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STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): With waves crashing in the distance I poured .37" out of my rain gauge this Thursday morning on the coast. 52F with scattered showers at 5am. Off & on rain is forecast into Sunday but nothing BIG is on the radar currently. & do not forget another high surf warning is in effect all day.
SERIES of atmospheric river storms will continue to bring periods of heavy rain, possible flooding, strong winds and dangerous surf through the weekend. (NWS)
MARY PAT PALMER: Merry beautiful Christmas morning!! Sunny today here in Boonville
PREP ATHLETES OF THE WEEK (PRESS DEMOCRAT)
Adrian Vasquez, Ukiah Boys Soccer
The Wildcats’ junior forward scored three more goals last week as Ukiah picked up a 3-0 win over Casa Grande and played to a 2-2 draw with Redwood. He scored both goals against the Giants and then scored a goal with an assist against the Gauchos. Ukiah is 5-0-1 on the year.
Ukiah Boys Wrestling
The Wildcats brought home two team titles from the Drew Esquivel Memorial Duals Tournament at Healdsburg on Saturday. Ukiah’s A Team won the Gold Bracket, while its B Team won the Aluminum Bracket.
Gibran Silva (113 pounds), Raven Acosta (120), Drake Porter (144), Keith Christianson (150), (157), Dave Rensen (175) and Jordan Schwarm (heavyweight) all went 5-0 in the tournament.
THE MENDONEWS AI PROJECT
Hey Mendo Folks,
Happy Holidays!
I'm working on a project to help me stay up-to-date with local government meetings: mendonews.com
The main content is on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MendoNewsDotCom
I'm leveraging AI to help summarize hours of meetings of local government operations/initiatives without having to spend dozens of hours a month to be 'tuned-in'
Currently I'm tracking Board of Supervisors + Fort Bragg City Council Meetings.
In 2025, I expect to expand to the various commissions/committees, FBUSD, and Mendocino Coast Healthcare District.
Please, feel free to suggest other organizations / groups to follow (links to agendas are helpful, especially if they include links to the audio / video recordings).
And if you want to stay caught up, be sure to subscribe to my Youtube Channel!
Best,
John Naulty, retired Fort Bragg Police Chief
PS. I don't have any mechanisms in this service to check for mistakes, and there are plenty points where errors can be introduced (audio -> transcript -> summary text -> Audio).
I'm using LLMs for this, And they are known to 'hallucinate' so no guarantees on quality (yet).
I could have multiple independent AI's produce summary output and select the best one with a "judge AI"
For now, if you hear something egregious, post a comment in YouTube or email me and I can track it and add a note about it.
ED NOTES
PUNCTUALITY being the Editor's sole remaining virtue he is right on time for Christmas dinner, waiting for the rest of his clan. The thing on his throat disguises a freshly dug opening to the tropical winds of his chest cavity, and the lapel pin memorializes the last Palestinian. Happy New Year everyone.
ANOTHER BALLPARK ADVENTURE
I always go for a seat at the very top of the stadium. Between pitches I can look out on the bay and the east hills, one of the grandest vistas anywhere, and I can stand up whenever I feel like it without blocking anyone else's view of the field of play.
Which is a major consideration when a guy's trying to watch the on-field action as the junk food pack trains move constantly up and down the aisles down below, from the concession stands far from the twenty dollar seats high on the perimeter.
If you're here for the game and not the diabetes, the beer and pizza pack trains are a major irritant, hence my devotion to the unimpeded vistas offered by row 18, seat 34, View section.
The sociology up there in the cheap seats is heavily working class Hispanic and baseball savvy, although ballplayers themselves say St. Louis fans are the most knowledgeable fans there are, way ahead of Frisco’s.
Anyway, one early evening I’m up there in row 18 watching the Giants lose to the Cardinals as Mount Diablo fades to night in the east bay mists when suddenly, about thirty feet to my right, a woman yells, “Hey! I'm downwind of you guys!” Then she gives me and the five Mexican dudes seated in front of me a death glare, but we couldn't help knowing that we were upwind so how could it be us somehow downwinding her?
We looked at each other. Whatever she thought she smelled, it wasn't us. Everyone else had left. A couple of fly balls later, she yelled again. “I said I'm downwind!” Our mystification was compounded. A third out and damned if she wasn't lumbering toward us, a great angry she-bear. “I know what you guys are doing and I don't appreciate it because I'm downwind.”
It finally occurred to me that she assumed we were smoking dope. But we weren't. She-Bear stood there glaring at us, an old fashioned battle ax in her Giant's hat, triple XL Giants warm-up jacket over a muumuu, waiting for us to fess up and promise to stop violating her air space, her scent shed, I guess you could say.
