIMA, February 1945

A CAPITALIST SOCIETY requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.

Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is a machine. “Speed is at the bottom of it all,”’ as Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), “the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture indefinitely: the moment made eternal.”

Faced with the awesome spread and alienness of a newly settled continent, people wielded cameras as a way of taking possession of the places they visited. Kodak put signs at the entrances of many towns listing what to photograph. Signs marked the places in national parks where visitors should stand with their cameras.

— Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

We all make habitual movements that catch us off guard when the power goes off. We’ll be going about with flashlights and candles, yet at times we’ll have a brain hiccup. We’ll forget there’s no power, and find ourselves flipping up light switches and instantly feeling silly when no light comes on. We’ve flipped these switches so many thousands of times that we do it with muscle memory, zero thinking involved. 

We always assume it will only be a few hours or days when the power is back on. The idea of power being off for a month or two never enters our minds or is accepted as a valid possibility. Electricity is something we are now physically addicted to. Electricity is an extension of our bodies and minds, giving some of us a lot of leverage on the world. Rock n roll bands use electricity to churn up a real load of audio dopamine in the audiences.

HILLARY & DONALD

by Doug Holland

It's an understatement to state that I've never been a fan of Bill or Hillary Clinton. They made it their mission to steer the Democratic Party and the American middle (same thing) to the right, and in this they were quite successful, to the detriment of the party and the country.

In 2017, Hillary founded a PAC called Onward Together, which, according to Wikipedia, raises funds "for progressive political groups including: Swing Left, Indivisible, Color of Change, Emerge America, and Run for Something." In my 60-some years on the left, I've never heard of any of these groups, but if a Clinton is involved, that's a guarantee that none of them are at all "progressive."

Someone somewhere in the hierarchy of her PAC's staff apparently has access to CGI that can approximate a sense of humor, though. Onward Together is now marketing a "But her emails" hat ($32), and that made me smile.

It did not, however, make me want to spend $32 + shipping for a damned hat, and I do not believe that Hillary Clinton has ever worn the hat. There's a picture of her wearing it, but it's gotta be Photoshopped.

* * *

As for Hillary's one-time friend, Donald Trump, his indictment brings no great joy. It's deeply frustrating that Trump — the man of 10,000 crimes and 1,000 treasons — now faces prosecution for the most trivial of his myriad misdeeds.

"It is hard to overstate the gravity of the criminal indictment issued against Donald Trump," says the New York Times in a scolding editorial, but it's overstated unanimously across all mass media. A multi-charge indictment that boils down to the mishandling and misappropriation of classified documents — well, whoop-de-doo.

The federal government classifies huge volumes of documents, claiming "national security" or whatnot — another library's worth of documents no-one will ever see, every day. Charging Trump over his comical mishandling of classified materials is piffle, like going after Al Capone for failure to file 1040s on his earnings as a crime kingpin.

A government of the people, for the people, by the people, doesn't need to keep secrets from the people.

There might be a very few exceptional exceptions, but nowhere near enough in all of US history to fill those boxes we've seen in the photos — boxes stacked atop boxes stacked atop boxes, in what's apparently a carpeted bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.

Every trust we give the government is immediately or eventually betrayed, so allowing federal officials to keep huge swaths of secrets from Americans is idiocy. Bearing in mind the USA's longstanding penchant for lies and cover-ups and crimes against humanity, the world would be a better place if 99.9% of state secrets were published unedited on Reddit.

Until his receives his inevitable "heal-the-nation" pardon, Trump must bear the anguish of headlines and editorials calling him a mishandler of classified documents? Give me a polite synonym for shitfuck.

