Mendocino County Today: Sunday 9/15/2024

By AVA News Service on September 15, 2024

SMALL FIRE ON HOLMES RANCH, Saturday, September 12

First reported 3:30am. Response about 6:45am.

Vegetation Fire, approximately half-acre size, uphill

100-300* Block of Holmes Ranch Road, north of Philo

Fire on the hillside, powerlines down

Power Outage for approximately 18 units.

Fire extinguished before Noon, Saturday.

No reports of damage or injury.

A BOONVILLE FAIRGOER WRITES:

My daughter took her hat off at the fair to go on a ride and somebody stole it from her right here in Boonville. If this hat appears at your house in the near future it's probably the hat that's been stolen from my daughter at the Boonville Fair today. Sad. Please return this hat if you find it. Private message me.

AN UPPER LEVEL DISTURBANCE continues to approach the area. Unsettled weather conditions are expected today, with lingering showers into Monday. Isolated thunderstorms are possible for Trinity County this afternoon and evening. Another shortwave will bring scattered showers mid week. A drying and warming trend is expected late in the week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Sunday morning it is overcast & breezy with a moderate 55F. Yesterday got a lot more windy & cloudy than I expected, likewise today it is much less "sunny" than forecast earlier. I'm going with a partly cloudy forecast into Wednesday night - Wednesday morning when we might see a little rain, not much though.

EARLY WINTER?

The National Weather Service in Hanford (San Joaquin Valley) has issued its earliest winter weather advisory in two decades for the high Sierra as a storm system is expected to bring several inches of snow to the area, including large parts of Yosemite National Park.

An unusually cold and potent storm will move through California late Sunday night into Monday morning, bringing light rain as far south as the Bay Area and more significant precipitation to the Sierra.

Evening at Lake Ada Rose, Brooktrails (Jeff Goll)

AV ATHLETICS:

Congratulations to the Boy’s Soccer Team! They took the win Friday night 3-1 against Mendocino!

AV UNIFIED NEWS

It has been a busy week in AVUSD! Here are a few of the highlights.

Fair Friday

AVES and Anderson Valley Jr/Sr High students had a great time at the fair on Friday!

The Senior class was working hard to fundraise for this year’s activities. Some were working in the parking area and some were working in the “potato booth.” All were doing a great job. Mr.Folz, their class advisor, will be at the fair all weekend, supporting this group. Thank you, Mr. Folz!

The AV soccer team beat Mendocino 3-1 on the soccer field. Way to go, Panthers! Staff members,community members, students, and families cheered with enthusiasm from the stands throughout the game.

Our fantastic FFA program will be out in force all weekend and we look forward to reporting on their successes. To start, their booth looks amazing. Mrs. Swehla and Mr. Bautista, along with their students, have spent many hours planning for the fair.

AVES students were all around, watching their older siblings play soccer and enjoying all the activities and “fair food!” It was wonderful to see so many of our families out together.

Professional Development Monday, 9/16 - No School!

There will be no school on Monday! Teachers will be working hard to plan to make students’ learning experiences this year exceptional!

Both sites’ principals will lead their teams in looking over AVUSD’s student achievement scores on last Spring’s Smarter Balanced Assessments. This allows educators to pinpoint where we are doing well and helps us identify areas of academic focus for the coming year.

AVES teachers will be working with staff from Mendocino County Office of Education as they dig into their new Bridges math curriculum.

Jr/Sr High teachers will be learning more about Social Emotional Learning (SEL). Esteemed teachers Nat Correy-Moran, Ali Cook, and Casey Farber, have taken a rigorous course on this topic through UC Berkeley and are excited to share what they have learned.

Restorative Practices Conference

In the coming week, Nat Correy-Moran (Community Schools Coordinator), Arthur Folz (English teacher), and Kristin Larson Balliet (superintendent) will head to San Diego for a Restorative Practices conference. Restorative Practices have been proven to improve student behavior more effectively than older, more punitive approaches. We look forward to next steps with SEL.

Construction

We are excited about the track! We are waiting to get 2nd round comments from DSA. After that, we will be ready to go out to bid.

The estimate for updates to the gym has been submitted and we are awaiting word from DSA about whether we will be funded for updates to the existing building or a full replacement. We will keep the community posted!

The Science rooms will be ready around December; stay tuned for information about a ribbon cutting and room dedication

We remain incredibly thankful to Louise Simson who continues to consult with the AVUSD team. It is Ms. Simson who got all these projects underway. When we are done, we’ll have a whole new campus. Thank you, Mrs. Simson!

Respectfully,

Kristin Larson Balliet, Superintendent

AV Unified School District

GROUP SPEAKS OUT TO SUPES ON HOMELESS

by Justine Frederiksen

A recently formed group of frustrated property and business owners addressed the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors Tuesday to request they take more action to protect residents from the costs and damage inflicted by what one member described as the “Homeless Industrial Complex.”

“I’m here today to ask the board to take corrective action on the disarray of our Homeless Industrial Complex,” said Julie Golden, describing herself as “exhausted and overwhelmed from the actions I personally have to take, to call code enforcement, the sheriff and the city of Ukiah Police Department for illegal camping, trespassing and dumping on all of my private properties. I have to engage all of my employees to protect and defend my property boundaries (on a daily basis), cleaning up and filling up trailers with debris to be taken away (and repeating the process the next day).

“Our creeks and streams are an environmental disaster, with human feces and needles strewn everywhere, drugs and debris endangering our health and safety, not to mention the devastation and destruction of fish habitat,” continued Golden. “If I committed even one of these offenses in a waterway, I would be fined, and quite possibly arrested. Whether housed or unhoused, all citizens are subject to the rule of law, (and) the City of Ukiah and the County of Mendocino have been derelict in protecting its citizens, their private property, and the environment. I look forward to the actions you will take to acknowledge the misuse of millions of taxpayer dollars that flood this county each year, and I look forward to the plan you implement to address the chronic disarray, which can be addressed when everyone in this room becomes accountable.”

Golden, Adam Gaska and Kerri Vau all introduced themselves to the board as members of Mendo Matters, which Gaska described as “a group of business owners, property owners, and concerned citizens who are united by the shared goal of improving the vitality of our community (and) believe the current approaches are insufficient in resolving the persistent challenges we face as a county, and we urge the implementation of new, effective strategies.

“We respectfully request the immediate adoption of the Care Response Unit model, developed by the city of Fort Bragg in collaboration with the Marbut Report,” Gaska said, reading from a statement he provided to the board. “The CRU model was originally designed to address the homeless crisis in Fort Bragg and is based on the findings of Dr. Robert Marbut’s comprehensive study on homelessness in Mendocino County, conducted between 2019-2021. While Fort Bragg has successfully adopted his recommendations, they have yet to be implemented county-wide. We strongly believe that the county-wide adoption of the CRU model will enhance both the safety and appeal of Mendocino County for residents and visitors alike. The model offers nearly 30 recommendations, including the principle of ‘engage, don’t enable,’ a zero-tolerance policy toward encampments, and the reduction of redundant services.”

Vau also addressed the board, stating that “a significant amount of taxpayer money is being spent to fuel what has become a multi-million dollar ‘homeless economy’ in our county, however, this board does not appear to know the total dollars spent per individual, nor the cost-benefit outcomes. I am requesting this board initiate a comprehensive audit and cost/benefit analysis to determine exactly how much each homeless individual (both housed and unhoused) is costing this county. This should include all relevant service agencies such as fire, police, sheriff, hospitals, public works, etc. Also, there should be a requirement and condition of funding that all county contractual service providers submit verifiable documentation of monies they received from both the state and federal governments.”

Vau ended her comments by saying that the “Mendo Matters group is formally requesting the board add this request to a future meeting agenda within the next 60 days.”

After Gaska read his statement, 5th District Supervisor Ted Williams said that he had “brought forward an item on this topic almost a year ago, in September of 2023, and I can bring forward another item — or is something already underway?”

Board Chairwoman Maureen Mulheren said there was an item already underway, and when Williams asked if the board “could give the public an estimate on when” it might be discussed, Mulheren said, “I have been working actively with (Mendocino County Sheriff) Matt Kendall, the CEO’s Office, Social Services and Behavioral Health on coming up with a solution for the inland Ukiah Valley, as well as the entire county, that works with the principles of some of the things that CRU does, as well as what other programs are doing to really create united policy and process, rather than just dealing with the problems as they arise.”

When prodded for a “rough date,” Mulheren said, “I’m hoping we’ll be able to bring forward something mid-October, late October, possibly November.”

ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE List of Events

MENDOCINO STALKER GETS HIS GUNS TAKEN

I do not apologize for the sensationalist title.

This youtube user's channel is being operated by a locally living transient who operates out of his electric Nissan Leaf.

This individual has been arrested and detained multiple times for stalking and harassment.

Here is a video published by him, featuring an 'argument' (hardly), between him, a local surf instructor & a CHP officer.

Beware this individual is not unintelligent, however he is highly unstable.

I am very very glad they took his guns away.

Truman, snoringdoog@gmail.com

BLAHUT AGAIN

A Ukiah man was found guilty of felony vandalism this week after causing thousands of dollars worth of damage to Highway 101 signs earlier this year, the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office reported.

According to the office of DA David Eyster, a Mendocino County Superior Court jury Thursday found Michael E. Blahut, 51, of Ukiah, “guilty of felony vandalism” by causing approximately $4,500 worth of damage “to three separate traffic safety signs along Highway 101 at the end of May 2024 … by his cutting of power cords and engaging in other mischief that caused the safety signs to stop operating.”

Eyster’s office also explained that, “an additional evidentiary hearing on possible circumstances in aggravation alleged against the defendant was scheduled to get underway on Sept. 19, (and) once that evidentiary hearing is concluded, the defendant’s matter will be referred to the Mendocino County Adult Probation Department for a background study and sentencing recommendation.”

The DA notes that “the law enforcement agency that discovered the defendant disabling one of the signs and gathered the additional evidence used against the defendant at trial was the California Highway Patrol.”

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

EDUCATIONAL BURN IN JACKSON STATE FOREST

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) Mendocino Unit will be conducting an educational burn on Jackson Demonstration State Forest. This educational burn will treat approximately 280-acres of timber understory as part of the multi-year forest-wide Greenhouse Gas Fire Fuels Mitigation Project.