“Excuse me, ma'am,” I began, “but we…” She cut me off. “Who are you?” She-Bear demanded. I said I was the king of the View section, Bruce of the 18th Row, and if we're doing credentials, who the hell are you?
Why don't you relax, I suggested, and leave us alone because we aren't smoking marijuana or anything else. “That's right, lady. We aren't smoking,” one of the Mexican kids chipped in.
“I know what you're doing,” She-Bear insisted, “and I think it's very inconsiderate of you. I'm downwind and you don't care!” She harrumphed back to her seat and plopped heavily down beside her male companion, another round mound of indignation, both of them glowering over at us.
The youngest Mexican kid said, “Hey! Is this racism?”
EVERETT LILJEBERG
The Redwood Highway is a scenic route that traverses Northern California, known for its breathtaking landscapes and towering redwood forests. This highway stretches for about 170 miles, from Leggett in the north to the city of Eureka in the south, winding through some of the most iconic and ancient redwood groves in the world.
Key Features of the Redwood Highway:
Redwood Forests: The highway provides access to some of the largest and oldest living trees on Earth, including the famous Avenue of the Giants, a 31-mile stretch that runs parallel to the main highway. These ancient forests offer awe-inspiring views of the tallest trees, lush undergrowth, and diverse wildlife.
Scenic Views: The Redwood Highway is renowned for its scenic beauty, featuring winding roads through dense, green canopies, and offering stunning vistas of mountains, rivers, and coastline. It passes through communities that celebrate the logging and conservation history of the region.
Historic Landmarks: Along the route, travelers can find several historic landmarks, including old logging towns, visitor centers, and museums that provide insight into the history of the logging industry and the conservation efforts to preserve these ancient forests.
Tourism and Recreation: The Redwood Highway is a popular route for tourists seeking outdoor activities like hiking, camping, and sightseeing. It connects to numerous state parks and national forests, offering opportunities to explore the natural beauty and history of the area.
The Redwood Highway is more than just a road; it’s a journey through one of the most iconic landscapes in the United States, highlighting the intersection of human industry, conservation, and natural beauty.
THE TIME A TINY CALIFORNIA TOWN DECLARED WAR ON RUSSIA AND JAPAN
The ‘Mendocino Whale War’ fizzled out quickly
by Suzie Dundas
Mendocino Headlands State Park, now a quiet destination celebrated for pretty coastal views and local art galleries, once stood at the center of a uniquely Californian chapter in America’s environmental history: The Mendocino Whale Wars. It would be described by the press as “one of the oddest hostilities of the decade,” in which a sleepy coastal town of 1,000 people publicly declared war on Japan and the USSR, during the peak of Soviet hostilities.
The dramatic and unconventional acts of protest drew global headlines, merging local activism and global politics with the uniquely Californian Yippie counterculture of the 1970s. And while the Mendocino Whale War has largely faded from public memory, the legacy it left behind is very much alive today on the streets, trails and parks of Mendocino.
In the mid- to late 1800s, Mendocino thrived as a small but booming timber town. But by the early 1900s, the logging industry dried up, and the town’s relatively isolated location kept other industries from taking hold. The town was largely forgotten, surviving as a quiet coastal outpost, and many of its Victorian homes and buildings fell into disrepair.
But by the mid-20th century, artists, writers and countercultural seekers discovered its charm, drawn by its natural beauty, relative isolation, and low cost of living. It developed into something like a bohemian enclave, where residents often opposed extensive development, rejected capitalism and worked to protect the town’s open spaces.
That also meant prioritizing environmental conservation and public spaces. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, successful protest and lobbying campaigns from residents led to the creation of Mendocino Headlands State Park in 1972, on land that was nearly sold to real estate developers.
From the park’s cliffs, visitors can observe gray whales traveling along their migration routes between Alaska and Baja California. It’s a twice-yearly journey that quickly made the area a renowned destination for whale watching. At the time, commercial whaling by countries such as Japan and the Soviet Union was driving global whale populations to dangerously low levels while simultaneously fueling a growing international environmental movement aimed at banning the industry.
Not surprisingly, given Mendocino’s history, it sided with the whales. And in 1975, the town’s countercultural community of artists, environmentalists, and activists took action, after Greenpeace shared video and images of its first encounter with a Russian whaling boat off the coast of Cape Mendocino. It was the birth of the “Mendocino Whale War Association,” (MWWA) with “war” chosen in deliberate contrast to Greenpeace’s name.
The next year, organizers hosted the inaugural Mendocino Whale Festival, hoping to raise enough money to secure their own whaling boat to challenge Russian and Japanese whalers. In July of 1976, the association found success, chartering the same Greenpeace boat from 1975 to prowl Mendocino’s coastline in search of whaling boats violating international hunting laws.
