Mendocino County Today: Sunday 11/3/2024

Clear & Cool | Navarro Woods | Time Change | Position Available | Parks Pass | Village Newsletter | Pet Butch | Accessible Walks | Senior Center | 10,000 Buddhas | Stay Upbeat | Ed Notes | Special Screening | Redwood Classics | Chainsaw Octopus | Yesterday's Catch | Canine Heimlich | Marco Radio | Crumb Parents | Invisible Men | On Foot | Invasive Mussel | Candlestick Park | Lively Debate | Even Donald | 60s Music | Owning Yourself | Works Wonders | Lead Stories | Fought Fascists | Garbage Politics | Old Trends | Unserious Man | Think Big | Hit Job | Three Little Kittens

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DRY WEATHER and breezy northerly winds are expected for today. Northerlies strengthen again on Tuesday, followed by stronger northeasterlies over the interior Tuesday night. Dry weather is expected to prevail all next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): An overcast 49F this Sunday morning on the coast although the satellite only shows some passing high clouds? Dry skies & moderate temps until maybe next Saturday. High surf advisories kick in tonight.

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REAL TIME COUNTING SHEEP

by Paul Modic

It’s time for the November time change which usually generates a lot of opinions, mostly from those who don’t like it and question why we even do it.

Most of those who live off-grid, or are self-employed or retired, rarely do anything different, except to change watches, clocks, and computers, though the latter often adjust themselves automatically. Mostly the change can be ignored, when you’re out of the mainstream, unless you have to get the kids to school or go to work.

There is a choice to be made at bedtime when the change comes: do you try to go to sleep at the same set time but an hour earlier than you usually do? Or do you switch to going to bed an hour earlier than the clock will say tomorrow, in order not to change the “real time” that you’re used to?

For example if your usual bedtime is 10pm, will you start going to bed at 9pm? (Instead of going to sleep at 10 and waking up at 5, you’d be going to bed at 9 and waking up at 4, assuming the goal is the hallowed seven hours.)

If you just go to bed when you’re tired, regardless of the time, then you probably won’t be affected, but if you have a set bedtime, one of the things recommended for insomnia, then changing your bedtime to an actual hour earlier may mess with your sleep quality or quantity for a while, maybe a few days or even longer.

(If you really get into it, it’s interesting how interrelated sleep, food, alcohol, weed, exercise, sex, and anxiety are.)

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CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY PARKS PASS

You can now check out a free vehicle day-use entry to over 200 participating state park units at your local public library…

https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=30806

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AV VILLAGE NEWSLETTER

Hello, November! Let the cozy evenings begin…

https://mailchi.mp/9ee21d09dfa6/anderson-valley-village-newsletter-august-5846595

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UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Butch is a sweet, happy boy who’s in heaven when he’s getting attention! Butch is easy to walk and enjoys going on adventures. We think Butch would enjoy a home with children and a friendly canine roomie. This dude will be a loyal and loving companion. Mr. Handsome is 2 years old and a hunka-hunka 70 pounds. Butch is neutered, so he can trot right out the shelter door with you today! To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, tortoise, 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. Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

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LESLIE'S ACCESSIBLE WALKS

I moved to the Mendocino Coast in August of 2021. Shortly after I moved here I fell during a walk in the Town of Mendocino and realized the progressive neuromuscular condition I’ve lived with had entered a new stage. I could no longer trust my balance and required mobility assistance. Now I use a walker or wheelchair in the house and out in the world.

Thanks to the Mendocino Land Trust, I had the opportunity to use a beach wheelchair. Gradually, I’ve learned more about accessibility and what I can do here on the Coast.

I became involved with the Blue Zone Project and challenged myself to organize a series of Walk & Roll Moais (a series of 10 mostly accessible walks). I’ve decided to continue with free monthly walks around the Mendocino Coast area. I hope you’ll consider joining us.…

https://glasshalffull.online/leslies-accessible-walks/

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AV SENIOR CENTER CALENDAR

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THE MYSTERIOUS CALIFORNIA TOWN WITH 10,000 BUDDHAS

A 5-minute detour off Highway 101 in Ukiah leads to an enlightening travel destination

by Silas Valentino

Much of the magic in Mendocino County is that marvels often await you at the end of any road splintering off Highway 101. Talmage Road, for example, cuts east from Ukiah’s downtown and delivers drivers to a surprising city that appears to have been dropped into the Northern California foothills from a faraway land.

At first blush, the two-lane road is your run-of-the-mill route through the bucolic North Coast valley. After scaling over the Russian River, Talmage continues past a concrete supplier, a meat market and a general store before arriving at a two-story landmark that’s unlike anything else in the county.

A palatial, three-arch gate topped with beige roof tiling marks the transition from Talmage Road into Bodhi Way, one of the main access streets for a thriving community beyond the gateway. The trio of colors reflects the region’s earth tones while perfectly bilateral symmetry instills a sense of harmony. From a balcony between the arches, a sprawling campus is revealed below. Numerous oak trees cast amorphous rings of shade for students of all ages shuffling to class or monks sauntering toward temple.

The saffron arches symbolize the passage from Ukiah, a city of about 16,000 people, into the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, or CTTB, an international and public monastery with around 350 residents. Although the property contains a discomforting past, a holdover from the 19th century, it’s since gone through a metamorphosis to become the largest monastery of its kind in Northern California. The city was reborn. A fundamental Buddhist belief in bare view.

It’s hard to imagine how a campus teeming with life at the foot of Wonderful Enlightenment Mountain was formerly a state asylum for the criminally insane and home to some of the most violent inmates ever to have ever been committed in California.

A haven for education

Nearly 50 years after founder Master Hsuan Hua left San Francisco to establish the monastic sangha in Mendocino, the Buddhist city remains committed to his vision: educating students while expanding the campus — tripling its size since it was established in 1976.

Seventy buildings are spread across the 700-acre site, which is open to the public to freely visit. From prayer halls to classrooms and even a popular vegetarian restaurant, Ten Thousand Buddhas is a self-contained universe for the spiritually enlightened. It has a senior home, a roster of doctors and practitioners, and both its own water supply and its own composting program.

Less than five minutes from Highway 101, Ten Thousand Buddhas is a unique opportunity for travelers on the corridor to stretch their legs and eat a distinct meal from a kitchen that eschews some common ingredients, including meat.

Students there span the ages from kindergarten through high school and college. Some of the roughly 40 university students are in pursuit of a Master of Arts in Buddhist classics from the Dharma Realm Buddhist University. Elsewhere, about 45 high school students take classes among the grade schoolers.

The university has no lecture halls; instead, classes foster roundtable discussions. Inside a dormitory lounge on a recent visit, three students openly debated the merits of their education and what was more valuable: academics or personal development.

To a visitor strolling its several quads, CTTB seems like a typical liberal arts school, but unlike those other colleges, this one is also home to about 150 monastics.

Wrapped in golden and brown robes with heads tidily buzzed, the monks rise at 4 a.m. each day for their first prayers in the main hall — adorned with the city’s namesake: 10,000 miniature golden statuettes honoring the Buddha.

