Mendocino County Today: Saturday 9/28/2024

Sunny | Dennis Miller | PD Headline | Candidate Forum | Ukiah Wildcats | Answering Machine | Local Events | Ed Notes | CRU Grant | Quilty Pleasures | Dahlia | Garden Fair | Wentworth Event | Tent City | Yesterday's Catch | Confuses | Carbon Credit | Family | Marco Radio | Behold | Tasting Room | 1968-2024 | Hotel Strike | MLB Hate | Propane Cylinders | 57 Chevy | Newsom Vetoes | TV Toss | Lead Stories | Public Library | Modern Jacobins | Ice Block | Mope Less | So? | Bach's Music | Jack Frost | Moral Property | Your Protector

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A PERSISTENT WARMING TREND will steadily increase heat risks and fire wx danger as low RH and high temperatures build towards the early week. High winds will also be a factor in the next few days as high pressure sets in. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 53F this Saturday morning on the coast. Our forecast remains mostly sunny well into next week, the fog is obviously very close by. We'll see.

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FORMER AV DEPUTY DENNIS MILLER DIES IN RENO

Good morning AVA.

I wanted to let you fellas and the residents of Boonville know, Retired Mendocino County Sheriff Sgt Dennis Miller passed away this week at his residence near Reno, Nevada. He passed working in his back yard doing what he loved to do on Monday morning.

Dennis Miller was hired at the Sheriff's Office first as a dispatcher in March of 1975 and left in February of 1977. He returned as a deputy sheriff on May 14, 1979 and served until he left for El Dorado County on September 26, 1998 where he worked for several years before retiring to the Reno area.

Services will be held Friday, October 4th at 1 pm at Walton's Funeral home, 2155 Kietzke Lane, Reno, NV 89502.

Sheriff Matt Kendall

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HEADLINE OF THE DAY (Press Democrat)

“Shooting at Napa apartment complex prompts police investigation.” (Later revised to “2 dead in Napa apartment shooting; suspect in custody after standoff.”)

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ROUND VALLEY CANDIDATE FORUM TO BE HELD OCTOBER 8

The public is invited to a Q&A session with candidates running for Mendocino County Board of Education, Round Valley School District and the Covelo Fire Protection District in the upcoming November 5 election. The program will be held at the Covelo Library located at 23925 Howard St.in Covelo, CA 95428. The forum will begin at 5 pm.

This Candidate Forum is presented by the Mendocino Women’s Political Coalition (MWPC) and the American Association of University Women (AAUW Ukiah). The public is encouraged to submit questions by emailing vjmuchowski@gmail.com or submitting written questions at the event. Due to time constraints, submitted questions will be combined by category and formatted to cover as many concerns as possible. Unfortunately, not all questions will be able to be asked. Come join us and be an informed voter.

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BEAU DAVID, JR., QUARTERBACK, UKIAH (Press Democrat Player of the Week)

On Friday [September 20], the Ukiah Wildcats earned a 28-21 win over the Chico Panthers. The victory made it back-to-back wins for the Wildcats. Beau David went supernova for Ukiah, throwing for 290 yards and four touchdowns while completing 75% of his passes, and also rushing for 75 yards. 119 of those passing yards were hauled in by Omaurie Phillips, who also brought in two receiving touchdowns. (maxpreps.com)

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BACK IN 2007 an amusing audio file was going around the internet. It’s a cop’s parody of a new 911 answering machine message: “Hello! You’ve reached the police department’s voicemail. Please pay close attention as we update choices often as new and unusual circumstances arise. Please select one of the following options: To whine about us not doing anything to solve a problem that you created, press 1. To inquire as to whether someone has to die before we’ll do something about a problem, press 2. To report an officer for bad manners when in reality the officer is trying to keep your neighborhood safe, press 3. If you’d like us to raise your children, press 4. If you’d like us to take control of your life due to your chemical dependency, press 5. If you’d like us to instantly restore order to a situation that took years to deteriorate, press 6. To provide us with a list of officers you personally know so we will not take enforcement action against you, press 7. To sue us, or tell us you pay our salary and will have our badge, or to proclaim that our career is over, press 8. To whine about a ticket and/or complain about the many other uses for police rather than keeping your dumb ass in line, press 9. If you want a ride to the hospital, press 0. Please note your call may be monitored to assure proper customer service and remember, we’re here to save your butts not kiss them. Thanks for calling your local police department and have a nice day.”

INSPIRED by the cop parody we followed the cop’s answering machine message with a newspaper office version.

“Hello. You’ve reached the offices of your local newspaper. Please listen to the following options as we try to maintain a more or less viable business while still telling the truth as much as possible. If you'd like free advertising for your silly event that you’re charging money for, press 1. If you'd like us to print only your version of events, press 2. If you'd like us to complain about somebody you don't like without giving your name, press 3. If you'd like us to run your 2,000 word essay about how bad the Republicans are, press 4. If you'd like to complain privately about the content of somebody’s letter which we had nothing to do with, press 5. If you'd like to explain that the letter you sent us about a public matter wasn't intended for publication, press 6. If you'd like to tell us that you're going to put us out of business because of something we said about something you wrote for public consumption, press 7. If you'd like to run an ad in the paper that's going to the printer in less than an hour, press 8. If you'd like to tell us we misquoted you, but you don't know which quote is the misquote, press 9. Thank you for calling your local newspaper and remember, we’re here to keep you informed, not to make you happy.”

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LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)

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ED NOTES

THE GREAT defenders of democracy have always maintained a team of lawyers working to keep third parties off state ballots. They are especially afraid of the Green Party's presidential candidate Jill Stein, who is running strong against The Party of Joy's Kamala Harris.

ROBERT REICH wonders, “Is Trump lying or just losing it? Does he simply have no grasp of reality?” Orange Man has always been marginally coherent but, yes, he's gone full on 5150 as his debate with Harris proved to everyone outside his cult.

ARMAGEDDON, THE LATEST: Israeli forces wiped out a whole block of residential buildings south of Beirut on Friday afternoon to get one guy, claiming that the central headquarters of Hezbollah was underneath the neighborhood. The airstrikes came shortly after Netanyahu delivered his usual speech to the UN declaring that “We have to kill ’em all because they're trying to kill all of us.” Many people walked out as the Israeli fascist thundered on.