“Maybe I’ll get a harpoon in my backside,” organizer Byrd Baker told the Detroit Free Press, “but we’ve got to stop the senseless killing of these magnificent creatures before they’re all gone.”
The tactics were twofold, as were the goals. If the boat found gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus), the MWWA hoped to scare them away, actively interfering with industry boats to ensure the whales’ safety. The organization also employed contrasting strategies: It declared war on Japan and Russia while simultaneously blasting radio transmissions of Russian balalaika music, Beatles songs and invitations to defect from the USSR, promising assistance in helping defectors emigrate to the U.S. On land, it encouraged Mendocino stores to boycott Japanese goods, going so far as to remove ramen from restaurant menus.
MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, December 25, 2024
KEVIN LEONARD, 30, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation.
JUAN MORALES, 43, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Reckless driving, controlled substance, smoking/injecting device, no license, ammo possession by prohibited person, resisting.
BIANCA SCHOFIELD, 38, Point Arena. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
RIGHTEOUS CONDITIONS’: SURFERS SHRED MONSTER WAVES AT MAVERICKS DURING EPIC CALIFORNIA STORM
by Aldo Toledo
Thick fog enveloped the world-renowned surfing spot Mavericks on Monday when surfer Chase LaRue stepped on the beach.
Waves at the iconic surfing spot just up Highway 1 from Half Moon Bay were massive — and LaRue wasn’t going to miss out on catching a bomb like the ones breaking on the shore.
“Pretty righteous conditions out there,” he told the Chronicle.
Righteous, indeed: A storm that plowed through Northern California this week wreaked havoc up and down the coast, especially in Santa Cruz where monster waves destroyed part of the famed Santa Cruz Wharf. But the storm also created the perfect conditions for 30-foot (or higher) waves off the coast, attracting daring surfers like LaRue from across the region.
National Weather Service meteorologist Roger Gass didn’t mince words about how dangerous conditions remain on the coast and cautioned that people should “just stay out of the water.”
“It’s very dangerous — we really don’t encourage people to enter the water, even if they are experienced swimmers,” he said, adding that if people are going to the beach, they should stay at a safe distance.
“We don’t recommend people being on rocks and jetties and piers right now,” Gass said. “Be on solid ground well away from the coastline.”
Still, dozens of surfers could be seen walking through the muddy trail up to the Mavericks shore on Monday as spectators donning binoculars and steering drones watched on just a short hike up a small hill near the beach — what some said was the perfect vantage point for the action.
Some drone pilots couldn’t believe what they were watching.
“I am starting to get nervous watching these guys with the size of these waves,” said Jack Persons of San Francisco. “My heart is beating out of my chest just watching these guys from my drone.”
But for LaRue, it was the thrill of a lifetime.
“Felt the flow, felt the rhythm,” LaRue, a surfer from Santa Cruz, said after dipping into the Pacific. “It was pulling me into position. The swell started filling in, and eventually, a nice solid peak came my way, and then I stroked into it and scored it.”
It was a moment LaRue could only describe as “next level.”
Gass said a weather buoy floating off the coast near Point Sur recorded a 27.9-swell about 7 p.m. Monday evening, with expected 25-foot to 35-foot breaking waves through Tuesday afternoon. The swell was subsiding, Gass said, but it was already one for the record books: These were the fifth-tallest recorded waves since 2008.
The weather service said Monday’s waves were considerably higher than predicted.
“When it’s happening it’s almost like a big relief,” LaRue said of riding the waves. “I am actually more scared in the days leading up to my session. I am biting my nails, holding my breath, and it is such a relief when a wave finally comes and I know I can stroke into it.”
(SF Chronicle)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
In 1659, the Puritans in Massachusetts enacted a law that declared that Christmas was sacrilege and exchanging of gifts, greetings, and wearing fine clothing on that day was Satanic. Anyone caught celebrating was fined 5 shillings. (About 5 days wages.)
INNINGS-EATER
by Paul Modic
There’s a term which describes a major league pitcher, which I also use sometimes when walking in the park, called an “innings-eater.” (Not to be confused with “rug-muncher.”) It refers to an average to above average pitcher, who is sent out in relief to throw a lot of strikes, get a lot of outs, and “eat” innings. Sometimes he’s put in by the manager when the team is way behind, way ahead, or involved in a high-scoring slugfest, ie, “garbage time.” (Some starting pitchers are also innings-eaters.)
When walking in the park I’ll often veer one way, circle around, take little paths then reverse myself, walk all the way around the field or through it, go up a small hill, and I call that time-eating or yards-munching, whatever it takes to get to my goal of total time walked, around seventy minutes these days.
