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A BRIEF DRY PERIOD will lead into the onset of a more impactful system this evening into Tuesday, including heavy rain and strong southerly winds. Increasing hydrologic impacts are expected by midweek, with additional rainfall likely through next weekend. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A partly cloudy 48F with .41" more rainfall this Festivus morning on the coast. Rain returns later this morning then a LOT of rain tonight. Rain Tuesday, dry Christmas Day then more rain rest of the week. We also have a high surf advisory today. No really.
JDSF ANNUAL SALMON TOUR
About 50 people who were interested in local freshwater salmon habitat showed up on Saturday, Dec. 21 at Camp One on the South Fork of the Noyo River for the annual Jackson Demonstration State Forest Salmon Tour.
— George Hollister
MENDOCINO COAST’S DUNGENESS CRAB SEASON FACES EXTENDED DELAY
by Matt LaFever
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has announced that the Dungeness crab season in Mendocino County’s Northern Management Area (Zones 1 and 2) will remain closed until Jan. 15, 2025, due to delays in the required industry-sponsored crab meat quality testing.
A press release from CDFW states the commercial crab fishery will open at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 15, with a 25% reduction in the number of traps that can be used in these areas. A pre-soak period, during which crab traps can be set in the water but not hauled, will begin on Jan. 12 at 8:01 a.m.
To the south, from the Sonoma/Mendocino county line to the U.S./Mexico border (Zones 3-6), the crab season will open on Jan. 5, 2025, at 12:01 a.m., with a 50% reduction in traps, starting with a pre-soak on Jan. 2 at 8:01 a.m.
The delay to the northern season follows several years of late openings due to concerns about protecting marine life, particularly whales, which are at risk of becoming entangled in crab traps. Last year, the northern fishing zones opened on Jan. 5, while central zones were delayed until Jan. 18. Despite these delays, the Dungeness crab fishery in California remains one of the state’s most profitable, averaging $45 million annually.
“Opening the Dungeness crab fishery is a difficult decision that requires balancing the need to protect marine life with the needs of the fishing community,” said CDFW Director Charlton H. Bonham. “Reducing the number of traps in the water is one way we can minimize the risk to marine mammals while allowing the fishery to open as early as possible.”
This year’s season opener follows more than five years of research and collaboration to reduce the risk of whale entanglement, including over 150 meetings and more than 50 risk assessments. Commercial fishers are required to reduce the number of traps used by 25% in the northern zones and 50% in the southern zones. The CDFW also encourages fishers to retrieve lost traps and report any derelict gear.
The temporary restriction on recreational crab traps from the Sonoma/Mendocino county line to Lopez Point in Monterey County will be lifted on Jan. 2, 2025, at 8:01 a.m. For more information on the Dungeness crab fishery and regulations, visit CDFW’s Whale Safe Fisheries page and Dungeness crab resources.
(mendofever.com)
CHRISTMAS 2024: HO, HO & HUM
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
There once were holidays when I wrote sad words and heartbreaking paragraphs about the commercialization of Christmas, but by 2024 anyone caught moaning such rubbish would be brought up on charges of Journalism Malpractice (Second Degree); mandatory 60-day license revocation.
Better to spend newspaper ink on more relevant holiday fare.
Below, a few questions, but not a quiz.
1) How many of your friends will “experience” their final Christmas in 2024? (Should it count if your friend is alive but has tubes inside everything but one ear, and doesn’t know Christmas from Rice Krispies?)
2) Which of your Christmas gifts is your least favorite? (Hint: The last one to go at the yard sale next June.)
3) Bet your spouse this: Come February 1, 2025, name any present given to you by any family member. Keep a list of each other’s gifts, then laugh at the failing memories: “How about the vape kit? No? The port wine? Alright, an easy one: Who gave you the ‘1000 Places You Absolutely Must See Before You Die’ book?”
4) Did your first nap on Christmas morning begin prior to the last package being opened?
5) On a scale of one to ten, how annoyed were you to receive a gift from someone A) you dislike, and B) you sent nothing to?
6) Good news: Kids called from Florida to say “Merry Christmas.” Better news: with smartphones they can’t call Collect.
7) What idiot decided champagne on Christmas morning is a good idea?
8) Did you remember to tell everyone that it irritates you hearing radio stations play “classic rock” at 9 a.m. instead of continuing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Annual Christmas Singalong?
9) Rounded off to the nearest second, how long did it take to decide not to put Christmas lights up this year?
10) Suppose your wife whispered to you that the maroon velour smoking jacket you received this year is actually the same one you got in 2021. It had been on a closet shelf, put in a box, wrapped in shiny paper with red ribbon and placed under the tree in 2024. Question: would you be able to name which of your cheap, sneaky offspring was responsible?
11) On a scale of one to ten, how much are you looking forward to New Year’s Eve? Would it matter if you thought it would be held at the Forest Club?
12) Joy Joy Joy! Christmas Day falls on March 25 next year. Black Friday is in three weeks.
NOT SO JOLLY
Motoring south on State Street down around Raley’s I spotted a bearded gent walking an uncooperative bicycle across the intersection. The big bags and bulky sacks contributed to the bike’s recalcitrance.
And I thought, “That’s an awfully tough way to live.” It was a guaranteed-to-get-cold night and it looked like all he had to keep himself warm was his beard. A hard life indeed.
It resonates with me now, as it always has and will. A few wrong turns, some friends worse than the ones I had, some bad decisions, a few drugs and more alcohol and all I would need tonight is the bicycle and the beard.
How did it come to be that a poor fellow can’t have a small room with a locking door with a window and a hot plate? Is that too much?
How is it we spend billions of dollars on workshops and networks and working toward common goals and collaborative immersions and constellations of services toward viable working solutions, and meanwhile out on the street a 60-year old man with nowhere to go is pushing a broken bicycle down a cold busy street in mid-December?
There is something so cynical, so corrupt, so selfish and so wicked that the tax money we give to people and agencies who promise to help the poor instead get rich, while the streets of Ukiah and the cities of California are clogged with people dying and crying for help.
I don’t know where all the money goes and neither do you, and neither does the guy trying to persuade his balky bicycle to get under the Highway 101 overpass 500 feet north before the cold rain starts, again.
I give whatever spare change and however many smallish dollars in my wallet to anyone in a parking lot who asks. Had my unknown friend been on my side of the street at the Raley’s entrance I’d happily have given him a 20. Not much really, in 2024.
But the utter and disgusting failure(s) of the state and nation’s programs to help the homeless are a stain on all you thieving profiteers, grifters, nonprofit agency administrators and elected leaders trusted to do the right thing but instead pad the payrolls with Democrat loyalists, election operatives, friends, thieves and criminals.
May the souls of your dead suffer in hell.
ED NOTES
ONE MORNING'S headlines from the SF Chronicle reminds me that in 1955, a single murder case, was a headline story for two years, culminating in the execution at San Quentin of Burton Abbott:
“Family of man fatally shot by police in S.F.’s Union Square seeks answers
“Two women’s naked bodies were found by a Fremont road. Decades later, a killer is convicted
“Northern California man arrested in beheading of 1-year-old son
“Former Vallejo High teacher arrested for alleged sexual assaults of student
“Two fatally shot after argument in Oakland home
THE POINT, Mr. Editor? The accelerating collapse of Western Civ.
THE LATE CHARMIAN BLATTNER remembered meeting the granddaughter of Henry Wightman, the man who built Reilly Heights and what used to be known as the Banks House on the south side of the Elementary School. “Not only was this house, and the Reilly Heights home built by Henry Wightman,” Charmian wrote, “but he built the Con Creek School and assisted in the building of the New Boonville Hotel and Boonville's Methodist Church. Wightman's wife Julia died in 1900, leaving her husband with their daughter Pearl, 3, to raise. According to his granddaughter Virginia, her grandfather stayed in this community until about 1903 when he moved to Chico and later Briceland where he continued as a contractor specializing in distinctive buildings.” Wightman's descendants included William and Marianne Pinches of Willits. The Pinches' are related to former supervisor John Pinches who also maintains a home in Willits and the family's pioneer ranch east of Laytonville overlooking the Eel River.