OLD TIMERS will remember the Moonie camp on Boonville's south end, circa 1971. (Now Sheep Dung Estates.) Few of us knew who the Moonies were or what they were doing behind their beautifully crafted, hand-hewn wooden sign stuck out on the highway heralding a “New Ideal City,” whose grandeur would always, as it turned out, remain imaginary. We knew that there were an awful lot of young people confined to the property with only a few ancient farm buildings to house them. On still nights we could hear the rookie Moonies chanting in great choruses that echoed off the hills. During the day we would encounter frantic parents rushing around Boonville trying to retrieve their adult children from what the parents assumed was a cult. It was a cult, a cult presided over by a Korean electrical engineer who said he was God. Or a god. Or a freelance messiah. It was a confused belief system the reverend was selling, but apparently made sense to some confused young persons, of which there were many wandering the highways and biways of our confusing country. The Moonies were finally shut down when county officials discovered a thousand or so aspiring, sleep-deprived world unifiers on premises with nary a septic tank. Banished from Boonville, the Moonies moved their camp to Sonoma County and, soon, a chinchilla farm appeared on the Boonville place with an occasional little beastie appearing in Boonville when a local teenager employed part-time at the farm liberated one. (A chinchilla is an upscale guinea pig.) This second enterprise was overseen by a German national married to an Italian national in one of Moon's famous mass weddings where Moon decided who would marry whom. The couple seemed compatible, their two sons wild and, at least as children, unlikely cult material. Moon, like Jim Jones and many lesser gods who touched down in the Anderson Valley, went on to grander things, including a daily newspaper based in Washington, D.C. Moon and his “Holy Spirit Association for Unification of World Christianity,” much like the Mormons and their jaw-droppingly improbable theology, is no longer considered a cult because in America, as the Mormons can tell you, cult-to-tax-exempt church is purely a matter of cash. Lots of it buys respectability, plausibility too, which Moon gets from his “professionally” staffed newspaper and the fat checks he writes for Republican officeholders. (Reagan and both Bushes got Moon money by the bushel.) One of Moon's many enterprises was poaching endangered leopard sharks. A branch of Moon's bogus church finally got caught at it and had to pay $500,000 to help restore leopard shark habitat in San Francisco Bay. The sharks were in big demand by collectors, selling for between $9 (hatchlings) and $75 each. The Moonies had been depleting this particular fish population for 11 years, making a lot more from the sale of the sharks than they've had to pay in fines. From unmoored youth and chinchillas in Boonville to leopard sharks in San Francisco Bay, to photo ops with the president, Reverend Moon sailed on. He went a long way since his ideal city in the hills of Boonville.

RECENT HED in the Press Democrat: “Cloverdale Seeks Identity.” Cloverdale better seek water or stop hooking up new housing tracts to its sole source, the radically diminished and overdrawn Russian River which, as you know, depends entirely for its summer flow on the radically diminished Eel River diverted through a hundred-year-old-tunnel hand-dug-by-Chinese labor at Potter Valley. But if Cloverdale's priority is an identity, Santa Rosa looks like the best fit.

DIANNE FEINSTEIN'S mansion in Pacific Heights sat midway on the Lyon Street Stairs, a round-the-clock vertical exercise track busy with Type A's rain or fog, including me, and a more scenic exercise venue does not exist even in scenic Frisco. An old easement gives the public a perpetual right to huff and puff past Feinstein's lavish front door. Given the self-serving givens of contemporary politics, it's surprising the easement survives. Feinstein, no longer with us, probably wished it didn't. One morning the splendid little plaza on the long stairway through which the rabble huff and puff at all hours, and which doubles as Feinstein's front yard, was once covered with chalked messages reading, “Out of Iraq,” “Shame on Feinstein,” and so on. A few blocks east where Nancy Pelosi resides in comparably pasha-like splendor, the chalked messages and even a few protesters are familiar sights.

AN 18-YEAR-OLD was arrested in San Francisco the other day for shooting another kid to death. The shooter's mother said, “My son breaks into cars. He doesn't shoot people.”

THE CHRONICLE recently featured a series of tired reminiscences about The Summer of Love from the same old Summer of Lovers — Wavy Gravy, Grace Slick, Country Joe and other A-List Hippies. The fairest assessment I've read of that dreary, foggy summer of race riots and prevalent bad urban vibes, comes from a fellow survivor named James Pendergast of Sonoma: “The Summer of Love per se may not have had much meaning, but many features of the counterculture had a great effect that is still powerful today: the organic food movement, the peace movement, sustainable agriculture, back-to-the-land, protecting the environment, ‘living lightly on the earth,’ ‘small is beautiful’ and more. On the other hand, I witnessed many transcendent examples of ignorance, naiveté, mindless hedonism, venality, and plain old American stupidity. And drugs ruined many promising things. As David Crosby said later, ‘We were wrong about drugs; we were right about everything else’.”

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CELEBRATIONS: PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE…

by Debbie Bowles

We came to Laytonville in 1973. Diana Robinson once told me that in order to be considered an Elder in our community you have had to be living here for 50 years! Well I guess the time has come. Looking over our 51 years of living here we recall many of the celebrations that we have enjoyed. One of the Fourth of July parades really stands out in my memory was when we were asked if Ruby Branscomb could ride in the rumble seat of our old Model A. Our kids were pretty excited when we explained to them that Ruby Branscomb was a very special elder in our community, so they couldn’t wait to meet her. Our concern, on the other hand was that she might not be able to climb into the car as she was then in her 80s. However when the moment arrived she just took Dave’s hand and hopped right up the step plate, sat down and started waving to the spectators as we followed the parade route!

Sadly, we no longer have a Fourth of July parade, but one celebration that has lasted through time is the Christmas Bazaar! We may have lost some of the businesses in our historic storefronts but we still have so many talented people who share their artistry at the Christmas Bazaar. I too loved vending at the Bazaar each year, however after retiring from teaching, once a year just wasn’t long enough. So for the past 20 years I have been sharing my love of fabric with others at the Fat Quail Quilt Shop.

Early on I found out that some of those talented people I had met at the Christmas bazaar were also fabric lovers. We started meeting for classes and then once a month to share new quilting methods and ideas. When that wasn’t enough to keep us busy and out of trouble we agreed to share our love of fabric by starting The Long Valley Quilters. Once again the word “Celebration” started being discussed and we decided to have an annual outdoor quilt show right at the store.

The store was too small to display the quilts inside so Dave started building our present day quilting apparatus to hang all the quilts we knew quilters would want to display. Dorje Bond helped us secure the awnings that we still put up every year to protect the quilts from the sun, and sometimes the rain.

I guess the rest is history. We have been making a quilt every year and auctioning it off at our outdoor quilt show we lovingly call “Quilty Pleasures.” The community has been so supportive of our raffle that we have been able to award about five scholarships each year. We are currently piecing together our 2025 Quilt!

Personally, I have made so many wonderful friendships throughout the years. Many of my customers live outside of Laytonville. They enter quilts in our show and have inspired others to make memory quilts. A memory quilt can be a very personal journey as they might be made from a husband’s shirts or baby clothes from long ago that you just can’t part with. T-shirts are also popular to commemorate a child’s sports career or T-shirts from National Parks that a family has saved.

We have laughed and yes, cried together over our memories but feel a quilt is worth a thousand words, and can bring years of joy and comfort. Thanks to all of you who have shared your story and your quilt in our show. You have inspired others to do the same. If you want to share a loved one’s story please don’t hesitate to drop in for a visit and I will help you down that road.

Meanwhile, Laytonville’s Fat Quail Quilt Shop is Celebrating 20 Years in Business. If you have a chance to come by for a visit, I would love to thank you!

My new dream is that more of the spectacular artists and “idea” people in our community would like to get together and see how they could start sharing their talents with those “customers” who travel up and down the 101 Highway. We have the power to bring our little town back to life and create a new “Celebration.”