(Another sports expression is “adding on,” for when a team has a small lead which doesn’t seem safe, so they try to score more runs or points or touchdowns to gain a cushion of protection, just as I keep adding on during my park walks.)
BANG! BANG!
Editor:
Guns, guns, guns! It’s a coward’s answer to their anger and frustrations. What does it take, America, to end this carnage? How about limiting easy access to guns for a start?
Sue Bates-Pintar
Petaluma
ALBERT BENDER
(Reference to him in the Diego Rivera–Frida Kahlo item led me to look up Albert Bender in Wikipedia. — Fred Gardner)
Albert Maurice Bender (June 18, 1866 – March, 4 1941) was a German-Irish-American art collector who was one of the leading patrons of the arts in San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s. He played a key role in the early career of Ansel Adams and was one of Diego Rivera's first American patrons. By providing financial assistance to artists, writers, and institutions, he had a significant impact on the cultural development of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
A lover of literature from an early age, Bender began collecting rare books and helped create the Book Club of California in 1912. Inspired by his cousin Anne Bremer, a professional artist, Bender began collecting art, with an emphasis on work by local artists and the arts of China, Japan and Tibet. He became very interested in getting to know and help the artists and writers of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Bender enjoyed giving things away even more than he liked acquiring them, and he became a prolific donor to Bay Area museums and libraries. He was once called "the most active buyer—and donor—of the work of California artists the state had ever known.” He donated significant collections to what are now the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Mills College Art Museum, and the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Beginning in 1932 he donated 260 pieces of Asian art to the National Museum of Ireland in memory of his mother. He gave collections of rare books and fine printing to Mills College, Stanford University, the University of California and the San Francisco Public Library.
His generosity in Europe earned him the titles of Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of France and Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy. He received honorary degrees from Mills College and the University of California, Berkeley. Stanford University has a Bender Room in its library, and at Mills College there is a Bender Room in the former library building.
Bender served as a trustee of Mills College, a commissioner of the San Francisco Public Library, and a board member of the California Society of Etchers (today's California Society of Printmakers), California Historical Society, Book Club of California, Japan Society, the Home for Aged Disabled, and the San Francisco Symphony, Art Association, Museum of Art, Opera Association, and Opera Guild.
Bender helped launch the career of many artists and photographers, including Ansel Adams. He financed the publication of Adams's first portfolio (Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, 1927) and his first book (Taos Pueblo, with author Mary Hunter Austin, 1930).
Bender was described as "the best-known Jew in San Francisco" in the 1930s. He "was a founding board member of the Federation of Jewish Charities and a long-time congregant of Emanu-El, whose cavernous sanctuary could not hold all who came to his funeral."
A permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland opened in 2008, entitled "A Dubliner's Collection of Asian Art - The Albert Bender Exhibition." This exhibition displays the material donated by Bender to the National Museum of Ireland during the 1930s when his gifting, initially refused,[a] was accepted by the museum's director Adolf Mahr, later the leader of the Nazi party in Ireland. The collection is on display at the museum's Decorative Arts and History site at Collins Barracks, Dublin. The modern remounting of this exhibition displays a selection from the 260 objects of Asian art Bender donated, with one of the most important set of objects being the set of rare thangkas (Buddhist tapestries) from 18th-century Tibet. There is also a large display of Japanese woodblock prints, Chinese metalwork and religious figures.
JOE TATE:
After working on it for many years, my book about Sausalito, my sailing adventures and playing with the Redlegs, is finally finished.
“Last Voyage Of The Redlegs” is the story of a two year sailing journey by members of the Redlegs, during 1977-1979.
Looking for adventure and the possibility of establishing new houseboat communities, the narrative also covers the years 1969-present, through a series of recollections are revealed in the voyaging narrative. The recollections include the history of the Sausalito Houseboat Wars, the exploits of the Redlegs and family matters.
Expect Adventure, romance and violence, in 212 pages with 8 chapters, epilogue and index.
RELATED: "The Redleg Boogie Blues" — Jeff Costello joins a band of musical pirates on the Sausalito waterfront, where he encounters sex, drugs, and rock & roll — along with boats, seamanship, and survival skills. [6 part series]
GEORGE BOUTWELL, Texas Artist:
Today is our 62nd Wedding Anniversary!
I worked as a Bus Boy and Martha worked as a Maid and we rented a Garage Apartment for $40 a month which included the Utilities!
We couldn't afford a fancy wedding so we were married at Martha's Aunt's house and got several sets of drinking glasses as wedding presents (we hadn't registered with a bridal registry).
Martha's Father gave us the best present, he went to the grocery store and bought us a bunch of food! We left the wedding and went to our garage apartment where I carried her across the threshold, and we opened a can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti, which was our first meal as newlyweds (we’ve had Spaghetti on our anniversary ever since but not from a can!).
