Mendocino County Today: Friday, Feb. 16, 2024

Rain Coming | Doc's Shots | Corrected Ballots | Park Update | VSO Issue | Become Tiresome | Ed Notes | Prognosis Positive | Sleep Normally | Outage Panic | Calypso Orchid | Public Safety | Mockel Endorsement | Weed Everywhere | Junkie | Customer Service | Yesterday's Catch | Irony | Mouse Club | Big Tech | Rat Race | Paint Job | Dependents | Moral Collapse | Barbarism | Cowboy Nation | Eggs Ackley | Zionist Scheme | New America | Independence Float

THE ACTIVE PATTERN will continue with the arrival of two sequential, strong storm systems late tonight and into early next week. Periods of moderate to heavy rainfall and gusty to strong southerly winds can be expected with these systems. In additional, mountain snow is expected for elevations above 4500 feet. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Friday morning I have a cloudy 50F with .10" more rainfall. Cloudy today, rain Saturday, cloudy Sunday then a bunch more rain for a few more days. I do not see any BIG WIND in the forecast, yet.

HYDROLOGIC OUTLOOK (National Weather Service, Eureka): Two sequential strong storm systems will impact the region with periods of heavy rainfall and periods of strong winds. Soils are already saturated in many locations, and the additional rainfall will likely lead to numerous slides plus urban and small stream flooding. There is also a risk for minor flooding from main stem rivers. The first storm system will bring 1 to 3 inches of rain from Friday night through Saturday night. The second system will be focused more over the King Range through Lake and Mendocino counties, and will bring an additional 2 to 5 inches of rain from Sunday afternoon through early Tuesday.

CORRECT BALLOTS ARRIVING FOR MENDOCINO COUNTY VOTERS

by Mike Geniella

About 53,000 newly printed ballots for the March 2 primary are hitting Mendocino County voters’ mailboxes this week, as county election officials scramble to correct a snafu that is being blamed on simple human error at the last step of a ballot mailing process managed by an outside vendor.

The corrected ballots have been sent to every single registered voter in the county, and they include a bright yellow flyer titled “Please Read,” said County Clerk Recorder Assessor Katrina Bartolomei. If registered voters have not received the corrected ballot, they should call the Elections Office at 707-234-6819, Bartolomei said.

“Sure, there are questions that still need to be answered but we have the ballot problem corrected, and county voters can be assured the corrected ballots they are receiving are the ones to be used,” Bartolomei.

Bartolomei said in her 19 years working for the County she never experienced “something like this.”

The County Elections Office and the Secretary of State are investigating what happened, but Bartolomei said the first priority was getting corrected ballots to voters at a state-approved vendor’s expense.

Mendocino County used Integrated Voting Systems of Dinuba in Fresno County for 15 years without problems. Two years ago, the county switched to a different vendor for a short time and then returned to using Integrated Voting last Fall. 

“We looked at other vendors and attempted to contact a few without success. We returned to Integrated Voting because we felt it was more responsive,” said Bartolomei.

The company in recent years has had ballot printing problems in Colorado and Utah, according to a research of online news organizations. Last October, the Board of Supervisors in Fresno County decided not to extend a contract with the Dinuba-based firm because of its “spotty record.”

Bartolomei said she was aware of the issues surrounding Integrated Voting, but she said Mendocino’s experience until now has always been positive. She noted every county in the state contracts out for the services, and that Integrated Voting is one of 12 vendors approved by the Secretary of State Office for ballot printing.

“There are strict regulations about which companies can perform these services and the Secretary of State must approve a company before a county uses it services,” said Bartolomei.

At this point Bartolomei said what is known is that the company used a third-party vendor to assist in the Mendocino ballot printing, and that vendor sent an incorrect data file for printing and mailing. Bartolomei said the third-party vendor was selected and hired without any county involvement.

“We don’t have any control over subcontractors,” said Bartolomei.

Integrated Voting executives said the correct ballots were reprinted and mailed at the company’s expense, and not the County.

Bartolomei provided a fact sheet outlining how the county will ensure that no one is able to vote more than once.

“When the Elections Office receives a ballot the privacy label is removed, the addressed scanned and the file is uploaded into the elections management system. If a challenge code comes up in the election management system, the ballot is put aside for the elections official to review.

Additionally, Elections Office staff check the signature on each ballot envelope by hand. If there is a discrepancy in the signature it is challenged in the elections management system and brought to the election official for signature verification. If the Elections Official verifies the signature, the challenge is removed, and the ballot is filed by precinct to be opened and counted. If the signature does not match, the Elections Office contacts the voter to re-sign and/or complete a new registration form (a person’s signature may change over time).

