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LIGHT RAIN spreads across northwestern California this morning. This will keeps highs this afternoon only around 70 for the interior areas. Seasonable temperatures will resume Sunday, then another another potential rainfall event approaches mid week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): The new rainfall collection season kicks off today with .20" & a very warm 57F with light rain at the moment. A chance for light showers today then patchy fog daily until our next shot of rain Tuesday night.
PRESIDENTIAL GENERAL BALLOTS MAILED OCTOBER 7, 2024
On Monday, October 7, 2024, the Official Ballots for the November 5, 2024, Presidential General Election, were mailed to all active registered voters in Mendocino County.
In past elections, the envelopes containing the ballots included an insert notifying voters of our local polling and drop off locations with the Official ballot mailing. However, with this election the inserts were not mailed out with the ballots. The print vendor created and printed a separate mailing with the polling and drop off locations that will be mailed to each active registered voter, at no additional cost to the County. The mailing uses a similar format as our outgoing ballot envelope (blue stripe on the left side of the envelope), so that voters will recognize that the information included was related to the ballot mailing. The outside of this flyer says “Important Voter Information” – this mailing is not another ballot, but information as to where you can drop off your ballots and where our local polling locations are.
Voters should also be aware; if you re-registered, through DMV or elsewhere, after September 20, 2024 (when we sent our voter file to the printer), you may receive an additional ballot. If you receive more than one ballot, please call the Elections Office and we will help you. We are required by law to send a new ballot if there is a new or a re-registration, this can be confusing. Please call the Elections Office if you need assistance.
To save time processing ballots, this election we did not include a perforated stub at the top of the ballot. The stub directed voters to remove it before returning it to us, many voters left the stub on the ballot. The stub had to be removed by staff before the ballot can be tabulated.
You can check the status of your ballot by visiting https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/government/assessor-county-clerk-recorder-elections/elections/vote-by-mail-absentee-status, or by calling our Election’s Office. If you have any questions, please contact the Election’s Office by calling 707-234-6819 or emailing us at mcvotes@mendocinocounty.gov
Katrina Bartolomie
Assessor, Clerk, Recorder, Registrar of Voters
501 Low Gap Rd., Rm 1020
Assessor - 707 234-6800
Clerk - 707 234-6822
Recorder - 707 234-6823
Registrar of Voters 707 234-6819
SEEKING BOONVILLE EXTRAS [Unidentified Facebook Post]
I’m still looking for a few extras for the movie shoot this Sunday morning. Let me know if you want to get in on it. Cool people. Beautiful location. Bucket list item potential. 8:30-afternoon.
A group of us had a fun time shooting this Wednesday. This photo was taken at the shoot by Chay Peterson.
UNCHAINED MELODY
Ballot recommendations
Hello.
Because I'm a long-time local progressive who studies the issues, lots of folks ask me for voting advice. I also ask dozens of politically aware, community oriented locals for their election advice. Here below are my resulting ballot recommendations. I hope it’s helpful to you, and if it is that you pass it on to others who might appreciate it.
Tom Wodetzki
Albion
President & VP: Kamala Harris & Tim Walz (Democrats). (See footnote 1 at bottom)
US Senator: Adam Schiff (Dem)
US Representative: Jared Huffman (Dem)
State Assembly: Chris Rogers (Dem)
Mendocino School District: Jim Gagnon
Mendocino Coast Health Care District: Michael Blaisdell & Paul Katzeff
Fort Bragg City Council: Lindy Peters and Bethany Brewer
Fort Bragg School District: Sage Statham
State Propositions: Yes on all except 34 and 36, with 35 a Maybe. (See footnote 2 below)
2: Yes
3: Yes
4: Yes
5: Yes
6: Yes
32: Yes
33: Yes
34: No
35: Maybe. (See footnote 3 below)
36: No
Measure S, Albion Fire assessment: Yes
Measure T, Fort Bragg Sales Tax: Yes
Measure U, Fort Bragg Tourist Tax: Yes
Footnote 1: For voters wanting to protest US-backed killing and destruction in Gaza, it’s okay to vote Green or Peace & Freedom since all of California’s electoral college votes for President reliably go to Democrats.
Footnote 2: These recommendations are the nearly unanimous positions of these non-profit organization: Democratic, Green and Peace & Freedom Parties, California Nurses and Teachers Associations, League of Women Voters, Sierra Club, Friends Committee, California Federation of Labor Unions and the California Environmental Voters.
Footnote 3: Proposition 35 is supported by the Democratic, Green and Peace & Freedom Parties but is opposed by the League of Women Voters, Friends Committee and Courage California.
THE TOXICITY OF WOKE POLITICS
Editor:
I’ve been engaged in numerous online “discussions” with Cult Blue members who believe Kamala is here to “save” democracy. You can’t really have a discussion because these woke DEI libs use their ideology to dismiss any discussion counter to their narrative. For my efforts of pointing out that they’ve abandoned the working class, and thus pushed millions of voters into Trump’s waiting embrace, they’ve become the party of a forever war that will finance the murder of Gazan children, the party of Dick F-ing Cheney. For these efforts I’m dismissed as a MAGA Republican, a racist, a sexist who doesn't even care about his own daughters, etc.
Here on the local level it first came to my attention during my 2018 Supervisor run. As a candidate you get all kinds of questionnaires from groups, maybe an invitation to come and speak with them, etc.
Well, one time I got one from a Latinx group. I had no idea what the “x” was about. But part of campaigning is learning about the people you hope to represent, so I asked about the “x” and learned it has something to do with gender fluidity. So I think I answered their questionnaire. But I remember thinking that in all my 40 years of living in northern California; I’ve known many Latinos and Latinas, and never once had heard anyone saying they want to be an “x.”
A couple years back I was working with the coalition to save Jackson State Forest, an organization founded by mostly white libs, with some Pomo allies. I watched as the white libs deferred to the Pomo even if their ideas were bad ones. Their mantra, “listen to the Pomo,” was stretched to ridiculous limits. They eventually cancelled me when I wouldn't support Ted Williams for Supervisor, which was shocking. But the only pushback I gave them was this: ”I can’t work with a group that supports biodiversity in the forest, but not diversity of thought.” I can’t work within that contradiction and haven't missed them at all!
In closing I think it’s pretty clear that “woke” politics has been manufactured to distract us from class politics, that’s all. Thanks!
Chris Skyhawk
Fort Bragg
ED NOTES
HERE’S A PIECE of unknown local history (unknown to me anyway) with large subsequent implications.
Look Tin Eli was born in Mendocino in 1870. In 1884 he left the country to visit China. When Look Tin Eli — undoubtedly an Anglicized corruption of his true name, which was Look Tin Sing — tried to re-enter the country at San Francisco during one of the West Coast’s periodic fits of Yellow Peril, he was told he was unwelcome in the land of his birth. He sued, and sued successfully, and thenceforth a person born in America was and is an American. From humble beginnings in Mendocino, Look Tin Sing went on to become a leading business figure in the Bay Area. He died a very wealthy man.
INCIDENTALLY, Chinese the world over don't work the first day of Chinese New Year because they believe if you work the first day of the year you’ll always be a slave to unfairly compensated labor, in this life and the next one.
I LEARNED about Look Tin Sing at the California Historical Society’s headquarters on Mission near 3rd in San Francisco in a fascinating exhibit on the history of Chinese in California, complete with artifacts and documents confirming their long persecution and eventual success. The original complaints about the Chinese were, basically, that they were smart, worked long and hard for low wages, always showed up, and had no vices that got in the way of their productivity.
THE LAZY, the stupid and the drunk became quite alarmed at Chinese labor. (As the descendants of the lazy and the stupid are alarmed today at the Mexicans.) There were lynch mobs, murders and burnings of Chinatowns up and down the state, many of them encouraged by elected officials.
