Breezy | Porch Pirate | Peawoo | Tax Annexation | School Improvements | Noyo KelpFest | Ukiah Construction | Football Camp | Mendo Parade | Eddie Mitchell | Inefficient Adventists | Comptche BBQ | Moving AQMD | Election Notice | Essay Contest | South Fork | Eel Future | Music Festival | Facing Out | Yesterday's Catch | Cats In | Flower Median | Social Muddle | Candidate Peskin | Burger Protest | Lefty O’Doul | Chekhov Bio | Brief Season | Glamour Biz | Good Day | Train Station | Innocence Project | Memory Foam | Felon Hillary | Two Choices | Machine Gun | My Money | Bump Stocks | Diesel Charger | American Plunder | Indian Land | Surprising Indifference | Book Morons | Old JB | Remain Sane | Ain't Human | Fall Apart | Rescue Massacre | Airdrops
DRY WEATHER is expected through the weekend. Interior temperatures continue to drop below seasonal normals this weekend. Breezy to windy westerly to northwesterly winds this afternoon and evening, with much stronger winds are expected this Sunday evening into Monday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Saturday morning I have 49F with clear skies. Clear skies & breezy conditions are forecast thru Monday.
FRED EHNOW:
Beware, there is a porch pirate swiping packages in the deep end (Navarro).
Friday around 12:30pm this car pulled into my driveway (Hwy 128 between Guntley and Gschwend) and took a package that had just been delivered by FedEx about 5 minutes earlier (which makes me think they were probably stalking the FedEx van). Unfortunately my camera only got a partial shot of the car, and it cuts off right at the bottom of the license plate. I'm pretty sure this is an older model Jeep Grand Cherokee, silver or gray or whiteish, probably from the late 90's or early 2000's. That cargo carrier (probably used to haul all of the loot they steal) is pretty distinctive looking, does anybody recognize the car with this carrier?
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Whats way more interesting and expensive for the County was an obscure special meeting they had a week or two ago. With no robust discussion, written reports, financial or critical analysis, the Board signed off on a master tax sharing agreement, countywide. After one meeting. Ukiah, no doubt salivating at the chance to annex the Thurston Auto Plaza is now poised to make that grab, and transition to take that tax revenue stream in whole in as soon as five years. The County, protected by state law, can only lose this tax revenue through a “tax sharing agreement” which they just did! It’s now in the hands of LAFCo and out of the Board’s! It’s a sure financial loser for the County, but the water will only get to a boiling point as early as 2029, when most of the current clowns will be replaced by a new set of amnesiac clowns. Big win for Ukiah, and good for them. If you don’t already, move into one of the incorporated cities quick! The current Board has basically given up on trying to make the County system work on any level.
MS NOTES: Supervisor Haschak explained to Karen Ottoboni on Wednesday that 14 of the County’s top 25 sales tax generators are in the area north of Ukiah which is slated to be annexed under the one-sided tax sharing agreement that his colleagues (Haschak dissenting) approved. Ottoboni wasn’t sure but the annexation area could also include the big box stores in the Ukiah airport area would also be subject to annexation and additional loss of sales tax.
THE GREAT BOONVILLE HIGH SCHOOL MAKEOVER IS ON!
Jobs in progress: High school science labs and elementary parking lot!
Louise Simson, Superintendent
AV Unified School District
NORTH COAST KELPFEST continues through the weekend! Events happening all weekend in Noyo Harbor.
Visit the Noyo Center for Marine Science Field Station for an Urchin Ranch Open House on Saturday from 11am to 3pm.
Also at the Noyo Center Field Station (in the harbor), join us for the Closing Celebration from 4pm to 7pm. There will be a speaker panel and seaweed happy hour.
Finally on Sunday, join the Noyo Harbor Marine Center staff for a walking tour of the harbor from 10am to 12pm. Learn about the different fisheries and vessels that operate out of the marina and how a healthy kelp forest relates to healthy fisheries and thus healthy communities.
UKIAH CONSTRUCTION UPDATES FOR THE WEEK OF JUNE 17:
The first layer of pavement is down on BOTH sides! The end is near, folks. The final layer of pavement will occur July 1-3. July 1st will be the north side (Henry to Norton), and July 2nd and 3rd will be the south side (Mill to Gobbi), and will include the section from Gobbi to Cherry.
Next week, crews will be working on creating medians on both sides of the project—sawcutting the pavement, pouring and forming, curbs, etc. Additionally, crews will be painting the traffic signal poles to match the streetlights. Landscaping crews will arrive back onsite soon, too.
Traffic signals are scheduled to be activated between July 9th and 11th. Remember that these will be “smart” signals, like the ones currently installed at Perkins and Standley Street. They are demand based, rather than timed, and allow for left turns on flashing yellow lights, which ensures more efficient traffic flow.
Scott Street (between State and School Streets) will be repaved in conjunction with the final layer of pavement on July 1st. This will require removal of the surface ahead of time, so we anticipate that that section of the street will be closed between June 28th and June 30th.
On Main Street, as part of the “Urban Core” project (www.cityofukiah.com/ucrt), replacement of the underground sewer lines will continue between Smith and Norton. For the duration of the week, that section of Main Street will be closed to through traffic—deliveries and business traffic permitted.
Low Gap Road is getting reconstructed between State and Bush! Starts July 8th; will take about a week.
Construction hours will be Monday-Friday, 7 a.m. - 6 p.m., depending on the weather.
There will be some noise and associated with sawcutting for the medians; not much dust.
On-street parking has been restored on the north side between Henry and Norton. Pedestrian access to businesses will be maintained at all times. No major impacts to traffic are anticipated during median construction. Traffic signals at Gobbi/State and Mill/State and Scott/State will remain on flash.
Have a great weekend—
Shannon Riley, Deputy City Manager
THE FOURTH IN MENDOCINO
Get Ready! It’s that time again! The 4th of July parade in Mendocino, takes place on Thursday, July 4 from noon until around 1pm. If you are interested in participating in the parade, you can get a parade entry form on the Chamber of Commerce's website home page at www.mendocinocoast.com. Tell all your friends,too! We hope to make this even bigger than last year!
BE HUMANE… to all! That’s this year’s theme. For questions call 707-961-6300.
STAFF SHORTAGES COMPOUNDED BY INEFFICIENCY
Editor,
On May 14, my Adventist primary care provider ordered some blood work and put in a referral for an outside specialist, noting referrals were running about two weeks behind.
At the hospital, tents were being set up for another job fair. I waited in line at the reception desk, gave my ID and insurance proofs, and then waited before entering a private room, where I gave the same cards to another person. I completed the form and went on to the lab, where I waited to be checked in. Then I waited for the phlebotomist. Total: about an hour.
After two weeks, Adventist said with just one person managing the referrals, they were now taking three weeks. The specialist’s office said January was the first opening.
Referral transmission is moving out a week for every week of waiting. Tomorrow it will be four weeks. February will probably be my specialist’s first opening.
Patients move to the back of the line due to Adventist’s profoundly inefficient system.
The job fair, the cumbersome lab check-in, and the referral wait are all connected. Of course they need more people; they aren’t utilizing the ones they have. The current employees, forced to work so inefficiently, must be frustrated. That affects retention.
The lab check-in process needs to be streamlined. One or two people from that process should be retrained to work referrals.
This is a rare case where commissioning a management consultant might be fruitful.
Jean Arnold
Mendocino
THE MENDOCINO COUNTY AIR QUALITY MANAGEMENT DISTRICT OFFICE WILL HAVE LIMITED IN-PERSON SERVICES THROUGH JULY 8.
Interim Air Pollution Control Officer Douglas Gearhart announced that the office is moving to 1100 Hastings Road, Ukiah. The district anticipates being open for limited in-person services at 1100 Hastings Road., starting July 8.
In preparation of the move, and throughout the move, staff availability will be limited. Temporary, full office closures may occur. The district’s online and phone services should remain operational during normal business hours.
During the move, district staff will respond to priority items as soon as possible, non-urgent matters will be addressed as time allows. District staff will respond and be available to the public whenever possible.
