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WIDESPREAD light to locally moderate precip sweeps through this afternoon with a cold front. Strong southerly winds develop Tuesday afternoon and evening as the next storm approaches. Steady rain is forecast Wednesday into next weekend.
POTENTIAL FLOODING: A prolonged period of moderate to heavy rainfall mid to late week will increase the risk of flooding and generate rapid river rises. The greatest risk is for Humboldt and Del Norte Counties where soils are already near saturation. Rain will be lighter though still significant for Mendocino and Lake Counties, though generally drier soils will reduce the flood risk. Much of the precipitation in Trinity County will likely fall as snow with snow levels in the eastern half of the county as low as 2500 feet. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A much warmer 48F under cloudy & drizzly skies this Sunday morning on the coast. Sun & showers into Tuesday then a LOT of rain is forecast from Wednesday thru the weekend. The NWS forecast discussion does indicate some uncertainty on the aim & amounts of rain we might get. As always, we'll see?
NOTTY BUMBO [coast chatline]: According to the currant estimates on Weather Underground, it looks like we have the first serious storm of the year, with 4-5" expected between tomorrow and the following Sunday. Of greatest concern is Wednesday and Thursday as much as 3" are forecast. And the winds will be commensurate, so you can practically bet on downed power and internet, if not area-wide, then at least scattered and sporadic. Check the batteries in your flash lights, secure the hatches, and keep phones charged, JIC. Might consider buying a few extra gallons of drinking water. And some pretzels, because why not? Stay dry with a martini.
IN POINT ARENA:
ATTENTION: SOUTH COAST
I normally don't speak out about things like this but it completely boggles my mind. I just heard that they are asking for donations to build a 7,500 Sq. Ft. 7 million dollar community center. Are you kidding me! Who is going to pay the taxes on that? How much will they charge US to use that monstrosity of a building we don't need? I see this being an eyesore against our beautiful landscape. Our community is who built the last community center, donating their time and materials to make it happen. I don't feel like our community is involved at all or has any idea whats happening. I feel like it's just a bunch of people I've never heard of from god knows where trying to modernize this "wonderful" idea of a building. Not to mention, they have hired architects and contractors who are not even from the area! We have so many talented hardworking architects and contractors right here in our COMMUNITY. 7 million dollars would go so far for the people in our community. I think there are a lot of better things we can do with an amount of money like that in this community because I tell you what I doubt the majority of this community wouldn't be able to even foot the bill for rental of that building. I think this is just over the top ridiculous. Why can't we just modernize what we had and give the seniors and pay n take their own spot too. If you are curious, Google the community center and read up on it and you can view the plans.
This community needs to rally together and build our community center again, like it's supposed to happen.
My name is Mallory Kennedy and I approve this message. Thank you for reading, please leave your comments in the comment section.
Courtney Miller:
I went to the rotary club meeting and the topic was the community center. The main reason why we didn’t hire any contractors from our area is because they were searching for our contractors but they are all busy! All booked out to 2027. Our guys are busy around here! lol
Another thing to note is that the community centers plans are to 1) provide a place for safety during time of emergency (there would be generators, WiFi connectivity, shelter, etc) and 2) provide a place for events and provide a venue to OUR community at an affordable price, and that area stretches as far as Manchester and timber cove and everywhere in between.
3) there is going to be a cafe opening that’ll be available during times of non-events and I think that’s great to provide extra jobs to this community
4) everything is energy and eco efficient in the plans (big skylights, solar panels, led lighting, etc)
5) to preserve the natural history and essence of the old community center while also modernizing it and making it more efficient.
6) the cost also includes insurance, building permits, demolition, restoration, new energy efficiency, etc).
Overall I think that the idea of bringing the community center back better than ever is probably the best idea for our community right now as it holds many memories (crab feeds, academic celebrations, spaghetti dinners, etc) and provide a place of rest, shelter, WiFi connectivity, a board meeting area for important businesses such as the rotary, lions club, mendonoma, RCMS, and the south coast fire district
Thank you everyone for your comments regarding the rebuilding of the community center. Since I was honored to be invited to attend the Rotary meeting yesterday, I would like to clarify comments made by an attendee. The reference to general contractors not being available until 2027 is in reference to what options are available should the project be postponed for construction in 2025. All of the General Contractors interviewed for job were asked to reach out to local sub-contractors as part of their bid packages. Both local and out of town general contractors bid the project in excess of $1k per sq. ft. Being responsible to the public and Gualala Community Center General Membership, the Board of Directors awarded the contract to the lowest responsible bid. The lowest bid was $1 million less then the next bid. The old building was 6,500 sq. ft. and the new building is 7,400 sq. ft. The intent of the Board of Directors is to replace what we had. I appreciate everyone's comments and involvement.
WHERE’S MARGIT PRITCHARD?
Prichard was last seen in the garden at her residence in the 1300 block of Pepperwood Springs Road in Piercy, California at 1:00 p.m. on May 18, 2018. Her husband realized she was missing at 4:30 p.m. and searched their property for her, then enlisted neighbors to help look around in the local area before calling the police. She left her purse and phone behind and has never been heard from again.
At the time of her disappearance, Prichard was very fit for her age and could walk long distances. She had disappeared about three months earlier and traveled seven miles on foot before she was located. After her May 2018 disappearance, an extensive search turned up no sign of her.
Prichard used to live on Bethel Island in the East Bay area of California, and may try to return there. Her case remains unsolved.
Investigating Agency
Mendocino County Sheriff's Department 707-463-4095
https://charleyproject.org/case/margit-lillian-prichard
https://oag.ca.gov/missing/person/margit-lillian-prichard
ANDERSON VALLEY’S LONG-AWAITED $300k-plus new ambulance delivery was delayed again last month when, during the installation of the complicated medical equipment, the ambulance assembly vendor discovered a wiring problem in the Ford chassis (assembled in Mexico) they were building the ambulance on. The chassis now has to be returned to Ford for wiring repair. The ambulance purchase, ordered more thaan two years ago, has been funded by a combination of Volunteer Firefighter Association fund-raising donations, strike team equipment reimbursements (which have increased in the last few years because 1. there are more fires around the state to respond to, and 2. Anderson Valley’s fire department has been far-sighted enough to have a couple of new wildland/structure engines that are suitable for strike team deployment, and 3. Anderson Valley has been lucky to have enough volunteer firefighters to staff and dispatch them) and ambulance reserves. A new delivery date has not yet been provided. (—ms)
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE List of Events
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Fritz is a typical happy, energetic, young dog. During his meet & greet and evaluation, we learned Fritz knows sit, loves playing with stuffed toys and he enjoyed meeting a fellow shelter guest. Fritz will benefit from basic obedience training, and we bet he will be a star pupil, as Germans Shepherd Dogs are agile, energetic, and very smart. This very sweet dog is eager to please and seems to love everyone he meets! Fritz is 8 months old and 41 very handsome pounds.
To see all of our dog and cat guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, or tortoise, 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.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA TOWN PAYS TRIBUTE TO ITS SEX WORKERS OF THE PAST
by Matt LaFever
For most travelers, Ukiah is little more than a pit stop off Highway 101, tucked somewhere between wine country and the redwoods. From the highway, it’s a blur of a Costco, the fairgrounds and an In-N-Out sign.
But hidden in plain sight is a tribute to the town’s scandalous past — a nod to the sex workers of yesteryear that might just stop traffic if it were more prominently displayed.
In the beginning
Long before Western expansion, the Ukiah Valley was home to the Pomo people, a sophisticated network of Indigenous communities who crafted canoes, baskets and tools from local materials. The name Ukiah itself comes from a Pomo word meaning “deep valley.” But in 1845, colonial forces arrived, and after the U.S. took control in 1847, Ukiah’s growth came at a brutal cost to the Indigenous population, marked by violent events like the Bloody Island Massacre, carried out by slave owners and U.S. Cavalry. Despite its dark history, Ukiah rapidly developed into an economic hub, fueled by agriculture and logging. In 1889, the North Pacific Railroad connected Ukiah to San Francisco, linking this once-remote outpost to the rest of the United States.
Living on Northern California’s rugged frontier brought hard-drinking, backbreaking work — and ladies of the night to practice the world’s oldest profession.
‘Houses of ill-fame’
Jan MacKell Collins is a historian and author who has written extensively about prostitution in the American West. Collins told SFGATE that “sex workers were an unseen, unappreciated cornerstone of many towns across the west, including California.”
Records from Ukiah’s early days reveal a thriving sex trade that forced locals and officials to confront the moral implications head-on. In 1897, a local couple was fined for employing a minor in their brothel. By 1921, authorities were cracking down, ordering sex workers to “keep curtains down and doors closed” to curb the growing number of brothels. The 1910s also saw high-profile arrests, including a madam in 1912 and a notorious “white slaver” named Jack Jaspar, who was caught trafficking his wife to a Ukiah brothel.
‘Vultures in the semblance of men’
In the late 1800s, temperance advocates across the U.S. linked alcohol to societal ills like crime, gambling and prostitution, fueling widespread moral panic. In Ukiah, the Baptist Church led a heated temperance meeting in 1894 demanding the closure of saloons on Sundays, while a group of women petitioned the city council in 1891 for the removal of a local brothel.
A columnist for the Ukiah Republican Press took perhaps the most progressive stance in 1891, arguing that the brothels’ customers were just as morally culpable as the prostitutes. The writer questioned why sex workers faced the community’s ire, rather than “those vultures in the semblance of men who live off the shame of fallen women.” The columnist urged law enforcement to “take cognizance of every man in Ukiah who lives by gambling and by hanging around houses of ill-fame.”
Collins explained how, contrary to popular belief, sex workers played a philanthropic role in their communities. She said, “Brothel madams and their girls willingly contributed to and/or collected money for schools, churches and other important aspects of forming a community. The ladies knew that if their hometowns did not do well financially and socially, they would not do well either.”
Still, brothels became a target, especially with women’s temperance groups growing in influence nationwide. They merged women’s rights ideals with the abstinence movement, leading officials to eventually use liquor laws as a legal Trojan horse to fight prostitution.
In December 1901, the Ukiah Public Press reported on the county’s plan to dismantle three local brothels by cutting off their lifeblood: liquor licenses. The strategy involved not only denying new licenses to the three businesses, but also revoking those of any business found to be operating as a brothel.
In 1904, the California legislature tackled the issue of prostitution by enacting the “vice law” known as the Red Light Abatement Act, inspired by Iowa’s liquor regulations. This legislation imposed civil penalties rather than criminal charges, prompting cities across the state to sue property owners linked to prostitution.
