Mendocino County Today: Sunday, Feb. 11, 2024

Warmer | Sunning | Bad Ballots | Saturday Experience | Ballot Questions | Candidate Forum | Dump Fees | Early Morning | Pet Ben | Ed Notes | Warm Day | Dams Outmoded | Big Marlin | Rename Kelseyville | Yesterday's Catch | Mental Treatment | Stupid Things | Landline Service | Niner Prayer | Field Notes | Italian Sub | Marco Radio | Ocean Spume | Hip Square | Weird Habits | Super Serf | Fools Art | Driverless Cars | Young Willie | RFK Campaign | USA Rudderless | Whoot | Old Joe | Eden Vendors | Maga Diaries | Putin Puppet | Gaza Report | Burmese Days | Stop Madness | Mobile Home | Eddie Waitkus | Valentines

MILD, mostly calm weather will continue through the weekend with night time valley fog and possible coastal drizzle this evening. More unsettled weather will begin to return midweek into next weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 49F on the coast this Sunday morning. Mostly cloudy & moderate temps into Wednesday when rain returns. Although forecast models are far from in agreement on where & how much rain we could get. There are hints of another BIG ONE next weekend. As usual, we'll see?

MENDOCINO COUNTY VOTERS RECEIVE INCORRECT MAIL-IN BALLOTS

by Marisa Endicott

Early this week, election ballots were mailed out for the upcoming March 5 Presidential Primary Election, but the process didn’t go so smoothly in Mendocino County.

In a Feb. 8 press release, the Mendocino County Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder warned that all registered voters there, regardless of political party affiliation or where they lived, received a Republican ballot for the First Supervisorial District, and that there may be other mistakes as well, even on ballots for First District Republican voters.

“Based on what we know at this time, this appears to be an unfortunate case of a simple human error at the last steps of the process,” the Mendocino County Elections Office said in a “frequently asked questions” post published Friday night.

Suzy Worsham of Gualala believes that explanation, but, she said, “the biggest thing is that it’s just going to undermine people’s confidence in elections even more.”

Worsham didn’t find out about the debacle until Saturday morning while checking in on an active community Facebook page, where she said commenters were already sharing doubts and theories.

She’d received her ballot in the mail, but hadn’t yet opened it. “Normally we’d wait until we’re ready to fill them out,” she said, confirming that she, too, had received the wrong information.

‘People are not happy.’

The countywide error was caught by ballot recipients reporting the problem to local officials. The issue was traced to the county’s election ballot mailing vendor, Integrated Voting Systems, a national election service and technology company headquartered in Central California.

The Assessor County Clerk Katrina Bartolomie told the Ukiah Daily Journal that a test image using the First District Republican ballot produced by a third-party vendor was mistakenly used and mailed out to all county voters. She said that all ballots were proofed and correct before going to their vendor, and until discovering the error, the county was unaware a third-party was involved in the process.

Mendocino County worked with Integrated Voting Systems for about 15 years until roughly two years ago, before returning to the vendor in fall 2023, stating that the alternative company they tried was not as responsive.

Every California county contracts out for ballot printing and mailing services. The process is strictly regulated, and the California Secretary of State has to okay vendors involved. Integrated Voting Systems is one of 12 ballot print vendors with approval.

On Friday, the Mendocino Voice reported that the California Secretary of State is investigating the mistake.

The county confirmed the state investigation and said it has been in contact with the agency, which had signed off on the county’s process for handling the mistaken ballots, according to the Mendocino Elections Office Friday evening post.

Replacement ballots are being printed and sent, on the vendor’s dime, to all registered voters early this next week. The County has asked that all voters, even registered Republicans in the First District, use the reprinted ballots given the possibility of errors that could cause the ballots to be read incorrectly. If any voters have already returned their ballots, they should contact the County Clerk’s Office as soon as possible. There are also “procedures in place to identify incorrect ballots that are submitted and to provide voters with an opportunity to submit correct ballots,” the county’s Friday message said.

The Elections Office emphasized that there are a number of protocols to prevent voters from voting more than once or casting a ballot in a primary in which they’re not permitted to vote.

Military and overseas voters reportedly received correct ballots since these are printed and mailed directly by the Elections Office. Anyone with questions can reach out by phone at 707-234-6819 or or email at mcvotes@mendocinocounty.gov.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

A HUGE SHOUT out of thanks to Charlotte Triplett and her team for the amazing Saturday experience for our kids. 

Attendance was lower than expected but the children that attended received a high energy, quality program. All the effort and time on this is so appreciated. Well done.

Louise Simson, Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

HANNAH NELSON TO FRANK HARTZELL:

Please ask ballot follow up questions

Hi Frank,

I assume that the ballot article was way more important than the electricity outage impact article and that is why you did not contact me on Friday as planned. The ballot issue was certainly critical to cover and I appreciate you doing so.

Your article on the ballots was good, but I do not understand how it could be entirely printer error if the Republican ballot for 1st district also had errors. As I understand it from your article, the county triple checked the accuracy and the files sent to the printer were correct, but the printer did a color check on the 1st Dist. Republican ballot and somehow wound up sending those out to everyone by mistake. But, if that’s is true, then how could those ballots (specific to Republican 1st Dist.) have errors if the file sent was correct? What in fact were the errors that in the end made those specific ballots incorrect as well?

Of course, I can call the Elections office, but I do think that these are questions that might be interesting for everyone to hear the answer to through your journalism, which I greatly appreciate.

Best,

Hannah Nelson

Ukiah

FAIR PLAY (AND PAY) FOR MIKE MANNIX

Beth Swehla: Went to the Boonville dump/transfer station this morning. The price per bag is now $8.50. Under new ownership. Monopoly in the County. The senior citizen attendant is now being paid $2 less per hour.

EARLY MORNING, COFFEE, DOG

Equanimity 
Our own quiet autonomy
Till time to get up

— Jim Luther

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Our Valentine’s Day Pet of the Week is Gentle Ben, a sweet Doberman boy who is a little shy when he first meets new people. GB is easy to walk on leash and will be an awesome hiking partner and companion. Because of his shyness, we recommend older children in Ben’s new home. Ben is easy going once he feels comfortable, and we predict it won’t take long before his loyal and goofy Doberman traits show themselves! Dobies are wonderful companions and tend to have a great sense of humor. They are velcro dogs who like being near their guardians, and are guaranteed to keep you entertained! Gentle Ben is 3 years old and 58 handsome pounds. ~

For more about Gentle Ben and all our adoptable dogs and cats, head to mendoanimalshelter.com.

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

Check out our Facebook Page and please share our posts!

ED NOTES

RECURRING bumper stickers: “There’s No Excuse For Domestic Violence.” O yeah? There are lots of excuses for it, not that a gentleman should ever succumb. “Security Provided By Smith & Wesson.” Thank you for the warning. I’ll shoot you first.

COUNTY SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT NICOLE GLENTZER'S endorsement of Trevor Mockel for 1st District supervisor is the local zen equivalent of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it fall?” Ms. Glentzer heads up MCOE, inspiring a second zen koan: If a public agency spends millions a year but nobody knows what it does, does it exist?

THEY'VE already started, the professional Democrats, putting it out there that if voters don't support Biden we'll get another round of Trump. In other words, if we don't get behind a guy who barely knows where he is or what he's doing we'll get the guy who will finish US off forever.

2024 is shaping up as a pivotal year in lots of ways pegged to the looming election, but how long have the professional Democrats been telling us that we'll get catastrophe if we don't vote for their defective presidential candidate? And whose fault is it that out of desperation millions of working people have turned to an orange billionaire because the Democrats stopped being Democrats?

BIDEN WAS ALREADY hugely diminished when Obama and the DNC foisted him off on US, and here we are about to get him foisted off on us again even more debilitated than he was four years ago. The Democrats have been essentially the same as Republicans on key issues for a long time now.