If a voter sends in one ballot and then sends in a second ballot, the system will recognize that the person has already voted and challenge the second ballot. Elections staff will research to verify the reasons for any subsequent ballot. If the reason is a result of the mailing of incorrect ballots, the incorrect ballot will be voided.”

OUR CONTINUED APOLOGIES for the extended delay in access to the new elements at the Boonville Community Park. 

Again, serious errors were made during initial installation that halted any continued work and we are in negotiations with the installer at this time to resolve the pending issues. In the meantime, please keep clear of the new elements and marked off areas. Thank you for your continued patience as we work to keep our play areas safe while we bring new improvements.

(Elizabeth Jensen)

THE CONTROVERSY surrounding Mendo’s abrupt relocation of the Veterans Service Office from their comfortable house on Observatory Avenue in Ukiah to make room for the small Air Quality office staff remains unresolved. Pieces of the puzzle are still in motion. The “Coastal” Veterans Service Officer has been moved to the Ukiah office and a little more space in the old Hospital on Dora Street has been opened up to make room for her. But that basically defeats of purpose of having a “Coastal” VSO. This aspect of the issue hasn’t even reached public comment so far. Supervisor Maureen Mulheren who first said she would try to get the subject on the February 26 Board Agenda is now telling people that that won’t happen until at least March 26 and more likely April. So far the County seems to be taking the position that the cramped and inhospitable space in the old Dora Street hospital can be made to work while the Vets and their supporters insist that the Office should simply be put back into the house on Observatory and the Air Quality District be moved into the Dora Street offices. Whether Supervisor Mulheren will provide the requested budget info justifying whatever cost savings were claimed — after the move — or whether any other options will be mentioned is unknown at this time. Adding an interesting political angle to the dispute is the upcoming Supervisors race with Mulheren running against Ukiah veteran Jacob Brown who has been outspoken in his criticism of the VSO move. Local observers have noted the suspicious delay of the Agenda Item on this subject which has been personally taken over by Mulheren. The agenda item has been conveniently postponed until after the March 5, primary election where Mulheren is running against Brown in a two-person winner-take-all primary election. If Mulheren and the County stubbornly stick to their unpopular relocation of the VSO to the Dora Street store rooms and are hit with another round of public outcry, it will be after the Mulheren-Brown election. 

(Mark Scaramella)

ED NOTES

AMONG the many things I just don’t understand, count the large numbers of people taking photos of the most unimaginative, unimaginably boring, done-to-death, cliched tableaus whose pure conceptual tedium nearly causes one’s eyes to cross at even thinking about some poor trapped soul having to look at the finished product. The other day, on my way in to see a show at the wildly over-rated and almost always disappointing SF MOMA, and being a little early, I lingered in the plaza across the street. Darned if there weren’t at least ten shutterbugs going through all kinds of contortions and techno-prep to get artsy shots of seagulls perched on an oblong fountain. Seagulls. Fountains. Seagulls on fountains. Seagulls on anything! Are you stark, staring nuts!? The only picture more depressing would be a flock of pigeons, another surefire camera draw at places like Union Square where great flocks of these flying, plague-riven rats thrive well beyond the point of public health, pedestrian comfort and common sense. There oughta be laws. 

REPORTS FROM THE OR say that the Editor’s tracheotomy at UCSF hospital went well with no difficulties. He is recovering from the surgery and being “monitored.” Reportedly, the Editor will be back in communication in some fashion by Saturday. 

FRANK HARTZELL: 

I was horrified and disappointed at the behavior of Fort Bragg people during the early February power outage. Did you see the rushes on the grocery stores and gas stations? What is WRONG with you people? We have endured these power outages for almost 40 years. Sometimes two weeks in the 80s and no panic like this. (I was not living here at the time but my parents were and I heard the stories.) Back before we came here in 1985, the power outages were even worse. There was a time when the Union Lumber Mill folks plugged the town into Mill power and kept the lights on. In my decades here, up until now, the same thing happened every time Safeway's generator fails, the Harvest one works and folks hang out at Harvest and maybe a couple of other places. The one gas station has gas. Safeway once had a BBQ of all the meat in the parking lot because the generator had broken for the umpteenth time, sometime in the 90s, I think. A different world. People didn't turn into crazed mobs then. I was here for a couple. Did you see the lines down the highway for gas, the Walmart Black Friday like koo koo food rushes? This is a different place than it used to be, but it’s not really the new people doing this. Go figure! Folks, panic is never the right thing to do. Guys were filling up cars, cans, vehicles on trailers, and for what? Stay home silly people. Dr. Jennifer Kreger has been working on Hubs and Routes to prepare for a genuine disaster which we WILL have here someday. If people act like they did this time, there is little hope. Anyway, the storm previous to this one nuked the road into the MacKerricher parking lot/boardwalk off Ward, right by our house. But they had already fixed it before this storm, which didn’t seem to add to the damage.