Jackson Demonstration State Forest is located on Highway 20 between the towns of Willits and Fort Bragg. Burning will begin on Monday, September 23rd, 2024, and continue for approximately 3 to 4 weeks, as favorable conditions allow for safe and effective operations.

This project adds to significant work underway throughout the state and brings California one step closer towards meeting state fuels reduction goals directed by the California Fire Plan and the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan. To track the progress being made, both in your community and throughout California, visit the CAL FIRE fuels reduction dashboard at https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/natural-resource-management/fuels-reduction.

This project burn will be conducted under strictly controlled weather and fuel conditions. Smoke and aircraft may be visible in the area.

For more information about the Jackson Demonstration State Forest visit:
https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resource-protection-improvement/demonstration-state-forests/jackson/

NEW ALLIANCE PUSHES FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN FORT BRAGG

A mural in Fort Bragg (photo by Judy Valadao)

The Alliance for a Better Fort Bragg (AFABFB) has launched to promote a positive economic climate that best serves the citizens and visitors of Fort Bragg. The alliance is composed of dedicated residents, business owners, seniors, veterans and community leaders.

AFABFB is dedicated to ensuring local leaders are held accountable to supporting policies that build and retain local businesses, create jobs, and grow the economy of the Fort Bragg community and the greater North Coast.

“Fort Bragg is a community deeply rooted in history, tradition, and hard work,” states Gabriel Quinn Maroney, member of AFABFB. “This alliance was founded in an effort to recommit to the future of our community, and that together, we can build a stronger, and more prosperous Fort Bragg.”

This community-based alliance is dedicated to actively contributing to shaping policies that support local businesses, create jobs, and ensure the economic vitality of our coastal town. Their vision is to hold community leaders accountable and foster a positive environment where residents thrive and there is a promising future for the next generation.

The next AFABFB meeting will be on Wednesday, September 18, 2024, and is open to the public. They will be meeting at Dijon Seafood & Grill in the Company Store (301 North Main St., Fort Bragg).

The evening will begin with a complimentary reception at 5 pm, followed by a brief introduction to AFABFB at 5:30 pm.

If you are interested in learning more about AFABFB, or are interested in joining the alliance, visit AFABFB.com.

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

This beauty of a dog is friendly and sweet and loves to be around people. She walks well on leash and enjoys getting out and about. Tess loves her toys and can entertain herself for hours! We think Tess will be a fine companion for a home with children. What’s not to love? Ms. Tess is 2 years old and 56 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.

UKIAH BROADBAND EXPANSION GRANT

The City of Ukiah has been awarded a significant grant as part of the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) effort to expand broadband access to underserved and unserved communities. Ukiah will receive funding through the Last Mile Federal Funding Account Grant Program, which aims to bridge the digital divide across California.

Ukiah’s Gigabit Project will use the grant to build new fiber optic infrastructure, providing affordable high-speed internet access to residents and businesses throughout the city. The project promises to offer upload and download speeds of up to 10 Gbps, bringing crucial connectivity to areas that have historically lacked access to reliable broadband.

“This project will close the digital divide in Ukiah and provide residents with opportunities to thrive,” said Jim Robbins, the City of Ukiah’s Housing and Grants Manager. “The new infrastructure will support economic growth and ensure that our community is well-equipped for the future.”

Ukiah is one of several recipients of CPUC’s $91 million in grant awards, which were distributed to projects in Mendocino, Marin, San Benito, Santa Cruz, and Sutter counties. These projects will benefit an estimated 32,000 Californians, with the goal of enhancing education, healthcare access, and economic development in rural and underserved areas.

The CPUC’s Last Mile Federal Funding Account Grant Program is part of a broader $2 billion initiative aimed at achieving broadband access for all Californians. The CPUC has awarded more than $600 million in grants to date, with more projects under consideration.

For more information on the CPUC’s grant programs, visit the CPUC’s Federal Funding Account Recommendations and Awards webpage.

Wild Watsonia, Westport Landing (Jeff Goll)

ED NOTES

I'VE LIVED in San Francisco off and on since I arrived in 1941 as a Pearl Harbor refugee, and I've lived in neighborhoods ranging from the Fillmore before it was black, Haight-Ashbury before the hippies, the Castro before it was gay, the Mission before Mexicans, Noe Valley long before the Giants’ right fielder paid two mil for a home there, at 5th and Brannan in a bathroom-down-the-hall fleabag hotel, clean sheets once a week, and way the hell out on Ramsell Street near SF State in a studio apartment reachable only by a homemade elevator up from the garage in a private home owned by an old man who became nightly livid at the antics of television wrestlers. “Did you see what Lash Larue did to Gorgeous George?” he'd shout. “The man ought to be arrested!” And I lived in the inner Richmond, a block off Clement, a street whose mercantile and socio-ethnic diversity is unmatched anywhere in the Greater Bay Area.

THE CITY is much richer and, in some ways, much poorer than I've known it. It also remains as a fundamentally conservative polis, unless, of course, you think the Democratic Party that runs it is in any way, “progressive.” The City's dominant political figures could give Republicans lessons in how to do benign neglect.

SEVERAL THOUSAND homeless and hopelessly screwed-up people are confined to certain, perennially expendable San Francisco neighborhoods because federal money is not available to house them, and federal money is not available to beat back presently intractable despair because Democrats don't demand it, and won't demand it given their inside-the-bubble indifference. There's less succor for the insane and the drug addicted than ever before, and more of them on the streets all the time.

SAN FRANCISCO’S current administration pretends that it can shelter the unhoused out of a municipal budget because, like Republicans, it pretends there's no money to do the basics — housing, health care, education, the full civilized monte that other rich countries assume as social givens. But that's what we get with Death Penalty Demos who own chemically-dependent, non-union vineyards and get insider stock tips…

A PERSON of ordinary means can still live in San Francisco if you're very, very frugal, and Clement Street is mostly committed to frugality, with fresh food prices running about half what they do at Safeway, probably because Chinese are frugal fresh food consumers and refuse to be gouged.

DESPITE the political dominance of the limo libs, this town provides a great free-of-charge, daily spectacle to which one adjusts as, I suppose, one adjusted to public inpredictability in the Middle Ages, of necessity assuming that you share public space with the deranged and the doomed but nevertheless, as we used to say in the Marine Corps, “Every day’s a holiday, and every meal’s a banquet.”

RETIRED MENDO DEPUTY RON PARKER WRITES (re: 1984 Brinks hijack/robbery in 1984): The Brinks robbers also stayed at the Lu Ann motel overnight. They stuffed their clothing under the bed, wearing new clothes when leaving in daylight the following morning. It was found accidentally when employees rotated the mattress.

MENDOCINO’S MASTER OF MINIATURES

by Carol Dominy

Herman Fayal, a lifelong resident of Mendocino, became known for his intricate miniatures that captured the spirit and history of the town he loved. Born in 1893, just a year after his parents Manuel and Maria Costa immigrated to California, Herman grew up with deep ties to the Mendocino coast. (Herman later changed his last name to avoid confusion with other Costas.)

Like many children from Portuguese families in the area, Herman left school after the sixth grade to help support his family. He went to work in the woods in Greenwood when he was 16 and later became a carpenter, a trade he learned while employed by the Mendocino Lumber Company.

Herman’s skills as a carpenter became central to his life’s work, but it was his passion for preserving Mendocino’s past through miniature models that cemented his legacy. In his later years, Herman began constructing tiny, detailed replicas of the buildings and landmarks of Mendocino as he remembered them from his boyhood. These miniatures, including water towers, homes, and old Main Street buildings, were displayed in his front yard at the corner of Calpella and Kelly streets, attracting the admiration of locals and tourists alike. His work was not just a tribute to the architecture and spirit of Mendocino but also a reflection of his dedication to preserving the town's history.

Fayal’s miniatures were a featured stop on walking tours of Mendocino in 1976, led by newspaper columnist Compy Compomizzo. Visitors marveled at his detailed renditions of Mendocino’s historic buildings, and many were treated to a personal conversation with the craftsman himself. By 1979, Fayal had garnered such a reputation for his work that tourists began requesting custom-made pieces, particularly his water towers—once a common sight throughout Mendocino. Fayal was happy to oblige, creating replicas to sell while continuing to expand the collection of miniatures in his yard.

Herman Fayal in front of his workshop, 1986. Three of his water tower miniatures can be seen on the right. (Photographer: Bill Wagner)

Herman Fayal passed away in 1988 at the age of 95, leaving behind not only a loving family but also a lasting tribute to Mendocino’s past. His workshop on Calpella and Kelly streets, where he lived for over 80 years, was a testament to his skill and his deep connection to the town. His miniatures offered a window into Mendocino’s history and served as a reminder of the town’s proud heritage.

(kelleyhousemuseum.org)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, September 14, 2024

ARIANA ARNOLD, 20, Ukiah. Contempt of court.

JOSE BUENROSTRO, 57, Ukiah. False ID, failure to appear, probation revocation.

MARK GRANT, 60, Covelo. Probation revocation.

WILLIAM HOAGLIN, 60, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation, failure to appear.

TAYLOR KESLER, 19, Ukiah. DUI.

DELANEY MARRUFO, 47, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

SHAREEN MARRUFO, 24, Covelo. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear.

GERARDO RODRIGUEZ, 24, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

My chief hangout In Salt Lake City became a saloon-gym run by an old fighter from the East, young Peter Jackson. Jackson's wasn't Sunday School. I got into a fight with a customer one night, a no pay fight, and he knew everything I knew and maybe more. We stood in front of the bar and slugged it out for a good 15 minutes before I nailed him and then he quit. I took a cigar and strutted to the gas cigar lighter. 'LOOK OUT!' somebody yelled, and just as the yell reached my ears I ducked. It was my recent opponent, hurling a beer stein at me. He missed. All this for nothing. Today, on television, it would be considered one of the fights of the century.

— Jack Dempsey

FROM MAN TO BARCODE

AVA,

Good issue Friday with Eli Zaretsky (LRoB) on AI and the important distinction of free association between man and the computer machine.