IT IS STILL A DAY that only amateurs can love. It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to still believe in Santa Claus—but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Christmas will be dead this time next year… Some people can accept this, and some can’t. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season.
— Hunter S. Thompson
GOD REST YE MERRY BILLIONAIRES
by Martin Kerr
God rest ye merry billionaires, let nothing you dismay
Forget your workers families going hungry on this day
And save yourselves from income tax, you'll never need to pay
Oh, tidings of corruption and greed, corruption and greed
Oh, tidings of corruption and greed
In Washington and London-town, you pay the lobby fees
To hold the reins both left and right of sham democracies
And keep us entertained, so we don't know we're on our knees
Oh, tidings of corruption and greed, corruption and greed
Oh, tidings of corruption and greed
Fear not ye say the media, they only sing your praise
The job-creator gave us all, that's good and all that pays
Be thankful for your stable-beds and don't ask for a raise
Oh, tidings of corruption and greed, corruption and greed
Oh, tidings of corruption and greed
The Prince of Peace you call Him while you make war in His name
A man with no possessions made a shill for earthly gain
Imagine all the people led by men who have no shame
Oh, tidings of corruption and greed, corruption and greed
Oh, tidings of corruption and greed
(via Bruce McEwen)
CHRISTMAS EVE, ALONE,
Christmas eve, alone,
in a motel room
down the coast
near the Pacific—
hear it?
they've tried to do this place up
Spanish, there's
tapestry and lamps, and
the toilet's clean, there are
tiny bars of pink
soap.
they won't find us
here:
the barracudas or the ladies or
the idol
worshippers.
back in town
they're drunk and panicked
running red lights
breaking their heads open
in honor of Christ's
birthday. that's nice.
soon I'll finish this 5th of
Puerto Rican rum.
in the morning I'll vomit and
shower, drive back
in, have a sandwich by 1 p.m.,
be back in my room by
2,
stretched on the bed,
waiting for the phone to ring,
not answering,
my holiday is an
evasion, my reasoning
is not.
— Charles Bukowski
RAISE A GLASS WITH WILLIAM HAZLITT
by Alexander Cockburn
Hazlitt got gloomily drunk for a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, accurately anticipating that decades of reaction lay ahead, now that Boney had been definitely put away, with the Holy Alliance in the saddle and the French contagion safely bottled up. Smart fellow, that Hazlitt. He should have stayed drunk for a month.
Sometimes, on the edge of a new decade, things look dismal but one has the feeling that something good just might be around the corner. The 70s for example: at their onset, Nixon was in the high noon of his first term, drenching Vietnam in blood, while his attorney general John Mitchell pored over plans to lock up the left at home. It looked as though darkest night was falling.
And yet there was a certain edgy, desperate hope in the air — and four short years into the 70s the hopers, no longer desperate but exultant, saw Nixon clamber into a helicopter and take off from the White House lawn towards his version of St Helena, in San Clemente; and nine months later on April 30, 1975, Gunnery Sgt. Bob Schlager and ten other Marines finally caught the last helicopter off the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon.
Ah, those raucous, wonderful 70s! Those who missed them will never know the sweetness of life, as Talleyrand said of the Ancien Regime. Sweet and sharp. I spent them in New York and there was no better place to be.
With the 80s you could feel the air beginning to seep out of the tires. For one thing, Death kept missing his appointments in Samarra, after years of rigorous punctuality with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers. He’d already fumbled two dates with Gerald Ford, when his chosen messengers, Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme, messed up. On March 30, 1981, another of death’s chosen messengers, John Hinckley, tried to shoot Reagan and failed to get his man.
That would have been a game changer! We’d have had three months of Ron instead of eight weird years when America plunged into fantasy, where it still resides. We wouldn’t have heard Ron give the Star Wars speech, or Nancy just saying No. Or Ron saying he expected Armageddon to come in his lifetime. Or Nancy running the country with the help of Mrs. Quigley, her astrologer. We’d have had George Bush Sr., surely a one-termer. It would have all been different.
But would it really? Clinton and the 90s suited each other fine, and Bill gave us our last known dose of politics as fun, with the Lewinsky affair, but the decade would have had the same general contour — though a Republican president would have had much bigger problems getting the poor tossed off welfare.
And then in 2000 we had Bush and Gore, and the American people very reasonably couldn’t figure out which one to go for. The folks who knew Al best — the voters of Tennessee, went for George. And then in September of Bush’s first term we had a game changer here in America. Death finally rounded up a gang of messengers with a real commitment to getting the job done.