It’s believed that Master Hua made each statue in the hall by hand, casting them in gold from a basement in a Sacramento temple. Bhikshuni Jin Jr Shi, the university’s associate dean of academic affairs, told SFGATE that a strain of the master’s hair is planted within each golden Buddha.

The statues are stacked on shelves against the four walls inside the main prayer hall. In the foyer is a lifesize statue of Master Hua, who died in 1995.

Outside among the sidewalks, the monks’ benign and colorful presence is matched by the muster of peacocks roaming the grounds with a unique immunity. All life at Ten Thousand Buddhas is revered, and any killing, even of the tiniest of insects, is kindly forbidden.

Distinct duality

Well before Master Hua arrived in Ukiah to transform the space into a mellow monastery, the property was the site of the Mendocino State Hospital. Also known as Mendocino State Asylum for the Insane, the psychiatric hospital and surrounding complex was established in 1889. Luther Burbank, a pioneer in agricultural science who lived in Santa Rosa, designed the original landscaping.

Over nearly 80 years, the asylum took in thousands of patients. It was coed, and records show the inmate population grew rapidly in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. Notorious people were institutionalized there, including Erwin “Machine Gun” Walker — a former police employee whose 1940s crime spree in Los Angeles inspired one of the first police television dramas: “Dragnet” — and serial killer Herbert Mullin, known for stalking Santa Cruz County.

About 1,600 people died on campus during the hospital’s years in operation. Its tenure ended in 1972, when Gov. Ronald Reagan gutted funding and emptied psychiatric hospitals in California.

The stately administration building was razed in 1952, but several others remain. Some were built using Tudor architecture and have gradually adapted, undergoing a renewed life cycle after Master Hua’s Sino-American Buddhist Association purchased 237 acres from the state, including the old hospital buildings, for $1.8 million in the mid-1970s.

From the beginning, Master Hua’s mission was to promote an ethics-based education and cultivate a community that could house thousands of people once more — this time without the bedlam.

Speaking to the Ukiah Daily Journal in 1979, just as the archway gate first went up, a spokesperson for CTTB relayed that 150 people lived there at the time, when it was a smaller campus. But Ten Thousand Buddhas was already envisioning space for 3,000 more residents. “We’re still preparing,” David Rounds told the Journal. “We’re building the blocks for the future.”

Today, a former gymnasium has been transformed into the Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas, where monastics gather to recite the Shurangama Mantra, one of the longest mantras in Buddhism. The Rebirth Hall adjoins it while a nearby boiler room is sometimes used for badminton. Around lunchtime on a recent afternoon, a pounding rhythm was pouring out from what used to be a firehouse but now contains an enormous drum.

More growth is on the way, as a new school is under construction on the eastern half of campus. The International Institute of Philosophy and Ethics East Campus was envisioned decades ago and recently reached the second phase of development. IIPE plans to accommodate up to 500 more residents with a 1,000-person hall.

It’s expected to be completed in 2026, exactly 50 years after Master Hua planted the first seeds among the fallow fields. Although vestiges from the hospital’s past lurk on the campus — asylum architecture remains inside some of the buildings — the atmosphere does not induce shuddering. It would be difficult to assume the city’s past with all the monks and peacocks roaming around.

In 2002, when the Mendocino County Planning Commission decided on Ten Thousand Buddhas's expansion for IIPE, Rounds wrote a letter to the editor at the Ukiah Daily Journal pleading for public support, noting how the property’s past was sanitized by the Buddhists. The spokesperson described it as a “white elephant” after the state hospital closed and said that both the county and Mendocino College declined ownership because “the property was unusable.”

Facing neglect, the campus found redemption in Master Hua who, as preached in Buddhism, recognized the continuous cycle of life, death and rebirth. With this samsara in mind, a disregarded hospital reawakened into a city of 10,000 Buddhists — give or take a few thousand.

“Truly, if there was ever a perfect illustration of the old saying, ‘To make silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ this is it,” Rounds wrote.

Food for health

The day begins before sunrise at CTTB with the ringing of the ceremonial Shurangama Mantra Bell promptly at 3:30 a.m. It’s perfectly placed in the heart of campus. Beneath the bell are cracks and fissures in the cement due to its weight pulling it down to earth.

Eight hours later at 11:30 a.m., the Jyun Kang Vegetarian Restaurant opens. One of the more popular ways to attract outsiders to Ten Thousand Buddhas, the restaurant is open only for lunch and is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It’s destination dining for folks living in the Ukiah Valley or passing through it on Highway 101.

Shi said that Jyun Kang translates as “to your health” in Mandarin, and the Chinese menu lives up to the promise. The single-room banquet hall holds a dozen circular tables, and the walls are mostly bare, except for a vertical poster with calligraphy by a window.

A petite casement the size of a porthole is in the wall behind the host. It connects with the kitchen, which cooks free of onions, garlic and other alliums because in Buddhist philosophy, pungent plants can lead to interstitial irritation or emotional upheaval that could interfere with spiritual energy by disrupting the calm.

Nonetheless, the dishes are appetizing and flavorful. One of Jyun Kang’s most popular items is the golden tofu roll, which wraps dried tofu skin in seaweed. It comes gilded from frying and lightly topped with sesame seeds. The kitchen prepares many items with a generous amount of basil, and portion sizes easily filled a small group.

The highway beckoned following the meal, and it was back onto Bodhi Way to pass through the archway. This time, with an appreciation for how places adapt and renewal’s availability to all.

(SFgate)

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ED NOTES

THE SANTA ROSA PRESS DEMOCRAT. Shall we all sigh together, or am I the last person who even bothers to be annoyed by the paper? A recent on-line edition listed the following as the top stories. (1) SR Man Arrested in Assault, Accused of Threatening to Kill His Father (2) Woman Killed in Crash (3) Man Killed in Ukiah Knife Fight (4) Tracy Diver Dies Entering Ocean (5) Man Exposes Himself to Teen (6) Woman Dies, Kids OK in Crash (7) Man Killed on Motorcycle (8) Motorcyclist Dies at Bay Bridge (9) Picking Pinot for Easter.

SHOULDN'T STORY number 9 have been “Picking Pinot to Die With”? Or maybe “Crucifixion Pinot: the Only Wine To Get Really Nailed With”? Later in the week a headline read, “SR Man Shot and Injured.” Very few shot people aren't injured, as a subsequent PD headline confirmed: “Off-Duty Cop Shoots Self With Gun.”

LOOKING BACK (2007): ‘Pig Hunt,’ the movie, began filming early, very early one Monday morning at the Comptche Store, where some 100 support people gathered, the 100 included the opening scene's star, the great blues man Charlie Musselwhite, who plays an outback shopkeeper but was performing in San Diego as late as Sunday night. Boonville people were pleased to learn that Vince Ballew, a local logger, would appear in the movie which, by the way, is not some hand-held camera epic but a full-fledged, union-sanctioned, Hollywood production directed by Jim Isaac whose $20 mil horror film, ‘Skinwalkers,’ will be released in July. Working behind the scenes are multiple-Oscar winners Aggie Rodgers and Geoffrey Kirkland, the latter up for another Oscar for his work on ‘Children of Men.’ ILM, the San Rafael-based special effects outfit responsible for the creation of Lucas Film's panoply of weird creatures, has constructed the scariest pig pig hunters will never see. Most of the crew is billeted in Ukiah, with another group bunking in the Toll House on the Ukiah-Boonville Road. The lead actors and actresses, I believe, are being put up at various inns around Anderson Valley. Filming in and around the Anderson Valley will take about a month before the production relocates, to shoot final scenes in San Francisco. Everyone involved, by the way, has raved about all the good food available in Boonville and Philo. A whole lotta money has rained down on Mendoland from this venture — a whole lot.