LISTEN TO THE COPS, SACRAMENTO

Editor,

I seriously doubt that anyone, no matter what their political views, wanted to see public safety failing. That simply isn’t the case. We all want the same things, absent the rare true anarchist, we all want to have safe families homes and communities. The question is how we get there? We have reached a time when academia is weighing in on things they have studied or theories which have been written by extremely educated people who truly want to make a difference. This is all well and good. However, there are other experts in these fields who must be consulted as well. The experts who serve on the front lines every day. Without their input the best made plans will fail. 

I have spent a lot of time swinging a hammer over the years. I have seen many carpenters lock horns with architects and engineers who draw plans which look good on paper, however are completely impossible to build. This happens because one side doesn’t realize what the other must do in order to complete their task. A friend of mine is a civil engineer and while he was attending university, his father made him work summers with him building houses. His father made clear his thoughts that no engineer should receive his license and stamp until he knew what it took to build things. What looks good on paper at times is completely impossible in the real world.

Strangely it appears the architects of laws in our state aren’t listening to the people on the front lines. Fire, EMS, behavioral Health, law enforcement personnel, all should have a say in this. However it appears no one in state government wants to hear that things aren’t working. If I was building an aircraft midflight, as our state often does, I think I would like to know if the tail rudder was falling off. 

There was a time when we all worked together. Lawmakers worked with each other across the aisle and our representatives would serve the public. State governors would consult with Sheriffs and Police Chiefs and truly solicit their input on things which would affect the public safety. That is no longer happening in California. Our governor and many state leaders seem to have become deaf to us, actually worse than deaf, they simply refuse to meet with anyone who has an opposing opinion or who looks at legislation with any critical thinking. This has to change. 

I recently read a statistic which showed that more than 150 people die every day in the United States from drug overdose. Overall life expectancy in the U.S. has declined for three years in a row largely due to the opioid epidemic. This article also indicated overdoses kill more Americans than car crashes or gun violence. This loss of life is roughly equal to a Boeing 727 crash where all passengers were lost, every day of the year. In Mendocino County we continue to see the largest percentage of our accidental deaths are due to overdose. Drug abuse and overdose are issues that destroy entire families. These also lead to property crime and violence. Legislators have attempted to move the focus of these problems from our courts to public health. 

My question to the public is, does it look like this is working? 

Many folks have fallen under the spell that many folks who are committing crimes are victims. Sorry, that theory doesn’t hold much water. My father often preached to my siblings and I about the things we would truly be victims of. Our laziness and our foolishness would be the two bullies in our lives who we should avoid at all costs. Is anyone preaching this any longer? 

Over the past several years, many laws were written which would enhance the penalties for narcotics, thefts, property crimes and violent crimes, nearly all were shot down by legislators, primarily in the public safety committees. Either this has to stop or someone needs to come up with a magic cure. Losing a 727 full of people every day can’t be the direction we continue. 

Sheriff Matt Kendall

Ukiah

OF COURSE: 

POT PROHIBITION ZONES

Letter to the Editor

In part one on the above subject, we ended with the pitfalls and perils of continuing to promote the Commercial Cannabis industry in Mendocino County on the scale at which it is currently being promoted. We continue here. It wasn’t enough that we had so much marijuana being grown for so long already in this area. It was decided by the “Powers That Be” (aka Carmel Angelo and the BOS at the time allegedly) to push into Phase 3. This would presumably solve so many problems, provide jobs and perhaps even solve the County’s budgetary problems? Yet, the “industry’s” long history has already proven that this is just not going to happen and that it brings far more problems than solutions. Flow Cana was touted as a great hope for a new business and provider of local jobs. The owners came in, made a quick buck and then skipped town. Let’s not kid ourselves that this is not what is happening with many of these big new “legal” grows as well.

Admittedly, the Mendocino County Cannabis ordinance was developed prior to four of the current Supervisors being in office. However, one Supervisor stated her intention during our hearing, "My intention is/was that the goal was to move illegal grows out of the hills." At the same hearing, an undersheriff commented on the fact that legal grows can very quickly turn illegal. Not a comforting thought as they have been allowed in so close to and amongst our residential residences. With millions of dollars accepted from the State in order to help the County help the growers get issued permits to become “legal”, a whole new costly division of local government has been formed. The “Cannabis Division” has a Director, support staff, many code enforcement officers and surely must be using a lot of County Counsel’s time. We are sure the majority of citizens would have voted for more dollars to be allocated to Law Enforcement rather than a costly new branch of government and Code Enforcement officers, had we been asked. Our local Sheriff, Matt Kendall, has been very vocal about the fact that the Sheriff’s Office does not have adequate personnel to combat problems which arise from Cannabis grows in Mendocino County. Two deputies allegedly for all of Mendocino County for such problems are severely inadequate. Given our County’s budget deficit, it would be nice if the Board of Supervisors would report to the citizenry of Mendocino County the revenue currently being generated by the Cannabis industry versus the expenditures to maintain the Cannabis Division. Is it really providing any additional dollars to the County coffers, given salaries and benefits the County is paying and will continue to pay in the future for retirements?