One man’s pet project
The historical record casts a grim shadow over Ukiah’s early days of prostitution, lacking the charming portraits of madams and bordellos. Seventy-five years after California enacted the Red Light Abatement Act, one local man’s appreciation for the town’s history led to a tribute that reframed this narrative. It not only acknowledged the harsh realities of Ukiah’s past but also honored the memory of the women who lived it.
Ted Feibusch was born in 1912 in Berlin and raised in Nazi Germany. Feibusch, whose father was Jewish, actively worked in an underground communications network against the Third Reich. He moved to Ukiah with his wife in 1947 and became a contractor, eventually renovating four historical buildings in Ukiah’s downtown. Along the way, he became both a polarizing and beloved political figure in Ukiah politics, frequently clashing with fellow city leaders, to the point where he was labeled “feisty” in multiple news accounts.
Feibusch often spent time at Ukiah’s Held-Poage Research Library, now the Historical Society of Mendocino County, where he researched local history. He discovered that one of his renovated properties, the McKinley Building, once stood close to “Irene’s Place,” a notorious brothel from the early 1900s. His research revealed that two women, Irene Dale and Hattie Rivington, served as madams of the operation and were said to ride through Ukiah in luxurious horse-drawn carriages, always adorned in their finest attire. On June 18, 1917, a fire broke out in Ukiah’s downtown, turning three blocks into “a mass of smoldering ruins,” according to the Fort Bragg Advocate News. One of the buildings destroyed by the blaze was Irene’s Place, while the McKinley Building, its neighbor, survived.
Inspired by these stories and the McKinley Building’s close ties to the infamous brothel, Feibusch placed a boulder outside the building on Church Street in 1979, directly east of where Irene’s Place once stood. On this rock, he mounted a plaque that read, “To the Ladies of the Night Who Plied Their Trade Upon This Site.”
A life of its own
The plaque began to resonate in unexpected ways. Two years after Feibusch installed it, a Ukiah Woman’s March celebrating suffrage concluded symbolically at the tribute to the “Ladies of the Night.” The Ukiah Daily Journal described how the marchers “read poems, pieces of feminist history, and inspiring words to each other” near the site of the former bordello.
Thanks to travel writers with an eye for the unusual and the internet’s reach, word of the plaque began to spread. In 1999, RoadsideAmerica.com, an online database of “offbeat tourist attractions,” featured the tribute. A 2006 book titled “Weird California” also highlighted it as a must-see oddity for travelers exploring the Golden State’s quirky pit stops. (Millennial music fans may be interested to know that AFI’s lead singer, Davey Havok, who grew up in Ukiah, referenced the plaque in his 2012 novel, “Pop Kids.”)
For 41 years, the plaque honoring the “Ladies of the Night” stood proudly at the site. Then, in December 2020, a sharp-eyed Mendocino County resident captured evidence of its removal. Word spread quickly after Elisa Laughton, a local artist, shared a striking photo on social media: a displaced rock from the site, captioned, “Here’s downtown Ukiah summed up in one tragic photo I’ve titled ‘Progress, Reconsidered.’ Au revoir to the ladies of the night…” Laughton told local media, “The monument on Church Street was important not only to myself but to many others in our community. It lent a sense of originality, uniqueness, and edgy character that I would like to think defines Mendocino County.”
Outrage erupted over the displacement of this cherished local oddity. Residents initially thought the removal was the result of Ukiah’s Streetscape Project, a multiyear revitalization effort to beautify Ukiah’s downtown.
Enter Ukiah City Councilwoman Mo Mulheren, who uncovered that the new owner of the McKinley Building had taken it down at the request of a tenant. Determined to preserve its legacy, Mulheren stepped in, retrieving the plaque and collaborating with the city to secure a permanent home for it on the southwest corner of Church and State streets just weeks after it was displaced.
Despite towns like Ukiah that publicly celebrate their sordid pasts, Collins has seen a lingering reluctance to acknowledge the contributions of sex workers across similar towns, where the idea of honoring a prostitute’s role in society remains “morally incorrect.”
She continued, “It is my opinion that the more we learn about how these women bet against the odds, and the law, to provide a service while donating their money to help their cities, the less we will regard them as sex objects.” Ukiah’s plaque, she said, makes “an excellent and historic contribution to recognizing the importance of their industry as part of the development of the west.”
(sfgate.com)
ED NOTES
PONTIFICATIONS. EXIT NOW OR…
BEYOND citizenship and being old enough to vote there are zero requirements to run for local office, and given the prevalent no-questions-asked local info context even those two basic qualifications could be waived without anybody knowing if the candidate was a ten-year-old big for his age or a serial killer who'd swerved in off 101.
YOU are probably aware that Mendocino County is also unique in its collective amnesia; where else does history start all over again every morning and people are whatever they say they are? Political life in this odd jurisdiction is kind of like living in a mass witness protection program, few elected people are ever held responsible for anything because nobody can remember who did or said what — case in point, freshly retired Supervisor Dan Gjerde.
IN THEORY, the supervisors establish policy, but the various department heads, most of whom are quite capable, simply work around the supervisors as if the supervisors were five errant children who occasionally have to be told to stay out of the way while the adults run the store. If the supervisors disappeared tomorrow we’d save about three-quarters of a million tax dollars a year and nobody outside their families would notice they were missing.
MENDOCINO COUNTY has been run by its department heads and its superior court for many years, while the elected people come and go and the career bureaucrats and the judges stay. And stay. And stay some more. I’d say the present board is the worst board of supervisors we’ve ever had, and we’ve had some doozies as people who remember Al Barbero, Marilyn Butcher, Patti Campbell, Tom Lucier, Kendall Smith, and Nelson Redding will testify to.
BUT AS LAUGHABLY derelict as the great boards of yesteryear were, nobody could say they sought the position to get themselves fat pay days and sweet retirements. The Supervisors making themselves first priority commenced with the libs assuming dominance, circa middle 1980s, ever since steering the county inexorably toward the fiscal rocks while fattening their own pay and perks.
STATE and federal governments are also largely occupied by hustlers like our supervisors — Huffman, McGuire, Wood et al — the diff being that the state and federal people occasionally are forced to appear on television shows like Lob Ball to yap back at The Barking Dogs. But in Mendocino County the media pooches at KZYX, to name the most egregious medium, with built-in muzzles, nuzzle right up to the officeholder to ask, “Tell us what a great job you’re doing, and if there’s any time left tell us what a wonderful person you are. Take all the time and space you need. We’re here to serve.”
THERE'S a supervisor’s “mission statement” on the county’s website. It says, among the clutter of its unfulfilled assurances, that one of their goals is to “treat all people with dignity and respect,” which they do not do as anyone appearing before them can attest, most not even getting a simple thank you. When the late Supervisor David Colfax told several constituents to go fuck themselves he only expressed his colleagues’ unspoken attitudes.
THE UPSHOT of fifty years of bad government is Trump, and why is anyone surprised?
A CORRESPONDENT creates a third conspiracy to go with the Kennedy assassination and 9-11. He says if I think Oswald acted alone to shoot JFK, and if I don’t see Bush-Cheney up to their shifty eyeballs in 9-11, I'm an “agent” of disinformation, a conspirator working for the conspirators.
THAT'S THE THING with conspiracy people; if you’re not with them you’re part of the conspiracy. They all have this terrible need to see complicated plots everywhere. I think most bad things happen right out front if you have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the perceptive apparatuses to process the whole of it.
TWO ENTIRE literatures have grown up around the Kennedy murder and September 11th. You’d need to devote your every waking moment to sort out the evidence, the charges and counter-charges. And a whole computer archive and a working wife to support you while you studied up on all of it.
I’VE READ a dozen or so books on the Kennedy assassination, but only a couple of them made sense to me, and one of them was a novel, ‘Libra,’ by Don Delillo. If there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy it probably would have been pulled off something like Delillo described in Libra. But given the number of people who would have had to have been involved at various levels, and the fact that none of these alleged conspirators have ever talked, argues against conspiracy. The most incriminating files on the Kennedy case are still sequestered. Orange Man, in his first term, promised to unsequester them, but…
DITTO for September 11th, and I haven’t read one thing about that catastrophe that convinced me it was anything but a group of medieval fanatics, funded by other medieval fanatics, who got lucky. And the upshot of that one has been an eviscerated constitution, an endless war in the Middle East, a crumbling economy. If it took a conspiracy to shove the whole show over the side, governments since Bush-Cheney are allied with Osama bin Laden.
THERE WASN’T a huge policy shift after Kennedy’s death unless you assume Kennedy was poised to pull out of Vietnam and was about to seek some kind of live and let live accommodation with Castro. If you believe that then you can proceed to believe that anti-communist hysterics in our government arranged to have Kennedy killed. A lot of the Kennedy books go into technical discussions of trajectories of fire and so much hard-to-check stuff that they all seem plausible as you read them, at least until the next book comes along.
I'M TOLD by people who have been to Dealey Plaza that from Oswald’s perch in the Texas School Book Depository it was an easy shot to hit Kennedy driving by in the street below. No more than 150 feet. Oswald could easily have done a low-tech job like that himself with the scoped rifle he had, and probably did do it by himself. If Oswald were a lone nut today he’d probably get himself twenty automatic weapons and go to war on a Burger King. Even our lone nuts seem to have deteriorated. And this is the country that gave us some great ones — Lee Harvey, Zodiac and the Unabomber!
NORMAN MAILER’S book on Oswald — ‘Oswald’s Tale, An American Mystery’ — confirms that Oswald was indeed one very weird guy. As it happens, and as the world turned prior to The Summer of Love when the world spun off its axis, I was in the Marines at Camp Pendleton the same time Oswald was there, although I didn’t know him. I can tell you, though, that in the late 1950s, Oswald might have been the only person his age in the entire country, let alone in the Marine Corps, who secretly wanted to go live in Russia. The place had zero appeal, even to American communists who liked the theory but not the practice.
BUT IF YOU were like Oswald, if you’d grown up hard with a crazy mother like he had, if you spent a lot of time as a kid in libraries trying to understand your experience like he had, you too might have become a crypto-commie. At a minimum, some kind of radical. At the max, you may have become a real communist as, it seems, Oswald did, an unaffiliated and confused communist unable to distinguish Trotskyists from Stalinists.
