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WELL ABOVE NORMAL temperatures continue across the interior today. A more fall-like pattern arrives this week, bringing temperatures down to near-normal and potentially rain by the end of the week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): It's a bit warmer this Sunday morning on the coast with 51F under clear skies. Our forecast has changed with fog returning Tuesday night then a chance of rain for next Friday. I'll be watching for sure. Our temps will be dropping thru the week also.
RECKLESS TEENS IN AV
[1] Whatever high school kid that owns the white infinity needs to stop endangering peoples lives! I got passed on 128 by the grange with my kids in the car and he almost put our lives in danger because he almost hit oncoming traffic.
[2] I just picked my son up from his buddies house and at the gravel pit a white car was sitting there with the lights off. I drove by and boom, 2 seconds later they were on my ass with their high beams on. I dipped left onto my driveway and they slammed on the brakes and sat there. So I stopped and put it in reverse and backed down the driveway. They sped away. It wasn't the same car as your incident, but wtf is going on in the valley?
[3] Kids driving like psychos. It’s insane. My mom almost got hit by a brown tundra just a couple days ago with my baby in the car too. Someone is gonna end up dead if not a whole family. It’s crazy.
UKIAH SHOWS RESILIENCE IN COMEBACK WIN
The Wildcats have looked mighty impressive over the past three weeks and showed their grit and resilience in a wild comeback win on the road in the South Bay this week. They trailed 24-0 in the first half before outscoring Belmont 28-3 in the second half for a 52-34 win.
Since their season-opening loss to Rancho Cotate, Ukiah has improved week after week and very nearly upset San Marin last week. Beau David and Omaurie Phillips-Porter are a dynamic one-two punch on offense but far from the only weapons, while their defense features a host of strong players.
Since their loss to Rancho, the Wildcats are averaging 38 points per game and have put up those numbers against a tough group of opponents. If their three-point loss to San Marin didn’t show they were a team to be taken seriously, their win this week over Calmont certainly did.
— Gus Morris
AV UNIFIED NEWS
Hello Anderson Valley Community,
It has been a fantastic week in AVUSD! Thank you to all families who attended our Back to School Night events. It was wonderful to see you there.
As a reminder, parent / teacher conferences (also known as PLPs at the Jr/Sr High School) will be happening Friday, October 11 through Friday, October 18. These will be minimum days; school ends early but the After School Program remains available.
When parents are involved with school, our students do better! Please plan to attend. We are so proud of the strong history of almost every student having a parent participate. Our teachers are looking forward to talking with you about your child, and translation will be available if needed. Here are some tips for making these meetings a success:
You should have received an appointment time. Please contact the office or your child’s teacher to confirm that you will be there. Please let them know if you need to reschedule.
Talk to your child and consider: What is going well? Where are your concerns? Your opinion and your questions are important. Feel free to share them with the teacher.
At the Jr/Sr High, students should also be at these meetings. Their participation is important too. Please encourage them to be prepared.
We look forward to seeing every student supported by a parent or guardian. Please reach out to the office if you have questions or need to ask for a different appointment time.
Exciting Events at AV Elementary
New principal, Mr. Ramalia, will be officially joining AVES on Monday. He was there for most of the day on Friday, talking with Mrs. Larson Balliet, getting familiar with the school, and meeting some of the staff and students. He will be an excellent fit and he is so excited to join us! Please give him a warm welcome!
Welcome, Brianna Hammond! Ms. Hammond was hired as Yard Duty Clerk, to start Oct. 28. Previously, she has been working in our After School Programs. Ms. Hammond is an active, energetic addition to our yard duty team and we are very happy to have her!
Math specialists “Sarah and Barb” came out from MCOE last week to work with our staff. They shared, “We enjoyed a very productive day of learning with teachers, students and Jenny from MCOE at AVES today. Thoughtful planning, model lessons, materials organization, classroom management tips and relationship building were all a part of our successful day.” This is good stuff! We look forward to future work with Sarah and Barb.
Jr/Sr High News:
PLPs are coming and are so important. Please call the office to confirm that you will attend.
The Jr High dance was a hit! Students enjoyed tunes spun by our own Mr. Bautista and dined on pizza, salad, and cookies. We were proud of our students for their excellent behavior. It was a lot of fun to see them being silly with their friends and just enjoying the night. Congratulations to the AV Jr/Sr High Leadership Team for the great job you are doing with bringing fun events to our student body! Many thanks to Mr. Mc Nerney, Mrs. Johnson, Mr. Bautista, and Mrs. Malfovon for being there to keep it safe and fun.
Thank you to Mrs. Deleh Mayne and to all the parents who attended ELAC last week. It was wonderful to see students receive their reclassification awards. Reclassification means that the student has acquired the English skills to be considered a fluent English speaker. We are so proud of our bilingual students and their achievements. Way to go!
Ms. Stefani Ewing is heading up a Mock Election! What a great way for students to learn more about this important civic responsibility. On “voting day” (Tuesday 10/8) students will complete a ballot.Teachers and Ms. Ewing will tally class results. Of course, at school, we as staff do not share political opinions; this exercise is to familiarize students with the voting process and to emphasize that their vote makes a difference! Students will receive “I voted” stickers for participating.
Homecoming will be Saturday October 19, 2024
There will be a parade at 12 from the fairgrounds to the HS soccer pitch, followed by a
Soccer game (Anderson Valley vs. Geyserville) at 1:00
The dance will be in cafeteria from 7-10, with a Las Vegas theme
Congratulations to our Homecoming Royalty (elected by their peers):
Freshmen: Jaquelin Contreras & Logan Venuto
Sophomores: Evelyn Escobar & Eric Velasco
Juniors: Guadalupe Arias-Pena & Pablo Escobar
Seniors: To be announced at Homecoming!
District-Wide Updates:
Community Schools Grant
Mr. Corey-Moran organized a meeting with the Anderson Valley Health Center team and it went very well. We look forward to expanding our work with the Anderson Valley Health Center for the benefit of our students.
Mr. Nat Corey-Morran took a group of 11th and 12th graders to Mendocino College's College and University Day on Tuesday, 10/1.
Additional Supports for our Students And Community
Thank you, to Mrs. Cora Hubbert for organizing many wonderful opportunities through Adult School! Please see the attached flier
Thank you, Mrs. Deleh Mayne, for organizing the nex ELAC meeting, mainly for AVES parents. Older siblings are welcome to attend. Please see the attached flier
Construction News
We remain thankful to all who voted for Measure M, and to CalTrans for the Clean California grant. As you know, we have several projects in progress! Here are some highlights:
High School students are still on pace to move into updated classrooms by November. A new fire alarm is being installed at the Jr/Sr High, along with the updates to our classrooms and hallway. We look forward to classrooms being finished very soon! The hallway will be completed during Thanksgiving Break. (Measure M funded)
Plans are in progress for updates to the AVES Kitchen. This is getting to be exciting! Soon we will be going to bid in order to get this project underway. (Measure M funded)
The plans for the Jr/Sr High School Track are moving forward. Our architect, Don Alameida, is working with DSA to ensure questions about landscaping and wheelchair access to park benches meet requirements. Construction should be in progress by the Spring! (CalTrans / Clean California funded)
Thank you to our community for your involvement in the education of our students!
With respect,
Kristin Larson Balliet, Superintendent
Anderson Valley Unified School District
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Wally is a fun-loving and energetic puppy/young adult, eager to learn and guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. Wally enjoys playing with toys and he’s easy to take on walks! Yahoo! This good-looking and cheerful dog will need basic training in his new home, along with daily exercise. We think Wally will do well with children but may be a bit energetic for toddlers. Wally is 9 months old and 50-ish handsome 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.
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE List of Events
REPEAT DRUNK DRIVER CONVICTED AGAIN
A Ukiah woman previously convicted twice of driving under the influence in Lake County was recently found guilty a third time, the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office reported.
According to DA David Eyster, Lindsay A. Nielsen, 41, of Ukiah, was found guilty last week by a Mendocino County Superior Court jury “of driving a motor vehicle on May 18, 2024 with a blood alcohol .08 or greater, a misdemeanor.”
Eyster notes that “the defendant admitted prior to a jury being selected and empaneled that she has suffered two prior DUI convictions within the last ten years — the first in Lake County Superior Court in May 2017 and the second in the same court in November 2017, and that these strategic admissions eliminated the need for the eventual jury to know about and, in turn, have to decide whether these prior convictions had occurred, as the DA had alleged.”
Eyster also pointed to the California Highway Patrol and the California Department of Justice crime laboratory as “the law enforcement agencies that presented testimony during the course of the trial,” but did not provide information regarding sentencing.
DEFENDING FORT BRAGG’S FUTURE THROUGH RESPONSIBLE LEGAL ACTION
by Del Potter
The City of Fort Bragg’s decision to spend over $1 million in legal fees regarding Mendocino Railway has sparked significant controversy, with critics calling it an unnecessary or impulsive move. However, this legal action is far from reckless. It’s a necessary step to protect the long-term governance of the city and ensure that local interests are preserved.
Waiting for the railroad to potentially violate zoning or environmental laws would diminish the City’s ability to enforce those laws effectively. By acting now, Fort Bragg is ensuring transparency, accountability, and protection of its community before irreversible actions take place. Once Mendocino Railway’s federal preemption claim is cemented, the company could bypass critical local regulations, leaving the City and its residents with little recourse.
There’s been criticism directed at Councilman Peters for raising environmental concerns. The issue is about maintaining comprehensive oversight for a company operating under federal preemption, which could bypass local concerns such as pollution, land use, and resource strain. Federal preemption often limits local oversight, making it harder for municipalities to protect their long-term environmental interests.
Mendocino Railway claims compliance with the Mill Site Zoning Map, but this is only one part of the issue. The real concern is whether the railroad is subject to the full regulatory process required of other developers, including permitting, environmental review, and public accountability. Working within the zoning map doesn’t mean they can skip these critical processes. Zoning maps are guidelines, not blank checks to proceed without public consultation or regulatory oversight.
It’s important to recognize that railroads operate under a complicated web of local, state, and federal regulations. However, this complexity only underscores the need for clarity and cooperation between Mendocino Railway and the City. The City’s lawsuit arose from concerns that the railroad is using federal preemption to sidestep local laws is an issue that any community should take seriously. Fort Bragg’s lawsuit is not about blocking development but defending its right to oversee its land use. The City’s concern is that local interests are being sidelined by broad federal claims.
This opposition to Mendocino Railway’s plans is not a rejection of development; it’s about ensuring that development is transparent, accountable, and community-focused. If the railroad proceeds without sufficient local oversight, it sets a dangerous precedent for future projects that might ignore the best interests of Fort Bragg’s residents.