These new larger grows, which we were lectured to as not being nearly as big as those in other areas such as Lake County, were deemed more suitable for Ag lands zoned anywhere from RR5 to Ag40. This because these lands have been previously “disturbed” and are not as environmentally sensitive as other outlying lands. Never mind that some communities such as Round Valley, Redwood Valley, Potter Valley, Ukiah and Willits have dense residential neighborhoods that are being “disturbed” by these grows due to their close proximities. These neighborhoods are also certainly environmentally sensitive when well water usage by some of these grows is not being monitored, and many nearby homes depend on well water only. Let us also not forget the irrefutable evidence that plastics are not good for the environment, or that marijuana growing is an attractive nuisance.

We have become very concerned citizens here in Redwood Valley that our voices are not being heard and we are not being given any say as to how our community develops. Most importantly, that more large grows may be approved when we do not want them. During our hearing before the BOS to request a Cannabis Prohibition zone, not only were we denied, but the Supervisors were unwilling to consider a suspension of accepting any new applicants in the neighborhood. Our proposed prohibition area is of only approximately 4 and 1/2 sq. miles located within a 10th of a mile of downtown Redwood Valley. We see the writing on the wall. We can easily become the next Round Valley. The County will continue to promote more Cannabis grows without taking into consideration whether the majority of citizenry want it or not. We encourage you, readers, to go to the following website to see photos from Santa Barbara County. This is our concern. Please educate yourselves as to what our politicians are capable of promoting and their total disregard for the will of the majority of people. 

Respectfully submitted by Concerned Redwood Valley Citizens (CRVC)

Christine Boyd, Cynthia Grant, Star Gilley, Frances Owen, Richard Sagan, Cyndi Barra Woskow. Michael Woskow and others.

Redwood Valley

THE TOURIST

by Olivia Dugan (2000)

She walked in, diamonds first, tapping the tips of her long, slender fingers of one hand against the elegant fingers of the other. Her expression: a mix of casual boredom and mild amusement (amused, most likely, with this little town of Boonville, this little shop, these little people). She was middle-aged, attractive, and draped in delicate, dark-colored fabric. She stopped in the very center of Otto’s Ice Cream Shop and sighed, then said in a loud but graceful voice, “Oh, what do I want, what do I want, what do I want…?”

She was the type of person who is used to getting what she wants.

She spoke as if she were in the kitchen of a grand house addressing a staff of thirty servants.

Again, “Oh, what do I want?”

(Is this a quiz?)

It was just the two of us that autumn afternoon. I smiled. I waited patiently. Customer service is important.

“Give me a cappuccino, but without the foam,” she ordered.

I kept smiling. “A cappuccino without foam?” I said.

“That’s right,” she said.

Now, anyone who knows anything about cappuccino knows that a cappuccino can’t be made “without foam.” A cappuccino, done correctly, is nothing more than plain espresso topped with foam. A “wet” cappuccino is espresso with foam and a bit of steamed milk—not recommended. Wet cappuccino, wet dog, wet blanket, wet firewood…

“So,” I asked, “You’d like just plain espresso? Or would you like espresso with milk?”

“No,” she said, already sounding frustrated, “I would like a cappuccino with no foam.” She turned around and looked out the window. I’m sure she was rolling her eyes, wondering why I couldn’t just do it like Starbucks.

Not all out-of-towners are unpleasant. Many enter Boonville as they would a stranger’s house, appreciatively and with a show of good manners. They take a look around, enjoy some food and shopping, and leave a nice gift — money — behind as a thank you. But in every batch of incoming tourists there are a few challenging individuals.

Finally I said to the woman’s back, “I generally make a cappuccino by topping straight espresso with foam. Could you please tell me exactly what you want?”

It turned out that she wanted a double espresso with steamed milk. She was obviously displeased with me for being such a dumb and difficult person, but she paid for her drink and left me forever. 

Later that same day a man came in, tapped the top of the ice cream freezer with heavy palms and stared down at all the yummy flavors. He tapped and stared, tapped and stared. He was dressed in khaki shorts, a t-shirt and a pair of sandals. It wasn’t an outfit he would wear around his house or to work or to the movies. Serious tourists have special wardrobes for traveling.

After what seemed like several minutes he said, “Yeah, can I get a chocolate milkshake please?”

