Estuary | More Heat | PA Parade | Exciting Chase | Helicopter | Solar Project | AV Events | Horsetail Ferns | Warehouse Fire | Pet Ted | Fundraising BBQ | Ball Buoy | Dementia Forum | Walton Book | Taiko Drumming | Ed Interview | Yesterday's Catch | Michelle v Donald | I or Me | Oxford Comma | Forest Clubber | Gift Tax | Marco Radio | May Brown | As Game | Cold Blood | Sweet Wyoming | Santa Cruz | Organ Convention | Cotton Picking | Wildfire Costs | City Exodus | Perpetual Growth | Young Servant | NYT Stories | Sex! | Biden v RFK | Open Wider | See Better | Slush Puppie | Crazy Week | Wagon Ride | Exhausted | Nurse
EXTREME HEAT RISK is expected for much of the interior today through Monday. Hot weather will continue in the interior all next week. A shallow marine layer will slowly rebuild today through Monday and likely bring periods of fog to coastal areas. (NWS)
YESTERDAY'S HIGHS: Ukiah 117°, Yorkville 115°, Laytonville 114°, Covelo 112°, Boonville 110°, Fort Bragg 72°, Mendocino 69°, Point Arena 64°
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Clear skies for the fireworks last night! 54F under clear skies this Sunday morning on the coast. Coastal temps will drop back into the upper 60's this week, warmer away from the coast. Hints of patchy fog returned to our forecast. The bulk of the fog remains well to the south currently.
DUI INVESTIGATION LEADS TO PURSUIT, ARREST OF ATTEMPTED HOMICIDE SUSPECT IN FORT BRAGG
On Friday, July 5, 2024 at approximately 10:16 PM, Fort Bragg police officers were proactively patrolling the area of Pomo Bluffs Park, when they contacted three subjects in a vehicle. The driver displayed indicators of driving under the influence of alcohol and officers initiated a DUI investigation. Prior exiting, the driver, later identified as Nathan Hoaglin, 21, of Clearlake, fled in the vehicle.
Officers initiated a vehicle pursuit, which went south on Highway 1 for approximately ten minutes and ended near Lansing St in the town of Mendocino, where Hoaglin lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a stationary traffic device on the Jack Peters Creek Bridge, then into an oncoming vehicle. All three occupants fled on foot.
Deputies from Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, already in the area to assist in the pursuit, searched Mendocino for the rest of the night. They located Hoaglin in the 45000 block of Main Street in Mendocino and arrested him. Deputies continued to search Mendocino and later located the passengers, Diego Ceja Sandoval, 19, of Ukiah and a 16 year-old male juvenile of Coyote Valley. Both passengers were also arrested.
While searching their vehicle, officers located a loaded unregistered handgun with a high capacity magazine.
During the investigation, officers learned Hoaglin was on Post Release Community Supervision (PRCS) and had a felony warrant for Attempted Homicide and Participation in a Criminal Street Gang, for an incident in Santa Rosa. Hoaglin was booked into the Mendocino County Jail for the warrants, and new charges of Evading a Peace Officer; Child Endangerment; Conspiracy to Commit a Felony; Carrying Loaded Firearm in Public; Carrying Concealed Firearm in Vehicle with Prior Conviction; Felon in Possession of a Firearm. All are felonies. Hoaglin was also booked for Leaving the Scene of an Accident, a misdemeanor.
Sandoval was booked into the Mendocino County Jail on the charges of Carry a Loaded Firearm in Public; Conspiracy to Commit a Felony; and Resist/Obstruct/Delay Arrest. The first two charges are felonies and the third is a misdemeanor.
The juvenile passenger was booked into Mendocino County Juvenile Detention Center on the charges of Carrying Loaded Firearm in Public; and Conspiracy to Commit a Felony, both felonies. He was also booked on misdemeanor charges of Resist/Obstruct/Delay Arrest and Public Intoxication.
Chief Neil Cervenka said, “This was an example of the outstanding partnership we have with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office and all our allied agencies. Working together as a team, we successfully located and arrested an alleged gang member wanted for attempt homicide, considered armed and dangerous, and recovered an illegal firearm. This started with officers doing good, proactive police work, protecting our community.”
There were no injuries as a result of the vehicle collision and minor damage to the uninvolved vehicle. The suspect vehicle was completely disabled. All three suspects sustained minor injuries from jumping off the Jack Peters Creek Bridge when they were fleeing from officers following the collision. They were all medically cleared prior to booking.
Anyone with information on this incident is encouraged to contact Sgt De Leon of the Fort Bragg Police Department at (707)961-2800 extension 214.
This information is being released by Chief Neil Cervenka. All media inquiries should contact him at ncervenka@fortbragg.com.
MAJOR SOLAR PROJECT APPROVED NORTHEAST OF UKIAH
by Sarah Reith
At a brief hearing on Wednesday morning, the Mendocino County Planning Commission approved an application for a major use permit for a 4 megawatt, 20-acre solar farm on Redemeyer Road, about two miles northeast of Ukiah, near the intersection with Deerwood Drive. The site is a fallow portion of a 97-acre property, the rest of which is planted with vines. Senior planner Russ Ford described the project, which was submitted by Renewable Properties, a San Francisco-based firm specializing in small-scale solar farms.
“It would consist of more than 10,000 individual solar modules mounted on tracking swivels and would have the capacity to generate as much as four megawatts of renewable energy,” he told the commission. “Daily energy usage estimates vary, but using the average of 20 kilowatt hours a day, four megawatts could power approximately 200 homes.” He added that the site includes “PG&E infrastructure that would allow connection to the larger power grid.”…
mendofever.com/2024/07/07/major-solar-project-approved-northeast-of-ukiah
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE Events Calendar
FIRE DESTROYS FORMER PEAR STORAGE WAREHOUSE IN UKIAH
UVFA Chief Doug Hutchinson said that the first fire alarm began sounding around 4 a.m. July 2, and that a 911 call placed soon after confirmed that there was a fire in the large building that used to serve as cold storage for boxes of picked fruit when the warehouse was a pear picking plant.
“Two of the four walls are gone, and so is the roof,” said Hutchinson, who reported at 12:45 p.m., more than eight hours after it started, that the fire was still burning deep within the tall piles of paper products and compost. “Some of the piles of materials here are 10-feet deep.”
To completely put out the fire, Hutchinson said that C&S personnel were using heavy equipment to move the smoldering piles so that UVFA crews could douse them with water. Since the UVFA ladder truck was in the shop when the fire began “out of an abundance of caution,” a ladder truck from the Healdsburg Fire Department first responded, but Hutchinson said the UVFA ladder truck was able to respond soon after.
When asked how the fire started, Hutchinson said it will be quite some time before firefighters “can even enter the building and start to sort through” the materials to determine a cause.
Fire Investigator and UVFA Battalion Chief Justin Buckingham said Tuesday afternoon that “it will probably be a few days before I can get inside to take a look,” explaining that the warehouse was “filled with green waste and mixed recyclables (such as cardboard), which is why it is still burning.”
Hutchinson said that a vegetation fire was ignited near the warehouse and began spreading outside of the building toward the railroad tracks, but that firefighters were able to quickly knock it down.
Repeated calls to C&S Waste Solutions did not reach anyone available for comment.
Personnel from the Redwood Valley-Calpella Volunteer Fire Department, Potter Valley Fire and the Hopland Fire Protection District also responded to the incident, as did the Ukiah Police Department and the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Ted is a sweet dog who enjoys being around people. He appreciates getting out and about in the wild blue yonder, and has lovely manners indoors. Ted walks nicely on-leash and knows a few basic commands. This delightful guy is very smart, and eager to learn new things. We see him graduating Doggie Cum Laude at canine college. Ted is a 2 year old, mixed-breed dog weighing in at 45 dapper pounds.
To see all of our canine and feline guests, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.
Join us every first Saturday of the month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event at the shelter.
We're on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter
For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.
ALBION-LITTLE RIVER BBQ JULY 16TH, BENEFIT FOR THE VOLUNTEER A-LR FIRE PROTECTION DISTRICT FIREFIGHTERS.
Barbeque is about as red, white and blue as American cuisine gets, and the only real question when it comes to barbeque is, how to save room for seconds. And let's get one thing straight - really good barbeque is more than just food; it's a celebration of flavors, a community experience, and as it happens, a fantastic way to support the Albion-Little River Fire Protection District firefighters and their dedication and service to our community.
So gather up your family and friends and come join us at our 61st annual Fundraising Barbeque sponsored by the Albion-Little River Fire Auxiliary on Saturday, July 13 at Albion-Little River Fire Station 812, 43100 Little River Airport Rd., Little River, CA from noon to 5PM. This year's barbecue will feature a mouth-watering selection of grilled favorites, including tri-tip, chicken, and a variety of sides (salad, garlic bread, beans and corn), all prepared by our skilled volunteer chefs. Vegetarian and vegan options will also be available to ensure there is something for everyone to enjoy. Wine, beer and soft drinks will be available for purchase.