It would be far more fair to see Trump mocked or prosecuted as the man who installed horrendously evil judges all across America (one is presiding over Trump's case); who never divested his financial holdings, and during his term in office steered big bucks to his hotels; who ran his entire administration via cronyism, nepotism, and patronage; who abused his Presidential pardon powers to protect his buddies; who politicized the Justice Department and sabotaged the Post Office; who used his Presidency to bully-pulpit bullshit daily for four years; who sat on his ass while the Coronavirus killed its first 400,000 Americans; who tried to strong-arm Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky into producing faked evidence against Joe Biden; who obstructed and interfered in numerous investigations; who had the DHS separate children from their parents at the border; who did his damnedest to subvert the 2020 Presidential election, before and then after Election Day. And I'm probably forgetting lots of his high crimes and misdemeanors, because I wrote this paragraph in in about five minutes, with very little silence between keystrokes.

But no, Trump gets scolded for sneaking a bunch of souvenir "secret" documents to Florida.

(Hey, stop by itsdougholland.com and tell me I'm full of crap.)

I WOULDN'T RECOMMEND fighting anymore because it's a tough business and it's a million to one shot if you make it. When you're playing football you got twenty six guys on your side, when you're playing baseball you got twenty-whatever guys on your side, basketball you got a gang of guys on your side. When you're in the ring you're all alone, baby, and there's a guy throwing punches at you.

— Rocky Graziano

JUSTICE IS HARDLY BLIND IN THE FEDERAL CASE GOING AGAINST DONALD TRUMP

by Michael Goodwin

The indictment of Donald Trump is a detailed recounting of his decisions to keep classified documents and to involve others in his alleged refusal to come clean about everything he had. 

Based on a grand jury search warrant, federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago and the evidence they gathered was bolstered with FBI interviews of Trump aides, employees and even his lawyers. 

Weaving in seized texts and emails from key moments, prosecutors have created a compelling picture of their case, with Trump’s personality and habits of deception coming through loud and clear in the 49-page charging document. 

However, I believe that if federal prosecutors had empaneled a grand jury and obtained a search warrant for Joe Biden’s properties and if FBI agents had put his aides, employees and lawyers under oath, scoured their phones and emails and confronted them with evidence to get them to talk, agents would have found that Biden knowingly kept classified documents for many years in his homes and offices, including in the four years between his being vice president and president. 

Honest agents unencumbered by any political bias of their own or their bosses’ might also have discovered that Hunter Biden and other family members and associates had access to the supposedly secret documents and possibly used them in drawing up their lucrative business schemes with foreign officials and businesses.

Instead, a special counsel assigned to the case appears to be about as vigorous as Joe. 

I also believe that had the Department of Justice empaneled a grand jury and executed a search warrant on Hillary Clinton’s home and offices in 2013 or 2014 and seized her private computer server, phones and electronic devices, along with the devices of her aides and interviewed her lawyers under oath, FBI agents would have found many thousands of unsecured critical documents that were still in her possession long after she left the Department of State. 

As it was, more than 2,000 documents deemed to be classified, top secret or confidential were recovered from her devices in 2015 and 2016, despite the fact that Clinton deleted some 33,000 emails she claimed were not work-related. 

Although the FBI oddly accepted her claim, then-Director James Comey said Clinton was wrong to use a private server and there was evidence she and aides were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” 

“None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system,” Comey said before suddenly changing course and adding: “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” 

Comey was out of line in publicly recommending against prosecution, but got away with it — and so did Clinton. 

It probably didn’t hurt either one that Attorney General Loretta Lynch worked in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton and that Bill and Loretta just happened to meet during the probe in an Arizona airport and have a private conversation about, you know, golf and grandkids.  

Tale of three candidates 

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” 

For my money, that neatly sums up the challenge presented by the Trump indictment.

While his case will ultimately rise or fall on its merits, it is indisputable that Trump is being treated far more harshly than either Biden or Clinton were under very similar circumstances. 

All three kept classified documents where and when they shouldn’t have. 

Only one is being prosecuted. 

All three ran for president, but only one had his campaign spied on by the FBI, an action later found to be unwarranted.

And only one was the victim of nonstop FBI leaks to the media alleging collusion with a foreign power that helped undermine his presidency, even though many of the leaks were found to be misinformation. 

Does it matter that the one person subjected to these extreme measures by the government and media is a Republican, while the other two are Democrats? 

Only a fool or a liar would deny the obvious.

