Mendocino County Today: Friday 12/27/2024

Bird Perched | Showers Today | Sloan Wake | Ed Notes | Entomologist Talk | Mendo Justice | Yorkville Toast | Library Events | Ballroom Milonga | Boonville Pioneers | Crumb Christmas | David Lansing | Yesterday's Catch | Humboldt Snow | Deportation Priorities | No Address | Water Battles | San Francisco 1857 | Hippie Parents | God Created | The 101 | What A Year | Baldwin's Spell | Optimistic Pessimist | Lead Stories | Life Mystery | Witness Protection | Make America Healthy | Actively Murdering | News Delayed | Street Poet | Killing Civilians | Art of Conversation

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RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Laytonville 2.21" - Covelo 1.45" - Ukiah 1.13" - Boonville 0.85"

PERIODS OF MODERATE TO HEAVY RAIN will bring a slight risk for minor flooding through this weekend. Gusty southerly winds will increase again tonight. Stronger southerlies are expected Saturday night into early Sunday with cold frontal passage. Drier weather, colder morning temperatures and valley fog are expected on Monday. Elevated and hazardous surf will be possible through the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A warm 53F with cloudy skies & 1.11" more rainfall this Friday morning on the coast. Off & on rain remains in the forecast into Sunday. Dry to start off next week then not sure after the 1st? We'll see.

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ED NOTES

I USED to have, and probably still do somewhere, a copy of a locally produced film called “Mommy, Daddy, Wait For Me: Teen Parents Talk About The Struggles Of Parenthood,” nicely produced by Heidi Knott and Mitch Mendoza, both local people, the former a professional filmmaker, the latter now retired but formerly a teacher at Anderson Valley Elementary.

THE FILM centers on local teenage girls and their stunned boyfriends who discover that their intimacy has resulted in life sentences, the life sentence having appeared in the form of a tiny creature demanding round-the-clock attendance who will continue to make demands on you well past your lost dentures.

THE TEEN PARENTS interviewed had no idea of the long-term obligations represented by new life, and here they were living forever with unintended consequences, namely a human being.

ONE UNWITTING PARENT complains about the high cost of diapers, another that she can't afford a new iPod. Another that her figure is no longer fit for a bikini. The wages of sin! Most look and sound like they've been hit over the head with baseball bats. They're simply at a loss, and now there's this energetic little thing, this Wanna-Wanna creature running around the house pulling the curtains down and throwing food on the floor.

BUT IF THE FILM was intended as a series of cautionary tales, I don't think it gets there. A doctor named Chu expresses the quaint opinion that it would be wise for young people to marry before they become parents. Yeah, and it would be helpful if we weren't born with reproductive apparatuses and overpowering instincts.

NO ONE in the film, as I recall, comes out strong for abstinence. Birth control devices and methods get short shrift, abortion is mentioned only as Not An Option, and adoption is not mentioned at all.

OF COURSE I looked all this from the Old Fogy perspective. If it were up to me I think I'd airlift every young woman in Mendocino County outtahere until she was clear of her high school years. Every year I see a real smart young woman who should have gone on to college, or at least a few years of independent life, hanging on to some doomed, low-expectation lunkhead certain to drag her down with him.

WHAT I FOUND particularly frustrating about the film is the resigned attitude of the adult professionals depicted. “They're gonna do it anyway; we just have to get them to do it so they don't have kids.” That was the attitude. But it's not as if Young Lust is a new phenomena, so maybe it's time to revisit such old strategies as school uniforms and perhaps even single sex education for the adolescent years, especially in the sex-drenched society we've got going here.

THE CATHOLICS are way ahead of the rest of us in libido-quenching battle plans, which is one big reason their high schools are so popular with the, ah, more sensible parents. But the present situation, with young boys placed in the constant proximity of young women dressed in erotic fashions simply not allowed prior to 1967? Then wrap these irresistible visuals in booze, dope, boff tunes, absent parents, and a paucity of adult role models… Well, hell, why not just convert the high schools to maternity wards and be done with it?

RECOMMENDED READING: Alcatraz, the Gangster Years by David Ward with Gene Kassebaum. There are a lot of books about Alcatraz around, but this one is in a class by itself. The authors seem to be the first writers to go to the archive and to make full use of it. The Rock's archive seems to be wholly intact, right down to daily incident reports and critical assessments of prison guards and administrators written by outside agencies.