LAST TIME I LOOKED, Mendocino County had the greatest incidence of child abuse of any of California's counties. In that same body of allegedly pertinent statistics was one that said Mendocino County also has the greatest percentage of credentialed classroom teachers.

IS THERE A LINK? Should we reduce the number of credentialed teachers to reduce crimes against children? Seriously, though, 657 sustained child abuse out of 2,322 reports?

PEOPLE EMPLOYED at various levels of government, a third of all persons employed in the county, vote for Democrats because Democrats can be depended upon to make more government of the type that re-elects them. What the Democrats have done on the Northcoast is create an old-fashioned political machine that creates jobs for people who delude themselves that Democrats are the “progressive” alternative to Trump. Zodiac would be a ‘progressive’ alternative to Trump, but San Francisco and some other cities elect people to supervisor and even Congress who are genuinely progressive — but not in Mendocino County. In Mendocino County Democrats and Republicans are interchangeable, so alike that Republicans don't bother running anybody against the entrenched, impenetrably gerrymandered, machine-selected Democrat — Huffman, Wood, McGuire, and now some cipher out of Santa Rosa! Weep for lost Mendocino!

CONGRESSMAN THOMPSON, the wine industry's main man in Washington, was instrumental in getting the ban on ozone-destroying methyl bromide delayed for five years when he “represented” the Northcoast because that's what the wine industry wanted. Pumped down into the earth to depths of 12 feet, methyl bromide sterilized the earth for new vines. Immigrant Mexicans, upon whom the entire industry depends for their hard work at starvation wages, clad in hazmat suits, applied not only this particular poison to the earth, but year round poisons that kill weeds and insects. The poisons get into the water — cf the dead Navarro — and everything around these vineyards is soon dead. (When's the last time you saw a frog anywhere near a vineyard?) The wine industry, thanks to Democrats, is basically exempt from industrial safety standards, and the industry's use of pesticides and herbicides is pretty much unregulated because Mendocino County is wine country.

THE LATE MICHEL SALGUES, a PhD in chemistry, and the former boss at the huge, French-owned Roederer Winery in Philo, was quite candid about the realities of wine making in Mendocino County. “Why do you think we're here? We can do things here we cannot do in France because the wine industry in France, right down to labor practices, is heavily regulated.”

ONE SPRING MORNING back in the early 1970s, as clusters of hippie kids waited on Greenwood Road for the big yellow buses to carry them to classrooms as dull as the ones their alienated parents had fled for California's backwoods, a Louisiana-Pacific helicopter, spraying the freshly logged hills with herbicides to prevent non-commercial re-vegetation, heedlessly doused the little Rainbows and Karmas as they stood beside the road near where the logging had been done. The hippies mobilized and quickly passed a county-wide ban on the aerial application of herbicides. Within months, state Democrats, including the Northcoast contingent, led by mega-liberal Willie Brown, their pockets stuffed with corporate ag cash, passed legislation that prohibited individual counties from regulating herbicides and pesticides; only the state could decide who could poison the kids and who couldn't. You don't like Garlon dropped on your kid? Take it up with Sacramento.

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ARENA THEATER SPECIAL EVENT

We are hosting a special one-day screening of the documentary, SOS - The San Onofre Syndrome at the Arena Theater on Sunday, November 24…

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REDWOOD CLASSICS, PAST & PRESENT

All My Life I Want To Be A Panther

by Zack Anderson

All my life I want to be a Panther…

Work, work… oh baby, work, work!

— A.V. Cheer from 1980s

From early on the Boonville High School gym was a temple to me, a sacred place. At night it would glow like a signal fire, and if you were in a car driving past and held your breath you could hear the hollow thump of a dribbling ball, or the plaintive atonal shrieks of tennis shoes scuffing on the hardwood. I couldn’t wait for my turn, to get inside and run and shoot and be part of it, whatever it was.

First it was watching my dad and Uncle Ken scrape and sweat through various men’s league teams and pick-up games with and against the local boys: Gene Waggoner, Gary Waggoner, Tony Summit, David Summit, Leroy Perry, Chris Rossi, Jed Steele, Coach Jim Mastin from Mendocino, Danny Huey, Charlie Hiatt, Steve “Turbo” Blackstone from Ukiah, Rick Cupples (whose girlfriend used to read paperback novels in the empty stands), and a host of others whose names I’m sure will come back to me in the days to come, standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, or flipping channels late at night wondering where all the time has gone.

Perhaps the greatest single game I ever saw was at the old Pomolita Gym in Ukiah. It was Gene Waggoner’s five against a team led by Ukiah native Kelvin Chapman, who played second base for the New York Mets for several years. As local sports fans know, Chapman was also an unbelievable hoops player, having been an All-American point guard at Santa Rosa Junior College before getting paid for hardball. And Gene, who starred at the University of Mississippi, could fill the iron like nobody’s business, a master of a dazzling array of playground junkball shots, Boonville’s own Pete Maravich.

A true gym rat, Gene was a shooter and a scorer who regularly played several hours a day, and thought nothing of driving three hours to some cold and dusty gym, usually with G.P. and me crammed into the backseat of his V.W. Beetle, for a pick-up game against ragtag foes. That long ago night at Pomolita, Gene and Kelvin were both unstoppable, and went at each other jumper after jumper, twisting lay-up after darting steal and breakaway. It was poetry. It was rhythm. It was the game the way the game was meant to be played. And I knew if I wanted to be within a thousand miles of Gene and Kelvin, I had to practice, and keep on practicing. I had to learn the fundamentals, to understand how a team works.

Luckily for me (and hundreds of other Boonville kids), there was Junior Panthers, the stellar youth basketball program founded and expertly run by Paul Hughbanks and Ron Penrose. Paul and Ron co-captained a tight ship, two hours each Tuesday and Thursday night spent on dribbling, ball handling, two-handed chest passes, free throws, defense, keeping one eye on the ball and one eye on your man (or woman), over and over again. If you were lucky, you were asked to join Rodger Tolman’s tournament team, which traveled to Mendocino, Leggett, Covelo and everywhere in between to play other pee-wees.

Rodger taught us even more discipline and fundamentals: how to look to pass first, how to bounce pass, how to cut off the baseline, how to box out, how to box out in our sleep, how to judge where the rebound is going to by the angle of the shot, how to follow-through on our own shots so that the ball has a nice rotation and practice and practice and then some more. Things got easier after fifty or so attempts. Hitting the outlet man and filling the lanes became second nature. We had pretty good teams even then, with Jerry Tolman, Aron Evans, Eric June, Danny Pardini, Olie Erickson, Ronnie (son of Ron) Penrose, Steve Fortin, Richie Wellington, Jeff Burroughs, Brian Roberts, G.P. Price, and myself. We thought we were pretty cool in our red and white uniforms. We even had red wristbands. And if there was ever a more glorious endeavor in the annals of humankind, we wouldn’t have believed it.