The City’s legal action is a justified defense of local governance, ensuring that any development aligns with environmental, social, and regulatory standards. This is not a trivial issue. There are real risks like infrastructure strain, environmental damage, and gentrification that come with unchecked development. Poorly planned projects often lead to depleted resources, increased pollution, and the displacement of lower-income residents. These are consequences we’ve seen time and again in other areas, and Fort Bragg is right to take steps to prevent them. While Mendocino Railway’s plans may seem aligned with zoning laws, the bigger issue is its reliance on federal preemption to bypass local authority. The City’s concerns are about ensuring proper community oversight and compliance with local laws, not stopping development altogether. Transparency and accountability are key, and the lawsuit is an effort to guarantee these principles are upheld.
Cooperation between the railroad and Fort Bragg is essential, but it must go both ways. If Fort Bragg believes that Mendocino Railway is bypassing local regulations, the City has a responsibility to protect its community. Local government exists to ensure that development benefits residents without risking long-term consequences that arise from underregulated projects.
The City’s stance isn’t about rejecting progress. It’s about ensuring that progress happens with proper oversight. The zoning and planning process exists to protect community values, environmental sustainability, and public health. Mendocino Railway’s reliance on federal preemption threatens this local authority and reduces the City’s ability to safeguard its interests. While litigation is costly, it is necessary to defend the community’s right to control its own land-use policies.
Development can bring jobs and infrastructure, but those benefits must be balanced against long-term impacts. Economic growth doesn’t need to come at the expense of environmental sustainability or community cohesion. Without thorough environmental reviews and adherence to local regulations, the promises of development may be short-lived and outweighed by harm to the broader community.
Reopening the rail line or tunnel, as some suggest, won’t automatically lead to economic prosperity. These projects require significant investments, public subsidies, and long-term infrastructure support, and they may not deliver the expected growth. It’s essential that Fort Bragg has a voice in how these projects proceed, ensuring that they don’t undermine local zoning laws or environmental protections in the process.
Fort Bragg has a responsibility to ensure that any development within its borders serves the long-term interests of its residents. Litigation, while expensive, is sometimes necessary to prevent corporate overreach and preserve local governance. Allowing unchecked development under federal preemption could strip the community of its ability to shape its future.
The City’s opposition to Mendocino Railway’s plans isn’t about being anti-development; it’s about ensuring responsible, accountable, and community-oriented growth. Protecting Fort Bragg’s long-term interests, ensuring sustainable development, and preserving local oversight is the core of this legal action. Progress must not come at the expense of community control, environmental health, or transparency.
Fort Bragg’s actions aren’t rejecting growth. They are making sure it benefits everyone, not just developers.
THE CROW'S NEST Interpretive Center, part of Noyo Center for Marine Science, is a must experience for anyone interested in the marine ecosystem of our North Coast. Tidepool touch tanks and a reproduction of a blue whale skeleton are among the attractions.
You can bike or walk the coastal trail to stop in to visit our Crow’s Nest Interpretive Center. To get there, park at the Noyo Headlands parking lot off of West Cypress St. and walk or bike north 0.7 miles to the Crow’s Nest. There is also access to the trail from Alder St. in downtown Fort Bragg.
MENDOCINO COUNTY is no stranger to police misconduct cases. High-profile examples dominated local headlines in 2022-2023. Law enforcement officials, including the county's District Attorney, largely stayed mum. An investigative series statewide suggests why—there was far more than the public had not learned about police misconduct and how cases locally were handled behind closed doors. The city of Ukiah, for example, refused to turn over documents relating to so-called private agreements detailed in the new statewide investigative report.
Here's the link to the series, published by the San Francisco Chronicle with reporting by the University of California Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program:
“This is the secret system that covers up police misconduct — and ensures problem officers can get hired again
The Police Officer’s Career was in peril. Twenty-five years ago, Hossep ‘Joe’ Ourjanian’s supervisors at the Los Angeles County Office of Public Safety accused him of “flagrant” misconduct. They said he had pretended to attend military training to skip work. They had already decided he should be fired when they learned of another allegation: Ourjanian’s girlfriend said he had grabbed her and pulled her hair while she held their infant son.
But then Los Angeles County did something remarkable: The county agreed to hide evidence that Ourjanian allegedly lied to dodge work in exchange for his promise to go without a fight. Records documenting the county’s finding of misconduct would be removed from his personnel file and their very existence would be kept secret. His firing would be rescinded. If any future employer asked, the county agreed to say only that he had resigned ‘indicating personal reasons’.” …
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/police-clean-record-agreements
(Mike Geniella)
DEADLINE FOR WRITTEN E-MAIL COMMENTS ABOUT ALBION RIVER BRIDGE PROJECT IS THIS WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9 AT 5PM
The deadline for written comments for the Albion River Bridge Draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) and Draft Section 4(f) will end this Wednesday, October 9 at 5pm. Please Submit comments via email to: albionbridge@dot.ca.gov
The document and related technical studies may be downloaded at www.albionriverbridgeproject.com
The Albion Bridge Stewards made it easy for you to comment. You can choose one of the templates on the web page: https://savehighway1.org/2024/08/27/comment-templates/
Add your name, address, and why you believe that this state-and federal-historic bridge should be rehabilitated.
Caltrans’ proposed plans are bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and bad for history: https://savehighway1.org/2024/08/10/what-you-should-know-about-caltrans-latest-plans/
ED NOTES
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is the problem, you fools! Don’t you understand anything? And at your age, too! There hasn’t been a real liberal around here since Congressman Clem Miller died in a plane crash in the early 1960s and he still managed, as a dead man, to defeat Don Clausen, the Republican candidate. So, class, if a young, pro-labor liberal can get elected as our congressman in the early 1960s when the population of the Northcoast was entirely pre-Cambrian, maybe the political problem is with the current population of Northcoast “progressives,” eh my little apple cheeked lib-lab?
HAVEN’T found anybody yet who can confirm, but I’ve got a source who tells me there are indeed for-profit dog fights in Mendocino County. It’s also a fairly well-known fact of local life that cock fights are not hard to find if you travel in those circles where your friends keep 50 roosters and no hens in their backyards.
I WAS WALKING around Mission Bay, early for the latest in endless doctor's appointments, marveling that my value to that noble profession is in the low millions as they keep me alive to loot Medi-Care, when a raggedy man of my vintage rode up to me on his bicycle and said, “It's your lucky day. I'm going to tell you the joke nobody told you at Christmas.” I don't remember anybody telling me any kind of joke at Christmas and anyway it's September except for, “Golly, you sure look great.” I probably first heard the joke the bicycle man proceeded to tell me sixty years ago. It was a smutty unfunny one about a door-to-door salesman and a housewife, but it was the thought that counted so I thanked him and moved on, it occurring to me he was more of a prisoner of a time long past — 1950s traveling salesman gags — than I was, a person with zero nostalgia for the 1950s, a strangling era of insane domestic policy and an even more insane foreign policy, a time much like today except for people living on the streets and millions of others in their telephones.
ENCOURAGING BUMPERSTICKER spotted in San Rafael: “Your kid's an honor student but you're a moron.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK from Joe Namath: “I never walked off a professional football field without first thinking of something boring to say.”
THE OTHER DAY I watched an elderly Chinese man snapping off the stems of a half-dozen red peppers he soon purchased. I couldn't figure out why he was doing it. I told my cultural consultant what I'd seen. “Oh, he's just making them weigh less so they'll be cheaper.” Cheaper? The total savings on that particular purchase couldn't been more than a tenth of a cent, but if he'd been de-stemming fruit and vegetables for 70 years the old boy probably had himself the equivalent of this year's Honda. My cultural consultant agreed. “That's exactly the way we look at it.”
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, October 5, 2024
BRUCE CARTWRIGHT JR., 32, Willits. Conspiracy.
RYAN CRONIN, 32, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, robbery, damaging communications device.
SUMALEE FOLGER, 52, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.
DAVID GARCIA, 39, Eureka/Ukiah. Parole violation.
DANIEL HARRINGTON, 51, Ukiah. DUI.
FRANCISCO NAVARRO-SANDOVAL, 35, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-solicitation of lewd act, under influence, burglary, failure to appear.
RICKEY PHILLIPS III, 32, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
KINGDAVID SHORT, 21, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
TYSON VERRETT, 39, Baton Rouge/Ukiah. Domestic battery, stalking/threatening bodily injury.
ALEXANDREA VONREKOWSKI, 30, Lower Lake/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.
DONALD WILLETT JR, 40, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, suspended license, failure to appear.
CHELSEA WILLIAMS, 24, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.
RESIDENTS, COMMUTERS IMPLORE SONOMA COUNTY TO REPAIR DANGEROUS STRETCH OF LAKEVILLE HIGHWAY
In the 7 miles of Lakeville Highway under Sonoma County’s jurisdiction, there have been 41 collisions since 2022, according to county records obtained by The Press Democrat.
by Marisa Endicott
Anyone who drives the stretch of Lakeville Highway approaching Highway 37 — and that’s more than 18,000 people per day — is familiar with the cracks and crevices that buckle and warp the two-lane road.
It’s a frustrating and sometimes frightening experience for drivers and nearby residents who in desperation have affixed a plea to the signpost where the freeways intersect. “PAVE THIS ROAD,” the sign says in big white stenciled all-caps letters. “ROUGH ROAD,” an official warning sign cautions nearby.
“It’s been years, and it’s getting worse and worse and worse,” said Paul Decker who lives nearby. “It’s just dangerous,” he said, noting that cars frequently veer out of their lane to avoid potholes. “You’ll see that. I’ll do it. If you follow the lane specifically, it’s a heck of a ride.”
The stakes have only risen as Lakeville has become a major thoroughfare. “When we moved here in 1986, we’d drive to the end of our driveway and sit there for 15 minutes before seeing a car,” Decker said. “Now, you’ve got to sit there for five minutes to get out.”
Officials are well aware. A Sonoma County 2020 Local Road Safety Plan called Lakeville, which connects Petaluma to SR 37 and the Bay Area, “one of the busiest roads in the county” that “accounts for a large number of collisions causing serious injury or death.”
“There’s no controversy or denying that stretch of road is dangerous,” said Gold Ridge Protection District Fire Chief Shepley Schroth-Cary. “Anecdotally, when crashes occur on that road, there’s no barrier, the shoulders are narrow, it’s often very high speeds, it’s one of the main ways people come in and and out of Sonoma County.”
Historically, Schroth-Cary said, the area where Lakeville and Highway 37 has been a hot spot for emergency response.
In the seven miles of Lakeville under Sonoma County’s jurisdiction, there have been 41 collisions since 2022, according to county records obtained by the Press Democrat.
There have also been 22 repair requests, including four this year, submitted to the county by drivers and even California Highway Patrol officers.
“Hit a MASSIVE pothole … Felt like tire or wheel to rip off. Worst pothole hit we’ve ever had in (Sonoma County),” one person said in a July 2022 submission. “Please look and fix. It’s criminal.”
Another woman reported she worried her RV was going to tip after hitting a dip on Lakeville about a quarter-mile from the 37 juncture.