THE CON CREEK SCHOOL Charmian refers to is now The Valley's historical museum housed in what is known locally as “the Little Red School House.” When Wightman built it he was assisted by Daniel Jeans, a former slave, who arrived in Anderson Valley in 1870 where he homesteaded the area off Ornbaun Road called Ham Canyon and later built a home on Anderson Valley Way.
WITH CAPITALISM eating itself everywhere except the ballpark, I paid $3.75 for a cup of coffee at the Giants ballpark a few years ago before making my way to my $33 gift seat a few rows up from the bullpen. It was the most expensive cup of coffee I've ever had, and lukewarm at that, kinda like the Giants, you might say.
I settled in among the vapid young people who filled the reserved section that night, chattering on their cell phones and waving to their friends in other areas of the vast enclosure.
The game wasn't very interesting, but the people sitting next to me were.
They were an elderly couple with a chubby little girl I assumed was their granddaughter, although these days, I suppose, the kid could have been some delayed in-vitro creation.
Grandpa was under attack from Parkinson's so severe it was an unnerving. He fluttered the whole game like a large bird over a nest, and positively alarmed everyone around us when Grandma, about every two innings, sent the old boy reeling up the stairs for more wildly overpriced negative food value delicacies.
Off he'd go, flailing up the stairs and, twenty minutes later, here he'd come flailing back down the stairs, chili dogs falling, garlic fries fleeing, beer spilling onto him and the occupants of the aisle seats.
Settling into his seat like a helicopter landing in a compost pile as the remaining inedibles flew in all directions, the old guy would pass the remaining rubber mega-dogs to the old lady and the child while he commenced digging into his with wholly inadequate plastic cutlery which, of course, resulted in long minutes of utterly futile stabbings and sawings before the random bits of petrified pig parts finally reached his mouth.
The child ate non-stop. When she wasn't pounding down the cotton candy, she was swilling a magnum-size soft drink.
The old lady was tucking it away too, four separate servings of pure junk food over 9 innings. If she ever once looked out on the field of play she did it while I wasn't monitoring her. Every time the crowd got excited, the old lady would jab me in the ribs.
“What happened?”
“Mendolib struck out Cheney, Bush is on deck. Rumsfeld's in the hole, and we're probably doomed as a species.”
“Thank you,” she'd say, then she'd dispatch the old man up the stairs for more corn dogs and sugar-coated grease sticks, and off the old man would go, windmilling his way up the stairs, fighting to keep himself propelled forward and upward.
Just after the 7th inning stretch, which my three companions passed hunched over their latest round of double-dipped deep fried whatevers, the old lady suddenly produced a see-through pouch containing innumerable syringes. She extracted one, and began brandishing it.
Jesu Cristo! Now what?
“My granddaughter is diabetic,” the old lady explained. “It's time for her insulin.”
The old lady was holding the syringe up to the sky, tapping it, loving the needle, grinning rather maniacally it seemed to me. I thought of the Russian defector the Bulgarians knocked off in London with a poison-tipped umbrella. The little girl, oblivious in her sugar cocoon, was tossing M&Ms into her mouth.
“My husband usually does this,” Grandma explained, “but he says his fingers are too cold tonight.”
I thought back to the baseball fans of my youth. I remember them coming out to the ballgame for the game, not to force feed their children life-abbreviating concoctions, but by the time the kid got the needle Tony Bennett was singing about having left his heart in San Francisco, the seagulls were circling, and the Giants had lost another one.
REMEMBERING RICHARD PETERSEN
by Sheriff Matt Kendall
I was driving through the County last week and my mind began to travel along with me back to a time when I was younger. I thought about several people who I truly miss now that they are gone. I realized how much I miss Richard Petersen.
During my mid twenties I was promoted from patrol into investigations unit. Our unit was assigned a Deputy District Attorney. At that time I hadn’t worked with a specific Deputy DA therefore I didn’t know the ins and outs of their world.
Prior to trials and court appearances we in law enforcement would attend a meeting to go over the facts of the case and all of the evidence seized. We would discuss the order in which evidence would be presented as well as the duties of the investigating officer and the other witnesses. Most of it was simply putting the pieces together in a fashion a jury would understand. This was all fairly simple because normally the prosecution has all of the facts of a case on their side.
The other part of a trial was the defense. I was always watching and trying to learn what the defense would do. It fascinated me to watch some of the older lawyers who had mastered their craft leading the jury down paths I had never imagined I would see. Many of them were incredible showmen and gifted speakers, all of them knew their jobs well and worked hard for their clients.
I remember we had been in a jury trial all week in which the defendant was represented by Richard Petersen. The proceedings had ended and the case went to the jury for deliberations on a Thursday afternoon. I was off duty on Friday, however I came to the courthouse Friday afternoon when I received a page-out and was advised the jury had reached a verdict. I stood by while the foreman read the verdict which was “guilty.”
It was the end of the day and I met up with a cousin of mine at the Sports Attic for supper. I worked a lot as a carpenter on the side when I was younger. My cousin and I had been roped into roofing a house by an old friend of my father’s.
I entered the tavern and saw my cousin seated near the front. Seated at a table towards the back I saw all of the lawyers who had been engaged in combat earlier in the week. There were Deputy DAs as well as public defenders and private lawyers all of whom were simply ending their week and visiting about the laborious journey it took to get to Friday.
On the table were several pitchers of beer as well as appetizers and meals strewn about. It was clear from the haphazard placement of personnel and supplies there were no skirmish lines at this table.
Looking to the bar I noticed several younger lawyers seated on bar stools with their backs turned to the bar, facing the table. They were engaged in the rhetoric occurring at the table which had been overtaken by the older lawyers. My initial observations were based on this seating arrangements and it seemed clear to me the old bulls were holding court while the younger legal eagles we're attempting to gain knowledge and favor.
I initially thought it odd to see these folks whom I thought to be sworn enemies, telling knee-slapping jokes and poking fun at one another. I could hear gossip and ribbing coming from the table. Richard Petersen was seated with these folks.
Upon seeing me enter the bar, Richard waived me to the back towards him. I walked to this motley crew to see what was happening. When I arrived at their table, Richard called to the barkeep for another beer mug, then poured me a beer.
Richard told me I had done a good job on my testimony and the people had put on a good case. We chatted for just a moment when I suddenly realized that if I stayed any longer I could become cannon fodder to be shot back and forth between the opposing sides. I was raised with brothers and cousins and can recognize when this is about to occur. I thanked Richard for his words and took a seat with my cousin.
A few months later I was preparing to go to trial in another case. This case was also represented by Richard Petersen. I ran into Richard out in Ukiah, this time prior to the case. I somewhat jokingly made it a point to ask Richard if he had any pointers for me, believing he would likely laugh and tell me nothing.
Richard, in good spirits as always, looked at me very seriously and told me, “Don’t be a jerk.” Richard smiling wide said, No, you’re normally polite and to the point, however you are quick witted and passionate. Richard told me “quick witted” often turns to “smart ass” which would at some point allow him to work me over in front of the jury. He pointed out the fact he wouldn’t do this unless I provided him the opportunity to do so. I thought about this advice and weighed it out in my head.
Richard also said, come Monday morning there will be two jerks in the court room they will be “you and my client.” He told me I should do my best to ensure the jury saw me as the lesser of the two jerks before them.
I realized something at that moment which lead to many conversations with many lawyers over the next few decades. After several years in Mendocino County I saw defense lawyers become deputy DAs and Deputy DAs go into private practice. So yesterday’s sworn enemy could be tomorrow’s best friend. I found myself on fishing trips with old friends who were members of the defense bar. I know my life has been enriched by these friendships.
Somewhere along this journey I realized there was the truth as I knew it, however there was also the truth which played out before the jury. Their perceptions were their realities and therefore these perceptions became the truth.
Over the next few decades Richard defended many cases which I had investigated. I always enjoyed watching him work. Hell, we all enjoyed watching Richard work. I remember a couple of occasions where I could see the magistrate snickering when Richard pulled a fast one or suddenly produced a defense which only he could come up with. I always remembered the things he had told me and the advice which I had received simply because I had asked. That doesn’t mean I didn’t give him hell every chance I could and he always gave it right back.
The last time I saw Richard, we were helping a friend move from one home to another in Mendocino. Richard was suffering from the cancer and undergoing treatments. I could see he wasn’t going to be with us much longer and it moved me to see a man I had long respected, preparing for his move to the next place. When we are young we attend a lot of weddings; at my current age I am invited to more funerals.