MENDOCINO COUNTY'S noble Sheriff Standley, however, would not tolerate crimes against the Chinese or anybody else. He once rode out to confront a mob of drunks and loafers poised to burn down Mendocino’s Chinatown. Standley had a simple negotiation strategy. He said he’d shoot anyone who didn’t go home. The mob dispersed.
(LITTLE known local fact: It was Chinese labor and Jim Armstrong who dug the Potter Valley diversion tunnel.)
WALKING DOWN Mission towards the Bay one spring day with the vague intention of dropping in on Fan Day at the ballpark where, if I or any old random fan so desired, we could directly question the ballplayers and management, I decided against the ballpark because I didn’t have any questions beyond, “How come so many major league outfielders don’t know how to go back on fly balls?” And, “How come a lot of you millionaires don’t run out ground balls and some of you do?”
I WAS THINKING these big thoughts when I suddenly wondered how Sheriff Standley would have handled the person walking towards me, an unusually nutty looking street guy— pink ballerina’s skirt over levis, no shoes, a Muslim headwrap who, although he was deliberately fouling himself and the public sidewalk as he strode merrily along, not drawing so much as a second look from other pedestrians among Mission Street's human panoply. But here he came towards judgemental me, walking rapidly up the sidewalk, projectile vomiting as he went, pumping out seemingly inexhaustible streams of vomit at intervals suspiciously timed to the approach of female pedestrians, about half his spew landing on himself. “Hey! Stop that,” I yelled. “You toodle de doo,” he yelled back, keeping westbound, not breaking stride. But the vomitmeister had stopped his synchronized eruptions, probably because he was finally out of supply, but not before he’d managed to temporarily ruin a few minutes of a dozen people’s day, and any society that can’t keep its insane off its streets has truly lost its way.
WHEN I VISITED my late brother once while he was living in San Francisco in the 1980s, my brother and I went out early one morning for a cup of coffee. It was a little before 6am. Chilly, foggy, the sun just starting to lighten the streets. As we approached a downhill intersection, a very macho looking man with lots of body hair and thick mustache and beard came rushing through the crosswalk in front of us wearing nothing but a see-through women’s lingerie teddy top and skimpy panties and high heeled shoes. As he strode past us, left to right, he turned to his right and growled at us in a very low, gruff, angry voice: “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKIN’ AT?”
(Mark Scaramella)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, October 11, 2024
JOY BUZZARD, 56, Redwood Valley. Elder/dependent abuse, witness intimidation, domestic violence court order violation.
LEONARD CAMPBELL JR., 52, Hopland. Under influence, probation revocation.
ANGELA GREENWOOD, 38, Lucerne/Ukiah. DUI.
DEREK HADDON, 52, Redwood Valley. Suspended license, failure to appear.
AUSTIN KISTLER, 32, Ukiah. Domestic battery, controlled substance.
KYLE MCNAMARA, 42, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
ANGELA NIUKKANEN, 42, Fort Bragg. Battery, elder/dependent abuse with great bodily harm, damaging communications device.
SHEILA OWENS, 32, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
CHRISTOPHER SKAGGS, 42, Ukiah. Felon-addict with firearm with prior. (Frequent flyer.)
KRISTOPHER WHITE, 35, Fort Bragg. Failure to appear.
BRANDON WHITMAN, 24, Fort Bragg. Domestic violence court order violation, probation revocation.
MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night Friday night on KNYO!
Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. If you can't make that, it's okay, send it whenever it's done and I'll read it on the radio next week.
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first hour of the show is simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.
Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:
“Take this cottage to any lake.” Starting at $275. https://www.vintag.es/2024/10/interior-of-schult-mobile-home-trailer.html
She's a Dairy Queen, gunpowder, turpentine… https://www.vintag.es/2024/10/dairy-queen.html
And a fun typing game. Get practice typing, a words-per-minute count, accuracy percentage, and if you're competitive, compete. https://entertrained.app/books
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
“I write about 10 feet in a good day.”
— Jack Kerouac, San Francisco Examiner interview, 1957 (reprinted in Empty Phantoms)
I DON’T KNOW who’s worse at scoring when the opportunity presents itself, the 9ers or me.
— Matt Fraser
NATHAN WONG
I find it absolutely unacceptable that the replay booth has worse camera feeds, angles, and zoom capabilities than the guys that do the broadcast. On that muffed punt return you can clearly see the returner’s fingers moving as the ball bounced away. That should have been 49ers ball. Instead it went to the Seahawks. The replay people’s excuse was that “they didn’t have the high resolution feeds that the broadcaster had.”
‘SO RIGGED’: 49ERS INJURY SOMEHOW FUELS CONSPIRACY THEORY FOR DESPERATE ONLINE FANS
by Gabe Fernandez
Petulant sports gamblers believe the San Francisco 49ers’ cautious approach to Jordan Mason’s shoulder injury Thursday was part of a conspiracy to rob them of their wagers.
While filling in the shoes of an injured Christian McCaffrey, backup Jordan Mason has become one of the top rushers in the league statistically. Gambling sites have naturally picked up on this, and bettors have followed suit, placing money on Mason to continue this trend. Case in point: Sports betting writer Ben Fawkes tweeted ahead of Niners-Seahawks that 99.8% people betting Mason’s rushing prop of 80.5 yards went with the over — that he would rush more than 80 yards.
However, in the second quarter, Mason picked up a shoulder injury after a tackle caused him to land hard at the end of a 14-yard run. The third-year player went out for the rest of the half, but it looked like he would soldier on for the rest of the game at the start of the third quarter. That optimism faded immediately after his lone rush of the second half, when he was taken out of the game and his impact was diminished to just rolling his shoulder on the sideline whenever the broadcast camera panned his way.
This was an unforgivable crime, according to the gambling-obsessed. In some cases, gambling sites and bookies will void a bet if a player gets hurt in the first half and doesn’t play in the second at all. Mason’s singular rush in the third quarter meant that gambling sites were no longer obligated to void certain bets made on the running back. These could include second-half yard totals, “touchdown any time” props or even standard wagers on his total yards for the game, like the one mentioned earlier.
It would be one thing if this was just a smattering of bettors screaming their frustrations into the social media void, but posts complaining about this very thing garnered a fair amount of attention.
One post that read, “Jordan Mason comes in for 1 carry to start half, wont play again, the NFL is so corrupt, working for the books,” garnered about 9,600 likes and 2.9 million views, not to mention a slate of supportive replies. Another from a self-proclaimed “professional sports analyst” got 114,000 views and about 1,700 likes: “Jordan mason only getting 1 carry in the 2nd half so books don’t have to void is evil asf. S—ts so rigged it’s unbelievable,” wrote X user _LennyLocks.
Similar posts abounded:
Of course, the explanation for this single rush is quite simple. Mason — who is in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be the starting running back for the San Francisco 49ers while the reigning offensive player of the year is out hurt — was clearly trying to test out his shoulder to see if he could play the rest of the game. After one play, he determined he could not, and stepped out. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported Friday that Mason suffered a sprained AC joint that will require further testing, but the injury is not considered serious.
But logic doesn’t seem to be a strong suit for these bettors. After all, if they had any sense, they’d stop complaining on social media and remember the first rule of gambling: The house always wins.
BEFRIENDING WILDFIRE
A new book from Obi Kaufmann illustrates the reciprocal connection between California ecosystems and fire.
by Meredith Lawrence
Throughout much of human history, fire has been a source of comfort, warmth — even inspiration. Only when the flames eclipse our control and threaten the things we prize do we hasten to extinguish them. But in doing so, and doing so constantly, acting desperately and without thinking, we have created a fearsome specter with which to reckon: today’s megafires, which are unlike the wildfires that have burned for millennia.…
https://www.hcn.org/articles/befriending-wildfire/
(via Bruce McEwen)
"I have often wondered if the sadness that haunts me is not my own, but something that has been passed down through generations, an inheritance of sorrow that I carry with me. It is a sadness that I cannot fully understand, a sense of loss that I cannot explain. It is as if I am mourning something that was taken from me long before I was born, a grief that has been passed down through the ages, from parent to child, until it has become a part of me, woven into the very fabric of my being."
— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
TRIBES, ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS ADDRESS FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS WITH DELTA TUNNEL PROJECT HEARINGS
by Dan Bacher
Sacramento — The struggle by Tribes, environmental organizations, fishing groups and the people of California to stop the construction of the Delta Conveyance Project (DCP), AKA Delta Tunnel, heated up today with the submission of a formal statement with the State Water Resources Control Board that highlights the “fundamental flaws” with the Delta Conveyance Project (DCP) hearings.
The Delta Tribal Environmental Coalition (DTEC), represented by the Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School, along with the California Indian Environmental Alliance, San Francisco Baykeeper, and Golden State Salmon Association, submitted the statement exposing the flaws of the hearings concerning petitions submitted by the Department of Water Resources (DWR) in February 2024. The petitions ask the State Water Board to modify water rights permits issued in 1972, allowing DWR to use them now to construct and operate the DCP.
“In August, DWR also quietly added a request to extend the construction deadline for water storage and conveyance facilities under those permits by fifty-five years, from 2000 to 2055,” the DTEC said in a press release.
“The statement by DTEC and its allies draws focus to DWR’s request for special treatment, as the permits DWR is requesting to use for the DCP expired decades ago and cannot be resurrected,” they explained. “The group calls on the State Water Board to hold DWR to the same policies and processes as other water users, requiring them to submit an application for a new water right â“ allowing the public to provide comments and the State Water Board to sufficiently analyze whether there is sufficient water available for this unprecedented water export project,”
In case you’re not familiar with it, the Delta Conveyance Project is a proposed 40-foot-wide underground tunnel with the capacity to siphon 6,000 cubic feet per second of water—the equivalent of roughly 245 Olympic swimming pools every hour—from the Sacramento River in the North Delta, sending it directly to corporate agribusiness water users in the San Joaquin Valley.
The construction of the Delta Tunnel will only hasten the extinction of Central Valley salmon and steelhead and imperiled Delta fish species, according to scientists and fish advocates.
“Meanwhile, the State Water Board’s continued delay in updating water quality standards is worsening conditions in the Bay-Delta. The DCP would reduce flows to even more dangerously low levels, adding another chapter to the state's history of trammeling on the rights of Delta Tribes, overlooking the interests of disadvantaged communities, and sacrificing the ecological integrity of the Bay-Delta for the profits of Big Ag,” the groups said.
The project comes at a time when imperiled Central Valley salmon populations and Delta smelt, longfin smelt and other fish species have collapsed, due to massive water exports to corporate agribusiness and Southern California water agencies, combined with the impacts of toxics, pollution and invasive species. No Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish species in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, have been caught for six years in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl Survey.
In addition, a weekly survey by the US Fish and Wildlife Service targeting Delta smelt caught only one smelt this summer. “A late April IEP juvenile fish survey (the 20-mm Survey) caught several juvenile Delta smelt in the same area,” noted scientist Tom Cannon in his blog on the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance website: calsport.org/…
The State Water Board remains under investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for discriminating against Delta Tribes and disadvantaged communities in its mismanagement of Bay-Delta water quality controls.
The coalition urges the State Water Board to “reject DWR’s petitions and require the completion of the Bay-Delta Plan and the conclusion of EPA’s investigations into Board discrimination before taking further action.”
A broad group of Bay-Delta cities and counties, environmental organizations, and other stakeholders have submitted statements to the State Water Board expressing similar concerns with the DCP proceedings. The State Water Board hearings office will consider the statements at a pre-hearing conference on October 17.
Representatives of the Tribes and environmental groups commented about the Department of Water Resource’s continuing campaign to build the Delta Tunnel at the expense of tribal rights, fish populations and the public trust.
Gary Mulcahy, Government Liaison for the Winnemem Wintu Tribe said, “As the Tribe has stated before, the Department of Water Resources attempt to extend expired water rights permits by a significant 55 years is unlawful. DWR has wasted public money now for 24 years on the basis of an expired permit and a version of a zombie project rejected by the public since 1982. DWR can no longer skirt the law and must go through the actual process of filing for a new water right permit.”
Malissa Tayaba, Vice Chair for the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, stated, "While tribes continue to be impacted by unhealthy rivers and watersheds, the Department of Water Resources is trying to rush forward with a tunnel project that would divert more water out of our rivers and Delta eco-cultural systems. We need a transparent and fair process that prioritizes our tribes, our rivers, and cultural landscapes. We should not allow DWR to play by a different set of rules that further harms us."
Naji Thompson, certified student attorney with the Yale Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic, said the Board must first resolve “critical threshold questions about its jurisdiction and the rights and interests of Bay-Delta Tribes and communities.”
“It is essential that the Board rejects DWR’s attempts to sidestep procedural safeguards, which are designed to protect the voices of those who will be forced to live with the long-term impacts of the DCP’s construction and operations for generations to come,” Thompson argued.
“The approval of DWR's petition will force historically marginalized Bay-Delta communities to continue to endure generations of ecosystem disruption, an unjustifiable act, and proceeds to neglect the voices of Tribal and marginalized communities,” said Gloria Alonso Cruz, Environmental Justice Advocacy Coordinator for Little Manila Rising. "The State Water Board has the authority to hold DWR accountable and prioritize protections for communities and the Bay-Delta environment."
The statement was submitted during the second year in a row of a complete closure of recreational and commercial salmon fishing on the ocean and recreational salmon fishing in all California rivers, due to the collapse of Sacramento River and Klamath River fall-run Chinook salmon populations.
"Extending water permits for 55 years isn’t a 'minor change'—it’s a major blow to California’s already struggling salmon populations,” emphasized Scott Artis, Executive Director for the Golden State Salmon Association. “The Delta Conveyance Project will devastate the fishing industry and Bay-Delta watershed that communities and tens of thousands of people and businesses rely on, all while bending the rules for big water interests.”
“DWR is requesting the Board bypass proper review to extend expired permits without standing,” reported Cintia Cortez, Policy Manager for Restore the Delta. “Yet, it's been two years since Delta communities, that continue to live with degraded waterways and toxic algae, requested relief from the state. By continuing this process, the Board prioritizes serving special interests and gives DWR cover to please the Governor."
"The State Board's processes matter,” concluded Eric Buescher, Managing Attorney for the San Francisco Bay Keeper. “How the Board handles this water rights proceeding will have impacts on the ecosystems and people who depend on a healthy San Francisco Bay, Delta, and watershed. The State Board needs to act fairly, justly, and quickly to address the crisis in the Delta before it considers whether to grant DWR the authority to further degrade conditions throughout the watershed over the next five decades."
DAVID SEVERN:
Kids being taught to build nuclear submarines.
According to the NY Times, the U.S. Navy has put in an order for General Dynamics to produce 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion. The industry is struggling to find the tens of thousands of new workers it needs. For the past 18 months, the company has traveled to elementary schools across New England to educate children in the basics of submarine manufacturing and perhaps inspire a student or two to consider one day joining its shipyards. A fifth-grade class at Preston Veterans’ Memorial School designs and builds mini-submarines as part of a curriculum created by the defense contractor General Dynamics. The coursework on this particular day described in the Times, involves welding crackers together with Easy Cheese to create mini-submarines. It is one small facet of the much bigger preparations America is making for an historic struggle with its nuclear rivals. With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs, the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal.
BILL KIMBERLIN:
In a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” Yet abortion was so “deeply rooted” in colonial America that one of our nation’s most influential architects (Ben Franklin) went out of his way to insert it into the most widely and enduringly read and reprinted math textbook of the colonial Americas—and he received so little pushback or outcry for the inclusion that historians have barely noticed it is there. Abortion was simply a part of life, as much as reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Black Voters Drift From Democrats, Imperiling Harris’s Bid, Poll Shows
Trump Leads in Arizona as Harris Holds an Edge in Pennsylvania, Polls Find
The results in Arizona and Pennsylvania repeated a mystery from earlier polls, Nate Cohn writes.