At this point, the multitudes who have cell phones, computers, et cetera are fully, and often constantly, immersed and have willingly given in to the structure of the electronic platform. The bias is established and even though people have free will to engage in many various topics, an ever more advancing technology is nuancing many away from innate free association of thought. Eli's last sentence sums it up well: ”The danger is that we will become a species of artificial intelligence ourselves.” So maintain R. Crumb and memes such as the “evolution of man into a bar code” even as the experience is within the “Matrix.”

Two digital images from a digital camera sent digitally. Enjoy,

Jeff Goll

Willits

HER FACEBOOK ACCOUNT GOT HACKED, SO SHE SCOURED THE INTERNET FOR HELP

by Jessica Roy

On Facebook, she had posted a bunch of things for sale on Marketplace, including vehicles, saying she was raising money to help get her sister-in-law into assisted living. Except Magilavy didn’t have a sister-in-law.

A friend wanted to know what was going on. After that, Magilavy said, she got dozens of calls and texts that day asking about the unusual activity.

Her Facebook account had been hacked. The people who did it were already busy attempting to scam her friends and family members out of deposits to hold big-ticket items. She tried to log in to her account, but the password had been changed, and a new email address and phone number added.

Magilavy went to work trying to wrest back control of her account, following Facebook’s provided steps to the letter. Every email she received from Facebook came from a no-reply email address, and messages sent to support over Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp went unread.

Frustrated, she looked online for a customer service phone number.

Facebook has no official phone number that you can call to speak to a human and get help. But if you search for a Facebook customer service number on Google, you’ll find lots of them — posted by anonymous users on online forums like Ask.com, Reddit, PissedConsumer and GetHuman.

Almost all of them — probably every single one — is another scam.

Magilavy, desperate, called one of them. She taught at an independent school in New Jersey for 20 years and has a teacher’s intensity and intuition for nonsense. (She recently used that hard-earned educator’s diligence to successfully recover homeowner’s insurance.) The person on the phone politely informed her that he was a Meta support tech, and he was able to quickly pull up her full name, phone number and address. He said he needed her bank account information so he could alert her bank that her information had been compromised.

That teacher’s sixth sense went off. She asked him for his Meta employee identification number.

He hung up.

Magilavy, who lives in San Francisco, isn’t the first person to have trouble getting Facebook to help with a hacked account. Two years ago, the Washington Post wrote about “the long, lonely wait to recover a hacked Facebook account.” Similar stories have been reported elsewhere, including as recently as last month, when the Santa Rosa Press Democrat’s managing editor’s Facebook account was taken over by crypto spammers. He referred to dealing with Facebook support as “a Sisyphean circle of Meta madness.”

But AI and other technological developments have created a new problem: Scammers stepping up to fill Facebook’s customer service void.

There’s a forum on Reddit for Facebook, r/Facebook, which has a lot of posts about needing help for hacked accounts. And there’s another forum with 17,000 members specifically dedicated to the problem: r/facebookdisabledme.

Some of the posts are from people who have recovered their account, either through diligent communication with Facebook’s official channels or, in some cases, reaching out to their state attorney general for help. (Law enforcement has direct channels to Facebook that the general public does not.)

But a concerning number of posts are screenshots of a website or direct message from someone offering to help recover a hacked account, saying they’re a Facebook engineer, or Meta programmer, or an expert hacker trying to do someone a favor out of the goodness of their heart.

These are also all scams.

A Longtime Support Problem

Before I went into the specific details of Magilavy’s case, I asked Eva Velasquez, the president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, whether Facebook had changed or improved its support processes since stories started coming out about such customer service issues a few years ago.

“No,” she said. “Nothing has changed. In fact, what I can say is I think it’s actually gotten worse.”

Then she outlined exactly what had happened to Magilavy: “People are so desperate to talk to someone, they Google the number, they search for the Facebook customer service number. There is not one. It does not exist. But what has filled that void are scam websites. So people go and look and try to find the Facebook customer service number.”

They call this “magic number,” she said, and they get scammed again.

Why doesn’t Facebook have meaningful customer service? Part of it is a volume problem. Facebook says it has more than 2 billion daily active users. Making and using a Facebook account is free. An estimated 300,000 Facebook accounts are compromised every single day.

But also, Velasquez said, I’m actually asking the wrong question.

“They have great customer service,” she said, “because their customers are the people who buy their ads. We are not their customers. We’re their end users. We’re their product. So what they don’t have is user service. And the reason is because we don’t make them. We are not paying them. We’re not that important.”

Facebook’s motivation to have little to no support is “pure profit,” said Jonas Borchgrevink. He’s the director of Hacked.com, an actually legitimate website where you can pay a fee for someone to try to help you get your account back (though they offer no guarantees). Facebook could have better customer service, but that would be expensive, and as Velasquez said, Facebook doesn’t make much money from users.

New Era Of Automated Scamming

Right now, Facebook says it uses a combination of live customer support and automated help in its customer support process. It’s far from the only company doing so. Many businesses are replacing or “enhancing” live support with chatbots, which the White House recently said often “give the run-around to customers seeking a real person.”

When people talk about jobs being lost to AI and industries becoming automated, they often bring up things like customer service, programming, law, health care, even journalism. But hardworking criminals can lose their jobs to bots, too. We’re on the cusp of a new era of fully automated scamming.

AI has made it easier for scammers to communicate, Borchgrevink said. He used to see lots of messages originating in Asia and Africa written in short phrases and broken English, which tipped off potential victims. That’s changed. Scammers can use large language models to write perfectly coherent web copy and bogus ads and direct messages offering to “help” hacking victims. He said the messages he sees from scammers now are “indistinguishable from native speakers.”

A 2024 report from cybersecurity company Imperva found that almost half of all Internet activity now comes from nonhuman sources.

Little Legal Recourse

And when people get scammed on social media, there’s little legal recourse. If you have a problem with your health insurance, you can reach out to the California Department of Insurance. If you have a problem with your bank account, you can reach out to several government organizations that oversee the banks. But there’s no government entity that oversees or regulates social media sites.

Magilavy filed a report with the San Francisco Police Department, which she said has not assigned the case or sent her a copy of her report. Filing the report triggered a call from someone with the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, which was also no help.

She reached out to the office of House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and said the person she spoke to on the phone “hemmed and hawed and finally said, ‘Well, we can’t really do anything.’”

“I said, you guys have to know someone at Facebook,” Magilavy told me. They told her to file a report with the Federal Trade Commission. After spending 40 minutes on hers, she got back an automated message back saying the FTC accepts reports but does not investigate them. So no help there either.

She called back and spoke to the same person.

“She said, ‘Well, have you tried one of the ‘Internet for seniors’ classes?’” Magilavy, who is 73 and took her first programming class long before Mark Zuckerberg was born, was insulted. Five minutes after hanging up the phone, she received an automated message thanking her for reaching out about her interest in health care.

Magilavy hasn’t had access to her account in weeks. She has done everything Facebook has asked of her, including sending selfies from multiple angles. She shared a Google Doc with me on which she has kept track of everything she has tried and the responses or lack thereof from Facebook. It spans nine pages. She says every time Facebook sends her a link to reset her password or get back into her account, it also sends it to the scammer’s email, and they move fast. Every time she changes her password, they go back in and change it again.

Facebook could improve this process. It could have some human beings available to help people. Borchgrevink proposed another easy solution: Facebook could implement a seven-day grace period where you could undo any changes to your account and remove any new email addresses, phone numbers, or two-factor authenticators that had been added.

Velasquez said she would like to see more regulatory oversight of social media platforms, though past attempts at regulation have been met by fierce opposition from both site operators and users.

Multiple requests to Facebook for comment, for both general advice on what hacking victims can do and details on Magilavy’s specific case, were not answered.

There are things you can do to try to protect your account, though no digital security system is 100% foolproof. And if you think you’ve been hacked, there are steps experts recommend you take.

How To Protect Your Facebook Account

The biggest security flaw that you can correct is failure to use a unique password for Facebook and other important accounts, Borchgrevink said. In Magilavy’s case, she used a unique password for Facebook, but the email address associated with the account was an old one, and she used the same password for it that she’d used for FlightAware. She received notification that she was a victim of the FlightAware hack in late July, so she assumes that’s how this all started.

It’s best to use unique passwords everywhere, but if that’s a little daunting, start with email accounts, banking log-ins and social media sites. Borchgrevink recommends using Google or Apple’s password managers, which are free.

Adding two-factor authentication is another best practice. Magilavy said she hadn’t used it for her Facebook account, because she’s wary of potential security issues if the authenticator itself gets hacked. I understand where she’s coming from. Unfortunately, because she hadn’t added two-factor authentication to her account, the scammers were able to, making it even harder for her to untangle their work.

What to do if you think you’ve been hacked

If you think your Facebook account has been hijacked, take steps to secure your other social media accounts, as well as your email and bank accounts. Change passwords, add two-factor authentication where you can, and search for suspicious transactions.

Borchgrevink recommends making posts on your other accounts announcing you’ve been hacked, so that your friends and family will be less likely to fall for whatever scam the hackers are trying. Notify family and friends directly as soon as possible.

He also said to resist the urge to make a new account. It will just muck things up in your recovery case with Facebook.

(SF Chronicle)

MEMO OF THE AIR: Night shift in the puzzle factory.

Here's the recording of last night's (Friday 2024-09-13) 8-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-0609

Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement 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.