But game changer isn’t quite the word for the event that launched the Noughts. 9/11 just speeded up basic tendencies which were already in train. Invasion of Iraq? The onslaught had been in full spate through most of Clinton-time via a lethal embargo and almost daily bombings — and the course of Iraqi politics had been set back in 1963 when the Kennedy administration okayed CIA complicity in the overthrow and murder of the Iraqi nationalist, General Kassim, setting the stage for the CIA’s man, Saddam Hussein.
The Afghan mess, was about to get messier, having been set up in the late 1970s, when the Carter administration supervised the overthrow of Afghanistan’s one shining moment of hope, the left reformist governments that took power in 1978. That’s when Osama was ushered onto the stage of history, as one of the CIA’s men. Israel, the Palestinians? Rewind the decades back to Truman and beyond.
What made the American 70s exciting was that the left — in its broadest antinomian contours — had life in it, still pumped up by successive radical generations all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. The last time we saw that left in action was in the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 and the solidarity movement during Reagan’s wars in Central America.
In 1992 the left went hook, line and sinker for Bill Clinton and lost all independent traction. By 1996 fealty to the Democratic Party had become a habit. There was the brief flare up in Seattle during the WTO confab, but that turned out to be more of a final flicker than a new ignition point. Same story in 2000. Same again in 2004 (all in behind the Democrat Kerry, in case you forgot) and finally, most deliriously, there was the left’s love affair with the salesman of Hope in 2008, Barack Obama.
Yes, there are many candles in the darkness. Brave souls soldier on, whether battling the military recruiters, defending Palestine, or advancing labor’s cause. Gaze out across the political landscape and there are many vigorous, dogged people at work. But, as a vital, compelling, creative force in American political life, the left is dead and gone, many of its erstwhile or potential members lost in the new Age of Superstition, fretful captives in the thickets of kookdom, whether in the form of 9/11 conspiracism — au revoir Cindy Sheehan! — or gazing aghast at Michael Mann’s bogus hockey-stick graph instead of improving their minds and political potential by reading the Eighteenth Brumaire.
What a grim and revealing irony that it was the Medieval Warm Period — which Al Gore and the IPCC have sought to purge from natural history — that gave birth to some of the most glorious chapters in human intellectual and artistic achievement!
The corporations run the show now and the only vivid opposition comes from Christian populists, who bought several million copies of Sara Palin’s memoir.
The teens? Raise your glass along with Mr William Hazlitt.
Happy Ending!
LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT
Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians
Here Are 8 Ways Israel Weakened Civilian Protections
Five Journalists Killed in Gaza Strike, Palestinian Officials Say
Will the U.S. Ever Be Ready for a Female President?
A Reflective Biden Harbors Some Regrets as His Term Winds Down
Investigators Try to Determine Cause of Deadly Plane Crash in Kazakhstan
The Deadliest Tsunami Set Off Work to Be Ready for the Next Big Wave
BOOKED UP: THE 15 BEST BOOKS OF 2024
by Jeffrey St. Clair
- If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose
Refaat Alareer (OR Books) - The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776-1888
Robin Blackburn (Verso) - Everyone Who is Gone is Here: the United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis
Jonathan Blitzer (Penguin) - A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through 40 Years of Wolf Recovery
Diane K. Boyd (Greystone) - Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism
Patrick Cockburn (Verso) - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool
James Kaplan (Penguin/Random House) - Creation Lake: a Novel
Rachel Kushner (Simon and Schuster) - The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe
Gideon Levy (Verso) - Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States
Matthew D. Morrison (UC Press) - The Migrant’s Jail: an American History of Mass Incarceration
Brianna Nofil (Princeton) - The Last of Its Kind: the Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction
Gísli Pálsson (Princeton) - Otherworldly Antarctica: Ice, Rock and Wind at the Polar Extreme
Edward Stump (Chicago) - The Case for Open Borders
John Washington (Haymarket) - The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx
David Lay Williams (Princeton) - Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
Maya Wind (Verso)
A few other books whose spines I’ve broken this year: Tariq Ali’s You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024, Henry Cockburn’s The Tale of Ahmed, Carla Blank’s A Jew in Ramallah, Joseph M. Thompson’s Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism, Kashmir Hill’s Your Face Belongs to Us, Genevieve Guenther’s The Language of Climate Change Politics, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Percival Everett’s James and Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice.
(Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. c)
RAPID-ONSET POLITICAL ENLIGHTENMENT
How Barack Obama built an omnipotent thought-machine, and how it was destroyed
by David Samuels
If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.
Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.
The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.