THERE ARE ALSO complete social and criminal histories of many inmates, famous and unknown alike. What emerges in the final product is a book that gives us not only an informal history of American penology as it culminated in Alcatraz, but the very words of infamous outlaws like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly, whose letters to family the authors have also found.

ALL THIS and a compendium of reports on how a number of prisoners did on the outside, including one who paroled to the Ukiah home of a policeman in the early 1950s . The Ukiah graduate of Alcatraz, by the way, did fine on the outside, as did most of the men who did time there.

NOT THAT inmate success outside incarceration could be attributed to the rigorous conditions of the prison itself, which included lengthy no talking edicts and plenty of isolation of the old fashioned bread and water type, the isolation generously seasoned with much hands-on brutality for dessert. Post prison success seemed (and still seems) to be more attributable to the slow realization that prison of any kind is not the place to spend your life if there are other options which, increasingly, there aren't.

ABOUT HERE it's appropriate, as the libs say, to inform those who don't know that the Ukiah-based “legal community” is a giant welfare system presided over by more judges than any county its size in the state. Beneath this apparat, you've got the nicely compensated attorneys of the public defender's and DA's offices, plus their supporting apparatuses, and a large number of under-employed lawyers who depend for their Schats coffee and pastries on invisible conflicts of interest, most of which are simply declared and signed off on by the judge whether or not they exist.

A LOT of cases are sub-leased this way to a gaggle of under-employed lawyers lurking in the Courthouse halls looking for one of these conflict handouts. Thirty years ago two judges heard all the cases and they never even heard a lawyer trying to conflict out of a case simply so a buddy could get some easy work pretending to defend a doomed prole, and here we are today with three times the number of judges, who knows how many more lawyers but, excluding pot farmers, roughly the same number of full-time crooks of the type who need to be put away.

THE NEO-CROOKS UNTIL RECENTLY were dope people, most of whom, except for the Mexican cartels, are not criminally oriented in the traditional sense of guns and ultra-vi. They shouldn't even be in the court system, but so long as they are, conflict and appointed lawyering in this county will continue as a growth industry.

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NATURE’S BEST HOPE

Entomologist Doug Tallamy, renowned author and advocate for nature preservation, will present a live Zoom webinar ‘Nature’s Best Hope’ to the Fort Bragg Garden Club on January 15, 2025, at 1pm. The 90-minute webinar will include a 30-minute Q&A. The Garden Club has arranged with the City of Fort Bragg for the webinar to be available to the public on the big screen at Town Hall, 363 N. Main St. Anyone interested is welcome.  Donations to the Garden Club’s fund for native plant installations in Guest House Park are appreciated. Doors open at 12:30pm. Two copies of Tallamy’s books will be raffled courtesy of Gallery Bookshop, Mendocino.


Doug Tallamy is one of the nation’s leading conservationists and an evangelist for the importance of native plants to preserve what remains of the natural ecology of North America. His message across his many books, including best-sellers, Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope, is that the loss of biodiversity, depletion of natural resources, and environmental degradation endanger all life on Earth—and that nature preservation is a crucial and urgent matter that requires immediate attention and individual action. 

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A FEW YEARS AGO, a local public defender sent us a list of criminal cases which he said indicated that the District Attorney’s office had “lost” — trials with either not-guilty verdicts or guilty of lesser charges. The implication was that the DA was overcharging, at least in the cases listed. The list included a brief description of about 20 cases, including case number, charges, date, and verdict. The list’s preparer suggested that we look into the cases to independently verify the “losses.” There obviously wasn’t enough time to check them all, so I picked the five cases which appeared to be the easiest to check. After several painfully long wait-in-line experiences at the court clerk’s window, we found that of the five cases, only one was available to even review. The other four were either “under judicial review,” or in Fort Bragg or in Willits, not Ukiah. I was told it would take up to two weeks to see them. I decided to ask for the one that was available (the next day), a domestic abuse case involving a Mexican couple in Ukiah where the man was charged with hitting his wife in the couple’s backyard when they were both drinking. The file included photos of the “crime scene,” including a rundown barbecue area outside a small trailer with empty beer cans lying around. The defendant said his wife had started the argument and was coming at him when he hit her causing moderate injuries, most of which were the result of the woman’s fall following whatever encounter had occurred. It wasn’t a clearcut case and the evidence was weak. Neither the defendant’s nor the victim’s memory were very good and their English was poor. Verdict: Not guilty.