Trump haters, some of whom call themselves journalists, justify that sordid history of misconduct against him by calling him every vile epithet under the sun.

He had it coming, they say, and believe he had no right ever to be president.

There is no concern of the unprecedented nature of the charges, only jubilation that he is the first former president in American history to be charged with federal crimes. 

Many fantasize he will die in prison. 

Bias just like old Times 

The New York Times, which never fails to reveal its agenda, moaned that the Miami judge assigned to the case was appointed by Trump and “has shown him favor.” 

The assumption seems to be that a Biden appointee would be more fair. 

Really? 

One does not have to think Trump is an angel, or even innocent in the current case, to believe there is something very rotten in Washington.

Two standards of justice, open and notorious, are doing more harm to American democracy than Trump could do in two lifetimes. 

The decline of trust in government, including the once-hallowed FBI, mostly reflects actions taken by Democrats in recent years to gain or keep power. 

As special prosecutor John Durham recently concluded, there was no justification for the FBI to open a case against Trump’s 2016 campaign, even as it inexplicably delayed or ignored potential avenues of investigation against Clinton’s family foundation. 

And don’t forget that the phony Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, helped fuel the FBI’s zeal to nail Trump. 

Think what that means: The Justice Department, with the knowledge of the Democratic White House, meddled in a presidential election with the aim of electing the Democrat and defeating — and perhaps prosecuting — the Republican. 

And here we go again. 

The federal case against Trump now, even if it meets the standard of the law, cannot be divorced from the recent history of election meddling, given that he is the leading GOP candidate against Biden. 

In five years, perhaps a future Durham will look back on these events and write another report chronicling how the party in power again weaponized law enforcement to control an election. 

In a brief statement defending the 37 charges against Trump, special counsel Jack Smith insisted there was nothing unusual about the case, saying, “We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everybody.” 

Please, save it for civics class. 

In reality, Biden appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed Smith. 

Whether he likes it or not, the buck stops on Biden’s desk, especially because Biden let it be known more than a year ago he wanted Trump prosecuted. 

Does anyone really believe it’s just a coincidence that Smith, under Garland’s guidance, has delivered what the boss wanted? 

Meanwhile, Biden has a lot of dirty laundry himself, but Garland is protecting him.

Consider the evidence. 

The Hunter Biden probe, now in its fifth year, reeks of favoritism, a charge leveled against it by IRS and FBI whistleblowers. 

The evidence of various crimes has been public for years, and Joe’s connection is provable. 

Nearly three years ago, he was identified as the “big guy” scheduled to get a secret 10% cut in a multimillion-dollar family deal with Chinese communists. 

Those charges, based on The Post’s stories about the contents of Hunter’s abandoned laptop, were censored by Big Tech at the direction of the FBI. 

The Ukraine $torm 

Then there’s the newest dimension to Joe’s likely misconduct — the discovery that the FBI has been sitting on a charge since 2017, and renewed at least twice since by an informant, that he accepted a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian businessman.

Reports say Hunter also got $5 million in the same deal, and there are suggestions the money came from the head of Burisma, the corrupt energy company that hired Hunter for its board of directors and paid him millions while Joe was Obama’s point man for Ukraine. 

Where’s the grand jury on that case? 

Where are the subpoenas for Biden’s bank records and a house raid searching for evidence? 

Where is the media firestorm?

Nowhere, that’s where, because Garland and the FBI have been sitting on the Biden bribe allegation without either confirming it or dismissing it. 

We know the allegation exists only because a tipster told congressional Republicans, who demanded to see the FBI report of the informant’s story. 

The possibility of Joe Biden’s guilt has many implications, including the specter that Congress impeached the wrong man in 2019. 

House Democrats impeached Trump over a phone call with the president of Ukraine, in which Trump asked for help investigating whether the Bidens engaged in corrupt actions there when Joe was vice president. 

It was an unfair, purely partisan impeachment under any circumstances, but even more so if Biden really was guilty of corruption. 

Had that been discovered then, Trump would have been re-elected and Biden would be the one facing criminal charges.