SEAN O’BRIEN, TEAMSTERS PRESIDENT:
I’ll be honest with you, I’m a Democrat, but they have f*cked us over for the last 40 years. Not all of them — but for once, we are standing up as a union. I’m probably the only one right now saying, WTF have you done for us? And I’m getting attacked from the left.
Since I’ve been in office, two-and-a-half years, we’ve given the Democratic machine $15.7 million. We’ve given Republicans about $340,000 — truth be told. People say the Democratic Party is the party of the working people. They’re bought and paid for by Big Tech — those Big Tech companies.
You’ve got the Republicans, who are now saying, we want to be the working-class party. You’ve got a great opportunity now to do that. And the Democrats, if 60% of our members aren’t supporting you, the system’s broken and you need to fix it.
KAMALA UNWINDING
by James Kunstler
“As the US increasingly resembles ancient Rome, being president is more and more dangerous. Something around 35 emperors met violent deaths, most from people in and around their courts. In other words, members of the Roman Deep State. An ugly situation is brewing in and around Washington DC.” — Doug Casey
Don’t kid yourself: Kamala Harris does not want to be President of the United States. She doesn’t even want the ceremonial stuff, the incessant shuffling from one photo op to the next, the tedious Easter egg rolls, the prayer meetings, the turkey pardonings, the tiresome state banquets for men in strange headgear who are unfamiliar with using the fork and knife, and forbidden to sip chardonnay…
It’s obvious she has been played for a chump, that she was sandbagged into play-acting “the candidate” by an odd coalition of the distraught and the desperate — that is, the many agency blobsters who fear prison and the perfidious politicians such as Pelosi, Schumer, Mitch the Turtle, the Clintons, and Obama, paid to cover for the blob, often doing it badly, who fear the judgment of history, as well as the loss of their fortunes. Distraught and desperate characters make foolish decisions.
About thirty seconds after “Joe Biden” vowed to stay in the 2024 race, a delegation of these panicked pols paid him a call and passed him the black spot, knowing he could not credibly front for the massive election cheat underway. He was barely able to front for the previous one in 2020, when every lever of power got pulled to-the-max to conceal the truth about the steal, and to severely punish those who dared to murmur doubts about the election’s freeness and fairness.
How did they decide that Kamala would do any better? I assure you we will find out when the party explodes in recriminations sometime after November 5. It will probably turn out to look like the 2017 movie, The Death of Stalin, a frantic vaudeville of scheming buffoons oblivious to mundane doings of the suffering nation they pretend to serve. Unlike Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, Kamala did not prevail among this gang of squabbling clowns by force of personality or guile. She was merely a default setting as veep, arrived at to present the illusion of continuity and solidarity where none existed. She was not even involved in the backstage action. I doubt that anyone even asked her if she wanted the assignment — she was only notified after-the-fact. Thus, all the drinking.
The outstanding question: will the Democratic Party actually go ahead and attempt to execute an election steal despite growing evidence of a developing Trump landslide that might obviate it? The works are already in motion. The mail-in ballots went out long ago and early votes are getting cast by the day. The overseas ballots that require no US address or voter verification are flooding in by the millions and four years of open borders has 10-million illegal aliens (at a minimum) dispersed around the nation, great gobs of them planted in swing states, processed through the DMVs and social services — with the requisite automatic voter registration — their ballots already pre-bundled for harvest.
It could go a few ways. One is, just let’er rip, harvest all those fake votes, stuff the drop-boxes, flood the zone, and do it all right in America’s face as if to say: we can do whatever we want. . . Â to get whatever we want… and you can’t stop us. That is probably the point where blue America finds out exactly what the Second Amendment was designed for. You might also expect a whole lot of state-organized resistance, especially in the populous red ones, Texas, Florida, real court cases over fraud this time, contested certification.
Or, the election could come out a hopeless unresolvable muddle. There’s no precedent for this and no provision in the Constitution, but you can imagine the Supreme Court having to decide a necessary do-over minus all recent gimmicks, paper ballots only, voters with proof of citizenship only, all voting on one re-scheduled election day before January 1. This novelty would be something apart from the clunky Congressional machinery established for settling electoral college disputes, since it is predicated on various states’ inability to determine their electoral college vote in the first place, based on patent irregularity and fraud.
You could also imagine a period of disorder so deep and grave that the regime behind “Joe Biden” declares martial law… or, alternately the military — the martial institution — has to take matters into its own hands, shoving aside even “Joe Biden” and his filthy retinue. Appalling to consider, I’m sure, but these things happen in history, and the Party of Chaos has set enough mischief in motion to wreck the election and wreck the country. Call it catastrophizing, if you will. There it is.
But to step back from that abyss, it appears that Mr. Trump’s momentum accelerates by the day, that he is becoming, at last, an implacable, irresistible juggernaut who will, perforce, overcome all the gimmicks, traps, and frauds arrayed against him. Kamala seems to think so. Have you ever seen such resignation, such loserdom-in-action as her recent performance on CBS’s 60-Minutes, or her pitiful admission on ABC’s The View that she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently beyond the excellent management of national affairs under “Joe Biden” (and herself as veep). Surely that said it all. She has nothing, brings nothing.
Long ago, she was a pretty girl with a law degree and an infectious laugh on the fringes of local politics in San Francisco. The winds of fortune blew her this way and that way until she ended up way over her head, used by the reprobates around her as a mere device to stay out of jail. She ends as an historical prank on her own country. It must be deeply demoralizing to be used like that in front of the whole world.
I WAS TRUMP’S GHOSTWRITER. A NEW BIOPIC GETS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING RIGHT.
by Tony Schwartz
“The Apprentice,” a new movie that dramatizes the early years of Donald Trump’s career, ends with a scene between Mr. Trump and an actor who plays me. The year is 1986 and I’m interviewing Mr. Trump for the first time, to begin ghostwriting “The Art of the Deal,” a book that I view today as an unintended work of fiction.
Since my time collaborating with Mr. Trump, I’ve spent my adult life studying, writing about and working with leaders and other high achievers. I’ve focused especially on how their early childhood experiences have influenced their adult lives — mostly unconsciously — and on exploring the often vast gulf between how they present themselves on the outside and how they feel on the inside. Mr. Trump, for me, has always been Exhibit A.
Watching “The Apprentice” crystallized two big lessons that I learned from Mr. Trump 30 years ago and that I’ve seen play out in his life ever since with more and more extreme consequences. The first lesson is that a lack of conscience can be a huge advantage when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society where most other human beings abide by a social contract. The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we’re missing on the inside.
“The Apprentice” tells Mr. Trump’s story through the lens of the two men who most influenced him: his father, Fred, and Roy Cohn, his longtime lawyer and one of the most notorious and disgraced fixers of the 20th century. What they had in common, and passed on to Donald in spades, was their shamelessness when it came to winning and dominating others, whatever that took. The end always justified the means.
The film starts with a disclaimer that some events have been “fictionalized for dramatic purposes,” and the filmmakers clearly took artistic liberties. Journalists, historians and critics can debate which specific scenes in “The Apprentice” actually happened and which ones did not. For me, the movie felt emotionally true — and consistent with the Donald Trump I came to know three decades ago. “The Apprentice” is less about how Mr. Trump rose to power than it is about the generational impact of his family’s trauma and dysfunction, and how it shaped the person Mr. Trump became and the impact he’s had on an entire country.
During my time working on “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump would call me most evenings from his Trump Tower apartment, and nearly every call began the same way. “Can you believe it, Tony?” he asked, rhetorically. “Bigger than ever.” Then he would go on to talk about some triumph he’d had that day or a hapless competitor he’d vanquished.
On the face of it, he was riding high in the mid 1980s. He had just built Trump Tower at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, he owned two large casino hotels in Atlantic City and was on the verge of buying a third, and he traveled around in a limousine, a helicopter, a yacht or a private plane.