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:

Rerun: Requiem for a Dream. I saw it when it came out, and not since then, but just now I was thinking about it, burst into tears and said, “Oh, the poor little people. Oh, no.” Back when I was in high school in the early 1970s they’d show us 16mm movies in the gym on rainy days. They showed movies of car wrecks with slides of before-and-after face-reconstruction surgery of kids our age who thought they were too cool to wear their seatbelt, and that worked. But they showed movies of people talking about how drugs would ruin your brain and your life, and they weren’t very effective. When I saw Requiem For A Dream, I thought, This is what they should show kids to scare them from trying drugs, because it would fucking work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Dream

And your skin, a conveyor belt of death. Every hour you shed 200,000,000 dead skin cells, and good riddance. But under the skin, the grievous insult of a tattoo. A man who worked in the hardware store forty years ago had crashed his bicycle when he was a boy and somehow asphalt had got under the skin of his nose and cheek and stayed there forever. It didn’t look too bad, but you had to consciously look him in the eye to keep from focusing on the blotches, while you were describing the part or tool or product you needed, or handing him your key to duplicate. When kids have acne problems I feel so sorry for them. You don’t have to just imagine how they feel; they look haunted, the expression in their eyes. It’s misery. And there was a graceful, tall, seriously smart, pretty woman who used to work in the library forty years ago, and she ran a reading program for the school district; she had the crinkled scar of severe burns on the side of her face and down her neck. She dressed in well-fitted, thin-flowing-cotton dresses like sharp magazine ad women in the 1950s, and she looked sad, even when smiling. I always wanted to say something about how pretty she was, but, Christ, Marco, she’ll think you’re a creep, and you are, so I never did. (via Kottke.org) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGggU-Cxhv0

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

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Kids are truant for a number of reasons. Did we look at truancy rates as they compare with longer schedules, and earlier season starts to school because of football? Out here in rural CA it takes five hours of driving to get your kid to a dentist appointment. Ever notice how the school week overlays with normal business hours? (Go to a 4 day week)

Another thing we’re fighting: nature. Young people, especially middle and highschool aged kids need more sleep, they naturally want to sleep in, and no, they’re not going to bed at 8:30. I’ve seen plenty of 50, 60-something year old administrators who just don’t get why kids don’t want to rise at 5:30 to catch a 7:30 bus in the dark of winter. (The old timers just want to get home earlier and start drinking!) And finally, what has changed with where we live? Do kids live farther from schools? Has the number that can walk shrunk, are kids more dependant on rides, has public transportation improved?

CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS FACE TWIN PERILS: CHRONIC ABSENTEEISM AND DECLINING ENROLLMENT

by Dan Walters

California’s public schools have a numbers problem — and it’s not just that their students don’t score very highly in national tests of mathematics ability.

Their other numbers problem is the financial squeeze posed by declining enrollment, especially in large urban districts, compounded by apparently growing levels of chronic absenteeism, or truancy.

“Thirty percent of California public school students were chronically absent from school in 2021-22 — a near tripling of the percentage in 2018-19,” the Public Policy Institute of California declared in a recent report. “Although we do not know if this stark increase in chronic absenteeism, defined as missing at least 10% of the school year or at least 18 days, will continue, the data from last year raises concerns about the pace of students’ learning recovery after the educational setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

California is one of just seven states that base state financial support of local school systems on attendance, rather than enrollment, so the declines in enrollment and attendance comprise a double financial whammy, one of the reasons many school districts are facing budget deficits.

Enrollment is an immutable effect of demographic change, both the out-migration of young families to other states and lower birth rates. Chronic truancy, on the other hand, first became notable during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools were closed for months and many students were unable to keep up with studies via the internet.

Another report from the Public Policy Institute of California found that “schools with greater increases in chronic absenteeism saw steeper drops in proficiency rates on the Smarter Balanced (SBAC) English and math tests, when comparing pre-pandemic levels (2018-19) to 2021-22.”

During the pandemic, the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom temporarily deviated from basing state aid on attendance, given the massive dislocation of school closures. The situation also reinvigorated an old debate over whether using attendance is outmoded and California should shift to an enrollment-based system.

Policy Analysis for California Education, a think tank maintained by the state’s major universities, chimed in with its own take on the issue, to wit: “We find that about 90 percent of districts would receive more funding under an enrollment-based formula than they would under the current ADA-based system, with the biggest boost going to high school districts and districts with more low-income, English learner, and foster youth students.”

ADA refers to average daily attendance.

The analysis estimated that switching to enrollment would cost about $3.4 billion a year, since truant students would still qualify their schools for aid. It cautioned, however, that while “switching from attendance to enrollment may help districts gain greater fiscal stability and may shift more resources to school districts with greater student needs,” on the other hand, “the current system includes a fiscal incentive that, most agree, encourages higher attendance, even if that attendance definition is relatively weak.”

In other words, switching to enrollment would take schools off the hook in battling truancy.

Last year, Anthony Portantino, a Democratic state senator from Glendale, introduced legislation, backed by the public education establishment, including state schools Supt. Tony Thurmond, to make the change.

“Enrollment-based funding ensures that California schools are funded more equitably and have greater financial stability and predictability,” Portantino said.

However, with the state facing chronic budget deficits of its own and barely able to supply schools with their constitutionally mandated levels of money, Senate Bill 98 faltered. It eventually morphed into merely an instruction to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the Legislature’s budget advisor, to study the effects of changing to an enrollment-based system and report on it by Jan. 1, 2026.

That’s known in political circles as kicking the can down the road, a time-dishonored way for officials to avoid making decisions.

(CalMatters.org)

HOW THE NINERS BRIBED SANTA CLARA TO BUILD THEIR HELLISH STADIUM FAR, FAR OUTTA FRISCO WHEN CANDLESTICK WAS PERFECT FOR FOOTBALL

by Lance Williams & Ron Kroichick

The San Francisco 49ers pumped more than $900,000 into Santa Clara City Council races this month, boosting the campaigns of officials who have voted against scrutinizing the team’s financial management of publicly owned Levi’s Stadium.

The donations by “DeBartolo Corporation & Affiliated Entities, including the Forty Niners Football Company LLC,” reported to the California Secretary of State, bring the 49ers’ spending on Santa Clara politics to $8.3 million dating back to 2020. That’s when the team’s political contributions first helped elect a 49ers-friendly city council majority.

As the 2024 campaign begins and with control of the seven-member council at stake, the 49ers reported spending more than $225,000 apiece to help re-elect council members Kevin Park and Suds Jain.

They are part of a five-member voting bloc that a county grand jury accused of putting “the 49ers’ interests ahead of the city’s interests” on financial issues affecting the team. The council members pushed back at the grand jury’s report, calling it biased and incorrect.

The 49ers made an additional $248,000 in independent expenditures to help elect local school trustee Albert Gonzalez to replace council member Kathy Watanabe, who must step down because of term limits. Watanabe and Mayor Lisa Gillmor are the only 49ers critics on the current council.

“It’s the same playbook they’ve used in the past,” Gillmor told the Chronicle on Friday, referring to the team’s latest financial foray into politics. “The grand jury here in Santa Clara County has documented how the 49ers have purchased the City Council, so it’s really up to our voters right now to decide if they want to be controlled by an NFL owner. … The 49ers want to continue to control our city.”

The team did not spend any money to reelect perhaps the most pro-49ers council member on the November ballot, Vice Mayor Anthony Becker.

While running for reelection, Becker is awaiting trial on a felony charge of perjury in connection with alleged political improprieties involving a 49ers lobbyist during the 2022 mayor’s race. The team spent $2.5 million in an unsuccessful effort to replace Gillmor with Becker.

His oft-delayed perjury trial may start next week. Becker has pleaded not guilty.

Though the 49ers have spent no money to support Becker this time, they donated about $225,000 to fund a campaign against Kelly Cox, a Santa Clara University dean whom Gillmor has endorsed to replace Becker. George Guerra, a former parks commissioner, also is running for the seat.

“Our organization is proud to continue to support a diverse slate of candidates running for City Council this year,” Ellie Caple, the 49ers’ vice president of corporate communications and public affairs, said in a statement emailed to the Chronicle. “We are glad to see the current council has effectively managed the city’s finances, reduced the city deficit and continues to serve our community.”

In all, four of the seven City Council seats are on the ballot. In addition to Cox, Gillmor has backed former council member Teresa O’Neill to unseat Park, sales executive David Kertis in the race against Jain, and onetime charter review commissioner Satish Chandra for Watanabe’s seat.

In a filing with the city, the Related Companies, developers of a 240-acre project near Levi’s Stadium, said the firm intended to make independent expenditures on behalf of Gillmor’s slate of candidates. Related is owned by Stephen Ross, who also owns the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. The company spent $250,000 to back Gillmor in 2022, but it has not yet spent any money on Santa Clara’s races in 2024.

(SF Chronicle)

ms adds:

The Santa Clara County Grand Jury Report is much more interesting and blunt in its criticism of the Niners ownership and the “unsportsmanlike conduct” of the Niners bloc on the San Jose City Council.

Here’s a link to the “highlights” of that report:

https://grandjuryreport.com

And here are more updates about the follow-up Grand Jury report:

https://www.svvoice.com/civil-grand-jury-report-finds-hindsight-is-20-20/

https://localnewsmatters.org/2024/09/11/dysfunctional-santa-clara-city-council-begrudgingly-responds-to-grand-jury-reports/

https://santaclara.courts.ca.gov/system/files/civil/outplayed-santa-clara-city-council-and-santa-clara-stadium-authority-board.pdf

BEING A JUROR IN THE TRIAL OF PAUL PELOSI’S ATTACKER LEFT ME TRAUMATIZED — AND GRATEFUL

by Leslie Katz

A San Francisco jury this summer found David DePape, the man who in 2022 broke into Nancy Pelosi’s Pacific Heights home and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer, guilty of five felony charges.

I was one of the jurors.

The trial that followed DePape’s conviction and sentencing in federal court left me emotionally drained, revisiting gory evidence in my nightmares and agonizing over whether I’d correctly interpreted the subjective concept of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Yet I emerged deeply grateful for the opportunity to be a citizen participant in the judicial process.

Being a juror wasn’t a job I wanted, especially on a high-profile trial expected to last weeks and include bloody images (the attack left Paul Pelosi with a fractured skull and traumatic brain injury) and testimony about conspiracy theories that underscore the country’s deep and disturbing divides. A number of jurors worried about maintaining their privacy during such a politically charged case and felt rattled by the press gathered just outside the San Francisco courtroom.

The other jurors ranged in age from 22 to 64 and live in neighborhoods across the city, from the Excelsior to Cole Valley, the Richmond to the Castro. As it turns out, Zach, the foreman, lives four blocks from me, a new familiar face in the neighborhood.

The jury included Matthew, a platform developer at a biotech company focused on cancer research. On breaks, we talked about his work and laughed about other potential jurors whose jobs require high levels of critical thinking, yet they suddenly became incapable of it when asked whether they could be fair and impartial. One woman said she couldn’t consider the facts objectively because she’s morally opposed to violence (as if the rest of us support it).

I thought of the bonds I’d forged with my fellow jurors during the trial’s darkest moments, such as when Paul Pelosi testified from the witness box just feet away from me. He recounted the October night when he woke to the sight of DePape looming over his bed, wielding a hammer and demanding to know where his wife was. Following the violent attack, he testified, he had to learn to walk again and still struggles with balance and dizzy spells. My dad suffered a traumatic brain injury that changed his life forever, so those details hit me extra hard.