(Mendocino Observer)

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FORT BRAGG Fall Garden Fair Oct 5

Fall Garden Fair -- Saturday October 5 10am--3pm

First Presbyterian Church of Fort Bragg, 367 S. Sanderson Way

Native Perennials - Fall & Winter Veggies - Succulents – Flowering plants and shrubs

Information tables on native gardens and winter veggie gardens

Garden Art - Pots - Seeds - Garden Items Raffle

Garden Deals on POGS Previously Owned Garden Stuff: Used Tools, Garden Books, Pots, Other Garden Supplies

Relax with a cup of hot cider; enjoy our Craft Table for all ages.

Visit and learn from local gardeners.

Participating organizations include Rhododendron Club; S. Lincoln Street Garden.

Produced by the Fort Bragg Garden Club & Fort Bragg Bee City USA.

All proceeds support the Garden Club Community Fund which supports Noyo Food Forest, Fort Bragg Food Bank and more.

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MUSIC & WINE

Join Wentworth Vineyards Sunday 10/6 for music and wine in the Rose Garden at the Madrones! Mark Rivera, saxophonist for the Billy Joel band and extension of the Wentworth Vineyards family will be playing some tunes and sharing some of his favorite tracks from his long musical career. $30 for a glass of wine and a music filled afternoon with family and friends. Email or call to RSVP to moreo@wentworthvineyard.com

DETAILS
Date: October 6
Time: 1:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Cost: $30

ORGANIZER
Wentworth Vineyards
Phone: (707) 813-1339
Email: moreo@wentworthvineyard.com

VENUE:
The Madrones
9000 CA-128
Philo, CA 95466

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DAVID SEVERN (2005): I took a couple days off to visit my daughter Dandelion in Fresno. What I found interesting, and I’m glad Dandy had the where-with-all to take me there, was what locals called “Tent City.” This was a privately owned city block just South of downtown that housed most of the city’s homeless. It was chock full of 6 foot by 8 foot mini-shacks built out of plywood with a corner of porta-potties. Most of Fresno’s homeless were apparently housed there since I saw very few homeless people anywhere else in the city. A rescue mission was a block away and I suppose it supplied food and other basics. I spoke to three homeless men at random, one white, one Mexican and one black. They did not seem crazy or drugged out. I felt I could have had a meaningful conversation with either of them and I got the sense that most of these “Tent City“ people were pretty much in touch with their sanity. On the other hand my experience of homeless populations in Ukiah indicates many, if not most, homeless individuals have mental health and/or drug problems. I asked Dandy about this and she said it was probably because Fresno has six mental health facilities that care for street people and that a major function of the commercial ambulance service she worked for was to transport 5150s to appropriate care.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, September 27, 2024

STEPHANIE BROWN, 43, Ukiah. Vandalism, resisting, offenses while on bail.

MARK CAMPANERO, 23, Nice/Ukiah. DUI

KEVIN FLANAGAN, 41, Willits. Paraphernalia, parole violation.

BRADY GOFORTH, 58, Willits. Probation revocation.

ANGEL TEPALE-RAMIREZ, 22, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, under influence.

JACINTO TUPPER, 19, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

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PG&E TO ISSUE ELECTRIC BILL CREDITS TO MILLIONS OF CUSTOMERS NEXT MONTH

by Aidin Vaziri

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. announced Thursday that millions of residential and small business customers in California will receive a credit on their electric bill next month.

Residential customers with active accounts will receive a credit of $55.17, the same amount they received in the spring. Initially issued in April alongside an $85.46 annual natural gas credit, this twice-a-year credit totals $195.80 for residential customers in 2024.

Eligible small business customers will also receive an October credit, bringing their total annual credits to $110.34.

But the credit is not necessarily a gift from PG&E.

The savings stem from the mandated California Climate Credit, a state program enacted over a decade ago requiring power plants, natural gas distributors and other significant greenhouse gas emitters to purchase carbon pollution permits, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. The state redistributes these funds to consumers through utility bills, offering electricity credits in April and October and a single natural gas credit in April.

“The credit is a ‘win-win’ for our customers,” PG&E Senior Vice President Vincent Davis said in a statement. “The California Climate Credit helps reduce customers’ energy bills and our state’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

No action is required from customers to receive the credit. Other California utility customers will receive different amounts but generally follow the same schedule.

(SF Chronicle)

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MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight on KNYO!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. If you can't make that, it's okay, send it whenever it's done and I'll read it on the radio next week. Probably I'll even check email on a music break and read it tonight anyway.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am* PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first hour of the show is simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:

This is what people should be like. https://boingboing.net/2024/09/21/polaris-dawn-astronaut-performs-music-from-star-wars-with-orchestras-around-the-world.html

And this is not. Who would do this in real life? and waste all that good food. Poor impulse control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPqwQAaRiD0

Also this cartoon MAGA man in the virtual million-MAGA march. It shows steps of his deterioration, though the bar was set pretty low at the beginning. https://boingboing.net/2024/09/25/tom-the-dancing-bug-how-it-started-how-its-going.html

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

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PROPOSED WINE TASTING ROOM IN HEALDSBURG CLEARS FIRST HURDLE WITH CITY PLANNING OFFICIALS DESPITE RESIDENTS’ CONCERNS

A tasting room proposed for what currently is a hardware storage building on Foss Street in downtown Healdsburg has cleared its first hurdle, much to the chagrin of neighboring residents

by Amie Windsor

A proposed wine tasting room on Foss Street in downtown Healdsburg has cleared its first hurdle with city officials, but not before an outcry from a half-dozen residents concerned about traffic and parking problems they say it might bring.

The 1,220-square-foot tasting room would hold up to 45 people and occupy what’s now the Garrett Ace Hardware storage building owned by Rod Matteri and Carole Mascherini. Plans call for the tasting room to be open no later than 7 p.m., with live music allowed Thursdays through Sundays from noon to 7 p.m.

Three other businesses that are under the same roof as the proposed tasting room would be displaced during construction.

Matteri and Mascherini, who own Garrett Ace Hardware stores in Healdsburg and Windsor, declined to comment, other than Matteri responding to a Press Democrat email inquiry that he’d been made aware the planning commission had unanimously approved the project. City records show the two are winemakers and would serve their wines in the building at 430 Foss after they renovate it.

The commission signed off on the project Tuesday despite an hour-long discussion with residents who say the tasting room would sit on a busy, dead-end street. Other Foss Street businesses include Hotel Les Mars, Little Saint, Chris Blum Studio and Hotel DuChamp. Chalkboard is also on the street, but the restaurant closed down abruptly in April.

“To help people who live and work, you need to see all the trucks that are parked on Foss,” Charlene Schnall, who lives across from the proposed project, told the planning commission. “And now, we’re gonna have more delivering wine? I’m not complaining. I love my neighbors. But you have RVs, trucks and cars all day long backing up. It’s a joke.”

Planning commissioners noted that plenty of parking exists throughout downtown Healdsburg, including public lots on North Street, the West Plaza and the end of Foss Street.

“While I do share concerns about parking, traffic and pedestrian visibility, I venture to guess that very few clientele make destination-specific trips,” Commission Chair Conor McKay said.

But McKay did empathize with residents’ concerns that an additional tasting room caters to tourists rather than locals. Downtown Healdsburg already is home to 27 tasting rooms, city officials said.