“The public is urged to call our office in advance (707-463-4354) to confirm the availability of staff and services. If you reach our recording, please leave a detailed message and staff will return your call as soon as possible. The district can also be reached via email at mcaqmd@mendocinocounty.gov, the district stated in a news release.
(Ukiah Daily Journal)
BRIBING THE KIDS — Unwitting teens write essays confirming a flawed version of local history
Change Our Name Fort Bragg:
2024 High School Essay Contest Winners Announced
Change Our Name, a local 501c3 non-profit will distribute checks totaling $3000 to two Fort Bragg High School students beginning on Wednesday, June 26, at 7 p.m. in an award ceremony held at The Harbor Lite Lodge at 120 N. Harbor Dr. in Fort Bragg.
The essay contest invited students at FBHS to write on the statement of their choosing, either: (a) The name of Fort Bragg High School should be changed or (b) The name of Fort Bragg High School should not be changed. The contest kicked off in February 2024.
The First Place essay was written by Darwin Marroquin who won $2,000 and the Second Place essay was written by Abilene Kamstra who won $1000. Mr. Marroquin will read his winning essay at the June 26 event. Due to a conflict in her schedule Ms. Kamstra will receive her prize money and read her essay at an event later this summer.
The three judges for this second annual contest, all educators and/or writers themselves and unaffiliated with Change Our Name, were:
Susan Lundgren is the immediate past President of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast and a well published author
Esmeralda Plasencia is the Latino Outdoors North Coast Chapter Program Coordinator for California State Parks and a graduate of Fort Bragg High School
Margaret Reiter a retired lawyer, formerly worked in the Consumer Protection Division of the Office of the California Attorney General.
Change Our Name is dedicated to educating residents to the need to change the name of the city of Fort Bragg since the present name, adopted in 1889, includes both an homage to the military Fort which helped wage genocide against the local indigenous population and Braxton Bragg, who enslaved 105 men, women and children on his Louisiana sugar plantation and later served as a General in the Confederate Army where he waged war against our country.
Change Our Name plans to continue this essay contest each each year until the name of the high school and our city have been changed. Fort Bragg Middle School and Fort Bragg High School remain the only public schools in the state of California honoring a traitor and enslaver, and a genocide. The city of Fort Bragg now stands as the only locality named for Braxton Bragg. Fort Bragg, North Carolina was renamed Fort Liberty on June 2, 2023 by order of Congress.
You can learn more about Change Our Name here: www.changeournamefortbragg.com
(Mikael Blaisdell)
A VISIT TO AN OLD DAM YIELDS A GLIMPSE OF THE NEW FUTURE FOR THE EEL RIVER
Many challenges still need to be worked out in a bid to open up the Eel River while maintaining water supplies in the Russian River watershed.
by Mary Callahan
Cape Horn Dam ― Poised atop a high concrete structure that will no longer exist in a few short years, a group of public officials surveyed the Eel River on a recent Friday as it tumbled down the face of Cape Horn Dam.
There, they contemplated the river’s future. It is a future without the two dams that impede its flows. A future that will once again allow declining salmon and steelhead trout to once again swim upstream. And a future that will maintain water supplies critical to more than 600,000 Russian River water consumers at the same time.
The 51-foot-high, sloping dam they stood on that day — and the enormous boulders that now slow the water so some can be redirected into the Russian River — would be shaved away, freeing the Eel to flow more naturally.
Impediments that put declining salmon and steelhead populations at risk would be eliminated, improving conditions as well for Pacific lampreys that occupy the same waters. (Often mistaken for eels, lampreys prompted the river’s name.)
Scott Dam, which impounds Lake Pillsbury 12 miles upstream on the Eel, will be gone too, reopening 288 miles of streams to migrating fish and restoring a river that has been manipulated for more than a century to provide hydropower and water through Pacific Gas & Electric’s Potter Valley power plant.
But enormous challenges lie ahead, including the sensitive negotiation over when and how much water could be sent to the Russian River and what metrics would be used to determine when diversions could occur.
Fishing and environmental interests, as well as downstream users in Humboldt County, have long fought to end diversions, saying all the water should be left in the Eel ― particularly now, as water temperatures below the dam heat up, imperiling fish.
The source of substantial funding needed to build and maintain new infrastructure is also undetermined, though some portion would be born by municipal ratepayers and other consumers.
Even the design of the thing, still largely conceptual, is unfinished, though a $2 million infusion from the Bureau of Reclamation announced in December is intended to take the design from 30% to 60% in the next year or so, closing in on final details of a fish-friendly diversion system.
The mixed crowd of local elected officials, environmental stewards, federal officials and others who visited the smaller of the two dams, about 85 miles north of Santa Rosa, appeared united in their commitment to the plan.
Brought together by North Coast Congressman Jared Huffman, they were celebrating, for one, the $2 million in bipartisan infrastructure funds from the Bureau of Reclamation’s Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Program, a product of legislation Huffman championed “with this project in mind,” he said.
Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton spoke of the value of improved fish passage in California’s third-largest river system and water security for those who live along the Russian River, into which some Eel River water would still be diverted.
The new funding program is set up to provide $250 million over five years for projects that bring widespread, regional benefits that enhance ecosystem restoration and climate resilience. It could be a source of future funding for the Eel-Russian river project, Touton said.
“Your success is Reclamation’s success, and we are committed to that,” she said. “I anticipate that as we move forward, there will be other funding announcements that you should all look out for.”
In more good news for the Eel and Russian partners, PG&E has recently decided to include their recommendations in the draft license surrender plan it is preparing for federal regulators for the Potter Valley plant, to allow for closer collaboration on dam deconstruction and construction of the new diversion facility.
Janet Walther, PG&E’s senior manager for licensing and compliance, joined Huffman’s tour in a sign of good will and said the cooperative approach would ensure disruptions to the river “occur one time” and “have the least impact.”
The decision follows a period of some consternation earlier this year when the utility announced that the surrender plan would not include recommendations put forward by the partnership in hopes of avoiding delays in the decommissioning process.
The company has since requested a six-month extension from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to coordinate planning with stakeholders in the two-basin partnership, which includes government agencies and non-governmental organizations, elected officials, and the Round Valley Indian Tribes. Many are represented by the newly formed Eel-Russian River Project Authority, whose members include county supervisors from Mendocino and Sonoma counties, the Sonoma County Water Agency, the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission and the Round Valley Indian Tribes.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
MUSIC RETURNS to the edge of the world, July 13th to the 27th! Perched on the edge of the Pacific, in the iconic big white tent, the Mendocino Music Festival features an eclectic lineup of more than twenty-five amazing concerts, from orchestral to bluegrass, chamber music to jazz, Big Band to Americana, in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
FACING OUT
Dearest AVA,
Would you, please do a story on the newest trend which is to park one's vehicle facing out (instead of driving into space).
Warmest regards,
Bird/Falcon
ED REPLY: OK. Some people are parking facing out instead of facing in.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, June 14, 2024
BRITTNEY BOULEY, Willits. Domestic abuse, disobeying court order.
CHARLES CHRISTIAN JR., Ukiah. Burglary, forgery, bad checks, obtaining money by false pretenses, conspiracy.
NATHAN CROSS, Point Arena. DUI.
ANTONE DOWNEY JR., Covelo. Paraphernalia, metal knuckles, ammo possession by prohibited person.
LARIZA GONZALEZ, Ukiah. DUI, misdemeanor hit&run, probation violation.
CORY IMUS JR., Ukiah. Sex registrant removal of GPS monitor, parole violation.
KENDALL JENSEN, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
CHRISTOPHER KEYES, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
CASEY RAY, Ukiah. Marijuana for sale, controlled substance, paraphernalia, county parole violation.
MATTHEW RIOS, Victorville/Ukiah. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.15% with prior in past ten years.
JOSEPH STONE, San Luis Obispo/Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, trespassing, disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.
NORMA TESTROETE, Ukiah. Trespassing, probation revocation.