Another difficult moment came when the court clerk read the guilty verdict on one charge that had initially divided the jury down the middle. As the verdict was delivered, my hands shook, and I saw tears in the eyes of another juror. We had pored over the evidence and debated the definition of words like “intent,” but knowing we were thorough didn’t lessen the enormity of holding sway over another person’s life.

The defendant had struggled with mental health issues and lived a difficult, isolated life, the defense told us in opening arguments. But it was only after we delivered the verdicts and left the courthouse that I learned a guilty ruling on the aggravated kidnapping charge means DePape faces a life sentence without possibility of parole.

DePape committed a horrible crime, but he had already been sentenced to 30 years in an earlier federal trial. I knew additional sentencing was the judge’s job, not mine, but I couldn’t help wondering whether my decision had ruined any chance the defendant had of a life beyond his crime. (The sentencing hearing will take place in late September at the earliest.)

Because of this, for weeks following the trial, I ruminated on the concept of “beyond a reasonable doubt” as it related to the charge that would likely land DePape in prison for good. I felt better when a relative who’s a lawyer reminded me that “beyond a reasonable doubt” doesn’t mean no doubt. All humans have doubts.

‘I Felt Like I Was Being Attacked’

The American Psychological Association has found that 50% of jurors experience post-traumatic stress, especially when cases involve graphic evidence, and that condition can last months. One of my fellow jurors described a dream so terrifying that he consulted a therapist specializing in trauma. “I felt like I was being attacked,” he told me. “My nightmare was vivid and real.”

For me, the monthlong experience had a cascade of lighter effects. It got me out of my work-from-home yoga pants into real pants and pushed me beyond the cozy confines of my neighborhood.

To my surprise, serving as a juror reawakened my affection for the city I’ve lived in and loved for more than 25 years but had grown distant from as I spun deeper into my personal “doom loop,” fueled by seemingly endless headlines of a descent into urban decay. Jury duty reintroduced me to the optimistic sides of San Francisco.

Some days, I’d stroll home through Civic Center Plaza, contemplating trial evidence as I stopped to watch strangers hunched over a chess board or playing table tennis. One unseasonably hot June afternoon, I detoured to the main San Francisco Public Library and marveled at the beauty of the lobby spectacularly drenched in sunlight. I hadn’t visited that branch in years.

Best of all, I got to know a diverse group of San Franciscans I would never have met had chance not filed us into a windowless courtroom with a momentous assignment. Spurred by their serious commitment to jury duty, disruptive as the task can be, I watched the mayoral debates with renewed interest and began reading more about our city’s web of problems, including fentanyl addiction and homelessness.

At first it was odd not seeing my fellow jurors daily after sharing such an intense and singular experience. But we reunited one recent Saturday at a Mission bar, and the afternoon ended with talk of where we’d hold our next gathering. Alex, one of the alternate jurors, gifted everyone a bottle of his homemade hot sauce. That night, praise of it dominated our group chat.

More than two months after the trial, the sense of power and responsibility I shared with these San Franciscans remains with me, and it will for a long time. So too, I hope, will my revitalized appreciation for the city I call home.

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder - 1562

CALIFORNIA REMAINS IN PUZZLING ‘EARTHQUAKE DROUGHT’ DESPITE RECENT SHAKING

There have been no significant damaging earthquakes underneath California's most populous cities in the last 30 years.

by Rong-Gong Lin II

Despite an unusual number of modest earthquakes this year in Southern California, the state overall remains in the midst of a drought of major earthquakes.

There have been no significant damaging earthquakes underneath California's most populous cities in the last 30 years.

That's a stark contrast to the prior three decades, when earthquakes in suburban or mountainous areas caused catastrophic damage in the urban infrastructure, causing freeway and building collapses and resulting in the deaths of scores of people.

“If you take the last 30 years as your definition of how often you should expect to be feeling earthquakes, you are underestimating the long-term rate,” said seismologist Lucy Jones, a Caltech research associate. “Since Northridge, in the L.A. area, we've been seeing fewer earthquakes, and having fewer damaging ones, than the long-term rate would imply.”

30 Years, But How Much Longer?

Between 1964 and 1994, Los Angeles faced two big earthquakes, which both hit the suburban San Fernando Valley hard: the magnitude 6.6 Sylmar earthquake of 1971, which resulted in 64 deaths; and the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake of 1994, in which about 60 people died. The Northridge quake caused up to $20 billion in damage and an additional $40 billion or more in economic losses — the costliest seismic disaster in U.S. history, the California Geological Survey said.

In Northern California, the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 was centered in the Santa Cruz Mountains, yet still caused collapses in San Francisco and Oakland, about 60 miles from the epicenter. Sixty-three deaths were reported.

Scientists warn that even those earthquakes are relatively moderate compared with what can happen. No one alive today has experienced the kind of seismic power early Californians faced more than a century ago. In 1906, an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.9 ruptured 300 miles of the San Andreas fault, from Humboldt County to San Benito County, which destroyed much of San Francisco.

Southern California's last “Big One” was in 1857, when an earthquake with a magnitude of roughly 7.9 ruptured 225 miles of fault on the San Andreas, between Monterey and San Bernardino counties. A hypothetical future magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas fault, from the Mexican border to Los Angeles County, could result in 1,800 deaths and nearly 50,000 injuries, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's “ShakeOut” scenario.

That scenario would result in the deadliest quake in modern Southern California history, with more than 1,000 of those fatalities possibly occurring in L.A. County alone.

The magnitude 7.8 ShakeOut quake would be more than 12 times bigger than the Northridge quake as measured on a seismogram. But a more important comparison shows that the ShakeOut scenario quake would be 45 times stronger, in terms of energy released, than Northridge. The 1994 earthquake resulted in perhaps seven to 15 seconds of shaking; many buildings would face nearly 2 minutes of shaking in a ShakeOut scenario quake, according to the USGS.

There's now an entire generation of Californians who have grown up without experiencing the damaging earthquakes we saw in the 1980s and 1990s, even smaller ones that caused localized damage, such as the magnitude 5.9 Whittier Narrows earthquake, centered in the San Gabriel Valley, which killed eight people in 1987.

Certainly, there have been a few earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater in the last three decades that brought damage to California. Humboldt County saw them in 2010 and 2022; the Mojave Desert in 1999 and 2019; Napa County in 2014; Imperial County in 2010, resulting from an earthquake centered in Baja California; and in San Luis Obispo County in 2003.

Those were the most noteworthy of the 12 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater that have shaken up California and Nevada in the last 30 years.

But that tally is fewer than half of the 28 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater in the prior 30 years, between 1964 and 1994.

Unfinished Business

The earthquakes in the 1980s and 1990s brought a renewed wake-up call to California's seismic vulnerabilities. Earlier quakes — the magnitude 6.4 Long Beach earthquake of 1933, centered just off the Huntington Beach coast, and the Sylmar earthquake — also sparked changes in building codes and led to a better understanding of seismic risks.

Officials responded to the 1989 and 1994 earthquakes with an unprecedented seismic safety campaign that remade California's freeways and bridges and generally raised awareness about the financial and personal stakes.

More progress was made starting about a decade ago. In 2013, San Francisco ordered retrofits of “soft-story” apartments, which are vulnerable to collapse because their upper floors are held up by flimsy, skinny columns on top of carports or garages.

Los Angeles followed suit in 2015, and also ordered “non-ductile,” or brittle, concrete buildings to be retrofitted. Cities in Southern California that have recently passed retrofit laws include Torrance, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. In Northern California, they include Oakland, Berkeley, Fremont and Mill Valley.

But not all of those cities have ordered retrofits of all of the types of buildings structural engineers are concerned about. There remain many other cities that have done nothing for decades to order vulnerable buildings be retrofitted or demolished. And experts say there is much more to do and fear the lack of a major urban quake since 1994 has made people forget.

Apartment owners who fail to retrofit their quake-vulnerable buildings risk a total loss. About 200 soft-story apartment buildings in the L.A. area were seriously damaged or destroyed during the Northridge earthquake. At one of them, the Northridge Meadows complex, 16 people died when the ground story collapsed. Experts warn that the collapse of many of these buildings in a future quake would result in an increase in homelessness and threaten the limited stock of affordable housing, imperiling a community's ability to rebound after the shaking fades.

And some cities remain decades behind in seismic safety laws compared with other jurisdictions, which began voting decades ago to order century-old brick buildings to be retrofitted or demolished. A particularly worrisome spot is the Inland Empire, through which the San Andreas fault runs. A Times investigation in 2018 reported how hundreds of old brick buildings in more than a dozen cities in the Inland Empire remained unretrofitted despite decades of warnings.

State officials are also taking steps to encourage owners of single-family homes to voluntarily retrofit their houses. Relatively simple fixes to protect homes can prevent owners from incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage after a quake hits.

2024's Elevated Seismic Activity

For those who might wonder whether Southern California has been seeing more felt earthquakes than usual, it's not just your imagination.

The magnitude 4.7 quake just north of Malibu on Thursday was the 14th seismic sequence so far this year in Southern California with at least one earthquake of magnitude 4 or higher, Jones said. That tally broke a record for the last 65 years.

In that time period in Southern California, there were an average of eight to 10 independent sequences of earthquakes that included at least one of magnitude 4 or greater. In some years, there was just one or two of those sequences. The prior record was in 1988, when there were 13 of those earthquake sequences, Jones said.

The activity is not necessarily an indication that a large, damaging earthquake is around the corner, scientists said. Some researchers have offered dueling theories — some say earthquake activity goes up in a region before a large earthquake, others say seismic activity goes down before a large earthquake.

So the recent activity does not offer any hints of when the next large, destructive earthquake will occur, according to USGS seismologist Susan Hough.

“So, yes, this is a more active year than we've had in the past,” Jones said. But, she added, “we can't quite say yet that whether or not that it is actually statistically significant to be seeing this.”

The latest quakes are “a really good reminder that the quiet of the last couple of decades is not our long-term picture, and we do need to be prepared,” Jones said.

Why we're talking more about quakes

Some people have noted how it seems like we might be talking more about modest earthquakes more than we used to. That's probably for a number of reasons — including the rise of the internet and social media, which make it quite easy for even people who never felt a given earthquake to talk about it.