Along with silent and wine auctions, there will be ALRFPD t-shirts and ALRFPD Three Ridge Blend coffee and mugs for sale, firefighter demonstrations and of course music provided by Keeter Stuart & Dan Crary and Latchkey.
Tickets are available at the gate day of the event at $25 per adult; $12 for children 7-12; and FREE for those under 7. Proceeds from the event will go towards purchasing new equipment, funding training programs and supporting fire prevention within the community.
Q: What's better than the annual Albion-Little River Fire Protection District Barbeque?
A: Absolutely nothing. See you there.
DEMENTIA FORUM ON LOCAL SERVICES & NEEDS, July 18th at Caspar Community Center
Friends of Health is sponsoring a one-day event on how to cope with the epidemic of dementia. This is a hard topic, but our intention is to give hope and resources, and opportunity to ask questions of experts. We especially want family and community members who are willing to help those who are facing this terrifying prognosis.
At Caspar Community Center, 9:00 to 4:30, Thursday 7/18. Free, including lunch.
We'll hear from a psychiatrist from Ukiah who specializes in brain health and will offer dementia prevention and treatment updates. The new Hospice program is represented and wants to hear our needs. Panel includes medical director of Adventist Health Mendocino Hospital, director of our Senior Center, county Adult Protective Services and caregiving organizations. Estate attorney and Fiduciary will discuss preparing before it's too late. And family members who are coping will be there as well.
In the late morning, we'll break into small tables, where you can meet experts, browse the information, brochures, schedules and ask questions. Physical therapists will demonstrate how to help move people safely.
Then lunch and a chance to meet personally with others. Afternoon we will be brainstorming and doing a needs assessment to make this a gentler journey.
(Tom Wodetzki)
TODD WALTON writes:
Rejoice! My new book Pooches and Kiddies: the further adventures of Healing Weintraub is now all here. By that I mean the handsome paperback, the various e-book editions, and the audio edition narrated by yours truly are all available now.
Yes Pooches and Kiddies is the sequel to Good With Dogs and Cats: the adventures of Healing Weintraub, and also a fine stand-alone novel that begins four years after the conclusion of Good With Dogs and Cats and spans one momentous year in the life of Healing Weintraub and his family and friends: human, canine, and feline.
Introducing Raaz and Oz, Healing’s marvelous four-year-old twin grandchildren – Raaz a girl, Oz a boy – Pooches and Kiddies finds our hero helping dogs and cats solve their problems with humans while he and his loved ones navigate the mysteries and challenges of being alive.
Making the audio edition of Pooches and Kiddies with the help of Peter Temple was one of the most challenging and enjoyable creative adventures of my life – so many accents and timbres and personalities to assume – and I’m pleased with the result.…
underthetablebooks.com/blog/archives/6830
TAIKO DRUMMING
The Genryu Miasa Taiko "Feel the Beat" Performance Series by Mendocino Sister Cities Association
Since 1989, the Genryu Miasa Taiko has been active in the Miasa-Omachi Area and beyond, performing at various festivals, events, and competitions more than thirty times per year. This year marks their 35th Anniversary, and they will perform in Tokyo in November. Currently, they have fifteen members with a wide range of ages between 8 and 59 years old.
Their existence is vital in the community. Additionally, they provide a place for the community members to meet and have fun together as well as for the young students to nurture their personal growth, such as teamwork, self-control, patience, and all those good things, through taiko drumming. We are excited to have the seven members of the Genryu Miasa Taiko group in Mendocino. Please come and join us!
FEEL THE BEAT!
The 18th Mendocino Sister City International Art Exhibition Opening Evening The Genryu Miasa Taiko opens the reception. Enjoy the evening full of Art, Culture, and Taiko.
Where: The Mendocino Art Center
When: July 13th, 2024: Saturday 5 pm
Genryu Miasa Taiko Special Performance
They are back!
The Mendocino Music Festival kindly hosts the Genryu Miasa Taiko for another performance at the lawn by the Festival Main Tent. This performance is a gift to our community. However, your donations are appreciated.
Where: The lawn by the Mendocino Music Festival Main Tent at Mendocino Headlands State Park on Main Street.
When: July 14th, 2024: Sunday 2 pm
AVA STAFF INTERVIEW THE EDITOR
Part 1: Questions from Terry Sites
Do you miss being able to talk? Are you in pain? Can you eat conventionally? What senses have you lost? Which ones do you miss the most? The least? What is your prognosis?
Ed: In order: Miss my powers of speech? Not intensely, but the inconvenience of the loss to my family is beginning to annoy them.
Odd as it must seem given the severity of my operation — a new throat — I've experienced no pain, only fairly constant discomfort caused by adjusting to life with my manufactured orifice. For instance, I often have to suction my new throat via a nifty little machine perched on my desk. Of course for the week in ICU after the operation my IV may have been loaded with pain killers, but I've directly experienced no real pain. (My surgeon, Doctor Ryan, is an absolute maestro of the scalpel.) There was a general depletion of energy, for sure, but I'm now able to walk and do push-ups for an hour every morning. Got to say without my martyred wife and my dutiful daughter I would have had a much more terrible time.
I can eat normally but still don't have much of an appetite. I down a lot of Ensure these days.
I've lost senses of smell and taste. Much as I'd prefer to still have them, I don't dwell on their loss.
Prognosis is good, at least according to the medicos who, after all, are professionally optimistic.
Looking back, what is the most “golden moment” thus far in the history of the AVA?
I've never thought of the long slog in terms of auras, but overall I think we accomplished what newspapers are supposed to accomplish — afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted.
What is the most ghastly and wretched moment you can remember at the AVA?
There have been a bunch, and reading around in the archive I wish I'd had an editor instead of being the editor. One particularly ghastly moment was publishing false information fed to me by a person I'd trusted. I still cringe thinking about it.
Do you wake up curious and ready to plunge into the zeitgeist, or do you wake up tired and finished?
I wake up. You can't know how happy I am to bring it off on a daily basis.
If you could get one “wish” in this world (as broadly speaking as you like), what would it be?
I'd like my grandchildren to step into a relatively peaceful world other than the violently chaotic world they will inherit.
Who is the most noble human you can think of?
Eminent-type human? Ralph Nader comes to mind, but I most admire unsung people who go about their lives doing good, or simply managing to live on under difficult circumstances. I know a single mom who successfully raised two children on her own, for one instance, and there are many millions like her doing admirably in the context of an unraveling society.
Who is the most dastardly character you can think of?
My, a little judgemental aren't we? The inventor of the mobile phone certainly, Democrat big shots who claim to be defending everyday people while in fact making life more difficult for the majority, many of whom have gone over to The Orange Beast in desperation.
What is currently your greatest pleasure?
Watching my two grandchildren grow up. So far, so good, but the minefield of adolescence lies ahead. It was a lot easier being a kid when I was young. These days the negative distractions are everywhere, nevermind dope and Taylor Swift.
What would you do differently at the AVA given a chance for a “redo”?
Nothing.
Do you have any major regrets?
The zillion minor ones more than add up to the majors.
What are you most proud of?
Lasting as long as we have, and the stories we did that did major good for wronged persons, or at least lent them some consolation.
Could you let us know when you will visit the AVA office so we can come by and see you and shake your hand and thank you for all you do and have done for this community? (Local appreciation)
Absolutely not!
Part 2: Questions from The Major
How would you rank the AVA’s major contributors over the years, and why?
I won't rank them and the why is unnecessary given their work itself, but your coverage of county functioning, of course, Bruce McEwen's uniquely brilliant court coverage, Alexander Cockburn, also the best political writer and writer-writer in the country for many years, Mike Geniella, David Yearsley, Clay Geerdes, Fred Gardner, Mike Koepf on local matters, Jonah Raskin, Mary Miles, Katy Tahja, Doug Holland, Paul Modic, Terry Ryder-Sites, Tom Hine, Mark Heimann. Lists like this are dangerous because inevitably people get left out and are justifiably miffed, but a truly unfettered forum like the AVA's attracts talent.
What comes to mind as your favorite personal stories?
A lot of them still make me as angry as I was when I wrote them, and remain painful to re-visit, but I'm proud of the series on the Fort Bragg Fires of '87 — we went to three or four print runs on that one, which was our all-time best seller. The saga of the grotesquely persecuted Orr Sisters of Fort Bragg during the Satanist hysteria, to name two that always come instantly to mind.
Who do you think have been the most interesting (good or bad) County officials?
Johnny Pinches as supervisor is the most doggedly conscientious person to hold the position, but generally the quality of the supervisors has been poor. McCowen was pretty good, but I die a little thinking of most of them.
Do you recall any particular Keith Squires anecdotes or stories, especially from the early days?
If every community had a cop like Squires, America would be a better place. A tough guy but unfailingly fair.
Most memorable local characters?
Larry Parsons, the blind winemaker of Philo, and probably the least sympathetic handicapped person in the country in his time.
How do you see the future of the AVA?
Considering it's a geriatric enterprise…. I hope someone will keep it alive when we've gone to our reward. (I can feel the Reaper's hot breath.) Specifically, I don't see a likely successor but I'm sure there are people out there who could capably carry on. Our website just keeps growing so someone could eke out a living keeping it alive if that someone had the discipline and ability to do it. The AVA remains important to many Mendo people and even to thrill seekers beyond the County. I didn't know if it would survive behind a paywall, but it has.