While on my way to assist my friend move, I had stopped to pluck a few abalone that morning. Richard was at the home of our mutual friend when I arrived. On that day I was able to thank Richard for being a true professional and for the advice he had given me many years ago.
Richard was in good spirits and asked if I had any abalone for him. I replied that I had pulled several 6 inchers and had secreted them under the seat of his car indicating he should “play it cool” when stopped by the game wardens, which was certain to occur as I had already tipped them off. Richard laughed and implied that it would be a fitting continuance of the hell we had given each other over the years.
I feel very fortunate to have had the conversations we had. I will remember this as a time when the champions respected one another. Respect during my youth was hard earned and likely a much deeper respect than the type of people who simply throw out to a title. I miss those times and I miss many of the characters which the time had produced. I miss Richard Petersen and will remain grateful to him. I hope I can pass along to the younger folks a couple of things he and many others taught me. I think it’s the right thing to do.
MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, December 22, 2024
VANESSA ELIZABETH, 55, Ukiah. Probation revocation, unspecified offense. (Frequent flyer.)
EDUARDO ESCARENO-DAVILA, 28, Covelo. Intimate touching against the will of the victim.
JUSTIN JACKSON, 28, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
GABRIELLA MARRUFO, 22, Covelo. Resisting.
GABRIEL MENDOZA, 47, Hopland. DUI with priors, no license, suspended license for DUI.
ELI RIOS-WILLIAMS, 23, Point Arena. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
ANTONIO RODRIGUEZ, 42, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, unspecified offense.
WILLIAM RYKEN JR., 57, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.
CHEYENNE WALTERS, 25, Willits. Battery with serious injury, assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury.
EMERALD TRIANGLE MISSING PERSONS
Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Phone (707) 463-4411
Agency Case Number 2013-33336
https://namus.nij.ojp.gov/case/MP32665
JEFF BLANKFORT:
In June, 1970, before flying from London to Lebanon where I would spend four months in the refugee camps there and in Jordan, I spent 10 days in Northern Ireland where I had an opportunity to visit and walk the streets of a country under occupation…for 600 years.
This and the previous generation of Israelis and its supporters, not only have not experienced foreign occupation, but they have been spoiled rotten (emphasis on rotten) by the US and its Western allies, all with a history of colonialism, thanks to their clear willingness to suspend what moral principles they may have had for Zionist Jewish money. The Irish know better.
MARIN COUNTY CONFIDENTIAL
(Eva Chrysanthe)
BREAKING – Hidden in the Fine Print of Senate Floor Analysis of SB 1277: Marin County Office of Education To Transfer Additional $5 Million To Private Nonprofit “Jewish Family And Children’s Services
New package brings state total for controversial educational program to $8.5M since 2021; MCOE takes a crumb. Also: Hank Levy Makes History! And a Class-Action Suit Against Reps Huffman and Thompson
During an interview with Marin County Office of Education Superintendent John Carroll last summer, I asked about the initial $2 million provided by the California Department of Education to the MCOE for transfer to the Bay Area’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services for a controversial “Holocaust and Genocide Education” program.
At that time, Superintendent Carroll confirmed the funding, and responsibly informed me that he had learned of another, nearly identical round of funding that MCOE would transfer to the JFCS. This additional funding would have brought the then-total to nearly $4 million over a three-year period.
But that was in late June, before Senate Bill 1277 passed in September, which delivered an additional $5 million to the MCOE for transfer to the private, already well-funded, “nonprofit” JFCS. …
https://marincountyconfidential.substack.com/p/breaking-hidden-in-the-fine-print
REBECCA SOLNIT: Yabuts want people to know they are smart.
Yabuts need to show their intellectual prowess. One way they do it is by presenting alternative facts or sharing a new way of looking at ideas. This demonstrates their knowledge. For example, if I say, “I think one of the most important contributions made by Freud was the notion of: id, ego, and superego.” The other person might say, “Yes but, I think his three stages of child development were more important.” It isn’t so much that his comment is right or wrong but that it challenges what I said. It leaves me with the choice to argue my point, passively agree with his point, or not say anything at all. I usually don’t say anything at all which probably tells you a little bit about my personality.
How are Yabuts different from the rest of us?
On the face of it, a Yabut isn’t much different from the rest of us. We all use the term, “Yes but” in our daily conversations. There are many notions and ideas presented by colleagues and acquaintances with which I disagree and I show it by saying something like, “Yes, but we need to consider …”
The difference seems to rest on how we feel after a volley of Yabuts. When we feel agitated or when we feel discounted it is likely we are with a person who uses Yabut to control and/or demonstrate his abilities. On the other hand, when a “yes, but” builds on an idea rather than discounts an idea you probably are not with a hard-core Yabut.
49ers GAME GRADES: DOLPHINS LOSS ANOTHER FORGETTABLE CHAPTER IN MISERABLE SEASON
by Michael Lerseth
The postseason curtain came down on the San Francisco 49ers before Sunday’s game began. Then the Niners offered a team-wide display of unattractive football in a 29-17 loss to the Dolphins in Miami.
Offense: F
Two players had good games: Deebo Samuel — who bashed and smashed his way to 121 total yards (25 rushing, 96 receiving) — and George Kittle (season-high-tying eight catches for 106 yards). Brock Purdy had decent numbers (26 of 40, 313 yards), but a leaky line led to him being sacked three times and none of his four rushes (for 26 yards) were planned. Patrick Taylor gained 24 yards on eight carries in his first NFL start. Ricky Pearsall killed a potential go-ahead scoring drive in the third quarter with a pair of illegal formation penalties.
Defense: D
Tua Tagovailoa nickle-and-dimed the 49ers all afternoon. He completed 22 of 34 for 215 yards and a TD, wasn’t sacked or intercepted. De’Von Achane had his first 100-yard rushing game (120) of the season, added 70 yards receiving and put a lock on the outcome with a 50-yard TD run with 1:36 to play. In addition to the sack shutout, the 49ers had only three tackles for loss (as did Miami) and registered one QB hit (the Dolphins had six).
Special Teams: D
The drive that was scuttled by Pearsall’s penalties became a microcosm of the 49ers’ season when Jake Moody misfired on a 41-yard field goal that would have pulled the Niners within 16-13. Moody did make a 21-yarder in the second quarter and both of his extra points. Pat O’Donnell averaged 45 yards on four punts (net: 41.3).
Coaching: D
Chalk Pearsall’s miscues up to his inexperience, but the 49ers finished with a season-high 11 penalties (for a season second-most 90 yards) and three of the flags resulted in first downs for Miami. Coaching — in all three units — has to play a role when the team is flagged times for three false starts, three times for unnecessary roughness, and three times for either formation or substitution violations.
Overall: F
The season of “too many” continues unabated: too many mistakes, too many missed opportunities, too many injuries and — of course — too many losses. The season was formally declared dead minutes before Sunday’s kickoff leaving as the only noteworthy issue whether the final two games will resemble preseason affairs chock full of reserves or will the banged-up front-liners continue to be sent out to play?
WHY OAKLAND’S OWN RICKEY HENDERSON WAS THE GREATEST PLAYER I EVER COVERED
by Ann Killion
Rickey Henderson was the greatest baseball player I ever covered. An insane combination of speed, power and style, he returned to Oakland in mid-1989 when I was just a newbie sportswriter and didn’t fully understand the uniqueness of what I was seeing. Or that I would never see anything like him again.
I have covered many more great baseball players over the ensuing 30-plus years. But Rickey stands apart, with his otherworldly skills and his unique ability to absolutely torment the opposition. With a strike zone that Jim Murray once described as “smaller than Hitler’s heart.”
In real time, Rickey’s talent was at times overshadowed by his Bash Brothers teammates, his obsession with salary and his vagabond path through the majors. But with the passage of time, he looks even better. His legacy wasn’t tainted by PEDs, his teammates adored him and his quirkiness and self-aggrandizing were just an amusing part of his legend.
It doesn’t show up in his stats, but the coolest part of Henderson was that he was a homegrown Oakland player and local high school legend. He was around a lot this past year, throwing out the first pitch at the final game at the Coliseum, along with his former teammate, fellow Oaklander Dave Stewart. We all remarked that Rickey looked like he could still play; his physique never changed. His shocking death, just 11 days before the calendar turns to 2025, is another devastating event in this heartbreaking year for A’s fans.