(New York Post)

REST IN PEACE: HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST TED KACZYNSKI DEAD AT 81

by Andrew Anglin

American philosopher, political activist, and folk hero Ted Kaczynski was found dead in his prison cell on Saturday. He was 81.

Kaczynski, who is commonly known to Americans as “Uncle Ted,” is believed by many to be one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, and one of the most fundamentally American philosophers. He had been unjustly imprisoned since 1996, when he was arrested for various activist activities.

Uncle Ted was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942, to Polish parents. His father was a sausage maker. In the fifth grade, Uncle Ted tested 167 on an IQ test. This means he was smarter than 99.9985889129% of people on the earth. That is to say: he was what is known as a “super genius” or a “mega mind.”

Fun Fact: Uncle Ted was more than three times more intelligent than the second most intelligent Polish person.

Uncle Ted had a troubled childhood, being bullied by moronic peasants, and having trouble fitting in with such trash. He was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 15, and began studying at the school at 16.

During his time at Harvard, he was subjected to a brutal behavioral study that turned out to be part of the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program. They exploited his social insecurities in their testing of how to break down a human mind. At one point, he was told to write down all of his hopes and dreams in an essay, and then random people mocked and insulted him based on these hopes and dreams. Henry Murray, the CIA operative who conducted the study, said that the verbal attacks were meant to be “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive.”

Ted was recorded while being abused in this manner, and then the footage of his reaction was played back to him repeatedly. These sessions of abuse would take place weekly for 3 years, with our good Uncle spending more than 200 hours involved in the study.

What the CIA pigs did not realize was that it was Uncle Ted who was doing the studying. He was studying the deranged and sadistic psychology of the domesticated and over-socialized human being. Later on in life, university professors would be a prime target of his political activism, as he well understood the kind of scum that inhabits these hives of villainy.

After graduating from Harvard, Uncle Ted earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in the field of mathematics at the University of Michigan. He specialized in complex analysis, specifically geometric function theory. Ted’s 1967 dissertation “Boundary Functions” won the Sumner B. Myers Prize for Michigan’s best mathematics dissertation of the year. His doctoral advisor, Allen Shields, hailed it as “the best I have ever directed,” while Maxwell Reade, a member of the dissertation committee, said, “I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it.”

More than 10 or 12 men would understand his later work. His magnum opus, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” is one of the most widely read and cited works of American philosophy. However, the understandings he reached, and the conclusions he drew in that text, would only be possible after he’d exited the technological system.

In 1969, he resigned from his position as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He briefly lived with his parents before moving to Montana to live a simple life in a cabin in the woods. He would ride his bike into town and visit the local library, where he would read classic literature in their original languages. The 1990 census describes Ted’s cabin as containing a bed, two chairs, and a lot of books.

He was a big reader of political philosophy, and would ultimately identify with the writings of French Christian-Anarchist philosopher Jacques Ellul. Ted’s brother David said that Ellul’s “The Technological Society” was like Ted’s “Bible.” In a 1998 interview, Ted said of the book, which was titled “La Technique” in the original French: “When I read the book for the first time, I was delighted, because I thought, ‘Here is someone who is saying what I have already been thinking’.”

Ted’s own great work was in large part a summary of Ellul’s work. However, having read both, I can say that Ted’s work is much better, and not simply because it is more accessible. There are also various added insights that Ted offers that Ellul missed, including various details about the botched nature of modern human psychology and interpersonal relationships.

Ted was upset about the endless expansion of the meaningless society of the Western world, and in 1978, began engaging in political activism. Contrary to popular belief, only three people died as a result of his activist activities. He has never shown any kind of feelings over the deaths, but it should be known that the purpose was not actually to kill people, but rather to build up hype for his book, which would be published in the Washington Post on September 19, 1995.

“Industrial Society and Its Future” was one of the books most influential on my personal development. I read it at the age of 24. It led me to read Ellul’s work, which triggered a thought process which would ultimately lead me to the conclusions I came to in my later 20s. As the long time reader is aware, those conclusions have remained more or less completely static since I began publishing the Daily Stormer ten years ago.

