Mendocino County Today: Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023

Brief Clearing | Navarro Quake | 253 Fatality | Pozole Night | PG&E Rates | Crane Photos | Student Fundraiser | Camp Tax | Victoria Gonzalez | Executive Roundtable | AV Poets | Castro Christmas | Odd Air | Everything Important | AI Boring | Yesterday's Catch | Million Monkeys | John Lee Hooker | Twitter Dispersed | Phone Prisoners | Partisan Con | Caffè Trieste | American Values | Burlesque | Gaza | Henry Handout | Billionaire Swirly | 20th Century | Posers

LINGERING SHOWERS will be followed by brief clearing today before an active upper level setup brings more chances of precipitation. Most moisture will be concentrated in northern zones with some interior mountain snow possible Thursday and Friday. Potential for heavier rainfall is possible late this weekend and early next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Wednesday morning I have .15" of rainfall collected & 49F under mostly cloudy skies. I have 3.24" for the month so far. We might see a shower this morning but it looks like the next batch of rain arrives tomorrow midday. This remains a erratic series of rain makers with small amounts of rain involved.

2.1 MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE occurred yesterday a little before noon (11:21am). The epicenter (three kilometers deep) was just off Navarro Ridge Road, between the hamlets of Navarro and Little River. Annemarie Weibel reported feeling it in Albion.

REDWOOD VALLEY WOMAN KILLED AFTER CAR CRASHES DOWN EMBANKMENT IN MENDOCINO COUNTY

The woman was thrown from the car, according to authorities.

by Madison Smalstig

A Redwood Valley driver was killed overnight Monday after her vehicle went off a Mendocino County road and traveled 400 feet down an embankment, authorities said.

Erica Gonzalez, 37, was driving east near the 9500 block of Boonville Road and continued straight as the road curved left. Her red Honda Civic went down a steep grass embankment, struck a tree, hit a dirt-access road and rolled multiple times, according to a report from the California Highway Patrol in Ukiah.

Gonzalez was thrown from the car as it went down just about the steepest incline on the Boonville-Ukiah Road. Medical personnel pronounced her dead at the scene.

CHP does not know the exact time of the crash other than sometime between 3 p.m. Monday and 2 a.m. Tuesday.

(pressdemocrat.com)

POZOLE NIGHT AT AV UNIFIED

Despite very low reservation numbers, we had more than 120 guests enjoy dinner tonight.  Terri and crew served up a storm (and she has a broken foot to boot!).  The yummy Pozole, fresh fruit cup, chips, Fresca, and cookies were followed by a walk through displays in the wood shop, and the high school hallway, and multiple rousing basketball match ups in the gym.   Coaches Espinoza and Rhoades and our Panther Players were in the house rocking it.  We even had a table of graduates from 2019 join us. Good stuff!

Thank you to the staff who participated during the dinner event, and forgive me if I forget anyone:  Ali, Matt, Arthur, Casey, Kira, Kim, John, Wynne, and Citlalli, who joined us from elementary.  Good to see families out celebrating their kids' work and sitting down to visit over a meal with staff.

I appreciate Martin and Martha on the custodial staff for working to get us ready, Dennis and Guy in maintenance for the tables, and the certificated staff for setting everything up.  To Mel, Letty, and Vicky, thank you for sharing the kitchen.

One of the pics was my drive home showing a view of the moon. If you haven't seen that tonight, go take a look!

REDWOOD CLASSIC STARTS WEDNESDAY.  NO GATE FEE. COME WATCH. GOOD FUN!

ELAC dinner is in the library on Thursday at 5:00.

COME OUT AND JOIN US.

Take care,

Louise Simson
Superintendent
707-684-1017

PG&E RATE HIKES

Editor: 

So, PG&E will be bestowing upon us a 12.8% increase on our monthly bill. They say it’s to underground lines, among other things. My neighborhood has underground lines. Why do we have to pay for that? Last winter we all paid four times our usual winter rates. I cannot imagine what we’ll be paying this year. Why are consumers paying for PG&E’s lack of attention and wildfire preparedness? I’ve asked for heavy, warm blankets for Christmas since I won’t be turning on the heat.

Deb McGauley

Santa Rosa

WHO KILLED LES CRANE?

I am a film producer making a film about a man named Les Crane. Les was my good friend who was murdered in 2005 who lived in Laytonville. Les owned two dispensaries and employed dozens of people from 2003-2005. I am looking for anyone who had video or photos they could share of Les Crane. If you possess, or know someone who does, please let me know: whokilledlescrane.com

THE LATE SUPERVISOR DAVID COLFAX in 2009 expounding on the possibility of applying the bed tax to campgrounds. (A subsequent board of Supervisors, after Colfax had left the Board, put the question of including campgrounds in the bed tax fold on the ballot where it was approved, and designated for fire/emergency services):

“We’re doing a lousy job in one area, so we have to do a lousier job in another. We have no housing for the poor, so we can't do anything, so we have fees for camping. … Somebody said crap moves downhill. The Lodging Association says you can't tax our esteemed tourists who come through – the valued tourists. You can't increase their tax by 1% for parity with adjoining counties. The word was out that there was no support for increasing the bed tax. But by whom? And we [the Board of Supervisors] immediately folded, or those who bring things forward folded. They don't want it. [The bed tax] taxes outsiders, not Mendocino people. It pays for police protection, emergency services, fire protection and for when we scrape them up off the highway. The cost is enormous and there’s no reimbursement. Why did we abandon the 1% [bed tax] increase? A few bucks for people staying in high end places in Mendocino? A $400 bill would go up $4 for your night of fun and relaxation in Mendocino. $404! No sirree! I will not come to Mendocino again! So they reduce it to $400! That's a compelling argument – if you don't pay attention to common sense and numbers.