“The hazardous condition out on Lakeville Hwy has gotten worse in the last few days,” a CHP officer said in December 2022. “Large dip in the roadway, concerned a motorcycle will go off roadway.”
In March 2023, CHP again called in “potholes at usual spot,” roughly 10 inches deep and three feet wide, with “cars swerving to avoid them,” according to the report log.
Kasey Williams of Sonoma County’s Department of Infrastructure said the county is not ignoring the problem. It’s true: there have been a dozen projects to patch potholes, profile pavement, seal cracks and repair drainage along the road since 2022 totaling more than $180,000, work order summaries show.
(pressdemocrat.com)
THE LAST STRAW
Editor:
I get that this is a country of changing demographics at every level: racial, economic and educational to name a few. We are increasingly dissatisfied. The country has experienced an unprecedented epidemic, countless, unending natural disasters and political unrest. People are afraid and tired. Many of us are beyond depressed at the choices at hand. Perhaps because of social media, and media in general, we don’t know whom to trust or what to believe in anymore. Now we face a national election for president and are trying to do the only thing left to us to do. Vote. And not necessarily with the confidence that we need and always thought would be there.
Thanks in large part to Donald Trump and his numerous conspiracy theories, family and friends are being lost. I don’t see how this can be happening. All else aside, we can’t hand over what’s left of our democracy to the likes of Donald Trump.
Judith Gage
Santa Rosa
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Personally I feel divine intervention is the only thing that will save us, not so sure what sorta intervention or such but know its got to be from on high as we are fast being nullified.
DURING an address at CUNY, City University of New York, NY TIMES columnist Paul Krugman got heckled by the all time greatest heckler:
Heckler: Uh-oh! No-Ball Prize-winning economist here to tell us how great the economy is. I certainly wonder how the residents of Asheville, North Carolina must be feeling right now with no access to power or water or communication with the outside world. I wonder how enthusiastic they are about the economy right now. I wonder how enthusiastic the residents of the South Bronx must be feeling about the economy. Hey, maybe North Carolina should rename itself Israel so it’ll get $20 billion in aid. Or maybe Ukraine so it can get $300 billion in aid. Maybe the South Bronx should do the same thing. I mean, I’m sure the economy is great for smug liberals like yourself who make $5 million and are worth $5 million. I’m sure the economy must be great for all you smug journalists, economists, all of you must be having a great time with the economy when most people can’t even pay for basic necessities or people who are getting evicted because they can’t pay their rent. Because over in the South Bronx just a few miles away from here, there are portions of buildings that are literally collapsing. And I’m supposed to give a shit about the stock market You want to know why the presidential election is tied right now? Because our money is being sent to Israel and Ukraine so that they can continue to bomb innocent women and children! You think that’s a great economy? I’m sure Israel with their free healthcare is having a great time with American taxpayer money. Hey, is anybody here going to talk about the fact that we could be at war with Iran in a few days? Or do we need to focus on the S&P 500? Is that what actually matters? Huh? The S&P 500? When most people may not even be alive here in a few days just because we’re on the verge of nuclear war? Hey, listen to me, Mr. Krugman. Your degree is worthless! You might as well use it as paperweight because it means nothing! I hope you enjoy the dead children that the economy is powering! Our economy is definitely very powerful right now! All that stock market money goes to the military complex so that more innocent women and children are dead! And fuck off with The New York Times, the liberal apologists for war and genocide. You all fucking suck! People need to wake up right now and we need to have peace. We can work with China. We can work with Russia! We don’t need to start a war with Iran.
MEMO OF THE AIR: Pas de duh.
Here's the recording of last night's (Friday 2024-10-04) 7-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-0612
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:
Coming soon to the sky of every planet within thousands of light-years: A star that becomes visible to the naked eye once every 80 years and then hides again. Here's the story with an animated illustration. A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (that goes with his A Fire Upon the Deep) involves an expedition to a variable star. A different kind than this, but it's what this makes me think of. https://www.space.com/astronomers-new-star-nova-explosion-t-coronae-borealis
A rich stew of cinematic menace. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJjQ6S8xJRw
Food looks delicious on billboards and in magazine and teevee ads because it's made of diaper material and shredded white plastic bags, tampons and marbles and shaving cream, steamed at with a steam iron and torched at with a torch. And there's something called candle gel (jellied wax) that's glossier and clearer than ice cubes. A sunny-side-up egg is a slice off the side of a peach on yogurt in a pan, which at least is edible, at least to someone who likes yogurt. They spray varnish on donuts to make them more appealing. Ice cream is mashed potatoes, technically also edible if you're not tricked into thinking it's ice cream, which would be nauseating, like biting into a pickle made of apple, or the other way around, or like biting into carob that someone told you was chocolate. But in general, nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about. Nor eat. https://laughingsquid.com/food-stylists-commercial-tricks/
A poem about something like that. https://decompmagazine.com/picnic.htm
And rerun: Don't pray so much. Featuring Sally Field. Phil Hartman as Jesus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaIUkv-9HiE
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
FIRST SIGHTING OF SALMON IN 100 YEARS MARKS KEY MILESTONE FOR CALIFORNIA DAM REMOVAL
by Kurtis Alexander
In an early victory for the nation’s largest dam-removal project, the first salmon in more than a century is believed to have pushed up the Klamath River this week into waters formerly blocked by dams.
Scientists with the nonprofit California Trout told the Chronicle that their sonar camera captured what was almost certainly a chinook salmon migrating upstream Thursday past the site where Iron Gate Dam once stood, just south of the California-Oregon border.
The roughly 2½-foot-long fish is thought to be part of the Klamath River’s fall run, the first and largest run of salmon expected to benefit from the recent removal of four hydroelectric dams on the 250-mile waterway.“This fish marks the beginning of the recovery for the fishes of the Klamath,” said Damon Goodman, a fish biologist and regional director at California Trout. “This is testament to the success of dam removal and marks a new beginning for the Klamath River.”
Since the early 1900s, the construction of four hydroelectric dams has kept fish from swimming to hundreds of miles of upstream waterways in what was once the third-largest salmon-producing river in the West. The lack of access to these cold waters for spawning is one of the reasons for the steady demise of California’s iconic salmon population.
While the decades-long push to raze the dams was billed as a restoration of the Klamath River’s entire ecosystem, the central driver of the project was the fish.
A collaboration of nonprofit, state and federal scientists has been monitoring fish movement in and around the site of the former Iron Gate Dam since dam removal wrapped up over the past few weeks. Iron Gate was the southernmost of the four demolished dams.
At 10:06 p.m. Thursday, the sonar camera at the site recorded a fish swimming upriver, which the scientists discovered Friday when they were reviewing footage. The equipment does not photograph the fish, but from the images created by ultrasonic waves transmitted through the water, the scientists have little doubt that the fish is a chinook salmon.
Salmon had been observed just south of the area in recent weeks.
The fish are generally born in the river, then swim to the ocean for two to three years, before returning to their birthplace to spawn. The fall run of fish is named for the time of year the salmon come back to the river.
The $500 million dam-removal project, which sought to finish before the fall run, was directed by PacifiCorp, the utility that ran the hydroelectric dams, and the states of California and Oregon.
Native American communities had pushed for the project for decades, and PacifiCorp eventually agreed to remove the facilities because of their age and high operating costs. The dams did not provide water storage or flood protection. Funding for the project came from the utility and California voter-approved water bonds.
The ongoing fish monitoring is a collaboration of conservation groups Cal Trout and Ridges to Riffles, the Karuk, Yurok and Klamath tribes, state and federal scientists and others.
While salmon were expected to begin swimming past the former dam sites this year, scientists have said it will be years, even decades, before they fully populate the long-blocked upper reaches of the watershed.
(SF Chronicle)
I’VE COVERED HOMELESS SWEEPS IN CALIFORNIA FOR 40 YEARS. WE’RE RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED.
‘Ping-ponging’ was the tactic of choice to deal with the homeless even before the term ‘homeless’ sprang into use in the early 1980s. It never went away.
by Kevin Fagan
The first homeless camp sweep I covered was in winter 1981, after the grape harvests concluded in the San Joaquin Valley. As a police reporter, I watched cops roust a farmworkers’ spread of lean-tos and tarps outside Lodi. The pickers weren’t needed anymore — they knew it, the cops knew it. No arguments. They just left.
“We’ll be back next season,” I remember one of the farmworkers — most of them were up from Mexico — casually saying.
“We know,” one of the officers replied with a laugh.
Fast forward to Oakland and Contra Costa County in the late 1980s and the 1990s, when I went with homeless activists to cover encampment sweeps in streets and fields. This time there were arguments. But the laws were clear. Move or be cited, maybe arrested.
The same dynamic held in 2003 when I spent six months on the streets of San Francisco with Chronicle photographer Brant Ward. The five-day series we produced, “Shame of the City,” concluded that radically improving street counseling and wraparound supportive housing could make a huge dent in the homelessness crisis (that’s still true).
But we also found the same ol,’ same ol,’ when it came to kicking sidewalk eyesores down the road. Whenever street cleaning trucks showed up, sometimes with a cop or a street counselor, whatever camp we were in had no choice — everyone scattered.
Scattering homeless people was the norm pretty much everywhere in California until 2018. That’s when the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a decade-old lawsuit challenging anti-camping laws in Boise, Idaho, saying sweeps couldn’t be done unless campers were offered shelter. Until that ruling, there was little to constrain governments from chasing homeless people away using anti-camping and loitering laws. The only efforts to move campers into shelters were voluntary. And even after 2018, most places found workarounds.
So, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Boise decision on June 28, ruling that cities again have a freer hand in clearing homeless settlements, it mostly reset everyone back to what used to be normal.
Homeless camps can be genuinely disruptive to businesses and residential neighborhoods, which then pressure cities to clear them out. And most homeless people don’t really want to sleep in the dirt. The problems that put them there and keep them there are dizzyingly complex, and the best thing is to bring them inside. But despite some terrific efforts throughout the country, including those in San Francisco, nobody has yet created a system to enduringly shelter and counsel every person on our streets and keep them housed.
It’s been like this for a long time.
For most of my four decades covering homelessness, there weren’t big tent clusters like today. Homeless folks called sweeps “ping-ponging.” I remember Peg, a guy with a titanium leg in a little camp near San Francisco City Hall, shrugging in 2003 when I asked him about being rousted.
“The cops ping-pong us from block to block every few days or, if we’re lucky, weeks,” Peg said. “As long as you don’t fight and just move on, it’s all right. The cops don’t really want to hassle you, but they have to move things around or the people who live here start complaining a lot. Who the hell wants to move, but what can you do?”
His answer back then wouldn’t be that much different today, with the caveat that now sweeps are accompanied by teams that offer services — which most campers refuse, because they’re either too stuck in street life or unhappy with congregate shelters.
And actually, “ping-ponging” was the tactic of choice even before the term “homeless” sprang into use in the early ’80s. People were called winos, bums.