REMEMBER when Nader took on Gore? The two-party dictatorship combined to keep Nader out of the for-profit “debates” and tried to keep him off the ballot on state after state while libeling Nader as soft on women’s issues, and that he was indifferent to the welfare of ethnic minorities, and that he wasn’t much of an environmentalist, and even that he might be gay, all of which were straight-up lies. 

I TALKED with lots of people who had intended reflexive votes for Gore but had taken the time to investigate Nader’s positions. They've been lost to the Democrats ever since. That was the election Al Gore told black audiences that if Bush were elected they would be back to three-fifths of a human being status. Millions of Democrats, along with that lost half of eligible Americans, who don't vote, and we got the disaster of W. Bush.

THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC reality of the Democrats is confirmed when one considers how their candidates are selected on the Northcoast from among existing officeholders, or from among the staffs of former officeholders. In Mendocino County there are no more than 25 active Democrats as remote from the political realities on the Northcoast as the plutocrats who fund both parties.

NORTHCOAST Republicans don’t bother to give their volunteer candidates any money because they’re pleased with the Democrats, in our case a series of career officeholders of the bland opportunists of the Jared Huffman, McGuire, Wood type.

WHEN Democrats and Republicans have to convene their anointing sessions at conventions ringed by thousands of police, and then sell those candidates via public appearances by Cher and Snoop Dog, what kind of democracy do we have here?

ON THE NORTHCOAST, the hardcore delusionals get off a few rote letters of support for this or that uninspiring candidate, open unvisited offices, stick a few signs in front of wineries, their unopposed candidates assume office, and we seldom hear from them again. 

THAT'S pretty much it, locally, but there's always a large dissenting vote for third party people like there was in Election 2000 when Ralph Nader — still pulled — a big vote on the Northcoast.

A BIDEN-TRUMP re-run is too depressing to contemplate without diving deep into a whiskey bottle. I don't think it'll happen. The masterminds at the DNC will somehow yank Biden and run Newsom, the safest guy the DNC can put up without alienating the oligarchs who own both parties. 

CAN NEWSOM beat Trump? Biden would for sure lose to Trump if the DNC tries to brazen it out to pretend Biden is a fit candidate while everyone with eyes to see can see he isn't. Newsom-Trump would be close, but whoever wins they'll be presiding over a politically estranged population split a thousand ways.

GOT UP TO 70 DEGREES AT TEN MILE SATURDAY AFTERNOON

DAMS ARE OUTMODED

Editor: 

David Fanucchi’s recent letter (“The Real Salmon Threat,” AVA, Feb. 4) is part of a backward-looking campaign to save Eel River dams at taxpayers’ expense. This appears to spring from the pocketbooks of two groups fearing the loss of amenities they have long enjoyed at no cost: vineyard owners and owners of vacation homes near Lake Pillsbury.

PG&E is removing obsolete, seismically unsafe dams on the Eel River because they no longer generate electricity and cost more to operate than they’re worth. Water users, a tribe and other stakeholders — including Sonoma Water and Potter Valley irrigators — are pursuing a plan to maintain a diversion after PG&E pays to remove the dams, in part, because of Rep. Jared Huffman’s foresight.

Why aren’t those entities trying to keep the dams? Because operating Scott and Cape Horn dams means paying huge bills and carrying eye-popping liabilities. Those liabilities include the risk of Scott Dam collapsing in a major earthquake and expensive retrofits to protect endangered salmon the dams have pushed toward extinction.

What salmon and steelhead need aren’t dams, fish ladders and hatcheries. These false solutions have driven them closer to extinction. They need quality habitat. What our water supply needs are cost-effective, sustainable and modern solutions, not rundown 1900s technology.

Larry Hanson

Forestville

VALERIE HANELT: After fighting a 130-lb striped marlin for 26 minutes, Hans Hickenlooper of Yorkville successfully landed and released it back into the sea near Cabo. I’m ready to head in, but no, he is still happily fishing.

COUNTY ‘CULTURE’ CONFLICTS

by Betsy Cawn

Similar to the City of Ft. Bragg’s contentious arguments over changing the name of the city, in Lake County there is a long-standing desire to change the name of Kelseyville. Families and friends of students at the school district successfully campaigned to change the name of the high school’s sports teams from “Indians” to “Knights,” after a many-year effort, with impassioned supporters persuading the school board to acknowledge the demeaning impacts on their many Native American students.

Likewise, the effort to change the name of the area and town from Kelseyville to Konocti (a campaign that was endorsed, at least tacitly, by the former Economic Development department’s “rebranding” ideas used by the former Lake County Visitors Center and marketeering vendors circa 2010), has met with significant opposition from the Anglo-American patriots who are active or retired agency leaders — aiming to stop the multi-cultural organization “Citizens for Healing” (www.citizensforhealing.org).

In 1998, when I was visiting the county for the first time, I ventured to the county courthouse with an eye toward learning about the county’s public works and water resources (on the third floor).

Standing at the counter waiting for assistance, I listened to a conversation between one of the desk-bound secretaries visible to the public and an unseen but clearly audible conversant in the adjacent doorway. “What was that all about?” the unseen speaker asked, after the secretary hung up on what sounded like an annoying caller. “Oh,” said the secretary, “just one of those idiots asking about changing the name of Kelseyville. Why don’t these people just get over it?”

Indeed, why do our insistent redneck recalcitrants insist that the name of the earliest “European Settlers” — who raped, tortured, and murdered their “Indian” slaves — should be preserved? Locally famous archaeologist Dr. John Parker explains in this lecture: “The Kelsey Brothers: A California Disaster”; “Learn about the two Native American Massacres in Lake County and what lead [sic] up to them.”:

I don’t know the word for something worse than irony, but in a recent Facebook post by one of the community’s highly revered firefighters, the public is asked to send emails “expressing your opposition to the change” to each of the county Supervisors — two of whom are respected Tribal leaders. The opponents of the name change can be emailed at “savekelseyville@gmail.com.”

The late 1800s “Bloody Island Massacre” was “one of many government-sanctioned slaughters of Native Americans under California’s official policy to exterminate Native Americans.” 

https://www.aclunc.org/sites/goldchains/explore/bloody-island.html

We’ve come a long way since the beginning of the 21st Century, but not far enough for the White fathers, who appear to be completely unsympathetic to the anguish of our Native American citizens and their supporters. Speak now or forever hold your piece.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, February 10

CURTIS BETTENCOURT, Fort Bragg. Under influence.

JOSE GONZALEZ-GONZALEZ, Ukiah. Stolen vehicle, possession of manufacture’s ID numbers with intent to defraud, registration tampering.

JAMES HOFFMAN SR., Ukiah. Paraphernalia, parole violation.

DAVID MARTINEZ-ANDRADE, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, minor with alcohol.

CHERRI MAVIS, Willits. DUI-alcohol&drugs, paraphernalia.

JUSTIN SPIKER, Ukiah. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

FOCUS ON TREATMENT, NOT STIGMA

Why do we accept the disorder and violence stemming from untreated serious mental illness?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/focus-on-treatment-not-stigma/

(via Mazie Malone)

MILLIONS IN CALIFORNIA COULD LOSE THEIR AT&T LANDLINES

by Annie Vainshtein

An effort by AT&T to pull out of its obligations to offer landline services across a huge swath of California — including most of the Bay Area — has raised impassioned safety concerns among residents worried about what might happen if they lose access to their traditional wired phone lines, especially in the event of a natural disaster or other emergency.

As the designated “carrier of last resort” in California, the telecommunications giant has long been required to provide basic phone services to people who want them, as required by state law. Such services are cheap, ubiquitous and heavily regulated.

But now, the company wants out.

Last year, AT&T filed an application with the California Public Utilities Commission to shed its obligation to offer basic phone services to people who request them. After a series of public meetings through the spring, the PUC is expected to make a decision on AT&T’s request in September. 