OSWALD'S lumpen-Marxist worldview would account for his attempt to kill General Walker, a fascist neighbor of his, and for his subsequent successful attack on Kennedy who was a center-right enemy of communism. Factor in Oswald’s apparent desire for fame however he might achieve it, and you’ve got a uniquely improbable lone nut, but a lone nut nevertheless.
MENDOCINO COUNTY has more judges for its population, 8 plus a commissioner, than any county in the state. Our county is also home base for innumerable “retired” judges who, having gotten themselves elected or appointed to one of Mendocino County’s defunct justice court slots, retire out of Ukiah then sweeten their fat retirement pay by sitting in as substitute judges around the state, thus pulling in more annual money than they made working full-time on top of their pension. This extravagant jobs program for lawyers came about nearly 50 years ago when the county's justice courts became superior courts by state mandate. The state legislature, mostly lawyers, did the mandating.
PRIOR to the eight judges and the commissioner we now have, two judges did it all — Tim O'Brien and ‘Bev’ Broaddus, and they did it without whining about being overworked. This dyspeptic pair of old-school boys were occasionally opposed at election time because both were, ah, serenely, obliviously, reactionary and, personally, ah, highly irritable. I was in Broaddus’s' courtroom one afternoon when Broaddus fired what seemed like ten consecutive guys off to the state pen. As the cries and sobs of the women and children of the defendants filled the courtroom Broaddus would snarl, “Next!” It was so unnerving I felt like heading for the door before he packed me off, and I was only there to watch.
THE RIVER GOLD, PART 2
A Fisherman’s Point of View for The Restoration of the Eel River Watershed Project
by Roy Branscomb
In regard to our Eel River System and its commercial fishing history, I need to explain a couple of things regarding the commercial fishing and the efforts taken to maintain the runs of salmon that I was not aware of until recently. These things will strengthen the existing ideas I have to share.
The Eel River enters the ocean near Eureka, California below Ferndale. Tidewater goes up to about Fernbridge. The river gold was found in tidewater and fished until the commercial fishermen had overfished the river. I knew that salmon were caught commercially on the mouth of the river in the tidewater. I have seen pictures of nets full of salmon pulled out of the river. I always thought this was a short-term event and that people figured out that this was a bad idea. I was so wrong because the commercial netting started in 1850 and continued until around 1920.
The commercial fishermen used seine nets and gill nets as their fishing techniques because they could make huge hauls of fish. They fished from September thru December when water conditions allowed. Canneries were set up along the river to process these fish and then they were shipped to San Francisco for pennies per pound.
Along with the salmon they also netted steelhead and sturgeon. It is hard to tell the amounts of fish that were caught each year, but according to one article from a Eureka newspaper one seine net would pull from 2,000 to 5,000 lbs of fish at a time. Even with all of that, biologists have estimated that there were between 800,000 to 1 million fish came up the Eel River System per year, counting all three major species: Chinook, Coho, and Steelhead.
After fishing the Eel for nearly 20 years, in 1870 it was a great concern that the amounts of fish coming into the river were dropping rapidly. Something needed to be done, so they took action.
What was done was also a surprise to me. In 1897 a fish hatchery was built on Price Creek, a few miles upstream from the mouth of the river. This hatchery operated from 1897 to 1916.
This hatchery did not raise fish, it hatched eggs at a 95% hatch rate, and then the juveniles were released into local tributaries where they grew and returned to the ocean. These eggs were primarily from the Sacramento River along with some from the Klamath River. Reportedly by 1905, the fish runs of the past were back.
Due to problems in Price Creek the hatchery was relocated to Steelhead Creek located between Ft. Seward and Alder Point. This hatchery was in operation until 1942, and shut down because of the war. There were reported to have been 40 million fish hatched and released during that time.
Also starting in around 1850 was the discovery of redwood and tan bark for commercial use. This discovery also led to jobs population growth, destruction of forests and streams primarily along the coast. The methods of removing these trees were very primitive and caused a lot of destruction. Logging grew and expanded due to market demands as well as newer equipment and roads. Forest practices in future years were not very pretty and more damage was done. The people doing this, I believe were not aware of the irreparable damage being done. Currently, logging continues but there are new practices that take the environment into consideration.
In the early 1900s dams were built for the purpose of generating power. The railroad was also built along the Eel River canyon in the early 1900s. Tons of dirt was pushed over the banks into the river taking a devastating toll on the river in many ways.
On the main Eel, Van Arsdale was built first for the purpose of generating power. Scott Dam was built later to store winter water so that water could be released in the summer months to insure enough water for downstream power and due to that water was diverted to the Russian River Watershed. Benbow Dam on the South Fork of the Eel was also built for the purpose of generating power.
All of these projects had an effect on the Eel River. In 1955 there was a dam and a fish hatchery built on Cedar Creek near Leggett Valley. This hatchery washed out the first year of operation during the 1955 flood. It was promptly rebuilt and operated successfully from 1955 until 1964, when the big flood hit. Fish were supplied to local tributaries and streams. After the dam washed out in 1964, it never operated again. With the dams and floods, and other events that had taken place there were still large runs of salmon and steelhead. After 1964 the fish runs took a sharp decline but still greater numbers of fish compared to today.
The dams had been installed 30 years prior to the days I described being on the river in my earlier days. The main Eel and the South Fork were loaded with fish at this time when I was 9 to 12 years old.
BOONVILLE, '72
by Bob Wells, October 1972, (Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
One thing going on in Boonville is the contest at the November 7 election for judge of the Anderson Justice Court between Homer W. Mannix, incumbent, who wears several other official hats in the small Mendocino County community, and Richard E. Kossow, a new lawyer who has moved into Anderson Valley. Kossow is a University of Minnesota graduate who chose a life somewhat removed from the madding throng. With the attorney are his wife Ginger and daughter Amy.
Incumbent Judge Mannix, among other things, is the publisher and editor of the local newspaper — printed in his downtown Mannix building below the courtroom — in effect he has to write up and print his own proceedings.
Friendly folks are on duty at the Anderson Valley Branch of the First National Bank of Cloverdale, managed by Mrs. Jack (Kaye) Clow of Philo. The clerks here are Eileen Pronsolino with Vera Titus. The bank opened in recent years, eliminating many trips over to Cloverdale or Ukiah for Anderson Valley residents. Mr. and Mrs. Clow also operate Jack’s Valley Store near Philo, a few miles west of Boonville.
Old Redwood Troughs filled with flowers decorate the sidewalk in Boonville, adding a colorful touch to the downtown area. Mrs. Ila Ervin is the clerk of the Anderson Justice Court covering a long area between the Sonoma County line and the Coast, flanking Highway 128.
The Core Area, as the planners say, is the downtown business block in Boonville along Highway 128, and a similar row of buildings extending in the other direction behind the flow of logging trucks. That row of buildlings also mostly hides from view the main exhibit building at the local fairgrounds where the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show is held each September. Timber is still one of the sources of industry in Mendocino County and much of the traffic through Boonville consists of logging trucks which don’t seem to slow down much while passing through town. Just a few years ago there were from 35 to 40 sawmills in this area. They are all gone now with the depletion of timber and take-over by industrial giants like Georgia-Pacific and Boise-Cascade.
Women’s Lib in a mild form is practiced by Mrs. Peggy Bates, who has been the postmaster at Boonville for a couple of years. She thinks women should be in responsible jobs, all right. But in the home, “the man is the boss.” Mrs. Bates is assisted by Joann Wyant. Postmaster Bates succeeded George Lawson, who served there 34 years and still lives in Boonville. Where else?
Melvin Baker is superintendent of the Anderson Valley Unified School District and high school principal. One of the outstanding programs at the school involves aviation in which a number of students learn to fly and do aircraft maintenance work. A recent addition to the equipment is a Cessna which the school district bought for $2,500. This is considered a low price for the 1962 model plane, now used for instruction at the school. A Beech 18 is queen of the fleet at the Anderson Valley High School Airport. While we were there it got a paint job from Billy Harding who is a junior this fall. This and other planes are housed in an aluminum hangar, constructed mostly of “surplus” and donated materials.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, November 16, 2024
MAURICIO DELGADO-GARCIA, 27, Fort Bragg. Possession of firearm with prior misdemenaor, loaded firearm in public, metal knuckles.
KELLI HALL, 37, San Francisco/Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for DUI, cruelty to child-infliction of injury, resisting.
AUDREY PHIPPS, 29, Clearlake/Ukiah. Robbery, shoplifting, petty theft.
GABRIEL RAY JR., 28, Ukiah. Battery by gassing of peace officer, criminal threats.
ROMAN RAY, 25, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
VALENTIN SORIAN-HUERTA, 52, Ukiah. DUI.
THE AMERICAN CHESTNUT TREE (Castanea dentata) was once a towering giant of the Appalachian forests, dominating the landscape with its immense size and longevity. Growing over 100 feet tall, these majestic trees could live for centuries, and at their peak, they made up about 25% of the hardwood canopy in their native range, which spanned from Maine to Mississippi and into the Midwest. The American chestnut was vital not only to the forest ecosystem but also to the people who lived among them.
Known for its straight, tall trunks and rapid growth, the American chestnut provided high-quality timber that was resistant to rot, making it a valuable resource for building homes, furniture, and railroads. Its wood was lightweight but strong, and its nuts were a reliable source of food for wildlife, such as deer, squirrels, and birds, as well as for humans. Communities relied on chestnuts as a staple for both nutrition and income, often selling the abundant crop in local markets.
However, in the early 20th century, the American chestnut tree suffered a catastrophic blow. A deadly blight, caused by the Cryphonectria parasitica fungus, was introduced to North America from imported Asian chestnut trees. First detected in New York City in 1904, the blight spread rapidly, wiping out billions of trees within just a few decades. The fungus attacks the tree's bark, girdling it and cutting off the flow of nutrients, which eventually kills the tree above ground, although the root systems sometimes survive and send up new shoots.
Despite numerous attempts to halt the spread of the disease, the American chestnut was largely driven to functional extinction by the mid-20th century. Its disappearance left a void in the ecosystem and the livelihoods of many Appalachian communities. Yet, efforts to restore the American chestnut tree have continued for decades, with scientists and conservationists working on breeding blight-resistant varieties and using genetic engineering to introduce resistance to the fungus.
Though the American chestnut's reign over the eastern forests is now a distant memory, the hope remains that through restoration efforts, these majestic trees may one day reclaim their place as giants of the Appalachian woodlands. The story of the American chestnut is a testament to both nature’s resilience and the enduring legacy of one of North America's most iconic tree species.