“I’m not over the moon about another tasting room, but this is the vision of the city council,” McKay said, noting that the city’s zoning code allows for one tasting room per city block in the downtown corridor. “If you have a problem with the ordinance, I’d recommend speaking to your city council about that specific issue.”

The proposed tasting room is under the same roof as three other businesses: Ramos Shoe Repair, Spiritual Awakenings and Skin Studio at Gina’s Boutique. Those three likely would need to relocate because of the construction work required to convert the storage facility into a tasting room and two apartments.

That didn’t sit well with some planning commission members.

“I am concerned about displacing businesses while under construction and am hoping the owner will provide some monetary compensation for that period of time,” Commissioner Jonathan Pearlman said.

George Ramos, owner of Ramos Shoe Repair, whose frontage is on Healdsburg Avenue, told The Press Democrat he hasn’t heard much about the proposed renovation. “Nobody has reached out to me,” he said.

Ramos has been in business for 50 years, having taken over the shop from his dad in 1991. “I was going to retire in about five years, but I suppose I’ll retire early if and when this happens,” he said.

Construction is still at least a year away, but plans for the tasting room include modernizing the entire building, which would be “extensive,” said Alan Cohen, a Healdsburg architect and spokesman for the project.

“We will retain the roof structure, but scrape the insides and back out,” Cohen told the planning commission. Plans include a new facade on the Foss Street and Healdsburg Avenue sides, as well as a second story to house two apartment units.

According to a historical evaluation of the building, the structure was originally built in 1948 and has had few updates since, except for changes to the facade in 1961. Corrugated awnings were also recently added.

Commissioners didn’t approve renovation plans for the project; they will consider them at a later date. The project also will require city council approval.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

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SAN FRANCISCO & OAKLAND HOTEL WORKER STRIKE

Hotel workers strike three hotels in San Francisco and tell Oakland hotel bosses they want a contract

by David Bacon

Over 1500 hotel workers, members of Unite Here Local 2, go on strike against three hotels in San Francisco, demanding higher wages - Westin St. Francis, Hilton and Hyatt Union Square. Strikers picket and beat on buckets and gongs to make noise.

Meanwhile, hotel workers, members of Unite Here Local 2, go into the lobby of the Oakland Downtown Marriott Hotel to tell management they want agreement on a new contract with higher wages. Hotel workers are on strike in many other hotels over the contract demand, including in San Diego, Boston and Honolulu.

Jin Ling Xie, a housekeeper at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square for ten years, said “Going on strike wasn’t an easy decision, but it’s what I have to do for my family. My job at the Hilton isn't enough to pay all the bills, so I'm always worried. My kids are in high school, and I don't know how I will pay for their college. I know that when we fight together, we can win.”

Photographs by David Bacon: https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2024/09/02-san-franciso-hotel-strike.html

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NEWSOM SIGNS BILL BANNING SINGLE-USE PROPANE CYLINDERS POPULAR WITH CAMPERS

by Maliy Hearsta Ellis

Disposable propane canisters like the dark green ones used with camping stoves will soon be phased out in California, after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Sunday requiring all one-pound cylinders sold in the state to be reusable or refillable starting in 2028.

The portable fuel canisters, sold by brands like Coleman and Bernzomatic, are popular with campers but have long been a headache for park rangers as they sometimes end up littering campgrounds and dumpsters in state parks after hikers head home. Disposing of the cylinders properly can also be dangerous and expensive.

Now, stores and businesses that sell the single-use canisters have until Jan. 1, 2028 to phase them out.

“For years these propane cylinders have placed a great burden on our park systems, beaches, material recovery facilities, and local governments,” said Sen. John Laird, who introduced the legislation, in a statement. “Signing SB 1280 will result in more reusable propane cylinders for consumers to refill which will lead to a cleaner and safer California.”

Between 4 million and 7 million of the single-use cylinders are sold in California each year, according to an estimate from the California Product Stewardship Council, a nonprofit local government coalition that sponsored the bill.

Because the cylinders are considered hazardous waste and can sometimes pose an explosion risk, waste managers have to use special equipment to empty the containers before processing them. These extra steps can run local jurisdictions up to $65 in disposal costs per cylinder, according to Laird.

In 2022, Newsom vetoed a near-identical bill, SB 1256. In his veto letter, Newsom raised concerns about prohibiting sales of disposable cylinders “without a plan for collection and refill infrastructure.” The governor also urged the legislature to consider “market-based solutions” over an outright ban.

After that veto, legislators made a “real good faith attempt” to negotiate with propane cylinder manufacturers on a market-based solution, Laird said, but he said he decided to introduce a new bill after negotiations failed.

Reusable and refillable one-pound propane cylinders have been on the market for years. Yosemite has exclusively sold refillable cylinders since 2020, when the park pulled single-use cylinders from its shelves. But the more eco-friendly canisters have historically cost more than their single-use counterparts, often selling for up to triple the price.

The market for refillables has expanded significantly since the last time a single-use cylinder ban reached Newsom’s desk, said Yalin Li, a senior associate at the California Product Stewardship Council.

Two years ago, refillable one-pound propane cylinders were only manufactured by two companies: Flame King and Little Kamper. Now, a new company, Fuel Keg, also offers the products, and the portable refillables are now stocked in national chains, like Ace Hardware and REI, Li said.

“With the market development, we’ve seen a new contender in the past few years,” Li said. “It’s really showcasing that the market is ready to transition to fully refillables.” Though this bill is “almost exactly the same” as the one from 2022, the market’s growth since then may have made this bill more palatable to the governor, Li said.

Worthington Enterprises, an Ohio company that makes most of the country’s disposable propane canisters, criticized the bill, saying it lacks a plan for developing refilling infrastructure and that its passage would push consumers to buy imported single-use cylinders.

“The ban does not allow for that plan,” Worthington spokesperson Sonya Higginbotham wrote in an email. “Instead, it removes a responsible U.S.-based manufacturer from the California market while providing little to no enforcement mechanisms for continued supply of non-refillable cylinders by less responsible market participants and does not address the safety of self-fill, refillable cylinders on the market.”

Infrastructure for refilling the cylinders is “still in development,” Li said. Places that refill larger, 20-pound propane tanks, like gas stations and hardware stores, don’t always have the adapter that’s necessary to refill a one-pound cylinder. But Li said the bill’s passage could incentivize those places to invest in that infrastructure.

Next up, Laird said he intends to work with CalRecycle on a plan to develop infrastructure for collecting and refilling reusable propane cylinders.

Newsom’s signature now kicks off a three-year transition period for manufacturers to retire their single-use cylinders, start manufacturing reusable or refillable cylinders, or both.

In the long term, Laird said a more sweeping approach to managing single-use waste is preferable to one-off product bans. A bill that incorporates extended producer responsibility, a policy approach that shifts the burden of waste disposal onto producers, is a future goal, he said.

But in the short term, Laird said the urgency of the propane cylinder problem required an immediate solution.

“A broader-based extended producer responsibility is the best way to go for California, but until that’s in place, we have to do it product by product,” Laird said. “The propane canisters are really an issue in parks and beaches across California.”