KEEP CATS INSIDE
Editor,
To suggest that the 60 million to 100 million free-ranging, unowned cats in the U.S. are a beneficial part of a balanced and healthy ecosystem is difficult to accept and wrong.
Cat owners and feral cat defenders need to contribute to viable solutions to the problem that feral and roaming cats present to our native wildlife populations, especially in the face of mounting pressures brought on by climate change.
Cat owners need to keep their animals indoors. Studies show that catch, neuter and release programs do not work.
John Wadsworth
Concord
AI DUMBS US DOWN
Editor,
The advent of the iPhone and social media have already contributed to adults and children losing in-person social contacts. Social media has enabled suicidal thoughts and bullying.
Now Apple wants to relieve people of their ability to think by providing automatic emails, doing homework and just asking the phone to do everything for them.
A century from now, we will see people with tiny little heads. Humans will completely lose the ability to develop their brains.
Carole Glosenger
San Francisco
AARON PESKIN FOR SF MAYOR
by Jonah Raskin
On June 14th, a day before Flag Day, Aaron Peskin celebrated his 60th birthday and rallied hundreds of supporters and dozens of dear friends along with a handful of family members, including his wife, Nancy Shanahan at Saint Joseph’s Art Society on Howard Street in San Francisco, a short, fraught walk from Market. Briefly, Peskin waved an American flag. The crowd included folks from Sonoma County and Berkeley, though it was attended mostly by San Franciscans. The event belonged to feisty former mayor, Willie Brown, dressed more smartly than anyone else, and who roasted Peskin to perfection. But the city, at least for that one night, belonged to Aaron, who is running for mayor and facing stiff competition from the incumbent, London Breed, and others.
Before I attended the party and roast, I spoke to Aaron’s campaign manager who told me I could attend as “a friend of Aaron’s, but not as a reporter,” and that “the event is off limits to all media.” When I shared her words to me with Peskin he said, “Don’t listen to my staff. Do whatever you want to do.” And when I told him I write for the AVA, he said, “I love the Anderson Valley Advertiser and Bruce Anderson.” He probably would not have offered such kind words to reporters from The Chronicle and The Examiner who have clearly slanted the articles they've written in an anti-Peskin direction. Apparently he rocks the boat, as he ought to.
In the crowd, I encountered friends I hadn’t seen in years, including environmentalist Ralph Benson and organic grape grower and winemaker, Bill Hawley at Random Ridge, plus new friends like photographer extraordinaire Colin Campbell and his wife Naomi Marcus, a journalist. The enthusiastic pro-Peskin crowd made me want to take back every barbed word I have ever written or spoken about the city that once belonged to columnist Herb Caen, who knew how to dish out kisses and slaps in about equal measure. No, I would not take back every word, but some of them.
Willie Brown played the boisterous crowd with all his many talents as a politician, satirist and a raconteur. That crowd was made up of folks with long hair and short hair, Afros and cornrows, bald, white haired and wearing wigs, some with beards both kempt and unkempt, chewing gum, picking their noses, laughing and drinking wine and beer from the no-host bar. I met jovial Emperor Norton—his most recent incarnation— wearing a gaudy uniform.
When I mentioned to Naomi Marcus that the evening seemed “chaotic,” she said, “yes, that’s typical of San Francisco political events.” Ralph Benson observed: “I don’t know how anyone can govern San Francisco; it’s such a complex place.” Just walking from the Van Ness MUNI stop to Saint Joseph’s tested my own street smarts. I had to ask directions a few times and didn’t always strike gold. Some sent me in the opposite direction I wanted to go.
“Aaron’s office is like a 7/11,” Brown said. “Open all the time, and nothing good ever comes out of it.” Lots of chuckles from the crowd. Brown added, “Peskin reads everything. I don’t deal with people who read.” He called Peskin a “whippersnapper” and remembered meeting him at the bohemian Caffe Greco on Columbus Avenue at 8 a.m. for coffee and when Aaron picked up the tab.
Brown recounted the many times that Peskin opposed him on critical issues, including a garage for parking vehicles on busy Vallejo Street. At Greco, Brown told Peskin, “If you don’t like the way I’m running the city, why don’t you run for office.” Years ago, Peskin ran for supervisor and won a seat. Now he’s the president of the board of supervisors and represents District Three, which includes Chinatown and North Beach, the Financial District, part of Russian Hill and Union Square. It remains to be seen if the citizens in Chinatown and North Beach can outvote the suits and the realtors in the Financial District and Union Square.
Peskin has pledged to build affordable homes for teachers, cops, firefighters and the middle class, create safe streets and end the corruption that’s rife in city government. He has been supported by many renters and opposed by some landlords. Elderly Chinese women seem to love him.
According to Wikipedia, Peskin “owns a 1,495-square-foot duplex in Telegraph Hill that he purchased for $800,000 in 2002 and that had a market value of $1,750,000 in 2022. He and his wife own other buildings in Telegraph Hill, which they rent. The combined market value of their real estate properties was nearly $7,000,000 in 2022.”
No, he doesn’t belong to the working class, but he seems to have the working class—and the middle class, too— in his heart. He can’t win without middle class voters. Aaron’s mother, Tsipora, immigrated long ago to California from Israel. She appeared on stage with her son. Not a word was said about Gaza, Jews and Palestinians. Peskin’s campaign manager would no doubt approve of that silence. When presented with a birthday cake that boasted 60 candles Peskin blew them all out. The crowd roared. Folks lined up for slices to eat with plastic forks. I went home satisfied without cake and with a button that reads “Aaron’s 60th birthday Roast & Toast,” and with a photo of him as a boy.
TRIBUTE TO LEFTY O’DOUL: What His Career Could Have Been
by Mark Koller
More than 40 years ago while I was a college student at USC in Los Angeles, there was an annual ‘weekender’ football game in the Bay area vs. either Stanford or U Cal Berkeley. My recollection is that the 400-mile trip was made on the cheap since none of us had any money to spare. One year we tried to save on hotel rooms by renting an RV (who would rent an RV to 20-year-olds?) and parking it down by Fisherman’s Wharf.
Always on the hunt for cheap beer we invariably ended up at Lefty O’Doul’s. Being a baseball fan, I somehow knew of Lefty O’Doul being a baseball player and that there was a connection to the New York Giants. I did not have much more of an idea beyond that. ‘Former baseball player opens Irish bar in San Francisco’. There did not seem to be a reason to know more. Boy was I wrong.
Lefty O’Doul came up with the New York Yankees in 1919 at the age of 19. He was a left-handed (naturally) pitcher and occasional batter in 1919 and 1920 but only played in a total of 32 games over those two seasons. in 1920 the Yankees acquired another left-handed pitcher that was a better hitter than he was a pitcher. The same turned out to be true for Lefty O’Doul but it took longer.
In 1921 O’Doul won 25 games as a pitcher for the Pacific Coast League San Francisco Seals. The team for which Joe DiMaggio and his brothers Dom and Vince would later play. O’Doul ended up later managing Joe D. and said the smartest thing he did was leave the future Yankee Clipper alone.
The following year in 1922 O’Doul was back with the Yankees but only appeared in six games as a pitcher finishing games and appeared in two other games as a batter. The Yankees subsequently traded him to the Red Sox. He pitched in 23 games for the BoSox starting one game and batted .143 in 39 plate appearances. It seemed like his Major League days were in trouble.
Coming Back From Obscurity
After 1923, O’Doul disappeared from the Major League for five years. The New York Giants signed him and sent him back to the Pacific Coast League to work on his hitting. He played two years for Salt Lake City, another for Hollywood, CA, and a final season at age 30 again for the Seals. O’Doul mostly played outfield, but also caught 32 games for Salt Lake in 1925. From 1924-27 O’Doul batted .392, .375, .338, and .378 smashing a total of 88 homers over those four seasons. This earned him a promotion to the New York Giants for the 1928 season. O’Doul was a different hitter now and batted .319 in 114 games with an OBA of .372.