It would be improper to try to summarize Ted’s book and its effects on me here. It is a book about the way technological development has affected human and natural systems. It contains a level of insight into the state of modern man that is really beyond comparison, save for my own work (I say that humbly, and with full credit to Ted). It gave me a framework for viewing the world we live in that has not changed.

It has been a while since I read through the document in full, so I plan to do so in the near future, and will write another series of articles about it. The full text is available here. I highly recommend it.

What has changed most about me since I began this website is that I’ve become much more Christian in orientation. In some ways, Christianity is a spectrum, and the closer we come to the truth, the closer we come to Jesus Christ. It took me a long time to really internalize this fact.

Obviously, what I’ve written above is slightly tongue-in-cheek in places. I certainly do not agree with mail bombing random people, and do not believe this was legitimate political activism. What I believe is that Ted was a genius who was very damaged by society. I believe that though he sought the truth, and found a lot of it, he never came to the full truth of Jesus Christ, and therefore he took actions based on an incorrect morality.

I do not believe in the kind of primitivism that Ted promoted, simply because I do not believe it is possible. I went through a phase of believing in it, but ultimately lost faith in the basic premise. This technology exists, and there is no way to remove it, even if that were desirable. For the most part, it is desirable. If I could push a button and take the world back to a static pre-industrial world, I would certainly do so. But it simply does not make sense in practical terms. Even if civilization were to totally collapse, the seeds of technological civilization would not be fully destroyed. What’s more, even if all of this was destroyed, white people would just invent it all again, and the process would begin again.

That having been said, there is nothing in Ted’s book that is wrong. It’s all very true. However, just as Ted did not understand Christ, he did not understand the Jewish problem, and the role that Jews have played in the direction of technological society. Jews are entirely urban creatures, and they never could have risen to their current level of power without technological society. But just so, if it were not for the Jews, technological society could and would have developed in an entirely different direction. If it were not for the Jews, development over the last 200 years would have been guided by Christian principles, and the development of technology would have been limited by the natural law found in Christian philosophy.

Without the light of Christ, there is no way to come to the whole truth. If Ted had been a Christian, he would have worked to redirect society, instead of living in a cabin and sending people bombs. If he’d been a priest leading a religious revival in America, he could have completely changed the world. In the 1970s, America had a hope that no longer exists.

Ted was a gentle soul who was deeply harmed by this society, in particular by the educational institutions, which are anti-intelligence. Though I am being very honest about my love of his book, I think his life should be looked at as a tragedy. This was a man with virtually limitless potential, given to him by God, and that potential ultimately amounted to very little.

We are all broken without God. Ted was a genius, and without God, he forfeited what could have been a wonderful life. This is true of all of us: it is only with Jesus Christ that we can live the lives that God intended for us to live. Each of us has two paths in front of us – the life that God planned when he created us, and the abyss of the material world.

It should be noted: although Ted’s brother said that “Technological Society” was Ted’s Bible, he owned a King James Bible.

Among the verses he highlighted in the Bible were the 23rd Psalm.

We will never know how close he came.

Ted’s death should be a time for all of us to reflect. His understanding of the workings of this society was incredible. He understood on the deepest level how broken humans are. I will say again: I attribute much of my own understanding to Ted, and the path he led me on. None of us could be where we are without those who came before us, as that is the way knowledge works. But he did not know why we are so broken, and therefore, he did not know how to fix us.

I hope that sometime during his imprisonment, Ted Kaczynski made peace with God.

I pray that he will rest in peace.

REQUIEM FOR OUR SPECIES

The effects of the climate crisis intrude with increasing regularity into our lives and yet we do not act. We are as paralyzed as past civilizations were when facing catastrophic destruction.

by Chris Hedges

Princeton, N.J. — As I write this, the sun is a hazy reddish orange orb. The sky is an inky yellowish gray. The air has an acrid stench and leaves a faint metallic taste in my mouth. After 20 minutes outside, my head starts to ache, my nose burns, my eyes itch and my breathing becomes more labored. Streets are deserted. The ubiquitous lawn service companies with their machine mowers and whining gas-powered leaf blowers have disappeared, along with pedestrians, cyclists and joggers. Those who walk their dog go out briefly and then scamper back inside. N95 masks, as in the early days of the pandemic, are sold out, along with air purifiers. The international airports at Newark and Philadelphia have delayed or canceled flights.