After Junior Panthers, we graduated to Jeff Miller’s Junior High squad. Miller was another strict if affable teacher, and had us going to tournaments from Crescent City to Knightsen.

One evening, we were coming back from the Delta in the school’s old GMC jitney, with Miller driving. The fog was so thick Miller forbid any one of us from talking. Of course, that made us all giggle, which increased Miller’s annoyance, which made us laugh more. I’ll never forget inching through the impenetrable fog with Miller’s white knuckles on the steering wheel as he tried not to run off the road — though at five miles an hour we probably wouldn’t have been hurt too badly.

By thirteen, G.P. and I were the managers for the boys’ varsity, coached by Gene Waggoner. We had matching brown t-shirts and swept the floors during time-outs, and at half-time cut oranges to give our hardy warriors that winning energy. Gene instilled in us the desire to, above all, win the Redwood Classic. He made it seem like it was the most important thing since the Battle of Stalingrad, and maybe it was.

But despite our desperate yearnings, Gene’s early squads couldn’t get over the hump, even with Don Summit, Terry Hughbanks, the 7’0” Charles Davis, the 6’10” Randy Yates, John Stevenson, Brian Wyant, et al.

The brick wall those guys ran into was Mendocino, coached by legendary taskmaster Jim Mastin, whose hard-nosed ways made Vince Lombardi seem like Deepak Chopra. Mendo also had talent galore with Mark Moulder, Kevin Young from Deep Comptche, a kid named Satterfield, and of course Dan Doubiago (who went on to play offensive line for the Kansas City Chiefs). As good as the Panthers were, Mendocino was a little better. After watching our heroes lose to the Cardinals yet again, G.P. and I vowed that one day we’d win the Redwood Classic.

Fast forward several years and Gene is still coaching the boy’s varsity team, only G.P. and I have graduated from towel boys to players. We are pretty good, ranked number one in the state in Division B. We beat Ukiah (with 1,600 students) that season, not bad for a public school with a hundred kids total. We had worked hard, playing in summer leagues and pick-up games and practiced daily in the hot August sun. G.P. and I used to run down Anderson Valley Way singing pep songs, dreaming of winning the Redwood Classic… and suddenly we were there.

I think it was against Ferndale or South Fork in the championship game, and the clock was winding down and we were going to win the thing that no other Panther team had won since 1967. All the car rides, all mornings opening the gym with Rodger and Gene and Jeff Miller were worth it. The winning was nice, but the camaraderie, the group achievement was the best thing. We started playing together at a very young age, and the core group stayed together, and the heavens opened up and smiled upon us.

Every year the Redwood Classic brings together sixteen teams from all over Northern California. Enjoy it, kids. Enjoy the pageantry and the warm-up cheers and the smell of popcorn mixing with the floor wax. Enjoy the improbable shots and upset victories and precision teamwork when it happens. Enjoy your youth and your sweat and your friends both in and out of uniform. Enjoy it all while you can, whether or not you play or know someone who plays or just like to watch like Chauncey the Gardener, because it’s the Redwood Classic, and this is the heart of a small town, still beating loudly after all these years.

And speaking of memories, here are more Panther hoops stars I neglected to remember before (and forgive me for duplications or leaving the many more worthy out, whose only sin is that I don’t know them): Adam Bjorquist. Joy Kinion. Randy Yates. Robert Mailer Anderson. Gary Waggoner. Miles Gibson. Tony Sanchez. Ryan Parrish. Sarah Christian. Tonya Daniels, Graciela Torres. Erica Wallace. J.J. Thomasson. Christina McFadden. John Stevenson. Paul Hughbanks. Ron Penrose. Jeff Miller. Rodger Tolman. Deputy Squires. Harold Perry. Dick and Jane Warsing. Gene Waggoner… and those countless untold parents and guardians and coaches and scoreboard operators and referees like Brad Shear and Jeff Campbell and Paul Jack who made our youths special with their time and patience and encouragement. You taught us the beauty of the game and the honor of the team. And we are forever in your debt.

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EXPERT CHAINSAW CARVER Jeffrey Michael Samudosky used part of a dead redwood tree to create his incredible octopus sculpture.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, November 2, 2024

GABRIEL CHAON, 18, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

BRANDON CONWELL, 36, Vacaville/Ukiah. Vehicle registration tampering.

JOHN DOYLE, 36, Ukiah. Concentrated cannabis, controlled substance, ammo possession by prohibited person.

NATHAN ELLYSON, 34, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, under influence, false ID.

CHARLES GIELOW III, 48, Albion. Controlled substances for sale, paraphernalia, metal knuckles, county parole violation.

WILLIAM GOFORTH, 56, Willits. Trespassing, controlled substance, polluting state waters, failure to appear.

JOSHUA LEONARD, 25, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

NICOLAS MITCHELL, 24, Kelseyville/Ukiah. Resisting.

ANGELA OXLEY, 50, Chico/Ukiah. Public nuisance.

JEFFREY PAYTAS, 56, Newport, Oregon/Ukiah. Assault weapon.

JOEL RAMOS, 43, Hopland. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

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MEMO OF THE AIR: In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines.

Here's the recording of last night's (Friday, 2024-11-01) 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-0616

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 not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

"The Chicken God said I could come back, but if I were to eat chicken again I would be permanently banned." https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/10/george-peterland.html

OH! I've designed and built a few mixing boards, and I've known and handled dozens of them. This here is mixing board porn, or pron, as they spell it now. Prepare to adjust your pants. This is the smoky-voiced Julie London of mixing boards. https://boingboing.net/2024/10/31/the-original-beatles-recording-console-is-on-sale-for-3-million.html

When I was little and my mother was taking me around with her on her job selling real estate in L.A. (and winning the salesman of the month trophy month after month at the office full of men), she had a Polaroid camera, the original kind that you pressed flat to put it away. You'd take it out of the bag, click the catch, and it accordioned open /POP/ on a spring. like George Jetson's car unfolding into existence out of his briefcase. She'd take pictures of a house from outside, and in all the rooms, each time pulling the picture out; you'd count to sixty, peel the layers off and toss them and, for some reason, shake it, maybe to dry it faster. The process smelled like beauty parlor chemicals and urine. That camera was one facet of an amazing promised future. Regular cameras and film were cheaper, but for those you'd have to wait until you used up an entire roll of film, drive to a store, drop off the film, and come back in three days to a week to pay and see whether you'd cut the bride's head off or not, or forgot to wind it and double-exposed every other shot. But, and this is about the way people were then, the man in the store would only charge you for the pictures you liked, plus you could keep the ghosts of cars and pets and whatever. And if your shoes wore out in two or three years, you could take them back to the shoe store and they'd apologize and give you a new pair for free, because they stood behind their goods. And you could take old shoes to your choice of four or five shoe repair shops downtown and have them resoled and patched and refinished like new for like a dollar-fifty. When's the last time you were in a shoe repair shop? Remember what it smelled like in there. A shoe repair man could have a nice life, live in a house, support his family, even take a vacation in the mountains, and take pictures of the lake, and tape the pictures to the back of the cash register. https://boingboing.net/2024/10/28/enjoy-two-different-looks-at-the-impossibly-instant-polaroid-camera.html