What did the Giants do after displaying all that patience? They shipped him off to the Philadelphia Phillies. And then, in today’s vernacular, O’Doul started raking. From 1929-1933 in which he played two seasons for the Phillies and 2 ½ seasons with the Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers), Lefty hit .398, .383, .336, .368, and finally hitting a combined .284 in that final split season between the Giants and Robins. In 1922 while a member of the Giants O’Doul did not get to play in the World Series (won by New York). In the 1933 Giants World Series victory over the Washington Senators, Lefty was on the roster and had one at-bat, singling in two runs and later coming around to score. A perfect 1.000 batting average and on-base plus slugging average of 2.000 for that one at-bat!
O’Doul played in 83 games in his final season for the Giants in 1934, at age 37. He batted .316 with an OBA of .383 and slugged .525. An 11-year major league career played out over 16 years had finally come to an end.
Highest Career Batting Average Not In The Hall of Fame
Lefty O’Doul is not in the Hall of Fame despite having a .349 career batting average. This happens to be the highest career average for a player who isn’t in the Hall of Fame.
For his career, O’Doul posted an OBA of .413, slugging percentage of .532, and a career OPS+ of 143 which means he was 43% better than his peers! Gary Sheffield, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Shoeless Joe Jackson are the only players producing a 140 OPS+ and bWAR of 60 or higher. The reasons they are not in Cooperstown are well documented.
Lefty O’Doul had a career bWAR of 25.7 in part because WAR is a cumulative statistic, and he only played in 970 career games. FanGraphs Jay Jaffe uses JAWS – his own measurement taking the best seven years of a player’s career. O’Doul had five great years and a sixth very good one.
Lefty Helps Establish Baseball in Japan
After his playing days were over O’Doul was instrumental in spreading baseball’s popularity in Japan, serving as the sport’s goodwill ambassador before and after World War II. The Tokyo Giants, sometimes considered “Japan’s Baseball Team,” were named by him in 1935 in honor of his longtime association with the New York Giants; the logo and uniform of the Giants in Japan strongly resemble the one we know today.
O’Doul also began managing the San Francisco Seals in 1935 after he retired and managed them for 17 seasons. He wasn’t quite done yet and in ‘53 continued to manage in the Pacific Coast League until 1957 teams other than the Seals, when he finally walked off the field at age 60.
Founding the eponymous establishment Lefty O’Doul’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge on Geary Street in 1958, Lefty was a fixture there until his passing away in 1969. A landlord-tenant dispute forced the restaurant to close in early 2017.
I wish I’d thought to go there when I visited San Francisco 10 years ago. I can still see the shamrock cutouts all over the wall. Nothing fancy. But just right. As for Lefty O’Doul’s career, oh what it could have been!
(Mark Kolier along with his son Gordon co-hosts a baseball podcast called ‘Almost Cooperstown’. He also has written baseball-related articles that can be accessed on Medium.com and Substack.com. BaseballHistoryComesAlive.com)
DO YOU NEED MY BIOGRAPHY?
Here it is. In 1860 I was born in Taganrog. In 1879 I finished my studies in the Taganrog school. In 1884 I finished my studies in the medical school of Moscow University. In 1888 I received the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a trip to Sakhalin across Siberia — and back by sea. In 1891 I toured Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I strolled with V.A. Tikhonov at [the writer Shcheglov’s] name-day party. I began to write in 1879 in Strekosa. My collections of stories are Motley Stories, Twilight, Stories, Gloomy People, and the novella The Duel. I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately. I have been translated into all languages with the exception of the foreign ones. However, I was translated into German quite a while ago. The Czechs and Serbs also approve of me. And the French also relate to me. I grasped the secrets of love at the age of 13. I remain on excellent terms with friends, both physicians and writers. I am a bachelor. I would like a pension. I busy myself with medicine to such an extent that this summer I am going to perform some autopsies, something I have not done for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy, among physicians, Zakharin. However, this is all rubbish. Write what you want. If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical.
— Chekhov
TEENAGE BOYS, goaded by their surging hormones, run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.
— Camille Paglia
DAMN GOOD DAY TO LEAVE
Girl I always pictured it'd be pourin' down rain
With Old Hank singin' some song about trains
And midnight taillights tearin' down a highway
Or some other heartbroke cliché
But there's nothin' but blue skies as far as I can see
You pick a damn good day to leave me
Sittin' here cooler full of keystone
Nothin' to do but fish all day long
Pocket full of three-day weekend money
Ain't a heartbreak cloud in the forecast, honey
I hate to see you go but if you ask me
You picked a damn good day to leave
Well how in the hell can I watch the big game
Without me havin' you here to complain
And how am I gonna do anythin' now
Without you here tellin' me how
Guess it could be worse, hell, it's seventy-five degrees
You pick a damn good day to leave me
Sittin' here cooler full of keystone
Nothin' to do but fish all day long
Pocket full of three-day weekend money
Ain't a heartbreak cloud in the forecast, honey
I hate to see you go but if you ask me
You picked a damn good day to leave
No doubt
Damn good day to leave
I guess I'll miss the Bachelorette
Well what a shame
But Channel 8's about to marathon John Wayne
You pick a damn good day to leave me
Sittin' here cooler full of keystone
Nothin' to do but fish all day long
Pocket full of three-day weekend money
Ain't a heartbreak cloud in the forecast, honey
I hate to see you go but if you ask me
You picked a damn good day to leave
(Ooh-oh-oh-oh)
Yeah, it was a mighty fine day to leave
(Ooh-oh-oh-oh)
— Riley Green
THE INNOCENCE PROJECT IS EMBROILED IN DRAMA.
It started when a prison romance turned to blackmail threats
by Rachel Swan
A Bay Area attorney who works to free innocent people from prison is facing an extraordinary predicament after exchanging intimate texts and videos with a convicted murderer who then tried to blackmail her.
“I recorded every phone call, kept every text. And copies of every video. You can try to clean it up. But you’ll never practice law again. Your career is done,” Marritte Funches, who is incarcerated in Sterling, Colo., wrote to Paige Kaneb, legal director of the Northern California Innocence Project, in an email.
Funches demanded “2 million dollars. After taxes. In a trust that belongs to ‘me.’ ”
If Kaneb didn’t comply, he said he would release the texts and videos to a news outlet — the San Francisco Standard. Additionally, Funches threatened to recant critical testimony in one of Kaneb’s biggest cases, according to Stuart Hanlon, a spokesperson who reviewed messages and audio recordings that Funches sent to Kaneb, and made some of them available to the Chronicle.
Kaneb declined to be interviewed, but allowed Hanlon, an attorney and a volunteer for the Innocence Project, to speak on her behalf.
When Kaneb refused to pay Funches, he sent their communications to the Standard, which published them, setting in motion a tense drama that embroiled a high-profile nonprofit and one of its key leaders.
Officials at Santa Clara University, where the Northern California Innocence Project is based, have opened an investigation into Kaneb’s conduct. They maintain that her exchanges with Funches have no bearing on the exoneration of her client, Maurice Caldwell, who benefited from statements made by Funches clearing him of the crime. “As with any unit of the university, when we receive any allegations of inappropriate conduct by an employee, we refer the matter to the university for investigation,” Todd Fries, executive director of the Northern California Innocence Project said in a statement.
It all stems from an early major success of Kaneb’s career. Shortly after joining the Innocence Project in 2007, Kaneb got assigned to represent Caldwell, who was then serving a 27-year-to-life sentence for a fatal shooting in 1990.
At that time, Caldwell was locked in Folsom State Prison, convicted of killing Judy Acosta over a drug deal gone bad in San Francisco’s Alemany public housing project. He had spent nearly two decades behind bars, persistently denying involvement in the slaying while exhausting his legal appeals.
But Kaneb helped uncover new evidence, according to a 2012 Innocence Project press release touting the case, “including a statement from another man that he was the real killer.”
That man was Funches. He is serving a life sentence in Colorado on a separate murder charge, and did not immediately respond to inquiries from the Chronicle.