(SF Examiner)

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GAVIN NEWSOM IS VETOING 1 OF EVERY 5 BILLS

by Jenna Peterson

Heading into the final four days before his midnight Monday deadline, Gov. Gavin Newsom will need to decide whether to sign or veto 465 bills still on his desk.

So far, he’s blocked 102 of 526 measures he’s acted on since the Legislature adjourned Aug. 31, or nearly 20%. That compares to a 15% veto rate in 2023, when he blocked 156 bills. He had a similar veto percentage in 2022, including some significant bills. In 2021, he vetoed fewer than 8%.

While the Legislature can override vetoes, it takes a two-thirds vote in both the Assembly and Senate and that hasn’t happened since 1979. Governors can also allow bills to become law without their signature, but that doesn’t occur very often, either.

So in most cases, lawmakers try again the next session, often tailoring their proposals to avoid Newsom’s veto pen.

“In most instances, legislators try to work with the governor and the governor’s administration in trying to address the concerns that are in the veto message, as opposed to saying simply that their approach is the right one,” said veteran lobbyist Chris Micheli.

On some high-profile and contentious bills, whatever Newsom says publicly about why he issued a veto, there can be a healthy dose of politics involved — as well as the push and pull of various interest groups.

“Whether it’s an election year or it’s not an election year, political considerations will impact not just the legislation going through the legislative process, but also whether or not a bill results in a gubernatorial signature or veto,” Micheli said. “But that’s a small number by my estimate.”

A Newsom spokesperson said the veto messages speak for themselves.

Here are the main reasons Newsom gives for his vetoes. (When he gives multiple reasons, it’s counted in all categories.)

• It’s Bad Policy

Newsom cited policy problems as his reason for vetoing one third of the bills — the second largest category. These are bills that he didn’t agree with or had language that was too broad.

For example, Senate Bill 804 would have let community service officers testify at preliminary hearings. In the governor’s veto message, he wrote that the bill raises concerns about “the reliability of evidence presented at a critical stage of criminal proceedings.”

SB 1170 would have allowed candidates to use campaign funds to address mental health-related issues that arise during a campaign, but Newsom wrote that it could allow for other changes to campaign fund use that go “beyond what a reasonable donor would expect.”

And SB 1432 aimed to let hospitals seek five more years to meet seismic safety standards. “In the aftermath of an earthquake, not only would these hospitals be unable to provide emergency care to victims, but they would also require emergency response efforts to be diverted to rapidly evacuate and transfer patients to other facilities,” Newsom said in his veto message.

• It’d Strain The Budget

For the third year in a row, the most common reason Newsom gave for vetoing a bill was budget concerns — about 40%.

Newsom and the Legislature had to make sweeping cuts to some programs and dip into the state’s reserves to close the $56 billion budget hole over the next two years. The deficit also played a central role in decisions during the session to shelve hundreds of bills. The state’s financial crunch accounted for 41% of vetos last year, according to Micheli.

“Every governor and his or her staff, they’re going to look at the policy implications. Second, the fiscal implications,” Micheli said. “A negative fiscal consideration this year, last year and the prior year has been an overriding factor in many instances.”

For example, the governor vetoed AB 1840, which would have allowed undocumented applicants to apply for a homebuyer assistance program. In his veto message, Newsom wrote that there is “finite funding” available and that this change would have to be considered in the state budget.

Another bill that Newsom squashed because of the budget was AB 544, which would have provided funding so three counties could test in-person voting in jails.

But even if an author attempts to address their bill in the budget, it may not be enough. State Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Van Nuys Democrat, secured $5 million for SB 954, which would have required public high schools to provide condoms to students.

Newsom vetoed the bill, writing that “one-time funding does not adequately address the fiscal concerns associated with this bill.”

• It May Not Be Legal

For a couple of bills so far, Newsom said that courts should decide on an issue before he gives his signature.

His second veto of a bill relating to undocumented Californians, SB 2586, would have let undocumented students work on campus. In his message, Newsom wrote that, “it is critical that the courts address the legality of such a policy and the novel legal theory behind this legislation before proceeding.”

• It’s Up To Local Officials

Sometimes Newsom vetoes a bill because it’s an issue that could be solved at the local level.

For example, AB 1950 would have created a state task force to research reparations for people displaced in the Chavez Ravine area in Los Angeles. In his veto message, Newsom wrote that it is “an issue best addressed by stakeholders closest to the Chavez Ravine community.”

• It’s Not Needed

Newsom vetoed another large percentage of bills because he sees them as unnecessary given the work the state is already doing on an issue.

SB 936 would have required Caltrans to conduct a road safety study and come up with an improvement plan. In Newsom’s message, he wrote that Caltrans is already working on road safety, so the bill would be redundant.

Despite the governor’s explanation of Caltrans’ current efforts, bill author Sen. Kelly Seyarto, a Republican from Murrieta, wrote in a press release that he is “deeply disappointed by the veto, as it sends a message that road safety isn’t being prioritized at a time when fatalities are on the rise.”

AB 2903 would have required state homelessness programs to more closely track and report spending data. However, Newsom wrote in his veto message that he’s already signed legislation that strengthens reporting requirements for California’s two largest programs.

That didn’t satisfy the bill author, Assemblymember Josh Hoover, a Republican from Folsom. “Governor Newsom is doubling down on his failed response to homelessness,” Hoover posted on X. “Our state has spent billions of taxpayer dollars in recent years only to see the homeless population increase statewide.”

• It’s Too Soon

Newsom dubbed another small portion of bills as “premature,” such as SB 1220, which would have banned agencies from staffing call centers with AI or automated decision-making systems if it gets rid of a human job.

Last year, Newsom signed an executive order for the state to evaluate how to use AI in its workforce, so the bill would create guidelines before the ones from the order are announced, he wrote in his veto message.

SB 1050 would have allowed Californians who had land taken from them or their families for racially motivated reasons to apply for compensation. But implementing the bill is “impossible,” according to Newsom, because there’s no agency to do so.

(CalMatters.org)

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SATURDAY'S LEAD STORIES, NEW YORK TIMES

Hezbollah Leader Killed in Israeli Airstrike

Group Confirms Death of Longtime Leader

Israel tracked Hassan Nasrallah for months before the assassination, officials said.

As Hezbollah pursued a limited war, Israel went for a knockout blow.

The Israeli military issued expanded evacuation warnings to Beirut’s southern suburbs.

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THE SHADOW OF THE SHADOW

by James Kunstler

You have to wonder: has there ever been a country that marched off to war with no head-of-state at the top of its war machine? It’s exactly that bad in our country, with a broken animatronic Halloween scarecrow popping in-and-out of the White House to yell incoherently at election campaign events for a putative successor too scared of the predicament she’s in to think straight. Really, no one is in charge — and if any of the leading actors on the scene really were, the situation could easily get worse.

Hence, the brainless wish roiling through the NSC, State Department, and the various shadow councils of the intel emeriti to lob long-range missiles into Russia, apparently heedless of any consequences. America, you are a headless horseman riding blindly into chaos.