What area(s) in Mendocino County would you consider to be the most attractive?
Fort Bragg going away. And Covelo. The Anderson Valley runs a strong third.
Least attractive?
Ukiah, and this is a consensus opinion.
What do you recall as highlights or lowlights from your time(s) in jail?
First time in, I was able to get every single inmate to sign onto a writ to the Superior Court complaining about conditions. That was the old falling-apart jail with showers that ran all night, sheetrock crumbling, guys sleeping on the floor, me included, from overcrowding. Our writ was upheld and about twenty inmates had to be released.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, July 6, 2024
JORGE ALVARADO, Ukiah. Domestic abuse.
CHRISTOPHER ASHURST, Ukiah. Controlled substance, no license, probation revocation.
JASMINE BAILEY, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.
DIEGO CEJA, Fort Bragg. Loaded firearm in public, conspiracy, resisting.
TASHA CRAIG, Willits. DUI, resisting, probation violation.
KATRINA FOWLES, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.
NATHENAL FULLER, Fort Bragg. Battery withw serious injury, resisting.
RODOLFO GONZALEZ-ALVAREZ, Willits. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.15% pot transportation, suspended license, resisting, failure to appear, probation revocation.
ERIC HICKS, Greenboro, North Carolina/Ukiah. DUI, concentrated cannabis.
NATHAN HOAGLIN JR., Clearlake/Fort Bragg. Attempted murder, street terrorism, participation in criminal street gang, felond-addict with firearm, concealed firearm in vehicle, loaded firearm in public, cruelty to child-infliction of injury, conspiracy, evasion.
ADAM PARKINSON, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.
JUAN SANCHEZ-MONTIEL, Ukiah. Arson, resisting. (Frequent flyer.)
SAMUEL SIERRA, Ukiah. County parole violation, resisting, bringing controlled substance into jail.
LINDY PETERS: See what I mean?!?
Michelle Obama, author, attorney, and wife of former President Barack Obama, has a double-digit lead over Trump, 50%-39%, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll.
PAM HOWARD
I don’t know if this has been mentioned before but I was taught that, when including “and I” or “and me” in a sentence, try removing the other person from that sentence. If the sentence then reads only “I” or “me,” and it sounds right, it is right.
For example “Mother is taking my sister and me to the cinema” becomes “mother is taking me to the cinema.” But it wouldn’t sound right if we said, “Mother is taking I to the cinema,” so “my sister and I” must therefore be grammatically wrong.
(Boy! That was difficult to explain!)
YABUT, WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WITH THE COLOMBIAN? FESS UP, CRAIG! (Are you the first Hindu ever to be 86'd from a Ukiah establishment?)
Craig Stehr:
Warmest spiritual greetings,
The solution to the chaos and insanity of this world, is to center one's mind in the heart chakra, and not interfere with the Divine Absolute working through the body-mind complex. The individual goes where one needs to go and does what one needs to do.
Please know that I am available for the remainder of this incarnation for radical environmental and peace & justice direct action. I am prepared to leave my present circumstances anytime after July 19th, and otherwise have secure housing until August 5th in Ukiah, California. The recent change of banks has been completed, and now have an account which enables travel and access to money without complication. The final medical and dental appointments are upcoming, and are already paid for. Am eating well due to the proximity of the local food co-op. Got new shoes and sandals. Am happy. Fair enough?
— Craig Louis Stehr
CRAIG REPLIES:
Hey, the Colombian guy is very uptight. He said that the other bartenders could serve me. I was not asked to leave, but who would want to be there after that!? So I ambled over to the Forest Club where I am very welcome and had a wonderful afternoon. Dropped by Villa del Mar afterwards for a combination plate. Slept like a log.
MEMO OF THE AIR: One (1) meatball.
"I am sorry, My Lady. There I stand, glorious, impressive, and helpless. I am your fortress, I should be defending your town. You should not have to rely on smug enigmatic murder ghosts." -Castle Heterodyne, in Girl Genius
Here's the recording of last night's (Friday 2024-07-05) 7.2-hour Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first hour, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino): https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0600
Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or whatever. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air. That's what I'm here for.
Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:
"Out in the West Texas town of El Paso I fell in love with a Mexican girl." https://27thstreet.me/2024/07/04/el-paso-3
Eight hours of fireworks. One idea: use it to desensitize your pet animals. You've got a year again, once you can coax them out from where they're wedged in behind the bathtub. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbPYmjiaS2U
And this grandmotherly creature, that has all the marbles a fish can have, hatched from an egg the year Michelangelo spent on his back on scaffolds painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. What do you suppose a 500-year-old fish tastes like? Well, sir, the answer is, "The Greenland shark has a distinctive taste due to its high urea content. This gives the shark's flesh a strong, ammonia-like odor, making it toxic and inedible until properly treated. It must be fermented and dried for several months. The traditional Icelandic dish /hakarl/ is made this way. People often describe the taste as being similar to very strong, pungent, fishy cheese." When I went to work for Tim in 1989, in the toolbox was a Sears-Craftsman nut-driver set whose plastic handles smelled strongly of urine; it hit you in the nose when you pulled out the drawer. These have been very durable tools. I'm still using them; they're not chipped or cracked, despite that I often manhandle them with channel-lock pliers to get stubborn parts loose. They still smell like stale piss, not as much, but it's there. Remarkable. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/07/greenland-shark-could-be-512-years-old.html
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
BYE BYE OAKLAND A’S
by Jonah Raskin
Faithful Oakland A's fans – I counted myself one of them — kept hoping until the bottom of the ninth inning that Andujar, Langeliers or someone else on the squad might hit a towering home run, tie the score and send the game into extra innings. Then perhaps the ghosts of Ricky Henderson, Reggie Jackson and Rollie Fingers might smile down on the Coliseum and on the beleaguered As who are bound for Las Vegas via Sacramento. The ghosts of the past might help them squeak out a win. But that was not to be.
I didn’t go to the baseball game on the first Saturday in July expecting the As to win. They were enjoying a losing season, though enjoying might not be the right word. They were at the bottom of the standings in the American League West, and the Baltimore Orioles, who they were battling, were at the top of the standings in the American League East, a few games ahead of the Yankees who were on a losing streak.
Sometimes you just have to go with a loser for sentimental reasons or because you root for the underdog and lump it. That’s the way it can be in sports and in politics and that’s the way it was at the battered Coliseum which looked like it had seen far better days. My pal Greg and I had good seats, right behind home plate. We paid $90 each, but the seats didn't afford us a good view of the batter’s box, perhaps because the seats weren’t sufficiently distanced apart from one another or because we just happened to be seated behind a few tall guys who wore goofy Orioles hats and jerseys.
The stands were packed with Orioles fans. The stadium has over 60,000 seats. Only about 9,000 were occupied. Oakland seems to have given up on the As. I enjoyed the game, though the As defeated themselves. As players committed three errors that led to Baltimore runs. Bad throwing, bad catching, perhaps bad coaching and lousy team spirit. It looked as though the As didn’t really care about the 2024 season, though their fans never gave up on them.
Still, by the end of the second inning there seemed to be little doubt that the As were going down to defeat. I had a hot dog with lots of mustard. Greg sipped a cola, fans next to me devoured fries buried in ketchup. Everyone in the stands stood for the seventh inning stretch, everyone stood for the national anthem and everyone sang, “Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd.” The patriotic fans, just a day after the Fourth of July, seemed to believe that “our flag was still there.”
It took me two hours to reach the ball park on public transportation and two hours to get home by public transportation. Just before I boarded a BART train for San Francisco, Greg asked, “Are you afraid to be out at night in your neighborhood?’ I said “No, but I’m not out after ten p.m.” I arrived at Ocean Beach after ten and I was a tad afraid; a couple of guys were going through garbage cans on my street. Not to worry. I turned the key in my gate, went inside my apartment and knew that the whole day had been well spent. Oh, yes, the final score was 3-2. Can't forget about that fact.
MIKE KOEPF:
Belatedly, Happy Forth of July. Up here in Wyoming it doesn’t get dark until late. Something to do with the latitude and sun. However, latitude equals attitude here on the wide open plains. The plains are actually kind of hilly, of course, but blowing and waving grass can be seen for hundreds of miles. Back to the 4th. Twilight. We walk out onto the deck. Our view is kind of over the end of long wide valley with the Big Horn mountains directly across from us that we see for, probably, for over a hundred miles all the way up and into Montana. Anyhow, there are scattered homes and little ranches below. Some very big ranches far off. One of them owned by the people who founded M&Ms my favorite treat as a kid. Bang! then the fireworks began. I know that in Marin lighting a sparkler can get you tossed in jail, but in Wyoming every house seems to be in charge of big time fireworks of their own. Not fissy stuff on the ground, but rockets bursting in the air high above most of their homes. It was spectacular and didn’t end until well after one AM. Next door neighbors fired off a few bursting over our house, while the Star Spangled Banner blared loudly in their yard. Pal, you’d love it here. No joke. I've returned to America again.