I began to scoop chocolate ice cream.

“Wait,” he said. “Can I get that with vanilla ice cream?”

“No,” I said. 

“Well isn’t that how you usually do it?”

“No,” I said. “I usually make a chocolate milkshake with chocolate ice cream.”

“Really?” he said, amazed.

It turned out he wanted vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup mixed with milk. That was OK. I made his shake and smiled and he was happy.

Later that same day a man came into the ice cream shop with a tiny white dog. The little white dog had been in the car, and was getting some fresh air. The man tied the dog to a tree outside, but the leash was long and the dog pranced into the shop. The man ordered an ice cream sundae. He sat at a table. He lifted the tiny white dog onto a red cushioned chair and scooted the chair close to the table. He saw me watching.

“He always sits at the table,” the man explained. 

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

The man pulled a children’s book from the shelf in the corner and immersed himself in it while spooning dainty bites of ice cream and chocolate into his mouth. He read a bit of the story aloud to the dog, who seemed completely disinterested.

Outside a confused-looking couple huddled together on a bench eating vanilla cones and clutching the collars of their two matching collies. They looked around suspiciously. Clearly they felt out of place, but were fulfilling the obligation of stopping in “this little town” and taking in the sights. And the ice cream. As they prepared to leave, the woman stood up quickly and stomped her foot on the pavement, then twisted as if she were grinding a large insect to its gruesome death. The couple and their collies marched away. And there was nothing—not a thing—in the place where the woman had stomped. 

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, February 15, 2024

TYLER CALES, Willits. Probation violation.

BAILEY COMER, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

CHARLES FOSTER, Willits. Metal knuckles, protective order violation, probation revocation.

STEVEN GESELL, Vallejo/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

SANTOS GONZALES-CARBAJAL, Boonville. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

SEAN HAMMON, Ukiah. Pedestrian on roadway, failure to appear.

JAMES HOFFMAN SR., Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, parole violation, smuggling controlled substance into jail.

ROBERT JAMES SR., Ukiah. Failure to appear.

JEREMY LOPRESTI, Ukiah. Failure to appear, resisting.

JORGE MONTIEL-AVALOS, Ukiah. DUI, controlled substance.

LEE RUPERT, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

ELIAS RUTHERFORD, Fort Bragg. Probation violation.

KRISTOPHER SHEPPARD, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

CHRISTOPHER WOOD JR., Mendocino. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

DANIEL YEOMANS, Fort Bragg. County parole violation.

IRONY HAS ONLY EMERGENCY USE. Carried over time, it’s the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

— Lewis Hyde

BIG TECH ACCELERATES ISOLATIONISM

by Rebecca Solnit

By producing such extremes of wealth, big tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who — after buying Twitter for an inflated $44 billion — invited in misinformation, disinformation and hate, providing a platform for extreme right-wingers, racists and conspiracy theorists, while also using his Starlink satellite technology first for and then against the Ukrainian military in their conflict with Russia. “There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations,” Ronan Farrow wrote in the New Yorker, “or for the degree of dependency that the US now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space.” Farrow also reported that people who know Musk say his ketamine use “has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, along with his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.”

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, the fifth richest, who has turned a blind eye to Facebook’s role in election corruption around the world and in the genocide in Myanmar, and to Instagram’s role in the teenage mental health crisis. His company recently lost $46 billion on the Metaverse, the virtual-reality venture he has earnestly promoted. “Pretty soon,” he said last September, “we’re going to be at a point where you’re going to be there physically with some of your friends, and others will be there digitally as avatars or holograms, and they’ll feel just as present as everyone else.” Like technocrats before him, Zuckerberg insists that online connection is a perfect substitute for human contact.

Here’s Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, who put $10 million into the lawsuit that in 2016 bankrupted Gawker, which had outed him as gay. This might make you think he cared about privacy, but he also founded Palantir, which surveils immigrants for the Department of Homeland Security, assisted in Cambridge Analytica’s weaponization of Facebook user data on Trump’s behalf and, according to the Intercept, “has helped expand and accelerate the NSA’s global spy network, which is jointly administered with allied foreign agencies around the world.” 

Big tech is ferociously protective of its own privacy while abusing ours. Frank Wilhoit’s claim that “conservatism consists of one proposition: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect” applies precisely to the industry and its captains.

While Musk dreams of space travel and colonies on other planets, Thiel dreams of immortality. Many tech billionaires do not believe they should be bound by the laws of nations or biology, and apparently want to continue consuming an outsize amount of the world’s resources indefinitely. “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” Thiel wrote in an online libertarian journal in 2009. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He didn’t choose democracy.