“Did the estimates take into account the cost of administration? Staff work? Will the money come in? We had two big high end destinations go bankrupt on us without paying the bed tax over a long period of time. We know where they are. They had big buildings. We asked the manager, why do you owe us, how much was it? $250k? It's obscene that we could not get them to pay in a timely fashion so we didn't get that money! In the other case we had to use high cost staff time to get part of the money back. If we can't go after the high class destinations in the county and properly collect the [bed tax], how in the devil will we get the little campground operator, the trailer park, to take care of the campers? I'll tell you. We'll have to hire somebody and we'll quickly use up whatever funding is generated because we went to the bottom of the food chain, the campers. If we'd been more effective on the high end places, more efficient…

“I will not support anything that goes after camping until we address the housing problem in Mendocino more effectively and until we increase the [bed tax] to get within spitting distance of every other county around us with perhaps one exception. We have the lowest generally. It needs to be increased. I will not support the camping option. It’s inappropriate that we're discussing this. It's disgusting.”

(Mark Scaramella)

VICTORIA JOYCE ARNOLD GONZALEZ was born March 25, 1953, in Lakeport, CA. She was a descendant of Scotts Valley, Hopland, Redwood Valley and Laytonville tribes. Joyce passed away surrounded by family and friends on November 17, 2023. She was a graduate of Stewart Indian High School and a lifelong resident of Mendocino County. 

Joyce was proud of her basketmaking and a strong believer in her Pomo cultural ways. She enjoyed being with family and friends, camping and spending time at the casino. She will be remembered for her strength, having love for her family and no being afraid to do the right thing. 

Joyce lived in Redwood Valley with her lifelong partner Ruben Peridia where she raised her sons Jesse (Dodies), Miguel Gonzalez and Joseph Peridia. She is also survived by her mother Merlene Ray Besoni, sister Mary Jane Arnold, grandchildren Merlene, Jesse III, Isaac and Victor Gonzalez, Dakota Perez, Miguel Jr, Caprice, Emonie, Kalise Rabano and Arianna Peridia along with numerous nieces, nephews and relatives. She was preceded in death by her dad Walter Arnold, brothers Victor, Bill (William), Ronnie, Raymond and Dewayne Arnold, sisters Louella (Arnold) Elliott and Donna Mae Myers, grandmothers Bessie Augustine Ray and Hazel Elliott and grandfathers Louis Arnold and Gene Ray. 

JUDY LEACH, Administrator at Adventist Health Mendocino Coast, recently participated in the Becker's Healthcare Executive Roundtable Panel presentation, where she addressed the crucial topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion in healthcare systems. Her involvement in this prestigious event showcases her commitment to shaping the future of healthcare and advocating for marginalized communities. Furthermore, Judy's extensive experience in the healthcare industry positions her as a key contributor to the discussions surrounding rural healthcare and the importance of diversity and inclusion.

Judy eagerly shared her excitement about attending the Beckers Health Care 11th Annual CEO and CFO Roundtable. This exclusive event allowed her to collaborate with CEOs, CFOs, and executives from top hospitals and health systems. Together, they tackled pressing issues in healthcare, engaging in insightful conversations and debates to devise the best strategies for the future of the industry.

One of the reasons why Judy was enthusiastic about this event is due to its emphasis on discussions surrounding rural healthcare and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Recognizing the unique challenges faced by rural communities, Judy was able to contribute her expertise and insights to address these issues effectively. As a member of the diversity council at Adventist Health, she is wholeheartedly committed to championing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in healthcare organizations of all sizes.

Judy was honored with the opportunity to serve as a panelist during the "Bold DEI Initiatives for the Next Two Years: Healthcare Executive Action Plan" conversation. This panel took place on Wednesday, November 15, and Judy's involvement underscores her dedication to ensuring that diversity, equity, and inclusion remain at the forefront of healthcare entities.

Her contributions to the discussions surrounding rural healthcare and DEI initiatives were invaluable. With her experience and passion, she is poised to make a significant impact on the future of healthcare, and her engagement with fellow healthcare professionals at the event undoubtedly helped foster meaningful connections and collaborations.

AV POETRY CLUB

The short lived and now defunct AV Poetry Club published a book of about sixty nine poems a few years ago. The poems ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime as one might imagine. The poets themselves wished to remain anonymous for reasons I can't really explain but I would like to share some of the included bios here which rivaled the poems in many ways.

Jerry "Jumper Cable" Kahn: Jerry has intermittently been found grazing around the Anderson Valley for the past 9 years. He first arrived in town with a flat tire and a pension for apples and quickly fell in love. In it for the cheap thrills, he can often be found subverting the daily caffeine drip with a quick hookup to 500 cranking amps with a couple of over-sized alligator clips.

Leon Ardo: "Leon Ardo" isn't my real name but the constraints of the witness protection program I'm enrolled in require this subterfuge. I write poems to pass the time while waiting for the criminals I ratted out to grow old and hopefully forgetful. I feel safe and protected here in Anderson Valley surrounded by its natural beauty, aging hippies, tree hugging loggers and abundant tasting rooms. Hi mom!

Perthy Whazeau: Anderson Valley? Never heard of it. Oh wait. I was there once selling Roundup Weed Killer door to door. Those truculent, superannuated hippies were not amused. I managed to get out with my ears still attached, though. Tree huggers my ass.