THE OTHER FOUR CASES I had picked were drug cases where the verdict was guilty of lesser crimes than what was charged. It seemed to me that the alleged “losses” were more like judgment calls. It did not appear that second-guessing the DA’s original charges would prove much other than they may have been overcharged either because the DA was supporting whatever the cops initially filed the case as or to get a plea bargain, both of which are common charging practices. Typically, not all the information and witnesses are available when charges are filed. Police reports can have errors and gaps. Witnesses and victims can “go south” (disappear or provide contradictory testimony when deposed or put on the stand), or “go sideways” — i.e., change their story, decline to confirm their story, or be shown to be lying or mistaken. Cases change as they proceed through the system and “ripen,” as the lawyers like to say. I eventually looked at two more of the case files with similar conclusions. None of the case files included the trial transcripts or the probation/sentencing reports. (Probation reports are only public for 60 days after a plea or verdict, then they’re sealed and require a court order to be accessed. Even though they are a public record of a public trial, trial transcripts are copyrighted by the court reporter and are very expensive, especially if they’re long.) Several of the cases I chose not to look at involved juveniles, which meant that even more of the case files would not be part of the public record. After three trips to the courthouse and access to very limited parts of the cases, the only conclusion that could be reached about the original allegation of overcharging was “not guilty” since the jury (me) couldn’t get enough evidence to prove the allegations.

SINCE THEN, it’s become even more clear that second guessing individual case results, much less drawing larger conclusions about the criminal justice system, is fruitless unless you’re involved from day one and can get ahold of most of the relevant documents, a time-consuming process, and, even then, a hit or miss undertaking. Not to mention, somewhat subjective. As one cop told me, “If the system’s working right, everybody’s guilty.” By which he meant, if someone is properly arrested and the DA files proper charges backed up by sufficient evidence, the jury will conclude that the person is guilty of the charges. But of course, the system is far from perfect, and, by a combination of legal secrecy, procedural limitations, non-cooperation, ignorance, overwork, false leads, delay, turnover, expediency, incompetence, occasional malfeasance, and bureaucracy (did we leave any out?) — versions of which can occur to some degree in every department in Mendocino County — it’s very hard to fairly and objectively examine a case from the outside. That’s why 1. It’s very hard for the public to know if it’s getting its money’s worth from the criminal justice system (other than it’s too big and has too many lawyers and judges), and 2. The death penalty should never be an option.

(Mark Scaramella)

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JANUARY 2025 AT FORT BRAGG LIBRARY

Annual Friends of the Fort Bragg Library Membership Meeting
Friends! Join us for the annual election of new board members, 2025 Budget proposals, expansion updates, the yearly library recap and what’s in store for your library in the coming year.
Wednesday Jan 11, 2025, 10:30-12
Contact: fortbragglibrary@gmail.com
707-964-2020

Writers of the Mendocino Coast Creative Writing Workshop
A monthly workshop taught by published authors. Each month will feature a different genre/style/or theme.
Open and free to all adults. Bring your notebooks and pencils.
This month: NON-FICTION with Kailyn McCord
Wednesday, Jan 8, 2025, 2-3:30 pm
Contact: fortbragglibrary@gmail.com
707-964-2020

Giant Memory Match Game
Kids, 3 & up, can match giant cards with pictures of famous book characters to win stickers.
FREE event
Saturday, January 11, 2025, 2-3 pm
Contact: fortbragglibrary@gmail.com
707-964-2020

The Detective Club—A Murder Mystery Event
Help us solve the murder of Austin St Clair, Chairman of the Detective Club. This is an audience participation event written by bestselling mystery author, Ruth Ware. Adults and older teens welcome.
FREE event
Saturday, January 25, 2025, 2-4 pm
Contact: fortbragglibrary@gmail.com
707-964-2020

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BOONVILLE PIONEERS

AVA News Service

During the early settlement of Anderson Valley there were two factions of cattlemen between whom there existed bad blood. Several men were killed. On one occasion both factions met in Boonville. Two members of the opposing factions engaged in altercation which was sponsored by the respective factions who forced themselves in battle array at close quarters. Henry Beeson, one of the members of the historic Bear Flag Party of Sonoma County, was a member of neither faction but a friend beloved by both. Before actual hostilities began, Beeson walked down between the two lines of men, shoving their presented rifles aside and admonishing them to desist. Beeson’s bravery and loyalty to both sides carried unanimously, the men laid down their arms, shook hands and became friends. Henry Beeson averted a terrible tragedy.