I feel as if I am in a ghost town. Windows shut. Air conditioners on full blast. The Air Quality Index (AQI) is checked and rechecked. We are hovering around 300. The most polluted cities in the world have half that rate. Dubai (168). Delhi (164). Anything above 300 is classified as hazardous.

When will the hundreds of forest fires burning north of us in Canada — fires that have already consumed 10.9 million acres and driven 120,000 people from their homes — be extinguished? What does this portend? The wildfire season is only beginning. When will the air clear? A few days? A few weeks? 

What do you tell a terminal patient seeking relief? Yes, this period of distress may pass, but it’s not over. It will get worse. There will be more highs and lows and then mostly lows, and then death. But no one wants to look that far ahead. We live moment to moment, illusion to illusion. And when the skies clear we pretend that normality will return. Except it won’t. Climate science is unequivocal. It has been for decades. The projections and graphs, the warming of the oceans and the atmosphere, the melting of polar ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, droughts and wildfires and monster hurricanes are already bearing down with a terrible and mounting fury on our species, and most other species, because of the hubris and folly of the human race. 

The worse it gets the more we retreat into fantasy. The law will solve it. The market will solve it. Technology will solve it. We will adapt. Or, for those who find solace in denial of a reality-based belief system, the climate crisis does not exist. The earth has always been like this. And besides, Jesus will save us. Those who warn of the looming mass extinction are dismissed as hysterics, Cassandras, pessimists. It can’t be that catastrophic.

At the inception of every war I covered, most people were unable to cope with the nightmare that was about to engulf them. Signs of disintegration surrounded them. Shootings. Kidnappings. The bifurcation of polarized extremes into antagonistic armed groups or militias. Hate speech. Political paralysis. Apocalyptic rhetoric. The breakdown of social services. Food shortages. Circumscribed daily existence. But the fragility of society is too emotionally fraught for most of us to accept. We endow the institutions and structures around us with an eternal permanence.

“Things whose existence is not morally comprehensible cannot exist,” Primo Levi, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, observed. 

I would return at night to Pristina in Kosovo after having been stopped by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebels a few miles outside the capital. But when I described my experiences to my Kosovar Albanian friends — highly educated and multilingual — they dismissed them. “Those are Serbs dressed up like rebels to justify Serb repression,” they answered. They did not grasp they were at war until Serb paramilitary forces rounded them up at gunpoint, herded them into boxcars and shipped them off to Macedonia.

Complex civilizations eventually destroy themselves. Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments,” Jared Diamond in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress,” detail the familiar patterns that lead to catastrophic collapse. We are no different, although this time we will all go down together. The entire planet. Those in the Global South who are least responsible for the climate emergency, will suffer first. They are already fighting existential battles to survive. Our turn will come. We in the Global North may hold out for a bit longer, but only a bit. The billionaire class is preparing its escape. The worse it gets, the stronger will be our temptation to deny the reality facing us, to lash out at climate refugees, which is already happening in Europe and along our border with Mexico, as if they are the problem. 

Wright, who calls industrial society “a suicide machine,” writes: 

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.

We will frantically construct climate fortresses, like the great walled cities at the end of the Bronze Age before its societal collapse, a collapse so severe that not only did these cities fall into ruin, but writing itself in many places disappeared. Maybe a few of our species will linger on for a while. Or maybe rats will take over the planet and evolve into some new life form. One thing is certain. The planet will survive. It has experienced mass extinctions before. This one is unique only because our species engineered it. Intelligent life is not so intelligent. Maybe this is why, with all those billions of planets, we have not discovered an evolved species. Maybe evolution has built within it its own death sentence.