ED REPLY: Every ten-year-old in America wishes he'd been there.
GILDED AGE ORGAN RICHES FROM LONG A.G.O. AND LAST WEEK
by David Yearsley
From last Sunday evening through yesterday afternoon, some 2,000 organists have been shuttling around the San Francisco Bay Area for a program of lectures, workshops, and concerts. This installment of the bi-annual convention of the American Guild of Organists (A. G. O.) concluded with a Fourth of July solo recital by the American organist and scholar, Kimberly Marshall at Stanford University’s Memorial Church. This cavernous basilica was built in honor not of Jane Stanford’s doomed son, Leland Jr., for whom the university is named, but of her late husband, Leland Sr. The church’s neo-byzantine style is a fitting architectural representation of the Byzantine schemes that Stanford used to enrich himself before rebranding himself as a philanthropist.
Merchant to the Gold Rush—selling pickaxes was far more lucrative than using them—and railroad magnate, Stanford was an early Governor of California and a U.S. Senator, side hustles to the title that best defines him: Robber Baron. Through bribes, influence pedaling, kickbacks, duplicitous stock deals and monopolistic practices, Stanford built the fortune that would build Stanford University. His numerous dirty schemes are detailed in his incriminating correspondence: the complexities of these machinations and malfeasances were beyond Stanford’s mental grasp and he needed ample explanation and re-explanation.
Built on Gilded Age lucre, Memorial Church glows like the stuff of the Gold Rush, the structure’s richly mosaiced walls and niches glorious in the Californian light filtering through the stained-glass tributes to the Old Master paintings that the Stanfords had admired in Europe. Jesus, the Word-spreading Apostles, and the Old Testament prophets are all nearly as white as the sheets that conveniently cover up offending body parts. There were people of color living in what is now California when these saints were busy proselytizing and getting martyred, but these first inhabitants are nowhere pictured in the Stanford church. Just six days before a group of American colonists signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Spanish Franciscan priest Junipero Serra founded the mission in San Francisco.
In the hours before the A.G.O. convention officially kicked off, fugitive sonorities resisting these erasures were heard in the National Young Artist’s organ playing competition held at a church on the southeast edge of San Francisco with a view of the Pacific Ocean beyond avenues of modest bungalows. Each of the five contestants who made it through to the final round was required to play Navajo pianist/composer Connor Chee’s Hózhó. For many, bombast is the default setting of the organ, but Chee’s ruminative, sincere piece did not bow down to the King of Instruments, a symbol of conquest from sea to shining sea. Instead, Chee’s native melodies and calm, cyclical harmonies asked all to reflect on beauty and balance, rare commodities in the high-tech rat race run every day in this region and beyond its ever-expanding boundaries.
To many it might seem a daunting prospect to play for pews jam-packed with organists, among them the leaders in the profession. But Kimberly Marshall’s generosity to that profession is boundless. Over her impressive career, Marshall has guided scores of students, first as University Organist at Stanford the late 1980s and into the 1990s, and for some three decades as Professor of Organ at Arizona State. She plays widely varied programs on organs ancient and modern around the world; has served as a consultant on important construction projects; has commissioned and performed new works; been a forceful voice for women at an instrument dominated for centuries by men. A wide-ranging scholar, first of the medieval organ but stretching far beyond it, her most ambitious project has been an Organ Encyclopedia, a massive, decade-long undertaking that will launch online under her aegis.
Marshall’s organ concert was a kind of homecoming for her, since Stanford was where she launched her academic career in the 1980s. Her imaginatively conceived, intellectually convincing recitals are never academic.
The wealth accrued from Stanford’s nineteenth-century misdeeds has yielded no fewer than five organs in Memorial Church. Strolling around this sanctuary-cum-organ showroom one could draw the conclusion that big crimes make for good organs—or at least lots of them. There is a reconstruction of a Tudor organ that recalls the sound world from the time of Henry VIII, mass-murderer of wives. Next to to it a somewhat larger, more sumptuously decorated organ of the next century (the seventeenth), modeled on an instrument in the collection of the Dukes of Braunschweig. These princes and their armies accumulated a big body count on the battlefield and they had more than a little experience with revenge, murder and self-enrichment.
These fascinating organs remained silent on the Fourth. Marshall instead played the two biggest and therefore most expensive instruments in the spacious east end gallery. The church’s original organ from 1901 by the American builder Murray Harris survived, if with damage, the 1906 earthquake. It is divided on either side of the balcony and the central rose window. The massive Romanesque tower came down and blew out that window and the back wall but mostly missed the organ. Above and between these original stands of pipes is a separate baroque-style instrument from 1984, the last project of the pathbreaking American builder, Charles Fisk, who died the year before its completion. Along with its older neighbor of 1901, this organ survived the next great earthquake of 1989. It covers the rose window, probably to the disapproval of some of those Mosaic Saints now obscured in shadow rather than shining in the morning sun.
Marshall began on the early twentieth-century organ. It was a ninety-degree 4th of July but there were no Variations on America or kindred national anthems, though Marshall’s opener, Paraphrase on Handel’s “See the Conquering hero comes!” by the famed French organist Alexandre Guilmant, had the militaristic ring of Manifest Destiny.
The Murray Harris is an instrument not as brilliant as its baroque counterpart higher in the gallery. Instead, it has a dark, complex power. Guilmant composed his Paraphrase on Handel’s famous theme within a few years of the completion of this first of Stanford’s organs, and it was uncannily thrilling, even unsettling, to hear these historical synchronicities ring out in the sweltering, golden church. Guilmant must have played the Paraphrase on one of his many concerts at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis. Thus, the Frenchman wrote himself into the enduring legacy of European conquest.
Thursday’s heat, increased by the thousands down in the church, rose mercilessly up to the organ loft, yet Marshall marched resolutely, rousingly through Guilmant’s impressive fugue on Handel’s swashbuckling theme. To Marshall’s right as she played from the Murray Harris console with her back to the audience below, rose God in mosaic form, his hand raised as if conducting the music and/or blessing the progress of his Christian people across the globe.
From the flash and clamor of victory, Marshall artfully and wisely turned to African-American composer William Grant Still’s Elegy with which she explored the organ’s muted orchestral colors. I tried to hear the prayerful repose as an Elegy for the kind of bombast just heard, that is, as an end to war. But everyone in that church knew that bombs were falling around the world.
A world premiere followed: Gather by Errollyn Wallen, commissioned for the convention. Marshall was an imaginative and sensitive guide through this sometimes fragmented survey of organ textures.
Marshall then climbed the stairs to the highest seat in the church, the bench at the baroque-style organ. From this lofty perch, she played a set of five more works ranging from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth.
The Fisk organ’s individual stops are more distinct from one another and more penetrating than the more numerous registers available on the Murray Harris. Yet on the Fisk, a single flute stop reaches the most distant corner of the church and the listener’s imagination with undiminished expressivity and bloom.
In the Guilmant, Marshall had demonstrated that the Murray Harris can deliver a compelling polyphonic oration, but the Fisk injects a clarity, texture and lift into the music, from Dieterich Buxtehude’s storm-tossed explorations of the Magnificat, through the early Modern Minimalist of an Anonymous English vamp “Uppon la mi re,” to the famed blind organist Arnolt Schlick’s sharply faceted, but sweet Maria zart. Nasal reed stops introduced a pompous, if pithy elaboration of a theme that would later be taken up by J. S. Bach in the epic Passacaglia in C minor with which Marshall concluded her concert.
In contrast to the cyclical bass pattern of pieces heard previously on the second of Marshall’s program, Bach begins his theme alone in the pedal, as if confronting the player and listener with the ineluctable fact of the bass line. Bach then develops this motive in the most diverse ways: kaleidoscopic figurations; textures shifting from thick to gossamer and manifold gradations between these extremes; migrations of the theme from the bass to other voices; contrapuntal dialogues between the parts; unexpected harmonic inflections.
With a bracing combination of finesse and flamboyance Marshall imparted the relentless narrative with momentum and coherence, even while she welcomed the gathering majesty, even menace, of the behemoth Passacaglia.
After nearly ten minutes of elaboration over the cycles of the bass line, Bach seems to be piloting the variations into port. But after what appears to be the final culminating cadence a demonic fugue breaks out. The bass line itself then bursts its shackles and revolts against the genre itself. With the fugue that follows without a break on the passacaglia, Bach explodes the tradition he had received. The outbreak of fugal insurrection is as frightening as it is exhilarating.
But with Bach demolition is often a primary mode of construction: the resulting edifice formed before our eyes from the falling boulders of the past is nothing short of miraculous. I was studying at Stanford with Professor Marshall during the 1989 earthquake that closed Memorial Church for five years, and I felt myself reflexively ducking for cover.
On this Fourth of July, the church’s foundation did not tremble, but there were sonic fireworks reflected in gold and light.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
WILDFIRES COST EVERY CALIFORNIAN
by Julie Johnson & Megan Fan Munce
In October 2017, a dry windstorm swept across Northern California, exposing weaknesses in the state’s electric grid on a staggering scale. Trees toppled onto power lines and utility poles broke in half. Sparks landed on tinder-dry landscapes and exploded into deadly blazes that leveled thousands of homes. Most of the destruction occurred in just one night.