In fact, the entire Democratic Party and its Deep State intel blob partners have melted down into a desperate mob of political criminals frantic to evade accounting for their acts. So then, setting the world on fire is all they have left, a fitting act of revenge for a faction thwarted in its mad drive to merely wreck the United States for the sake of “social justice” and “equity.”

The Democrats of 2024 made exactly the same mistake that their predecessors, the Jacobins, made in France back in 1794: they just couldn’t tell when they’d gone too far with their insults against the public interest and common decency. Their insults derived from the age-old human impulse to demolish society due to life being unfair, later codified in Marxian doctrine, and then made into a play-book by Saul Alinisky (with annotations by Antonio Gramsci, Richard Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven).

As the French Revolution ground on and on, by 1793 the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety which actually carried out policy, while endless quarrels occupied the National Convention — the then-current legislative body. The Jacobins’ policy was insane, just as the policy of open borders, lawfare, war, censorship, pharma-terrorism, climate hustles, and drag queens in the schools is insane under our modern Jacobins, the Democrats. (Notice the Democrats’ constant invoking of “safety” and “safe spaces” as a similar rhetorical device for justifying their deeds and cowing the public.)

The Committee of Public Safety sought to remake French society by turning its cultural norms upside-down and by killing as many of its political opponents as possible. Thus, the Reign of Terror when, for a whole year, heads rolled and rolled off the guillotine in the Place de Concorde, usually without benefit of a trial. The ghoulish extravaganza of gore and death grossed-out those in the country who had not lost their minds.

One night in July 1794, as the Jacobin boss, Robespierre, took to the rostrum in the Convention for the umpteenth time to denounce his enemies and announce new death sentences, members in the chamber commenced throwing food at him. That was the turning point, and it turned so hard and fast that France was amazed. Within forty-eight hours, Robespierre and many of his cohorts got beheaded under the “national razor,” and that was the end of Jacobinism and all its insane measures to wreck what was left of society after five years of revolution.

Our Democratic Party Jacobins have been harder to defeat because government these days is vastly larger and more complex, and the equivalent of the Committee of Public Safety is now a huge network of cadres toiling in scores of federal agencies and associated NGOs financed by those agencies (or by their billionaire henchmen such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Reid Hoffman). Insane as they are, many public officials understand their culpability for the treasons and insults of recent years. They live in fear of prosecution and, short of that, of losing their cushy sinecures in the colossal bureaucracy that is bankrupting us.

There are many in our country today who are also not insane, just as in France circa 1794. This is actually the chief appeal of Mr. Trump, though he often expresses it clumsily, coming, as he does, from the rough and exacting world of property development, which is full of rough people in rough building trades using rough language. Secondarily, Mr. Trump represents leadership — the sheer idea that an actual person should be an executive-in-charge of a national polity — and it appears that a majority of the people in this land are finally sick of a faceless blob ruling madly from the shadows. Thirdly, Mr. Trump has become a national father figure, a titanic offense to a party run by women with daddy issues and to their Marxist allies dogmatically bent on destroying the family (along with every other institution). As it happens, countries need fathers, both actual and symbolic. What a surprise!

In the mad effort to evade judgment for their acts, the Democrats and their blob cadres are either trying to kill Mr. Trump directly, or are looking the other way while other nefarious parties attempt the wicked business. So far, no cigar. Who knows what they’ll try next: a surface-to-air missile at his airplane…a directed-energy weapon… a poisoned cheeseburger…?

The candidate himself seems a little tinged these days with the same aura of dauntless resignation that was seen in Martin Luther King and the first Bobby Kennedy in 1968 — who both went about their business trying to rescue our country from war and wickedness despite the threats against them. Many upright, intelligent, bold figures stand with and behind Mr. Trump this time, people capable and willing to pick up the flag in the event it becomes necessary. Do not fear.

Meanwhile, you have to also wonder: what on earth possessed the Democrats to maneuver Kamala Harris into this race? Everyone in the party and the blob must know she doesn’t have an agile mind — beyond some ability for reciting parboiled slogans — nor much acquaintance with the workings of the world besides her dwindled wiles in political amour, and that she may actually have a drinking problem. She is left, finally with no one to cheerlead for her but the harpies on The View and the degenerates on CNN and The New York Times who all know the score but are too invested in years of their own mendacity to even attempt to come clean.

Chatter arises that the awaited “October surprise” will involve “Joe Biden” resigning from office to make way for Kamala to become the First Woman President just before election day, affording her, supposedly, a magisterial prestige in the final leg of the race. Don’t bet on that. When he resigns, “JB” loses his power of the pardon. If he exercises it on the eve of resignation and lets son Hunter, brothers James, Frank, and other family members (including himself) off the hook for their global money-grubbing exploits, it will only besmirch Ms. Harris by association. He has to hang in office until after Nov 6, no matter how the election turns, and then he can pardon what left of his brains out.

Before we even get to that point, all you have to worry about are unaccountable government factotums doing something over in Russia that will make Mr. Putin want to turn the USA into an ashtray.

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ON OPTIMISM

by Matt Taibbi

I’ve been preparing a speech for the Rescue the Republic event in Washington this Sunday. It seems I may not be given enough time to deliver this address, but no matter what the whole text, now about something broader than censorship, will be on line the next day.

Thursday night, after finally finishing a draft, I took my wife and children to The Sphere in Las Vegas. For those who haven’t seen, it’s a wild, absurd, awesome invention, a giant pixelated Pac-Man containing the world’s largest LED screen and a “4D” theater accessed inside via a Guggenheim-esque system of criscrossing balconies. We watched “Postcard from Earth,” a Koyaanisqatsi-style compilation of natural and human scenes edited into a visual roller-coaster, with young and old gasping as, for instance, an African bull elephant appears to stomp on the shaking theater.

The movie is excellent for what it’s designed to accomplish, but I found myself bristling a little (a very little) at the script, which depicts two people forced to explore other planets because we destroyed this one. There are scenes of old structures buried under weeds or sand, with a voice-over warning:

We thought these ruins were only relics of the past and not portents of the future. So we pushed on…

The implication is we never noticed the fleeting nature of human grandeur and continued to build temples to ourselves, oblivious to the state of our true temple, mother earth. In the climactic scene earth groans to try to “shake us off” and the audience is shown a battery of floods, fires, hurricanes and graves.

My first thought was to chuckle, “I guess the Evel Knievel era is over!” The point of Vegas used to be to get audienes so adrenaline-wired they wouldn’t notice blowing their savings at the tables. Here I saw a little girl a few rows below whispering to Mom, “We’re gonna die?”

Thought #2: It’s not true! People always looked at ruins as warnings.

Shelley looked at “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” and recorded the boast of Ozymandias, King of Kings: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But we kept building, breeding, and exploring because we’re just like the fish and sharks and wild horses whose raw animal energy the film lauded, wired to live to the hilt, not to not die.

Building temples and opera-houses and works of art are the closest we get to immortality. Who can blame us for reaching?