J.L.Archer: Born San Francisco 1944. Raised on a steelhead/salmon creek in Marin County now full of steel culverts & concrete. He credits Ginsberg, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Wilfred Owen, Frost, Gretrudde Stein, Artaud, Whalen. Lorca, Charles Olsen, Bukowski, Pound, Williams, T.S.Eliot & the US Marine Corps for education. Gardening 51 years in Mendocino County.

Salty Doggerel: The Poetry Club only let Salty Doggerel submit one poem to this collection because they think he's a scurvy dog- son-of-a-gun-shiver-me-timbers-kind-of-poop-decking swabbie. But he and his tomcat "Rusty Scupper" will have the last laugh as soon as their new CD release "Whaling songs and some other shit" goes platinum. Meanwhile he's playing in Boonville's popular rock band "Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash" Stay tuned and turned on--Poetry People!!!

Sudzy Mozart: I'm the old lady who swallowed a fly tape to catch the fly (practical?!) Some people tell me it sounds like I have a frog in my throat. My reply is that I think they mean horse, and that they have the wrong old lady--she died of course. I, however, am perfectly alive and well. Bad a

I Like Pizza: I like pizza you like pizza I am bad at poems kiss me 

— Anon-o-mouse

AVA AWARENESS

Dear Editor,

Ever since Covid in my opinion things are weird cause some things that were have surfaced. To me it’s as though those who are deprived became desperate and others declare themselves isolated or invisible. As those recluse to apposing extremes yet not one mention of avenues blocked or being impossible to find a way out. 

Perhaps it’s different in Anderson Valley. But here in Willits or Fort Bragg it’s either territorial ignorance to score a bride or people just give up.

Sincerely yours, 

Greg Crawford 

Fort Bragg

PS. Have you had the time to notice a odd air of difference at night not like before? Maybe it’s me of being awakened so many times through the night with (bizzy) mindless chatter of little inspiration mind numbing threads cannot shut off. 

Well, happy holidays Editor. My only respite is a walk to clear my conscience weighing me down. 

BOB ABELES: This AI stuff bores me to death. In its present state AI is far from anything approaching intelligence. It’s a transform, a system of convolutions, similar to the Fourier Transform or the Discrete Cosine Transform. In the case of those better known transforms, information is transformed between the spectral and the temporal domains, yielding such useful things as MP3 and MPEG codecs that digitize audio and video. In the case of DALL-E, it transforms its training data into a set of weights that can be loaded into a neural network. All it can do is play back the training data in various combinations, transforming it from the stored weights back into a digitized image. It’s a party trick, it’s not intelligence.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, November 28, 2023

BENJAMIN KEATOR, Willits. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, suspended license, county parole violation.

ANGEL LOPEZ-GARCIA, Kelseyville/Ukiah. DUI.

MICHAEL MCGEE, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

DESIREE ST.PIERRE, Willits. Disobeying court order.

BENNY SUPNET, Yuba City/Ukiah. Controlled substance for sale, tampering with imitation firearm markings.

KORY WHIPPLE, Covelo. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, assault with firearm on person, grossly negligent discharge of firearm, attempt to keep stolen property, offenses while on bail. 

WE'VE ALL HEARD that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

— Professor Robert Silensky of California University

TWITTER DISPERSED

by Mark Sinker

“Thanks to the internet,” the Bluesky user Bobby Bungus (formerly Twitter’s @internethippo) wrote last month, “I don’t need to wait for the evening news to learn about recent events. I can read 2000 posts from the most deranged people on earth and make up my own mind.” In the year since Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X – at, well, deranged cost to himself, financial and reputational – it has largely dispersed as a useable medium and as a quasi-community.

Moguls used to have a certain shyness: they funded libraries and museums, collections and concert halls, but always paid someone else to curate it all for them. Today the second-richest blight on the planet would rather be judged the Memeing Sage of the People. And his subscriber-admirers – the excremental crust of the worst reply guys at the upper end of any popular thread – continue to declare their enthusiasm for his fug of stale jokes and stances.

At the heart of every conspiracy theory is a secret hope that at least someone knows what they’re doing: better a mastermind with a calculated and coherent plan than the inept whims of the billionaire k-hole! Meanwhile Apartheid Clyde, the omnipotent baasskap baby, hapless and incurious, isn’t even that clever about the things he’s said to have mastered: electric vehicles, rocketry and so on. None of his over-promised futures arrive: no Mars, no chips jammed into living brains, no everyday banking on X the Everything App.

Everything apps used to be known as newspapers. But the habits and practices of print were already unravelling when the internet arrived, and soon any blogging urchin – so the thrill of it ran – might confront and correct the unearned expertise of the seemingly better placed mind. Younger, impatient, keen to thumbtack the seats of the mighty, the net-native generation injected the cheek of this style into their journalism, with Twitter as their gossipy Rolodex, blurring much that their forebears kept severely siloed.

Since the 19th century, high-standard news-gathering had aimed to deliver reliability across the political divide. If you disagreed on everything else, you could still be confident in distinguishing fact from opinion; at the rational-utopian technocratic-liberal limit, a diversity of conflicted voices might (possibly) resolve disagreement without violence – that was the ideal, anyway, and much of the purpose of fact-checking, editorial balance and right of reply. But as the machine’s levers stopped delivering, it dwindled into a narrowly defensive professional tribalism, able to see partiality only outside itself. The more it sought to stand above politics, the more obviously and mockably political it became.

If Twitter is bad (and it is), it’s primarily because it remains so relentless a feed for and from its now untrusted precursors: the TV, radio and print we have never yet escaped. If Twitter always degrades those who supply their content and those who encounter it, so had and do those prior outlets. If Twitter is good (and intermittently it has been), it’s because it allowed us to take them to task; an asymmetrical, often pseudonymous harrying for their failings and their self-importance, which Musk’s clumsy tinkering has not entirely wiped away.