Spokespersons for AT&T said they planned to transition the “few remaining consumers with traditional copper-based phone service” to newer technologies from them — or other phone service providers. 

But if the company’s proposal is granted, AT&T wouldn’t legally have to. If the PUC approves AT&T’s request, the company would no longer be obligated to provide landline services to Californians who say they need them. Millions of people could be affected and lose access within six months, according to the application, if the PUC grants the company’s request. 

Being forced to offer what AT&T called “obsolete” telephone technology was sapping resources the company would prefer to devote to expanding “its state-of-the-art broadband network,” AT&T said in its application to the PUC.

Lipkowitz, who has a landline telephone in the hallway of her San Francisco home, is concerned about experiencing a natural disaster without access to a wired phone. 

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

Spokespersons for AT&T said less than 7% of households in their California territory are using copper-based landline phone services, and that the company is investing in newer technologies such as fiber and wireless. 

“At least one telephone company in a specified area is legally required to provide access to telephone service to anyone in its service territory who requests it,” state agency officials wrote in a summary of AT&T’s petition to cease offering landline services. The agency will be expected to make a decision on the request in September after a series of public hearings on the application.

AT&T has argued that its proposal should be granted even if there is no other carrier of last resort.

“Other outcomes are possible, such as another carrier besides AT&T volunteering to become the Carrier of Last Resort in your area, or the (agency) denying AT&T’s proposal,” PUC officials wrote. 

In addition, AT&T is also requesting to stop providing federally subsidized, low-income phone services. For that to be granted, AT&T must demonstrate that another company can provide the services it currently offers. Telecommunications policy advocates say they don’t think that’s possible because the only options to replace AT&T are cell phone services, and they are notoriously unreliable.

Getting rid of landlines, many Bay Area residents said, would be life-threatening for those who rely on them for medical or emergency needs. 

The impacts could be devastating for those especially in rural areas where cell service is spotty or nonexistent, advocates said. As of early February, nearly 3,000 people across California submitted comments to the commission raising concerns about AT&T’s proposal, many of whom said they were disabled, older, or live in areas where landline service is crucial. 

San Francisco resident Bella Rubin is one of many residents who said they rely on AT&T’s landline services for dire medical needs. Rubin, who is in her 80s, said that after her husband’s heart condition worsened, he began using a machine that transmits signals from his defibrillator to UCSF’s cardiology department — and it’s only by landline. 

“When the internet is down or electric outages have occurred, the transmission has blown,” Rubin said. “The AT&T landline is a medical necessity.” 

“What AT&T is seeking is really, really profound,” said Regina Costa, telecommunications policy director for The Utility Reform Network. “By removing that obligation, that means there is no one that can guarantee service for a customer.”

In San Francisco alone, 34% of households utilize a landline, and almost half of householders 55 and older use a landline, said Nicole Torres, CEO of On Lok, a nonprofit senior services provider.

“Disconnecting landlines could leave some of our vulnerable senior population isolated, unable to reach loved ones, access emergency services, or address critical needs,” said Torres, adding that many frail and isolated seniors do not use cellphones. “During power outages or disasters, landlines can be their lifelines for communication and help.”

Thousands of households in cities including San Rafael, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Fremont and Santa Rosa — and many more — could be affected, according to the PUC.

San Francisco resident Sandra Lipkowitz, who lives alone and has no immediate family, said she has felt devastated and helpless since hearing about the proposal.

“If electricity goes out, I have no way to contact anyone,” Lipkowitz said, calling the proposal corporate greed. “It just feels like we’re being thrown to the side … because we’re the most vulnerable and the big corporation doesn’t care.”

For Lipkowitz, AT&T’s petition to end landline services has evoked the terror of living through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the fires that followed. The Bay Area households and businesses that lost power for days after a stronger-than-forecast bomb cyclone this month ripped through California reinforced those concerns, she said.

“There are people who maybe haven’t experienced not having electricity or didn’t live through the fires,” she said. “With climate change right now — and way more rains and fires, there are way more times when electricity is going to go out.”

(SF Chronicle)

FIELD NOTES FROM THE NORTHCOAST OUTBACK

by Paul Modic

Superbowl Invitation

This is an outrage, this is a crime against nature: We have Carl here, a big sports fan who has humbly just listened on the radio to every 49ers game this year, watches the highlights on his phone, and all he wants to talk about is football and the 49ers, and yet he chooses to be in this rehearsal and miss the beginning of our most cherished national holiday, The Super Taylor Swift Bowl!

Yes, Carl, this is your life! This is the theatre stuff you love, these are your people, and who am I? Just your long-time sports buddy, who has taken you to a 49ers and a Giants game, yet you choose this random theatre rehearsal over watching the beginning of the big game with me. 

Something you might not know about this “gentle man” is that he loves boxing and unlike me, when a player gets hurt on the football field he always watches the replay multiple times, to gawk at the broken bones, twisted ankles, and grimaces of pain on the faces of the warrior gods writhing on the field, while I always turn my head and cough.

He loves that shit, but he loves you all more, the theatrical process, always seeing the positive and enjoying the adventure of experiencing an act evolve into something a little more than just an attention-getting device, and so he will miss the first quarter of the biggest game of the year, of years, of decades, of the century really.

This cannot stand, this is not right, I’m here to perform an intervention, I ask you theatre people, you amateur actors, to release Carl from this last half hour and let him come down to my nearby house where I have a chicken in the oven, barbecued by god!, with potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash with mango chutney sauce. You may ask but where are the greens and yes, there will be an all-organic twelve-veggie salad on the side, by god again, with maybe a fancy beer, and then I’ll give him a dark chocolate bar to take to his next stop, watching the rest of the game with his true loves, his “wives,” the old couple Susan and Jeannie. 

And what are they serving over there? Chips and salsa and cold lima beans from Winco? (Look at Carl, he loves to be fought over!) They probably don’t even care about the team, just want a glimpse of Taylor Swift, and will distract Carl with all sorts of conversation, when he just wants to watch the game. He will not have that problem at my house, only talk about the game is allowed, as I am an extreme control freak, perhaps why he chose his “mommies” over me.

I think this man, someone who we used to say resembled Harrison Ford, has made his point: He’s willing to sacrifice his sports joy (though one bad play by Brock Purdy will plunge him into disconsolate darkness) to show that you, his acting family, are all that matters. So please release him for the kickoff, a glance at the cute Taylor Swift with her bright red lips, and the big game.

Lets act together to help Carl overcome his deep feelings of unworthiness, huddling here in your bosom, and show him, tell him, that he is worthy enough to watch the first quarter of the game. Thank you, and Free Carl!

* * *

More Tales From The Hills: Grape-nuts

I was feeling great in town but became immediately depressed when I got back to my dark little cabin in the woods. I poured milk into a bowl of Grape-nuts and it tasted a little stale. I looked in the bowl and saw mouse turds floating on top. I lurched to the sink and barfed. Just then my uncle came halfway down my trail to visit for the first time. I said I had just barfed up mouse turds and he offered to stick his fingers down my throat. I told him it was bad timing and he went back up the trail. I never saw him again.

* * *

Mites and Mold

The worse time was the greenhouse era with all the mites and mold. After predator mites, lacewing larva, and Pyrethrum didn’t work someone said they were vacuuming their plants. I’d go out there at 11am every other morning, climb on the ladder with a shop vac, and vacuum the webs off the colas with a long improvised attachment as the sun burnt down on me. I decided to remove the roof and glass and grow out in the open.

I unscrewed a batten but it was securely caulked and wouldn’t move. The tempered glass pieces underneath them were also calked tight. I threw a rock at it with no success. I took a hammer and slammed it into the glass. Nothing. Next I took a pickaxe and slammed the pointy end into the glass. That worked. I spread plastic around the edge of the perimeter and smashed about forty sheets of the tempered glass.