California immediately opened its coffers, spending record amounts on firefighting and fire prevention. Insurance companies paid out nearly $12 billion in 2017 — the state’s most expensive year for wildfires on record. Pushed by California officials, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. dramatically ramped up spending to prevent more power-line-sparked fires.
Seven years later, as another fire season arrives, Californians across the state are paying the price for wildfires — in rising bills that have stirred deep anger.
On a per-person basis, the costs are eye-popping.
Some residents report jumps of $10,000 or more in annual insurance premiums. An analysis by S&P Global found that private home insurance rates in California soared 43.7% from 2018 to 2023. And further jumps appear imminent: Just this past week, State Farm — the state’s largest home insurer, which has cited wildfire risk as a key reason for dropping tens of thousands of California policies — asked regulators for permission to raise rates by 30% on average for its remaining homeowner customers.
When it comes to electricity, PG&E customers are collectively paying billions of dollars to prevent wildfires. Between 2020 and 2026, customers will have spent the equivalent of about $1,500 per person in the company’s jurisdiction, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from the California Public Utilities Commission’s Public Advocates Office. PG&E rates have soared 128% in the past decade. Electricity now costs more in California than any other state, except for Hawaii.
“The costs are everywhere,” said Alice Hill, senior fellow for climate change policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and chair of the California Department of Insurance’s climate working group. The cost of wildfires, Hill said, is now embedded in nearly everything Californians pay for, from health care to food products to home construction.
California taxpayers are also shouldering massive increases in state spending. Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, has spent more than $30 billion on battling and preventing wildfires since 2017. That’s about $750 per California resident and reflects a budget that has grown 72% in that time.
These services — insurance, electricity, firefighting — are crucial. But the costs are making an already expensive state even less affordable, including for those who live far from wildfire zones.
“It’s squeezing Californians, especially low-income Californians,” said Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, whose North Coast district has been burned and menaced by major wildfires year after year.
Right now, the state is careening into another wildfire season, in which a series of early-season blazes has charred nearly 118,149 acres — more than five times higher than the recent average for this time of year. Continuing to contend with this challenge means that the costs Californians face — compounded by inflation for construction materials and other basic items — may only increase.
PG&E anticipates it will take much more money to meet its fire-prevention goals. The Public Advocates Office estimates it could cost PG&E $30 billion to bury 10,000 miles of power lines in the riskiest areas for wildfires, which the utility intends to do. That represents about $1,875 per person in PG&E’s jurisdiction — and to date, the utility has billed customers for only a fragment of that work. Insurance companies, meanwhile, are expected to seek significant rate increases — as State Farm just did — to keep up with projected risks and costs. And that’s if they remain in the state; some have stopped writing policies in risky areas or altogether.
In a future guided by climate change and severe weather events, “We’re going to make trade-offs between affordability and reliability and safety,” said Michael Wara, a Stanford University professor and member of the state’s Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery commission. “And the trade-offs are big.”
Escalating Insurance Crisis
Dorothy Murphey has lived in Lafayette for four decades and has never seen a wildfire.
And yet last year, she found herself sharing the panic of tens of thousands of Californians after her insurance company left the state. Now Murphey, like so many others, has found herself paying hundreds of dollars more per year for insurance than she expected.
As a retired claims adjuster, Murphey never anticipated having problems finding insurance for her single-family home sandwiched between a four-lane thoroughfare and a residential neighborhood, even though it is near tree-studded hills. But as she began the process of searching for a new policy, all she heard was no, no, no.
“It’s kind of a crazy situation they put on us,” Murphey said. “We have a fire hydrant outside our house — you can’t get much better than that.”
Insurers are rapidly cutting back in California, and wildfire risk has been a galvanizing factor. Some, like Murphey’s former insurer, AmGUARD Insurance Co., have abandoned California entirely. Others, like State Farm and Allstate, have stopped writing new policies. Still others are dropping older homes that are costly to replace in the event of catastrophe, or are pulling back from big cities where they feel they have too much risk in one area.
At the same time, insurers are charging more. In the first half of 2024 alone, the state’s five largest home insurers, representing more than half the total market, all increased their prices. State Farm and Travelers, which together insure a quarter of California homeowners, have raised their average rates by double digits.
Wildfires are not the only issue for insurers. Inflation in building costs and the rising cost of reinsurance, which means insurance for insurance companies, have also put financial pressure on carriers. Some companies have also had poor stock market returns, according to Carmen Balber, executive director of the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog.
But the wildfires of recent years were a turning point. In 2017 and 2018, state records show that insurance companies collectively paid out more than $24 billion in claims related to wildfires — burned businesses and homes, buildings tainted by heavy smoke and destroyed cars.
Some of those costs have been reimbursed — for example, PG&E paid insurance carriers about $11 billion to partially cover claims for wildfires during those two years. Since then, insurance companies have continued to pay billions for wildfires, but have not suffered such a devastating year since.
Still, annual insurance premiums, which had been stagnant for more than a decade, immediately began to rise following the 2017 wildfires, and by 2021 had jumped by an estimated $395 to just over $1,400, according to data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. No official data is available for the past two years. But a Chronicle analysis of data submitted to the state found the average homeowner in 2024 pays a little over $2,000 annually for home insurance with the state’s top 10 largest companies.
Many Californians are being forced to the FAIR Plan — a state-created wildfire insurer for those who cannot find insurance elsewhere — at exorbitant cost. The FAIR Plan does not disclose its average premium, but many homeowners report paying thousands of dollars a year more for a policy that only covers fire.
Victoria Roach, the FAIR Plan’s president, said during a state hearing in April that the plan, despite being designed as the insurer of last resort, is in reality “quickly moving to be the first resort for a lot of people” and has become “one of the largest writers in the state right now in terms of new business coming in.”
As of March, about 35% of FAIR Plan policyholders don’t live in fire-prone areas, a FAIR Plan spokesperson said — a reflection of how difficult it is for Californians to find insurance regardless of their location.
Soaring PG&E Bills
PG&E — a massive utility company that provides service for about 1 in 20 Americans — has dramatically increased its spending on wildfire prevention since its power lines caused devastating fires in 2017 and 2018. The utility company spent about $5.5 billion between 2018 and 2023 on clearing trees and brush away from power lines — about six times more than it had spent in the seven years leading up to the 2017 fires.
Wildfires are a central issue driving up electricity prices. Inflation plus steep investments to expand electric capacity as the state transitions away from fossil fuel energy sources are also significant factors.
For typical residential customers, PG&E bills rose by more than $400 annually this year compared to 2023, an unprecedented and abrupt jump. PG&E CEO Patti Poppe, in an interview with the Chronicle, said that much of that increase can be attributed to fire prevention and state mandates the company is obligated to follow.
Whereas wildfire programs represented about 0.5% of the company’s budget in 2019, the figure rose to 18.5% in 2021, the year of the massive, PG&E-caused Dixie Fire.
Currently, in a hypothetical $100 PG&E bill, about $10 goes directly to trimming trees and other hazardous vegetation around PG&E power lines. Another $6 funds other wildfire prevention programs like planned and automatic outages when potentially dangerous conditions threaten to snap power lines.
About $10 of that hypothetical $100 utility bill goes to shareholders, a return authorized by the state so that investor-owned utilities can remain attractive investments. Some of that money, too, has gone toward wildfire prevention, since shareholders can either reinvest that revenue in the company or use it to pay investor dividends.
Shareholders have also been required to cover wildfire costs in ways that won’t raise rates for customers. For wildfires in 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019, for example, shareholders paid about $25 billion to cover property losses and other claims from wildfires sparked by the company’s equipment, an amount negotiated when major wildfires led PG&E to seek bankruptcy protection.
Poppe acknowledged her company’s wildfire-prevention spending is driving utility bills higher. She said her teams are trying to reduce other business costs because they must continue the wildfire-prevention spending for “the safety and wellbeing of our communities statewide.”
She insisted the costs are worth it. Poppe said she expects that future bill increases won’t be as dramatic and hew more closely to the rate of inflation.
“We know we’ve reduced the risk,” Poppe said.
An Expensive Future
Costly as wildfires are now for Californians, the future may be even more expensive.
Home insurance rates are poised to soar whether or not devastating wildfires once again rip into neighborhoods. The state’s Department of Insurance is pursuing a set of reforms called the Sustainable Insurance Strategy, set to take effect by December, that would make it easier for insurers to raise rates. Gov. Gavin Newsom, too, is backing legislation that would require regulators to process rate increase requests faster. The overall goal is to stop more insurers from leaving the state, but painful price hikes are likely. State Farm’s rate increase request this past week — 30% for homeowners, 52% for renters and 36% for condo owners — would, if approved, saddle several million Californians with hundreds or thousands of dollars more in annual payments.
Energy costs, too, could keep going up in the event of more utility-caused wildfires.