Ridicule, however, can no more repair the structure than it can replace it. All too easy in the new settlement, as @dynamic_proxy has observed, to fall for “the groundless superstition that being able to meme means you have the mandate of heaven” (or its converse, that being unable means you don’t). Because this too is a blurring: yes, your unmannerly local eloquence has garnered a following – but this is not the same as refostering trust across social divides. Old-school and urchin-school media – and Musk’s even more self-satisfied and thin-skinned versions – treat expanding your engagement (your follows) as a measure of quality, but such expansion always works by exclusion.

Even if none of us get to Mars, perhaps a less chaotic life awaits on the off-world colonies. I already mentioned Bluesky: there’s also Mastodon, with its riddles of entry; the unappealingly corporate Threads; or else Tumblr, Instagram and Tiktok – or even Facebook itself, antique, shattered, colossal and unusable. If we flee there, will the most deranged people on earth follow us? Will we miss them if they don’t? The knowledge that we’ll always be lied to arrives with psychological consequences. How ill do we no longer want (or need) to be?

“Move fast and break things,” the smart guys kept saying – and more and more things are broken. Bench by bench, the coders are fired; the system glitches and shrivels. Then, in response to murder and invasion and climate upheaval, mass migration and expulsion, a news-generated intensification across the unlicensed public square of the worst possible images and takes. Our screens are dense with untruth and personation; with shrieking racist scam-bots and bloodthirsty glee. A squid-ink of crackpot tech-bro fascisms spatters the contracts we must make with the scofflaw gamer-tycoon, as he strives to cosplay the worst of the untended ugliness.

But the switchback from trivial to deadly and back was always just the shape of the human mind adrift in the swirl of the world. So maybe, as the stakes intensify, it’s somehow good that the internet, this vast shivering mirror, is so palpably distorted by the many agendas running through it. Who can still be fooled that a top-down objectivity was either achievable or desirable – let alone that anyone laid plausible claim to it? The more utopian dreams of the early internet seem very distant now; the belief that we might all simply reconfigure our antennae and become our own citizen investigators – what’s even a citizen in this unhinged settlement?

If the attention economy is struggling, so too is the pop-cultural era, some seventy years in the ascendancy, which imagined that a “cooler” politics would make for a better politics: Musk is its reductio ad absurdum, and look at the state of him. A pity, for sure, that the man who ruined Twitter for everyone else will not end his days in a bankruptcy barrel and braces, freed of his money and the attention that came with it; ignored, powerless, forgotten.

And all around, the tycoon class doubles down and profits in other ways; if their broader humiliation is mounting, nothing material has truly yet shifted. This is one of the laws of large numbers. But the deeper law remains that no one well understands large numbers – and all can be changed in a moment.

(London Review of Books)

‘ANTI-DISINFORMATION’ IS A PARTISAN CON

"Anti-disinformation" always seemed like a thinly-veiled excuse to tilt the media landscape in partisan directions. Thanks to new #CTILeague disclosures, now we can say it for sure.

by Matt Taibbi

“The whackadoodles, the cult members, the Fox News Snorters, there’s not that much we can do about them in the short term,” says longtime marketing executive Deb Lavoy, in the video above. 

The pronouncement came in a training session for a group founded in March 2020 to fight pandemic misinformation called the “Cyber Threat Intelligence” or CTI League. The whistleblower-provided #CTIFiles that Michael Shellenberger and Alexandra Gutentag began releasing this morning provide answers to all sorts of questions not addressed in the Twitter Files, especially about techniques like cyber-infiltration, the use of sockpuppet accounts, and other “offensive” measures. The document cache from a group that partnered with the FBI and DHS goes in many newsworthy directions, some of which Mike and Alex already covered. It will be a while before we’ll be able to say we touched on all the main themes in them, even superficially. 

One theme that jumped out immediately, however, was the overtly partisan nature of the CTIL exercise. This was part of the whistleblower’s motivation in coming forward — the source recalled having CTIL co-founder SJ Terp remark hopefully in early 2020 that they might get Donald Trump removed from social media someday — but even someone without any particular affection for Republicans will have a hard time avoiding the constant partisan refrain in the CTI materials. 

Take the Lavoy quote above. The “whackadoodles” line is pro forma#Resistance gibberish, but the context is nuts. Like many of the members of the CTIL project, Lavoy appeared motivated by experiences in dealing with relatives, and in this particular training, she’d only just spoken in quite unflattering terms about her mother-in-law, as an example of a “low-information liberal”:

“I think of the low-information liberal and the persona I think of here is my mother-in-law, honestly. She lives in Burlington, she has been liberal-ish politically most of her life, but most of her so-called ideas are really things that she has heard somewhere from people she thinks are good guys and she repeats them. She doesn't really have any way to really support her ideas. She doesn’t have any information or facts to back them up with. She just thinks bad guys bad good guys, good.”

After describing her mother-in-law as a mindless follower expressing opinions unsupported by knowledge or fact, Lavoy dismounted to a grimly humorous conclusion. 

“What we should be trying to do is help these people stay connected to reality, defend and propagate their ideas.” Thenshe turned to ripping “whackadoodles” and “Fox News snorters.” 

In other words, it’s okay to be clueless, to repeat opinions blindly, and have no grasp of fact, so long as you’re on the right side. In that case, “What we should be trying to do is… defend and propagate their ideas,” i.e. the same ideas she just described as “so-called” thoughts acquired from other sources and vomited out without absorption. 