Court filings show that he confessed to Acosta’s murder in a sworn declaration before ever meeting Kaneb, though his statements were not the main factor in Caldwell’s exoneration. A judge ordered Caldwell a new trial in 2010, ruling his defense counsel had been ineffective. The San Francisco district attorney subsequently dismissed the case. Caldwell sued the city in 2012 for fabrication of evidence, among other claims, settling for $8 million in 2021.
Nonetheless, Funches appeared to treat his confession as leverage in his correspondences with Kaneb. He characterized their relationship to the Standard as an “off-and-on” courtship, which Hanlon said she disputes. Hanlon said Funches wrote his first seductive email to Kaneb shortly after they met in 2010, then sent another message two months later after she didn’t respond. Kaneb only began reciprocating Funches’ advances in 2023, Hanlon said, long after Caldwell was freed.
She had visited Funches in prison three times, twice accompanied by another attorney, and once by an investigator, Hanlon said.
Then in March of last year, Funches sent Kaneb a friendly email, initiating a correspondence that led to phone calls and became flirtatious in late August, according to Hanlon.
“You make my heart jump,” Kaneb said in one text thread reviewed by the Chronicle. “You give me butterflies. And somehow you always have.”
“I still remember in that first visit you were looking at Linda the whole time,” she continued, referring to Innocence Project attorney Linda Starr, “and I took my hair out — I wanted you to look at me — I’ve never admitted that before.”
“I sware (sic). I only saw you,” Funches replied. “I remember when she left for a few minutes. It was like my chest would explode. And we began talking …”
By November, Hanlon said Kaneb had begun distancing herself as Funches started pressing her for money. In February, she broke off the relationship entirely. Then the threats began. Besides requesting money, Funches pushed Kaneb to build a legal team to “get me out of prison.”
At the same time, he attempted to extort money from Caldwell and Caldwell’s civil attorney, Terry Gross, an email obtained by the Chronicle shows. Funches threatened to disavow his testimony that Caldwell had not been present during the Acosta shooting, Gross said.
“This can be settled amicably,” Funches wrote, pledging to sign a non-disclosure agreement in exchange for payment. “We only have a few days to settle this. I’ve already contacted an investigative reporter who wants very badly to do this story… These are not threats. It’s just a matter of fact what I’m going to do if we’re unable to settle. Half mil from you, half mil from Maurice.”
When the San Francisco Standard reporter reached out to Gross for the story about Funches’ and Kaneb’s relationship, the attorney warned the reporter against becoming a part of Funches’ extortion scheme. The Standard did not mention extortion in the story published about Funches’ and Kaneb’s relationship.
Jeff Bercovici, managing editor of the Standard, said the paper stood by its reporting.
The new allegations in the Standard story — that Funches “solicited and accepted favors from Kaneb,” and was romantically involved with her while she worked to free Caldwell — prompted concern for the San Francisco city attorney, whose office oversaw the settlement.
“We take this information seriously,” city attorney spokesperson Jen Kwart said, “and will be looking into the matter.”
(SF Chronicle)
HILLARY GOT AWAY WITH WORSE
Editor:
Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign was fined $8,000 for violating federal finance campaign laws. Her team falsely reported the funding of the Steele dossier as a legal expense and service and legal compliance consulting. Actually, this opposition research was an attempt to smear her opponent with false and salacious allegations. Obviously, this was intended to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Moreover Clinton's campaign was headquartered in New York state (in Brooklyn), which would make it fall under the jurisdiction of New York penal law Section 175.10 – the state law that makes it a felony to falsify business records with the intent to conceal the commission of a crime. What is the connection between Clinton's campaign violation and more recent news? For her violation, there wasn't a Manhattan prosecutor politically motivated to bring an unprecedented case to trial.
Clinton’s violation was far worse. It led to four separate Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants and the Mueller probe of President Donald Trump, and cost $36 million. At the end of the probe, Mueller concluded there was no Russia collusion involving Trump or anybody in his campaign.
See how this works?
Stephan Marquez
Santa Rosa
They were open. The Mexican girl who gave him his coffee looked at him as if he were a human being. The poor knew life. A good girl. Well, a good enough girl. They all meant trouble. Everything meant trouble. He remembered a statement he'd heard somewhere: the Definition of Life is Trouble.
Harry sat down at one of the old tables. The coffee was good. Thirty-eight years old and he was finished. He sipped at the coffee and remembered where he had gone wrong—or right. He'd simply gotten tired of the insurance game, of the small offices and high glass partitions, the clients; he'd simply gotten tired of cheating on his wife, of squeezing secretaries in the elevator and in the halls; he'd gotten tired of Christmas parties and New Year's parties and birthdays, and payments on new cars and furniture payments—light, gas, water—the whole bleeding complex of necessities.
He'd gotten tired and quit, that's all. The divorce came soon enough and the drinking came soon enough, and suddenly he was out of it. He had nothing, and he found out that having nothing was difficult too. It was another type of burden. If only there were some gentler road in between. It seemed a man only had two choices—get in on the hustle or be a bum.
— Charles Bukowski, “The Killers”
NOT A MACHINE GUN?
I squeeze the trigger
It fires a long deadly burst
Until I let up
— Jim Luther
THE BUMP STOCK BAN STEMMED FROM A HORRIFIC MASS SHOOTING
A gunman used bump stocks to help kill 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017, leading to wide political agreement that they should be prohibited.
by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs & Jack Healy
The ban on bump stocks overturned by the Supreme Court on Friday was a rarity in an era of deep division over gun violence: a restriction that won support from Democrats, Republicans and even the National Rifle Association.
Bump stocks are attachments that allow a semiautomatic rifle to fire faster. The effort to limit them, which former President Donald J. Trump put in place by executive order in 2018, gained support after a gunman killed 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
On the night of Oct. 1, 2017, a gunman who had smuggled rifles and reams of ammunition into his suite on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel opened fire. His target was a crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest country music festival.
The gunman killed 58 people and himself that night. Hundreds more concertgoers were injured in the frantic rush to escape the long, rapid-fire bursts of gunfire that rained down from the gunman’s room at the Mandalay Bay Resort. Two of the wounded later died.
About a dozen of the gunman’s rifles that were later found by investigators had been modified with devices known as bump stocks.
These accessories can cost as little as $99. They replace a rifle’s standard stock, which is the part held against the shoulder. The bump stock frees the weapon to slide back and forth rapidly, harnessing the energy from the kickback shooters feel when the weapon fires to make a semiautomatic rifle fire more like a machine gun.
The Las Vegas gunman was able to fire more than 1,000 rounds in about 11 minutes.
“You certainly don’t need bump stocks to have mass shootings,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But what happened in Las Vegas was a whole other level.”
Ownership of fully automatic weapons, like machine guns, is strictly limited under federal law. But critics say bump stocks skirt the law by effectively turning semiautomatic rifles into automatic weapons, which are rarely seen outside of battlefields.
In a brief to the Supreme Court supporting the ban, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence quoted one gun manufacturer’s advertisement that declared as much: “Bumpfire stocks are the closest thing you can get to full auto and still be legal.”
GROWING UP in the southwestern United States, I often heard stories from my stepfather about people who enriched themselves by stealing from Natives. These were not tales from the past, but ongoing stories taking place on the reservation lands where he was employed and later lived. My stepfather spent much of his career working to preserve land and water rights for tribes and their members, and he spoke to me frequently of the businesspeople, corporations, lawyers, and federal and tribal officials who routinely tried to defraud Native people. Though my stepfather is white, he grew up with extended family who were enrolled members of western tribes, and he became invested from an early age in understanding the bureaucratic machinations that denied people land and money that was rightfully theirs. As a boy I imagined the predatory individuals and entities he described as simple villains, and even as I grew older and began to comprehend the shape and design of their trickery, they remained faceless, the means of their duplicity hidden and incomprehensible.
The institutional lineage of indigenous dispossession is at the center of Michael John Witgen's recent ‘Seeing Red,’ which was a finalist for last year's Pulitzer Prize in history. It is neither a popular history nor a polemic, offering instead a deeply researched look at the ideological and legal foundations of the systems that have despoiled Native nations. Witgen’s subtitle, “Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America,” reveals the scope of his history, which examines the ways, both sweeping and quotidian, that early American settlers, traders, diplomats, and politicians stole and expropriated land. The Native people in Witgen's account, however, are recognized not for their victimhood, but for their adeptness at reasserting their rights, dignity, and sovereignty against the supposedly insurmountable power of the state.