I know because I lived it.
I’ve been on my own since I was very young, and for the first year or so that I was at San Jose State University in the mid-1970s, I lived in my car during semester breaks. The neighborhood was rough, and cops didn’t take kindly to a skinny youngster curled up in a Volkswagen bug. I’d get a rap on the window.
“Move on, bum,” they’d say. I had no choice. I’d drive a few blocks away and go back to sleep.
Columbia University professor Dale Maharidge has written about sweeps since 1980, when he drove to California from Cleveland and slept in his truck until he got a Sacramento Bee reporting job. He’s traveled across America many times to chronicle the homeless and working poor, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way. After decades of watching camps crop up and get batted down, he tells me he hasn’t seen “any real curb on sweeps” except for a brief pause during the pandemic because it was safer to not disrupt people.
He and I marveled that the problem really hasn’t changed since we were youngsters sleeping in our vehicles.
“We need some kind of national policy to really fix this,” Dale said. “But there is no policy. We’re not a society. I don’t know what we are, but not a society.”
Thankfully, cities and counties, especially in the Bay Area, are not as hardball with sweeps as they were even 20 years ago. And though homelessness has mushroomed, along with public exasperation over the street scene, so have resources.
In 2002, San Francisco officials counted 8,600 homeless people on its streets in a one-night tally, and it spent about $150 million a year on homeless services. This year, the one-night count was 8,323, and the city spends around $680 million addressing homelessness. San Francisco today has around 4,000 shelter beds; in 2002 it had only 1,300.
But it’s still not enough.
Four people are hitting the streets for each one who gets housed. Most homelessness workers I talk to say San Francisco needs to create at least 2,000 more shelter beds to get ahead.
In the meantime, city leaders say they’ll continue to offer shelter and housing when they do sweeps. What will that mean in practice? Almost certainly more of the same: pushing people from neighborhood to neighborhood. Yes, often trying to help them — but pushing. With no quick end in sight.
(Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. His book, “The Lost and The Found,” about two homeless people rescued from the streets with the help of his reporting, is due out Feb. 11 of 2025.)
AFTER NEARLY 80 YEARS, A GHOST SHIP IS SEEN OFF BODEGA BAY’S COAST
by Carl Nolte
It was a gray summer morning at sea in deep water 30 miles off the Sonoma County coast, and the research ship Island Pride was searching for a long lost shipwreck. The sonar system, which uses sound waves to find objects under the surface, picked up something — a sunken ship deep in mud on the ocean floor.
Intrigued, researchers sent down three unmanned submersibles, or ROVs, to take a look. The craft circled the wreck using light to penetrate what one researcher called “the eternal darkness of the Pacific’’ and to send back images. It was clear from the shape of the ship that it once was a U.S. Navy destroyer from World War II. But it was also clear from various design modifications that the ship had served in the Imperial Japanese Navy. They had found a ghost.
The Aug. 1 discovery was an amazing find. There was only one ship in the world like this — it was the USS Stewart, a destroyer that had served in both the American and Japanese navies. The Stewart started life as a U.S. Navy destroyer, one of a fleet of hundreds of small, fast, powerful warships. It was badly damaged by Japanese forces in 1942 and repaired and reused by the Japanese Navy. When American pilots saw the old U.S. Navy destroyer sailing under the rising sun flag, they called it “the ghost ship of the Pacific.”
Recaptured by the U.S. Navy again, the Stewart came back from the war to San Francisco, a floating legend, a veteran ship back from the dead. It was a big story in its day. But in 1946, the old ship dropped out of history. The Stewart was towed out the Golden Gate a few miles north and after suitable ceremonies, deliberately sunk. The exact location was a mystery.
“That ship has been on my list for 40 years,’’ said James Delgado, a maritime archeologist who got his start with the National Park Service searching for Gold Rush ships buried under downtown San Francisco.
Delgado, who is vice president of Search, a maritime archeology firm, got his chance when he was contacted by Ocean Infinity, a firm that develops undersea robots. They were testing new robot craft and were looking for a good target.
The use of new and better ROV underwater devices opens up a new world of underwater exploration. The Stewart search is a good example.
Delgado described how he and other researchers directed the ROVs to explore the ship. The first impression was of the ship itself, sitting on the ocean floor upright, as if it were sailing, pretty much intact. “It was a pretty powerful thing to see,” Delgado said. After nearly 80 years under the Pacific the old gray ship was green, covered with plants and sea life.
The researchers were nowhere near the wreck. Delgado was in Washington, D.C., others were in Texas and Florida. Each had its own area of expertise. They directed the robot craft, “Back and forth, back and forth,” Delgado said. “We took our time.” The robots sent back images, too. It is a bit of a surreal thing to watch this kind of undersea exploring in real time; you realize that humans only see the surface of a sea world, underneath is a universe of diverse life, much of it just outside coastal cities like San Francisco. The Stewart wreck, for example, is only a few miles from Bodega Bay.
The scientists are interested in discovering details of the construction of the old ship and how it was operated. But they are also thinking of its human history, and the men who sailed the ship in its career on both sides of the Pacific war.
The ship, first commissioned in 1920, served for years in the U.S. Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines and on river patrols in China. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. fleet was outnumbered and outgunned at first. The Stewart was sent to the then-Dutch East Indies. “Those guys fought hard to try and stop the Japanese advance and were getting pounded,’’ Delgado said. The Stewart was badly damaged and ended up in a drydock. The Americans left the Stewart behind and struck it from the rolls of the U.S. Navy. A new destroyer got the Stewart’s name. But the Japanese repaired the ship, modified it a bit and renamed it Patrol Number 102.
Because it looked like an American ship, U.S. pilots were sometimes reluctant to attack. But they hit the ship hard in Mokpo, Korea. The Japanese sailed the damaged ship back to Japan for repairs.
At the end of the war, the ship was in Kure, Japan, in bad condition. But the U.S. Navy recommissioned the ship, got a crew, and tried to sail it home to the U.S. “We wanted to treat her honorably,” Delgado said.
The Stewart broke down and was towed to San Francisco Bay. Old sailors came aboard, and one was Capt. Charles L. Best, who was the skipper of the Stewart in the ship’s China days. He came from his home in San Diego to San Francisco Bay for a last look. “You know the Navy’s always been like a family,” Delgado said. “And you know what sailors say. You never forget your old ship.”
IN WATERS DEEP
by Eileen Mahoney
In ocean wastes no poppies blow,
No crosses stand in ordered row,
There young hearts sleep… beneath the wave…
The spirited, the good, the brave,
But stars a constant vigil keep,
For them who lie beneath the deep.
‘Tis true you cannot kneel in prayer
On certain spot and think. “He’s there.”
But you can to the ocean go…
See whitecaps marching row on row;
Know one for him will always ride…
In and out… with every tide.
And when your span of life is passed,
He’ll meet you at the “Captain’s Mast.”
And they who mourn on distant shore
For sailors who’ll come home no more,
Can dry their tears and pray for these
Who rest beneath the heaving seas…
For stars that shine and winds that blow
And whitecaps marching row on row.
And they can never lonely be
For when they lived… they chose the sea.
TRUMP PLEDGES TO RENAME ARMY BASE AFTER CONFEDERATE GENERAL
Fort Liberty, previously known as Fort Bragg, was renamed in 2022 as part of a sweeping Army push to change the names of installations honoring Confederate soldiers.
by Irie Sentner
Donald Trump says that North Carolina’s Fort Liberty would once again become Fort Bragg if he’s reelected — less than two years after the base was renamed to remove the name of a Confederate general as part of efforts to reckon with the legacy of racism.
Trump, who opposed the change as president, pledged to restore Fort Bragg’s name during a town hall Friday in the nearby city of Fayetteville, home to many troops and veterans.
“I think I just learned the secret to winning absolutely and by massive margins. I’m going to promise to you … that we’re going to change the name back to Fort Bragg,” the former president said after taking a question about missile defense from a man who identified himself as an active duty soldier at the base.
The military renamed nine installations, including Fort Bragg, as part of a 2021 congressionally mandated process to remove the names of Confederate soldiers that followed widespread social justice protests after the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The North Carolina base was named for Gen. Braxton Bragg, who enslaved people in addition to being a Confederate general with a reputation for battlefield failure.
Fort Bragg and other bases in the south were named for Confederates before and during World War I to build support for the conflict in the South, according to the Department of Defense.
Trump, while in office, vetoed a bipartisan military spending bill in part because it included a recommendation to change the name of Fort Bragg and eight other installations. Congress overrode the veto and Fort Liberty was adopted at the recommendation of a commission following a public comment period.
Former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called for restoring the name Fort Bragg during the Republican primary.
Trump also pledged other changes in the military if reelected.
“We have a great military, and we have a military that’s not woke,” he said. “You may have a few people at the top who are woke, and we’re going to get rid of them so damn fast your head is gonna spin.”
(Politico.com)
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Israel Signals an Escalation of Military Activity in Gaza
Israel has also broadened its attacks in Lebanon in recent days, expanding its campaign against Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed ally of Hamas.
How the Global Push to Avert a Broader War in Lebanon Fell Apart
Diplomats from the U.S., France and the U.N. thought both sides supported a call for a truce. Then Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader.
VANCE SMIRKS HIS WAY INTO THE FUTURE
by Maureen Dowd
When I’ve covered the campaigns of women on presidential tickets, the question invariably arises: “Is she tough enough to be commander in chief?”
With the bubbly Geraldine Ferraro, a lot of voters had their doubts.
There was less worry with Hillary Clinton. She was a gold-plated hawk who voted to let President George W. Bush invade Iraq and persuaded President Barack Obama to join in bombing Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya.
It is not surprising, with cascading conflicts, that Republicans are leveling the toughness question at Kamala Harris. This week the Trump/Vance campaign released an ad called “Weakness.” (Donald Trump also ran an ad called “Weakness” against Nikki Haley, a hawk.)
The ad’s subtext is clearly gender, trying to exploit Kamala’s problems winning over Black and white working-class men.
In a Times/Siena College poll last month, 55 percent of respondents said Trump was respected by foreign leaders while 47 percent said that of Harris.
The ad claims Harris is not tough enough to deal with China, Russia, Iran or Hamas. It features actors playing Vladimir Putin, Hamas fighters and a tea-sipping ayatollah watching videos of the candidate who wants to be the first woman president. It ends with four clips of Kamala dancing — a lot better than Trump does — and a clip of Trump walking on a tarmac with a military officer and a Secret Service agent. The tag line is: “America doesn’t need another TikTok performer. We need the strength that will protect us.”
Even though Trump lives in a miasma of self-pity and his businesses often ended up in bankruptcy, somehow his fans mistake his swagger and sneers for machismo. What a joke. Trump is the one who caves, a foreign policy weakling and stooge of Putin.