Thisis okay. The supporters of the other side meanwhile are described as mental lost causes, reminiscent of cultists (“That’s taken me into a lot of reading about cults and deprogramming cults,” Lavoy says elsewhere) while the “low-information liberal” just needs more mental armament.

It’s important to note the #CTIFiles show that the organization tracked groups on the left as well as the right, from defund the police organizations to pro-Palestinian groups (@USPCR_) to #HealthCareForAll to the Democratic Socialists of America. In conversation, however, it’s the “Fox News Snorter” who’s treated as a threat not just to America but to humanity itself. Election 2020, Lavoy says, is an “end of the world type of moment” in her eyes, to which a colleague responds, “The virus is just an actor in a larger story.”

CTI League presented itself as being narrowly focused on Covid-19 misinformation, successfully convincing papers like the Washington Post it was only interested in offering “free digital defenses to hospitals that are being pummeled with digital attacks during the coronavirus pandemic.” 

In reality, however, the group from the beginning focused on “current events,” meaning not “aliens” or any more eccentric forms of potential misinformation, but anything “we’re interested in,” especially the upcoming presidential election and “right wing stuff,” which “we all desperately want to work on.”

CTIL members offered standard-issue blue team yammering, like:

Education’s great for the kids that are in school now, but what do we do with John and Jane Q Citizen that actually watch Fox News and believe the plandemic?

The bad guys have a very effective network. Someone whether it's the White House, Fox News, creepy Reddit or RT puts together some talking points and they all sort of coordinate around these things…

From the right wing perspective, like exactly this kind of deprogramming and that's what a couple of my colleagues are kind of looking at it in particular…

The scope of this is way beyond just medical and Covid-19… this covers many, many areas including the right wing stuff that we all desperately want to work on.

While those comments are yawners, what isshocking is the level of total unsophistication with which this group — which partnered with DHS and FBI —brought to the job of sifting through alleged disinformation. In multiple exchanges, analysts scoffed at the idea that they needed issue-specific knowledge. If it did occur to them that they might need to actually check a fact, it often appeared that the prospect of having to conduct real research was occurring to them for the first time. 

In one telling exchange, some of the group members asked the leader SJ Terp what they should do, if they need to figure out whether or not a piece of medical research is real or not:

Roger Johnston:If somebody publishes a fake paper and they say it’s cited and it’s not, how would you look that up quickly? Is there a database or something or a university?

Michael Klein: Yeah, I tossed to SJ on that one. 

SJ Terp: Sorry, what was the question?

Roger Johnston: So for fake experts, if somebody publishes research or claims to have published research, how would you go and where would you verify that…? There must be some database that compiles all of these sources together. Do you know what that's called?

SJ Terp: There are a bunch of… academic paper places so you can go check.

“Academic paper places”? What the hell is that? That’s a class-clown answer to end all class-clown answers. These are the people asking to be put in charge of saving the world from medical misinformation? 

The Terp quote was one of many in which CTIL researchers came across as somehow more clueless even than journalists (although there were reportedly journalists in the group). In another episode, Lavoy spoke passionately about her motivation:

My basic motivation here is that I don’t know a lot. I know something about narratives and there’s something about how people are manipulating those narratives and if the world is going to come to an end, I'm going to go down fighting…

As a substitute for “knowing a lot,” people like Lavoy, Terp and the other researchers basically operated on an authority principle, pushing people critical of government policies toward the disinformation camp while seeking to “boost” narratives by “good guys.” (Who’s a “good guy”? One unironic quote from the trainings summed it up: “If you’re in this network, it means you’re one of the good guys.”)

A true expert in epidemiology or virology would know instantaneously if a piece of research is real or fake, and wouldn’t need to go looking in an “academic paper place” to see if a source is trustworthy. There’s no substitute for a lifetime of institutional knowledge, a concept journalists once understood. Even the best get things wrong, and even consensus gets turned on its head quickly: there are few ironclad pronouncements in developing scientific crises. But CTIL and other groups treat complex moving-target controversies like either/or decisions.

CTIL was established at the outset of the pandemic, perhaps even before, and took certain positions right away against posters like “No more lockdowns,” hashtags like #AllJobsAreEssential, groups like “open carry Texas,” even a joke meme pushing the Declaration of Independence as a “permission slip” to break Covid-19 curfews. “We should have seen this coming,” is the groaning comment in one incident report.

Two examples of “disinformation”? 

CTIL — which at various points claimed to have over 500 people volunteering in their monitoring efforts — didn’t feel a need to hide electoral preferences in the group chats. As the whistleblower put it to me, “They just assume that anybody who’s smart thinks like them.” This is a common characteristic of people who work not just in this world but across professional America, in law firms, newsrooms, universities, etc. The uniform perspective for “anti-disinformation” work however is problematic in ways that don’t show up in those other places. It’s an extreme class issue, one of the reasons it’s so infuriating that the political left has expressed little to no interest in this topic. 

I don’t favor censorship, but if I did, I’d want to be sure the people doing it did not all come from the same economic and educational background. That’s clearly the case with CTIL and others like it. These folks come from the same schools and tax bracket, they vomit out the same pre-fab Flaubertian bourgeois idiocies, inhabit the same informational bubble, and boast the same immunity to proletarian frustrations (read: reality). When all the reviewers have the same opinions, it’s not hard for them to identify deviance, which is what “anti-disinformation” really is, a deviance hunt. These people aren’t checking facts or trying to figure out truths, which is very difficult, but policing narrative correctitude, which is so easy, it can be done by machine. 