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR: I spent much of the last week in Astoria, Oregon, at an aging hotel on the waterfront docks, about a quarter mile away from a vast log loading yard for NW Forest Link, a log export company, which manages the storage and loading of timber cut in the Pacific Northwest onto giant cargo ships bound for Asia before the logs have been sawn in American mills by American workers. On this rainy November weekend, the caterpillars, log loaders, and trucks were working round the clock to fill the cargo holds of the Pan Nova, a 700-foot long, 100-foot wide ship flagged in Panama. Despite the MAGA movement, the US continues to export nearly $3 billion in raw logs a year and thousands of jobs, mainly to China, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and Vietnam. The Pan Nova started its voyage north from Los Angeles harbor, docked in Astoria, gobbled up thousands of logs of Doug-fir, red cedar and Western hemlock, then departed up the Pacific Coast to Grays Harbor in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula to cart off even more of the ravaged temperate rainforests of the Northwest. Since September, the Pan Nova’s ports of call have included Taizhou, Dangin, Gwanuang, Busan, Los Angeles, Astoria, Gray’s Harbor and Vancouver…
MEMO OF THE AIR: Deferred maintenance.
Here's the recording of last night's (Friday, 2024-11-15) 8-hour Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first hour, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino). This show begins the 13th year of MOTA on KNYO, after almost 15 years on KMFB-that-was, so a total of 1,387 shows so far. You'd think I'd be pretty slick at it by now: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0618
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:
Fishing with fire. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/08/fishing-with-sulphuric-fire.html
Tilt-shift pixilated Lapland. Nice. https://theawesomer.com/little-big-lapland/755558/
Delightful two dogs and an exercise bat. Mmm, bacon. I can't remember the last time I had bacon. I think it was after Fourth of July fireworks in Healdsburg in 2014 or 16. Juanita and I stopped at Denny's on the long drive back and I got a BLT. They're so light and airy you immediately want two or three more, but who can afford that? I should be able to pinpoint the exact year by asking Juanita when it was that she lost her green jacket in a Denny's and we went right back and it was gone, it was not even in the lost and found. Somebody pinched it… Wait, no, it was longer ago than that. I still had the Mercury. Juanita will know. I'll get back to you. https://tackyraccoons.com/2024/11/15/the-gif-friday-post-no-880-hi-def-bacon-happy-rain-doggo-breaking-bat/
And sigils of the 72 ruler demons. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/11/09/org-chart/
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
TRUMP PICKS DOUG BURGUM, A BIG OIL SHILL, FOR INTERIOR SECRETARY
by Dan Bacher
President-elect Donald Trump has announced North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum — a climate skeptic who served as a liaison between the Trump campaign and oil company executives — as his choice for the Secretary of Interior.
Burgum will spearhead the Trump administration’s plans to open federal lands and waters to new oil and gas drilling, fulfilling Trump’s campaign mantra of “Drill, drill, drill” at a time of increasingly brutal heat waves, record storms and flooding, and the warming of ocean waters resulting from climate change.
“Governor Burgum, 68, has longstanding ties to fossil fuel companies and acted as a liaison between the Trump campaign and the oil executives who have donated heavily to it,” the New York Times reported. “The governor is particularly close to Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire founder and chairman of Continental Resources, one of the country’s largest independent oil companies, who has donated nearly $5 million to Mr. Trump since 2023.”
The state where Burgum serves as Governor, North Dakota, ranks third in the nation, after Texas and New Mexico, in both crude oil reserves and production.
Trump made the announcement during an America First Policy Institute gala held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday evening, according to the Times.
Governor Doug Burgum ”I won’t tell you his name — it might be something like Burgum,” Trump told the crowd. “Actually, he’s going to head the Department of Interior, and he’s going to be fantastic.”
Environmental groups blasted Trump’s pick.
“By picking Burgum, President-elect Trump is taking the first step toward unleashing a wave of oil and gas drilling on our public lands,” said Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen in a statement. “The Interior Secretary is entrusted with protecting our shared lands and waters, now and for future generations, but Governor Burgum is poised to prioritize reckless development above all else. We can’t double down on drilling and habitat loss in the face of runaway climate change and extinctions. We stand ready to go to court to protect our wildlands and waters from extractive industries and safeguard the interests of Tribal communities threatened by development they oppose.”
“It was climate skeptic Doug Burgum who helped arrange the Mar-a-Lago meeting with wealthy oil and gas executives where Donald Trump offered to overturn dozens of environmental rules and regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contribution,” stated Ben Jealous, Sierra Club Executive Director. “If that weren’t disqualifying enough, he’s long advocated for rolling back critical environmental safeguards in order to let polluters profit.”
“Doug Burgum’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deep and, if confirmed to this position, he will surely continue Donald Trump’s efforts to sell out our public lands to his polluter pals. Our lands are our nation’s greatest treasure, and the Interior Department is charged with their protection. The Sierra Club and its millions of members and supporters across the country will do everything in our power to stop Donald Trump and Doug Burgum’s fossil fuel agenda, and preserve our wild and special places,” he concluded.
Manish Bapna, President and CEO of NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), also slammed Trump’s pick in a statement:
“The Interior Department is charged with protecting public lands that cover one-fifth of the country, national parks used by nearly 320 million visitors each year and federal ocean waters. The Secretary is also entrusted to honor federal trust obligations for DOI-administered Indian lands. Our public lands are a public trust. We depend on the Department of the Interior to protect our wildlife and habitat, national monuments to our history and culture and the natural splendor of this country. We will hold the incoming administration to account for this mission.
“Trump has made no secret of his Project 2025 plan to open more public lands and ocean waters to the dangers of oil and gas drilling. That's the wrong direction for the country. Now he’s tapped someone with close ties to the oil and gas industry to spearhead the scheme.
“It’s time to reduce, not expand, the public lands, ocean waters and coastal communities exposed to the catastrophic risk and ongoing harm of oil and gas drilling. It’s time to protect wildlife, habitat and communities from cascading climate disasters ranging from rising seas to raging wildfires, storms and floods. It’s time to tackle the alarming decline of fish and wildlife across this country and make the nation’s public lands and ocean waters part of the climate solution, not part of the problem.”
During the previous Trump administration, Ryan Zinke served as Interior Secretary in the first two years and David Bernhardt in the second two years. Before taking the position, Bernhardt was a lobbyist for the Westlands Water District, the largest water district in the nation, and the oil industry. A coalition of fishermen, environmentalists, Tribes, family farmers, business owners and environmental justice advocates in California strongly opposed his policies that increased water deliveries to corporate agribusiness in the San Joaquin Valley at great expense to imperiled Central Valley salmon and Delta smelt populations.
The U.S. Department of the Interior “protects and manages the Nation’s natural resources and cultural heritage; provides scientific and other information about those resources; and honors its trust responsibilities or special commitments to American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and affiliated Island Communities,” according to the agency’s mission statement.
The agency has 70,000 employees, 280,000 volunteers and 2,400 operating locations.
Record numbers of salmon return to Mokelumne River, while shockingly low numbers show on upper Sacramento
A total of 29,912 fall-run Chinook salmon have moved past the Woodbridge Diversion Dam on the Mokelumne River as of November 13, 2024, according to Michelle Workman, the East Bay Municipal Utility District’s Fisheries and Wildlife Manager. This will be an all-time record for fall Chinook spawning escapement on the river, a tributary of the San Joaquin River. …
GIVE HIM A BREAK
Editor:
Not 24 hours after Democrats conceded the election. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta were already trying to undermine President-elect Donald Trump. Newsom already has a Dec. 2 special legislative session scheduled to figure out how to fight him. Is this what the Democrats mean when they speak of peace and unity? Seems to me they are trying to divide the country even more with their hatred for one man instead of working with the man who was overwhelmingly elected as our next president. Newsom should really try to fathom why Democrats were so soundly defeated in the election and focus on the good of the country instead of trying to convince Americans he knows better than what most Americans want.
Raleigh Chaix
Willits
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
MAGA is a pretty wide tent. People have different reasons for supporting him.
The biggest reasons are probably inflation, that Trump is not "woke", and wants to secure the border.
Many people despise Biden and Harris and wanted to see them lose.
Many people detest Harris because she is an empty pant-suit.
Some Trumpers might be from the Ron Paul school, but Dr. Ron Paul himself has many doubts about Trump, as you can hear for yourself on "Ron Paul on Trump’s Shocker SecDef Pick" on antiwar dot com, Nov 13 or 14.
Trump preaches a certain type of "industrial policy", and is PRUDENT about trade, that appeals to some workers.
And of course, many Christian and some Jewish Israel-first types love him, given his comments and past actions. But he is not any more pro-Israel than Biden is. They, like most of Congress, are all owned by the Israel Lobby. And I bet most Jewish Americans who voted supported Harris.
MOTHER OF MUSEs | The Official Bob Dylan Site
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/mother-of-muses/
(via Bruce McEwen)
MONUMENT TO MUSIC IN TIME OF WAR: SAMUEL SCHEIDT’S TABULATURA NOVA AT 400
by David Yearsley
The first half of the German seventeenth century was a time and place of short men with well-tended facial hair. The prevailing style dictated long, groomed mustaches and goatees tucked against starched ruffs that rode up to the ears. The Sun King was not yet on the throne across the Rhine in France and the wig was not yet in. Expressive locks still flamed and frizzed on top. Celebrated for their skill at piloting their age’s most advanced technology more sophisticated than siege machines, the organists of Germany commanded armies of thrilling sonorities with their fingers and feet. They were stylish and intrepid musketeers of music, dashing and devout.
It was in just such flamboyant guise that Samuel Scheidt had himself pictured in the engraved portrait that adorns the Tabulatura nova (the new tablature) for organ published in 1624. When bound together, its three parts were about as big and heavy as a one-volume encyclopedia. The behemoth was too massive to put on the music desk of any organ or harpsichord. Not directly to be played from, the Tabulatura nova was instead to be consulted and studied. In his explanatory notes that reveal much about the innovative keyboard practices and techniques that he pioneered, Scheidt acknowledged that his German organist colleagues would have to transcribe the publication’s open score (in which the four polyphonic parts of soprano, alto, tenor and bass were each presented on their own separate staff) into the then-standard letter notation. This common practice of writing music, one which appears to most of Scheidt’s modern musical descendants like indecipherable Gothic scribblings, was known as German organ tablature. Scheidt’s more proudly universal system, however impractical for performance, staked out new territory in the unexplored territory of the keyboard world. His was the music of the “Age of Discovery”—Tabulatura nova as terra incognito, an atlas, and encyclopedia.