What Mr. Trump never let me know was that amid all those glittering external signs of success, he was in increasingly desperate financial trouble, drowning in debts that would lead him into a series of bankruptcies. I did not yet realize that he routinely lied as easily as he breathed, including to me for his own memoir, and without a hint of a guilty conscience.
What struck me from the first day I met Mr. Trump was his unquenchable thirst to be the center of attention. No amount of external recognition ever seemed to be enough. Beneath his bluster and his bombast, he struck me as one of the most insecure people I’d ever met — and one of the least self-aware. He’d crossed the bridge from Queens to Manhattan but he remained the product — and even the prisoner — of his childhood experiences. As he told a reporter in 2015, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”
I buy that.
Children aren’t born seeking external success, power, wealth or dominance. What Mr. Trump seems to have buried as he grew up was the core emotional need that all human beings experience from the day they’re born: to feel safe, secure and worthy because they’re loved unconditionally by their primary caretakers. From my observations — and what the movie details — that kind of love was never available to Mr. Trump or to his siblings.
Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, was openly disdainful of any acknowledgment or expression of weakness or vulnerability. He had amassed a fortune building low-income, government-supported housing and, along the way, he developed a harsh, zero-sum view of the world: You were either a winner or a loser in life. If you weren’t a killer, you were forever at risk of being victim and a sucker. Brutality, in the service of winning, was no vice.
“The most importance influence on me, growing up, was my father,” Mr. Trump told me for “The Art of the Deal.” “I learned about toughness in a very tough business.”
Mr. Trump also learned lessons about how to earn his father’s approval and avoid his wrath by observing the fate of his older brother, Fred Jr., who was expected from an early age to someday take over his father’s business. When he chose instead to follow his passion to become a pilot — and to leave the family business — he lost the respect of his father, who began referring to him dismissively as a “glorified bus driver.” Fred Jr. died from the effects of alcoholism, at the age of 42.
“Fortunately for me,” Mr. Trump explained in “The Art of the Deal,” “I was drawn to business very early, and I was never intimidated by my father the way most people were. I stood up to him and he respected that. We had a relationship that was almost businesslike.”
I still remember the chill I felt when Mr. Trump said those words, as if it was fine to have an almost completely transactional relationship with his father.
When children can’t get what they need from their primary caretakers, they eventually turn to other means. For Mr. Trump, that seemed to manifest in relentlessly seeking attention and recognition from an early age, and measuring his value comparatively and by the numbers — whether it was his net worth, the height of his buildings or the number of people who attend his rallies. Early on, Mr. Trump figured out that sufficient bravado and bold assertions — even if they were false — could often substitute for actual accomplishments, especially if he repeated them often enough.
What “The Apprentice” captures most evocatively is Mr. Trump’s transition from pleasing his father to enlisting Mr. Cohn as a mentor and role model. Mr. Cohn’s role was to help Mr. Trump outdo his father, even as Fred used his vast wealth and political connections to clear Donald’s path. At the time that Mr. Trump first met Mr. Cohn at a private club in 1973, Fred and Donald had just been sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to Black people and other minorities at their Trump Village apartment buildings in Brooklyn.
The evidence of racism was overwhelming. But Mr. Cohn urged Mr. Trump to fight back rather than settle. “The Apprentice” distills Mr. Cohn’s worldview into three life lessons he shared with Mr. Trump: Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and claim victory and never admit defeat. Mr. Trump took those principles to heart.
“Whatever else you could say about Roy, he was very tough,” Mr. Trump told me for “The Art of the Deal.” “Sometimes I think that next to loyalty, toughness was the most important thing in the world to him.”
Loyalty and toughness were two qualities Mr. Trump revered, and he concluded his assessment in “The Art of the Deal” with the highest praise: “Roy was the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed, long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.”
For Mr. Trump, however, loyalty went only one way. By the time we began work on the book, he had long since bailed on Mr. Cohn, who had been diagnosed with AIDS. It didn’t seem personal for Mr. Trump because in my experience nothing was personal for him. It was all business, and Mr. Trump seemed to have no further use for his longtime lawyer, mentor and friend.
Mr. Trump did encourage me to interview Mr. Cohn for “The Art of the Deal,” and I went to see him in his last days. Over two rambling hours, Mr. Cohn shared an odd blend of hurt, bitterness, resignation and a certain awe at how easily his longtime student had walked away from their relationship. “Donald pisses ice water,” is the way he’d put it to one reporter.
It’s long been deeply unsettling to me how many behaviors associated with psychopathy Mr. Trump exemplifies. There are seven characteristics associated with “antisocial personality disorder,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: deceitfulness, impulsivity, failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, irritability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, consistent irresponsibility and lack of remorse. I’ve observed all seven in Mr. Trump over the years, and watched them get progressively worse. It’s the last one — lack of remorse — that gives him license to freely exercise the other six.
The past is prologue and, as Mr. Trump has said, he’s essentially the same person today that he was as a child. That is the central warning “The Apprentice” poses, and it comes just five weeks before the election.
Ever since Mr. Trump announced in 2015 that he was running for president, I’ve argued publicly that the only limitation on his behavior as president — then and now — is what he believes he can get away with. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes he can get away with a lot more today. If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination — damn the consequences — in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough.
(Tony Schwartz was an author of “The Art of the Deal” and is the C.E.O. of The Energy Project, a leadership development consultancy.)
HOW 2,000 HAITIAN MIGRANTS CHANGED RUST BELT TOWN OF CHARLEROI, PENNSYLVANIA
by Christopher F. Rufo & Christina Buttons
Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is a deeply troubled place. The former steel town, built along a stretch of the Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh, has experienced the typical Rust Belt rise and fall. The industrial economy, which had turned it into something resembling a company town, hollowed out after the Second World War. Some residents fled; others succumbed to vices. The steel mills disappeared. Two drug abuse treatment centers have since opened their doors.
The town’s population had steadily declined since the middle of the 20th century, with the most recent Census reporting slightly more than 4,000 residents.
Then, suddenly, things changed. Local officials estimate that approximately 2,000 predominantly Haitian migrants have moved in.
The town’s Belgium Club and Slovak Club are mostly quiet nowadays, while the Haitians and other recent immigrants have quickly established their presence, even dominance, in a dilapidated corridor downtown.
This change — the replacement of the old ethnics with the new ethnics — is an archetypal American story. And, as in the past, it has caused anxieties and, at times, conflict.
The municipal government has felt the strain. The town, already struggling with high rates of poverty and unemployment, has been forced to assimilate thousands of new arrivals.
The schools now crowd with new Haitian pupils, and have had to hire translators and English teachers. Some of the old pipes downtown have started releasing the smell of sewage.
And, according to a town councilman, there is a growing sense of trepidation about the alarming number of car crashes, with some vehicles reportedly slamming into buildings.
Among the city’s old guard, frustrations are starting to boil over. Instead of being used to revitalize these communities, these residents argue, resources get redirected to the new arrivals, who undercut wages, drive rents up, and, so far, have failed to assimilate. Worst of all, these residents say, they had no choice — there was never a vote on the question of migration; it simply materialized.
Former President Donald Trump, echoing the sentiments of some of Charleroi’s native citizens, has cast the change in a sinister light.
As he told the crowd at a recent rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, “it takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. … But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently.”
Progressives, as expected, countered with the usual arguments, claiming that Trump was stoking fear, inciting nativist resentment, and even putting the Haitian migrants in danger.
Neither side, however, seems to have grappled with the mechanics of Charleroi’s abrupt transformation. How did thousands of Haitians end up in a tiny borough in western Pennsylvania? What are they doing there? And cui bono — who benefits?
The answers to these questions have ramifications not only for Charleroi, but for the general trajectory of mass migration under the Biden administration, which has allowed more than 7 million migrants to enter the United States, either illegally or, as with some 309,000 Haitians, under ad hoc asylum rules.