For six months, after the death of Willie Mays in mid-June, Rickey Henderson was the greatest living ballplayer. Far too short a time to wear the crown.
(SF Chronicle)
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREATEST CHRISTMAS TREE IN S.F. HISTORY
The City of Paris holiday tree was the Willie Mays of Christmas trees.
by Peter Hartlaub
For 122 years, through the Gold Rush, 1906 earthquake and Great Depression, the department store was a beacon of civilized life and prosperity in San Francisco, and the 60-foot-tall tree that appeared every winter at the center of the Union Square store was synonymous with Christmas in the city.
I try not to waste time mourning things that San Francisco has lost — traditions and destinations have always been changing. If you singularly focus on the losses of the past, you miss out on the wonders of the present.
But the holidays feel different. At a time when Union Square is associated with boarded-up windows and increased police presence, and the real-life dogs and cats in the Macy’s windows have been replaced with videos, it’s hard not to yearn for a time machine — to see the grandest Christmas decorations in the city’s history one more time.
The City of Paris department store was the first major Union Square retail anchor when it was built in 1896; a Beaux Arts building that set the architectural tone for the rest of the shopping district. City of Paris was also intensely local, created by brothers Felix and Emile Verdier — dry goods merchants who grew the business importing wine, liqueurs and fine fabrics for the Gold Rush crowd in the 1850s. The business remained San Franciscan-owned well into the 20th century by his children and grandchildren.
The tradition of a tree in the rotunda started in 1909, with notices appearing in The Chronicle beginning in the early 1910s.
“The Christmas spirit is all over the City of Paris,” a 1911 advertisement read. “Every child must see our three-story Christmas tree, planted in the middle of the dome and lighting the toydom!”
Perhaps most amazingly, it was a real tree. Often silver firs, the City of Paris trees were cut as far north as Mendocino County, fireproofed and trucked to Union Square. In 1957, The Chronicle’s Joe Rosenthal took photos of an enormous tightly bound tree being hauled through the entrance, with shoppers looking on in wonder.
It took more than a dozen workers to drag the tree through the perfume section, then erect it on elaborate scaffolding to decorate. The burly men looked like tiny elves surrounding the enormous evergreen. Throughout the holidays, the scent of pine and candy was reportedly detectable in the street outside the store.
Early in the tradition, City of Paris officials figured out that the toys belonged on the third floor, to build anticipation. As children and parents climbed the store’s different levels, new layers of the tree’s decorations became visible, ending with a wonderland of toys surrounding the star at the top.
During one year, in 1922, City of Paris decided to skip the tree, importing performing bears and movie stars from France instead. San Franciscans revolted in a storm of protests by letter and phone.
“The grown-ups of San Francisco were just as much disappointed that the big tree was not in its usual place as the children,” The Chronicle reported in 1923. “It was then agreed by the City of Paris that never again as long as the high hills afforded a selection in great Christmas trees would the children and grown-ups of San Francisco have to ask this question again.”
As the years passed, new layers of holiday traditions were added in downtown San Francisco. Santa began arriving by cable car or on top of a Muni bus. Macy’s put up-for-adoption animals in their windows. Golden Gate Park at one point had real sheep near a nativity scene. And perhaps most memorably of all for those from Generation X or older, the Emporium put carnival rides on the roof of their store at Fifth and Market streets.
By the 1960s, the City of Paris started suffering financially, as national chains continued to move in. On Dec. 23, 1971, a Chronicle article announced that the Christmas tree in the rotunda would be the City of Paris’ last.
Preservationists tried to save the building, but Neiman Marcus, with backing from The Chronicle’s editorial pages, secured a demolition permit.
“The truth is that the old rabbit-warren of a building, with its myriad rooms opening every which way, just never made it as a modern-day retail center,” a 1979 Chronicle editorial in favor of the Neiman Marcus project stated.
“It’s just our time, that’s all,” a company spokesman told the newspaper. “It’s been a trend that this kind of family-owned operation can’t compete with the big chains.”
During the holidays, however, it was the big chains that couldn’t compete.
The building was torn down in 1980, and while Neiman Marcus has thrived in the location, the Dallas-based luxury retail giant never seemed to get the tree part right. They started with a fake tree filled with bearded old men that frightened children, before moving on to modern Duran Duran-looking decorations later in the 1980s.
Currently there’s no large tree at all in the rotunda; just some strings of lights arranged in a tree-like shape — the ghost of City of Paris past.
Also haunting the building is the stained glass dome from City of Paris, removed and replaced in the 1980s, with the pirate ship that bore these words in Latin: “Fluctuat nec mergitur.”
It is the motto of Paris, France, and a sad epitaph for a local business that gave everything it could to the community: “It floats and never sinks.”
(SF Chronicle)
A READER WRITES: Here is a news story for you.
‘Missing’ GOP Congresswoman Not Seen For Six Months Finally Found Living at Dementia Care Home
Has anyone seen GOP reps Greene or Boebert?
THE 'BRAIN FOG'-RELATED HEALTH CONDITION LUIGI MANGIONE COMPLAINED ABOUT PRIOR TO BRIAN THOMPSON KILLING
by Aura Parnaby
Alleged assassin Luigi Mangione appears to have been plagued with a litany of health issues in the years before he grew estranged from family and friends.
The 26-year-old Ivy League graduate underwent spinal surgery last year for chronic back pain, and he frequently posted about his health battles online, including suffering with 'brain fog' at college.
Little is known about Mangione's mental state in recent months, but it appears he was withdrawing from close relationships. Since-deleted posts on X show a friend repeatedly reaching out and receiving zero response.
His family reported him missing to San Francisco authorities in November, police said. Earlier, while in college, Mangione posted on Reddit about experiencing severe brain fog and restless sleep.
In a July 2018 post, he said his grades were suffering and he had considered dropping out of school. But ultimately, 'staying in college has at least let me maintain some semblance of normality,' he wrote.
After his back surgery last year, he repeatedly posted on Reddit about his recovery and offered words of encouragement for people with similar conditions, telling them to push back against any doctors who advise them to put up with the pain.
Mangione´s Reddit posts suggest he was overwhelmingly pleased with the outcome and finally relieved of chronic pain. He encouraged others not to be frightened by horror stories of surgeries gone bad.
The detainee appeared to stop posting on social media roughly six months ago, around the time he lost touch with loved ones.
Family and friends expressed shock at news of Mangione´s arrest, but little information has emerged about his recent mental and physical health
Mangione´s Reddit posts reference a spinal condition called spondylolisthesis, which occurs when a fracture causes a vertebra to slip out of alignment. It can result in severe pain if the bone puts pressure on spinal nerves.
The condition, which can originate in childhood or be caused by an injury, began negatively impacting Mangione's life in recent years, according to his social media posts.
After earning his bachelor´s and master´s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, he worked at the Santa Monica-based car-buying website TrueCar until 2023 and lived in Hawaii for some time starting in January 2022.
During a six-month stay at Surfbreak, a 'co-living' space in Honolulu, Mangione´s back pain worsened in part because of a surfing incident.
Josiah Ryan, a spokesperson for the owner and founder of Surfbreak, R.J. Martin, said Mangione had expressed growing concerns about the pain.
In addition to missing out on recreational activities and exercise, he was worried about how it could affect romantic relationships.
'That was definitely a theme in his time there,' Ryan said. 'He wasn´t a big complainer. So it wasn´t like he was bringing it up constantly. But the people who knew him knew this was a significant part of his life.'
In July 2023, Mangione wrote in a Reddit post that he had decided to get surgery. 'I got caught in this loop for a year, all the while putting my life on hold in my 20´s and damaging my nerves while I waffled on the decision,' he wrote.
'I have surgery scheduled in two weeks and I keep wondering why I was so afraid of it.' According to his posts, the operation was a success.
An image posted to an X account linked to Mangione showed what appeared to be an X-ray of a metal rod and multiple screws inserted into his lower spine.
'Surgery was painful for the first couple days, but I was shocked that by day 7 I was on literally zero pain meds,' Mangione posted on Reddit in August 2023.
'Obviously will be awhile until I get into rigorous activity, but it was way less of a big deal than I had anticipated.'