Tabulatura nova is a veritable lexicon of keyboard knowledge and innovation. Its music is rigorous and research-driven but also, at times, capricious and witty. Scheidt makes use of the inexhaustible algorithms of invention to generate seemingly endless permutations not only in his high-minded polyphonic fantasias but also in his creative and demanding treatment of popular tunes of the day, sneaking ingenious polyphonic tricks behind the glittering façade of exuberant technical display.
The collection contains a vast range of forms and effects of newly invented virtuosic gestures that included phrasing—a seemingly subtle but still revolutionary development. The organs of Scheidt’s time, many of which he had inspected, hosted a huge range of new sounds imitating the other instruments of the day: viols, cornettos, dulcians, trumpets, recorders, and many others. This diversity inspired Scheidt to teach his fingers to imitate the performing styles of these other instrumentalists. His introduction of the slur to keyboard playing was an attempt to achieve the expressive subtlety of the best string players. Why shouldn’t organists, whose default touch was to separate each successive note in a kind of perpetual non-legato, try to mimic these varied groupings?
With painstaking notational specificity, Scheidt expanded the shadings and shapes of keyboard touch even to included smeared over-legato, as if the fingers had been dipped in honey. He extended this acoustic research out into architectural spaces like that of the vast church of St. Mary’s in his hometown of Halle, Saxony, in central Germany, where he served as organist already as a teenager. The sonic shifts and investigations of Scheidt’s Echo: ad manual duplex forte& lente (Echo for two manuals, soft and loud of his like) are curious, even obsessive, but also illuminating and uplifting. Though famed for his fast fists, Scheidt rarely rushed to get results.
In 1607, Scheidt, then in his early twenties, had been sent by the Halle city fathers to Amsterdam for two years to learn from the “maker of organists,” Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Echoes, variations and, most importantly, counterpoint were all on the expansive pedagogical program. Scheidt took tunes and technique from his teacher and pushed them to new and broader dimensions: homage by one-upmanship is everywhere in the Tabulatura nova.
Composer of big pieces (as well as a few less demanding, lighter keyboard dances), Scheidt was short by modern standards—5’5” if he was average height. His music not only leaves fleeting traces of his body in the flights and figures traced by the hands—the shimmering repeated notes for which he provides specific alternating fingerings, quaking tremolos, soaring runs, knuckle-busting double thirds and sixths in one hand, chordal leaps, and groovy syncopations—but also maps out the contortions of his entire frame.
German organists prided themselves on managing dense contrapuntal textures with all their four limbs engaged at once. Among the Europeans, only they deployed their legs fully at the wide pedalboards connected to massive ranks of towering pipes. The Germans even brought both feet into action at the same time, as Scheidt magisterially demonstrates at the end of the Tabulatura nova in a pair of valedictory pieces for full organ and six polyphonic parts, two of them to be played simultaneously on the pedals. Scheidt cautions the composer of such works not to exceed the span of an octave in the feet because his diminutive brethren wouldn’t be able to reach the span and perhaps fall off the bench in the attempt.
In his Modus ludendi pleno Organo pedaliter (A way of playing on the full organ with the pedal), Scheidt holds faithfully to his recommendations except at one moment where he transgresses the octave limit, the left foot clinging tenuously to the lowest D on the pedal board as the right then stretches up a minor third to achieve the yawning width of a tenth, the organist clinging to the high bench with his backside while his hands seek balancing purchase from the manuals. Not just at its conclusion is Scheidt’s three-volume compendium as much a physical as a mental test: mens et manus, mind and hands — et pedus, and feet.
The publication of the Tabulatura nova was a lavish and expensive undertaking financed by Scheidt himself with funds inherited from his wealthy father, city beer steward and inspector of wells in Halle. Konrad Scheidt’s work was not musical, but it made a certain, familiar sense that, thanks to the tremendous educational system built around music in the Lutheran Latin Schools of the era, the boy would become one of the leading organists of his generation. Both father and son were experts in fluid dynamics. They knew how to brew and let flow those two vital, very German products—the liquid gold of beer and that invisible magic of the air, music. It was no coincidence that at organ dedications—at many of which Samuel Scheidt participated as inspector, performer, and fellow feaster—the amount of beer equal to the volume of the new instrument’s largest pipe had to be supplied by town officials for festive communal consumption.
The Tabulatura nova was both a feast and a cornerstone: nourishing and foundational, built to last yet also to be fed on down the generations. I held Scheidt’s personal copy of the collection in his native Halle in 1989 when that city, then one of the most polluted in the world, still lay behind the Iron Curtain. Hefting the Tabulatura nova in the GDR felt then like lifting an ingot of Eastern Bloc steel. Vast cities of counterpoint and figuration could be constructed from its raw materials.
Two-and-a-half centuries after the publication of Scheidt’s magnum opus, the recently united Germany set about patriotically claiming and curating the new nation’s musical past. It is hardly surprising that in 1892 Scheidt’s Tabulatura nova was anointed to be the first volume of the Denkmäler der Deutschen Tonkunst (Monuments of German Tone-Art, i.e., Music), the series’ advisory committee presided over by Johannes Brahms, by then sporting a long gray beard rather than the suave goatee of his German musical ancestors. The organists of the new Germany could now play from this large, but far from lightweight, volume, since this modern edition of the Tabulatura nova was printed on two practical staves instead of Scheidt’s daunting four. The metaphor chosen to describe this monument was biological rather than industrial: future generations of German organists would admire, even emulate, this music—a mighty oak whose “greening branches” were nourished by deep roots in native soil.
Aside from his sojourn in Amsterdam, Scheidt spent his life in the city of his birth. Yet he published the Tabulatura nova in Hamburg, then Germany’s largest city. The cataclysm of the Thirty Years’ War, which in some regions of Germany like that around Halle decimated as much as half the population, had broken out in 1618. The war was more than a confessional conflict, although religious affiliation in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation was a decisive factor. The administrator of the Lutheran archbishop, which encompassed Halle, was Christian Wilhelm, the Margrave of Brandenburg; he was not even a Lutheran but a Calvinist. The war had as much, if not more, to do with who would acquire the wealth generated by these ecclesiastical units than it did with tenets of belief. Along with the Saxon Elector Johann Georg, the Margrave was the dedicatee of the Tabulatura nova. In general, the Lutheran powers hated Calvinists more than the enemy Catholics. Yet here on Scheidt’s title page, printed sumptuously in both black and red ink, the famed organist embraced a Calvinist Prince.
Scheidt’s opening music is carefully chosen: a setting of Martin Luther’s hymn Wir glauben all an einen Gott (We all believe in one good), the Reformer’s paraphrase of the Creed first published exactly a hundred years earlier in 1524. Scheidt’s almost austere contrapuntal elaboration of the venerable melody is a clarion call, or perhaps a shot heard, if not round the world, then across far-flung German-speaking lands ravaged by war. Ringing down the centuries from, and to, a world in turmoil, this music can also be heard now as a call for tolerance, though others might see “A Mighty Fortress” rise up from its sheer wall of sound.
The year after the publication of the Tabulatura nova, Imperial troops marched into Halle and Christian Wilhelm fled the city. Taken by enemy forces during the horrific sacking of Magdeburg, the archiepiscopal seat, six years later, in 1631, the wounded Margrave was nursed back to health by Jesuits and converted to Catholicism. He still believed in the same God.
The war destroyed Scheidt’s wealth, yet he soldiered on in Halle, publishing and performing vocal music for reduced forces. Two years after the war ended with the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, he produced a final volume of chorales; shorter and less erudite than those in the Tabulatura nova; these pieces could be played by village organists and pious amateurs at home.
A virtuoso on the loudest keyboard instrument (the organ), Scheidt was also renowned for his abilities at the softest (the clavichord). In a diary entry of June 22nd, 1636, another lesser potentate, Christian II, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg, could not contain his superlatives: “I had the world-famous Music Director and Organist, Samuel Scheidt, brought to me. He played extraordinarily sweetly on the clavichord and I have never in my entire life heard anything like it.”
That performance by Scheidt came just past the halfway point of the Thirty Years’s War. Early in his diary and in the war, Christian II had grieved that it was his “fatal destiny” to fight in the great conflict. The Tabulatura nova stands as a monument—perhaps hopeful, perhaps unyielding—to that same fatal destiny, one shared by Scheidt. He died in 1654 “in summa miseria et pauperitate”: in utter misery and poverty. The city of Halle covered the costs of the cheapest possible rate for his burial in a common grave.
Scheidt’s money was gone but not his trust in God, as the psalm text to the intricate canon that adorns his portrait in the Tabulatura nova affirms. That musical puzzle is deciphered by Scheidt at the end of the collection’s first volume, its theme re-used by him to launch and increasingly animate the sprawling Toccata super: In te Domine speravi that closes out the collection’s second installment. As the Toccata proceeds from stately composure to unbounded joy, the diminutive man plays on, larger than life, his music both an echo of, and a triumph over, war and death.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
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TRUMP’S NEW COLOGNE: EAU DE MUSK
by Maureen Dowd
I was feeling sad that Melania may not care to come play first lady in the second Trump administration.
She visited the East Wing only a couple of times during her husband’s first term, turning into the first lady of absenteeism, according to Katie Rogers, the author of “American Woman,” a history of modern first ladies. Her office there was so empty, her staff used it as a gift-wrapping station.
Even so, I thought we might get a little comme il faut from “the Portrait,” as Ivanka nicknamed her stepmother — a small bow to protocol.
But not likely. As some in the Trump orbit point out, it’s no accident that Barron is going to New York University, not a university here, like Georgetown or American.
Melania will probably “move in” to the White House and drop by the capital, looking impervious and gorgeous. But in general, the Slovenian Sphinx is going to get even more sphinxy this time. She has made her disdain for D.C. clear. She skipped the ritual torch-passing of having tea in the Yellow Room of the White House with Jill Biden as the two presidents met. Jill had to settle for handing a note to Donald to take back to Melania in Palm Beach.
The New York Post reported that Melania abhorred the Bidens because of the Mar-a-Lago documents raid in 2022, when she felt violated by F.B.I. agents with a search warrant snooping in the drawer with her fine washables.
In an interview with Paris Match, Melania dripped more disdain on the woman who succeeded and precedes her. While Jill reached out to her after the assassination attempt on her husband, she questioned whether the concern was “genuine,” given that a few days earlier, Jill called Donald Trump “evil” and a “liar.” She also said rhetoric from Democrats and the mainstream media provoked the assassination attempt.