For a while, Thiel backed the libertarian wet dream known as seasteading, building artificial islands beyond government control. Thiel’s attempt to build a post-apocalyptic bunker in a remote part of New Zealand’s South Island was rejected, but Bill Gates, now only the world’s eighth richest person, has his own island in Belize. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the world’s fourth richest person, owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, resort hotels and all, which he’s made an inhospitable place for anyone who’s not enormously wealthy. 

According to Wired, Zuckerberg’s private compound covering 1400 acres of the Hawaiian island of Kauai includes multiple mansions and luxury treehouses, plus an underground bunker. (Tech billionaires often seem more interested in surviving the apocalypse than preventing it.) Non-disclosure agreements bind the construction workers who built it, and a long wall shuts off outsiders from any view of the sea while making access to the public beach extremely difficult.

You can’t really be in favor of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability. I’ve long believed that democracy depends in part on co-existing with strangers and people unlike you, on feeling that you have something in common with them. The internet has helped people withdraw from diverse communities and shared experiences to huddle in like-minded groups, including groups focused on hating those they see as unlike them, while encouraging the disinhibition of anonymity.

Sometimes disconnection is itself the business model, as with the San Francisco-based Airbnb, which has undermined neighborhoods around the world, from major cities to rural communities, by turning long-term housing, where people had roots and relationships, into short-term rentals, often jacking up the price of housing and taking housing stock out of the area at the same time. A friend of mine who lives in Joshua Tree, the semi-rural community in the desert east of Los Angeles, has found herself surrounded entirely by short-term rentals, so she no longer has neighbors in the usual sense of the word.

The choices tech titans make in their personal lives – gated communities, private schools, private jets, mega-yachts, private islands – show that a segregated, shrouded life is their ideal. But they profit off technologies which, while encouraging our own social withdrawal, are focused on capturing as much information about us as possible. That is, we are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been. I have never to my knowledge seen any of these billionaires, but by necessity I use their platforms and software and move among their employees. I live in a city and to some extent in a world that has been radically reshaped by their urges and ideals, which are not my urges and ideals.

When I use cash to buy something in a shop, I sometimes joke to the cashier that this stuff is more secretive than crypto. If you’re paying Bay Area bridge tolls, using parking meters (which often require you to punch in your license plate and use a credit card), getting coffee or anything else with a credit or debit card, you’re creating a record of your activities. In the shops that use Square for card purchases, the devices already know your email address. (Bob Lee was chief technology officer for Square for a few years.) If you don’t adjust its settings, your smartphone is tracking your journeys for Google or Apple. Google and Meta are collecting and monetizing all the data they can, and while you can opt out of some of their surveillance, and that of most of the websites you visit, the default setting of the commercial internet is the capture and commodification of your life.

Facial recognition software and DNA collection are undermining other kinds of privacy. China has demonstrated that the new technologies can create a surveillance state far beyond anything previously imagined. At the same time, cryptocurrency is being promoted as a means of escaping whatever control nation-states have over their residents’ financial transactions, a libertarian privacy currency with almost no safeguards. Some have grown rich on it; others have lost their life savings. Scams and lawsuits abound.

In an essay for the New Republic in 2022 about Sacks and his isolationist, new-right peers, Jacob Silverman wrote:

“The symbolic epicenter of this movement is San Francisco, but really it’s the entire curdled utopian dream of California. In the eyes of rich techies who have seen their beloved metropolis fall into decay, vast inequality and social misery, the state is dead. Their disappointment and alienation has melded with traditional Republican disgust toward liberal cities (and their non-white residents) to paint a picture of irredeemable urban squalor. These frightened urbanites are echoing the Trumpist drumbeat that cities — particularly in California — are dangerous, dark places that must be tamed.

But they never really loved San Francisco, at least not as a place of diversity and free circulation, and they’ve never acknowledged their role in its dramatic economic divides, housing crises and desperate homeless population.

A BLONDE was in need of some quick cash, so she walked around her neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking people if they had any work she could do. Eventually, she found a man who offered to pay her $50 to paint his porch. The man gave her a can of paint and a brush, told her to let him know when she was done, and went back inside the house to watch TV with his wife.

Once the man had returned to his wife, he snickered loudly. His wife asked what the man had done, and when he told her, she remarked, “George, you are such an s.o.b. You know perfectly well our porch circles more than half of this house and will take that poor doofus woman forever to paint.”

About 30 minutes later, the blonde traipsed into the house with the paint can and brush, and proudly informed the man that she had finished her job. Amazed, the man handed her $50 and complimented her on the speed with which she had worked. The blonde replied, “Well, it was really hard, but I got it done easily after awhile. Oh, by the way, it’s a Ferrari, not a Porsche.”