Decades ago, “if you felt it, you talked about it with your friends,” Jones said. Now, even people who didn't feel it can talk about how they didn't feel it.

Today, “it's so easy to get the information,” she said.

It's also much faster to process seismic data nowadays. Decades ago, figuring out the magnitude and location of an earthquake was a time-intensive process.

Back then, “to figure out where an earthquake was, you had to get a seismologist to come into the lab and look, pull out the records and compute it,” Jones said.

Seismologists at the time relied on an alarm system triggered from six stations across Southern California, which made graphs etched by a mechanical pen, that rang when at least two of them went off scale, indicating an earthquake of magnitude 4 or higher had occurred. If the alarm rang outside business hours, someone would need to call down a list of seismologists until someone agreed to come in.

That meant that earthquakes of magnitude 3 or lower weren't prioritized for relatively quick analysis.

So, for the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake, it took roughly an hour to get a preliminary location and magnitude, Jones said, and something like three hours before she could begin talking to reporters formally about more details. Jones and other seismologists had to pore over paper records and measure them by hand, and had to initially guess at the magnitude.

And “shake maps” — maps that could quantify the intensity of shaking felt by location — weren't available virtually instantaneously as they are today. Making those shake maps required sending out survey forms or obtaining strong-motion records. “We had to go pick up film chips and process them, so that took like a month or two,” Jones said.

Contrast that with Thursday, when some people got a preliminary magnitude on an earthquake early warning app seconds before they felt shaking, and Jones was available on a Zoom conference call with reporters just minutes after the quake.

‘A Very Good Reminder’

The risks are all around us.

Take the Puente Hills thrust fault system, which was linked to several quakes this year centered in El Sereno, a neighborhood on Los Angeles' Eastside. The USGS and the Southern California Earthquake Center in 2005 said that a magnitude 7.5 quake on that fault system, which runs underneath downtown and broad swaths of southeast L.A. County, the San Gabriel Valley and northern Orange County, could kill as many as 18,000 people and cause as much as $250 billion in damage. Such a quake would be 15 times stronger, in terms of energy released, than the Northridge earthquake. It is impossible to say when such a large quake could occur.

The east-west faults that ran near Thursday's Malibu quake are also a threat. Earthquakes in that area can reach up to magnitude 8, which is actually “pretty standard for anywhere in California,” said Morgan Page, a USGS geophysicist. That's because individual faults can link up with others in the same seismic event to form a larger magnitude earthquake.

Officials worry that a huge temblor would cut off Southern California from vital utilities and communications for days, if not weeks. One vulnerable spot is the Cajon Pass, the narrow mountain pass where the San Andreas fault intersects with combustible natural gas and petroleum pipelines, electrical transmission lines, train tracks and Interstate 15 north of San Bernardino. Earthquakes could also cripple critical supplies of water to Los Angeles.

Hough, the USGS seismologist, said the Malibu quake offers another reason to prepare.

“It is a very good reminder to people that we live in earthquake country,” she said. “And we need to take the steps that will help keep us all safe if a bigger earthquake does occur.”

(LA Times)

NOT A TOUGH CROWD

by Christian Lorentzen

The Democratic Convention was an exercise in celebrity creation. Harris has been on the national stage for years but in a subordinate role, dispatched most often to speak to the liberal choir on friendly talk shows and at rallies for reproductive rights. She hasn’t figured as an object of hate for the right-wing media on the scale of Ocasio-Cortez, let alone Hillary Clinton. Dan Morain’s 2021 biography, Kamala’s Way, reissued in 2022 with a new epilogue, charts Harris’s rise in San Francisco politics. Morain is a veteran reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee. He recalls a conversation with the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen:

“Caen told me one of the secrets of his success: San Francisco was a town without celebrities, so he had to create them. It’s one way his three-dot column became a must-read for San Franciscans for fifty years. He defined the city, was its champion, its scold, its arbiter of class and the classless. And no one played a bigger part in the world he chronicled than his good friend Willie Brown.”

Brown was the speaker at the California State Assembly for decades, until term limits were imposed in the early 1990s. Near the end of his tenure, he started dating a young prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office. She made her first appearance in Caen’s Chronicle column in an account of Brown’s birthday in 1994. “Caen reported,” Morain writes, “that Barbra Streisand was at Brown’s sixtieth and that Clint Eastwood ‘spilled champagne on the speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris’.”

According to Morain, “Brown gave Harris a BMW … she travelled with him to Paris, attended the Academy Awards with him and was part of the entourage” that went with him to the East Coast, where among other business, he met with Donald Trump, who wanted to discuss a potential hotel project in Los Angeles. Harris rode with Brown on Trump’s private jet from Boston to New York but “likely” didn’t meet him. Morain’s point is that Harris had an early introduction to down-and-dirty transactional politics. She split up with Brown when he was elected mayor of San Francisco in 1995. He was married, and though he had long been separated from his wife, divorce wasn’t in the cards. In 2003, when Harris ran for San Francisco District Attorney and her rivals raised the issue of her relationship with the now retired Brown, whose administration had come under investigation by the FBI for corruption, as well as appointments he gave her during their relationship, she responded:

“I refuse to design my campaign around criticizing Willie Brown for the sake of appearing to be independent when I have no doubt that I am independent of him — and that he would probably right now express some fright about the fact that he cannot control me. His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next forty years. I do not owe him a thing.”

After winning that election, Harris ran afoul of the police when she announced that, in keeping with one of her campaign pledges, she would not seek the death penalty in the case of a suspect accused of killing a police officer in 2004. Even Senator Dianne Feinstein turned on her, announcing at the officer’s funeral that the crime “is not only the definition of tragedy, it’s the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.” The remark was directed at Harris, who was sitting in the front row. She lost the support of the police union, though this didn’t stop her being elected as attorney general in 2010 or as senator in 2016.

Morain points to a broader pattern in her political style. She tends to defer taking stands on issues for as long as possible.

While she was in office in California, she couched this approach as being in deference to existing laws, but it has made her a logical standard-bearer for a Democratic Party that seeks to be all things to all voters in the face of Trump. Some claims made by Harris and others on her behalf at the convention have since been revealed to be inflated: it was repeatedly said that she “took on the big banks” and won, but the $20 billion settlement she gained from lenders as California Attorney General did little for those who faced foreclosure. Some received compensation amounting to a month’s rent, while others were forced to sell their homes at a loss; most of the money went back into the state budget.

Overall, Morain’s book portrays a canny political fighter against a fascinating backdrop of ruthless, money-soaked California politics. He traces her on-and-off alliance with Gavin Newsom, now governor of California and previously Brown’s successor as mayor of San Francisco, who with Harris administered the country’s first gay marriages; her rivalry with his ex-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, now the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr, who rose to prominence in the right-wing mediasphere after prosecuting the case of a pair of defense attorneys accused of manslaughter, after one of a pair of vicious dogs that they were minding for a client, an Aryan Brotherhood gang leader called Cornfed, mauled to death a university lacrosse coach who lived in their apartment building; and her long-standing alliance with Barack Obama.

Obama’s speech on the second night was a medley of his greatest hits, with passages recalling his national debut at the DNC in 2004 and his ecumenical message against the notion of red states and blue states:

“All across America, in big cities and small towns, away from all the noise, the ties that bind us together are still there. We still coach Little League and look out for our elderly neighbours. We still feed the hungry, in churches and mosques and synagogues and temples. We still share the same pride when our Olympic athletes compete for the gold.”

His list of the malignant forces dividing the nation now includes “algorithms.” Obama also, with a hand gesture, made a joke about Trump’s anxieties about the size of his penis.

Michelle Obama was the convention’s most effective anti-Trump speaker:

“See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be black. I want to know – I want to know – who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him, that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs?”

Trump’s supreme agon is with the meritocratic professional class the Obamas personify. Michelle surprised some in the audience by referring to her own fertility struggles, which had over the first two nights become a leitmotif of the proceedings, an unambiguously pro-family counterpoint to the message against abortion bans. She also reframed the campaign as the return of “the contagious power of hope,” casting Harris as a challenger to a failed president rather than a principal in the incumbent administration.

(London Review of Books)

KIRN & TAIBBI

Walter Kirn: Well, Matt, a lot of people take trips down memory lane on 9/11 anniversaries. I don’t want to indulge that as a novelist. I could go into great detail, but I was living in Montana. I was a young father, father of young children, too. When 9/11 happened and suddenly the skies of Montana were free of jets, and it was quiet as the frontier again, and I went and filled up all my gas tanks because in the rural setting, you’re always prepared for things to break down. This looked like they were breaking down. I was rah-rah, okay? The evolution of Walter Kirn had not begun at that point, and I don’t think I was paying attention to curtailments of liberty and so on. I was not at all vigilant about any of that. I wanted to get these people, whoever they were, I was just in a state of shock.

But it was just a few years later, I was divorced and I was driving with a girlfriend through Kansas, merrily through Kansas on my way from Denver to Chicago. In the middle of the day, I get pulled over by the cops and they pull me over, and I notice that the cops are very different than they used to be. They’re tactical. They’re in black. After the first cop pulls me over, some others arrive, and one of the cops comes up to the door and he starts interrogating me about where I’m going. When I tell him I’m a writer, he just goes to a new level of suspicion. I can see it in his eyes and hear it. He separates me from my passenger, has his partner interrogate her separately while she’s in the passenger seat. Then he tells me that he’s going to search my vehicle, and I’m the son of a lawyer and, a cussed lawyer.

I said, “You don’t have my permission to do that.” I said, “You have no cause to do that.” I said, “What are you searching for anyway?” He said, “Well, it could be drugs.” I said, “There are no drugs in there.” He said, “It could be money.” I said, money. He said, “Listen,” he cited the Patriot Act right to me. Now, I don’t know if he cited it accurately, but he used it as a cudgel to inform me that what I thought were my rights had been superseded, and that if I didn’t proceed to this agree to this search of my big giant Land Cruiser full of junk, I was going to be in big trouble.