* * *

Buying Plants Fiasco

Way back in the day I went over to the goat shed in Briceland to buy some plants from Crazy Will. I picked out a group of twenty plants and said I’d be back to get them in two weeks. He agreed.

Two weeks later I returned. The plants had grown a lot and as I started to load them up he said, “No! Not those, these over here.” He pointed to some smaller ones.

“Hey,we had a deal for these over here!” I said.

“No, these over here!” he said.

“That’s bullshit!” I said. Will picked up a jack and lifted it up threateningly. I picked up a rock about the size of a baseball, cocked my arm, and aimed it at his head. We stood there like that for a few moments. Was this the famous Mexican Stand-off?

Finally we cooled down and I shrugged and paid him $400 for the twenty plants.

(I saw him a couple weeks later in town and he smiled and started over to greet me. I turned and went the other way and ignored him for months.

* * *

Massage Class

Whenever I’m driving to a big Gulch gathering memories of scenes out there over the years come flooding into my head in a pleasant wave of nostalgia. When heading to Beginnings for Nancy’s big 70th birthday party the other day I remembered a massage class that Joan had lead back in ’75 or so:

Upon arrival at the Tower House there were about ten naked people in the room. What could I do but take off my clothes too. Soon I was massaging a beautiful naked Star, although I remember having trouble focussing on her neck from above, necks can throw me. Then I was massaging Goat Don, and after a few minutes he opened his eyes and said “Will you stop dripping sweat on me?!”

* * *

It’s a Boy!

Births were often community events, they became like parties.

“Hey, Jan’s in labor, she’s having her baby!”

“Alright, let’s go over!”

Yerba’s birth of Sage in ’75 became one of those community events. Once I hitch-hiked to Willits three times within one month to be at the birth of a friend’s baby, it was the most amazing experience I ever had. Later people became a bit more private about it.

* * *

Last Tale From The Hills: California Shit Story

Back in the day it was often a cold rainy walk out to the outhouse so a neighbor, thank you Keith, came up with a brilliant solution: Shit on newspaper and burn it. Back then everyone had a wood-burning stove. This worked out well and we learned pretty quickly to push that bundle way back into the stove. There were some odd moments for visitors, like when during a dinner party little six-year-old Rosa, spread her newspaper in the corner and continued the family tradition.

So I burned shit during the long winter and then it was spring and I took a shit on newspaper but realized it was a nice day! Too warm to make a fire.

I put the package in a ziploc and stashed it up the hill behind my truck tire. Keith came by, glanced at it, and knew exactly what it was. I took it to town and settled on the Redway post office dumpster. Just as I was making my illicit drop-off the post master came out to confront me.

“Just this one time Jay,” I pleaded.

MEMO OF THE AIR: The Girl In The Cafe.

“Year by year the monkey's mask reveals the monkey.” — Basho"

Here's the recording of last night's (Friday 2024-02-09) Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first hour, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino): https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0579

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

The Iron Giant. This was Brad Bird's first movie. Of course he was inspired by Gigantor, one of my favorite teevee shows when I was four or five, as I recall, but Wikipedia says it came to the U.S. in 1966, when I was seven or eight. Gigantor was about a little boy who had a fifty-foot-tall robot that could fly carrying him in its hand or on its head. What puzzled me as a child about Gigantor was, the boy controlled him with a metal shoebox with a single button or lever on it. Whatever he needed Gigantor to do – rescue a sabotaged jet, walk three steps and turn right, save a car from a precipice – one motion on the control would make the robot do whatever complicated operation was desired, like magical telepathy. The little boy in The Iron Giant has no control box; the robot came from outer space and is clearly a person you can make friends with, no mere machine. (Hand animation and early CGI, 86 minutes. Voices: Vin Diesel, Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick, Jr. Cloris ~Leachman.) https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-iron-giant.html

Mechas by size. https://theawesomer.com/mechas-from-a-human-perspective/729667/

And a trick. Mentalists at work are always a bit frantic, which might be because of trying to line up current reality with their last who-knows-how-many Groundhog Day runs-through in alternate universes of that kind of time travel, displacing and discarding their doppels, settling on the time where the details finally match the intent and it works. It's a lot to hold in your head at once, especially on stage, observed, and you're troubled with guilt at, in one interpretation, leaving hundreds of alternate versions of yourself behind in those other worlds, humiliated, as well as anticipation of becoming one of them, to serve a future-present loop-through of yourself, who technically isn't any more the original you than a Star Trek matter-transported person is the one the transporter disintegrated for a model to construct a copy at the destination down on the planet. Think of it this way, moment-to-moment reality is the result of all possible realities collapsing into it. They were real, but they're not anymore. It's also a little like the Ship of Theseus problem in reverse, in Hilbert's Hotel, in a blender. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le_QfEpA2ag

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

‘HIP TO BE SQUARE’

I used to be a renegade, I used to fool around

But I couldn't take the punishment and had to settle down

Now I'm playing it real straight, and yes, I cut my hair

You might think I'm crazy, but I don't even care

Because I can tell what's going on

.

It's hip to be square

It's hip to be square

.

I like my bands in business suits, I watch them on TV

I'm working out most every day and watching what I eat

They tell me that it's good for me, but I don't even care

I know that it's crazy

I know that it's nowhere

But there is no denying that

.

It's hip to be square

It's hip to be square

It's hip to be square

So hip to be square

.

It's not too hard to figure out, you see it every day

And those that were the farthest out have gone the other way

You see them on the freeway, it don't look like a lot of fun

But don't you try to fight it, an idea whose time has come

Don't tell me that I'm crazy

Don't tell me I'm nowhere

Take it from me

.

It's hip to be square

It's hip to be square

It's hip to be square

So hip to be square

Tell 'em, boys

.

Here, there, and everywhere

Hip, hip, so hip to be a square

Here, there, and everywhere

Hip, hip

.

Here, there, and everywhere

Hip, hip, so hip to be a square

Here, there, and everywhere

Hip, hip

.

Here, there, and everywhere

Hip, hip, so hip to be a square

Here, there, and everywhere

Hip, hip

.

Here, there, and everywhere

Hip, hip, so hip to be a square

Here, there, and everywhere

Hip, hip

(Huey Lewis)

THE WOMAN POURING YOUR $18 BEER at the Super Bowl makes $14.25 an hour with no health insurance

by Matthias Gafni

LAS VEGAS — If you grab a beer or a soda in Allegiant Stadium’s Section 143 during Sunday’s Super Bowl, there’s a good chance Chayasura Walker will fill your cup. It’s not her only job. The 43-year-old cashier from nearby Henderson works at a clothing store and slings concessions at the Sphere concert venue, too, to make ends meet.

Amid the billion-dollar extravagance of the biggest sporting event in the world, the mother of three and grandmother of two makes $14.25 an hour, slightly above minimum wage but with no benefits.

“I work three jobs and I still qualify for Medicaid,” Walker told the Chronicle in an interview this week after getting off work at the Las Vegas Raiders home stadium in Paradise, Nev., just southwest of the Las Vegas Strip. “That should tell you something.”

Walker’s plight is not unique. About 2,300 workers will be serving hot dogs, mixing cocktails and scrubbing toilets on Sunday, from stadium janitors to ushers to cashiers hired by companies contracted to manage the new stadium as well as a couple dozen independent restaurants.

Some make as little as $13 an hour for part-time, seasonal jobs that leave many needing other employment to support themselves. Minimum wage in Nevada is $10.25 an hour until July, when it bumps up to $12.

Walker’s plight is not unique. About 2,300 workers will be serving hot dogs, mixing cocktails and scrubbing toilets on Sunday, from stadium janitors to ushers to cashiers hired by companies contracted to manage the new stadium as well as a couple dozen independent restaurants.

Some make as little as $13 an hour for part-time, seasonal jobs that leave many needing other employment to support themselves. Minimum wage in Nevada is $10.25 an hour until July, when it bumps up to $12.