PG&E has only begun charging customers for a fraction of the $30 billion estimated cost to bury 10,000 miles of power lines in the riskiest areas for fire. Currently, only about $0.005 of that hypothetical $100 bill goes toward undergrounding.
While some forested communities are clamoring to be placed on PG&E’s priority list for future undergrounding, ratepayer advocates are pushing back on the strategy out of concern that utility bills are increasingly unaffordable (PG&E customers owed $669 million in unpaid bills as of February). These groups have urged the California Public Utilities Commission to limit PG&E’s spending. One way would be for state regulators to require PG&E to put more resources toward covering bare wires — another fire prevention tool with an estimated cost of only $800,000 per mile, compared to the current undergrounding costs of $3.3 million per mile.
Another catastrophic wildfire blamed on PG&E could also increase bills.
However, the legislature in 2019 set out to shield customers from dramatic rate increases after utility-caused wildfires and keep essential energy companies afloat by creating the California Wildfire Fund. Customers and shareholders of the state’s three investor utilities each contribute about $10.5 billion over time to establish the fund, which is a pool of money managed by the state to help utilities pay for wildfire liabilities when they are responsible.
And then there are other types of costs that don’t show up in a utility or insurance bill.
PG&E has said one of its best strategies for preventing wildfires is shutting down electricity, either in advance of risky weather or when sensors detect problems. But left without power, residents and businesses lose work hours, revenue and often must pay to replace an entire refrigerator of spoiled food. Partly due to these shutoffs, the number of minutes its customers have gone without electricity has increased by 120% since 2013, according to PG&E — though the utility believes that technology introduced in the past few years is helping to narrow the scope of fire-prevention outages.
With fire risk top of mind, homeowners are also paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to clear vegetation or, at the behest of increasingly demanding insurers, replace roofs or upgrade electrical wiring.
And then there are the costs of California’s effort to slow global climate change — and hence reduce wildfire risk — in the first place. Newsom in 2022 said the state will spend $54.3 billion to tackle problems like drought, extreme heat and air pollution that are exacerbated by rising temperatures, though lean budget years with lower-than-forecast tax revenues have led the state to reduce that commitment by about 17%.
Newsom promised that the investments would eventually save Californians money and lower energy bills, but in the near term, bills are rising.
Insurance companies can raise premiums in areas they deem at greater risk for fire. But state law requires that utilities like PG&E charge the same rates for electricity and natural gas to all residential customers, regardless of whether they live in fire-prone hills or urban neighborhoods.
Urban and rural California are inextricably linked when it comes to the electric grid, said Kate Gordon, CEO of California Forward, a Sacramento-based nonprofit focused on sustainable growth. Power generation facilities — natural gas plants, hydropower facilities, utility-scale solar fields and nuclear plants — are mostly in the state’s rural areas. These areas bear increased fire risk from transmission lines overhead carrying electrons to the state’s suburbs and cities, and they also experience more frequent power outages.
“We do all have a responsibility to pay for the infrastructure that supports us all living in California,” Gordon said.
For homeowners like Murphey, relief can’t come fast enough. After finally finding coverage through a smaller insurer, she now pays $2,300 a year — about 50% more than she did before.
At 81 and long-retired, she has no desire to leave Lafayette, a peaceful city of about 25,000 where she can get to San Francisco in an hour’s drive. But if she loses that insurance, or can’t afford it, she fears she may be forced to leave the state altogether.
“I was born and raised in Oakland. I’m a California girl. That’s hard to leave. That’s a hard decision to make,” she said.
“I think the normal homeowner really does not know what to do.”
(SF Chronicle)
MARIE AZELIE HAYDEL, the last Haydel to own the Whitney Plantation, was born in 1790. She was the oldest child of Alphonse Haydel and Marie Troxclair’s thirteen children.
In 1810, she married Marcellin Haydel, her father’s first cousin who grew up on the next plantation over. Married for thirty years, they never had children, though they did adopt Marie Azélie’s nephew Alphonse.
In 1840 Marcellin died, leaving Marie Azélie to inherit everything. Soon she became one of the richest planters in Louisiana; in 1844 sugar mills operating on her plantation produced 356,000 pounds of sugar.
As historian Ibrahima Seck writes, “it should never be forgotten that the process of perpetual economic growth, which led to luxury, was made possible by the hard work of hundreds of African slaves and their descendants.”
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Resilience Has Fueled Biden’s Career. But So Has Defiance.
In Choosing a V.P., Trump Is Elevating the Next Generation of Republicans
Turnout Is High as France’s Snap Election Enters Its Final Hours
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
When Led Zeppelin proposed an album – remember those? – that didn’t have the name of the band on the cover, the record company went nuts. Peter Grant, the band’s manager told the execs to relax and that he could sell Led Zeppelin albums in a brown paper bag. A few years later, a Led Zeppelin album came out in a brown paper bag – and it sold.
The people running “Joe Biden” know he’s a demented buffoon and are exhibiting the same sort of hubris. They laugh every time this old man publicly poops his pants and it’s just not funny. They are laughing at the fact that he’s still considered a viable candidate by millions of people.
I really think the only reason he’s still considered a viable candidate is that he’s running against one of the most despised people anyone can name – Donald Trump. The handlers are laughing at the challenge of getting a senile, incontinent, incoherent geriatric elected. They feel like it would be a close race between a rutabaga and Donald Trump and they’re right. Such is the hatred for Trump.
If Biden had to debate RFK Jr he would lose the election 500 electoral votes to 38.
JOE BIDEN’S BLIND SPOT
by Maureen Dowd
King Lear gave up power too early. President Biden will give it up too late.
And that is Joe’s tragedy.
Unlike Biden, Lear had a loyal lord who was willing to tell him the truth. When the old king disinherits his good daughter and divides the kingdom between his maleficent daughters, the Earl of Kent tries to tell Lear he’s bollixing everything up:
“What wouldst thou do, old man? Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak, When power to flattery bows?” Lear, swayed by his bad daughters’ sycophancy, screams at Kent, “Out of my sight!”
Kent urges the king to “see better.”
Some eyes get plucked out in “Lear,” but the play is really a lesson about inner blindness, the way power can occlude the ability to see yourself, and the world. A lack of self-knowledge in a leader can lead to ruination.
And that is where we are with President Biden. His raison d’être for running, at 81, is stopping Donald Trump, a mendacious scofflaw who will become even more incorrigible with the egregious decisions of his radical Supreme Court and his own age spiral.
But Biden’s contention that he alone can beat Trump was never true. And now he has lost some moral high ground because he hid the evidence of cognitive deterioration.
Trump is the master con man, but Biden is giving him a run for his money.
He, his wife, his vice president and his longtime aides worked hard to conjure a mirage where everything is fine in Bidenworld.
That mirage vanished with the debate.
We don’t know now who is running the country. We only know who shouldn’t be — the president and the former president.
Republican lawmakers cravenly failed to stop Trump after Jan. 6. In the days after the debate, most Democratic lawmakers have shied away from being honest with Biden.
We now know that Biden aides have painted over every scene with a Panglossian brush, creating a picture at odds with what the rest of the world was seeing.
They burbled with praise for the president’s back-to-back-to-back performances in Normandy, the splashy L.A. fund-raiser and the Group of 7 summit in Italy. Odd moments of vagueness with the president, when people grabbed his arm to orient him, were dismissed as misinterpretations.
But I was in Paris that week of the Normandy anniversary, and some Macron advisers and European officials were alarmed at Biden’s foggy mien, at his moments of not seeming to know where he was.
I feel like a hostage to Joe’s ego — and the chip on his shoulder. I can have a president fighting for women to control their own bodies as long as I don’t care that Biden isn’t sharp enough to serve until he is 86.
He can handle an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot. But he has to stall for two weeks before having a live White House news conference to reassure those freaked out by his brain freezes at the debate — and his acknowledgment afterward to donors that he “almost fell asleep” at the lectern.
As Reid Epstein and Maggie Haberman reported in The Times, the president told the Democratic governors on Wednesday night that he needs to sleep more and work less.
Alex Thompson of Axios, who has been breaking news of top aides’ stage-managing minutiae — Biden’s sleep schedule, his orthopedic shoes, his shift to a lower door with a shorter staircase to board Air Force One — revealed that the president is “dependably engaged” only from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Yet, on Friday, the Biden campaign outlined an “aggressive travel schedule,” trying to prove he can still handle the job.
Biden is in denial and few are willing to tell him, with his every syllable being parsed, that he is sliding to even more humiliation.
The Democrats should give the public what it wants. Voters have said they’d like fresh, exciting voices and a broader choice than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Senator Mark Warner is trying to corral other Democratic senators to tell Biden to be the bridge he promised to be.
Let’s open the convention and check out all the Democratic stars.
As for those who say the nomination should be Harris’s by right, James Carville thinks competition would give her a chance to gain the cred that has eluded her as vice president. Even her booster, Representative James Clyburn, said that if Biden passes the baton, there should be a mini-primary before the convention.
And in this election, many think that it would help to have a candidate who can’t be cast as part of the coastal elite.