One of the precursor organizations to CTIL, MisInfoSec — which included future Stanford hotshot Renee DiResta and some other interesting characters (the connections angle in the #CTIFiles is mind-blowing, but a for-later subject) — published in 2019 a fascinating and inadvertently revealing definition of what they considered to be the information dichotomy in the United States:

The online political environment in the United States is polarized, but the “filter bubbles” are best characterized as 1) the Fox News bubble and 2) everyone else. Second, the corrective sanctions at play in the two environments are highly asymmetric. The latter bubble penalizes for straying from the truth while the former penalizes for straying from the accepted narrative.

Forget that this is infuriating nonsense that defines everyone who doesn’t agree with “accepted narratives” as being in the “Fox News bubble,” and look at how the authors view themselves. They really believe their “bubble” is uniquely oriented to “truth.” Once you believe that, censorship is easy. People I like are right, and as for people I don’t — can we get all troll on their bums?

If you’re ever tempted to think this story is more complicated than that, it’s not. It’s Heathers,but run out of Langley and Fort Meade. And unlike high school, these people will never grow up.

Deb Lavoy, SJ Terp, and others have not responded to requests for comment. Much more to come on this issue. 

THE CAFFÈ TRIESTE was the meeting place for Beat movement writers like Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth and Neeli Cherkovski, who lived in North Beach in the 1950s and 1960s. Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, has also been a regular patron. Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for The Godfather while sitting in the Caffè Trieste. Other writers and poets, painters such as Peter Le Blanc and Don Moses and photographers Joe Rosenthal (Pulitzer Prize Winner), Jimo Perini and Christopher Felver, other celebrities Paul Kantner (Jefferson Starship), Liam Mayclem, Joey Reynolds and Mal Sharpe, to name only a few. The Caffe has been featured in several movies, on television, radio, in magazines, and in dozens of photography, tourism and other books, ranging from local to national and international in scope. And many long lasting friendships have been made sitting at these tables...

TRADITIONAL AMERICAN VALUES: Genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods.

— George Carlin

BURLESQUE was introduced to America in 1868 by a visiting British acting troupe called “The British Blondes,” starring a provocative singer and dancer named Lydia Thompson. Described by one theater critic as a “disgraceful spectacle of padded legs jiggling and wriggling in the insensate follies and indecencies of the hour,” burlesque nevertheless found a welcoming audience in America, eventually evolving into a uniquely American expression called, appropriately enough, American Burlesque.

Whereas the British “Victorian Burlesque” was akin to a variety show, with some mildly risqué humor and suggestive dancing that would be considered utterly tame by audiences today, the American version that emerged began to put more emphasis on sexual humor and increasingly revealing costumes. By the turn of the century numerous burlesque companies were performing in New York and touring the country, often with all-female casts but sometimes including male comedians. Gradually becoming more and more racy, by the mid-1920s the “striptease” came to dominate burlesque shows, giving rise to stars such as Gypsy Rose Lee in the 1930s. 

During Prohibition the popularity of burlesque declined and the shows increasing became nothing more than a series of stripteases, without the songs, dances, and comedy that had once been essential parts of the performances. Meanwhile public pressure mounted to shut down the theaters. But despite frequent raids, in which the performers were often arrested, burlesque shows continued to thrive, remaining popular with principally working-class audiences. Finally, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had had enough. In 1937 he ordered the closure of New York’s burlesque theaters, declaring them to be “purveyors of filth.”

With the demise of the theaters, burlesque transitioned to film and Hollywood generated numerous burlesque-themed movies, albeit without nudity of course. 

Burlesque has not entirely disappeared. But while there have been several revivals of burlesque theater since the 1930s, none have approached the level of popularity and notoriety that the genre had in its heyday.

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR

by Yara Bayoumy, Samar Abu Elouf and Iyad Abuheweila; Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf

They walked for hours, raising their hands when they encountered Israeli troops with guns trained on them to display their I.D. cards — or wave white rags. All around them was the sound of gunfire and the incessant buzzing of drones. Bodies littered rubble-filled streets.

For the tens of thousands of Gazans who have fled the northern part of the enclave where the heaviest fighting has been taking place, evacuating to the south has been a perilous journey, according to at least 10 Gazans that The New York Times spoke to on the ground and by phone. Even though a tenuous cease-fire in place since Friday has brought temporary relief from the bombardment, they face an uncertain future — and the threat the strikes will return, leaving them displaced yet again.

The Israeli military launched a deadly bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip after an attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7 in which, Israeli officials say, 1,200 people were killed and 240 taken hostage. In the seven weeks since, Israel has pounded the tiny coastal enclave with the aim of destroying Hamas’s military capabilities. So far, more than 13,000 Palestinians have been killed as of Nov. 21, according to the Gazan health authorities.

For weeks, Israel has been urging Gazans living in northern towns to flee along Salah al-Din Street, the strip’s main north-south highway.

Those lucky enough or with means fled early, but some Gazans who spoke to the Times said they could not leave earlier because they do not have relatives or anyone they know in the south, cannot leave older family members behind or don’t have the resources. Instead, many sheltered in increasingly dangerous and desperate conditions at schools or hospitals in the north. But at some point, they made the difficult decision to leave.

Even that decision was fraught. In the weeks leading up to the cease-fire, Israel has also bombed the southern part of the Gaza Strip, and some Gazans feel uprooting themselves further with no guarantee of shelter in the south is not worth it.

The United Nations says 1.7 million of the 2.3 million residents in the Hamas-controlled enclave have been displaced.

The Gazans who spoke to The Times said they felt shame, loss of dignity and anger at finding themselves struggling for their lives in the latest war between Israel and Hamas. The journey — which takes Gazans hours depending on where in the north they are leaving from — is usually done on foot or on a donkey cart.