The basic pattern in Charleroi has been replicated in thousands of cities and towns across America: The federal government has opened the borders to all comers; a web of publicly funded NGOs has facilitated the flow of migrants within the country; local industries have welcomed the arrival of cheap, pliant labor.
And, under these enormous pressures, places like Charleroi often revert to an older form: that of the company town, in which an open conspiracy of government, charity, and industry reshapes the society to its advantage — whether the citizens want it or not.
The best way to understand the migrant crisis is to follow the flow of people, money, and power — in other words, to trace the supply chain of human migration. In Charleroi, we have mapped the web of institutions that have facilitated the flow of migrants from Port-au-Prince.
Some of these institutions are public and, as such, must make their records available; others, to avoid scrutiny, keep a low profile.
The initial, and most powerful, institution is the federal government. Over the past four years, Customs and Border Protection has reported hundreds of thousands of encounters with Haitian nationals. In addition, the White House has admitted more than 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, which it paused in early August and has since relaunched.
The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country.
The next link in the web is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middlemen in the flow of migration.
The scale of this effort is astounding. These agencies are affiliated with more than 340 local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations.
In Charleroi, one of the most active resettlement agencies is Jewish Family and Community Services Pittsburgh.
According to a September Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report, JFCS staff have been traveling to Charleroi weekly for the past year and a half to resettle many of the migrants. The organization has offered to help migrants sign up for welfare programs, including SNAP, Medicaid and direct financial assistance.
While JFCS Pittsburgh offers “employment services“ to migrants, it denies any involvement with the employer and staffing agencies that were the focus of our investigation.
And yet, business is brisk. In 2023, JFCS Pittsburgh reported $12.5 million in revenue, of which $6.15 million came directly from government grants. Much of the remaining funding came from other nonprofits that also get federal funds, such as a $2.8 million grant from its parent organization, HIAS. And JFCS’s executives enjoy generous salaries: The CEO earned $215,590, the CFO $148,601, and the COO $125,218 — all subsidized by taxpayers.
What is next in the chain? Business. In Charleroi, the Haitians are, above all, a new supply of inexpensive labor. A network of staffing agencies and private companies has recruited the migrants to the city’s factories and assembly lines.
While some recruitment happens through word-of-mouth, many staffing agencies partner with local nonprofits that specialize in refugee resettlement to find immigrants who need work.
At the center of this system in Charleroi is Fourth Street Foods, a frozen-food supplier with approximately 1,000 employees, most of whom work on the assembly line.
In an exclusive interview, Chris Scott, the CEO and COO of Fourth Street Barbeque (the legal name of the firm that does business as Fourth Street Foods) explained that his company, like many factory businesses, has long relied on immigrant labor, which, he estimates, makes up about 70% of its workforce.
The firm employs many temporary workers, and, with the arrival of the Haitians, has found a new group of laborers willing to work long days in an industrial freezer, starting at about $12 an hour.
Many of these workers are not directly employed by Fourth Street Foods. Instead, according to Scott, they are hired through staffing agencies, which pay workers about $12 an hour for entry-level food-processing roles and bill Fourth Street Foods over $16 per hour to cover their costs, including transportation and overhead. (The average wage for an entry-level food processor in Washington County was $16.42 per hour in 2023.)
According to a Haitian migrant who worked at Fourth Street and a review of video footage, three staffing agencies — Wellington Staffing Agency, Celebes Staffing Services, and Advantage Staffing Agency — are key conduits for labor in the city.
None have websites, advertise their services, or appear in job listings. According to Scott, Fourth Street Foods relies on agencies to staff its contract workforce, but he declined to specify which agencies, citing nondisclosure agreements.
The final link is housing. And here, too, Fourth Street Foods has an organized interest.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Scott said, Fourth Street Foods was “scrambling” to find additional workers. The owner of the company, David Barbe, stepped in, acquiring and renovating a “significant number of homes” to provide housing for his workforce.
A property search for David Barbe and his other business, DB Rentals LLC, shows records of more than 50 properties, many of which are concentrated on the same streets.
After the initial purchases, Barbe required some of the existing residents to vacate to make room for newcomers.
A single father, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was forced to leave his home after it was sold to DB Rentals LLC in 2021. “[W]e had to move out [on] very short notice after five years of living there and being great tenants,” he explained. Afterward, a neighbor informed him that a dozen people of Asian descent had been crammed into the two-bedroom home. They were “getting picked up and dropped off in vans.”
“My kids were super upset because that was the house they grew up in since they were little,” the man said. “It was just all a huge nightmare.”
In recent years, a debate has raged about “replacement migration,” which some left-wing critics have dubbed a racist conspiracy theory.
But in Charleroi, “replacement” is a plain reality. While the demographic statistics have shifted dramatically in recent years, replacement happens in more prosaic ways, too: a resident moves away. Another arrives. The keys to a rental apartment change hands.
In one sense, this is unremarkable. Since the beginning, America has been the land of migration, replacement, and change. The original Belgian settlers of Charleroi were replaced by the later-arriving Slavic populations, who are now, in turn, being replaced by men and women from Port-au-Prince.
The economy changed along the same lines. The steel plants shut down years ago. The glass factory, the last remaining symbol of the Belgian glass-makers, might suspend operations soon. The largest employer now produces frozen meals.
In another sense, however, legitimate criticisms can be made of what is happening in Charleroi. First, the benefits of mass migration seem to accrue to the organized interests, while citizens and taxpayers absorb the costs.
No doubt, the situation is advantageous to David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods, who can pay $16 an hour to the agencies that employ his contract labor force, then recapture some of those wages in rent — just like the company towns from a century ago.
But for the old residents of Charleroi, who cherish their distinct heritage and fear that their quality of life is being compromised, it’s mostly downside.
The evictions, the undercut wages, the car crashes, the cramped quarters, the unfamiliar culture: these are not trivialities, nor are they racist conspiracy theories. They are the signs of a disconcerting reality: Charleroi is a dying town that could not revitalize itself on its own, which made it the perfect target for “revitalization” by elite powers — the federal government, the NGOs, and their local satraps.
The key question in Charleroi is the fundamental question of politics: Who decides?
The citizens of the United States, and of Charleroi, have been assured since birth that they are the ultimate sovereign. The government, they were told, must earn the consent of the governed. But the people of Charleroi were never asked if they wanted to submit their borough to an experiment in mass migration. Others chose for them — and slandered them when they objected.
The decisive factor, which many on the institutional Left would rather conceal, is one of power.
Martha’s Vineyard, when faced with a single planeload of migrants, can evict them in a flash. But Charleroi — the broken man of the Rust Belt — cannot.
This is the reality of replacement: the strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must.
(From City Journal via New York Post)
RIPLEY’S WORLD: BELIEVE IT.
by Alexander Cockburn
Having established the basis of his fortune by collecting bizarre facts, Robert Ripley began to collect countries. He had been an unhappy, bucktoothed child burdened with a stutter, the name Leroy, and a mother widowed when he was 12. Travel seems to have been his way of stating that he never had a true home and was always on the lookout for a substitute for the earliest home of all. At the peak of his fame, at the end of the 1930s, he liked to boast that he had visited 201 countries out of a possible 253. In the manner of globetrotters of that period he liked to be photographed in each country set against the appropriate fauna and flora, looking manly in tropical kilt and white and brown sports shoes.
Just to make sure that guests to his home in Mamaroneck, New York, got the point, he had miniature flags of his country collection in the bar, and a compass sunk into the floor of his sun porch, along with the directions and number of miles to all the many hundred places in the world more exotic than Mamaroneck or the small town of Santa Rosa, California, where he was born.
With his wild and undiscriminating, childish curiosity, Ripley built up one of the great child's collections of all times. Most children have their tiny collection of bugs, coins, stamps and so forth. Ripley filled room after room in house after house, and when he ran out of space he stored the crates of his treasures in warehouses around the country.