Medical experts say treating back pain is almost always a challenge. 'In the gross majority of treatments, surgery is when everything else has failed to provide relief,' said Dr. Jason Pittman, co-director of the Spine Center at Boston´s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
He said doctors generally try conservative treatments like physical therapy, injections or medications before surgery.
Even people with health insurance can face thousands of dollars in bills from a surgery depending on their deductible and other factors, though it's unclear whether Mangione experienced any of those issues.
Experiencing chronic back pain can also significantly impact mental health, said Dr. Padma Gulur, a pain specialist with Duke Health.
'If you have underlying mental health issues - anxiety, depression - your pain can be worse because you have way more suffering,' Gulur said. 'But, the second aspect is pain can push you into anxiety and depression.'
Mangione also posted in early April about the gear he brought on a two-month backpacking trip through Asia that included some cross-country motorcycling, saying he had found 'the perfect balance between minimalism and practicality.'
In late April, he advised another Reddit user with a back problem to 'keep trying different surgeons' and, if necessary, convey an inability to keep working.
'We live in a capitalist society,' he wrote. 'I've found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it´s impacting your quality of life.'
However, notably absent from Mangione's social media posts are explicit concerns about corporate greed in the health insurance industry.
Those appear to have surfaced only later: in a handwritten note found after Mangione was detailed as a suspect in the killing of United Healthcare CEO and father-of-two Brian Thompson.
That short document references 'parasites' in the health care system and laments the power and profits of health insurers, according to law enforcement officials.
During his first public words since his arrest in Pennsylvania, Mangione emerged from a patrol car shouting about an 'insult to the intelligence of the American people' while sheriff´s deputies pushed him into a courthouse.
There´s no indication Mangione was ever insured by UnitedHealthcare, a senior New York City police official said in an interview Thursday with NBC New York.
The killing has nonetheless prompted widespread speculation about whether he had a bad personal experience with the health care system.
Mangione has been charged with murder as an act of terrorism for the shooting of Thompson, 50, on December 4 in Midtown Manhattan.
The accused assassin is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn will next appear in New York court at a later date.
(Daily Mail UK)
LUIGI MANGIONE’S INDICTMENT IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE DANGERS OF TERROR CHARGES
The indictment comes as some states expand terror laws to ensnare protesters who block "critical infrastructure."
by Schuyler Mitchell
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg unveiled new charges on Tuesday against Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. While Mangione already faced second-degree murder and weapons charges, the unsealed indictment reveals an escalation: New York prosecutors have charged Mangione with first-degree murder “in furtherance of terrorism.”
Bragg’s choice to invoke the big “T” word came as a surprise; it’s not often associated with a single, targeted killing. In fact, prosecutors are charging Mangione using a state law hatched after the 9/11 attacks “to combat the evils of terrorism.”
Tacking terrorism onto the indictment allows the district attorney to upgrade the murder charges from the second to the first degree; under New York law, first-degree murder charges are normally reserved for crimes like serial or mass killings or the murder of police officers. In previous cases, Manhattan prosecutors have used the state domestic terror law to convict people accused of plotting to bomb synagogues or recruiting support for ISIS. In 2019, a white supremacist pled guilty to New York terrorism charges after he killed a Black man with a sword with the intent of starting a “worldwide race war.” Bragg said he levied the charge against Mangione because his alleged killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO was intended “to sow terror.”
It’s hard not to see the bloated charges in the context of Mangione’s recent ascent to quasi-folk hero status. At the scene of Thompson’s murder, police reportedly found shell casings with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” — an apparent reference to a book about why health insurance companies deny claims. The suspect was also said to have left a backpack full of Monopoly money in Central Park. This assemblage of facts meant that broad swaths of the internet across the political spectrum erupted in praise for Mangione, who many saw as a crusader against the for-profit health care system. People shared harrowing stories about their own struggles to obtain coverage for life-saving care. As the public face of the largest health insurance company in the U.S., Thompson was flattened to a symbol of corporate greed. His total compensation in 2023 exceeded $10 million.
This outpouring of public resentment has unnerved health care executives. Corporations scrambled to scrub information about their C-suites from the internet and called up private security details. Bragg made a broad reference to this fear in a press conference. “This was a killing that was intended to evoke terror and we’ve seen that reaction,” he told reporters on December 17. “This was not an ordinary killing.”
The word terrorist has never been a neutral descriptor in the U.S., applied equally across populations. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, terrorism was recast by U.S. politicians and media as predominantly an issue of transnational, Islamist fundamentalism. This imbued the term with a political charge that often obfuscated sources of mass violence at home — like white supremacy. Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan has critiqued the terrorist label on his Substack, writing that, for years, it has been “embedded into the average American’s psyche as a synonym for ‘evil’.”
“It defines its subject from the outset as a villain,” Nolan wrote. “It connotes violence that is illegitimate, in contrast to the legitimate violence delivered by the state.”
Legitimate violence delivered by the state could, for instance, include systematic torture at Guantánamo Bay, the bankrolling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza or allowing a profit-driven health care system to kill thousands of U.S. citizens each year. I should emphasize here that I’m not, of course, condoning any form of violence, but rather thinking critically through the instances in which state actors do or do not choose to call upon the terrorist label. And in recent years, there have been several high-profile cases in which we’ve seen the police state’s definition of domestic terrorism expanding, even when no physical harm is involved.
In Georgia, more than 40 activists have been charged under the state’s domestic terrorism law for their alleged involvement in the decentralized Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. Police warrants cited probable cause for the protesters’ arrest on grounds as weak as having muddy shoes. Since late 2021, demonstrators have been pushing to stop the construction of a massive police training facility, dubbed Cop City, on Atlanta forest land.
“If I am arrested with domestic terrorism charges for camping in a forest, that’s something I’m willing to go to court for,” Sam Law, an anthropology doctoral student from Texas, told the Associated Press in March of last year.
Georgia broadened its domestic terrorism statute in 2017, two years after white supremacist Dylann Roof perpetrated a mass shooting at a Black church in South Carolina. Lawmakers framed the revised law as a response to white supremacist violence, but the new language also included attacks on critical infrastructure and government facilities under the domestic terror umbrella. The expanded definition has since been used to charge the Cop City protesters. According to prosecutors, blocking the construction of a police training facility now amounts to terrorism.
Several other states have proposed or enacted laws expanding their domestic terrorism definitions. When Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill in Oregon last year, civil liberties groups sounded the alarm. Democrats said the expanded statute was a response to recent attacks on the power grid linked to neo-Nazi groups, but legal experts noted that the law was broad enough to sweep up anti-racist and climate activists for peaceful protests. In February, New York Democrats introduced their own bill that would criminalize blocking public roads and bridges as an act of domestic terror — a further expansion of the already broad domestic terror law under which Mangione is being charged. The move appeared to be in direct response to the influx of protesters swarming New York streets to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
A brazen assassination, a mass shooting, and a peaceful protest are obviously wholly disparate acts — and so their conflation under the banner of terrorism, a charge that already has a tradition of being wielded politically, should raise additional red flags.
On the day of Mangione’s arrest, another 26-year-old in New York was acquitted. A jury found Daniel Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the case over the death of Jordan Neely, a Black unhoused man experiencing a mental health crisis on the city subway. Video captured Penny maintaining a chokehold on Neely for nearly a minute after he had gone limp.
The shocking and sudden nature of the killing sparked protests calling for justice for Neely, including one group of demonstrators that jumped on subway tracks in the Upper East Side. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested and charged those protesters with domestic terrorism last May.
Bragg’s office later dropped the NYPD’s charges. But as local reporting pointed out, the activists faced the same domestic terrorism charges as Frank James, the shooter who opened fire on a New York subway in 2022, injuring 10 people — simply for jumping on subway tracks.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors unsealed their own indictment against Mangione, including federal charges of murder, stalking and weapons offenses. New York ruled capital punishment unconstitutional in 2004. But if Mangione is convicted in federal court, he could face the death penalty.
(Truthout.org)
WHITE HOUSE AIDES WERE HIDING BIDEN’S MENTAL DECLINE, BUT WE ALL SAW IT IN PLAIN SIGHT
by Michael Goodwin
There are media bombshells and then there is The Wall Street Journal report that Joe Biden is so mentally diminished that aides have isolated him to hide his decline from the public and even key members of his administration.