This weekend, he is martyr-milking the one moment where he did show courage, the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., by returning to the crime scene and treating it as hallowed ground for his quasi-religious lion imagery. After vowing at the convention to never discuss the event again — “It’s actually too painful to tell” — he wants to wallow in accolades from Elon Musk and JD Vance, and sell more of his $299 “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” high-tops depicting his bloody face and raised fist.
His new ad slams Harris for “anti-Israel statements” that Hamas will use as a green light “to keep murdering Israelis.”
But Harris has said she would always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and she praised Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, saying he was “a terrorist with American blood on his hands.”
She has, however, shown more sympathy for Palestinians than has Joe Biden. In a Trumpworld that thrives on mendacity, demonizing and dividing, sympathy is weakness.
Unless you need to fake it to improve your favorability numbers — like Vance did in his debate against Tim Walz.
David Axelrod had predicted it would be a match between a Labrador retriever and a coyote. But there were two Labs onstage.
Vance’s performance was chilling. Once I thought Trump would be an aberration for Republicans. But on Tuesday night, I saw the future of the party and it was lies piled on lies, and darkness swallowing darkness.
Vance seemed like a replicant. There was no sign of the smarmy right-wing troll who said Harris “can go to hell” and told CNN’s Dana Bash that he created stories about migrants eating cats and dogs to dramatize a narrative that helps the Republican ticket. (A racist narrative.)
His views against abortion are adamantine and, until recently, he was an I.V.F. opponent. He has a bizarre, degrading view of the role of women in American society.
But on Tuesday night, he put on a mask of likability and empathy. “Christ have mercy, it is awful,” Vance said, looking down and shaking his head, when Walz told of his teenage son witnessing a shooting.
The chameleon brought back the JD Vance who was the darling of Hollywood, when “Hillbilly Elegy” was made into a movie, before he ambitiously code-switched into a Trumper. His wife, Usha, a debate adviser, helped him craft a persona that made him more palatable to women.
He was wily and deceptive in how he talked about abortion, stressing that women needed “options” and sending his love to an old friend who he said had had an abortion.
One woman in the CNN focus group was impressed with his empathy and talk of options, saying she was surprised and encouraged that Vance sounded so “progressive.”
But before the 40-year-old JD teamed up with the 78-year-old Donald, his abortion position was draconian. For women in the wrong states, the need to get an abortion is a terrifying prospect that could lead to death, if you are denied the proper treatment. And treatment is harder to get because doctors fear going to jail.
It’s remarkable, given Vance’s compassionate tone in his book, and his plea that the people of Appalachia be understood rather than ridiculed, how easily he morphed into someone with no compassion, stereotyping migrants and women.
After nearly 90 minutes of being lulled by Vance’s sham persona, Walz finally ripped his opponent’s mask off when Vance refused to say Trump lost the last election.
“Tim,” Vance protested, “I’m focused on the future.”
It was the truest thing Vance said in a night of lying about his own positions and mythical Trump achievements.
Vance was focused on the future — his own.
(NY Times)
TAIBBI & KIRN
Matt Taibbi: So getting back to Helene though, so this is going to come into play, all these things that we’re talking about because this is going to be a big issue for people who live in struggling areas and especially in that area and they’re going to notice certain things, right? So just as what happened with Katrina, I remember George Bush got in tremendous trouble because he waited a day to address it and then he flew over the area and got down in traditional Bush-y in fashion, said, “God, that’s horrible. It must be doubly bad on the ground.”
I forget the exact quote, but the idea was he didn’t go, right? He flew over and then said, “Yeah, that must really suck if you were actually there, which I’m not going to do, right?” And what happened with this, Biden and Harris visit a storm-ravaged area. President Joe Biden flew over storm ravaged parts of North Carolina on Wednesday, and President Kamala Harris ventured, I’m sorry, vice President Kamala Harris ventured farther south to Georgia to speak with emergency responders and devastated families in some of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Helene. So again, it’s sort of a flyover, right? And is that going to bounce back on Biden the same way it bounced back on Bush? I don’t know. We’ll see. I think it will though. And there was some evidence that that’s the case. We’re going to get to a pretty funny clip in a minute, but I don’t know. Walter, what do you think so far about the response?
Walter Kirn: Oh, it’s not going to bounce back in the press the way it did or it would have already. I imagine stories are going to come out of the sort of Republicans pounce type about how in some political sense, it’s being used against the administration. But the original editorials that came out with Bush that criticized him for overflying a stricken area haven’t happened and aren’t going to. I have held from about the beginning of this presidential season, which is endless and goes back over a year, that it is a competition between reality and propaganda, I guess would be the word. And that the enemy of the administration, of the incumbent administration is reality, which they seem to have a real hard time dealing with. They minimize the economic distress out there. They minimize, I think the sort of overall sense of breakdown and disorder and chaos and incompetence that people are seeing.
And in this case, we have a very acute case of, I think, not initially responding in a realistic fashion to what happened. So I think it’s bad for them. And to be honest with you, I’ve developed a pretty good sense for what is affecting people and what people are talking about. I travel a lot. I talk to everybody. I’m a curious guy and I’m on social media obviously, but it is deceptive in all sorts of ways now and tends to feed back to your assumptions. So I don’t trust it anywhere near as much as I might have in the old days. But I think this is radicalizing people. I know it’s radicalizing people. They’re saying, “Why the hell am I paying taxes?”
Matt Taibbi: Right.
Walter Kirn: What am I doing supporting foreign wars and politicians who sign artillery shells when my grandmother is incommunicado up in the mountains and I can’t get to her? There are no communications. One big issue has been internet coverage of the area. Elon Musk has kind of inserted himself in the situation to say, listen, these people would’ve had Starlink if certain government programs, which I was completely willing to cooperate with, had actually functioned, but they don’t. And I’ve seen story after story of people bringing in Starlink satellites to the area. As a Starlink customer out in the woods where my other cabin is, I know it’s a very effective internet connection for the most remote areas. I mean, kind of amazing. I’ve watched the progression of that technology over the last few years, and it really is a game changer.
So people are asking who really have drilled down on the situation, “Why don’t we already have this? Isn’t there a government mandate to provide internet to underserved areas?” Well, all you have to do is get one of these $150 or $100 a month satellite dishes. I think it’s a devastating issue for the Democrats right now in the middle of an election. There’s some question as to whether Western North Carolina will be able to vote in time or devote itself to the election. Other than Asheville, North Carolina, the sort of more liberal, cosmopolitan, small city, I would imagine it’s a very conservative area politically, one that would balance out-
Matt Taibbi: It is. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. One that would balance out the Eastern University research Triangle areas in Charlotte and so on. So that’s a chilling thought, and it’s being voiced all over the place. Are they ignoring us because we don’t vote the right way?
Matt Taibbi: Right, right. And well, let’s look at some stats about the thing that you just mentioned. The GAO put out a study a couple years ago about the decline of services to rural America, and they’re really interesting. There are things that I heard over the years. I covered a congressional race in upstate New York a while ago where one of the big issues was we just have to drive farther to get to anything that we need. Right?
Walter Kirn: Mm-hm.
Matt Taibbi: You’ll see a stat in there that says more than a hundred hospitals closed between 2013 and 2020. That’s 4% of all hospitals in the country. And as a result, residents have to travel about 20 miles farther for common services like inpatient care and 40 miles farther for less common services like alcohol or drug misuse treatment. And then it’s even farther from that for things like natal care. If you have to deliver a baby in some parts of the country, you’re driving 50, 60, even a hundred miles in some places. If you go even farther down the page here, you’ll see that many rural residents have to turn to telehealth services instead of going to hospitals via phone or video when care isn’t available locally. The problem is that as of 2019, at least 17% of people living in rural areas lacked broadband internet access compared to 1% of people in urban areas. And there’s just stat after stat about access to things like OB-GYN care, how far away you are from a VA, that kind of stuff. And these stories they tend not to make it to national coverage all that much, but when they do, we hear it in the form of they’re disproportionately consuming federal taxes. It’s the rich states supporting the poor states, et cetera, et cetera. And that combined with things like-
Walter Kirn: Think about that reasoning. We’ve had a Democratic administration for the last four years, and we had one except for the Trump interregnum for the previous eight. One of the banners of the Democratic platform is always help for the underprivileged and equity and reproductive care and so on. But in my experience as a resident of rural America and as someone who grew up in it and has spent most of his life in it, things have deteriorated terribly. And the idea that the rich should not have to support these places or are inordinately subsidizing them is amazing coming from an establishment that is now largely controlled by the Democratic Party. A what?
Matt Taibbi: Right, right. This is-
Walter Kirn: These poor people are stealing our resources.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, yeah. The level of delusion that you have to have even to have that thought is incredible. And this is a story that it goes back a long way in America. Right? I mean, if you think about William Jennings Bryan the Cross of Gold speech that he gave, that all grew out of this disproportional treatment economically of the rural poor versus the urban rich. That was a time when it was very hard for farmers to get access to capital, so they were completely under the thumb of New York bankers in order to have any kind of profit margin for farming. And what they wanted was more access to money through things like free silver. Right?
Walter Kirn: Bimetallism it was called.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Bimetallism, yeah. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: It was the backing of the currency by not just gold but silver too, which basically would allow looser, freer money. And it’s the original populist outcry. I guess after Jacksonian populism in America, we had this Bryan style around the turn of the century. I grew up with William Jennings Bryan as the great whipping boy of American culture.
Matt Taibbi: Of course. Inherit the Wind.
Walter Kirn: Inherit the Wind, Spencer Tracy playing the blowhard bigot. No Nothing. William Jennings Bryan and so on. He really was the original Trump in some ways in his treatment by the culture. I can only imagine the movies that will be made 15 years from now about all of Trump’s crimes whether or not-
Matt Taibbi: Jack Smith is going to be the new Clarence Darrow.
Walter Kirn: Right, right. Exactly. But in general, this argument that the colonies, and I’ll call them the colonies now because I do think we live in a kind of colonialist society in which big metropolitan centers of finance and so on look out at the places that have natural resources and fewer people as dependents that they have a right to control, ignore, even vilify if necessary. And I’ve watched the process accelerate over the years, and it’s going on right now in all these constitutional debates about the electoral college because one of the few advantages that rural places have in our political system is that there are two senators per state, no matter who. That can’t really be changed, I don’t think, but-
Matt Taibbi: Oh, I disagree. I think they’ll try.
Walter Kirn: Yeah.
Matt Taibbi: Well-
Walter Kirn: So from this argument that they take more than they give, more taxes are spent on them than they pay, so they have undue influence through the Electoral College and so on, and labels like deplorables and white supremacy and other things. One of the worst things about the white supremacy argument is it’s often directed at southern states and the rural areas of southern states that have huge Black populations. As though there are no Black farmers in America, no Black rural residents in America or Hispanic for that matter. I mean, the settlement in places like Iowa of Hispanic immigrants is largely, well, in small towns, I would say. I’ve seen that in my travels over and over. Towns that are hard done by, and we see this in Springfield, Ohio, which isn’t totally rural, are being resettled by migrants. So the idea that the empty spaces of America are just filled up with white people is a lie. It’s something that the metropolitan liberal tells herself so that they can justify this demonization campaign.