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

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INVISIBLE MEN

by Fred Gardner

Fort Lawton doesn't exist anymore – not as an Army base and not in historic memory, unless you come across “On American Soil” by Jack Hamann (University of Washington Press, 2007). In 1944, 43 Black soldiers were court-martialed there – 40 charged with rioting and three with first-degree murder. It was the biggest court martial of World War II. The lead prosecutor was an ambitious lawyer from Texas, Lt Col Leon Jaworski, who in '64 investigated the assassination of JFK for the Warren Commission and in 1974 became the special prosecutor of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

The Army ceded Fort Lawton – almost 700 acres on Puget Sound – to Seattle in 1965 and the city made it into Discovery Park. When Native Americans invoked an 1865 treaty promising “the reversion of surplus military land to their original landowners,” Seattle ceded 20 acres to the United Indians of All Tribes.

In 1986, Jack Hamann, a law school grad who had become a reporter for KING TV in Seattle, heard about an unusual headstone at the Fort Lawton cemetery that bore the (misspelled) name Gugliemo Olivotto and the date 14 Agosto 1944. The date led him to a front-page story in the Post-Intelligencer that he summarizes thus: “An Italian prisoner of war had been lynched at Fort Lawton, and the prime suspects were members of a 'mob' of African-American soldiers.” To his surprise, Hamann then had to “look long and hard to find anyone who had ever heard about this incredible event,” which was “conspicuously absent from history books and even from the collective memories of lawyers, soldiers, and journalists.”

Back in 1944, when the Army was hurriedly shifting personnel and equipment to the Pacific, Fort Lawton had become a major embarkation point. About 10,000 soldiers were housed there that summer, including a 200-man “Italian Service Unit” made up of POWs who had been interviewed by US Military Intelligence and deemed apolitical. Mussolini had been killed and the US State Department, anticipating the Cold War, was courting the new government. ISU members lived in barracks, did menial jobs, and wore the same olive drab fatigues as GIs, with a white shoulder patch that said “Italy.” (Signifiantly, Hamann notes, some ardent fascists avoided prison by bluffing their way through MI screenings and getting assigned to ISUs.)

The “Italian Area” at Fort Lawton was adjacent to the “Negro Area.” More than a million African-Americans served in the Army during World War II, but units were segregated and Black soldiers were disproportionately assigned supportive roles. “When roughly 10% of the soldiers were Black,” Hamann notes, “34% of quartermaster units and 42% of engineering units were Black. In the Transportation Corps… port companies, were almost 80% Black.” (After ranks were depleted by the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45, commanders were ordered to accept Black volunteers. ”General Dwight Eisenhower resisted the order,” the US Army website now acknowledges, “but formed black volunteer platoons that could be attached to combat units.”)

There were three “Negro port companies” assembled at Fort Lawn in August '44 –Invisible Men trained to load troops, food, supplies, ordinance, and equipment onto trucks, ships, and planes. Their work called for skill and coordination. “A hatch tender signals a winch operator as slings of cargo are loaded…” The inherent dangers had been demonstrated only a month earlier when an explosion of two ships at the Navy munitions depot in Port Chicago killed 320 sailors, two-thirds of them Black, and seriously wounded 300. (The 50 survivors who refused to resume handling munitions were then convicted of mutiny. The Port Chicago sailors were Invisible Men until Robert Allen's fine book about their court martial came out in 1990.)

“Discovery Park Graves,” Hamann's hour-long documentary about the forgotten “riot” and the ensuing court-martial Fort Lawton, was well received when it aired in 1987. His career flourished and he won numerous awards. But over the years he came to have serious misgivings about his original take on the Fort Lawton case, and he decided to investigate further. ”On American Soil” was his take two. After it was published, Hamman explained to archivist David S. Ferriero:

“The documentary had primarily accepted Jaworski’s theory that black soldiers in the segregated 1944 US Army had grown to resent that white commanders treated them little better than the Italian prisoners housed right across the street. Jaworski had convinced the court that simmering resentment boiled over the night of August 14, 1944, fueling a riot and Olivotto’s lynching. Years after the documentary first aired, friends and colleagues often expressed discomfort about its unanswered questions and incongruous assertions. In particular, it was the only case in American history where black men stood trial accused of a mob lynching; didn’t that raise a red flag or two?… In 2001, with many more years of reporting experience under our belts, my wife, Leslie, and I realized that the documentary had relied primarily on secondary sources – 1944 news articles and such – rather than on primary sources. Determined to learn more, we set out on a journey which eventually led us to the National Archives” in College Park, Maryland.”

The Hamanns had hoped to find the court-martial file in a matter of hours. But it would be weeks before Leslie came across something “far more intriguing and powerful” in the 'Miscellaneous' section of the Archives’ World War II collection – a recently-declassified report by Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke, who had investigated the tragic episode for the army Inspector General. From Cooke's report Hamann learned “that the U.S. Army knew – in advance of the trial – that its detectives had thoroughly botched the investigation of Olivotto’s murder, and that the defendants had been fingered by highly-suspect informants.”

“Leon Jaworski himself had a copy of that investigation,” according to Hamann, “yet fought successfully to keep it out of the hands of the defendants’ Army-appointed lawyers.” Jaworski aspired to prosecute war criminals in Europe after the Allied victory and he needed to win convictions at Fort Lawton to get that assignment. The court martial of US soldiers alleged to have attacked Italian POWs and killed one of them was being watched closely in Washington, DC. Italian-American organizations had expressed outrage, editorials demanding punishment were forwarded to the White House, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson had promised that “proper disciplinary action will be taken.”

Gen. Cooke's investigation and report enabled Hamann to construct a coherent account of the assault on ISU members at Fort Lawton. (“Riot” is an inaccurate description of the event.) August 14 had been a payday, and two of the “Negro port companies” – the 650th and 651st – were due to ship out for a combat zone the next day. That night members of the third company had thrown them a big going-away party. Around 11 pm, three ISU members returning from a night on the town in Seattle walked past some Black soldiers socializing in front of their barracks. Willie Montgomery, a small 39-year-old corporal from NYC who was very drunk said something derogatory. According to Giuseppe Belle, Montgomery was cursing and came at him with a knife, so Belle, who was also small, hit him with a left hook that knocked him out. The Italians raced to their barracks while Montgomery's friends attended to him.

An MP patrolling in a jeep soon came by. Although Montgomery had revived, the MP, Clyde Lomax insisted on driving him to the hospital. There were two hospitals on the base, but Lomax drove to the one furthest away. He would stay away for half an hour, although he knew that serious trouble was brewing between the Blacks and the Italians.