Aya Habboub, 23, remained in northern Gaza earlier this month, heavily pregnant with her third child. She gave birth in a hospital under intense bombardment but was forced to evacuate when the baby, whom she named Tia, was just four days old.

Barely able to walk, Ms. Habboub tried to rest by the side of the road, but her husband urged her to keep going. Israeli soldiers, she said, stopped her mother-in-law and ordered the woman to stand for half an hour and raise her hands.

“Then they were firing,” Ms. Habboub said, “and we started running.” Ms. Habboub was speaking in a hospital in Deir al-Balah, a city in central Gaza, where many are sheltering. In her lap, Tia, cocooned in a white cloth, was sleeping peacefully.

“I dropped my baby,” she said. “I was crying and screaming.”

Several Gazans whom The Times spoke to described similar scenes of soldiers firing in the general vicinity of those fleeing. It was not possible to verify independently such claims.

The Israel Defense Forces did not comment on the specific allegations. In a statement responding to questions about them, the military said it had taken “significant precautions to mitigate civilian harm.” It added that it had issued warnings of airstrikes ahead of time, when it can do so, and told civilians when to make use of “safe corridors” to evacuate.

It reiterated its assertion that Hamas has embedded itself within “civilian infrastructure” and uses civilians as human shields. “The I.D.F. is determined to end these attacks, and as such we will strike Hamas wherever necessary,” it said.

In the few days since a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas took hold, some Gazans have continued moving south. Others have tried to return north to check on loved ones and their homes, but Israeli troops have prevented that.

Mohammed El-Sabti said he began a trek from the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City on a recent morning with 15 family members, including his elderly mother. He saw another older woman screaming by the side of the road. She begged him for help, but Mr. El-Sabti was struggling with the load he was already carrying while he pushed his mother on a cart.

Mr. El-Sabti, who is now sheltering at a college building in the southern city of Khan Younis, rejected Israeli assertions about the safety of the so-called humanitarian corridor that Gazans are being urged to use to flee from the north.

“The corridor is not humanitarian, and it’s unsafe,” he said. “It’s an area of horror.”

After weeks of enduring intense airstrikes, smelling corpses and losing their homes and relatives, they speak with numbness about the horrors they’ve witnessed in their hometowns and on the road south.

“I had two boys and five girls,” said Malak El-Najjar, 52, who used to live in the Mukhabarat area in Gaza City and is now sheltering in Khan Younis. “Two of the girls are dead,” killed in an airstrike before they left, she said, aged 18 and 20.

Iman Abu Halima, 33, who first fled from Beit Lahiya in the north before taking shelter temporarily in Jabaliya and then carrying on south after it got too dangerous, described seeing “bloated bodies, flies on them,” next to scattered body parts.

“We saw many dead bodies,” said Mazen Abu Habil, a 52-year-old father of eight, who eventually made it to Khan Younis, which has become a teeming place of refuge for displaced people. There, Gazans cram into hospitals and U.N. shelters, living in substandard conditions — chasing a meal a day, sleeping with barely any blankets, wearing the clothes they fled with.

Mr. Abu Habil used to live in Jabaliya, a neighborhood north of Gaza City that Israel says is a Hamas stronghold and has been pummeling with airstrikes. He fled to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City once his house was destroyed, and then, when it was no longer safe there, to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Israel has recently produced video and photographs that it says shows Al-Shifa, a sprawling complex, conceals an underground military base used by Hamas. The militant group has denied it is operating from beneath the hospital.

“I saw a little girl who was killed on the ground,” Mr. Abu Habil said. With an eye on Israeli soldiers patrolling nearby, he said, he tried to cover the girl with a small cloth. “As I did that, they suddenly started shooting,” he said.

He described how the Israeli soldiers, many of whom spoke in Arabic, ordered him to undress and detained him for about 90 minutes. Eventually they let him go.

But that was not the case for everyone. Zahwa Al-Sammouni, 58, said she was fleeing south with her family when Israeli soldiers detained her three sons, all of them young men.

“What can we do?” Ms. Al-Sammouni said. “We’re too scared to yell or cry. We just want to know where did our kids go?”

She added: “We are farmers, we have nothing to do with weapons, with Hamas or with Fatah.” She added: “We are just looking for a piece of food because we have children to feed.”

She was squatting at the hospital in Deir El-Balah with more than a dozen members of her extended family.

Ms. Al-Sammouni and the people with her spoke in a stream of consciousness, recalling harrowing details of their journey. They talked about Israeli troops yelling profanities at them; about how the chaos of Gaza had become a matter of survival of the fittest in which people’s humanity extended only to immediate families; about desperately searching for even salty water to drink.

Some Gazans’ journeys had several false starts. Hamada Abu Shaaban, 33, a foreign exchange trader, fled on foot after Israeli strikes hit near his home in Gaza City. With his mother and aunt, and a suitcase full of cash, he began his journey, before clashes broke out. Mr. Abu Shaaban and his family hid for 16 hours in a nearby garage until the violence subsided. They managed to get home and tried again the next day. It was not easy.

“I do not understand how I went through all of these scenes without losing my mind,” he said in Al Maghazi, a community built up from a refugee camp established decades ago, in central Gaza.

mad Ziyadeh, who fled south to Khan Younis from near Beit Lahia, described his journey as one of “suffering, torture, terrifying fear.”

He said people were able to take the barest minimum of possessions: clothes, identification cards and the rags they used as white flags.