Matt Taibbi: And this was like the thesis of Thomas Frank’s book, The People, No. Right? So he traced the whole history of the populist movement, the actual populist party. And one of the reasons, because Tom has great affection for the original populists, and he went to great lengths to point out that it wasn’t just rural white people. There were also Black farmers who joined that cause. Right? But his main point was that once they started to show any kind of ability to organize and have political power, that there was this enormous PR effort to suppress them and label them as nativists, racists, bigoted. And then crucially, which I think is incredibly interesting, traitorous. Right? So especially when populism resurfaced under FDR, it was labeled a kind of red menace alliance with Russia.
Walter Kirn: And it still is-
Matt Taibbi: Exactly.
Walter Kirn: Even though Russia’s not red anymore.
Matt Taibbi: Right.
Walter Kirn: It’s still the fact that somehow dissatisfaction in rural areas is the work of Putin or some other foreign devil. I think that back to the hurricane, this is a microcosm, even though it’s not very small, this is a big storm and a big area that’s been affected by it. It’s a microcosmic look at the contempt in which these places are held and the way that they’re ill-served in all kinds of ways. And I too feel that the history of populism in America has been terribly misconstrued and misstated. And I think in this case, you’re going to have a major backlash because in a weird way, how you deal with storms is an essential political fact.
Someone told me that the mandate of heaven in China, which when leaders have it, they are in favor, but when it is perceived that it has departed, they’re no longer in favor was linked to how well they maintained the levy system that prevented floods. So when great floods would happen in China, and it was perceived that the levies had failed or had not been properly maintained, they got rid of the leader. They said the mandate of heaven has been lost. And one thing that’s important to realize is that in rural America, which is dependent on the cycles of nature largely for agricultural and other reasons, there is a kind of deep primal sense that when something really goes wrong and you’re left alone, it’s a sin. It represents a failure on an almost theological level.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And the contempt that comes from the cities, they feel it much more acutely than I think people in cities feel the reverse. Like for urban America, and I know this because unlike you, I spent most of my life living in cities. The image of rural America is basically like Republicans that we see on TV. Unless you go out of your way to visit those places, that’s going to be what you hear. So for most people, and this comes into play with a clip we’re about to show with Paul Krugman. Their whole idea of what rural America is, is complaining voters who pick candidates that they don’t like. And that was again, the premise of another Thomas Frank book What’s the Matter with Kansas? where the liberal voter, for some reason, couldn’t process why rural America wouldn’t vote for Democrats. They just struggled with that idea because they didn’t know anybody from those places and they didn’t understand what was important to them. And there were a lot of things like resentment, the condescension about religion, about patriotism, all these things come into play. And a lot of urban voters just aren’t conscious of these things. But anyway, let’s look at the Paul Krugman thing because this is kind of amazing. He gave an address at CUNY, City University of New York and got heckled.
Paul Krugman: Okay.
Speaker 2: Uh-oh! No-Ball Prize-winning economist here to tell us how great the economy is. I certainly wonder how the residents of Asheville, North Carolina must be feeling right now with no access to power or water or communication with the outside world. I wonder how enthusiastic they are about the economy right now. I wonder how enthusiastic the residents of the South Bronx must be feeling about the economy. Hey, maybe North Carolina should rename itself Israel so it’ll get $20 billion in aid. Or maybe Ukraine so it can get $300 billion in aid. Maybe the South Bronx should do the same thing. I mean, I’m sure the economy is great for smug liberals like yourself who make $5 million and are worth $5 million. I’m sure the economy must be great for all you smug journalists, economists, all of you must be having a great time with the economy when most people can’t even pay for basic necessities for people who are getting evicted because they can’t pay their rent.
Matt Taibbi: This is awesome.
Speaker 2: Because over in the South Bronx just a few miles away from here, there are portions of buildings that are literally collapsing. And I’m supposed to give a shit about the stock market.
Walter Kirn: This is when it gets good, people.
Speaker 2: You want to know why the presidential election is tied right now? Because our money is being sent to Israel and Ukraine so that they can continue to bomb innocent women and children! You think that’s a great economy? I’m sure Israel with their free healthcare is having a great time with American taxpayer money. Hey, is anybody here going to talk about the fact that we could be at war with Iran in a few days? Or do we need to focus on the S&P 500? Is that what actually matters? Huh? The S&P 500? When most people may not even be alive here in a few days just because we’re on the verge of nuclear war? Hey, listen to me, Mr. Krugman. Your degree is worthless! You might as well use it as paperweight because it means nothing! I hope you enjoy the dead children that the economy is powering! Our economy is definitely very powerful right now! All that stock market money goes to the military complex so that more innocent women and children are dead! And fuck off with The New York Times, the liberal apologists for war and genocide. You all fucking suck! People need to wake up right now and we need to have peace. We can work with China. We can work with Russia! We don’t need to start war with Iran. All right, I’m-
Walter Kirn: Okay. Just as a public service, that speaker to William Jennings Bryan of our moment deserves to be heard. Not because he’s right-
Matt Taibbi: Totally.
Walter Kirn: … about everything, but because he has a right to be heard.
Matt Taibbi: Great oratory.
Walter Kirn: It was great oratory. What I loved were the ineffectual attempts to block the camera by people. Some guy waving a hat in front of him.
Matt Taibbi: I know. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: But no one tackled him. No one really got up there. So I’m glad he got to speak his piece or shout his piece. It was a-
Matt Taibbi: You all fucking suck.
Walter Kirn: You may as well use your fucking degree as a paperweight. Degrees don’t weigh much. They are paper, so they really can’t weigh other paper. But that aside, I think you all fucking suck. Matt, that’s a little like your oratory last Sunday in D.C. except you delivered it-
Matt Taibbi: He was better. No, his delivery was like 90 times better. That was awesome. Yeah. If he had done it, yeah.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. Sadly, we live in a country where that guy will probably start a YouTube channel and yell every week like Howard Beale in Network. That was like Howard Beale in Network, by the way. It was exactly like him.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Walter Kirn: The movie I suggest people watch weekly these days, but-
Matt Taibbi: There’s a guy who does a thing on Twitter about bad NBA coaching.
Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And all he does is just yell into the screen like Steve Kerr, what the fuck are you doing? You should be fired. How do you still have a job? And it’s hilarious. I mean, this is the most amazing thing. Look what was in the screen. Can we just start the video just for a second? Because I think people might’ve missed one of the key details, which is what was up on the screen.
Walter Kirn: Yeah., I was wondering that.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Perceptions of the economy and the impact on the election. All right?
Walter Kirn: Oh my Lord. This guy had every right to scream.
Matt Taibbi: Right? I mean, I’m surprised he didn’t throw pikes through their skulls in the middle. You know what I’m saying? Like here we are in Manhattan with a-
Walter Kirn: A bunch of guys sitting with their legs crossed on a well-lit stage in front of a giant screen that’s all about perceptions.
Matt Taibbi: Talking about how people out there are misperceiving the economy. And this is one of Krugman’s main themes for years now, is that people-
Walter Kirn: Yes.
Matt Taibbi: … are claiming to have a bad economy when really things are awesome.
Walter Kirn: I got spanked on Twitter the other day by a leading national journalist associated with The Atlantic because I suggested that the Longshoremen’s demand for a 77% raise over the next 60 years, which they also justify as making up for having fallen behind in the last few, represented a reasonable request given the rates of inflation. And this person came at me and said, “What? But inflation is only 2.5% or something right now.”
Matt Taibbi: Oh my God. Since when?
Walter Kirn: That’s what I was told. “Stand down, Walter. You’re misperceiving the economy.” Well, I can tell you, I don’t care if I’m misperceiving it because the perceptions are also reflected in my bank account. And they’re also reflected in the receipts that my wife, for some reason, feels she has to keep from the store every time she shops for eggs.
WILL THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY END GENOCIDE AND CHAMPION WINNING DOMESTIC ISSUES IN TIME FOR NOVEMBER?
by Ralph Nader
With little more than four weeks to go before the November elections, polls show the Trump/Harris race as “too close to call.” Winning should be a breeze for Harris and the other Democratic candidates. The GOP’s Congressional votes and policies are bad for women, children, and workers. The GOP doesn’t recognize and act against climate violence, it protects the corporate-favorable tax code, it is soft on corporate crooks, it scuttles regulatory protections for the peoples’ health, safety, and economic wellbeing and mocks the dire necessity of preparedness for future pandemics. (The military Empire with its violent war crimes and runaway budget-busting drain on our domestic necessities is supported by both Parties and not in electoral contention.)
Why so close, then? Because for years, the Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP. It has hired corporate-conflicted political consulting firms that control campaign messages, strategies and has excluded access by citizen groups to candidates, generally preferring corporatism over democracy, regardless of its rhetoric.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country — the red states — and surrender them to the Republicans. The mountain states and North and South Dakota used to have Democrats representing them in the Senate. Failing to compete in these low population states concedes about ten Senate seats at the outset.
Most telling in these last remaining days is the refusal for Kamala Harris and most Congressional candidates to have front and center proven and proper vote-getting agendas reflecting the New Deal.
To begin with I’m referring to raising the GOP frozen federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour from its present $7.25. Democrats need more than a throwaway line on wages. They need to pour some of the billions of dollars raised into media and groundgame campaigns around the slogan “go vote for a raise, you’ve long earned and been denied by the Republicans.” That, authentically conveyed by thousands of Democratic candidates will get the attention of 25 million underpaid and struggling workers, who make our real economy run daily. Why aren’t the Dems ringing that bell?
Another winner for 65 million elderly voters is to pledge with full throttle to increase Social Security benefits frozen for half a century and to raise the Social Security tax on the wealthy to pay for it. Astonishingly, Kamala Harris and her handlers are not championing the “Social Security 2100 Act” which had 200 sponsors in the Congress, led by Congressman John Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal. The throwaway line is that they “will protect social security” as it deficiently exists. Talk is not enough. The Democrats need to organize and communicate to drive this message.
Third, they should be championing government-paid child care, maternal and family sick leave and the child tax credit — all opposed by the Wall Street GOP. Paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy — this issue is an 85 percent poll winner. Instead, Harris and the Dems mumble with some general rhetoric that nobody really believes. Western countries have long had such social safety net protections for families and children.
Get-out-the-vote efforts are still inadequate. The Party has trouble listening to Rev. William Barber who argues that just a ten to fifteen percent increase in low-wage voter turnout from 2020 would win the November elections. Instead of scapegoating the Green Party and spending money to block Third Party ballot access, the Democrats should try harder to tap into the 80 to 90 million non-voters who stay home, many of whom don’t see anything benefiting them coming from bloviating, hypocritical politicians.