Cabinet secretaries and congressional leaders find it next-to-impossible to get in-person meetings with the president, and full cabinet gatherings are rare.
As the years have passed, phone calls with Biden grew increasingly unusual, with most communications made through intermediaries.
“There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed,” a team of Journal reporters wrote.
Truth be told, this is one of those situations where something is simultaneously shocking but not surprising.
Anyone paying even cursory attention knows Biden’s not all there and hasn’t been for years.
All along, his rare public appearances were usually punctuated by stumbles, gibberish and a dazed, confused look.
To hide his infirmities, every move and word were scripted, which explains why he gave far fewer interviews and press conferences than his predecessors.
Stick to script, or else
When he did appear in public, he usually carried cheat sheets with stage directions and talking points.
He sometimes revealed the short leash by saying “I’ll get in trouble” by answering questions.
Aides also had to retract some wild statements he made, including one where he suggested regime change was US policy in Russia.
Last June, weeks after the Journal reported that people who had seen Biden said he was slipping, the whole world saw what a mess he was in the disastrous debate with Donald Trump.
The president had trouble forming sentences and several times trailed off into incoherence.
That performance led to his withdrawal from the presidential campaign, but White House aides have continued to insist he is fine and able to carry out his presidential duties.
They stuck to that story again last week.
They are lying and everybody in Washington has to know it, including all the media.
So why hasn’t the rest of the press corps, especially the outlets with scores of reporters and editors in the capital, ever pursued this critical story?
It was a scoop waiting to be told, and not just for domestic audiences.
Because America’s commander-in-chief is considered to be the leader of the free world, a president who is unable to carry out his duties is a global danger.
That prospect is especially acute now, with wars in Europe and the Mideast, and with a growing sense that World War III could be just around the corner.
Few people believe it’s a coincidence that the current crises are happening on Biden’s watch.
So why has his cognitive decline not gotten the wide scrutiny it deserved?
And why is there no reporting even now about who is actually running the government?
The answers to both questions are as obvious as they are infuriating: The legacy-media outlets and their activist offshoots don’t want the American people to know the truth.
They are not covering the White House.
They are covering up for the White House.
Democrats with press passes–that’s what they are.
And they put their partisan allegiance ahead of their professional responsibility and their country.
By not even trying to pierce the fog spun by Biden’s enablers, the Washington media became his co-conspirators.
The Oh Puh-leezer Prize
Is there a Pulitzer category for that?
Unfortunately, even calling the media co-conspirators doesn’t fully capture the dirty game they are playing.
To understand the complete picture, it helps to see the refusal to report Biden’s decline as one part of a set of bookends.
The other part is the nasty, distorted coverage of Trump.
There the media have always been full of sound and fury, determined since 2016 to keep him out of the White House.
They failed then, but tortured every word he said and every action he took during his first term.
They pushed for his impeachment and conviction over the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” hoax and other drummed-up scandals.
Their distorted coverage played a major role in the 2020 election.
They weren’t fairly and accurately holding Trump accountable — they were using all their power and tools to swing the election to Biden.
They had a major assist from the FBI and the Big Tech companies, who worked together to keep the public in the dark about Hunter Biden reaping millions by selling connections to his father to foreign businesses and governments.
Recall that 51 former intelligence officers signed the infamous letter saying the damning evidence on Hunter’s laptop had the earmarks of Russian disinformation.
Most of them knew better because the FBI already had authenticated the laptop’s hard drive’s contents, but they, too, were willing to sell their credibility to help defeat Trump.
And with Trump set to enter the Oval Office again, the war against him is already raging.
Fresh off a campaign where they supported the flimsy criminal cases brought by Biden’s Department of Justice and state prosecutors in New York and Georgia, and where they did all they could to push Kamala Harris into the Oval Office, the media coverage of Trump’s second term is shaping up to be as nasty and negative as the first.
Don Under Microscope
Everything he says and does is viewed through the claim that his motives are selfish or even diabolical.
They preen endlessly about what they claim is his plan for revenge and retribution, describe him as vindictive and warn that he plans an assault on the First Amendment.
A constant thread is the claim to have insights into his mind, as if the media are trained psychiatrists making a diagnosis.
Although public resistance to Trump is not nearly as feverish as it was before his first term and the Dems’ slurs that he is the new Hitler have disappeared, there is no sign that the media intends to cover him more fairly.
In fact, the fear-mongering tone employed against Trump remains remarkable compared with the soft-glove, see-no-evil coverage of Biden.
The world is in flames, the nation is angrily divided, the failing president and the daffy vice president are in hiding–and yet Trump is the problem.
The distortion reflects prejudice and ignorance.
The far-left orientation of most journalists and their outlets echoes the radical indoctrination dished out in elite colleges.
Editors used to provide a counterweight by having a knowledge of history and by insisting on standards of fairness, but those standards were abandoned soon after Trump entered the 2016 race.
The media landscape now is dominated by leftist advocacy while opposing views, whether conservative or centrist, are considered heresy.
One effect is the lack of interest in Biden’s mental decline and in learning who is filling the vacuum in the Oval Office.
Another effect is the requirement to hate Trump and his supporters.
So here we go again because many people infected with both traits masquerade as journalists.
(NY Post)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Oh sure, if you’re one of those globies you might believe that the shortened days are caused by axial tilt. You’ll believe anything those government-funded scientists tell you.
Some guy in line at the grocery store told me that the days are getting shorter because China has been buying up all the daylight.
After President Musk and Vice-president Trump take office, that’s all going to change.
Mark my words, within just a few months we’ll be enjoying long sunny days again.
MASA! (Make America Sunny Again)
(It’s also good for making tamales.)
BRUCE MCEWEN: "Wild Juanita’s Cactus Juice" by Kaitlin Butts
https://genius.com/Kaitlin-butts-wild-juanitas-cactus-juice-lyrics
SYRIAN EXILES
by Stefan Tarnowski
As Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) pushed south from Idlib Province, the rebels’ first priority was to liberate prisons. From Aleppo to Hama to Homs, videos emerged of fighters breaking down doors and cutting through locks. Detainees streamed out. They ran, sometimes barefoot, to freedom. “What’s happening?” one prisoner asks a bystander. “The regime has fallen!” He squeals in joy and quickens his pace. In another video men break down the doors of a prison cell full of female inmates. “You’re free!” they shout. “But where do we go?” Liberation came quickly and unexpectedly.
Those in exile—since 2011 half of Syria’s population has been displaced, a quarter abroad—pored over videos of prisons being opened and lists of inmates’ names circulating online. Attention soon turned to Saydnaya Military Prison. Located thirty kilometers north of Damascus and shaped like three blades of a propeller, it was the motor of the Assad regime’s repression. Since the 2011 uprising, detainees from a network of almost a hundred intelligence branches and secret police detention centers—including twenty in Damascus alone—were brought there for central processing. According to Amnesty International, between 5,000 and 13,000 Syrians were killed in Saydnaya between 2011 and 2015; the number killed in the subsequent years remains unknown. Syrian friends living in the country and in exile told me they feared the regime, in its final hours, would execute thousands of political prisoners held there. One anonymous opposition media activist group, Young Damascene Lens, released a statement expressing this anxiety: “We hope to God that today the birds of Saydnaya will finally fly free from this vile prison.”
Early on the morning of Sunday, December 8, the rebels declared Damascus “liberated.” Syrians from as far afield as Maarat Numan in the northwest and Deir Ezzor in the northeast began streaming toward Saydnaya, hoping to find loved ones who had been detained years and sometimes decades ago, or at least to learn what had happened to them. That evening, the rebels circulated a video with the words “from inside Saydnaya Prison” typed over the top. It showed the panopticon’s eye: a control room with a wall of video screens and hundreds of surveillance feeds, each looking into a cell or corridor stuffed with prisoners going about their daily routine, unaware that the regime had been toppled. The rebels then uploaded videos showing themselves systematically freeing prisoners from various blocks. Crowds rifled through the ledgers and abandoned documents for clues.
Rumors spread widely on satellite news channels and social media. A story went around that thousands of prisoners were held in three secret floors beneath Saydnaya. By Monday huge crowds were scouring the facility for an entrance leading underground. That day the Syrian Civil Defence (SCD) were called in from Idlib Province to excavate. (Also known as the White Helmets, the SCD is a first responder group founded in 2014 in response to the Assad regime’s aerial bombardment of opposition-controlled areas.) Videos circulated of them pickaxing at solid concrete walls and floors—to no avail. Soon they gave up the search. But people kept digging and rumors—about prisoners being concreted into rooms without openings, the existence of other secret prisons—continued to spread.