A Las Vegas Raiders spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

What was an all-union workforce at the Oakland Coliseum was transformed, with 1,500 of Allegiant’s 2,200 workers outside unions and doing seasonal, part-time and low-wage jobs, labor officials said. Many of those workers are now pushing to join the culinary union, holding a news conference this week designed to play against the Super Bowl hype.

“I’m fighting for fair pay for cashiers like me,” declared Vickey Powell, who said she had done the job for four years, had made $13 an hour and had been unable to take time off when her son died in 2021. “We haven’t seen a raise, and that’s not fair. I can’t wait for the union to come in. I love my job, and the Raiders are my football team, but we need fair treatment.”

Walker said she moved to Las Vegas in 2004, leaving her small town in Michigan. She’s worked all sorts of jobs since — personal assistant, timeshare salesperson, waitress at the Cheesecake Factory. She applied for the Allegiant job in June 2020 as the stadium was opening. She felt like she had found her dream job.

“I’m in love with football. I’m a diehard Vikings fan,” she laughed. “When football starts, I’m in it to win it.

“I thought I was getting some stability,” she said. “I was excited.”

Three years ago, though, she crashed a three-wheeled ATV into a fence, leaving her with spinal injuries and a loss of memory. She had no medical insurance through work and struggled to afford co-payments for her treatment. She returned to work before her body healed, she said, because she couldn’t get by otherwise.

The job also necessitates finding alternative work during the NFL offseason, Walker said. She and her coworkers often go through a temp agency, finding bartending gigs at various festivals during the spring. She cuts back on expenses during lean months, and some co-workers pawn items to make rent, she said.

Before Allegiant was built, state lawmakers were also promised 18,000 construction jobs. But according to an investigation by the Nevada Current, a site covering news and commentary about policy, the construction ended up generating fewer than a quarter of those jobs.

And in March 2022, an employment report presented to the Las Vegas Stadium Authority showed that less than 3,700 people were employed at Allegiant at the end of 2021. The stadium indicated that year that it planned to hire about 2,200 part-time workers, so most of the new jobs were not full time.

In his letter to the Raiders, Taylor, the union executive director, explained how similar jobs in Las Vegas provided better pay and benefits. Custodians working at casinos on the Strip earn $25.24 per hour, or $51,700 a year, he wrote, compared with $15 an hour at Allegiant. Cashiers like Walker would earn just over $27,000 annually with full-time hours, compared with unionized cashiers at the Las Vegas Convention Center who earn $23.54 an hour, or almost $49,000 a year.

On Jan. 25, Morgan, the Raiders president, responded on behalf of the team to the union’s notice that it was starting the organization process for the remaining non-union Allegiant workers.

“While I appreciate and respect your concerns over wages and insurance benefits extended to all workers servicing stadium patrons, I cannot confirm the accuracy of the wage information contained within your letter,” Morgan wrote. “Nor do I know how many of the … employees qualify for free health insurance. I can, however, confirm that the Raiders organization will always respect the legal right of employees to select a bargaining representative of their choosing.”

Stanford economics Professor Emeritus Roger Noll, who wrote the book “Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadium,” said NFL stadiums themselves are not job producers.

“Most team employees are day-of-game, part-time employees at or near the minimum wage and without benefits,” he told the Chronicle. “So the complaint from the culinary workers is expected. Any big increase would have to come from more tourism for NFL games and other stadium events. Since the latter are minimal, the former has to carry the weight here.”

The Allegiant job projections would include non-stadium employment spurred by increases in tourism revenue from visitors to Raiders games and concerts, but Noll said he has yet to see any studies showing such benefits coming to fruition.

At the time of the Raiders’ move to Las Vegas, Noll questioned the pro-stadium estimates of $620 million a year in economic impact, 450,000 new visitors annually, and 46 events. The proponents insisted Las Vegas was unique and its tourism industry would propel Allegiant’s draw, but football stadiums in particular, with so few home games, are not worth public taxpayer dollars, Noll has argued.

While he has not crunched the numbers for Allegiant Stadium since it opened, he said the biggest boon went to Mark Davis, the team owner, as the value of the team since 2019 jumped from $2.9 billion to $6.2 billion, about $1 billion more than the increase in value of the average NFL team.

“Interestingly, the magnitude of the public subsidy is roughly equal to this amount,” including infrastructure improvements, Noll said. “So Clark County can be proud of all it has done to increase the Davis family’s fortune.”

He noted that the Raiders were second to last in home-game attendance at 62,000, below the stadium’s 72,000 capacity, despite having the 18th best away-game attendance. College games have not been scheduled as anticipated. And concerts have also not transpired at large scale, with a total of 26 nights of concerts in 2022 and 2023 combined, and only seven scheduled for 2024, Noll said.

“This actually is not bad — new football venues tend to draw about five to 10 concerts a year,” Noll said. “The key point here is that Vegas is not that different. The claim that experience elsewhere does not apply to Vegas is not supported by these facts.”

This week, seats in Chayasura Walker’s Section 143 were selling for about $7,000 each, according to StubHub. It would take working about half an NFL season for Walker to afford one.

“I love my job. I do,” Walker said. “I just want to have it benefit me because I’m really good at it and I want it to work out.”

(sfchronicle.com)

IN THE SHADOW OF SILICON VALLEY

by Rebecca Solnit

Seeing cars with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian, but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand. Since August, driverless cars have been as available as taxis hailed through apps, but I more often see empty cars than ones with backseat passengers. These robots in the shape of cars don’t move like those with human drivers. While I waited next to one at a busy intersection, the vehicle first halted at the yellow light, then rolled into the intersection, where it stopped when the light turned red, confounding the traffic around it.

Still, I’ve become somewhat used to driverless cars in the years they’ve been training on the city’s streets, first with back-up human drivers, and then without. They are here despite opposition from city officials, including the fire chief, and San Francisco recently sued the California state bureau that gave companies licence to use the streets as their laboratory. 

Firefighters have reported driverless cars attempting to park on firehoses; last June one such car prevented emergency vehicles from reaching victims of a shooting; the vehicles are apparently unequipped to assess these situations and respond by stopping. Direct communication isn’t an option: the only way to get a driverless car to do anything is to contact the company in charge of it.

In early October, a driverless car owned by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, hit a woman who’d just been struck by another car, and in the course of performing what was described as a rote “pullover maneuver” dragged her 20 feet, mangling her badly and leaving her trapped under its wheels. The device was unable to detect that it was on top of a human and would not respond to rescuers, who had to lift the car off her. Cruise withdrew its 950 driverless vehicles, but Waymo, a company launched by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, continues to send its cars onto the streets.

Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles – but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a co-operative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures – mostly meaning “wait!” or “go ahead!” – when I’m out and about, and look for others’ signals. 

San Francisco Airport has signs telling people to make eye contact before they cross the street outside the terminals. There’s no one in a driverless car to make eye contact with, to see you wave or hear you shout or signal back. The cars do use their turn signals – but they don’t always turn when they signal.

The rationales for the introduction of driverless cars include eliminating human error and allowing people with disabilities to get about without having to rely on other human beings. A more convincing rationale is that the corporations which own them can keep income that would otherwise have gone on drivers’ wages. Automation has, of course, been a way to increase owners’ profits since the Luddites protested against mechanical looms. Airports have self check-ins; supermarkets have self check-outs; roads and bridges have, in place of toll-takers, technology that reads your license plate. Customer service phone numbers connect you to digital operatives and a host of other automated systems.

This takes a toll. Americans face a social pandemic of loneliness and isolation. The US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, has declared it a crisis. His reports identify causes including the internet, smartphones and social media. None of these were created with this agenda, but all of them have advanced it. Some of the “examples of harm” listed by Murthy include “technology that displaces in-person engagement, monopolizes our attention, reduces the quality of our interactions and even diminishes our self-esteem.”