I accept this intellectually. I don’t accept it emotionally any more than I accept my own death. Yes, I know our species is almost certainly doomed — but notice, I say almost. Yes, I know I am mortal. Most of my life has already been lived. But death is hard to digest until the final moments of existence, and even then, many cannot face it. We are composed of the rational and the irrational. In moments of extreme distress we embrace magical thinking. We become the easy prey of con-artists, cult leaders, charlatans and demagogues who tell us what we want to hear. 

Disintegrating societies are susceptible to crisis cults that promise a return to a golden age. The Christian Right has many of the characteristics of a crisis cult. Native Americans, ravaged by genocide, the slaughter of the buffalo herds, the theft of their land and incarcerated in prisoner-of-war camps, clung desperately to the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance promised to drive away the white invaders and resurrect the warriors and buffalo herds. Instead, followers were mowed down by the U.S. Army with Hotchkiss MI875 mountain guns.

We must do everything in our power to halt carbon emissions. We must face the truth that the ruling corporate elites in the industrialized world will never extract us from fossil fuels. Only if these corporatists are overthrown — as proposed by groups such as Extinction Rebellion — and radical and immediate measures are taken to end the consumption of fossil fuel, as well as curtail the animal agriculture industry, will we be able to mitigate some of the worst effects of ecocide. But I don’t see this as likely, especially given the sophisticated forms of control and surveillance the global oligarchs have at their disposal.

The awful truth is that even if we halt all carbon emissions today there is so much warming locked into the oceans deep muddy floor and the atmosphere, that feedback loops will ensure climate catastrophe. Summer Arctic sea ice, which reflects 90 percent of solar radiation that comes into contact with it, will disappear. The Earth’s surface will absorb more radiation. The greenhouse effect will be amplified. Global warming will accelerate, melting the Siberian permafrost and disintegrating the Greenland ice sheet. 

Melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica “has increased fivefold since the 1990s, and now accounts for a quarter of sea-level rise,” according to a recent report funded by NASA and the European Space Agency. Continued sea level rise, the rate of which has doubled over three decades according to the World Meteorological Organization, is inevitable. Tropical rainforests will burn. Boreal forests will move northward. These and other feedback loops are already built into the ecosystem. We cannot stop them. Climate chaos, including elevated temperatures, will last for centuries. 

The hardest existential crisis we face is to at once accept this bleak reality and resist. Resistance cannot be carried out because it will succeed, but because it is a moral imperative, especially for those of us who have children. We may fail, but if we do not fight against the forces that are orchestrating our mass extinction, we become part of the apparatus of death.

(chrishedges.substack.com)

COMANCHE LEADER Quanah Parker with three of his eight wives at his “Star House” in what is now Cache, Oklahoma, 1892. The house had been constructed just a couple of years before. Parker hosted many notables at the house, including influential ranchers Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett and President Theodore Roosevelt.

Quanah Parker had been a military leader of the Kwahadi, or Antelope, band of the Comanche in Texas, including in the Red River War in 1874, but later surrendered to the U.S. Army and moved the tribe to a reservation in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma.

Sadly, the house today is in terrible condition and in danger of being lost forever. It was in bad shape already when a 2015 storm caused severe damage. The National Trust for Historic Preservation estimates it would cost $1 million to restore it.

UKRAINE, SUNDAY, 11TH JUNE

Ukraine's forces have made gains in the southeast, recapturing a trio of frontline villages, according to a defense official and a Ukrainian army brigade.

The developments come a day after President Volodymyr Zelensky gave his clearest indication yet that Ukraine's counteroffensive is underway. Zelensky has provided few details, and CNN cannot independently verify battlefield reports.

The death toll has risen to at least 14 in the collapse of a major dam in southern Ukraine, according to local officials. Receding floodwaters have left a noxious mix of landmines, debris and dead animals.

Odesa is holding a day of mourning after a Russian drone attack killed three people and wounded 26 others Friday, Ukrainian officials said. Ukraine's Air Force says it shot down six more drones in northeastern regions Sunday.