I spoke to Mohammad Ali Atassi, a Syrian filmmaker and journalist who, in the late 1990s and 2000s, collected testimonies of political prisoners for the Lebanese weekly Mulhaq al-Nahar. He was elated at the fall of the regime, but disturbed by the memories that resurfaced as the prisons were liberated. “Once they find those three underground floors—if they find the underground floors—it will only drive a search for another three underground floors, and then another, and then another,” he said. “If they stop looking, the glimmer of hope of finding their relatives alive will die.” To his eyes the footage coming out of Saydnaya—of rooms where mass hangings took place, where a concrete press crushed live bodies into a tissue of flesh, where corpses were burned or dissolved in acid—wasn’t shocking. “It was expected, but few were listening, and sometimes they were unwilling to believe us.”
Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.
— William Faulkner
LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT
Biden Commutes Sentences of Nearly All Inmates on Federal Death Row
The Full List of Biden’s Death Row Commutations
House Ethics Committee Is Expected to Release Report on Gaetz’s Conduct
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Wants to Ban Drug Ads on TV. It Wouldn’t Be Easy.
Trump Names His Picks for Top Pentagon Roles
Callista Gingrich Is Trump’s Pick for Ambassador to Switzerland
Organized Looting Throws Gaza Deeper Into Chaos
PUTTING THE BUSH YEARS ON TRIAL
by Alexander Cockburn (April 2009)
The notion of putting the Bush years on trial has never held allure for President Obama; even less so that of putting Wall Street in the dock. From his lips has always dropped the catechism of uplift and forgiveness, of “moving forward.” He and his advisors had supposed that closing down Guantanamo and issuing a stern denunciation of torture would be sufficient advertisement of the new era; that a few terse reprimands for excessive bonuses for executives would slake the public appetite for retribution on the bankers and tycoons.
On torture, as he approaches the 100-day benchmark, Obama has been forced to change step, in response to public outrage at the chilling stream of memoranda documenting the savageries, and legal justifications for same, ordered and subsequently monitored in minute detail by the Bush high command. Obama's continuing aversion to any serious calling to account of the sponsors of torture has been evident in his almost daily shifts in position. At the start of this last week he indicated that yes, those okaying the tortures might be legally answerable, that a “Truth Commission” might be the way forward. By Thursday he was backing into that, saying that a commission would “open the door to a protracted, backward-looking discussion” and in the language of his press secretary, “the president determined the concept didn't seem altogether workable in this case” because of the intense partisan atmosphere built around the issue.
So it’s still not clear whether Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their subordinates will have to endure the soft option of a bipartisan commission of enquiry, or face a special prosecutor, or sit back and watch political momentum flag as the issue devolves into lengthy and possibly closed hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee. As Republicans have not been slow in pointing out, senior Democrats in Congress were certainly complicit in sanctioning torture as early as 2002. They say House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed waterboarding. She says she did not.
As always, former vice president Cheney has usefully raised the stakes. Did the various tortures, the hundreds of waterboarding sessions, the exposure of naked captives to weeks of intense cold in small concrete boxes, actually make America safer? Cheney snarls on television that they did, thus inviting documented ripostes that this is far from clear, and indeed they contributed nothing of advantage to the national interest.
A serious probe into the way Wall Street did business before the crash and during the bailout is even more politically fraught. Bipartisanship has always been the order of the day when it comes to enthusiastic receipt of campaign donations from the financial services industry, by far the most diligent supplier of funds to Democrats and Republicans alike, not omitting Obama himself, whose campaign accounts overflowed with money from Goldman Sachs and the big Wall Street forms.
But with each fresh billion dollar outlay of bailout money there’s been an uptick in public resentment which is why Speaker of the Nancy Pelosi let it be known last week that she proposes to launch Congressional hearings into Wall Street’s malpractices, along the lines of the famous hearings of the Roosevelt era, conducted by the Senate Banking Committee and led by the committee’s chief counsel, Ferdinand Pecora.
The diligent Pecora, formerly an assistant District Attorney from New York, used his committee’s subpoena power to expose the double dealing and chicanery of Wall Street’s most prominent denizens, among them Richard Whitney, Thomas Lamont and J.P. Morgan himself. His hearings set the stage for the regulatory apparatus set up by Roosevelt and the Democrats, ultimately dismembered in the late 1990s in a bipartisan spirit by Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, working in consort with Republican senator Phil Gramm.
On January 11, 2003, CounterPuncher Jackie Corr channeled the ghost of Ferdinand Pecora. Corr wrote:
“To the lords and ladies of America's state religion, upholders of the dogmas of the hard righteousness of the Marketplace, even the threat of a public forum on the causes of the Depression was considered an outrage. And now, the hearings have become a reality bringing fear and paranoia to the Wall Street temples and mansions. As Wall Street was to discover, Ferdinand Pecora was a man who did his homework and the first days of the hearings sent the country into an uproar as Charles Mitchell admitted to: Dodging his 1929 income tax with the ruse of a fictitious loan of $2,800,000 from the National City Company [the precursor to today’s Citigroup].”
Wall Street veteran, Pam Martens, a regular at CounterPunch, channeled Pecora again on March 17, 2008. Martens quotes testimony supplied to the SEC in August 2001, when there was still time to avert a collapse of the financial system:
“The body of evidence that should dictate how the SEC must now proceed since Congress saw fit to eliminate the critical protections afforded the investing public in the Glass-Steagall Act, resides in the tens of thousands of pages of transcripts of the Pujo Committee hearings held in 1913 and the Pecora Committee hearings of 1933 and 1934. Fancy promises from regulators that banks functioning in the dual role as brokerage firms can and will be self-policing is not what the SEC or Congress should rely on. The well-developed history of egregious abuses bestowed on the investing public prior to the enactment of Glass-Steagall, and since its recent repeal, is what the SEC and Congress must look to. To believe that the dynamics of power and greed have been materially altered in nine decades is to engage in naiveté at the public's peril.”
Did CounterPunch channel Pecora all the way to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office? Martens tells me there’s only one man in the country with the depth of experience and public trust to become the new Pecora: Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin, who has been at the forefront of bringing enforcement actions against securities firms to protect investors.
Martens says Galvin should take a leave of absence from Massachusetts to step into the role for the good of the country. He has a crackerjack team already in place to hit the ground running. Where would the modern day Pecora begin in unraveling the corruption? Start with the key issues we’ve been raising here at CounterPunch for the past two years: the clubby and opaque world of credit default swap trading at Markit Group Ltd.; the still unanswered question as to why the largest names on Wall Street formed a trading company called Primex with Bernard Madoff; what was really going on in Citigroup’s secretive oil trading operation, Phibro?; what was the role of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup in loading up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a crippling burden of derivatives?; who preempted the regulators from stopping this debt train before it drove the whole economic system in the ditch?
To be anything other than a pro forma whitewash, Pelosi’s Pecora-style committee would certainly have to have a relentless chief counsel and power of subpoena. How diligent and merciless the congressional inquisitors will be is open to surmise. As a story on Bloomberg News – citing the Center for Responsive Politics, pointed out last week, Wall Street’s individual and political action committee donations in 2007 and 2008 totaled $463.5 million, compared with $163.8 million from the health-care industry and $75.6 million from energy companies. Individual and PAC donations from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. which totaled $30.9 million, and Citigroup Inc., at $25.8 million, were higher than those from any other company except AT&T Inc.’s $40.9 million over the last 20 years.
Every decade or so, we get Congressional hearings that dramatically symbolize a significant change of step. The original Pecora hearings did that. The McCarthy hearings of the early fifties served as buttress for the Cold War and domestic red-baiting. The Fulbright committee hearings into the Vietnam war in Sixties were important. In the 1970s it was the Watergate hearings chaired by Senator Sam Ervin that set the stage for Nixon’s ejection from the White House. In the 1980s when Republicans controlled Congress, the “Contragate” hearings discomfitted Reagan and gave Ollie North his launch-pad as the hero of the right. The 90s gave us the glorious diversions of Bill Clinton's impeachment. Is it possible that well-staged hearings into the way Wall Street really did business across the past 15 years will be as momentous? The odds are against, since too many big players in the White House, the Congress and on Wall Street, have too much to lose.