Melania wondered if the notion of “respect” had become obsolete.
Good question to ponder as we watch people with no respect for Washington tearing it apart from the inside — starting with her husband’s bizarre nominations of people with contempt for the institutions they would run, a quartet of scandalous foxes in the hen houses: R.F.K. Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz. (If the odious, barely-a-lawyer Gaetz is confirmed, which is a long shot, even with obedient Senate Republicans, will he heed MAGA calls to reinvestigate 2020 with an eye toward proving Trump won?)
As with Melania, Trump wants “the look.” (In a photo popular online, Hegseth, a Fox News host, appeared half-naked and tattooed at the 9/11 Memorial.) Trump thought about appointing Brooke Rollins as chief of staff, he told people, because “she’s tall” and “she’s got the look.” He’s more concerned with appearance than any other president — or celebrity — in history.
I know the first lady role is antiquated. By scarcely doing the job last time, Melania proved just how dispensable it is. But, at this moment, with the capital poleaxed as Trump turns D.C. into a rage room, smashing all norms and protocols, I was feeling a twinge of nostalgia for first ladyhood. Would another historic tradition shatter?
Then I realized, happily, that someone else was eager to fill the role of President-elect Trump’s helpmeet, cheering him on and bucking him up, telling him his crowd was the biggest ever. Someone who seemed much more eager and excited to be by Trump’s side, to travel with him and bounce around onstage and look adoringly at him.
Elon. Or should we call him Elonia?
Musk is itching to clean house and fulfill the Bill & Hillary pledge of “two for the price of one.” T-shirts showing the lovey-dovey pair are being sold by MAGA vendors.
Melania seemed distant in pictures with Ivanka, whom she called “the Princess.” Elonia is rarin’ to be in the picture with Donald’s family. Trump’s teenage granddaughter Kai tweeted a golf course picture noting that he had achieved “uncle status.”
Trump appointed Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy to head what he called the Department of Government Efficiency, its name inspired by the classic dog meme. Elon is eager to learn how the branches of government work, so he can help Trump lop them off.
Full of recommendations, many about friends and associates, Elon has been in most job interviews for the new administration, The Times reported. He went with Trump to meet House Republicans Wednesday. Then, he was on the plane back to Mar-a-Lago when the deliberations happened that led to Trump picking the indecent Gaetz to replace the decent Merrick Garland.
Elon posted afterward that “the Hammer of Justice is coming.” More like the hammer of injustice for their enemies.
In addition to helping the transition, Elon has assumed diplomatic duties, sitting in on calls with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, and meeting with Iran’s U.N. ambassador in New York to talk about defusing tensions. Musk also attended a national security meeting.
Some Trump advisers complain that Elon is too high-profile and too pushy about his own agenda, NBC News reported.
One Trump associate even joked to me that Elon is “the Thing that wouldn’t leave.” At a Thursday night MAGA gala at Mar-a-Lago, Trump teased about Musk’s ubiquity.
“You know, he likes this place,” Trump told the crowd, including, of course, Musk. “I can’t get him out of here. He just likes this place. And you know what? I like having him here, too.”
Despite all his denouncing of elites, Trump loves them and craves their respect. He was thrilled, after he raised his fist after the assassination attempt, when Jeff Bezos posted about Trump’s “grace and courage under literal fire” and Mark Zuckerberg said “it was one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Trump loves Elon because he builds cool stuff, inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal in “Iron Man” and sparked superhero memes with Elon, Trump and the MAGA gang. Also, Elon turned the town square of Twitter into a political weapon and funneled circa $150 million into a Trump-aligned super PAC for the campaign’s ground game.
The two billionaires are both much-married highchair kings, relentless trolls and promoters extraordinaire who will say anything — whether it gets them in trouble or not. They both have the solipsistic attitude of a spoiled rotten 11-year-old.
They are both transactional. Elon is a glorified — and highly leveraged — defense contractor, so entwining himself with the president-elect is helpful. The mogul was born in South Africa so he can’t be president himself; this is the closest he can get.
Still, the men make strange bedfellows, given that Elon is globalism personified and Trump is trying to strangle globalism.
As in every blazing hot romance, there is a good chance that it will end in tears and jealousy. The moment may come when Elon, too, swats away Trump’s hand.
The first time that self-described “first buddy” Elon is on a magazine cover described as a younger, taller, better looking “co-president,” it will be over. Elon is probably already on thin ice because, like Trump, he has been getting standing ovations when he enters the Mar-a-Lago dining room.
At the MAGA gala, Trump warned R.F.K. Jr.: “Don’t get too popular, Bobby. You know you’ve reached about the level now.”
Trump and Elon may learn that people want government cuts until they find out what they’re losing. But for now, the two men are just a couple of bros with chain saws making googly eyes at each other.
‘THE INSANITY ERA DIES. WHAT'S NEXT?’
Taibbi & Kirn
Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you?
Walter Kirn: I’m a lot better than I was. The whole last week was both exhilarating, fascinating, and completely exhausting.
Matt Taibbi: I feel exactly the same. I’m ready to collapse. We’re doing this after I came in from a late night Amtrak, so I’m kind of half-awake at the moment, but feeling great, looking forward to it,
Walter Kirn: But Amtrak’s so comfortable that I’m sure you slept like a baby on the way back, right?
Matt Taibbi: Amtrak, I was just saying to our mystery producer, I’m a billion years old and I can’t, except for the addition of plugs to the seating areas, I can’t think of a single thing that’s gotten better about Amtrak since I was a little boy. It’s not really faster. There aren’t more trains. The seats aren’t more comfortable. The food isn’t better. I mean, I don’t know. Other countries have trains that get you there in 10 seconds and you…
Walter Kirn: Other countries have trains that allow you to get on in Germany and wake up in Asia somewhere.
Matt Taibbi: Right, yes.
Walter Kirn: Refreshed. If you don’t go to sleep, you make all kinds of new friends. Amtrak is a lonely experience. And even though you’re not allowed to smoke anymore, the memories of smokers are somehow imbued in the atmosphere. You can just feel the old Amtrak. I don’t think the trains have been rehabbed in any appreciable way. And the Acela, which I thought was some miracle of American futurism, is approximately three minutes faster, I think.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, the Acela sucks balls. It’s more expensive for the same product. And they force you to sit in those horrific foursome arrangements. Anyway, we’re getting off course, but I had a…
Walter Kirn: But I think Amtrak as a surrogate for the American state is a good subject. All I’ll say is that I went on it a couple of weeks ago, I went from Union Station in Washington to beautiful Penn Station in New York City, and I went to the ticket counter and she said, “Now, do you want first class or regular?” And I said, “Well, what does first class get you?” And she said, “A drink,” I think, and it was a hundred dollars more. And she said, “I actually won’t let you buy first class.” I guess I wasn’t dressed like a rich man, and she took pity on me.
Matt Taibbi: I could go on for a long time. I just had one of those days yesterday. There was a downed power line in front of the tracks, so all the Amtrak trains were stuck behind Philadelphia. Anyway, I’ve had so many misadventures on Amtrak that I could write three novels about it.
Walter Kirn: My final word on Amtrak though is that Amtrak reveals to you what the backyards of New Jersey are really like. And for that alone, I think it’s worth at least one ride.
Matt Taibbi: I’m also convinced that that’s where the producers of the wire got the idea because it runs straight through West Baltimore, right? But okay, so it’s a week after the election, a gazillion things have happened. They’re happening as we speak. The world is changing at a speed that is, I can’t recall anything like this pace in my lifetime. I mean, maybe earlier this summer when we had that succession of crazy events beginning with the assassination attempt or beginning with Biden dropping out. But now things are happening incredibly quickly and there’s consternation everywhere. But I wanted to start off this show with a remarkable series of facts that was reported earlier this week and is a growing story and needs to be remarked upon. Dylan Byers, who is one of those used to be. I’m a guy who used to be a writer at Rolling Stone. Dylan used to be a writer at CNN. He now writes at Puck. And he wrote a piece about how the new CEO of CNN is planning hundreds of layoffs.
This is going to include on-air talent. There’s going to be rethinking of some of the higher salary figures at CNN. And they’re going to reconsider apparently their entire strategy. This was coupled by a leak, I think, a little bit prematurely of some Nielsen numbers. And the New York Times finally put the story up today called Viewers Flee NBC and Flock to Fox News in Wake of Election.
Now, the Fox numbers, whatever, I think we could expect that Fox was going to keep its viewership. But primetime viewership at MSNBC has fallen 53% from October. If you go down, you’ll see The Rachel Maddow Show this past Monday had 1.3 million viewers, which is a million shy of her October average. So this coupled with some news about mass layoffs at some other papers, there are rumors about, let’s just say some of the bigger newspapers are about to take the ax to their staffs. We’ve heard-
Walter Kirn: Well, there are only two really left, so I mean maybe two and a half if you include the Los Angeles Times. So where did you hear that? Is that in that piece or is that just rumors?
Matt Taibbi: No, I mean the newspaper thing part of this is going to come out probably next week. But basically ratings have plummeted at the kind of non-conservative, non-heterodox spaces. And okay, you would expect this after an election loss, except that’s exactly what didn’t happen in 2016. What happened in 2016 is that the press rebranded itself as the resistance, right?
Walter Kirn: Right, right.
Matt Taibbi: It was democracy died in darkness. And they turned upside down the traditional pattern of news organizations losing market share after elections. Because what normally happens is news companies make money on ads, election ads during the election years, and then they kind of gut it out for the fallow seasons. But after Trump got elected the first time, they all made massive fortunes for 2017, 2018, all the way through the middle of 2019 or so until the Mueller report collapsed.
Walter Kirn: Well, exactly. They had Days of Our Mueller, the long-running soap opera to keep them going.
Matt Taibbi: Right. But they slowly rebuilt their audiences from there all the way through this election. But I don’t think they’re coming… I think this is actually the end for this incarnation of the media. We talk a lot about the quote, unquote, mainstream media on this show.
Walter Kirn: Right, right, right. Sure.
Matt Taibbi: I think that might be a past tense kind of a thing soon. We’ve already remarked upon how little influence they had on this election and…
Walter Kirn: Well, I mean, they might’ve had negative influence in the sense that the candidate that they so clearly and emphatically wanted to win didn’t. But what they did was a multi-level fail. On the one hand, they made bad predictions, which is one of the reasons people go to the media in an election season. Had they predicted anything even close to correctly, we might not be seeing it at this scale. But people realized that they were actively misled. I went back through my tweets for the election season.