If readers want more ideas for ways to get more votes, such as midnight shift campaigning, and cracking down on corporate crooks, they can obtain my usable new book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People https://nader.org/books/lets-start-the-revolution/“ and go to winningamerica.net.
Are you wondering why Tim Walz didn’t do better against J.D. Vance in the VP debate? Vance managed to normalize criminal felon Trump with his serial lies and law violations, corruption, abuse of women, awful presidential record (recall his lethal mocking of the early Covid-19 pandemic), because Walz was muzzled by the Harris campaign operatives. He was told what not to speak about and to hew to the narrow Party line. That kind of advice may sink the genocidal Democratic Party with its insular cowardliness in November.
Will these observations get the attention of the tiny number of ruling Democratic Party operatives who make most of the major decisions for their rank and file? Probably not. But similar advice from loyal party columnists like Dana Milbank, Michelle Goldberg, Eugene Robinson, Charles Blow, E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, among others, may breach the upper deck’s aloofness.
BURN THE PLANET AND LOCK UP THE DISSIDENTS
The fossil fuel industry, and the politician class they own, have no intention of halting the ecocide. As the climate crisis worsens, so do the laws and security measures to keep us in bondage.
by Chris Hedges
Norfolk, U.K. — I am sitting with Roger Hallam, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in the visitor’s room at HM Prison Wayland. On the walls are large photographs of families picnicking on lawns, verdant meadows and children playing. The juxtaposition of the photographs, no doubt hung to give the prison visiting room a homey feel, is jarring. There is no escaping, especially with prison guards circulating around us, where we are. Roger and I sit on squat upholstered chairs and face each other across from a low, white plastic table. Roger’s lanky frame tries to adjust to furniture designed to accommodate children.
Roger, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, is serving a five-year prison sentence for “causing a public nuisance without reasonable excuse.”
He and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic. The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses.
This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, preserved by protective glass, in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did, commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protestors who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years.
Global warming is expected to exceed 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 2020s and 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit) before 2050, according to a 2023 study published in the Oxford Open Climate Change journal. NASA scientists warn that “a 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur.”
The more the planet warms, the more extreme events such as severe droughts, heat waves, intense storms, and heavy rainfall intensify. The extinction of animal and plant life — one million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction — accelerates.
We are on the verge of tipping points, thresholds beyond which ice sheets, ocean circulation patterns, and other components of the climate system sustain and accelerate irreversible changes. There are also tipping points in ecosystems, which can become so degraded that no effort to save them can halt the effects of runaway climate change. At that point “feedback loops” see environmental catastrophes accelerate each other. The game will be up. Nothing will save us.
Mass death from climate disasters is becoming the norm. The official death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 227, making it the deadliest in mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In North Carolina, South Carolina and northern Georgia 1.1 million people remain without power. Mountain towns, without electricity and cell phone service, are cut off. Hundreds of people are missing with many of them feared dead. Anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people were killed last year in a single night by Cyclone Daniel in Libya.
These climate catastrophes, which occur routinely in the Global South, will soon characterize life for all of us.
“A billion refugees, the worst episode of suffering in human history,” Roger says of the 2 degrees Celsius mark, “and then human extinction.”
And yet with the devastation outside their doors, including the Southwest United States enduring the highest temperatures ever recorded in October — 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Palm Springs — the global oligarchs have no intention of risking their privilege and power by disrupting an economy driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture, which is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock and their byproducts account for 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released each year into the atmosphere and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead of a rational response, we get more drilling and oil leases, more catastrophic storms, more wildfires, more droughts, toxic factory farms, the charade of the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the eradication of the rain forests and the false panacea of geoengineering, carbon capture and artificial intelligence.
Fossil fuel subsidies have increased worldwide — from $2 trillion to $7 trillion according to the International Monetary Fund — as governments seek to protect consumers from rising energy prices. This is despite the fact that two years ago, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.
The governments that facilitate genocide in Gaza are, not surprisingly, the overlords of global genocide.
As the Swedish author and professor of human ecology Andreas Malm writes, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the earth.”
“The destruction of Gaza is executed by tanks and fighter jets pouring out their projectiles over the land: the Merkavas and the F-16s sending their hellfire over the Palestinians, the rockets and bombs that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right trajectory,” writes Malm who with Wim Carton wrote “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.” “All these military vehicles run on petroleum. So do the supply flights from the US, the Boeings that ferry the missiles over the permanent airbridge. An early, provisional, conservative analysis found that emissions caused during the first 60 days of the war equaled annual emissions of between 20 and 33 low-emitting countries: a sudden spike, a plume of CO2 rising over the debris of Gaza. If I repeat the point here, it is because the cycle is self-repeating, only growing in scale and size: Western forces pulverize the living quarters of Palestine by mobilizing the boundless capacity for destruction only fossil fuels can give.”
The genocide is tied to fossil fuels in other ways.
“One of the many frontiers of oil and gas extraction is the Levant basin along the coast running from Beirut via Akka to Gaza,” Malm writes. “Two of the major gas fields discovered here, called Karish and Leviathan, are in waters claimed by Lebanon. What does the West think of this dispute? In 2015, Germany sold four warships to Israel so it could better defend its gas platforms against any eventualities. Seven years later, in 2022, as the war in Ukraine caused a crisis on the gas market, the state of Israel was for the first time elevated into a fossil fuel exporter of note, supplying Germany and other EU states with gas as well as crude oil from Leviathan and Karish, which came online in October of that year. 2022 sealed the high status of Israel in this department.”
“A year later, Toufan al-Aqsa [the incursion into Israel from the Gaza by Palestinian fighters on Oct. 7, 2023] threw a spanner in the expansion,” Malm notes. “It posed a direct threat to the Tamar gas platform, which can be seen from northern Gaza on a clear day; in the range of rocket fire, the platform was shut down. A major player on the Tamar field is Chevron. On 9 October, the New York Times reported: ‘The fierce fighting could slow the pace of energy investment in the region, just as the eastern Mediterranean’s prospects as an energy center have gained momentum.”
Expanding Israeli production requires occupying Gaza’s coastline and the removal of the Palestinians.
“Five weeks after 7 October, however, when most of northern Gaza had been comfortably turned into rubble, Chevron resumed operations at the Tamar gas field,” Malm continues. “In February, it announced another round of investment to further bolster output. In late October, the day after the ground invasion of Gaza began, the state of Israel awarded 12 licenses for the exploration of new gas fields — one of the companies picking them up being BP, the very same company that first discovered oil in the Middle East and built the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline.”
The connection between the genocide in Gaza and global mass death is not lost on the Global South, where climate refugees are dying on the open seas and in deserts as they attempt to flee north. UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, calculates that weather-related “sudden onset hazards” — such as floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures — forcibly displaced an annual average of 21.5 million people every year between 2008 and 2016. There are now 260 million people in coastal areas — an increase of 100 million from three decades ago — who are at “high risk” of being displaced by rising sea levels. Ninety percent of them live in poor developing countries and small island states.
As the ecocide and genocide in Gaza accelerates, we also get more draconian laws to criminalize protests.
Laws designed to protect the fossil fuel industry in the U.K. include “conspiracy to interfere with national infrastructure” or the new “lock on” offense that can see a protester who attaches him or herself to an object, land or another person with some form of adhesive or handcuffs, in a manner that is capable of causing serious disruption, go to prison for six months and receive an unlimited fine.
The trajectory is clear. Burn the planet. Lock up dissidents. Censorship. Crush those who resist, especially those in the Global South, with industrial weapons and indiscriminate violence. And, if you are part of the privileged class, retreat into gated compounds that provide food, water, medical care, electricity and security that will be denied to the rest of us.
In the end, everyone will go the way of the dinosaurs, who, at least, were not responsible for their own demise. The tragedy is that most of the ruling criminal class will probably survive a little longer than the rest of us.
Collective suicide will define what we call human progress.
The three-week trial for the Just Stop Oil activists, like the court hearings for Julian Assange, denied the accused the right to submit objective evidence. The defendants were not permitted to speak about climate change, the motive for their protest. Roger, defying the ban, attempted to address the jury about the climate crisis. The judge ordered him arrested for contempt of court. He was removed from the courtroom by six police officers. When the judge sentenced Roger and his co-defendants, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin, he told them that they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.”
The five activists were not convicted for taking part in the protests, but for its planning. The evidence used in court to convict them came from an online Zoom meeting that was captured by Scarlet Howes, a reporter posing as a supporter from the tabloid newspaper “The Sun.” No doubt some fossil fuel think tank is dreaming up a journalism prize for Howes now.
Sentences for those engaging in climate protests have steadily got harsher, longer than many of the sentences imposed on those who engaged in acts of violence during the racist riots in Southport, as Linda Lakhdhit, the legal director of Climate Rights International, points out.
I have long admired Roger, who has on the rust-colored vest all prisoners in the visiting room are required to wear, not only for his courage, but for his belief that resistance against radical evil is a moral imperative. It is not, ultimately, about what we can or cannot achieve. It is about defying, quite literally when we speak of the ecocide, the forces of death to protect and nurture life.
I addressed a crowd in London on Sept. 11 to raise money for the legal defense of the five imprisoned activists. The organizers at the Kairos Center played a recorded introduction Roger had sent from his prison cell before my talk.
“Change,” he said in the taped message, “comes about not through instrumental reason, that meaning, you do something in order to get something to happen, but rather because you cannot stand by, and so you act, in order to be what you are. The critical reason we’re failing, in my view, is because we buy into the idea that they can oppress us by sending us to prison. While in fact, power resides in our fear of going to prison, not the act of doing it in itself. Once we realize it’s all about fear, we have that lightbulb moment. It’s not what they do to us, it’s how we choose to react that determines their power.”
“You carry out the good, not to create good outcomes,” he says to me, “but because it is good, because it’s truthful, because it’s a beautiful thing to do, because it creates a metaphysical harmony, a balance.”
The tactics employed over the past few decades by environmentalists — marching, lobbying, voting and petitioning — have failed.
In 1900, the burning of fossil fuel — mostly coal — produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That number rose threefold by 1950. Today the level is nearly 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the six decades the increase in CO2 was 100 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This is Roger’s seventh time incarcerated in the British prison system which is plagued by a lack of adequate funding, decaying infrastructure, reduced services, staff recruitment and retention issues and severe overcrowding.
“When I first went to prison the guards could be sadists, ex-military from our colonial wars,” he says. “Now they are usually polite, but nothing works.”
His shoes disintegrated, but his repeated requests for new shoes were ignored. Another prisoner, who had an extra pair, gave them to him.
I line up at the small canteen to buy us something to eat. I have been allowed to bring 40 British pounds into the prison. On the menu they have a vegan sausage sandwich. Roger and I are vegan. But when I get to the counter, I am curtly informed the vegan options are unavailable.
Roger argues that if 10,000 people are willing to engage in civil resistance, which means accepting prison terms for non-violent civil disobedience, carry out grassroots educational campaigns and mobilize public assemblies, they can ignite one to two percent of the population to embrace the militancy to rupture the existing order.