For decades, Biden was loquacious. But his voice has receded. His staff told him to curb his logorrhea. Later, the inner circle let him do very few interviews and no challenging ones. Biden began sometimes falling into a soft mumble in meetings, or trailing off. The crimped word count is a sign that it’s time to stop charging forward.
Biden told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News on Friday that he would get out only if the Lord Almighty told him to. When asked how he would feel if his defiance threw the race to Trump, Biden said: “As long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
But it’s not, not when Biden says that Trump is “a one-man crime wave” and “the biggest threat to our democracy in American history.” It’s time for the president to “see better.”
TAIBBI & KIRN
Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going? Crazy week, huh?
Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. It’s a crazy week, outside of Montana and inside. See, inside Montana, while the rest of the world goes to heck, we only have a week to capture the tourist dollar, and so we are having a 100th anniversary rodeo celebration in the town I live in. I live in Livingston, that is the Western Rocky Mountain equivalent of Mardi Gras. So I’ve got endless distractions here from the Mardi Gras that’s going on in the rest of the country, the sort of masked nonstop party and bad behavior fest that’s happening in Washington.
But let’s dip into that. I mean, I’ve had enough bucking broncs and popcorn and cotton candy. I’m ready for the-
Matt Taibbi: I mean, it sounds actually more interesting than, well, this is actually interesting. I would say this has been an interesting week, legitimately.
Walter Kirn: Oh, it’s interesting because it’s structurally such an X-ray of how things work. See, when you’re between big lies like we are now, you get to see the apparatus, and it’s fascinating. We’re between the big lie that “Joe’s okay,” and everything that shows him not to be okay is a cheap fake, and whatever the next one is going to be about the Messiah that will replace him.
So right now, I was saying before the show, the press reminds me, especially the press, of a showgirl, Las Vegas showgirl, kind of aging, who married a rich guy, and then he divorced her, and now she’s trying to get her virginity back so she can get the next rich guy.
And I’m watching journalist after journalist try to restore their stained honor or run history backwards to the point where they were before they started lying about this.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, that’s exactly the right metaphor. It’s pretty hard to imagine a situation where anyone’s going to buy it, but they’re really trying hard and some of these efforts have been, I think, kind of heroic in their gall.
Walter Kirn: Right, right.
Matt Taibbi: The first thing, and this is more of a humor thing than anything else, but I just want to talk about a certain tweet that came out yesterday, and we’re recording this on Wednesday because of the holiday, but Walter, did you see this by Brian Stelter, the inimitable Brian Stelter?
Walter Kirn: I saw it once you brought attention to it. I laughed at least as hard as you did, probably.
Matt Taibbi: I mean, I don’t know if I can read it out without laughing. So he’s pushing back. “The sheer amount of conspiracy thinking on the Left at this moment is deeply unhealthy. Example, all the people who seem convinced that CNN and other media orgs are trying to ruin Biden and reelect Trump, in reality, news outlets are merely trying to report the news.” Which is…
And then if you can see, he actually ends up taking lots of fire from Democrats saying, “Why are you bringing this up at all?” Which is also amazing. But my question to you, do you think he believes that or…?
Walter Kirn: Okay, so that is a great question. There’s a thing in philosophy called a theory of mind. You have to have a theory of how other minds work in order to analyze them properly; you must proceed from some basic assumptions. And having a theory of mind about a person like Brian Stelter is really hard because you just don’t know what proportion of stupidity-
Matt Taibbi: Calculation.
Walter Kirn: … calculation, just sort of inertia where they follow orders and they’ve emptied their own minds and maybe don’t have a head of their own anymore and they’ve sort of achieved a new state.
Matt Taibbi: That’s my theory, but go ahead.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. Well, let’s go forward on that theory then, because I think it’s a good one.
Matt Taibbi: I think this is 100% the whole thing about if you see a flock, a herd of deer, they’ll stay in place until exactly 50% of them decide to move and then they all go. Right? And you can watch that phenomenon in nature over and over again. Schools of fish, whatever it is.
That is 100% what the press corps is, I think, because once they go, they all go, right, and they never go anywhere alone, which is kind of the problem.
Walter Kirn: And Stelter isn’t one of those who goes early, okay. He is the exact measure of the 50% mark. He won’t be in the last quintile. He won’t be in the first quintile. He will be at exactly that moment.
Matt Taibbi: On the 50th percentile.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. It’s like watching water-
Matt Taibbi: That makes him the deciding vote, though.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, it’s like watching water freeze. He’s one of the molecules that just absolutely measures the phase transition. But what’s amazing is to see how offended he is that others might accuse him of something other than innocent. In other words, his theory of mind or his theory of his own soul, at least, is that he’s got a lot of integrity. He completely doesn’t catch that he’s a weather vane. He thinks that … he somehow mistakes his reactiveness for volition, and something was triggered in him a few days ago, which he thinks is integrity.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Yes.
Walter Kirn: But from the outside is obviously just a kind of completely mechanical state that is induced when 50% of things change.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it’s like a Hasbro toy or something like that. It’s got two little gears inside. I mean, it’s so obvious what’s going on with these folks, and it’s been popping up everywhere, and we’ll get into the more serious aspects of what this all means and the post-debate fallout and everything.
But there has been a remarkable series of developments just in the first couple of days of this week. We’ve seen high profile Democrats, Lloyd Doggett being the first, I think, elected Democrat to suggest that Biden drop out. Then we had Nancy Pelosi who’s been saying for a year that experience is an advantage. And then she adds a new clause saying, “Well, but is it a condition maybe, and not just age?” So she’s now opened the door to examining the question of whether or not he’s disabled.
(racket.news)
ANNE LAMOTT
The people in my galaxy are terrified, heartbroken, and exhausted, scrambling in their minds to figure this thing out. I want to remind you: “Figure it out” is not a good slogan. No one has a clue what is going to happen, or what would be best. I was blessed to be close friends with Molly Ivins, and I happen to know exactly what she would have said this weekend when asked what she thought was going to happen. She would have said, “Sweetpea? Let’s have this conversation in a week or two.”
Everyone I know is calling or texting to ask what I think, and what the best plan is, and I tell them all what Molly would say, which drives them crazy. Of course we want to know how this all shakes down, right now. I do, too, but I was reminded this morning of the very old New Yorker cartoon of the two prisoners in leg chains and manacles, several feet off the ground, one of whom is saying to the other, “Okay, here’s my plan: When the guard comes in with our food…”
So my plan is not to try and figure it out. What I know, however, is that everyone is exhausted by the nightmare of the last eight years of Trump. And that is absolutely the worst condition for us to be in, facing the very real prospect of him winning. So I dug up and retooled an old piece on dealing with exhaustion that I posted here, in the hopes that it might help:
My friend Mark Yaconelli gave a spiritual retreat to fifty on rising up, on renewal and second winds in these catastrophic times. One woman, who worked with children who had AIDS, came from Africa to hear his spiritual teachings. Mark talked all morning about filling back up, about energy reserves that are released by curiosity and (paradoxically) service. Then he handed each participant a cheap Mexican blanket, and had them lie down for a nap, like in kindergarten. The woman from Africa was furious with him for wasting her time. She had flown 10,000 miles to study with him. He tried to soothe her, but she stalked to the back of the room with her blanket. Everyone stretched out or curled up, closed their eyes, spaced out, and rested. The woman came over after the nap, and told Mark, “I slept. I dreamed. I’m beyond exhausted. I hadn’t even known that.”
We are exhausted in a brand new way, physically and psychically. We are wiped put by having been such good sports for so long and mustering hope in the face of the polls. We’re exhausted by the extreme stupidity and brutality of MAGA-and-Deep State-thought; by experiencing and trying to help the extreme suffering and death all We’re tired of ourselves. We need fresh horses but you know what? To paraphrase Obama, We’re the fresh horses we’ve been waiting for.”
Yikes, right?
But you always have to start where you are, where your butt is, and admit that you are sad and pooped. I wish I could give everyone a cheap blanket to curl up with today, but most of you have little children, or sick parents, and deadlines to take care of. It doesn’t really help to remind people that this too shall pass, but it will and in the meantime, there are things you can do, and not do. You can try to do less as a radical act; cross off one things you thought you needed to do each day—the world may keep on spinning if you don’t manage to buy that pad of graph paper today. May you will need a new packet of moist towelettes soon but does it really have to be today? I try to let myself do a few things way less perfectly that usual. (Perfection is the voice of the enemy, of the oppressor.) I say no a couple of times today to people who need something from me: No is a complete sentence. And my grandson’s 4th grade class had Condiment Day every Thursday. Ketsup: You had to catch up on some assignments. Mustard: There were things you absolutely must do, things you could not put off any longer. And relish: something that you loved doing, something fun or silly or any activity that brought you pleasure.
Relish, joy, and pleasure are one solution to exhaustion, just for today. So is a walk around the ‘hood, noticing people’s gardens, running from them when they come at you with grocery bags heavy with tomatoes and zucchini. Paying attention to real life (as opposed to cable news) relieves exhaustion, because it awakens us. It makes us laugh. Laughter is a battery charge. Laughter, once again, is carbonated holiness.