The Covid-19 pandemic worsened isolation, but tech had already made redundant many of the ways we used to congregate and mingle, while often portraying those ventures into the world as dangerous, unpleasant, inefficient and inconvenient. 

There is an underlying assumption that each of us aspires to be as productive as possible, and that stripping away everything seen to interfere with productivity is a good thing. This was the pitch made by many new companies in the 1990s, when online shopping and other digital financial transactions first became a big deal. 

The shift has reshaped cityscapes as well as psyches. The American Booksellers Association reported that in 2021 alone, “the movement of dollars to Amazon and away from retailers displaced 136,000 shops occupying 1.1 billion square feet of traditional commercial space.” That’s a lot of local jobs and relationships both to places and people.

The small independent businesses that we’re losing sold goods, but they also gave away for free all sorts of things that are less tangible. There might be cheaper ways to buy shampoo or a better selection of envelopes online, but at an in-person store you can have a social interaction, even build a relationship with the proprietor and chat with other customers, or run into a friend or neighbor. That may happen in big chains such as Starbucks – but the employees aren’t likely to be around for long, the profit doesn’t go back into the community and the design of the place is generic, not reflecting its environment.

The San Francisco of my youth was full of small shops whose friendly eccentricity felt like part of the place. Some of them still exist but they’re rarer now. Many had old photographs of the business or the neighborhood, some had artifacts of the past or pieces of the owner’s art. The little liquor and grocery store in my old neighborhood had a wall of pictures of locals attending its annual barbecue and a ledger in which the proprietor recorded transactions with elderly locals who bought their groceries on credit and paid up at the end of the month. The exchanges between people who knew one another were non-commodities these small businesses offered along with whatever was for sale.

Though The City has survived a series of local and national recessions in recent decades, San Francisco is said to be in a ‘doom loop’ because so much office space and so many shops have been abandoned since the pandemic. Tech layoffs drove some of the shutdown, but the industry also enabled a mass white-collar withdrawal from the workplace – employees working from home, sometimes leaving the region to work remotely. More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises.

(London Review of Books)

CHECK OUT RFK

Editor,

Why is no one talking aboout RFK’s campaign for the presidency? Don’t tell me he’ll be a “spoiler,” or that he’s an “anti-vaxxer” if you have not listened to some of the many interviews with him. Find them on the internet.

S.K. Dodge

Willits

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

But what’s next? The USA is rudderless, the Captain is out of his mind, the ship is crashing against the rocks.

OLD MAN JOE BIDEN’S ONLY CHANCE OF WINNING NOW IS JUST PUTTING TRUMP DOWN

by Michael Goodwin

The thunderous, blind rage with which Democrats and their media stooges are greeting the special counsel report on Joe Biden is a thing to behold.

With apologies to Jack Nicholson and “A Few Good Men,” they can’t handle the truth.

It’s as if Dems and their handmaidens really believed Biden was fit for duty, that the stumbling, mumbling, confusion and hiding were normal.

And now they are wild with fury because they’ve been embarrassed by the revelation of explosive facts they should have known.

That’s a possible explanation, but not the likely one.

A more reasonable view is that their fury stems from the fact that they, too, were part of a great con job, and their dirty little secret has been exposed by the devastating portrait of the president in special counsel Robert Hur’s report.

It doesn’t take a press critic to realize most of the White House press corps spent three years covering up for Biden instead of covering him.

On the few occasions when they allowed themselves to see his decrepitude, they quickly pivoted to defending him against those mean Republicans.

As a group, they are the least curious journalists ever, failing even to ask about the president’s obvious decline.

Instead, they did their Democratic duty by pretending that Old Joe was a good guy doing his best in a troubled world that would be much worse if the fiendish Donald Trump got back in power.

These are the same people who continue to overlook the president’s involvement in son Hunter Biden’s crooked business deals, preferring to paint a picture of him as a doting dad to his troubled boy.

With part of the curtain pulled back — by Biden’s own Department of Justice, no less — the party and media must deal with a changing political landscape.

Hunter’s lawyer pal was ‘at the center’ of talks relating to Biden’s handling of classified docs

The campaign will be polling furiously to see how much damage the president suffered from the finding that he escaped charges on illegally keeping classified documents largely because his memory was so poor that he would be a sympathetic defendant.

Although Hur wrote that he “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials,” he said he was not recommending criminal charges in part because he believes no jury would convict an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

Talk about killing with kindness!

Biden’s team tried to celebrate the fact that there would be no charges to draw a contrast with the pending federal case against Trump for similar offenses.

But the celebration was quickly overwhelmed by the reaction to Hur’s repeated citing of the president’s diminished cognitive functions.

Joe’s foggy memory

Citing two interviews, the special counsel wrote that Biden “did not remember when he was vice president” and “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”

Hur’s findings sent the White House into panic mode.

It quickly set up an unusual evening press conference by the president, where he threw more fuel on the fire by appearing short-tempered and calling Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi “the president of Mexico.”

Days earlier, Biden claimed to have had separate conversations with past leaders of France and Germany in 2021, which was years after both men died.

So his brain fog is a real, enduring reality and my guess is that, as more and more of the public learns about Hur’s findings, polls will increasingly make Biden look unelectable.

After all, Trump is already leading in most national polls and swing states, with Biden’s approval on the border and other issues at historic lows.

While it’s reasonable to wonder how much lower Biden can go, the crucial question is whether he can recover.

The biggest hurdle will be that Hur confirms what most Americans either knew or suspected —that Biden is not capable of serving nearly five more years.

President Kamala?

Indeed, the fallout even included an avalanche of chatter in Washington and on social media about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him.

The amendment lays out a mechanism for the vice president to take over when the commander in chief “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Although no sensible American wants Kamala Harris to occupy the Oval Office, the chatter recalls how often Dems demanded that process be used to remove Trump during his presidency.

For it now to be discussed about Biden is a remarkable turnabout.

Assuming that doesn’t happen, there is still the matter of how Biden’s campaign changes to meet the new reality.

The most radical scenario mentioned is that he will step aside and hand the nomination to Michelle Obama.

As wild as that sounds, it probably makes more sense than the way forward described by one anonymous official.

“The matter is closed,” a campaign aide told The Wall Street Journal.

“He’s going to keep doing what he’s doing. There’s not going to be some major strategy shift here.”

If that’s true, it’s a case of denial.

Or surrender.

Absent any upheavals, the likely course is that Biden will shift to a nonstop negative campaign against Trump.

That has been a staple throughout his presidency, but he has also tried to mix in self-promotions about “Bidenomics” and big-ticket climate programs he got through Congress.

Those positive pitches will get less and less time on the stump as the campaign heats up and his handlers tell him the only way he can lift himself up is to bring Trump down.

That won’t be easy, but it’s all Biden has.

Keep up with today's most important news

Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update.

Meanwhile, Trump is also getting a boost from other unlikely sources.

The Supreme Court is almost certain to overturn a Colorado court ruling that Democrats can block Trump from appearing on state election ballots.

The only debate after Thursday’s oral arguments is whether the vote against the ban will be unanimous or 8-1.

Either would be a dagger into the heart of a concerted effort by Dems across the nation to use the courts to rig the election.

The plot to give Biden a second term by having state officials disqualify his leading opponent reeks of banana republic politics, yet efforts to do just that were pending in 12 states late last month, according to CBS News.

Shame on them.

These election preventers are more dangerous threats to democracy than election deniers.

Developments in the Georgia criminal case over the 2020 election also favor Trump.

Growing evidence about the allegedly corrupt practices of Fani Willis, the Fulton County prosecutor, are casting greater doubt on whether a trial will be held before the election, or ever.

To be sure, Dems have weaponized law enforcement to stack the deck against Trump in every way possible.

But even a few signs that the justice system is still capable of fair play give reason to hope that a violent national crackup is not inevitable.