I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics a decade ago, when I reported on the selling of Barack Obama’s Iran deal for The New York Times Magazine. By the time I became interested in the subject, the outcome of Obama’s campaign to sell the deal, which had become the policy cornerstone of his second term in office, was a fait accompli. The Deal seemed odd to me, not only because American Jews were historically a key player in the Democratic Party—providing outsized numbers of voters, party organizers and publicists, in addition to huge tranches of funding for its campaigns—but because the Deal seemed to actively undermine the core assumptions of U.S. security architecture in the Middle East, whose goals were to ensure the steady flow of Middle Eastern oil to global markets while keeping U.S. troops out of the region. A Middle East in which the U.S. actively “balanced” a revisionist anti-American power like Iran against traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel seemed guaranteed to become a more volatile region that would require exactly the kinds of active U.S. military intervention that Obama claimed to want to avoid. Nor did turning over major shipping lanes to Iran and its network of regional terror armies seem like a recipe for the steady flow of oil to global markets that in turn helped ensure the ability of U.S. trading partners in Europe and Asia to continue to buy U.S.-made goods. Seen through the lens of conventional American geopolitics, the Iran deal made little sense.
In the course of my reporting, though, I began to see Obama’s plans for the Middle East not simply as a geopolitical maneuver, but as a device to remake the Democratic Party—which it would do in part by rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1922 book, as “public opinion.”
Lippmann was a progressive Harvard-educated technocrat who believed in engineering society from the top down, and who understood the role of elites in engineering social change to be both positive and inevitable. It was Lippmann, not Noam Chomsky, who coined the phrase “manufacturing consent,” and in doing so created the framework in which the American governing class would understand both its larger social role and the particular tools at its disposal. “We are told about the world before we see it,” Lippmann wrote. “We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.” Or as he put it even more succinctly: “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”
The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. In fact, as Obama’s chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.
When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.
To my mind, the point of the story I was reporting, in addition to being an interesting exploration of how the tools of fiction writing could be applied to political messaging on social media as an element of statecraft, was twofold. First, it usefully warned of the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House, which suggested a new potential for a large-scale disaster like the war in Iraq, which I—like Rhodes and Obama—had opposed from its beginning.
Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers. Hillary Clinton would soon inherit the machinery that Obama and his aides had built along with the keys to the White House. What would she do with it?
What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.
During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.
It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.
Even more unusual, and alarming, was what followed Trump’s defeat in 2020. With the Democrats back in power, the new messaging apparatus could now formally include not just social and institutional pressure but the enforcement arms of the federal bureaucracy, from the Justice Department to the FBI to the SEC. As the machine ramped up, censoring dissenting opinions on everything from COVID, to DEI programs, to police conduct, to the prevalence and the effects of hormone therapies and surgeries on youth, large numbers of people began feeling pressured by an external force that they couldn’t always name; even greater numbers of people fell silent. In effect, large-scale changes in American mores and behavior were being legislated outside the familiar institutions and processes of representative democracy, through top-down social pressure machinery backed in many cases by the threat of law enforcement or federal action, in what soon became known as a “whole of society” effort.
At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week, and that they were very often powerless to provide the slightest real-world evidence for. These sudden, sometimes overnight, appearances of beliefs, phrases, tics, looked a lot like the mass social contagions of the 1950s—one episode after another of rapid-onset political enlightenment replacing the appearance of dance crazes or Hula-Hoops.
Just as in those commercially fed crazes, there was nothing accidental, mystical or organic about these new thought-viruses. Catchphrases like “defund the police,” “structural racism,” “white privilege,” “children don’t belong in cages,” “assigned gender” or “stop the genocide in Gaza” would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence—or be fed—into niche groups and threads on Twitter or Reddit. If they gained traction in those spaces, they would be adopted by constituencies and players higher up in the Democratic Party hierarchy, who used their control of larger messaging verticals on social media platforms to advance or suppress stories around these topics and phrases, and who would then treat these formerly fringe positions as public markers for what all “decent people” must universally believe; those who objected or stood in the way were portrayed as troglodytes and bigots. From there, causes could be messaged into reality by state and federal bureaucrats, NGOs, and large corporations, who flew banners, put signs on their bathrooms, gave new days off from work, and brought in freshly minted consultants to provide “trainings” for workers—all without any kind of formal legislative process or vote or backing by any significant number of voters.
What mattered here was no longer Lippmann’s version of “public opinion,” rooted in the mass audiences of radio and later television, which was assumed to correlate to the current or future preferences of large numbers of voters—thereby assuring, on a metaphoric level at least, the continuation of 19th-century ideas of American democracy, with its deliberate balance of popular and representational elements in turn mirroring the thrust of the Founders’ design. Rather, the newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that necessarily privileges the opinions and beliefs of the self-appointed vanguard who control the machinery, and could therefore generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight.