When I see a friend or a relative who is worn out, I intuitively know what to offer; a cool drink of water, a chair in which to do the sacrament of ploppage, a bracing cup of coffee or tea, chocolate or a mandarin orange, a mandatory time out. I try to help them keep the patient comfortable, and it remind me to do this with my own baby self all day.
My diocesan priest friend Terry Richie says the thing is not to try harder, but to resist less. Remembering this may just help today. Reading your comments and stories always gives me a second wind because it means we are together in this, and connected. This is the best possible news. I thank God for you and your good hearts. Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe. Just for now; which, again, is all we have.
The AI generated artwork(?) above hits me right in my uncanny valley.
In 1776 tobacco was the primary plantation crop in the colonies, not cotton.
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-today/early-american-economics-facts/#:~:text=In%20the%20years%20leading%20up,for%20the%20years%201768%2D1772.
Spot on. Also, photography had not yet been invented in 1776.
Seriously, though, slavery is slavery, whether it’s about cotton or tobacco or present-day prison-labor phone banks or flying 10,000 miles to kick down doors and terrorize people who’ve never done us any harm, and whether the slaves wear brass bikinis or flour-sack skirts or hazmat suits or fire gear, or whatever kind of hat they have on. If you can’t say no to work that’s killing you or that goes against your conscience or even only is humiliating, and you can’t say /fuck this/ and realistically just walk away to a better life, I’d call that slavery. Also, there are are more slaves now, literal traditional-definition slaves, than at any time in human history, and many of them are children. Part of the great flavor of chocolate, for one example, might as well be their blood and tears. A case could be made for defining factory-farm animals as slaves. Pets are slaves, I suppose, too.
Ten again, old pal? Yes, remember when you were ten, and the presidential race began with the summer conventions, finished in November, and Democrat and Republican voters, sans recriminations, returned to their mutual productive and often happy lives? Oh to be 10 again in America before the forward people brought us to where we are.
PS. So glad to see you upright in your chair. Minus speech, you brain will be become more powerful unencumbered by useless talk.
Awoke early in the air conditioned Royal Motel room in sunny Ukiah, California. One minor medical appointment to remove a skin tag inside the lower lip tomorrow, and then the last dental appointment to get the new crown July 19th. And that is it! Am free to go where I need to go and do what I need to do. Continuing to advocate for spiritually sourced direct action, there being no other realistic alternative to respond to a chaotic insane world. Remember always that you are not the body and not the mind. Your true nature is bliss divine. ~The End~
Craig Louis Stehr
Royal Motel
750 South State Street, Ukiah, CA 95482
(707) 462-7536, Room 206
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
Blog: http://craiglstehr.blogspot.com
WHAT AMERICANS NEED FROM JOE BIDEN
Here’s a brief excerpt–the last paragraphs– from a piece regarding President Biden’s interview by George Stephanopoulos. I’m left troubled by Biden’s stark denial of reality and what I’d call his ego-driven persistence in continuing his campaign:
“But the exchange that might linger longest if Biden ultimately loses to Trump was this one:
Stephanopoulos: ‘If you stay in, and Trump is elected and everything you’re warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?’
Biden: ‘I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.’
Is it? If time has robbed Biden of too much of his power to protect the country against Trump, is giving it his “all” what Americans need? Campaigns require conviction—an audacious belief that one can and should be President. On a tactical basis, that conviction can take the form of spin and unshakable self-confidence. But it must also coexist with a capacity to absorb bad news and well-founded doubts, to pull out signal from noise. Without that check, conviction is prone to self-indulgence and failure—a combination bad enough for any campaign, and potentially catastrophic given the stakes of this one.”
“Did Joe Biden’s ABC Interview Stanch the Bleeding or Prolong It?”
Evan Osnos
THE NEW YORKER, 7/6/24
The Daguerreotype portrait of an older New Orleans woman with her young enslaved servant woman in the mid 19th century New Orleans. (1850s) is Madame LaLaurie famously depicted by Kathy Bates in Coven.
Madame LaLaurie and family were Mass murderers of their enslaved people. This poor little girl was combing Madame’s hair and came to a know and was chased around the mansion with a whip up to the roof where she fell/jumped to her death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie?wprov=sfti1#
You did good Pam Howard in explaining “I or me.”
(I think i even finally caught The Editor getting that mixed up a few months ago, or maybe it was another luminary?”)
No matter how many times someone explains “lay, laid or lain” to me I can never get it right, your next assignment.
My father, and English professor, was literally on his death bed, I said it wrong one more time, and he grimaced in defeat: His dumb son just can’t get it right.
Confessions of an English Teacher’s Son
Has anyone ever corrected something you wrote and told you what the right words were? This happened to me recently, a Facebook friend took issue with my grammar, and I was forced to do what any normal person would do: unfriended him, blocked him, put out a contract on him and his family, and burned down his house.
Couldn’t he first have asked me if I wanted advice instead of just laying it on me, ruining my day, wrecking my fragile self-esteem, and sending me into a depression from which I’m still trying to crawl out of?
And what was his nitpicking comment? He had the nerve to tell me you don’t say “Happy New Years!”, you say “Happy New Year!” It’s just one year he helpfully pointed out, rubbing it further in until I was a blubbering ninny crying for my mommy. (Fuck him, what an elitist, he knew what I meant!)
I should have thought of that today when I noticed a minor but common mistake in a comment a local writer posted and thought, as she was often in the public eye, that she might appreciate using the correct usage. (I should have said, “Hey, I noticed what I think is a mistake you made, do you want me to tell you where I think you got it wrong?” or something like that.)
It’s one of the most common errors (or I’m wrong and a fuckin’ idiot): People often say “I bought some beer for Joe and I” when the correct way to say it is “I bought some beer for Joe and me.” The trick to discover which way is correct is by taking out the “Joe and” and saying the two choices to yourself, ie, “I bought some beer for I,” and “I bought some beer for me,” and see which one sounds right, obviously the latter.
I knew I was very sensitive about my word usage (just kidding, I’m actually an adult, welcomed my friend’s correction, and am not a deranged banshee, well, at least in this case) but was not expecting her response, which was so freaking off the wall I have to share it: “Are you ever going to stop bullying women to attempt to compensate for your own inadequacies and fear of rejection? You could just get a lifted truck or something, no?”
My response: “That’s classic!”
Paul,
Happy New Year.
No exclamation point, says my Prof.
Trump has a big, abusive mouth, and is likely a terrible person to work for. With that said, what are all the terrible things he did as president? Something else Trump has also assisted in is stimulating some very active imaginations with his Democratic Party opponents regarding his ability to be a dictator. If Trump is to become a dictator, he will have to behave in a manner completely different than he has in the past, and have a dictatorial cadre the includes the military.
His sanctions on China gave us Covid.
“As of July 02, 2024, we estimate that COVID-19 infections are growing or likely growing in 39 states and territories, declining or likely declining in 0 states and territories, and are stable or uncertain in 10 states and territories.”
And, then His decision to let “OUR” people come “home” to the USA from abroad when covid shutdown everybody else’s borders!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103688/coronavirus-covid19-deaths-us-by-state/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093256/novel-coronavirus-2019ncov-deaths-worldwide-by-country/
If true, this is unintended consequences of bad judgement, and Trump has a lot of historical Presidential company when it comes to unintended consequences of bad judgement, including President Biden. The strain of Covid to come to the USA to begin with was consistent with a strain found in Italy.
I agree, it was bad judgement.
Strain from Italy came from “our” people who were in Italy, and who the Pres. called back “home”. Again, bad judgement.
Covid. His inattention to protecting the population from infection (denial that it existed at all, ridiculing face protection, ridiculing social distancing, derailing Obama’s work on epidemic detection and prevention, ridiculing governors who ordered isolation, and much more). This grossly irresponsible attitude resulted in a million deaths. If that isn’t enough for you, I will remind you of the fires in California, when Trump advised Californians to pick up sticks and rake more (in the forest!) while all the while he was busy cutting regulations to cope with global warming. I haven’t even mentioned blatant racism and misogynistic policies (and personal opinions), ignoring gun control, (remember Uvalde?) and just a general “ let them eat cake” attitude. I could go on and on.
Like let’s not forget inciting and supporting insurrection in our capitol.
Thank you, Sarah, for these responses. I have in the past responded to George regarding the real damage he has done, far beyond just his outrageous speech, but I have lost interest in trying to change his mind. Still, his posts about Trump need to be rebutted, and you did it.
Thanks, Chuck. I’m not counting on changing ng anyone’s mind, but as that master songwriter Paul Simon said: “Why deny the obvious child?”
Insurrection is a stretch, to say the least.
Pushing the pharma while omitting the gut microbiota with fermented foods health, is baffling loss of documented wellbeing.
Dumb, yea, but who would have done any different, or better? Probably the dumbest thing Trump did at the beginning of Covid was get on TV everyday and shoot off his mouth. Other than that he followed the CDC, and Dr. Fouci, until he didn’t. Trump was the one who pushed for the vaccines as well.
George: No matter what you say at any given time or on any subject, Donald Trump did nothing honest or worthwhile during his Presidency.
He will continue that legacy if “elected” again.
I wonder how you can believe otherwise.