It’s become fashionable in the age of scientific portent to chide humanity for its conquest of nature. Film sequences routinely render human settlements as a mindless overgrowth, an invasive menace like lantern-flies or zebra mussels. We should have known our place, been comfortable with less. Please. We’ve had antibiotics for less than a hundred years, and everyone from peasants to the very rich were likely to know the agony of a lost child. Until 1900 the survival rate past five years for all children was 57%, and only 30% of babies made it to a second birthday. Most people in most places suffered. But residents of the 21st century think we should look back at the aqueducts or La Sagrada Familia or the Hoover Dam or whatever as gloating selfies posed in front of earth heaving on her sick bed.

Species guilt is a strange thing to ask of a visitor to a $2 billion digital tennis ball in a desert resort town built by gangsters. I think people are amazing. We had other problems before and figured those out. Now we have new ones, and we’ll do it again. Mope less, live more! And have a good weekend, everyone.

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I MET MYSELF IN THE AFTERLIFE

by David Yearsley

Since its revival in the 19th century, Bach’s music has been an object of veneration. This reverence stoked, even as it was fueled by patriotic fervor in German-speaking Europe. It could not be contained by national borders still to be drawn and redrawn by the century’s wars and those that came after. In the decades around 1800, England’s vibrant curation and performance of Bach’s music, a development bolstered by German immigrants to the island two hundred years before Brexit, marked the first phase of an expansion that would become global.

Even as the topmast of a tricentenary appears on the horizon of a rapidly rising ocean, the uses and—as Russell Stinson suggests in a chapter from The Afterlife of Bach’s Organ Works on Hollywood’s exploitation of the composer’s music—abuses of the oeuvre grow and grow. The diasporic afterlives of his works are now spread across a vast and varied geography, both real and virtual. This sixth of Stinson’s Bach books for Oxford University Press continues his exploration of untrodden, but also oft-visited, regions with reach and rigor that occasionally allow him a longer view from the historian’s crow’s nest. A resourceful and rigorous researcher, Stinson is adept at tracing the publication histories of Bach’s organ works, the evolution—and deformation—of well- and little-known anecdotes and linguistic turns, and the collaborations and collisions of Bach-loving organists as well as other musicians.

Few, if any, of Bach’s 19th-century devotees were more ardent than Karl Gottlieb Freudenberg, whose memoir of 1870 Stinson surveys with a sure guide’s eye and ear for the telling detail and its persistent echoes.

Enterprising and combative, Freudenberg played his organ exams in 1823 for a Berlin panel that included A. W. Bach (no relation to J. S.) and Singakademie Director C. F. Zelter, two major figures in the musical life of the Prussian capital and both teachers of the young Felix Mendelssohn. Freudenberg seems to have played well under all this pressure but, after he had finished, he stormed out of the hall in a manner, Zelter complained, of “unsurpassed rudeness.” (86) Perhaps self-criticism, disappointment, and nerves made Freudenberg break decorum. His memoir also stages a vivid scene in which the anti-Semitic A. W. Bach jealously and vindictively enjoins Freudenberg not to give Mendelssohn a Bach manuscript in his possession. Freudenberg would have none of his teacher’s bigotry and duly supplied Mendelssohn with his copy of the Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 533. Mendelssohn acknowledged Freudenberg’s collegiality in his own copy of the piece made in Berlin on December 9th, 1822.

Freudenberg set off on his European travels a few years later. In Vienna he met Beethoven, who trotted out his oft-deployed pun that Bach (which means brook in German) should be called Ocean. The rebaptism would, in German, give us J. S. Meer, a fine enough name, but one that would deprive him and us of the musical signature B-A-C-H, a motive whose afterlife Stinson also assiduously attends to. In St. Peter’s in Rome, Freudenberg heard Frescobaldi’s music and rated it far inferior to Bach’s. Other nations-to-be had their own musical patriots.

After taking up a post as organist in Breslau, Freudenberg presented a recital in 1841 in honor of the respected Berlin music theorist, A. B. Marx; the program included the Toccata in F Major, BWV 540, a piece that Marx had, Stinson points out, called “mighty” in the first volume of his formidable Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition published four years earlier. Marx’s admiration for the piece perhaps inspired Freudenberg to perform the showstopper for the eminent visitor. Later in the decade, a fractious Freudenberg jostled with Germany’s leading organ virtuoso, Adolph Friedrich Hesse, for Liszt’s attention on that musical celebrity’s visit to Breslau where both organists lived, worked, and bickered.

Like Mendelssohn, Freudenberg had a particular affection for the chorale prelude “Schmücke dich o liebe Seele” from the Great Eighteen. Mendelssohn played it in his landmark Bach recital in Leipzig in 1840, and Stinson suggests that Freudenberg could well have learned the piece from Mendelssohn’s edition of 1846. For Freudenberg, “Schmücke dich” was “a gospel from his musical bible” (92). This was not merely a metaphor but a statement of belief.

One might think that membership in the Bach Cult required unswerving faith like this. Yet some swerved. Not all could bring themselves to praise every last number in the Bach corpus as it was inexorably cataloged, published, and performed across the 19th century.

Stinson tells us that the Leipzig organist Carl Ferdinand Becker (1804-1877) thought that the subject of the Fugue in E minor (BWV 533/2)—the same piece coveted and contested by Freudenberg, A. W. Bach, and Mendelssohn—was “scurrilous” [skurril]. The fugue subject of the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue (BWV 564) was for “merrymaking in the home”; to play it in the church would have been “to sin … in a tasteless way against Bach.” (71) Bach’s youthful, Northern-inspired works were not cottoned to by more than few buttoned-up, woolen-waistcoated organists of the Wilhelmine period. Pomp must have its proper circumstance: the fast and fantastical were for behind closed doors, not before God and fellow Lutherans.

Yet Becker and his Bachian brethren could, on occasion, loosen those suit buttons. Becker and his pupil Hermann Schellenberg, who succeeded his teacher as organist at Leipzig’s Nicolaikirche in 1854, did the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (BWV 542) as a duet with a double pedal. At the bench, demeanor was not always staid and reverential. Schellenberg would throw up his hands at the console when playing pedal solos just to make sure that his listeners out in the church knew that the fancy stuff was the result of footwork alone. Yet Stinson informs us that Schellenberg didn’t think much of the two pedal solos that kick-off, literally, the Toccata in F so admired by Marx. Such divergent opinions and postures animate Stinson’s book.

Schellenberg, Becker and others aired their views not just in performance, but in the 19th-century social media platforms that are Stinson’s vital sources for these interlocking tales—periodicals like Urania and Cecilia, and the more matter-of-factly titled Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (General Musical Newspaper) and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Musical Magazine). Stinson also scours manuscripts and consults letters in European and American libraries and archives, and he unearths rich rewards in exemplars of 19th-century published editions with annotations that document performance practices and aesthetic predilections very different from those that prevail today.

The penultimate of the book’s five chapters listens critically to Bach’s music as deployed in three Academy Award-winning films (The Godfather, The Silence of the Lambs, and Schindler’s List). These reflections take us away from the piety sought by those Protestant organists of yore, turning instead towards mass murder and the darkest nationalist, racist impulses that some have detected in Bachist ideology right from its early 19th-century beginnings.

A final chapter—a potpourri of transcription traditions of Bach’s music—returns to a safer civility.