Anyway, I found out later that this town in Kansas had been especially trained to make traffic stops, and then turn them into terrorist investigations. In other words, he had gotten special training about, in my case, a light out on my car, a light in the middle of the day. It happened to be foggy. I had my headlights on and they saw that one, and that was the pretext for pulling me over. But I was working at Time Magazine at the time, and I researched the whole thing and I said, “Oh, wow, there is this training program across the United States to leverage traffic stops and through interrogation techniques and other tactics, turn them into possible terrorist busts or something.” That’s when I realized, “Wow, we live in a new country.”

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I remember I was living overseas, so I came home and I remember walking through the subway in New York and seeing soldiers in camouflage carrying automatic weaponry or what looked like to me like automatic weaponry. I remember thinking, “What about the Posse Comitatus Act? Isn’t this illegal? Do we not have that anymore? Or do we now deploy people?” This was well after 9/11, right? This was not weeks after it happened or anything like that. Over the years, for Rolling Stone and other publications after I came home, I came home in 2002. I certainly covered a lot of that stuff, but it really wasn’t until after the Twitter Files when I had to work backwards to find the roots of a lot of these programs, that I started to realize how much continuity and how much what happened after 9/11 was really about a philosophical change in the entire approach to government.

If you take an issue like torture, you might remember shortly after 9/11… Well, the first hints, and I was digging up for stuff last night. The first hints that there was going to be a problem or that they might go down this road, came through news stories. If we could take a look, there was a story by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post talking about how FBI officials were frustrated by the restrictions on their ability to interrogate people. “Silence of four terror probe suspects poses dilemma for FBI,” right? FBI and Justice Department investigations are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Al-Qaeda,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This began this steady drumbeat that the tools that we had were insufficient. We needed to up our game and start getting into enhanced interrogation.

Walter Kirn: What year was that piece?

Matt Taibbi: That was in the Washington Post. It was I think in November or October. No, it was October 21st, 2001. Very early, within a month and a half or so, they were already asking about this. Then there became a point where it became clear that we were already doing it. You might remember Alan Dershowitz was at the center of this controversy where he proposed that we start using warrants to torture people because if we’re already doing it, we should have rules surrounding it. There was a rebuttal published by a judge named Richard Posner at the time, who became a very influential thinker in the War on Terror period, and who said all kinds of crazy things.

One of the things he said is, “If the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible.” He even talked about how, I think there’s a line in there about Martin Luther King and Gandhi ignoring official prohibitions on torture for the greater good, and I’m paraphrasing, was making the same ethical claim as the practitioners of civil disobedience, and that this would be right in the same way as “Gandhi and Martin Luther King were right in their situations.”

Walter Kirn: What a total perversion of the Tolystoyan idea of passive resistance that both Gandhi and King drew from.

Matt Taibbi: Right? It’s like a complete opposite.

Walter Kirn: There’s a higher law.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly.

“AT ONE OF MY FIRST Toughman competitions, some people were kind of laughing, saying ‘look at this fat slob who is going to get his ass kicked.’ Those same people weren't laughing after I destroyed this body-building boy. I destroyed him. The following day, Showtime came to me and said ‘how many people did you bring to the fight?’ I said ‘Just my wife, why?’ They said at least 30 people were out there with Butterbean shirts on. Others were wearing red, white and blue, like my trunks that I wear because I am proud to be an American, with Butterbean signs. Showtime was amazed. That was a pretty good kick start. Sega even contacted me, wanting to put me on a video game named ‘Toughman.’ That was before I turned professional. How many fighters are on a video game before they turn pro?”

— Eric ‘Butterbean’ Esch

A READER WRITES: “According to Newsweek the latest joke making the rounds of the Israeli army goes like this:

Q. What do you call one Palestinian in the sea?

A. Pollution.

Q. What do you call two million Palestinians in the sea?

A. The solution.

Some sixty odd years ago there was another ethnic cleansing that was termed ‘the final solution.’ The survivors swore, “Never again!” O, the irony!”

MASSIVE OIL SPILL IN THE RED SEA, ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

by Joshua Keating

Since it was attacked by Houthi rebels in Yemen three weeks ago, a tanker carrying roughly 1 million barrels of crude oil has been immobilized and on fire in the Red Sea. The MV Sounion is still intact, but may not be for long, and should it sink it could lead to one of the largest oil spills in history, nearly four times bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. This would have massive environmental and economic impacts on a region already beleaguered by war, and imperil the livelihoods and safe drinking water of millions of people. Efforts will likely soon be underway to salvage the vessel, but it’s a high-risk operation in an active conflict zone, and success is far from guaranteed.

“This is a cataclysmic disaster waiting to happen, and I don’t think everybody involved fully understands either the challenge of it, or the implications if that challenge is not met,” Ian Ralby, CEO of the maritime security firm Consilium, told Vox. “We’re staring down the barrel of an intergenerational problem that is really more consequential than pretty much any other oil spill has been.”

The Greek-flagged tanker Sounion, which had been carrying crude oil from Iraq to Greece, was first attacked on August 21 by Yemeni Houthi rebels firing small arms and projectiles, as well as an unmanned surface vessel. The Houthis, who have been attacking shipping in the Red Sea since near the start of Israel’s war in Gaza, claim they fired on the ship because its owner, the Greek company Delta Tankers, “has ties” to Israel and has other vessels that have called at Israeli ports. Two other ships owned by Delta Tankers were attacked in August.

The ship’s crew of 23 Filipinos and two Russians as well as four private security guards were rescued by a French destroyer the day after the attack, but the Sounion itself is immobilized, currently anchored between the coasts of Eritrea and Yemen. On August 27, Pentagon Spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters that an initial attempt to salvage the ship had been abandoned after the salvagers were “warned away by the Houthis.”

On August 29, the Houthis placed and detonated explosives on the deck of the ship, releasing a video of themselves carrying out the operation. Shortly after that, the Houthis’ main international patron, Iran, said that the group would allow a salvage operation to take place. One of the Houthi senior leaders, Mohammed al-Houthi, has said that they would allow the rescue to take place in order to prevent environmental damage, but that the US and United Kingdom would be responsible for any oil that spilled due to their support for Israel.

The situation appeared to be on its way to a resolution in early September, when an operation involving tugboats protected by European naval vessels was launched to salvage the Sounion. But on September 3, Operation Aspides, the EU naval operation in the region, said in a statement that “the private companies responsible for the salvage operation have concluded that the conditions were not met to conduct the towing operation and that it was not safe to proceed. Alternative solutions are now being explored by the private companies.”

In a statement provided to Vox, the tanker’s owner, Delta Tankers, said that it is “doing everything it can to move the vessel (and cargo). For security reasons, we are not in a position to comment further.” The EU’s Operation Aspides did not respond to a request for comment. As of now, the US military does not appear to be involved in efforts to rescue the ship, with Deputy Spokesperson Sabrina Singh telling reporters in a September 5 briefing, “The US Navy is standing by to assist, but right now I’m told that this is being done through private means.”

The trade publication Maritime Executive has reported that Greece — the ship’s flag state — has been in talks with Saudi Arabia over options, which could include towing it to a Saudi port or an effort to transfer oil to another ship before it sinks. On September 12, Reuters reported that another salvage operation would begin soon. But there’s no guarantee the Houthis wouldn’t strike again, and experts say the sort of companies that specialize in these types of operations are unaccustomed to doing so in the middle of a war zone.

“Even though the Houthis are giving a green light to tug this boat, they’re still attacking ships around it,” Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemeni security analyst with the consultancy Navanti Group, told Vox. “So insurance companies are not comfortable with it, salvage companies are not comfortable with it. There’s just no trust between the international community and the Houthis.”

With the ship still burning, there may not be much time left. Like nearly all tankers built since the Exxon Valdez disaster, the Sounion is double-hulled and will not leak easily, and its oil tanks still seem to be intact. But depending on the amount of damage it has already sustained, how much oxygen the oil cargo has been exposed to, and the intensity of the fire, it’s likely only a matter of time.

“We don’t know how long that vessel has. If the fires aren’t put out, it will eventually sink,” said Ralby.

The Exxon Valdez — Times Four

If the Sounion’s cargo spills, it could potentially rank among the world’s worst environmental disasters. Julien Jreissati, Greenpeace’s Middle East North Africa program director, told Vox that because the Red Sea is a mostly closed body of water — with the Suez Canal to the north and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to the south — it doesn’t have the same level of circulation and dilution as open ocean, making the oil more likely to stick in place.

“You cannot clean an oil spill,” Jreissati said. “You can try to contain it and mitigate it, but you will have impact and remnants for decades.” The difficulties involved in such an operation would be exponentially greater in an active combat zone.

“The Red Sea is truly a natural treasure,” Jreissati said. “It has species of corals which are among the most resilient to climate change and bleaching, and therefore are particularly precious, because they could help provide the solution for corals all over the world.”

And the impact wouldn’t only be felt underwater. A major oil spill could devastate the region’s fisheries, a key component of economies on both sides of the sea. (Prior to the outbreak of civil war in 2015, fish were Yemen’s second-largest export after oil and gas.) An oil spill could also block access to ports for impoverished Yemen’s much-need humanitarian aid.

It could also cause an even greater disruption to shipping through the Red Sea, which is already down nearly two-thirds due to the Houthi attacks, raising the costs of shipping and causing further reverberations throughout the global supply chain.

Much also depends on when a spill would take place. Currently, the surface current in the Red Sea is mainly flowing south toward the Indian Ocean. In October it will switch and begin flowing north, toward Saudi Arabia and Egypt. One major concern is that an oil spill could contaminate the coastal desalination plants that tens of millions of people in countries bordering the Red Sea, rely on for fresh water.

A cruel irony of this situation is that the Red Sea region only recently escaped a similar disaster. The FSO Safer, a 1970s-era tanker that had been converted by the Yemeni government into an offshore oil platform, is moored off the central Yemeni city of al-Hudaydah, unmaintained and rapidly corroding. In its hold were over a million barrels of oil, roughly the same amount as at the Sounion.

Around 2021, it became clear that the ship was at risk of sinking or exploding. A risk assessment at the time estimated that it could affect up to 1.6 million people’s livelihoods, disrupt 50 percent of Yemen’s fisheries, and that the cleanup alone would cost more than $20 billion.

After years of negotiations with the Houthis, a UN-organized operation was finally organized to transfer the oil off the ship. The operation was completed in August 2023, almost exactly a year before the Sounion crisis began. This time around, the international community has far less time to act.