According to testimony at the court martial, Montgomery's friends had gone into the barracks yelling “They got one of us, let's go get them” and words to that effect. Fueled by alcohol, groups of Black soldiers headed for the ISU barracks, picking up rocks and fence posts to use in their assault Twenty-four Italians, three black soldiers and three whites who'd been in the ISU orderly room were injured, some seriously (three fractured skulls, two knife wounds). It was not reported that any Italians were missing. The next morning, as dawn was breaking, Pvt Lomax, driving his jeep on the beach, came upon Olivotto's limp body hanging from a rope strung between two steel cables on an obstacle course used by trainees.

Gen. Cooke's assistant, Lt. Col. Curtis L. Williams of the Inspector General Department, arrived at the end of August and learned to his dismay that hardly any evidence had been collected or statements taken from witnesses. None of the attackers had been identified by the MPs who eventually arrived on the scene and ordered them back to their barracks. Even the rope from which Olivotto was found hanging had disappeared. No photographs of his limp body had been taken. No footprints or vehicle tracks had been preserved. (Trainees were allowed to use the obstacle course soon after Olivotto was cut down.)

Jaworski had to find participants willing to name names, honestly or otherwise.

To be continued

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NEW INVASIVE SPECIES THREATENS SACRAMENTO-SAN JOAQUIN DELTA: ‘CLEAN, DRAIN AND DRY WATERCRAFT’

by Dan Bacher

As if the imperiled Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta didn't already face a number of problems, the California Department of Water Resources staff has discovered a new invasive species, the golden mussel, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta while conducting routine operations.

The non-native freshwater bivalve (Limnoperna fortunei) was found in the Port of Stockton. Suspected golden mussels have also been identified at O’Neill Forebay in Merced County and are currently undergoing genetic testing for confirmation, according to a statement from the CDFW.

“This discovery is the first known occurrence of golden mussels in North America,” said Steve Gonzalez from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “The species poses a significant immediate threat to the ecological health of the Delta and all waters of the state, water conveyance systems, infrastructure and water quality.”

“In waterways where this species is present, heavy encrustations of golden mussels have blocked municipal and industrial water intakes, necessitated ongoing biofouling removal, harmed native species in the ecosystem, increased water clarity due to intense filter feeding, and diminished water quality,” Gonzalez stated.

Gonzalez said the Golden mussels were likely introduced to California by a ship traveling from an international port.

“They are likely to spread throughout the Delta and through the water conveyance systems associated with it. Without containment, golden mussels are likely to spread to other freshwater bodies in California, and to other ports and inland waters of North America, and abroad,” he said.

Following the initial discovery of golden mussels in the Port of Stockton, Gonzalez said observations of additional mussels have been made on monitoring equipment downstream. Species confirmation is pending for these organisms.

He noted that golden mussels are similar in appearance, biology, and impacts to quagga and zebra mussels and are a “continued priority for prevention and containment in inland waters of Southern California and across the state.”

Golden mussels are native to rivers and creeks of China and Southeast Asia. They are known to be established outside of their native range in Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, according to Gonzalez.

“The initial introductions to these countries were also likely the result of ships from biofouling on the hulls and/or ballast water release. In most cases, the invaded range has expanded upstream from the point of introduction and inland from ports through local, human-mediated pathways. Within the invaded range significant impacts are widely documented resulting from the dense colonization of golden mussels on hard surfaces,” said Gonzalez.

The discovery of the golden mussel comes at a time when the San Francisco Bay-Delta is in its worst-ever crisis. 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/…

All salmon fishing has been closed in California ocean and river waters over the past two years — and the season is likely to be closed next year, due to the collapse of the Sacramento River and Klamath River fall Chinook salmon populations. A shockingly low number of fall-run Chinook salmon have returned this fall to Coleman National Fishery, located on Battle Creek, a tributary of the upper Sacramento River. A total of 3.9 million green eggs have been taken to date at the hatchery, only a fraction of the typical 20 million eggs harvested during the spawning season.

Gonzalez said the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), California State Parks, California Department of Water Resources (DWR), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and other state, federal, and local agencies regularly coordinate through the Aquatic Invasive Species program. This partnership aims to limit the spread of invasive species in California’s waterways, which cause damage to native species and the ecosystems they need to survive.

“The California Natural Resources Agency and its partners call upon everyone working and recreating in waters of the state to clean, drain and dry watercraft and equipment every time it is removed from a waterbody. This simple measure has served to prevent spreading quagga and zebra mussels and is equally effective in stopping the overland spread of golden mussels. DWR is now conducting boat inspections at O’Neill Forebay in an effort to reduce the spread of aquatic invasive species,” said Gonzalez.

CDFW is continuing to work with state, local, and federal agencies to enhance monitoring efforts, communicate additional detection and response information, and coordinate on potential next steps.

“I think the solution to stopping the speed of golden mussels lies with all of us, the people of California,” said Gonzalez. “We must clean, drain and dry watercraft. This strategy has worked for slowing the spread of quagga and zebra mussels in California.”

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OPENING DAY AT CANDLESTICK PARK, San Francisco (1960)

Opening day at Candlestick Park in 1960 marked a historic moment as fans poured in to celebrate the new stadium, home to the San Francisco Giants. Known for its unique design and challenging weather conditions, the stadium quickly became a cherished venue for sports and entertainment. Over the decades, Candlestick hosted legendary baseball games and memorable concerts, becoming a pillar of the city’s community and sports culture. Though Candlestick has since been demolished, its legacy endures, remembered fondly by generations who shared unforgettable moments there.

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LILY TANG WILLIAMS roasts Jake Sullivan's wife in broken English: https://t.co/bcvrFszmXf

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FIGURING OUT TRUMP

So ignore “Mein Kampf.”
It’s more like “Citizen Kane.”
So watch it again.

Helps if you assume
Everyone’s got a Rosebud.
Even Donald Trump.

— Jim Luther

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THE INDIVIDUAL has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

— Rudyard Kipling

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I love your eternal optimism, tainted with realism! I don't have any faith that things will work out well anytime soon, but I'm here to watch the show. It never fails to be entertaining. I've already accepted that a large portion of our citizens have gone bonkers and that deep state denizens are numerous and busy trying to wreck anything we can do.

I work on keeping to the straight and narrow myself. As our society gets more neurotic and suicidal, I counter by continuing to put my faith in God. It absolutely works wonders: Keeps me sane and unafraid of whatever's coming down the pike.

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SUNDAY'S LEAD STORIES, NYT

Harris and Trump Battle to the Wire in Swing States, Times/Siena Polls Find

Some Surprises in Last Battleground Polls, but Still Pointing to Deadlock

Trump and Harris Offer Night-and-Day Views of the Economy

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PEOPLE AREN'T GARBAGE. PARTISAN POLITICS IS

Voting says very little about who we are, but propaganda telling us otherwise reveals a lot about America's political leaders

by Matt Taibbi

The cycle was the usual nonsense. At a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan a comic called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Joe Biden emerged from his crypt to croak, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” The Internet exploded. Reporters were dispatched around the country to gauge how much more pissed off everyone was now.