A WARNING FROM WITHIN MAGA WORLD

by Steve Heilig

On Jan. 6, 2021, journalist Tina Nguyen was sitting in the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., working on a story for Politico magazine on rumors of a rally there by fringe protesters somehow convinced the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump. The rally looked to be a non-event, and Nguyen had long had difficulties getting editors interested in such bizarre fringe elements as QAnon, the Proud Boys, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. “But it was not yet noon, and I’d already seen three people in full-fledged body armor. That was different,” she writes in her book, “The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (and How I Got Out).” By the end of the day, her longtime beat covering the far-right effort to Make America Great Again had suddenly gone mainstream.

Nguyen came by her interests in this arena early: “Either by coincidence or inevitability, my coming of age took place in the birthplace of MAGA: the conservative movement at the dawn of the 21st century, a secret world with a unique culture of fellowship, drive, and ambition that knits the right, like being in politics summer camp with your best friends forever.” 

Raised in a financially struggling Vietnamese American family in Massachusetts, she finds herself, via financial aid and a controlling first boyfriend, at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. CMC, as it’s known, is a ground zero of intellectual libertarian education, and there in 2008 Nguyen first encountered the high-rolling realm of figures such as William Kristol, Peter Thiel, John Bolton and seedier types like Andrew Breitbart. Later, she meets Steve Bannon. She wins a journalism internship, mentors take her on, and she winds up at the Daily Caller, one of the first far-right “news” sites. There she meets Tucker Carlson, who charms, inspires and hires her.

She was very young and not quite aware of what to really believe and what kind of professional and political realm she was being inducted into. Her path was rocky from the start, as she was both insecure — “I was born to rubes, studied with rubes, took jobs with rubes, and still talked like a rube” — and too smart not to note unnerving problems in her new arena. “Immediately I was thrown into the insane asylum,” she writes. Conspiracists and paranoia abounded. Shadowy right-wing funders called the shots and slants, and online clicks ruled all (the latter dynamic alas not unique to MAGA-world). And she soon realized she risked being condemned to the “conservative media ghetto” of writers who “could never again be hired in the mainstream press because of the toxicity of their resume, regardless of what their actual political beliefs were.” Plus, her trusted mentors were too often being exposed as white supremacists, eventually including that first boyfriend years later.

But Nguyen made it out, scoring a job at lofty Vanity Fair. There, any mention of her right-wing journalistic history “was met with blank stares at best and you’re a classless fringe lunatic and how did you get through security stares at worst.” But then, she writes, “the most hilarious news item popped up on Twitter, and I wrote it up with glee: ‘Donald Trump Announces Run for President.’ ” Of course, that soon wasn’t so funny — she’d seen it coming, knew many of the key players, and has gone on to author Politico pieces as part of the White House press corps and still covers Trumpworld for Puck, a newer online news company.

There’s now a full shelf of books about Donald Trump by disaffected former associates who have spoken out after their time with him. “The MAGA Diaries” is unique in coming from someone who witnessed this movement developing from within. Nguyen’s first-person report of the long-term right-wing network effort to recruit and indoctrinate youthful students into ways of thinking considered fringe not so long ago is valuable. Likewise, her aghast discovery of the GOP plan for a constitutional convention that might basically abolish the federal government, other than the elements that aid and abet the wealthy: “The first time I read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ I knew that its author, Margaret Atwood, got the premise wrong,” she writes. “Conservative activists wouldn’t have seized their power through a violent coup — they were going to do it gradually and slowly, using the Constitution as a clever road map.” 

The blatant attempt to overturn a presidential election that violent January 6th and Trump’s continued lies about that effort could have proven her wrong, but fortunately even Republicans who still had some sense of duty and patriotism turned back that madness. Yet of course many still blindly follow the serial fraudster and sex-offending ex-president. Some even think him holy. On that front, Nguyen explores the bizarre “Christian” embrace of a figure who is undeniably the opposite of Jesus in deed, word, and policy. She avoids the term “cult,” but that’s clearly what she describes, a mass movement of disaffected angry people “with a ticking time bomb in their head,” the type who, like, say, the John Birch Society decades ago would never have really emerged from obscurity but who have now been enabled by the internet and continual dumbing-down of our culture. Like most cult escapees and survivors, she was once a somewhat naive believer but is now clearly very worried about her former colleagues and convictions. Her book reads not as overly regretful or apologetic, although she clearly sees things much differently now.

Nguyen concludes with a 2022 conversation she has with her old friend Carlson before he was fired at Fox News, wherein he seems to have wandered into some strange alternate unreality and doesn’t appear to know what he might believe in anymore - other than making lots of money off the naive as always, of course. As for Nguyen, her old MAGA beat “was my entire world, once again — and now it was everyone else’s world, too.”

If that sounds like a warning, that’s because it is.

* * * 

The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out)

By Tina Nguyen (One Signal Publishers; 261 pages)

PUTIN PUPPET

Tucker “Useful Idiot” Carlson Makes The Big Time 

(via Steve Heilig)

EYES ON GAZA

by Selma Dabbagh

There were two types of graffiti in Gaza that I identified when I was there in 2012 with the Palestinian Festival of Literature. The siege of Gaza was in its sixth year, and it already felt like an eternity. There was little fuel and the power station had been bombed, making electricity supplies erratic at best. As expected, one type of graffiti consisted of political slogans but the other type – also exuberant and colourful, if not more so – was all about love. Khaled and Mona are to marry! Hearts, hearts, hearts. I am reminded of it as I look at the wedding photographs of dead Gazans put online by their families, and as I watch social media clips of Israeli soldiers rifling through the colourful lingerie left behind in the homes of Gazans who had been killed or forcibly expelled.

More than a million Palestinians have been pushed into Rafah, on the Egyptian border, with the Israeli army hot on their worn-out heels. A sea of tents stretches out in every direction, reminiscent of photographs after the Nakba in 1948, but more chaotic and shabbier. Those who have survived the Israeli bombings – estimated at over 28 kilogrammes of explosives per capita (and these are young heads, with 40 per cent of the population under the age of 14) – are left with nothing but one another and their blankets.

It is an ongoing campaign where the evidence of genocidal intentions could not be clearer, yet it is fading from sight. Why are we not seeing more of it? There is one answer in the complaints by CNN staffers that the broadcaster’s coverage ‘has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel’. Yet despite these allegations, the network has managed to report that some Gazans have been reduced to eating grass and drinking polluted water.

In 2012 I was shown round the Islamic University of Gaza by a man who I have since realised must have been Refaat Alareer, the poet and professor of English who was killed with members of his family two months ago by an Israeli air strike. I have seen the videos of him speaking hours before his death, his face wet with fear. I have heard one his poems – ‘If I must die/let it bring hope/let it be a story’ – read by the actor Brian Cox after his death. I have been part of theatre events reading his work. I lie awake at night wishing I could go back in time to apologise for not knowing more of who he was, and for what was to become of him and those he loved that we did not avert.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur, has called the assault on Gaza ‘the monstrosity of our century’. There is no safe place. The British Army had provided the Israeli military with the co-ordinates of a facility in al-Mawasi, the home of staff from Medical Aid for Palestinians (a British charity) and the International Rescue Committee. It was, as the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns told the House of Commons, a ‘protected, sensitive and humanitarian site’. It was bombed by an Israeli F-16 on 18 January. Four British doctors were injured in the attack.

On 5 February, a food convoy truck waiting to move into northern Gaza was hit by Israeli naval fire. UNRWA funds, never more needed, were cut by the US and UK governments immediately after the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the risk of acts of genocide. Trucks trickle into Gaza in single or double digits, when thousands a day are needed. Many are turned back. Hundreds queue to enter. When people starve, the babies die before the adults. Their mothers are too malnourished to feed them. The numbers of the dead are, in Albanese’s words, ‘unparalleled, unmatched in any other of the current conflicts’.