But as with settling accounts with the Bush years on torture, it’s a matter of political pressure and political circumstance. Obama has sensitive antennae to opinion, hence his wavering across the last week. Pelosi knows the level of popular fury at the bankers and Wall Street. Hence her signal about a Pecora-style probe. If the economic crisis depends and the bankers howl for more bailout money, the Democrats could see advantage in a set of tough hearings, just as FDR did in 1933.
You're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
— J.D. Salinger
VONNEGUT'S LETTER
In 1988, the great American novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to the people of the future. Benedict Cumberbatch read this remarkably prescient letter at Letters Live at London's Royal Albert Hall on 12th December 2024.
If there is no economic enterprise destruction in capitalism, then it’s not working.
Capitalism only works when it is well regulated. At the current time, it is not, and we can expect that to get worse.
The primary problem with capitalism is the establishment of monopolies, and monopsonies. Consumers, and suppliers then don’t have a choice. I think most of what we demand needs to be regulated, all ready is highly regulated. Public utilities, and healthcare are two examples. Government also creates monopolies, as in our education system, where parents don’t have a choice.
Beg to differ: Health care is decidedly not regulated in any efficient, fair way, for health care patients. While there is a strange, terribly unwieldy and wasteful mix of private enterprise and government, health care is primarily governed by private, profit-making enterprise. This is a fact that we should be clear about. The insinuation over recent decades of profit-making ventures into health care is a prime example of capitalist greed and dysfunction. As we’ve seen highlighted recently in the CEO killing and public outcry, the system begs–screams– for effective, patient-centered regulation.
True, but healthcare is regulated, in a very extreme way. But we don’t like the results. That only serves to open the discussion regarding our underlying assumptions, which I won’t do.
I wholeheartedly agree with Chuck’s comments on health care. With regards to public utilities, I cannot think of a single utility that is more in need of additional regulation than PG&E. With regards to public education, anyone who is unhappy with it should run for the school board.
The State sets the curriculum, and the standards. Then there is the teachers monopoly to deal with. Home schooling, or charter schools are the only options for parents who want a choice.
There are some wonderful charter schools out there. Merry Christmas, George.
ED: You say that the Giants played “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” following a loss at their home field. You should know that they only play that after a victory, but not following a loss. Sorry for nit-picking, but I could not let it pass. Merry Christmas.
Yup. Got it wrong. Good catch.
I can’t believe you wrote that Bruce.
Have you turned to letting AI write for you?
Curtailed crab season…again.
One more big step in California’s environmental plan to eliminate all commercial fishing, fishermen and their families. Public, enjoy your polluted crab from China, shrimp raised in the filthy ponds and rivers of South East Asia, and, of course, the piece de resistance, pen raised salmon raised in their own bacteria and viruses, fed soy bean byproducts, and dyed orange for your enjoyment.
“The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has announced that the Dungeness crab season in Mendocino County’s Northern Management Area (Zones 1 and 2) will remain closed until Jan. 15, 2025, due to delays in the required industry-sponsored crab meat quality testing.”
“The delay to the northern season follows several years of late openings due to concerns about protecting marine life, particularly whales, which are at risk of becoming entangled in crab traps. Last year, the northern fishing zones opened on Jan. 5, while central zones were delayed until Jan. 18. Despite these delays, the Dungeness crab fishery in California remains one of the state’s most profitable, averaging $45 million annually.”
Last year dungeness crab fishermen on average received $3.00 a lb for crab. In 2023 it was $2.25. Price per pound in retail goes from $16.00 to $29. per pound for dungeness. 45 million? Mr. misleading, environmentalist! Who do you think gets most of that money? Fish buyers, and retail seafood outlets get rich while fishing families barely stay alive. Metaphorically, put that rope of financial reality around your neck and jump off a dock.
Thanks, Matt Kendall, for the remembrance of your times with Richard Peterson, legal foe, valued friend. Lots of wisdom and heart there.
Hotel California
Ukiah Senior, it’s beautiful inside and out, the owner is someone who disregards tenants’ safety and welfare for a dollar. Automatic door for dis-abled people, nope, too expensive. I wish the elderly Chinese lady I found literally trapped in that door on multiple occasions comes to her in dreams. My scooter permanently damaged from all the crashes while I try to hold the door open in one arm and drive with the other. A test for even a healthy person. We are being injured, and someone will die if they don’t fix the elevator. It hasn’t worked for almost two weeks, we have at these three elderly obese people Buckingham Mangement put up on the third floor and never moved down despite 3 chances so far in my the three years I have lived here, from day one covering for management trying to keep the doors locked and almost the only security until the doors were locked. Behind Rite Aid? You bet that was/is fun. Why I know a little about deterrence a bunch of lame business owners dismissed when given to them freely recently. That knowledge comes hard.
I always tell people get on the list if you want to be here, people croak here, one not found for 3 weeks. I like it except for some of management and the owners overstepping, then under stepping on people they like. That’s gang like activity. I’ve faced it before with much worse people. But back to the elevator. The city of Ukiah was one the major donors to this owner it now cannot bring into compliance. The elevator sits there, likely the wrong one from the start, they tried to go cheap whenever possible like security cameras. Doors for that matter, they were all left unlocked for over the first year. Now, sometimes yes, sometimes no, mostly no. I don’t expect that elevator fixed anytime soon or in an orderly fashion. It would be fun to watch but I live here, sometimes with a squatter/s management as enabled to our space. No community here, those rooms are locked except for the favored on the third floor. Ok Ukiah, you’re giving this lady this place at a certain point from my understanding thanks to Adam Gaska’s deep digging. That will be even more ‘interesting’.
btw-surgery done, at home, appreciating the flowers sent by the BHAB I do have a couple people out there all I can do for is Pray, but I am eager to start figuring out this puzzle.
The owner is Ukiah Pacific Associates which is owned by Central Valley Coalition for Affordable Housing. Christina Alley is the CEO and makes over half a million a year.
https://www.mercedsunstar.com/news/local/article250150134.html
https://www.treasurer.ca.gov/ctcac/meeting/2020/20201014/staff/5/CA-20-124.pdf
https://cityofukiah.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/City-of-Ukiah-2019-2027-Housing-Element-Update-full-CERTIFIED-120519.pdf
https://coscda.org/projects/ukiah-senior-apartments/
They are a part of an even larger affordable housing group. Basically, they are a part of the affordable housing industry.
https://tpchousing.com/
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/770242399
It seems as if they are just government subsidized slumlords.
Adam Gaska
Mendocino County Farm Bureau
Executive Director
Office: (707) 462-6664
Mobile: (707) 272-5477
Address: 455 E. Gobbi St., Ukiah, CA 95470
Matt Kendall, you are showing prowess with you prose. Much appreciated for your reminiscent post today.
Thank you, I’m certain many folks around our county miss that old fella for same or similar reasons to those I described.
Every time we got into the ring I feel as though I left a little better to deal with the next case. He was amazing.
Aye, Richard Petersen was our Gerry Spence! But he was a wizard, too, He made that 50 lbs block of meth case vanish with a flourish that made my head spin! Half the sheriff’s deputies and all of the task force were involved but I could never find out what happened…! Now that Richard has gone to his reward and Keith Faulder has been elevated to the bench, I think young Justin Petersen is the best defense atty left in Mendocino County…
You nailed that one Bruce, Justin is one hell of a litigator and a top notch legal mind. Like his father he is a damn good fella as well.
BREAKING
AARP beholden to special interest groups.
Whadda shock…
Another day, another “Biden has been out of it for years” story. We the people have been lied to for 4 years or more about his mental decline. I particularly liked the “he’s sharp as a tack” or “he runs circles around us with his energy”. Is it any surprise that the world is on fire? Some countries look to the US for leadership or some kind of reassurance and they found a walking corpse. What a disgrace. His inner circle probably had to change his diaper and bring him ice cream when he threw a tantrum. This thing is FAR from over.
Brother, you’ve been lied to a lot longer than that.
Off topic, or not? Thank You and Appreciation for running the old photo images of the First Peoples inhabiting this continent. Thank You.