ABC’s take interviewing Harris supporters in Pennsylvania was, “Voters view one another across partisan divide with increasing animosity.” They quoted humans-in-the-street, who all felt strongly. “I would say that some of them are garbage,” said Samantha Leister, 32, while Shawn Vanderheyden, 44, opined, “I just think they are uneducated, and they believe all the lies.” ABC summed up the cultural divide: “Interviews with voters in battleground states reveal that it’s only growing deeper and more insurmountable.”

Surely people know it, but this is all a trick. First, campaign writers only talk to people at campaign events, so the pool of quotes is automatically pared to holders of Very Strong Political Opinions. Second, the odd “Who cares?” answer is instinctively culled by campaign writers as commercially/politically unhelpful. Non-voters or even just people who care more about other things than Harris/Trump — UFOs, knitting, the girl in biology class — ruin the suspension of disbelief. You end up reading copy that hugely over-represents that strange subset of people who define themselves by their votes.

When I was first sent to cover campaigns in 2004, a year in which 40% of eligible voters didn’t bother, I was troubled by the absence of non-voters in coverage. A Rolling Stone editor with whom I rarely worked rolled eyes and said, “We don’t cover them because they’re not part of the fucking story,” which I instantly knew wasn’t true, but I was new and to my shame I didn’t say anything. The numbers of non-voters exposed how inconsequential presidential politics was for most people. It measured the number of people left behind or out, and leaving the non-enthused out of the shot was journalism’s way of covering the holes in the charade.

Two years later I was embedded with a group of Oklahoma reservists sent to work as MPs in Iraq. Sgt. Stephen Wilkerson was the team commander. He wore a tattoo on his foot with an arrow pointing to his big toe that read, TAG GOES HERE. His nickname was “Stretch-Nuts” because it was said he could balance a Heineken bottle on his ball-skin. On my first day he asked what I do. I cover presidential elections, I said. He made a jerk-off gesture. That was the last mention of politics on the trip.

In the roughly twenty years since the act of not voting, or even just not really really caring about presidential politics, has been villainized. Now the emotionally healthy person, the one who has a life and isn’t consumed with fears about the Next Hitler, is assumed to harbor secret sympathies, as bad as the worst MAGAT. This is different from the old scam. Now the person who shrugs and says “Who cares?” is called a liar. Everyone must care the way they do, and if you don’t care in that right way — every waking minute, with chewed nails and a carefully weeded social circle to match the correct vote and attitude set — you’re garbage.

Many of us have seen in recent years what this hounding has done even to friends or relatives, turning them to Flatland characters, two-dimensional nerve cases scanning everyone for signs of unsuitability. Whatever happens next week, I don’t ever want to be that. It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.

(racket.news)

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ALL THE DEMONS ARE HERE

by Maureen Dowd

In the midst of the furor over Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his manipulative attempts to cover it up and figure out if he should lie about it or come clean, liberals began advancing the argument that the private character of a president should be differentiated from his public character.

Look at F.D.R., J.F.K. and L.B.J., they said. Lots of presidents betrayed their wives and deceived the electorate about their personal lives. But that should not distract from their public character, what they achieved and how they helped people while in office.

Donald Trump’s private life is marked by a cascade of sordid episodes. But so is his public life. Trump simply has no character.

When I asked a scholar what Shakespearean figure Trump most resembles, he replied that Trump is not complex enough to be one. You have to have a character to have a tragic flaw that mars your character.

And that raises the question: How did the America of George Washington never telling a lie, the America of Honest Abe, the America of the Greatest Generation, the America of Gary Cooper facing down a murderous gang alone in “High Noon” — how did this America, our America, become a place where a man with no character has an even chance of being re-elected president?

Once, character and reputation were prized in our leaders. “Character is like a tree, and reputation is like a shadow,” Lincoln said. When Claude Rains’s graft is discovered in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he becomes suicidal out of shame.

Republican politicians bending to Trump’s will don’t know what shame is. And Trump, brazenly projecting every bad thing that he does onto his rivals, and boldly hawking sneakers, Bibles and cologne like a late-night cable huckster, has no shame.

Trump has exploited the widespread disillusionment that has curdled into cynicism about a ruling class rife with hypocrisy, self-aggrandizement and bad judgment.

Americans have felt let down again and again since the ’60s, with wars we shouldn’t have been in, occupations we shouldn’t have had, the bank scandals that were allowed to happen, trade agreements that hollowed out manufacturing hubs. Then there was the devouring pandemic. Many Americans felt left behind, fooled by Republicans and disdained by Democrats.

All the dislocation was exacerbated by social media algorithms igniting anger, outrage, resentment, conspiracies and fake stories.

Donald Trump is a human algorithm, always ratcheting up antagonism. He’s a personification and exploiter of all the things creating anxiety in people’s lives.

I sat in Madison Square Garden for eight hours last Sunday, working my way through a box of popcorn, a large pretzel and two bags of peanut M&M’s. I was surprised when some commentators reacted with shock at some of the insults slung that day.

For me, it seemed like a pretty typical Trump rally: ugly, dark, crude, denigrating, racist, misogynistic. (Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host, helped kick things off by calling Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a bitch.”) Speakers included Elon Musk, R.F.K. Jr. and Tucker Carlson, who thinks a demon clawed him while he was in bed last year. It is frightening to contemplate how much power this gruesome threesome will have if Trump wins a second term. It’s unimaginable that R.F.K. Jr., who doesn’t trust vaccines, could be in charge of health policy.

Bobby Kennedy may not believe in vaccinations, but somehow we’ve been immunized against outrage.

Trump just keeps finding new ways to make America lurch backward; he has cast women back into back alleys on abortion. This past week, it felt as if every day there was some new horror story about a young woman dying or nearly dying because doctors are scared of new legal strictures on reproductive care.

We’ll see if Madison Square Garden was a last hurrah or a harbinger with this crazy movement that cannibalizes institutions and people and souls and spits them out and then replenishes its ranks with new Trump enablers.

The bizarro gathering was seen as a turning point by Harris campaign officials, who told reporters that they thought that the rally’s nasty tone had helped Kamala Harris with voters who decided late, underscoring her emphasis on the positive versus the negative, the light versus the dark.

It’s no surprise that Trump provided last-minute evidence of the character he lacks. As he said about being the Protector of Women, he will do it “whether they like it or not.” That’s the way it is with Trump and women — whether they like it or not.

I would have been more shocked if Trump had used his big moment at the Garden to offer a sunnier vision, to recall growing up in Queens, longing to get to Manhattan, to offer some humorous anecdotes from “The Apprentice,” filmed a mile away at Trump Tower, or some reminiscences about Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali or iconic Garden sporting events.

But that would have been the human thing to do. And Trump doesn’t care about human niceties. He just wants to be the biggest beast in the jungle, to take whatever he wants, in any way he can get it. At the Garden, an artist live-painted a picture, then revealed a pentimento of Trump hugging the Empire State Building, King Kong style.

Trump’s premier skill is an ear for the roar of the crowd — in person and in ratings. He will follow that roar anywhere and say anything to hear it.

Con men succeed because they tap into genuine yearnings in society. When Trump was a New York celebrity, he was famous for running his mouth, saying outrageous things and engaging in a mutually beneficial gossipy relationship with the tabloids. Then he learned the really dark arts. He began milking the emotions of Americans who don’t feel that things are working for them, who feel that government is corrupt and incompetent, who feel that it’s them versus Washington.