Another reason we are not seeing more reports in the Western media of atrocities in Gaza is that it is so dangerous for journalists to operate there and hard for international reporters to access, unless embedded with the Israeli army. If you can’t get there, how do you verify the account of, say, thirty blindfolded, handcuffed and tortured bodies that were apparently found in a school in Beit Lahia in the last week of January? There is evidence of Israeli war crimes on the social media accounts of Israeli soldiers themselves, such as the video of a handcuffed Palestinian man stripped to his underwear, blood pouring from what appears to be a bullet wound his thigh.

The reality in Gaza is outstripping dystopian fiction. Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song, is set in the near future, with Ireland ‘in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny’, according to its publisher’s description. ‘They are lifting people from everywhere now,’ a character says at one point, ‘did you hear the journalist Philip Brophy was taken, a fucking journalist, the NAP have some nerve.’

Since 2021, Forensic Architecture and other groups have been showing how the Pegasus technology developed by NSO, an Israeli company, has been used to track journalists’ phones around the globe, sometimes leading to their assassination. Efforts are being made by Israeli intelligence agencies to increase their legal powers to pry into the lives of journalists with spyware. The veteran journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by a sniper in May 2022. Since last October, the Israeli army has targeted journalists with Spike anti-tank missiles in the sovereign territory of a neighbouring country, showered white phosphorous on a civilian area and killed a young journalist shortly after she uploaded her last video.

The Israeli army has also bombed the home of al-Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh, killing most of his sleeping family. When Dahdouh returned to work, they injured his long-term Palestinian-Belgian colleague, Samer Abudaqa, in a drone strike. Rescue workers were prevented from reaching him for five hours until he bled to death. Dahdouh, wounded in his arm, managed to get to a hospital. Less than a month later they killed Dahdouh’s son, Hamza. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 85 have been killed since 7 October, making this ‘the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992’.

At a vigil in London in late December, the editor-in-chief of the New Arab, Lamis Andoni, decried the disappearance – not arrests, she insisted, they just are taken – of many colleagues at the hands of the Israeli army. Many of these Palestinian journalists, she says, supported and helped Western journalists as their fixers when they were in Gaza. Yet not one op-ed, Andoni said, had appeared in the mainstream British or American press. Arrest? Lynch’s fictional NAP is starting to sound rather quaint.

At the end of last month I went to an event at the Photographer’s Gallery, where the grandson (and namesake) of the Armenian Gazan photographer Kegham Djeghalian (1915-1981) took us through what is left of the archive of Studio Kegham. For many years the studio photographed the lives of the people of Gaza: girls laughing at the beach in 1950s dresses, dances, picnics, Sadat on an official visit, children holding hands beside the sea, group photos of builders, nurses, demonstrators and students on the Mediterranean over the years. Djeghalian’s work also includes the iconic photographs of tents after the Nakba of 1948. The lion’s share of the archive was inherited by Marwan Tarazi, a colleague of Djeghalian’s. Digital records remained in Gaza, in homes understood to have been destroyed. Tarazi was killed together with his wife in the bombing of the Saint Porphyrius Church on 20 October. It is believed that most of the archive and memory of Studio Kegham went with him.

(London Review of Books)

HOME SECURITY FIRST

Editor,

I see our Congress is now trying to approve aid for Taiwan in addition to aid for Israel and Ukraine. Where did this come from?

The US switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. As of January 2024, very few of the world’s countries officially recognize Taiwan. Are the warmongers trying to start yet another war?

The genocide in Palestine goes on, aided by our Administration, and funded by our tax dollars. The war in Ukraine, started by hawks Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland and the CIA via the Maidan revolution, is lost.

US sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba have caused the people from these countries to augment “our border problem.” If we stopped sanctioning these countries, conditions there would not be so dire as to causes their people to flee.

Stop this madness. Tell your representatives to invest in American and Americans, not to kill innocents in other countries and sanction governments which are not under USA’s control. Let’s work on our own country.

Joan Vivaldo

San Francisco

EDDIE WAITKUS was a solid-hitting, slick-fielding first baseman who had a successful 11-year big-league career beginning in 1941. 

It would have been longer, but Waitkus spent three years (1943-45) serving in the military during World War II. Given he fought for his country between ages 23-25, those would have been prime baseball years for him. It should be noted, moreover, that Waitkus didn’t spend his time playing baseball games on service teams far from the fighting, as other big league players did. Shipped to the Pacific and assigned to the 544th Engineering Boat and Shore Regiment, he was in the thick of heavy combat on New Guinea, Morotai, Bougainville and Luzon (Philippines). Waitkus finished the war with 10 meritorious service awards, including four bronze stars and four overseas bars.

With the war over, Waitkus returned to major league baseball in 1946 and resumed his career with the Chicago Cubs. Over the next three years, he established himself as a solid player, smacking 166 hits and batting .295 in 1948. But the Cubs needed pitching, so after that season, they traded Waitkus and Hank Borowy to the Phillies for Monk Dubiel and Dutch Leonard. (The Phillies got the better end of that deal.)

Joining the up-and-coming Phillies must have agreed with Waitkus. By mid-June, he was hitting a career-high .306, and leading in balloting to play first base for the NL All-Star Team. But what happened to him on June 14, 1949 is what he’s best remembered for as a ballplayer. The Phillies were in Chicago to play the Cubs, and the team was staying at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Waitkus received a note at the front desk from a Ruth Ann Burns whom he did not know. The note said she was also staying at the hotel, and they must meet because she had something important to tell him. Waitkus looked at the hotel register, and discovered Burns had written she lived on East Portland Street in East Cambridge, MA. That was the street on which Waitkus grew up, so he decided to visit her room thinking she might be a family acquaintance with a message to deliver.

Burns allowed him into her room when he knocked, and Waitkus sat in an armchair. She went to the closet, pulled out a .22-caliber rifle, then said, “I have a surprise for you. You are not going to bother me anymore,” and shot him in the abdomen. Burns returned the rifle to the closet and called the front desk to say she had just shot a man in her room.

The woman’s real name was Ruth Ann Steinhagen and she was 19 years old. Steinhagen lived in Chicago and had become infatuated with Waitkus when he played for Chicago. She attended Cubs’ games to watch him play, and her room at her parents’ house was a virtual shrine to the ballplayer. Although she never met Waitkus, at some point Steinhagen’s infatuation became an obsession, and she decided if she couldn’t have him no one could. Steinhagen was arrested and examined by doctors who assessed her to be mentally ill. She was committed to a state psychiatric institution instead of going on trial. Eventually released, Steinhagen lived out the rest of her days in obscurity and died in 2012.

Waitkus’s shooting was immortalized by Bernard Malamud in his 1952 book, The Natural, and by the 1984 film of the same name starring Robert Redford.

Waitkus did not play again in 1949, but the Phillies welcomed him back to Shibe Park by hosting “Eddie Waitkus Night” on July 19, 1949. He wore his Phillies’ uniform, although the jersey hung loosely from his body because of all the weight he had lost since the shooting. The occasion drew 20,000 fans. Monetary contributions solicited to buy gifts for Waitkus were sufficient to present him with a new Dodge convertible, a television set, golf clubs, a full wardrobe including about 10 suits, a two-week vacation to Atlantic City, and many other gifts.

Waitkus had come close to dying and endured a long and arduous recovery. Miraculously, he played in 1950 and was a key member of the pennant-winning Phillies. Waitkus continued playing for several years thereafter, but the effects of the shooting tormented him physically and emotionally for the rest of his life. After he retired following the 1955 season, Waitkus struggled with depression, anxiety and alcoholism, problems that grew worse as the years went by. His wife took the children and left him in 1960. Waitkus suffered a nervous breakdown in 1961 and became reclusive, living alone in a rented room. He entered a VA Hospital in 1972 and was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He died that same year at just 53 years old.

— Bob Warrington