He draws on the research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, and Maria J. Stephan who examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And we only need one to five percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.
“It’s not only about changing the world,” Roger says. “It’s about seeing the world in a different way, one that rejects the narrative of the dominant ideology. It is a re-enchantment of the world. It is about our spirit taking center stage. This is where it belonged all the time. But the spirit only becomes real through action. The spirit is made flesh, to use some old language.”
“I am not calling for an individualistic journey to personal enlightenment, which is a contradiction in terms,” he says. “I am not calling for calmness that never leaves your head, that never gets you off the couch and into the streets. The spirit is in the street. The street is the spirit. The spirit is in the prison cell. The time for pretending is over. We are facing the end of the old world, and we are going to have to battle to create what comes next.”
And then it is time to leave. We embrace. I promise to mail him books. Those of us in the visiting room are lined up and escorted by the guards through a series of locked doors to the prison courtyard.
Roger is paying a steep price for resistance, for the moral life.
Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to protest the U.S. invasion of Mexico, which he condemned as an effort to seize territory to expand slavery. He was arrested and jailed for tax evasion in 1846.
“I say, break the law,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist philosopher whose Divinity School address provoked outrage among the clergy and led Harvard University not to invite him back to speak for another thirty years, visited Thoreau in jail.
“Henry, what are you doing in here?” Emerson asked.
“What are you doing out there?” Thoreau responded.
(chrishedges.substack.com)
Re the stinky choo choo, actions speak a lot louder than words. Didn’t they both file an appeal of the Willits case and sue Fort Bragg this week? That’s a great corporate neighbor. Now cue Jacob (wonder what his last name is – not) and Chris Hart coming in to tell me how they are trying to improve Fort Bragg. What a load of crap, they want to set up to build that incinerator in case the big choo choo resort doesn’t happen. Never trust corporations or the people who run them.
So in Barbara’s World, only people you like are allowed to take legal action, and all businesses and business people are bad.
The gasifier developed our Sierra Energy company was only considered for the millsite when former City Manager Miller asked us to do so. You appear to be fixated on very old technology and not modern advances. FastOx gasification turns waste into clean synthesis gas without burning or creating new waste byproducts.
I have never supported any trash burning on the Mill Site or anywhere in Fort Bragg nor am I a railroad booster, I just think the City’s current legal challenge isn’t a cost effective way to address people’s concerns about future Mill Site development because it won’t actually address what most people think it will. My last name is Patterson in case you were implying I am part of the Hart family, which I am not. My personal preference for the Mill Site is for most of it to be restored to coastal prarie grasslands and a wildlife corridor and habitat along with creek and wetland restoration in the center.
“Fort Bragg’s actions aren’t rejecting growth.”
Past time that people woke up to the reality that infinite “growth” is what will wipe us dumb monkeys from the planet.
I’m a big fan of Chris Hedges, particularly his viewpoints on the constant threats from over-zealous. Christian Nationalists, but the climate warriors are not really my cup of tea.
I always felt that, if you really wanted to make an impact, just go Amish. Put your money where your mouth is and drop out. Grow your own food. Build your own barns. Ride your horse-drawn buggy to town.
But eco-warriors are more thespians than altruists.
As my Dad always said during the timber wars, “if those hippies had any balls they’d strap on some dynamite and jump down the smokestack at the pulp mill.”
It’s not really about such individual actions, Altho those are good too (agree that too much of it is show-off, and not really any sacrifice, such as stopping flying, cutting driving, not eating meat – hell, not having kids – the stuff that really makes a collective impact). It’s really about regulating and incentivizing the corporations and governments that are the real problem, as is the scientific and policy consensus.. Of course Trump offered $1billion to the oil CEOs to remove all such efforts – talk about a swamp. Wealthy folks figure they’re immune, but are in for a rude one.
Re: online comment of the day…
Maybe Divine Intervention will save Fort Bragg from the evil Skunk Train…
Not only does JD Vance smirk his way through the campaign . He does it with more eyeliner than any other contestant.
All the worlds a stage…
RESIDENTS, COMMUTERS IMPLORE SONOMA COUNTY TO REPAIR DANGEROUS STRETCH OF LAKEVILLE HIGHWAY
In the 70s, heading south from Sonoma, past the race track on Highway 121, then down Highway 37 to Lakeville Road, and back to Sonoma on Stage Gulch road, was one of my preferred routes for an evening drive in the summer. Lakeville Road in those days was a dream, and smooth. Shows what overpopuation causes…
Re Del Potter’s Misunderstanding About the Skunk Litigation
I agree with Del that local land use oversight is critical not just here in Fort Bragg but everywhere. If the expensive litigation actually addressed that, it might be worthwhile but it doesn’t really do that. Right now even without this litigation, the City already has oversight and control of permitting on the Mill Site, including about the central mill pond with its cleanup needs. This expensive lawsuit doesn’t affect that at all. The false narrative about what the litigation will address is why many people support it but if they understood it won’t actually do much of anything other than address whether or not the Skunk Train could use eminent domain in California in the future and doesn’t change what permitting and oversight will be required for everything except potential railroad track changes would they think it is a wise use of public money? Probably not. All current councilmembers, not just Lindy, are ultimately responsible for the decision to effectively throw our scarce tax revenue away. Del and others should research the actual scope of this expensive litigation and not just assume it will address all the issues rumor-mongering suggests it will.
Good point, Jacob. I agree that what people – and councilmembers – say the lawsuit will accomplish doesn’t match what the lawsuit would actually do, if successful. It is like one of those State propositions where the content doesn’t match the nice-sounding 30-second commercial.
DURING an address at CUNY, City University of New York, NY TIMES columnist Paul Krugman got heckled by the all time greatest heckler:
Great job of heckling a pompous ass. Eff Israhell. Eff Ukraine.
These depressing AVA editions lately combined with more than a hunch that an ideologue is in charge, has folks looking for the divine! Even though Craig left, the divine might still be around! You might end up with a smile if you try this:
Holy Spirit, enter into my heart and enlighten every corner of this neglected vessel with cheerful beam. SOL
Good one–made me smile.
Okay Cot, I’ll try to lighten things up with some fun submissions…
I agree, it’s almost all very skimmible these daze, though I did find a couple articles to print
and read at my leisure today, as I do most days…
“Skimmibles” Good one,I’ll remember that.
VANCE SMIRKS HIS WAY INTO THE FUTURE
We have nothing but poopheads running, and running the pore ol’ country. Well, whatcha expect from the offspring of a bunch of illegal, WHITE immigrants, from backward Europa…? I’m surprised Vance doesn’t have snot dripping from his nose, the big baby.
Economists agree another Trump term would ruin the US economy — will voters listen?
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4909602-trump-radical-economic-plan-disaster/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFvnX1leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHV1U79KilZv3ArHl-iDhcUkRF2NZ-0X9KmeaCTyIBifwOh-OYh0KRetbDw_aem_m3VPeUAbW9thJYhOFx7Nsg
ED NOTES
“THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is the problem, you fools! Don’t you understand anything? And at your age, too!”
I get it, Bruce, I really do, and am sure others do, too. The party needs to be reformed and renewed, get back on track— and we all know it .
It’s just that, as Judith Gage says in her letter today, after acknowledging in summary our country’s serious plights: “All else aside, we can’t hand over what’s left of our democracy to the likes of Donald Trump.”
That’s the heart of the matter. Vote for and elect Democrats, cast aside Trump and his whole bunch of crazies. THEN— push and push and push, relentlessly, for the Democrats to adopt truly progressive policies and actions that truly serve the people.
BTW, of lesser import, but still— loved your prose poem yesterday— the Asian teenage girls in giddy love with their favorite player. A sweet little slice of life, given out of the blue by the Gods to Bruce Anderson, baseball fan. The rest of us weren’t there, but we got to see it through your memory and pen.
Re. The Dems et al: In spite of himself, Donald Rumsfeld quipped a few good ones, this one relevant today: “You fight the war you’re in with the army you have.”
re: Del Potter & Litigation
Del, no one is saying that the work was completed with that zoning map. It was simply an example of how our plans were being done in an open, collaborative process.
You write about the importance for clarity. That is why we agreed to a Master Development Agreement that would lay the details out in advance. Yes, the railroad was willing to address many of your concerns long before anything was “cemented” in place. If we ever settle our fight, I think such a document will be essential.
You are out of touch if you think the City’s actions aren’t seen as anti-development. The town has an anti-business reputation, which has contributed to it losing its economic vitality. All of your long-winded prose makes me think you’d love to see another 20 years of community workshops with zero action.
The City’s actions created a hostile environment. You go on at length about how process is supposed to go, but when one party sues another the entire situation becomes hostile. That is not a constructive way to get anything figured out or completed.
And because of the City’s lawsuit, they have shifted all meetings related to us to closed session. I have lost track, but I think it is well over 50 council meetings have been without the public, and with nothing ever reported out. They have lost transparency and the barely tell the public what they are doing with their million dollar lawsuit.
The crux of this is that you feel a City is smart to sue companies before they do anything wrong, in anticipation of what they think the company will do. That is a costly & reckless approach to governance.
“The crux of this is that you feel a City is smart to sue companies before they do anything wrong, in anticipation of what they think the company will do. ” That’s why one side hires lawyers before they agree to a deal, to look for the loopholes that will screw ’em later on. And that’s why the other party hires lawyers, too, to find the loopholes to do that screwing. There are two parties to this suit.
There isn’t a “deal” involved in this lawsuit. It is literally about potential hypothetical situations. Why hire and pay lawyers to argue about future scenarios that may or may not happen? That is a far cry from using lawyers to help negotiate a contract about a specific thing that is actually happening.
Oh, c’mon. There’s no deal? It’s always about deals, this is business we’re talking about. And, yeah, hypotheticals are often preludes to reality. You’re a lawyer and speak up all the time at Council meetings and seem to take a certain pride in suggesting changes to wording and concept so the City can avoid future litigation. It’s kind of disingenuous for you to poo poo the City’s caution in this instance.
Divine intervention works best when combined with lots of hard work.
Okay Editor, the Democratic party is the problem,
and you know what else is?
Oh, maybe about 100 other things…
So how I look at it is: What will be best for MY mental health?
Believe me, worrying about the Dem Party is just about last on the list,
top of the list is Trump getting elected, so I’ll just worry about that for now,
thanks, and hope you’re getting along alright in your recovery…
P
Perspective from Paul. Makes good sense.
The AVA is groaning under all the TDS/ (Trump Derangement Syndrome) antisemitic Contributors. Ralph Nader and hot and cold running NYT? In 2024? LMAO!
Mr. Fagan attributing the homeless to “Dizzyingly Complex” factors? That about makes him the king of the bleeding heart, screenplay- obsessed liberals here. Maybe I’m just a simple minded guy looking at the piles of used syringes and Fetty foil that have come to define Frisco in the last 27 years.