DODGING BIDEN’S MORAL COLLAPSE IS NO WAY TO DEFEAT TRUMP

by Norman Solomon

For more than four months, President Biden has been the main enabler for Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian people in Gaza. Every day, hundreds of civilians are killed by U.S. weaponry and, increasingly, by hunger and disease. The cruelty and magnitude of the slaughter are repugnant to anyone who isn’t somehow numb to the human agony.

Such numbing is widespread in the United States. Some factors include ethnocentric, racial and religious biases against Arabs and Muslims. The steep pro-Israel tilt of news media runs parallel to the slant of U.S. government officials, with language that routinely conveys much lower regard for Palestinian lives than Israeli lives.

And while the credibility of the Israeli government has tumbled, the brawny arms of the Israel lobby — notably AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel — still exert enormous leverage over the vast majority of Congress. Few legislators are willing to vote against massive military aid that makes the carnage in Gaza possible.

A chilling example is Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. On Monday night, he took to the Senate floor and condemned Israel in no uncertain terms. “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food,” he said. “In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true. That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.”

Watching video from Van Hollen’s impassioned speech, you might assume that he would vote against sending $14 billion in further military aid to those “war criminals.” But hours later, he did just the opposite. As journalist Ryan Grim noted, “the senator’s speech pulsed with moral clarity — until it petered out into a stumbling rationale for his forthcoming yes vote.”

In contrast, three senators in the Democratic caucus — Jeff Merkley, Peter Welch and Bernie Sanders — voted no. Sanders delivered a powerful speech calling for decency instead of further moral collapse from the top of the U.S. government.

While the Senate deliberated, the White House again made clear that it wasn’t serious about getting in the way of Israel’s planned assault on the city of Rafah. That’s where most of Gaza’s 2.2 million surviving residents have taken unsafe refuge from the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces.

An exchange at a White House news conference on Monday underscored that Biden is determined to keep enabling Israel’s continuous war crimes in Gaza:

Reporter: “Has the president ever threatened to strip military assistance from Israel if they move ahead with a Rafah operation that does not take into consequence what happens with civilians?”

Spokesman John Kirby: “We’re going to continue to support Israel. They have a right to defend themselves against Hamas and we’re going to continue to make sure they have the tools and the capabilities to do that.”

Later this week, Politico summed up: “The Biden administration is not planning to punish Israel if it launches a military campaign in Rafah without ensuring civilian safety.” Citing interviews with three U.S. officials, the article reported that “no reprimand plans are in the works, meaning Israeli forces could enter the city and harm civilians without facing American consequences.”

Biden continues to serve as an accomplice while mouthing platitudes of concern about the lives of civilians in Gaza. Month after month, he has done all he can to supply the Israeli military to the max.

Under an apt headline — “Biden Is Mad at Netanyahu? Spare Me.” — The Nation senior editor Jack Mirkinson wrote this week: “In the real world, Biden and his legislative partners have continued to arm Israel; the Democratic leadership in the Senate actually brought people in on Super Bowl Sunday to take a vote on a bill that would, along with rearming Ukraine, send Israel another $14.1 billion for what is euphemistically dubbed ‘security assistance.’”

Ever since October, inspiring protests and activism in the United States have challenged U.S. support for Israel’s military assault on Gaza. However, boosted by revulsion at the atrocities that Hamas committed against Israeli civilians on October 7, the usual rationales for supporting Israel’s violence against Palestinians have been hard at work.

In this election year, an additional factor looms large. With just eight months until the voting starts that could propel Donald Trump back into the presidency, the prospect of his return to power is all too real. And with Biden set to be the Democratic Party’s nominee, countless individuals and groups are careful to avoid saying much that’s critical of the president they want to see re-elected.

Instead of candor, the routine choices have been euphemisms and silence. But — morally and politically — that’s a big mistake.

The electoral base that Biden is going to need for re-election is heavily against his support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Polling shows that young people in particular are overwhelmingly opposed. Most have seen through the thin veneer of his weak pleas for Israel to not kill so many civilians.

No amount of evasions, silences or doubletalk can make Biden’s policies morally acceptable. But — while the administration combines its PR hand-wringing with military arms-supplying — Biden apologists go on and on with evasion and verbal gymnastics to defend the indefensible.

A far better course of action would be actual candor about current realities: Joe Biden’s moral collapse is enabling the Israeli government to continue, with impunity, its large-scale massacre of Palestinian people. In the process, Biden is increasing the chances that the Republican Party, led by fascistic Donald Trump, will gain control of the White House in January.

(Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine was published in 2023 by The New Press.)