— Francisco Cantu, London Review of Books
SURPRISING INDIFFERENCE
by John Arteaga
I’ll never forget the day that my wife and I were walking around the streets of Cambridge, Mass. back in 2020 as the votes for president were being tallied; all of a sudden lots of cars were honking their horns, for no apparent reason. After a few moments thought though, it dawned on me that the official word had come down; that Joe Biden had defeated the man who would now go down in history as THE hands down worst president, ever.
It wasn’t even close; Biden won by 8 million votes or so, with a comfortable lead in the electoral college. Of course these incontrovertible facts were not sufficient to break through the consciousness of Biden’s malignant narcissist opponent, who’s mental condition rendered him incapable of admitting that he lost, or that he had ever done anything that wasn’t perfect. This derangement of Trump’s has now become a touchstone for acceptance in today’s Republican Party; one must completely buy into the completely evidence free narrative about how Trump had only been beaten because of the hordes of illegal voters.
Always one to invest vast resources into ‘lawfare’ to push whatever nonsensical case he may want to make to his low information base, Trump took his absurd ‘cases’ to 60 different courtrooms all over the country, where in each he failed to show any evidence to back up his preposterous claims, getting every one of the cases tossed for lack of evidence.
Anyway, the other day I was getting a quickie oil change when the news came down that The Donald had been convicted of 34 felonies related to a fairly routine (in NYC) charge of falsifying business records to conceal another crime.
As a fellow New Yorker, and, like many of us, one who holds a lifelong disgust for Trump and everything he represents; his garish, goldplated sense of aesthetics (if it can even be called that), his lifelong exploitation of everyone he associates with, from sucker investors who lose all their money while he walks away with millions, to the hard-working illegal alien Poles he employed on one of his building ventures, whom he refused to pay for their work, his racist rental policies, his career demonstrates the broken nature of our legal system.
The fact that one can escape any responsibility for what are clearly crimes by spending enough on lawyers to indefinitely delay any legal consequences is a most glaring injustice in our ‘justice’ system.
So, when the news came on my phone about the unanimous verdict that the jury of his peers had rendered, I was almost as excited about, at long last, seeing some comeuppance for this multigenerational crime family as when I witnessed the horn honking news about Biden’s victory over him, I had to share it with those around me.
The young manager behind the desk greeted the news with indifference and a statement to the effect that it’s none of his business. The fellow customer with whom I shared the breaking news looked at me as if I were speaking Swahili.
The grease monkeys down in the pit, one of whom was eating a sandwich as he changed my oil, were similarly disinterested, except for the more heavily tattooed gentlemen who declared that he liked Trump.
I find this so dispiriting; that these enormous hordes of low information voters who populate Trump’s hard-core Maga base; the one third or so of the country who have quaffed so heartily from the poisoned chalice of Trump’s Kool-Aid that they are simply beyond any kind of reasoning or persuasion. Is this another example of the utter failure of our educational system to not inculcate even a modicum of critical thinking?
I mean, the only people who have anything to gain by fealty to this Orange Jesus are the billionaire class; remember how, during his successful run for president, he ran to the left of Bernie Sanders, saying how his rich friends were going to hate him for getting them to pay some taxes for a change, while at the same time, I’m sure, reassuring his billionaire buddies that it was all BS for public consumption? In any event the single significant legislative item that he passed during his term as president was, true to Republican form, an enormous tax cut for the filthy rich who need that money the least, running the national debt into the stratosphere for the rest of us to make interest payments to the rich on forever.
As I was leaving the quickie lube, I wished that I had spent a few minutes questioning the tattooed Trumper; it is so rare to find someone who will even admit to supporting this disgraceful excuse for a human being. I wished that I had asked him what exactly he liked about Trump. Misogyny? Does the fact that he is an adjudicated rapist score points with you? Maybe it’s just the whole male chauvinist piggishness that the young gentleman felt spoke to him, or perhaps it was a vehement agreement with Trump on his appointment of the trio of serial liars he put on the Supreme Court to overturn the half-century old birthright of American women to autonomy over their own bodies in Roe V Wade. Maybe he liked the idea of commandeering women’s bodies and forcing them to bear children that they may not want, don’t have the wherewithal to care for, and God dammit it’s my freaking body!
How this ridiculous charlatan got where he is today, even with the 34 felony indictments, yet still at large, is an absolute mystery to me; I mean, to have inherited billions and frittered it away on multiple bankruptcies and stupid failed projects shows that he is just about the worst businessman to ever put on a suit. Added to this you have his long close relationship with super perv Jeffrey Epstein, the 100 million or so that he lost in court to E Jean Caroll in a civil suit for rape and defamation, the fact that he probably paid for dozens of abortions for his various bimbos over the years, but then sucks up to the religious right and pays them back with overturning Roe V Wade. Shame on these hypocrite Christians for supporting such an un-Christlike figure to bear their disgraceful torch of misogyny.
I guess he’s so entitled that he was never even potty trained; apparently those within olfactory reach at his trial were served up a nauseating bouquet of septic fragrances, which the msm tried to pass off as flatulence, but trusted sources say is actually a tendency to soil himself whenever someone says a word that he is not familiar with.
I just don’t get the devotion of his Pied Piper populism. Weird, disgusting and undemocratic. He’s OPENLY running for dictator!
On my blog at https://inarationalworld2.blogspot.com/2024/06/comeuppance.html
SICK OF & DONE WITH
by James Kunstler
“Biden is not well. Everyone knows this even those who support him…the difference is they don’t care and that’s the most frightening aspect of this situation.” — Edward Dowd
They’re kidding, right? That “Joe Biden” is capable of being president? Not just for another four-year term, but right here and now? This has got to be the most pitiful case of national gaslighting since 218-AD when the Romans installed 14-year-old Heliogabalus to front for their empire. Like “JB,” he reigned for four years (before the praetorian guard offed him). The Danish historian of ancient Rome, Barthold Niebuhr, said of him: “. . . [He] had nothing at all to make up for his vices, which are of such a kind that it is too disgusting even to allude to them.”
Lately, even the news media has begun to report “Joe Biden’s” senile mishaps. On Thursday at an outdoor photo op during the G7 meet-up in Italy, the ol’ dawg just wandered off from the assembled pack of world leaders until Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni went and reeled him back in.
Earlier in the week at a Juneteenth party, they rolled him out on the White House lawn like a cigar-store Indian where he stood utterly frozen while all around him boogalooed and clapped to the music of jubilee.
Do you think that folks are starting to notice? Even many mind-fucked Democrat Party regulars who have been just fine with the controlled demolition of our country under this human door-stop of a president are murmuring ominously that the scam has become too obvious. Not Rachel Maddow, though. America’s Woke lunatic-in-chief reigning on MSNBC warned this week that the return of Trump would lead to her (and millions of her fans) getting jammed into “concentration camps.”
Maybe you’ve already noticed that Rachel Maddow lives in a concentration camp of-the-mind located inside her own batshit-crazy skull. Dunno about you, but for the first time in a life lived through many decades of purportedly rational post-war Modernity, I’ve developed a sympathetic view of how come people in earlier eras resorted to burning witches. They are obdurate public nuisances. Their “magic” lately is the ability to provoke a mass formation psychosis, an actual “threat to our democracy” or, more precisely, to our republic. Maddow, the proudly out-front lesbian non-breeder is living proof that renouncing motherhood is a predictor of Cluster-B personality disorder — the condition that defines the “progressive” Wokery of these times.
I’m a little sorry to go all quasi-supernatural with you about this, but we are truly faced with the fact that the devastation in sexual relations and failures of family formation in recent decades has produced a very particular form of anomie in Western Civ’s female population — and the dynamic has badly deranged increasingly feminized men, too. Covid-19 was basically a Munchausen-by-proxy event, which ChatGPT describes accordingly:
… a psychological disorder wherein a caregiver, typically a parent, exaggerates, fabricates, or induces illness or injury in a person under their care, usually a child. The primary motive is to gain attention, sympathy, or praise from medical professionals and others, rather than any tangible benefit like financial gain.”