Why more environmental disasters are coming to the Red Sea Hopefully there is still time for the private companies and militaries in the region to organize a salvage mission — and for the Houthis to allow it to proceed — before the worst-case scenario takes place. But even if the Sounion itself doesn’t cause the cataclysm, it’s just one reminder of the knock-on risks posed by the nearly year-old conflict in Gaza. Two additional oil tankers were attacked by the Houthis, but not disabled, in early September, even as the Sounion continued to burn.

Then there’s the Rubymar, the first ship sunk by a Houthi attack, back in March. Though carrying only a fraction of the oil of the Sounion, the Rubymar left an 18-mile oil slick in the Red Sea.

A much bigger concern is the 22,000 metric tons of fertilizer still in the ship’s hold, which, if released underwater, could potentially cause massive algae blooms that would devastate local species and potentially create oxygen-free “dead zones.” Experts believe the cargo will remain in the Rubymar’s holds for years, but not indefinitely, and the International Maritime Organization, a UN agency, has launched an appeal for funding for a cleanup.

For Greenpeace’s Jreissati, the crisis is a reminder that even under the best of times, the global economy relies on “these big ships traveling across the world the whole time carrying very toxic material. It’s a ticking time bomb.”

It’s also a reminder that the longer the escalating conflict in the Middle East lasts, the greater and more unpredictable the risks grow.

INDIGENOUS JOY

I saw this gorgeous photo that Twyla Baker posted from a collection at the Minnesota State Historical Society of Arikara/Mandan/Hidatsa girls laughing, it reminded me of this piece I wrote last year in my endeavors to gather old photos that embody Indigenous Joy:

Indigenous joy. The laughter emanating from these faces, the pleasure of the sounds of corn husks rustling as harvests roll in.The essence of pure joy on those faces is the embodied wellspring to which I make my daily offerings.

We are sowing seeds of Indigenous joy. When the days are long, when the row is long to hoe, when the smoke fills the sky and uncertainty creeps into the corners of my mind. I bring my embodied prayer back to this; that the fruits of our labor and also our creativity will continue to carve into being a world where it is safe and nourishing place for grandmas to teach their children the stories that are held inside the seed corn, that the deft hands of grandmothers conjure up magic in the simple beauty of knot being tied or the way a knife is handled.

Remember this. They want us to be defined by our intergenerational trauma. Yet the blood in our veins carries wild rushing rivers of intergenerational resilience, reverence, pleasure, joy and collective creative force and a spirit fire that could never be extinguished against all odds and acts of atrocities.

Let that be our North Star, our ancestral blood memory of beautiful resistance. Make yourself into a vessel where that song can be sung…

Don't despair. This resistance is intergenerational work and it is alive and sprouting. The seeds of hope of this movement have been planted a long time ago, by loving humans who cared so deeply that you might know no hunger. These prayers have been whispered around many fires, in birthing rooms, in final breaths, heaved towards horizons at first dawn light, to the winds, under rustling dry corn stalks during the harvests…

Don't despair. Those seeds of hope are sprouting. We can hear the seedsongs of generations in that reverent inhale.

Let us hold the vision of Indigenous joy as we move in community and tend the hearth of dignified resurgence.

14 Comments

Mike J September 15, 2024

RE “Homeless Problem”

Solutions to problems commonly seen as caused of homelessness, mental illness and substance abuse, necessarily should take a back seat to first addressing the true root cause of homelessness:
There is simply a need in California for the construction of much more housing that goes hand in hand with a shift in perspectives that takes us away from regarding housing as a commodity and asset. There’s not really a barrier to enabling all humans to have their own private housing. Yet concerns over property values and a rejection of the “least among us” becoming neighbors rule the day.

Some community leaders, like the Mayors of San Jose and LA “get it” by planning for establishment of personal or private shelters. Homeless shelters should only be a temporary measure.

Abraham Maslow has provided a widely accepted identification of the human hierarchy of needs.
At the base of this “pyramid”, is the necessary foundation to all subsequent needs to be addressed:
~~Physiological Needs (breathing, food, shelter, clothing, sleep)

Then in ascending order:
~~Safety and security (health, employment, property, family and social ability).~~
Love and belonging
~~Self esteem~~
Self actualization

There are a high number of people living in homes and having a sufficient income to do so BUT who have substance abuse and mental illness issues. The segment of those on the streets with these issues don’t have the income to provide themselves with adequate and safe shelter. California by far has the highest level of homelessness compared to elsewhere with retarded home construction and elevated home values and excessive rent charges.

With a necessary change in perspective, currently seeing housing as a financial asset akin to stock portfolios, CDs and savings accounts, etc, we can establish a tier of housing for very low or no income persons, like the settings for tiny homes the Mayor of San Jose is planning and which some other communities are also looking at.

There are no real excuses for not doing this.

Reply
- MAGA Marmon September 15, 2024
  
  “California by far has the highest level of homelessness compared to elsewhere with retarded home construction and elevated home values and excessive rent charges.”
  
  Don’t you mean “developmentally delayed”?
  
  MAGA Marmon
  
  Reply
  - Mike J September 15, 2024
    
    Home construction isn’t a person James, LOL.
    
    Reply
- Mike J September 15, 2024
  
  I rest my case (from indexproject.org):
  “Utah’s Housing First Program
  Utah is ending homelessness by giving people homes.
  Utah’s Housing First project provides apartments to homeless people and doesn’t ask questions. “Housing First,” an initiative to place the homeless into supportive housing without any prerequisites”. The program gives everyone a chance to have a home and put their life together, instead of the other way around. Not only is it cheaper for everyone to have a home, but it empowers everyone and makes them feel like a worthy person. It makes streets safer and improves life for everyone in the state.”
  
  Just say no to Marbut!!!
  
  PS: I don’t know why there are lines thru some of the sentences in the previous post.
  
  Reply
  - Mazie Malone September 15, 2024
    
    Hey Mike,
    Shoot me an email sometime…. maziemalone@yahoo.com 💕💕
    
    Reply
    - Mike J September 16, 2024
      
      Ok.
      
      Reply
  - Adam Gaska September 15, 2024
    
    Utah’s programs have been a failure. Homelessness is on the rise, those housed are still dependent on government housing, and the cost of the programs is rising.
    
    Giving people something doesn’t automatically mean they value it. People who are homeless are generally stuck in a doom loop and their behavior reinforces it. Just housing them without addressing rhe reasons they are homeless won’t lead to a return to self reliance.
    
    Reply
    - Mike J September 16, 2024
      
      It’s actually the low available stock of deeply affordable housing that has become the issue there. As it is elsewhere, especially in California. A house is a foundation need that provides a circumstance for EFFECTIVELY addressing other issues. This is apparently the first year the Utah legislature funded for behavioral and mental health issues.
      
      “While Tibbitts [director of a major non profit] said he would like to see more ongoing money devoted to deeply affordable housing that’s “really needed” to help move more people out of homelessness, Tibbitts said he thinks lawmakers “funded the things that will have the biggest impact.” ”
      
      http://utahnewsdispatch.com/2024/03/13/whats-next-for-utahs-evolving-homeless-shelter-system/#:~:text=In%20recent%20years%2C%20the%20state,to%20bolster%20Utah%27s%20homeless%20system.
      
      The legislature there is struggling to even find shelter facilities and winter overflow ones.
      All this will require a major shift in perspectives in how we assure “food, clothing and shelter” basics for all humans. Our current human paradigm is falling apart, not really up to the soon major challenge of massive displacements and migrations due to climate change.
      
      The fact that old people, many without substance or mental health issues, are on the streets is due to not being able to afford rent. Many such people were forced out where I live after ownership changed and rent was hiked up alot. (They were made to move to another unit b/c of renovations to their long time unit and the beginning rent was higher for the new unit….I would next see them looking lost and bewildered in the BB shelter area.)
      
      Build, build, build.
      No excuses: we landed men on the moon during the summer of 1969. We can do this but we have to start looking at housing as meeting shelter needs, not as a financial investment.
      
      Reply
      - Adam Gaska September 16, 2024
        
        Even with profit taken out the equation, building homes in California is expensive due to high material costs, high labor costs, and regulation adding to the cost. High interest rates, high cost of insurance, etc are not helping, either.
        
        Even if we build build build, many would still struggle to buy homes without being subsidized by tax dollars.
        
        Reply
    - Norm Thurston September 16, 2024
      
      Could it be that some people just can’t care for themselves, and that is the reason they are homeless? Or they can’t get a job that pays enough to afford decent housing? What are the reasons for homelessness that we could address that you think would solve this problem? Or should we just leave them on the streets (but not on the nicer ones)?
      
      Reply
      - George Hollister September 16, 2024
        
        Adam’s view is a free American one, where people take responsibility for themselves. I agree with it. That said, there are people who can’t, won’t, or never will take responsibility for themselves. These people are the responsibility of loved ones, or the state. Merely putting them in a house does not solve the problem, anymore than leaving them on the streets.
        
        Reply
        
        Betsy Cawn September 16, 2024
        
        For those who “can’t” take care of themselves, rooms in “boarding houses” with lots of required participation and classes and occupational “therapy.” Lacking the ability to “participate,” semi-incarceration in “mental health” care homes and mandatory “treatment” for severe addiction.
        
        For those who can take care of themselves, especially older adults, but lack the financial means, “residential hotels” and “boarding houses” with access to (that is, provision of) preventive medical and mental health care assistance, plenty of “nutrition,” and volunteer activities. Networks of such facilities could create virtual communities (like the Anderson Valley Village) with community events available to the general public.
        
        Increase the wages and compensation for In-Home Supportive Service workers, pronto. Most of that workforce is “aging” and foresees the need for their own eventual in-home care — if they still have their own “homes.”
        
        Reply
Harvey Reading September 15, 2024

HOW THE NINERS BRIBED SANTA CLARA TO BUILD THEIR HELLISH STADIUM FAR, FAR OUTTA FRISCO WHEN CANDLESTICK WAS PERFECT FOR FOOTBALL

Par for the course in kaputalist freedomlandia. We idiots know of no other way to do bidness.

Reply
Harvey Reading September 15, 2024

A READER WRITES:

Perfect! And the cartoon below it refines its perfection…by referring to another monster, almost as bad as the Zionist savages.

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Sunday 9/15/2024

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