The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked—including Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above—and how it came to supplant the normal relationships between public opinion and legislative process that generations of Americans had learned from their 20th-century poli-sci textbooks, made it easy to dismiss anyone who suggested that Joe Biden was visibly senile; that the American system of government, including its constitutional protections for individual liberties and its historical system of checks and balances, was going off the rails; that there was something visibly unhealthy about the merger of monopoly tech companies and national security agencies with the press that threatened the ability of Americans to speak and think freely; or that America’s large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus. Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.
Until the fever broke. Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser. In fact, he looks physically awful—angry and gaunt, after a summer and fall spent lecturing Black men, and Americans in general, on their failure to vote enthusiastically enough for his chosen heir, Kamala Harris, the worst major party presidential candidate in modern American history. The totality of Obama’s failure left party donors feeling cheated. Even George Clooney now disavows him. Meanwhile, Trump and his party are in control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court.
But reducing the question of what happened to Barack Obama’s new American system to the results of a single election is in fact to trivialize the startling nature and ambition of what he built, as well as the shocking suddenness with which it has all gone up in smoke. The master political strategist of his era didn’t simply back a losing horse. Rather, the entire structure he had erected over more than a decade, and which was to have been his legacy, for good or ill, has collapsed entirely. At home and abroad, Obama’s grand vision has been decisively rejected by the people whose lives it was intended to reorder. The mystery is how and why neither Obama nor his army of technocratic operatives and retainers understood the fatal flaw in the new system—until it was too late.…
https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/rapid-onset-political-enlightenment
No news is good news, and the Editor is looking good. Happy New Year.
ED: I went to a Giants v. Cardinals game in St. Louis in 2015. I was not impressed by the vendors. I was wearing a Giant’s hat and shirt, but other than that I tried to behave like a good visitor. Then a vendor came up the stairs, stopped directly between me and home plate (I was on the isle), set down his goods, and just stood there. After a minute or two, I also stood up so I could see whatever was happening at the plate. The standoff lasted about 5 minutes before he suddenly decided to move on. Not a single word from any of the fans around us. To be fair, the weird vibe was not limited to the ball park – the whole city seemed to be less than cordial.
Great photo!
Loving the art, thank you
Yes, fine photo of that distinguished-looking older man, reading glasses handy. But the empty green bowl?
Our two cats liked this photo, too, said “he’s a cat lover for sure, but fill his empty bowl with people kibble, he looks hungry!”
They loved the first photo of the day even better, the poor cat looking out the window, yearning to go out in our wintry weather…
I too liked Mary Pat’s photo of Pounce de Leon. He must be scanning the horizon for a vole or something.
Nice seeing the Editor at the Christmas table with good wishes for 2025. Optimism amid personal travails shows real character.
Bruce Anderson
Is that Grey Poupon?
“Grey Poupon – The Lost Footage (2013, USA)” on YouTube
https://youtu.be/ajb8S77Pk5c?feature=shared
Ya Editor you look good, throat thingy be darned! Color in your cheeks, Some sparkle in the eyes… being filled w/ piss and vinegar must contribute to longevity.
Editor, nice pin. Congrats on having the freedom and courage to wear it.
David Samuels is an anti-semite not unlike the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. “American Jews” are not monolithic. They are on the left and right. They are Zionist, anti-Zionist, and I-don’t-care-ist. My friend who is a lab tech, my friend who drives Uber for a living, and my friend who is borderline homeless are all Jewish by one definition or another. None of them has anything to do with “American Jews” as described by the genocidal Mr. Samuels.
Further, Iran is not a terror state. Israel and the US are. Iran backs the three H’s – Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, none of whom I’d care to smoke a joint with, but all of whom are freedom fighters, not terrorists. Iran destroyed ISIS and fights Al-Qaeda.
The US does not have elections. It has selections. There’s a reason that it appears like Trump&Co leveraged the same tech and media that Obama did. Operation Mockingbird never ended, and its Mighty Wurlitzer never stopped playing.
Pretty sure half our county would be imprisoned if they lived in that region. I don’t know maybe you’re the expert?
Several members of my Dad’s family were murdered by Muslims because they were not Muslims. I’m not fond of any religionists, especially the Abrahamics. I’ve been known to smoke the wacky on occasion. The contents of my blood are literally illegal in some of those countries – there are actual cases of people being thrown in jail in Dubai on the basis of blood tests alone.
So does any of that mean it’s ok to commit genocide against 2million+ completely innocent people?
Just like free speech covers speech you don’t like, human rights covers people and cultures you might not like. The situation in Palestine boils down to something very simple: basic right and wrong. Those that claim to have human values but continue to support Zionism are either deeply ignorant about the history and the situation there, or they are simply deeply evil. There are no other explanations.
What is happening to Palestinians is wrong. Genocide is wrong – and illegal under both international and US law (See Article 6, Section 2 of The Constitution). I’m make no claim to be an expert, but my facts are verifiable, and my opinions are my own.