Actually, ChatGPT was wrong about the financial gain part. There were billions made off Covid by Big Pharma, including hundreds of millions in royalties doled out to public health employees. The government played the role of “mother” in the Covid caper, keeping you (her “children”) safe. You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that claims about safety and safe places have been major themes in Wokery both before and during Covid. Anyway, as usual with Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, the “children” (i.e., the US population) were injured badly by the “treatment,” the mRNA vaccines. And also as usual with mothers displaying Cluster-B personality disorder, the “bad” children who refuted the narrative and refused the specified “treatment” were punished severely. (Cluster-B is sadistic.)
One thing this suggests is that the cabal running things behind the empty suit “Joe Biden” is dominated by women, and my guess would be the women directly associated with Barack Obama: Susan Rice, Lisa Monaco, Kathryn Ruemmler, Sally Yates, Valarie Jarrett, Samantha Power, Avril Haines, Torie Nuland, give-or-take some combo of them, et al. I have alleged for years that the motif driving batshit-crazy, Cluster-B Democratic Party women is that Donald Trump represents Daddy’s-in-the-house. In their boundaryless state-of-mind nothing threatens the Cluster-B ladies as much as the imposition of boundaries by a fearsome daddy figure. Daddy = the monster of monsters to them.
Thus, the “Biden” regime’s remorseless persecution of Mr. Trump — like the village rabble hunting down Frankenstein with torches and pitchforks — and the fantasies, were he allowed to live, about being sent to concentration camps by the likes of Rachel Maddow. There’s nothing like barbed-wire and sentry towers to vividly suggest the imposition of “boundaries” on your behavior.
I have strayed a bit from my initial theme concerning the grotesque game of “pretend” being played around “Joe Biden’s” re-election candidacy. Let’s say this: it is the terminal op being run by an out-of-control Deep State blob now losing its mojo in big gobs each day as its epic dishonesty gets exposed. This blob had some very potent tools at its command to jerk around the people of this land, especially the legacy news media. Most of that consisted of deception which is to say the tactical application of untruth. The op was tragically effective for some years, but its victims — US citizens — are onto the game now and they are angrily flipping over the game board. Mark this essential fact of life: truth is sturdy and lies are fragile. So, now you know what must, in the end, prevail.
“Joe Biden” is not long for this world as a token in that game. Mere days, I’d say. There is no way that the Democratic Party can afford to put him in a debate arena June 27th with Mr. Trump. Two minutes in, “JB” would be leaking sawdust and stuttering incoherently. The Party would be revealed as a fraud for the ages. And then, by the time you’re scarfing down blueberry pie on the Fourth of July, Hillary Clinton (better known here as Rodan the Flying Reptile, or She-Whose-Turn-It-Is) will be flapping her leathery wings on-high in triumph as “JB’s” emergency replacement. I am here to save our democracy, caw caw—! Wait for it! Trouble is, batshit crazy women are exactly what our country is sick of and done with.
(kunstler.com)
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
How can anyone be fine with an incapacitated President…..how can his family watch and allow it…..if you're fine with this…..you ain’t human…..period
THAT THINGS FALL APART is a truth inscribed in the DNA of all living matter. It may be your fault, or her fault, or nobody's fault. It may happen in accordance with the laws of gravity or in defiance of all previously known laws. When it does happen, you may not believe it is actually happening to you. But that doesn't make it any less real.
The question of how it happens is usually easy to answer. You dislocate your shoulder. You lose your job. The money runs out. The plant shuts down. A spouse leaves. Your child is born with a rare heart defect and requires repeated open-heart surgeries. Your son or daughter is abducted by a political cult or by TikTok, or otherwise retreats into the darkness of his or her room. The roof of your house collapses under the weight of a heavy snowstorm in April. The dog runs into traffic and has to be put down.
Large, impersonal factors may also play a role. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses. An Iron Curtain descends across Europe. California tumbles into the sea. A songbird arrives on your doorstep and delivers a prophecy of a death foretold, and the death in question turns out to be your own. The arrival of long-awaited “fuck you money” means that your wife is free to finally leave you. Stranger things happen and keep happening.
— David Samuels, “County Highway”
NO WAY OUT IN NUSEIRAT: THE GREAT HOSTAGE RESCUE MASSACRE
by Jeffrey St. Clair
The Israelis usually make their abduction raids at night, when the streets are empty and their targets are sleeping. The raid on Nuseirat took place in mid-day at a refugee camp, when the roads and markets were packed with civilians, when children were playing, women doing their shopping, and old men drinking their tea.
Some of the Israelis came dressed as Palestinians, speaking Arabic, and looking like refugees. Some came concealed in civilian trucks. Others hovered above in Apache attack helicopters, waiting to strike.
The nearby Al-Aqsa Hospital was already overflowing with patients from the airstrikes of the previous few days, before it began receiving the wounded and maimed from the bloodiest day yet of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Al-Aqsa was already short on supplies, running low on drugs, water and power. The hospital’s hallways were already filled with moaning, bandaged patients, recovering from wounds and surgeries without painkillers. The staff was already overworked, tired and stressed out, when they heard the first explosions around 11 in the morning.
Dozens of airstrikes were followed by volleys of small arms gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades. Some explosions seemed very close to the hospital. Someone said the IDF had called the hospital minutes before and warned the staff to evacuate because it too was a target. But the nurses and the doctors wouldn’t leave their patients. Maybe it was disinformation or just another rumor of a hellish war.
Helicopters hovered overhead. Quadcopter drones darted in and out firing machine guns at the crowded streets. There was the unmistakable growl of tanks. The camp was surrounded. There was no way to flee. No air raid shelters to huddle in. No way out.
Then the calls came for help, soon followed by the wounded, the burnt, the dying and the dead. The bodies of children and women, the old and young, shredded by shrapnel, riven with bullets, some with severed limbs and others with perforated eyes.
“There were children everywhere, there were women, there were men,” said Karin Huster, who was working at Al-Aqsa with Médecins Sans Frontières. “We had the gamut of war wounds, trauma wounds, from amputations to eviscerations to trauma, to TBIs, traumatic brain injuries. Fractures, obviously, big burns. Kids completely grey or white from the shock, burnt, screaming for their parents — many of them not screaming because they are in shock.”
The tempo of the attack increased. The bombings and the gunfire and the tanks and the helicopters. The frenzied sounds of a war machine at full-throttle. For thirty minutes it went on. For an hour. For an hour and a half. It seemed interminable for those seeking shelter on the ground, cowering in buildings and the hospital. And then it was over, finally. And there were only the cries for help from the shattered streets and collapsed buildings. The cries of parents carrying dead children in their arms, the cries of children looking at the gutted bodies of their parents.
What had just happened? Why had this refugee camp at Nusierat, home of so many homeless people, so many Palestinian families who had been displaced by bombs time and time again, come under such a savage sustained attack from the air and the ground, an attack that destroyed 90 homes and apartment buildings? An attack of such fury that it left the streets scattered with severed arms and legs, the bodies of children and their mothers and grandfathers left to bleed out in the marketplace that seemed to be a target of the attack. What could possibly justify this slaughter, this killing, this destruction that one Palestinian refugee in Nuseirat said felt like “Doomsday”?
When the Israelis finally left, they took four people with them, four hostages who had been rescued by Israeli commandos and evacuated in helicopters that were stationed at or near Biden’s hapless “humanitarian” pier that had, coincidentally or not, just been reassembled and re-moored to the beach in central Gaza, after breaking apart in high seas last month.
When the Israelis finally left with the four rescued hostages, who’d been captured by Hamas on October 7 while attending the Nova rave just outside the Israeli security fence that pens in and isolates northern Gaza, they left behind 274 dead Palestinians, including 64 children and 57 women. They left behind 700 wounded, many in critical condition, many of whom seem likely to die in the coming days and weeks.