Matt Taibbi: I saw that. People should look.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. And nailed it at every point, and at every point I was contra the mainstream media. From reviewing the debate to thinking about Harris’s chances to the Paul Krugman-esque denial that the papers trafficked in about the economy in which they all echoed this thought that things were great and people just had a faulty perception of their own financial condition. I mean, they did everything they could really to jump off a cliff. And they all jumped off a cliff holding hands, screaming Hitler.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. It was like the Thelma and Louise ending.
Walter Kirn: Right. And it got worse at the end. It was as though they could not consider the possibility of failure. When they reviewed the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden as some sort of Nazi rally and did so almost unanimously, I thought, well, this is their Thelma and Louise movement. They just sped up to, they went from 60 to 70 to 90, and here they are flying over the Grand Canyon, and gravity can’t be escaped forever. So I think you’re right. The night of the election, you wrote and said, “So many people are going to lose their jobs now.”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, yeah. And I thought that was going to be first because executives, like CNN’s CEO, Mark Thompson, I thought people like him, there were going to be a number of figures in media who were going to say, okay, look, I’ve given these people all the rope I could. Not only did they not get the person elected, they may have actually gotten the other guy elected. And now I’m looking at losing another gazillion dollars.
Walter Kirn: And Anderson Cooper makes $20 million reportedly. He’s not the most shrill or impassioned of the propagandists, but I imagine that Rachel makes around that too. I can’t remember. It was publicized at one point.
Matt Taibbi: I thought it was higher than that, but yeah.
Walter Kirn: But they misled about everything. They misled about Biden’s state of mind. They misled about Harris’s chances. They misled about this fascist authoritarian rally and everything in between. But not only did that happen, they had not so great audiences already. In other words, they were already so far out over their skis in terms of their ability to profit from their broadcasts. And these people seem to be at that point obviously apparatchiks who were being paid because they kept the networks in good favor with the state. And what I think is happening now is not just a reflection of the market, because they were already failing in the market, they were already overpaying and overspending. What’s happening now is that they don’t have a client in the federal government anymore. In other words, there’s no one who it’s worth losing money to please…
SO HOW WILL TRUMP DEPORT 20 MILLION?
It's the bold pledge that helped propel him back into the White House. Now our US Editor reveals his $1trillion 'shock and awe' blueprint…
by Caroline Graham
When Donald Trump is inaugurated as America's 47th president on January 20, the event will mark the official start of his second term in office with carefully stage-managed images that will be seen around the world.
Within hours of the event, Trump will take his seat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and launch what he calls 'the biggest mass deportation in American history'.
While the expulsion of illegal immigrants was a focal point of Trump's election campaign, the precise details of how he intends to accomplish his goal of removing as many as 20 million people from US soil have largely remained unknown.
Until now.
The Mail on Sunday has spoken to those in Trump's inner circle who say his immigration plans have been top of the list in discussions held at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home, in the days since his crushing victory.
One lawyer familiar with the talks told me: 'Donald is preparing for a series of moves against illegal immigrants, which he says will cause 'shock and awe'. Kicking out illegals was the mainstay of his run for the White House and he knows people expect action on Day One. They will get it.'
The source claims Trump will immediately sign a series of executive orders, the most radical of which will be to close the border.
Citing an immigration crisis, he will temporarily shut the southern border to give officials a chance to clear a huge backlog of cases.
Trump claims that the Joe Biden administration allowed more than 10 million people to illegally enter the US, bringing the total number of illegal immigrants to 20 million.
There are plans to significantly increase the number of armed officers on horseback patrolling the rugged terrain close to the US's border with Mexico.
And, of course, construction will resume on the infamous wall running between the two countries, which was a central – if unfulfilled – plank of Trump's immigration policy during his first term.
Having lengthened the wall to around 700 miles (of the near 2,000-mile border), work abruptly stopped when Biden came to power. Trump has vowed to complete the $8 billion job by inviting businesses to 'sponsor' sections.
'Step One' of the deportation programme is to target undocumented immigrants with ties to criminal gangs.
It is dubbed 'Operation Aurora', after the Colorado town where members of the ruthless Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua turned apartment complexes into bases for drug dealing and prostitution.
Trump plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which gives presidents the authority to detain and deport non-citizens from 'hostile nations' during times of war and conflict. The law was used to justify the building of Japanese internment camps during the Second World War.
According to those familiar with Trump's plans, he will target the 700,000 Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans he has branded 'vicious criminals from countries that hate us', who have been allowed to stay in the US under a Biden parole programme.
And what if, as is highly likely, countries refuse to take back violent gang members? Trump will cut off aid and ban travellers from those countries from entering the US, even on tourist visas.
'Step Two' is to expel more than one million people whose applications to remain in the US have been denied and who are on the deportation list.
Then the round-up of the millions of remaining illegal immigrants will begin as part of 'Step Three'. Places of work, including farms and meatpacking plants, will be subject to raids (or 'targeted enforcement activities') – something the American Civil Liberties Union calls 'vile, unconstitutional and un-American'.
Individuals will be taken to 'holding centres' before their deportation is fast-tracked.
Experts say the cost of the first two steps could be as much as $300 billion and the cost of expelling every illegal alien – something even Trump privately admits is impossible – could be as much as $1 trillion.
The MoS understands Trump is considering deploying the military and National Guard to build 'tent cities' on unused federal land, including property belonging to schools and prisons.
He will reintroduce the 'Remain in Mexico' Act, which will compel potential immigrants – mostly from Central and South America but increasingly from China and Eastern Europe – to stay on the southern side of the border while their visa applications are processed.
Ronald Vitiello was director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump's first term in office. His predecessor was Tom Homan, the man now anointed by Trump as his 'Border Czar'.
Mr Vitiello told the MoS: 'We wouldn't be contemplating removing 20 million people if they [the Democrats] didn't let them all in. It's a travesty we're in this situation and it's completely preventable.
'Enforcement is difficult, expensive and risky for frontline operatives, but very necessary.
'The ICE is going to have to find people who don't want to be found, plan safe arrest and custody, find a place for them to stay, have due process in court, and the logistics to send them home.' So how exactly will it work?
Trump is said to be planning to merge ICE and Border Patrol – the federal law enforcement agency – into one 'uber' organisation of 88,000 people and will release millions in central funding to add 40,000 new agents and 8,000 extra immigration court judges to expedite expulsions.
Ira Mehlman, from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), is reportedly advising the incoming Trump administration.
He said last night: 'There are about 647,000 people with criminal records who have been allowed into the United States. Of those, 435,000 have convictions, including 13,000 murderers. Nobody's going to miss them if they're sent home.'
But how will authorities find those who don't want to be found?
'It's like finding any criminal,' a law enforcement source told me. 'You target their homes, the people who are financially supporting them. These people are not rocket scientists. If you put pressure on their families to give them up, nine times out of ten it works.'
Mehlman defended raids on businesses saying: 'The Government will go after employers who hire illegal immigrants. They have business licences and assets. You go in there, you bust the employers for violating the laws and you send a very clear message.
'Their competitor down the street, who might be doing the same thing, might then think, 'I don't want to risk this,' and will stop hiring illegal immigrants.'
But it is the rounding up of the bulk of migrants under 'Step Three' that will likely produce the defining images of Trump's second term.
Many of these people will have children, after being in the US for years. Pictures of families being torn apart, of children being ripped from their parents' arms, could backfire on Trump.
But the lawyer who has been speaking to Trump's team says: 'What you have to remember is that President Obama deported five million people, and no one talks about that because he's a Democrat.'
It was under Obama, he observes, that controversial chain-link fence enclosures – or cages – in deportation holding centres were first built. 'President Trump has a professional team around him,' says the lawyer. 'The best of the best. They have been working on this immigration plan for years.'
And, crucially, Trump 'has the mandate of the people'.
He insists that the President-elect isn't against immigration, pointing out that Trump is married to Melania, a Slovenian-American; his first wife Ivana was born in what was then Czechoslovakia; and Elon Musk, 'his best buddy', hails from South Africa.
'He wants to make the American Dream achievable again, but only for people who have the legal right to be here,' he says.
Intriguingly, Trump is exploring paying 'third-party safe countries' to take non-violent applicants while their visas are being processed. The scheme is similar to Rishi Sunak's now abandoned Rwanda plan, in which migrants who crossed the Channel illegally were to be flown to Rwanda to seek asylum there instead.
The source said: 'Trump isn't a monster. He understands many asylum seekers may face death if they have to return to their country of origin. There will be safe third-party countries which will house these people at some cost to the US taxpayers. But they will be the exception, not the rule.'
Alfonso Aguilar, former chief of the US Office of Citizenship under President George W. Bush, told the MoS: 'The biggest challenge will be communicating the immigration policy to the American people before the Democrats cry that it's a humanitarian crisis or cruel and inhumane. The Trump administration will need to show that this is a fair and just process.'
The American Civil Liberties Union has amassed a team of lawyers to fight deportations, while California governor Gavin Newsom says public defenders will be available to all illegal immigrants 'to ensure they get a fair trial'.
But Trump will try to bypass existing human rights laws and introduce 'deport now, ask questions later' legislation, and he has the numbers to do so given his party's control of the Senate and House of Representatives.
Furthermore, legal challenges will ultimately end up in the Supreme Court, which is currently weighted in Trump's favour.
No doubt the deportation plan will present a bumper payday for lawyers, but construction and transport companies will benefit, too. While the intention is to use federal housing, the military and border agents, the sheer size of the job means it is likely the Government will hire contractors to build temporary housing and provide extra planes for transportation.
Tellingly, within 24 hours of Trump's decisive victory on November 6, shares in 'private prison' firms such as CoreCivic and Geo Group surged.
Many fear Trump's plans could severely damage the US economy, often citing the example of Florida where governor Ron DeSantis issued the country's most stringent anti-illegal immigration orders 18 months ago.
Today, farmers in the state complain they do not have enough people to pick Florida's trademark oranges, while small business owners say they are being forced to shut down because Americans don't want to do menial jobs.
One restaurant owner who gave his name only as 'Charles' said: 'It's tough to find people to wash dishes. American students don't want to do this.
'If Trump gets rid of everyone doing the dirtiest jobs, then who will do them?'
'There may be shortages at first, some holes in the system,' concedes the lawyer close to Trump. 'But most illegal immigrants come here because they want to work, they want to create a better life for their families. All we are saying is, do it properly.'