Israeli soldiers, he said, yelled at them constantly. And on the road were horrific scenes. “Bodies all around us,” he said. “You look to the right, you see body parts.”

The comparison to the Nakba, or the displacement of Palestinians during the wars surrounding the founding of Israel, were not far from people’s minds, he said. “In 1948, we were displaced, and now in 2023 we are being subjected to a forced displacement,” Mr. Ziyadeh said. “I’m not expecting to go back to north Gaza, but if they do make us go back, what will we go back to?”

TO GIVE FOOD AID to a country just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason.

— Henry Kissinger, 1974

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

by Alexander Cockburn

In June, 1900, troops of the Western powers broke the Boxer siege of the embassies in Peking, looted the Empress Dowager’s summer palace and thus destroyed for a time the valiant nationalist effort to halt colonial exploitation of China. By the year 2000 we were at the other end of the century, listening to leading lights of progressive American politics from Ralph Nader’s fair trade campaign, from the AFL-CIO and assorted NGOs, plus leading lights of right-wing American politics, all calling for China to be denied admission to the World Trade Organization.

What happened in between? Oh, it’s an old story now. China had a revolution, a series of revolutions in fact. Other poor countries did too. They tried to redistribute land and wealth, build an industrial base, foster internal demand, get a fair price for the commodities they needed to sell abroad. The western powers didn’t care for that any more than they liked the Boxers. They mustered armies to crush these revolutions, hired mercenaries, saboteurs and spies. They never relented, never forgave.

Some revolutions struggled on for several decades, in varying states of siege, boycotts, embargoes, economic sabotage. One survives. Whole continents drowned in blood.

As the world neared its rendezvous with the third Christian millennium a refined system of exploitation had been put into almost universally successful execution. The poor countries are to be held in helotry just as they were in the colonial world of the nineteenth century, their assigned task still the provision of raw materials or cheap goods manufactured under imperial license. There’s nothing new about “globalization,” just refinement of the process. To ensure that these poor countries continue to depend on exports for survival, the western powers have made sure that all possibility of robust internal markets is undercut. Austerity programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have laid waste to the domestic sectors of these economies, creating small elites servile to the imperial powers, amid vast oceans of poverty and desperation.

So awful have been the cycles of repression and rapine that some countries are in advanced stages of physical disintegration. In the temperate zone of the Americas, hurricanes derived their devastation in large part to the crushing, with the CIA as impresario of last resort, of all bids for land reform 30 and 40 years earlier, thus forcing peasants off good land onto marginal terrain which they necessarily overexploit, thus rendering it vulnerable to flooding and consequent landslides and erosion.

So, should we not regard with at least preliminarily mixed emotions the launching of a campaign by progressive liberals to deny China entry to WTO? Should we not reflect at least for a moment on the fact that the WTO talks in Seattle in 1999 broke down in part because African and Caribbean nations regarded those proposals for labor and environmental standards as nothing more than a protectionist ruse by the western powers?

“China, were coming atcha,” yelled Mike Dolan, the Nader group’s organizer in Seattle, as he discussed the next item of business. “There’s no question about it. The next item of business is China.” Jeff Faux, director of the AFL-CIO-backed Economic Policy Institute told reporters that with China in the WTO it will be “impossible too get labor and environmental standards” installed, because “China’s too big for the sort of coercion that could be brought to bear on, say, Indonesia.” “The China vote is going to become proxy for all our concerns about globalization,” said Denise Mitchell, of the AFL-CIO.

So who exactly is the enemy here? China? The WTO? Or capitalism? After all, the WTO has been merely an expression of what the capitalist corporate chieftains of the western world want to lock in. The corporations probably could accept in some form those famous labor and environmental standards. It doesn’t take much by way of a pledge or a few more cents a month or an itinerant bunch of inspectors to bring most of the NGO watchdogs to heel.

Do I feel comfortable at the sight of western progressives execrating China? Not particularly, even though I know there are Chinese elites oppressing Chinese masses, inflicting dreadful working conditions and pay scales. The progressive intellectuals from the Economic Policy Institute who denounce China’s “state-controlled economic system” as “market distorting” (thus people like Robert E. Scott in “Working USA” aren’t so far removed from those who have administered the siege of Cuba all these years. The liberal NGOs are interventionist by disposition. The Somalian debacle, and to some extent the Kossovan nightmare were their shows. There’s no win-win situation for workers of the world, in the current era at least. American steelworkers here do better, ergo Russian and South Korean steelworkers overseas do worse. A garment worker here loses a job, a Central American makes a dime. Capitalism dictates the choices.

What can we do here? I don’t think we should be trying to fix up the WTO or keep China out. That’s not the sort of currency we, as radicals, should have truck with. Our currency is solidarity. We should be helping these poor countries develop internal markets, hence better paid workers, stronger agriculture by making war on the IMF and World Bank. The Jubilee campaign against World Bank bonds is a great thing. The campaign against the World Bank was terrific, at least until World Bank president John Wolfenson was smart enough to co-opt some of the relevant NGOs by hiring many of their technocrats. We have two million in prison. We have Pelican Bay prison and hundreds more hellish dungeons. We’re the world’s leading arms peddler, the world’s leading polluter. We don’t need, on the edge of 2000, at the end of this imperial century, to be signing on to a Yellow Peril campaign.

My grandfather Henry, a diplomat, was in the British Legation in Peking..Peter Fleming writes in his Siege at Peking: “The well-stocked library of Mr. [Henry] Cockburn, the First Secretary, provided some with solace. It included several reference books dealing with the Indian Mutiny, and accounts of the relief of Lucknow were in keen demand; the fate of Cawnpore was less closely studied.”