WHAT THE SUPER BOWL PARADE SHOOTING HAS TO DO WITH THE EMPIRE OF THE GUN

by Dave Zirin

It is an indictment of this country that there are few things more American than a mass shooting at a Super Bowl parade. One person was killed and 21 more injured during Wednesday's parade in Kansas City, Mo., celebrating the 2024 Super Bowl champions, the Chiefs. Eight victims are in critical care. Nine of those shot were children. The one confirmed death is Lisa Lopez-Galvan, a DJ for Kansas City radio station KKFI, who hosted a show called Taste of Tejano. Afterward, President Joe Biden said that the shooting “cuts deep in the American soul,” but that’s not quite right. This is the American soul.

It is true, as Democrats insist, that we aid and abet these shootings legislatively. Since 2017, Missouri has allowed people to carry concealed and loaded firearms in public, no need for background check or permit. The state’s governor, Mike Parson, who attended the parade and fled the gun shots, had recently signed a nullification law proclaiming that no federal gun control legislation would be adhered to in the state.

We are caught in this numbing cycle of tragedy, because this country reveres the gun. And it is impossible to separate our adoration of the gun from the glorification of how this country was founded, namely the westward expansion of the United States and the conquering of Indigenous people. As sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote, “The quintessential American myth is that of the cowboy. Central to that myth are the role of violence and the reverence for the gun. This violence is embraced and romanticized.” It doesn’t take a sociologist to notice the brutal irony that this mass gun tragedy took place at the celebration of a Kansas City team adorned with a Native American name.

Indigenous team names and mascots derive from celebrating the “savagery” of Native people—as if they were jaguars, lions, or wildcats. The names tacitly compliment the prowess of settlers, as well as our own prowess in militarily defeating them. Seeing Native people as warlike is more than just racist; it provides an unspoken justification for attempting to wipe them out.

Native team names celebrate settler colonialism, and there is no settler colonialism without the gun.

The US, unsurprisingly, is both the world’s top gun manufacturer and weapons exporter. Billions of dollars of those weapons are central to another settler colonialist project: the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The Super Bowl, with hundreds of millions watching around the world, acted as a weapon of mass distraction for Israel as it launched an attack on Rafah in the Gaza Strip, now the most densely populated part of the most densely populated area on earth. Following the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza City, more than 1 million Palestinians are crammed into refugee camps in and around Rafah. Over 100 people were reported dead in Sunday’s military incursion. While Biden furrows his brow in disapproval of Israel’s “over the top” actions, the president nonetheless keeps sending guns and other weapons to the barbaric Netanyahu government.

This is not about hostages. It’s about settlements. It’s about land. It’s about extending, as Netanyahu says openly, Israeli control “from the river to the sea.” We in the United States created the template for this kind of political morality. We exported the cowboy myth to the Holy Land: the cowboy myth of expunging the Indigenous “savages” through a savagery that the Indigenous people themselves could not replicate or perhaps even imagine. It’s the cowboy myth brought to you by Lockheed Martin instead of Paramount Pictures.

The pain and trauma brought home to Kansas City on Wednesday is heartbreaking and enraging. We lack the tools to confront it, because we have politicians who make clear after every school shooting that dead kids are a price worth paying for “freedom.” But it’s not really about freedom—it’s about fear. It’s a fear of not being armed to the hilt. It’s a fear that the violence their political forbearers glorified in building this country will be visited upon them by the “others.” It makes them gravitate to the gun like Linus to his blanket. It also makes them gravitate them to Trump, to the celebration of January 6, to venerating a disturbed murderer like Kyle Rittenhouse, and to fever dreams about race war, secession, and the shooting of migrants as they try to cross a border that we drew. Instead of reparations, today's cowboys want a reckoning. Instead of restorative justice, they want to restore ethno-nationalist supremacy. Instead of peace, we can’t even celebrate as a community in public without living in fear. That’s as true in Missouri as it is in the Middle East. And it’s intolerable. 

THE FUNCTION of the Oslo accords is to cage Palestinians in a remnant of their own lands, like inmates in an asylum or prison. What is astonishing is not the popular revolt against this diktat, but that it could ever have been passed off as peace instead of the desolation that it has really been all along. A dithering Palestinian leadership, unable either to retire or to go forward, has been caught on the wrong foot. But the signs are that a new generation will not be content with the miserable, denigrated place accorded them in the Zionist scheme of things, and will go on rebelling until it is finally changed.

— Edward Said, January 2001

LEAVE THE OLD AND DYING AMERICA and use your creative energies to help form a new America, which would be de-militarized, more humanistic, where the police are less hostile and closer to the community, where the wealthy are not given unleashed power for the exploitation of the people. And, mostly because it's now a matter of life and death, re-assert an ecological balance with the environment, which means the people in the oil companies and the car companies and the space industry and all the other industries will have to be brought into account, so that there will be a new definition of government which has to be closer to the people and less close to special interests which are far more harmful than any revolutionaries.

— Phil Ochs