Whether businesses that rely on imported labour will see it in such simple terms remains to be seen, as does the strength of protest from the blue half of America that voted Democrat.
What is more certain is that the success or otherwise of Trump's plan to deport some 20 million people will determine the fate of his second term.
(dailymail.co.uk)
IN KHARKIV
by Timothy Garton Ash
The day I arrived in Kharkiv, a 94-year-old woman was burned alive there by a Russian glide bomb. Her daughter had to order a DNA test to confirm the identity of the charred remains. Forty-three people, including children aged one, four, and twelve, were injured in the same attack. That Sunday, September 15, 2024, was just another normal Kharkiv day.
So close is the besieged eastern Ukrainian city to the Russian frontier that an S-300 missile can reach it in 30 seconds. By the time the air-raid alarm shrieks in your phone — and it shrieks often — it's probably too late to take shelter. Liudmyla, a university lecturer in English, told me that as she sat drinking coffee on the 12-floor balcony of an apartment building in the northeast of Kharkiv, she could actually see missiles being launched from the Russian city of Belgorod. For 32 months now the people of Kharkiv have lived like this, with a neighbor liable to knock on your door at any hour of the day or night — a neighbor called Death.
Russia is not just geographically close. Kharkiv is a historic center of Ukrainian culture, but it's also a largely Russian-speaking city, full of people whose families came from over the border when there was no border, in the old USSR. Liudmyla's mother and sister are in Moscow. A few days after Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, when advancing Russian ground forces were threatening to take the entire city, her sister got through to her on the phone and helpfully explained, “They're only attacking military targets.” “Then why,” Liudmyla retorted, “has a Russian missile just landed on your niece Polina's kindergarten?”
I was in Kharkiv to repay a debt of honor. Earlier this year a Kharkiv-based publisher, Vivat, published the Ukrainian edition of my book ‘Homelands: A Personal History of Europe.’ It was printed at the local Factor Druk plant, which a few weeks later was hit by two S-300 missiles. Of the 70 people who worked there, 21 were wounded and seven were killed. They died so books like mine could live. The least I could do was to visit the printing plant, give a couple of talks based on the book, and bear witness to the besieged city.
Andriy, a production manager at the large and modern Factor Druk complex, told me that he had walked out of the production hall just 25 seconds before the first missile struck. Three bookbinders, Olena, Svitlana, and Tetiana, were close to the point of impact. He knew them well. “Nothing was left of two of them, the third was just ashes.” He showed me exactly where they died in the hall, which was now loud with the sound of builders' hammers and drills since the plant is already being restored with the aid of generous donations. But, Andriy sighed, the human beings are irreplaceable.
On the way out, we bumped into another Olena, who had been injured in the attack. Shrapnel wounds were still visible on her arms, and one of her eyes would no longer open properly. I asked if she had a message for Putin. She replied, in Russian, that she wanted Russia to vanish from the face of the Earth: “No Putin, No Russia. Putin is a terrorist.”
Should Trump fulfill his promise to deport everyone here illegally, I’m wondering exactly who is going to do all those jobs that “Americans” don’t seem to be rushing to fill? Like picking your lettuce, washing dishes, mowing your lawn, and watching your kids? The floodgates to crazy town are opening, and by the time Trump’s fans realize the damage he’s planning on doing by dismantling our public institutions, they may have already died from whooping cough, pesticide poisoning, climate change or malnutrition when there is no more food in the stores. There are reasons we have these institutions. We can’t all do our own air traffic control or interstate highway construction. Buckle up, Buttercup. I just hope it won’t be as bad as promised.
Y’all thought inflation was bad before? If deportations and tariffs start, get ready to REALLY pay.
One of the New York Times links in today’s AVA edition talks about our ability to get things online, as well: “The Hidden Truth Linking the Broken Border to Your Online Shopping Cart.” Very interesting article.
“The dams had been installed 30 years prior to the days I described being on the river in my earlier days. The main Eel and the South Fork were loaded with fish at this time when I was 9 to 12 years old.”
Roy Branscomb’s observation was one seen by freshwater fisherman in all the North Coast rivers of that time. Lots of fish everywhere. Some rivers were impacted by logging, some with dams, some by grazing, some by agriculture, and the rest by nothing associated with human enterprise. But there were many fish back then, and then there weren’t. When the fish declined, they declined in all the rivers. Then why would one assume that removing the Eel River diversion, and Scott Dam will result in a significant increase in the fish population? Past history suggests that it won’t. Fresh water spawning habitat does not appear to be the limiting factor in salmonid fish populations. The real question is, if freshwater habitat isn’t the limiting factor, then what is?
Diversions need to be removed from ALL anadromous streams. All you’re doing is supporting, and making lame excuses for, human plunder of natural resources. The planet will be a better place without human monkeys and their lame excuses for problems caused by OVERPOPULATION. Growth is BAD, when the population of the species that is growing exceeds natural carrying capacity of its habitat. The population of Homo sapiens passed that point decades ago. All your rationalizations won’t change that.
Harvey Reading, To me this is nonsense. How long have you lived in Anderson Valley? My uncle’s mother was Cornelius Prather’s daughter. We used to have baskets of trout in the Navarro River and Indian Creek. Why? Because anyone with property adjoining the water ways had earth filled dams with spill ways for the fish, in the Summer. We all took them out in late September, again to protect the fish. Every waterway in the Valley was filled with fish. Now, there are no fish and no fishing allowed. How do you account for that? In the Russian River around Guerneville, they have Summer dams that are taken out October 1st. They have lots of fish. How do you account for that? Dams provide deep pools of cool water in Summer for the fish to hide. They also allow the fresh water to sink into and refresh the local ground water, instead of rushing to the Ocean. Please detail your successes in returning fish to Anderson Valley over the past 30 years, when they started to disappear.
I really am not interested in your personal history, being derived from first generation California Okies. I grew up with the “ol’ timers” looking down on people like me in Calaveras County.
There are no fish, because the water has been diverted serve greedy human monkeys. More people, more diverted water. It’s a statewide, actually a worldwide, problem. Talk to a Fish and Game biologist.
You make a good point. I would love to see a study done on the adverse effects of marijuana cultivation since 1970, especially on the Eel River Basin. Between illegal diversions and poisoning of streams, I would not be surprised if that industry accounted for a significant portion of our current problems. On the bright side, there have recently been reports of a strong salmon run on the Eel, near the confluence of the Van Duzen. Anyone interested in a documentary film about North Coast steehead fishing back in the day should try to find “Rivers of a Lost Coast”.
There are rivers with pot diversions, and rivers with none. Salmonids have declined in both. There are rivers with a lot of habitat improvements, and rivers with few. Hatcheries have worked, but not necessarily here. There are years with more fish, and years with fewer. But we are stuck in a range of fewer fish from what we had 50 + years ago.
Where’s Raskin?
Crafting another epic tome or
he’s fallen and can’t get up?
GIVE HIM A BREAK
No effen way. If people were dumb enough to vote for the brainless mutant, then they deserve little consideration for their stupid views.
Raleigh Chaix – The Governor and Attorney General are not on a personal vendetta against Trump. They are rightfully concerned about Trump’s past actions and stated intentions with regard to our state. Specific information may be found at: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/12/gavin-newsom-trump-proofing-california-00188951.
A few days ago, I either posted this too late to get any responses or it wasn’t worth any.
Donald’s new cabinet:
https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/5-great-movies-for-psychology-students-and-professionals.jpg
MAY–HE–CO
https://www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/45965/a-texans-map-of-the-united-states-of-texas-everything-de-oliver
Pictorial map of Texas drawn by Dallas illustrator Frank Oliver for the Texoak Flooring Company of Crockett, Texas, “Honest-to-goodness Texans who manufacture.” 1949
A valuable exchange on what happened to the salmon. Like most environmental considerations it is unlikely that there is one cause, but rather a combination of factors. I am presently here in my small cabin just North East of Covelo on a high bank looking down on the glorious Middle Fork of the Eel River. There are no dams on this branch and the spawning grounds extend miles up into the surrounding mountains. Never-the-less the fish are largely gone. When I first bought the land back in the eighties the river was full of fish. After a big rain when the river would recede salmon minnows would be trapped in the pools on the gravel beds. It doesn’t happen anymore. I am joining in here to point out what I think is the biggest factor and that is “drought”. Back in the ninety’s I partnered up with a couple of friends and bought a small commercial fishing boat.We were hoping to supplement our meager teacher’s salaries by catching salmon in the summer. It was a plan that failed since it was when the number of fish off the coast started to decline. We couldn’t make enough money to pay the year long dock fees and you can’t pull wooden boats out for the winter. I mention this because during this time Fish and Game sent me a chart with a graph showing the total number of salmon sold in Noyo Harbor going back to the early 1900’s. The thing that caught my eye in the graph was that it was not steady and went up and down over the years. I made the mistake of giving it to the science teacher with the hope of getting a student to graph rainfall totals over the same time period for comparison. It didn’t happen but I am confident that there would be a strong correlation between drought years and the survival rate of salmon. Low, clear water makes the fish vulnerable to predators and shuts off higher, safer spawning grounds.
Another factor not mentioned here is the impact clear cut logging had on the fish. When I first came to the coast in the late seventies I was eager to do some steelhead fishing. My favorite river to fish was the upper Noyo out of Fort Bragg. The fishing was so good that even a novice like me could wade the river and catch both steelhead and coho. Then Georgia Pacific decided to cut-and-run. The last time I went up the Noyo to fish I took an friend of mine with me. This guy was a real physical speciman- 6′ 5″ tall and 240 pounds of muscle. He played basketball and swam in college. He waded into the river and got stuck in this fine silt that was about 2 feet deep. It was like quicksand and he got stuck in it. I had to go get a long branch to help pull him out of the river. It should be obvious to any one that the eggs and minnows were getting smothered under this sticky mud. Shortly after this I took a small plane flight over this area and witnessed that the entire watershed had been “moonscaped”. No large trees left standing and large areas of open, disturbed soil. It was criminal! It is important to recognize that the California Department of Forestry signed off on all of these timber harvest plans with no objections from Fish and Game. It is also important to recognize that logging doesn’t have to be done that way. In fact there are graphs in the California Handbook of Forestry showing that in the long run more timber can be harvested over time by selectively cutting the bigger trees. This has the added advantage of maintaining a forest which keeps the mud out of the rivers allowing the fish to thrive. It would also maintain a functioning lumber mill. GP wanted the quick cash.
Another good perspective from someone who has seen several different sides of the matter. Thank-you.