Anything strange in all countries that met Ripley's maniacally acquisitive game was bought, parceled up and sent home. Humans were not exempt. When Ripley, in the course of his wanderings, met Wenseskeo Manuel in the Yucatan, who had survived both a firing squad and the coup de grâce, he hired him at $75 a week to display his bullet-riddled features in one of the Ripley “Odditoriums.”
Ripley retained three or four people to scour the world in search of the bizarre for a collection that he finally valued at $2 million near his death in 1949. Geoffrey Hellman, who visited him for a New Yorker profile early in 1940 reported on the surreal atmosphere of the Mamaroneck household with its chastity belts, Aztec masks, 500 beer steins, the skeleton of a two-headed baby and photograph of himself with a woman leper, “the most horrible looking human being in the world.” Over those and hundreds of other treasures brooded his equally odd housekeeper, Mrs. Almuth Dold, formerly the wife of a Russian baron, once in a Turkish harem as a guest and finely cultivated in the arts of graphology, astrology, palmistry, phrenology, numerology and tea leaves. Married to an efficiency engineer, she ran Ripley's house for him, acting as his hostess and, according to Hellman, “conversing easily with his guests in the barroom and at table.”
Fanatical collectors are mostly a repressed lot, stumbling uneasily about in their unconscious. My personal favorite is the collector of antique chairs who came to believe that he had glass buttocks and didn't dare sit down, eventually dying of inanition. Ripley was no exception. He spent hours every day compulsively rearranging all the pieces of his collection, before pottering about the waterways of his estate in various outlandish forms of marine transport. The libido burst through his surface pudeur in some curious ways; for example, he insisted that a lady sword swallower in one of his “Odditoriums” should ingest not tempered steel but a neon tube at the end of an electric flex.
He was, in sum, an eccentric, with all the appeal of those delightful and childish creatures, as I realized in the course of a visit to the Ripley Museum in St. Augustine, Florida.
Like many children in the dying years of the British Empire, I grew up surrounded by a collection of the Ripley genre. Curios and antiques assembled by the innumerable members of that empire filled the house and in the case of my grandmother's place, a few miles down the road in southern Ireland, these memorabilia were profuse enough to cram not only many display cases in the main house but also a small museum at the bottom of the wall garden.
My grandmother’s father had been an Irish adventurer who settled into a successful and prosperous career as a colonial governor: from bleakly inauspicious beginnings administering Newfoundland, he had passed through government houses in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Ceylon before ending up as a governor of Hong Kong at the end of the 19th century. The display cases and museum were thus filled with the consequences of a thousand Victorian shopping expeditions, from Kingston through Kandy to Kowloon; carved figures, vases, baskets, scrolls, howdahs, palanquins, robes, a carved dug-out canoe, ivory, jade, mounds of imperial medals and — best of all for a child — a veritable battalion of spears, clubs, shields, swords, daggers and arrows whose tips were darkened with traces of what my grandmother said was curare.
No collection of this sort was complete without its shrunken head. The one in my grandmother’s museum hung, out of my reach, from one of the museum’s beams.
It was supposedly acquired by Great Uncle Maurice on one of his diamond-prospecting expeditions up the Orinoco. Great Uncle Maurice had been something of a black sheep — another essential perquisite of any family's imperial collection — and we thought it quite possible that he had done the processing himself, shrinking this trophy down to the size of a tan grapefruit with long black hair. Irish damp began to overwhelm the museum in the end and so most of its contents were crated up and sent off to scholarly institutions to languish in pedantic and well-labeled obscurity.
The appeal of the Ripley collection is that it immediately recreates that childlike view which is the dawn of curiosity.
There in the St. Augustine museum were the curio cabinets, the palanquin and, grinning amiably from its display case, the shrunken Javaro head. All around me were crowds of happy children, speculating just as I had done on shrinking techniques and the toxic properties of native South American poisons, peering at the waxwork figure in the entranceway of the bucktoothed Ripley in his middle years looking welcoming and avuncular: the sort of uncle every child should have, with his shrunken heads, his horde of bizarre facts and charming huckster's cry of “Believe It or Not!”
I cannot speak for the eight other Ripley Museums scattered across\ the North American continent, but for anyone in northern Florida, wishing a respite from Interstate 85 or Flagler's great Spanish-style Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine (first major structure in the US built with poured concrete), the Ripley Museum is well worth a visit, and if children are of the party, merits a major detour. The museum reminds us what the world was like before public television, the late Sir Kenneth Clark or universal college education. In the American pantheon Ripley should stand in the same corner of the wall as such great entertainers as H.P. Stanley, P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney: less serious than the first, less outrageous than the second and without the latter's degrading addiction to the cute. Of the time when newspapers had their star writers always traveling the world in search of strange tribes, places and customs, Ripley was Sancho Panza to Stanley's Quixote and while the latter sent sober dispatches from the darkness of Africa, Ripley, in a more frivolous era, would return — as he did from China in the thirties — with a small glass vial, now in the St. Augustine museum, labeled “The only unbroken object in the city of Chapei after the Japanese invasion — a bottle of Chinese mange cure!” Like any resourceful uncle, Ripley could make anything interesting, even a tiny glass bottle.
Ripley was born in Santa Rosa on Christmas Day, 1893. His father died when Robert was 12 and the boy helped support his mother by polishing gravestones. He was a talented illustrator and after a stint on some California papers, Ripley came east and got a job on the old New York Globe as a sports illustrator. Short of material one December day in 1918 he strung together some odd sporting achievements in an illustrated panel. A Globe editor titled it “Believe It or Not” and within a few months, responding to surging reader interest, Ripley's employers were asking him to do one a day.
True success came in 1928. Simon and Schuster published Believe It or Not, “a modern book of Wonders, Miracles, Freaks, Monstrosities and almost-Impossibilities, Written, Illustrated and Proved by Robert L. Ripley”. The book ran swiftly through several reprints and William Randolph Hearst sent a simple telegraphic directive to his men in New York, “Hire Ripley.”
Ripley's salary went from $10,000 to $100,000 forthwith, and within a few years he was a major journalistic institution. About 19 million newspapers carrying his feature were sold each day and he reached 90 million readers. After scanning the headlines people turned to Ripley. He received an average of a million letters a year and launched radio and television series (the Ripley cartoons and program of today are not, I should hasten to say, particularly satisfactory). By 1940 there were three Odditoriums and a number of Ripley trailer shows touring the country. Still immensely successful — though on the threshold of an era less sympathetic to his brand of journalistic showmanship — Ripley died in 1949.
He grins toothily from the picture in the pamphlet available at the museum, but Ripley, like many compulsive travelers and collectors, seems to have been a complex and inhibited character. He was married for a few years in the twenties to a Massachusetts beauty queen but thereafter remained single. He had many cars but could not drive. Slightly vulgar, he was the quintessential Innocent Abroad, forever amazed at the strangeness of the world, forever determined to contain it within the confines of pragmatic American common sense. The child who had polished gravestones had a taste for the macabre but not the occult, the incredible but not the false. He was a collector for the common man, with a marvelous ability to reduce space and time to the status of Collector's Item.
The first Believe It or Not book has more of Ripley's personality in it than later products. “In Lhassa, Tibet", Ripley wrote, “there is a man with a horn growing from his forehead to the extent of thirteen inches. The reflected glory of the golden sun bounces off K2 and Mount Everest on this curious promontory each morning as its bearer makes his obeisance to Gatama while turning a prayer wheel. The horned Kaffir of Africa, like the Horned One of the Himalayas, is still alive. I saw him in London several years ago. He seemed self-centered and satisfied, though black and a Christian.”
As this last sentence suggests, Ripley lacked the Disney blandness. Although, as he said of himself, he made his living out of the proposition that truth is stranger than fiction, he did not feel it necessary to view all the world's truths with equal sympathy. Discussing the Hindu pilgrims at the Kali-Chat temple in Benares — "Sky-facers who hold their faces rigidly upward until unable to bend them back; UP-arm men, who hold up their arms in the same way until they wither away…” – he concluded sternly, “Most of the wretches that we see around the holy places of worship have no idea what their attitudes and symbols mean; all are intellectually degraded and some are mere fakers.”