I am long a member of the Bach congregation, even if I am often seen squirming in my pew. Unexpectedly, I met myself in the Afterlife. Stinson’s opening chapter includes a generous review—warning: self-serving product placement coming—of my Bach’s Feet (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He graciously corrects a few of what must be my many errors and broadens some of my claims with his commanding knowledge of the organ works’ reception both in Germany and England.

Stinson and I participated in a Westfield Center study tour of Bach organs in August of 1989 when German borders were about to be redrawn yet again. One afternoon, during a rest stop at a roadhouse somewhere in Thuringia, an earlier edition of this reviewer ordered Kirschwasser in halting German at a table crowded with leading scholars, organists, and builders. Russell gently informed me that Kirschwasser was schnapps, not flavored water, though he didn’t want to deny me a tea-time bracer if I really wanted one. This book has that same generous, modest quality—erudite but unassuming.

I have my doubts that the Kirschwasser vignette will make it into 22nd-century collections of the curious ways of Bach worshippers of the postmodern past. But I do know that Stinson has been immensely, fruitfully busy in the thirty-five years since that trip through what turned out to be the last days of the GDR. The journey is not yet done. Endless are the Bachian afterlives still to tell of.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)

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BRINGING THE ‘MORAL PROPERTY OF WOMEN’ TO AMERICAN WOMEN TOO

by Steve Heilig

Once upon a time I was an international drug smuggler. But please let me explain.

One foggy afternoon in the late 1980s I was sitting in the dungeon-like old medical library at UCSF medical center, listlessly leafing through medical journals, procrastinating studying or other work. A brief news article jumped out at me, noting that brilliant European scientists had developed a pill that triggered abortions in early pregnancy, and that the medication, then called RU486, had already been shown to be both safe and effective. I recall feeling a surge of some kind of excited energy, along the lines of: This Changes Everything.

Before coming to the Haight and UCSF I’d done graduate work in public health down at UCLA, and never forgot a senior medical professor taking us students on a little tour of the hospital there. He walked us into a big hospital room and quietly said “Back in the 1960s, before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, this was a ward for women suffering from the effects of illegal abortions. There were dozens of beds, almost always full. Many died. Blood had to be mopped from the floors. It reminded me of my time as a medic in wartime. But when abortion was legalized, the ward emptied out and was converted to other uses.” We just stood there quietly. He didn’t need to say more.

Later, my mentor and friend Dr. David Smith of Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic fame told me of watching a young mother die of an illegal abortion while he was training at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1960s, a tragedy he never forgot. By the 1980s abortion had been legal for over a decade but was still very controversial, to the point where clinics and doctors were protested, attacked, even murdered. So the new pills meant it would be much harder to target those committed to serving women, plus, wouldn’t almost every woman with an unwanted early pregnancy rather take a few pills than otherwise?

But the news of RU486 got out, and then-President George H.W. Bush vowed the medication would never be allowed in America, and banned it in 1989. That’s when I, and others around the country as it turned out, thought: We’ll see about THAT. And I embarked on a sort of crusade. First, I wrote articles about the new meds in the UCSF paper, the Synapse, and a review about the pills in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Then, with some veteran physicians at the San Francisco Medical Society where I also worked — some of whom also recalled the pre-Roe horrors — I drafted a policy statement urging that RU486 be made available in the USA. This was easily adopted not only in San Francisco but soon also by the California and American medical associations, which was very encouraging. The AMA adoption was even national news. I could then utilize the state doctors’ list to send a brief survey to California OB/GYNs, asking if they favored brining RU486 here and if they’d provide it to patients. The strong majority said yes to both questions and the published survey was again big news.

Meanwhile, a few of us drew up a research protocol for UCSF to test RU486, as even though it was already shown to work safely we knew US-based research would be needed for it to be approved here. Our proposal was approved but we still needed the actual pills, so we wrote to the French researchers and pharmaceutical company with our proposal, requesting a supply. It took some time - this was still pre-internet, involving lots of postage stamps - but eventually we were excited to receive an OK. But more months passed and the French went silent. It turned out that the CEO-types of the European companies controlling these pills were very wary of getting involved in the American abortion debate in any way. We even heard some of them may have been personally threatened, which was all too believable. So it seemed we might be at a stalemate, even tough the French minister of health had called RU486 “the moral property of women.”

Then I got a call from one Larry Lader, a veteran New York City abortion rights activist who’d seen my writings. He said he was coming to San Francisco and wanted to meet, and, might I be able to gather a few good OB-Gyn physicians too? When we met, at the medical society HQ, Larry’s modest proposal was this: Find a woman with an early unwanted pregnancy, fly her to Europe to pick up the pills and back into JFK airport in New York, tip off both federal authorities and the media so she would get busted and make RU486 a big public and political story.

It seemed an audacious plan and worth a try, so the doctors in our group started sending me potential patients. My job was to give them “informed consent” to the stunt - to make sure they knew they might wind up all over the papers and TV, and perhaps even get threatened. Basically I tried to talk them out of it. But I also assured them they'd have all medical care and any other costs covered. A few thought it over and decided they just couldn’t participate, until a young woman named Leona emphatically said “OK, stop trying to talk me out of this, let’s go.”

In sum, it worked exactly as planned. She arrived at JFK, was detained, and all the major papers and TV networks were all over it — it was front-page New York Times news. A fast Supreme Court case — she had little time left to use the meds before being past the ten-week cutoff — denied her the pills. She was taken care of and hidden from the swarms of media folks demanding to talk with her. I was her main media flack and did countless interviews, and also was told I might be indicted for our “smuggling” efforts — although how many real smugglers tip off the authorities?

Most importantly, Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, citing the coverage, pledged to bring these pills to American women. And TIME Magazine called RU486 “the pill that changes everything.”

We can’t claim our effort itself brought medication abortion to the USA but it helped put those wheels in motion. Still, it took the FDA eight years to approve it. As expected, many women started choosing pills over surgery, and as of now, almost two-thirds of abortions are done with mifepristone, as the medication is called.

This all occurred three decades ago. There’s no need here to get into the endless arguments about the morality of abortion. Jesus never spoke of it. Embryos are not “babies” any more than an acorn is a tree. Women have been doing what they feel is best for them throughout history, often with little knowledge or involvement from men; women providing the service have been derided as murderers and “witches” and so on. “Nature” causes many early abortions on its own as well. Legal prohibition has never worked to stop it and only hurts desperate women — in fact, abortions have actually increased since Roe was overturned two years ago. And women now denied safe abortion in their states are traveling far and wide for help, and some suffering severe medical consequences. Is this “pro-life”?

There’s no more fundamental right than control over one’s own body. As Dr. Dave reminded us when founding the Haight clinic, “Healthcare is a Right, Not A Privilege.” Universal access to contraception and reality-based sex education is what works to prevent unwanted pregnancy and abortion, and it’s safe to say that groups like Planned Parenthood have prevented more of those than any anti-choice activism ever has. Yet there are those who still hope to bring a real-life “Handmaid’s Tale” to America, and some of them are running for office. One doesn’t have to be a “childless cat lady” to know that’s a truly terrible prospect. We can’t let them drag us back to the bad old days. As many are rightly saying now, We Won’t Go Back.

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