The great rescue mission turned into the worst massacre to date in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, leaving the streets of Nuseirat, in the words of Abu Asi, “halls of blood.” Everyone on the streets and inside the buildings of Nuseirat was a target that day. The gunfire and airstrikes were indiscriminate. Then entire camp was a kill zone.
Nuseirat’s narrow streets were cratered, so clotted with rubble and bodies that ambulances couldn’t reach the victims, many of whom were wheeled to the hospital in hand carts and wagons. Many more were left to die on the streets from treatable wounds.
“Aircraft struck dozens of military targets for the success of the operation,” the IDF brayed afterward. “Hamas, in a very cruel and cynical way, is holding hostages inside civilian buildings.”
The attack came without warning. It came in one of the most densely populated camps in Gaza. The commandos came in disguise, one group in a truck filled with beds and furniture, as if to mock the very refugees they were about to slaughter. This is a war crime. The crime of perfidy, an act of treacherous deception in which one side promises to act in good faith with the intention of breaking that promise once they encounter their enemy. There’s a reason soldiers wear uniforms in combat situations. It’s to protect civilians.
The Israelis said they came at mid-day as an element of surprise. But their own history of raids in Gaza and elsewhere says they usually come at night. This rescue operation was different. This rescue operation in broad daylight was designed to kill. To kill as many as possible, no matter who they were or what they were doing. To kill kids kicking soccer balls, young women standing in line at the bakery, and old men carrying bags of flour and rice. It even killed hostages.
“We inform you that in exchange for these, your army killed three prisoners in the same camp, one of whom held American citizenship,” the military wing of Hamas announced in a video released following the attack.
The Americans knew. The Americans helped. Did the CIA or Pentagon help with the targeting? It hardly matters. The Americans provided the bombs, the helicopters, the fighter jets, the bullets and the tank shells. The Americans watched the attack unfold. They watched from Biden’s pier. They watched from drones. They watched as the streets filled with blood, bodies and limbs. Afterward, the Americans praised the rescue operation and said nothing about the dead Palestinian children and women. Nothing about the amputees and the eviscerated. Nothing about the three hostages who were also apparently killed in the Israeli attack, including an American citizen.
The Biden administration’s complicity in the Nuseirat mass slaughter shatters the last pretense of American diplomacy in the Middle East. It’s a sinister calculus that justifies killing and wounding 1000 people to rescue four–four people who could have been released through a ceasefire, a ceasefire the Biden administration claims it wanted to broker.
The massacre at Nuseirat made clear once more that some lives are worth more than others. And to the Israelis and their American allies, at least, Palestinian lives don’t seem to be worth anything at all.
(Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.)
KEEP CATS INSIDE
Can’t. I don’t own a cat.
“I guess he’s so entitled that he was never even potty trained; apparently those within olfactory reach at his trial were served up a nauseating bouquet of septic fragrances, which the msm tried to pass off as flatulence, but trusted sources say is actually a tendency to soil himself whenever someone says a word that he is not familiar with.”
I wonder if that tendency is common among MAGAts…
Awoke early in the air conditioned room atop the queen sized bed, the blue scented votive candle still aglow near the OM meditation shawl, which is draped over the large TV screen (which has not been turned on). Not identified with the body nor the mental factory, which are only instruments for use by the Divine Absolute. It is crucial for the karmis to free themselves from the illusory, from the spectacle of the mundane hell of global social collapse and environmental implosion, and to stop pretending that it is otherwise. A collective spiritual revolution is the solution, for the expressed purpose of destroying the demonic and returning this world to righteousness. There is no other reason to be here!
Craig Louis Stehr
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
A question, O wise one: when was the effen world ever righteous, except in the minds of fools?
It’s the best that I can do on short notice:
https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/vocab-insight-dikaiosune-righteousness/#:~:text=Dikaiosune%2C%20or%20righteousness%2C%20means%20living,faithfully%20according%20to%20God's%20instruction.
THE LAW AND GUNS THAT KILL RAPIDLY
“In a Scathing Dissent, Sonia Sotomayor Calls Out the Conservative Justices’ Hypocrisy”
“Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is calling bullshit on her conservative colleagues’ rationale for throwing out a 2018 ban on bump stocks, the device used to modify the gun used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting—the deadliest in modern U.S. history. The Trump administration reclassified guns with bump stocks as machine guns, thereby banning the device’s use under a 1934 law that heavily restricts access to machine guns.
In Sotomayor’s dissent in Garland v. Cargill, which Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan joined, she called out how her conservative colleagues had basically bent over backwards to redefine the legal definition of a “machine gun.” She noted that these linguistic gymnastics are particularly galling given how much conservative jurists claim to prize textualism—a theory that stresses adhering closely to the plain text of the law and to the ordinary meaning of words.
To drive the point home, Sotomayor came with receipts: She quoted past opinions where each one of the conservative justices in the majority had stressed the importance of textualism—and, specifically, a focus on the ordinary meaning of statutes… ‘today, the majority forgets that principle and substitutes its own view of what constitutes a ‘machine gun’ for Congress’s.’
Congress banned machine guns almost a century ago through the National Firearms Act and, as Sotomayor pointed out, has since updated it to expand the definition of a machine gun to include “any weapon which shoots, or is designed to shoot, automatically … more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” The federal definition also encompasses “any part designed or intended” to enable automatic fire, which bump stocks plainly are.
Sotomayor cited several dictionary definitions to support her reading of the law and drew attention to the way the majority went out of its way to impose a new, bizarre understanding of the words Congress used. ‘The majority looks to the internal mechanism that initiates fire, rather than the human act of the shooter’s initial pull, to hold that a ‘single function of the trigger’ means a reset of the trigger mechanism,’ Sotomayor wrote. ..
In this way, the conservative justices’ use of textualism mirrors their use of originalism: Both are supposedly strict philosophies for interpreting law that give them cover to do whatever they want when it suits them. Originalism—the theory that the Constitution must be interpreted through the lens of its original meaning at the time of ratification—has also been misused to put America on a path away from common-sense gun reform, as Jill Filipovic explained in a essay for Slate: ‘Since 2008, the court has radically departed from centuries of case law on gun regulations and the Second Amendment, making it astoundingly difficult for lawmakers to implement even the most basic and commonsense of gun laws.’
But Sotomayor stressed that the meaning of words does matter. ‘When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,’ wrote Sotomayor. ‘A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.’ ”
SLATE, 6/14/24
Mr. Kunstler’s photo of President Biden “wandering off” at the G7 gathering is a confirmed “Cheapfake”, wherein the parachutist Biden has broken away from the group to speak with, has been cropped out of the frame.
Similarly, the photo of Biden standing listening to the music play while others gyrate to it, is cropped to leave out other attendees who were also simply standing and listening.
Such Cheapfakes are cheap shots, designed to distort reality in ways that show Biden in the worst possible light. Fasten your seatbelts, because many, many more of these are coming your way, compliments of the reality-twisting MAGA world.
Giorgia Meloni Had to pull Biden back to the group. He’s obviously old and confused which is sometimes normal for a 81 year old. Another 50 billion approved to rebuild Ukraine seems odd considering they are still at war.
Whatever. He looks as braindead as he always does. He’s too far gone for drugs to do any real good, as his state of the union speech demonstrated. That “we the people” have a “choice” between him and the brainless mutant, and that we still have the nondemocratic electoral college and equal representation for all states in the senate, show the true state of this pathetic country.
RE: VIGILANTE JUSTICE
I was at Grocery Outlet in Clearlake today and witnessed something I never thought I would. Some guy tried to kidnap a baby from a women who was in the process of putting her groceries in her car. The woman fought back and was stabbed twice. Before the guy could get away with the baby, bystanders kicked in gear and beat the shit out of him and held him under citizen arrest until the police and ambulance arrived. I sat there in my Lexus in awe.
MAGA Marmon
Everyone has a bad Adventist story. This was predictable once Adventist achieved a geographic monopoly. It thrives whether its service is good, bad, or really bad.