As collector for the common man, Ripley had a keen appreciation for time and effort, qualities he esteemed. One exhibit at the Ripley museum in St. Augustine is a table with a label noting that it was made of “11,000 separate pieces of wood from 29 different species of tree, by Klaus Finzar of Innsbruck”. Conventional museums would have stopped there, but Ripley adds the all-important news that the table was intended “as a wedding gift for his daughter who entered a convent and never had use for it. It took nine years to complete.”
There are kindred monuments to such pertinacity throughout the museum: a tiny bottle painted on its ulterior surfaces by manicured fingernails, a railroad arc bridge made of “more than 3,100 ordinary tooth picks” by Joe Gross of Brooklyn, a vase 24 inches high wrought from the bladder of a camel. There are stamps covered with the entire Constitution of the United States and biblios the size of a fava bean.
Ripley knew the common man appreciated not only time and effort but also their expression as value. So he made a particular point of collecting bizarre types of money from around the world. Cases in the St. Augustine museum are filled with stones, shells, whales' teeth, beads, pictures, symbolic objects and notes of hand that have served through history as a means of exchange.
The rhythms of its eccentric accumulation throb from these samples of money, to the camel's bladder, to the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, to the final Barnum-like touch of “The Bathtub Marshall". This last, found at the top floor of the museum, is a tribute to the curator's ingenuity in making good use of every square foot. Behind a glass partition is an antique bath with dripping tap. In the half-filled bath sits a uniformed figure and the label informs us that this is “The Bathtub Marshall… Marshall de Castellane (1788–1862), Governor of Lyons, France", who “had three uniforms and three sets of medals, one for bathing”.
By all rights one of Ripley's most cherished possessions, the Chinese junk in which he sailed on inland Florida waters near his winter quarters at Palm Beach, should be anchored in St. Augustine's Matanzas Bay, off the Castille de San Marcos. Visitors to the museum would thus get in advance that intimation of the exotic Orient which Ripley found so alluring and which caused him, after his first trip to China, to sign his cartoons Rip-Li for a while. The Orient — outlandish and mysterious — lay at the very heart of his appeal, as the adventurous uncle who has knocked about the world, seen a thing or two and returned to tell the tale.
A DOG HAS DIED
by Pablo Neruda
My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.
So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.
Re: Which way to vote. What about measure X for Point Arena?
Had to say goodbye to my dog yesterday, the Neruda poem gave me the first cry of the day. Doing the right thing is really hard sometimes.
Sorry to hear that. Lost my old bird dog this year and it was like losing an old friend. So please hang in there, no fun for sure.
Right there with you, Barbara– we had to say goodbye a while back to our beloved kitty of a decade. Our animal friends dive deep into our hearts. Crying helps as it comes and goes.
Thanks Chuck and Matt. It’s a club most of us join and none of us want to.
All animal stories have a sad end for us, but not necessarily for those still in the Garden Eden. Go get new puppy.
UNCHAINED MELODY
Ballot recommendations
An example of why I never ask advice on how to vote.
To: Tom in Albion
Will have to disagree on many of your picks.
Most importantly for me — Yes on 36 is the way to vote.
This guy is a joke! Keep your vote to yourself, nobody gives a rat’s ass about your Libtard votes.
Harris/Walz, Schiff and No on 36, you must hate America.
+1
Ain’t the rain great?
Have a nice day…
Laz
Yes indeed. It provides a break from dystopian influential influences.
Yeah, really! Who is this Commie schlmiel to think that strangers in a comment section want to hear his toeing California Party Line? And FOOK New Jersey too, with it’s always Laughable Springsteen and Bob (sic) Jovi.
(Ignore the angry troll “Call It As I See It.” Too cowardly to use his real name, spouts juvenile terms like “libtard,” is a sad laughing stock here, desperate for any attention).
As for Prop 36, I think the League of Women Voters got it right: No. Much as we all wish for less crime, 36 relies on faulty reasoning and failed approaches:
https://lwvc.org/ballot-measure/2024-prop-36/recommendation/
DAVID SEVERN:
Kids being taught to build nuclear submarines.
Kaputalism in action. Pure insanity.
KAPUTALISM! My new word for the day! Not a compliment, I gather… our Navy’s Trident sub fleet is wearing out?
Comment to Neruda poem responses referenced to, previously…
Heard on social media, today, how DTrump/DVance could have used squirrels, rabbits, goats, sheep, instead.
RIPLEY’S WORLD: BELIEVE IT
Haven’t read “Ripley,s Believe It or Not”, or for that matter “Prince Valiant”, since the mid 70s. Guess they disappeared, or else I got fed up with SF noozepapers.
Thanks to Steve Talbot for the links to those two documentaries. “1968” made me weep (again) and my fully disabled Viet Nam veteran brother reminds me every day of the price of that war crime.
And the damned leadership of this country did NOT learn a thing from that genocidal escapade. We just keep repeating it or funding other savages to do so.
Our dog Boswell died over a decade and a half ago and I guess I’ll never get over it. Maybe because he was such a special dog, a Boston terrier so beautiful he could have won at any dog show (but he had no “papers”) and yet tough enough to fight two pit bulls to save his lady friend, another Boston terrier (beautiful when she was running full speed, which was often). He lived to be sixteen and had the softest heart and the biggest brown eyes, full of love, humor, and probably sadness for the human condition. Unlike Neruda, I believe in rebirth, and he will have a good one, I think, as he never did harm except killed a baby skunk, for which he paid dearly.
Look Tin Eli has a book that was written about him, sold by the Kelley House Museum. Look Tin Eli’s childhood name was Look Tin Sing. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but back in the day, Chinese people used different names at different point in their lives. So Look Tin Eli = Look Tin Sing.
Thank you, Ms. Tillis. I hadn’t known about the book.
I WAS TRUMP’S GHOSTWRITER. A NEW BIOPIC GETS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING RIGHT
What a waste of film and time. Anybody who can’t see through the phony, Trump, on its own is too dumb to understand the movie.
Thank you so much to Flynn Washburn and the AVA for posting a great update from him!!
I am so happy to hear he is upright and taking good care of himself!! I found it to be inspiring tackling my own aging issues!
Please do write some more Flynn and do continue on your health journey! Actually just writing on aging would be great as many readers here are climbing up in years.
Thank tou so much❣️
He apparently couldn’t resist the good vibes you sent him, Marianne.
I am reminded 24/7
My right to secrecy, and privacy is violated with vote by mail by signing the back of my envelope.
‘The right of individuals to vote by secret ballot is fundamental’.
‘The right to cast a secret ballot in a public election is a core value in the United States’ system of self-governance. Secrecy and privacy in elections guard against coercion and are essential to integrity in the electoral process. Secrecy of the ballot is guaranteed in state constitutions and statutes nationwide.
Course nothing’s going to change, and no one is going to convince me voting by mail is safe.
No choice. I just throw my hands up in the air, roll my eyes, and keep on truckin’.
So Socal decides to change 100+ years of tradition and label the rainfall year from Oct ->Sept from the usual July to June and we are all supposed to “falsify” our records to suit LA’s weather patterns. Let’s just cut off their water supply and let their golf courses dry up and i know this is a stupid rant, but the times call for resistance to ALL THE BULL FECES. Like Adventist Health moving as many procedures as they can to Ukiah and Willits and abandoning the coast because they can’t make money. Too bad we can’t send them to LA and too bad the AVA is digital.
“When the Teamsters are in trouble, who do they call? It was Sean O’Brien calling Democrats for help.” – AOC
Teamsters locals across the country have endorsed the Harris campaign. O’Brien reminds me of the old corrupt Teamsters, not quite Hoffa level but well on his way.
KAMALA UNWINDING.
James Kunstler becomes a Trumpster, who would have believed that?