When Joe Biden jumbled his response to a vile remark about Puerto Rico by a comedian at Trump’s Garden rally — making it seem that Biden was calling Trump’s supporters “garbage” — Trump pounced. He turned the “garbage” comment into a “deplorable”-like slur against his fans, even putting on a neon orange vest and riding in a garbage truck to emphasize it.

There were two things Trump said to me during the 2016 campaign — when he was still speaking to me — that struck me as unusually honest.

I asked about the incidents of violence that were starting to erupt at his rallies. Wasn’t he worried about that?

No, he explained, he liked it rough; it added an air of excitement to the proceedings, he said. (This barbaric side of him came out on Jan. 6, as he watched television, savoring the violent scene he had egged on, saying about the rioters who wanted to hang Mike Pence, “So what?” He recently told Fox News it was “a day of love.”)

I also told him once that his persona was getting more belligerent and divisive. To me, he had seemed like a more benign, if crazily narcissistic, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon of a figure in the New York real estate days. Why was the former pro-choice Democrat going down such a dark and authoritarian path as a candidate?

“I guess,” Trump mused, “because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1, and I said, ‘Why don’t I keep the same thing going?’”

Trump can play it round or square, pro-choice or anti-abortion, pro-TikTok or anti-TikTok, pro-crypto or anti-crypto. He has no philosophy, except: What’s in it for him? The only thread of continuity in his life is self-interest. He supercharged and retrofitted the Republican Party for his own benefit.

Trump told a Friday rally that he’s always “tossing and turning, spinning around like a top” in bed at night, thinking about the problems in the world.

I don’t think he wakes up every day worrying about the country, and how to solve problems that people care about, or how to soothe our raw divisions.

He wakes up obsessing on how to reward himself and his family and friends and how to punish his enemies. He wakes up plotting how to pit people against one another.

Government can produce a positive effect only if it’s run by people who are serious about government.

And, as Kamala Harris said, Donald Trump is an unserious man.

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THE CELEBRATED NEW YORK TIMES ELECTION WEEK HIT JOB

The New York Times teams with David Brock's Media Matters to smash records for editorial mendacity. Plus, Mark Twain's great take on fraud, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.’

by Matt Taibbi & Walter Kirn

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you feeling in the last week before the election?

Walter Kirn: I feel like they have set up some subsonic wave. I’m going to go deep. Other people have superficial conspiracy theories. Mine is that somewhere in Antarctica or the center of the earth, there is a transmitter that sends a chaos wave at different frequencies that deeply rumbles like a bad broken speaker. And it has both emotional, spiritual, and digital effects, and it’s now causing interference in all realms. I’m sensing some days that it’s specifically aimed at me.

Matt Taibbi: Dude, you got to get the foil out.

Walter Kirn: It’s like Havana syndrome, except it’s continental. Yeah, it’s Eurasia syndrome, and all of Eurasia is being made to vibrate like a cracked tuning fork.

Matt Taibbi: But it’s all for a reason. It’s another Ocean’s 13 plot device. It’s election misinformation waves, but what they’re actually doing is robbing the Fed in New York or something. You’re a screenwriter. You know this is all a diversion.

Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. After the election, we’re going to all look up and find out that Fort Knox was robbed.

Matt Taibbi: That’s right. While we were all arguing about this other thing.

Walter Kirn: Right. We’ll have a very clean election afterwards. Harris will concede to Trump, ask to be a cabinet member, he will agree, and everything will be fine, except we won’t have any gold.

Matt Taibbi: Right, because Jeremy Irons will be driving a convoy with trucks out of America. We’ll get back to the British, speaking of Jeremy Irons. But so that people know, we had to calm Walter down to do this show. He was, let’s say, in a borderline state for broadcasting because it’s been an upsetting couple of days. It’s been really, really weird. I don’t know where to start. I guess we could start with the New York Times thing. That’s going to be on everybody’s minds still, probably.

This is going to come out on a Friday, we hope. And the story came out, this is something that we heard about earlier this week, because a number of people who were the subjects of this New York Times article that was going to be written by a fellow named Nico Grant got mad about the query they received in the mail and published them ahead of time, including Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. Tucker told this person to fuck off. The gist of the article we knew ahead of time was going to be that a study was done by Media Matters of America, which is the David Brock arm. It’s basically the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the American version.

And we’ll get into its whole methodology, but this is what it does. It does reports that accuse people of misinformation and then it goes to platforms and says, “Hey, how come you haven’t taken this stuff down yet?” And what they did ahead of this election, and if we could see the piece on the New York Times, the graphic, they put a lot of work into this. It’s got the whole, “And they told two friends and so on and so on,” graphic, and it’s a video thing. And they accuse the 30 people of collectively creating 268 videos that were collectively seen by 47 million Americans, and it’s the worst thing in the world, and we have to stop it. Walter, did you read the piece when it came out on Thursday, I believe, right? Yes, on Thursday. And what did you think?

Walter Kirn: Okay, well, I did read it. It’s a very interesting piece, beginning with that graphic. Usually, uncomplimentary graphics of the human face are used in political campaigns or so on, but here they did a whole fandango where they sped it up, put them together, and made it as unattractive as possible. They look like insects caught in a hive. So you get that, and before you-

Matt Taibbi: Wait, can I interrupt? It’s got a little bit of the whole Superman, two villains trapped in the Phantom Zone effect. Remember that, when they were kicked off of Krypton and then sent hurtling through space? Anyway, sorry. Old reference.

Walter Kirn: They look like they’re trapped in bottles. There’s an insectile herky-jerkiness to their movements, and that primes your mental pump for what comes next. What they tell you in this article is that the New York Times, in concert with Media Matters, a group that they admit is ideological and-

Matt Taibbi: Oh my God.

Walter Kirn: … so on. But they find it a group that they want to work with because it does such exhaustive research, they say.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, we got to look at that passage because it’s really an amazing passage. Let’s back up a little bit. There’s nothing wrong, there’s nothing illegal, about a political action group working with a newspaper. They put together these reports, and you go and you pitch them to people on the news and you say, “I would like you to do a story on this.” That’s not unethical per se in itself. It’s a little weird when the entire purpose of the organization is to get things deplatformed or censored, but still, they’re allowed to do it. The problem is-

Walter Kirn: Media matters is the dog, the bounty hunter, of left-wing digital assassination, okay?

Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly. And so the problem usually is that when they do these things, when they do these collaborations, and we saw behind the scenes how they work a lot in the Twitter files, when the news story comes out, they’re usually described in some term like the independent research outfit Media Matters, or the nonprofit. There was a story that came up the same day in the Washington Post working with CCDH that called them the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. They were ashamed to do that, in this case, among other things, because-

Walter Kirn: Because it’s three days before an election, and the subject of the piece is not just one or two or three, but dozens of subjects, all of whom might play a part in the election. Yeah, I think they might have to have a proviso about why they chose this at this moment.…

https://www.racket.news/p/transcript-america-this-week-november

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