Another time Beeson, with a companion, was riding through a flat on Rancheria Creek on what was later the Hobson ranch near Boonville. An enemy of the companion fired from the grapevine-fringed creek bank, the ball shattering the man’s arm. Beeson hurried home in time to give the wound first aid which was about all the aid there was to an unfortunate in those times. The pioneers certainly felt cramped for elbow room when later settlers began to come in for locations.

When Henry Beeson settled in Anderson Valley, Mendocino and Sonoma counties were all Sonoma County. His lifelong friend settled in Lake County. The friend in Lake County attempted to visit Beeson at his home in Anderson Valley. Enroute, the man encountered a settler erecting his log cabin on the Russian River near the present site of Hopland. Being very much perturbed over the encroachment, on arriving at Beeson’s, the friend said with an oath, “Henry, you and I will have to leave these parts, they are getting too thick for us. There is a son of a gun building a shack over on the river between you and I. We want more room.”

The first settlers in Anderson Valley, like their brothers in other localities at the time, were a little clannish and adverse to strangers. When a new settler moved in, he was looked on with more or less distrust until such time as he had proven to their satisfaction his integrity.

July the fourth was held sacred to the pioneers; to allow that national day to pass without a fitting recognition would have been a sacrilege. The occasion was celebrated at the trading post of Boonville by a huge feast of barbecued elk, bear and venison with horse racing and games. A committee of mountaineers were appointed whose task was to ride the trails in every direction to the isolated cabins, bidding the settlers attend the feast to be held on that great day. As the promoters and committee of the celebration sat on the fence or squatted on their haunches at the trading post whittling sticks with their pocket knives, as was the custom where men congregated at that time, they discussed the ineligibles who were to be blacklisted. A new settler had recently moved in on Con Creek at the lower end of the valley. Only one or two members of the acting committee had met the new settler. None knew what manner of man he was. Long they debated the responsibility of inviting one who had no sponsor. At last one of the committee said, “Well, boys, if the new settler is an eligible feller, we don’t want to disappoint him, ‘tweed be a shame. On the other hand, if he can’t cut the mustard with his woman and passer of younguns, we don’t want his kinds.”

“Well Bill,” said another, “how you gain’ to find out?”

“Wall, les’ ask the varmint to come to the feed and see how the son of a gun will act.”

The man and family were bidden to attend the feast, the new settler was a seasoned pioneer who knew the ways of his kind. He made good at the feast and was unanimously accepted as one of their own.

Jasper McCracken, who lived near Windsor, hale and hearty at the age of 88, was one of the only surviving pioneers of that time. He lived in Petaluma in 1850. He related a hunting trip which he took at the time with another white man and three or four Indians into what is now Mendocino County with the light running gear of a spring wagon drawn by three yoke of oxen. As there were no roads, the team was hard put to draw the light rig over the gulches and mountain ridges. The only building they encountered on the entire trip was the Baihache adobe, La Casa, one mile below the present site of Healdsburg. Camp was made by the McCracken party on what was afterwards the Hobson stock ranch in Mendocino County four miles south of Boonville, where they killed many deer and several grizzly bears.

(Courtesy, Lofthouse Publishing, Amlin, Ohio.)

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SALTWATER IN HIS VEINS

by C. Michael Berghash

Historians agree that what gold did for California, redwood timber did for the Mendocino Coast. A rough and tumble group of men and women came to California in search of gold and wealth. Many found it in the gold fields; many more did not. The same spirit motivated a group of pioneers to come to this coast. Captain David F. Lansing was one of the lucky ones who struck it rich here.

Lansing was born September 14, 1809 in Albany, New York, to parents David Lansing senior and Mercy Buckby. The original Lansings (also spelled Lansingh or Lansinck) came to New York from Holland around 1650. The records indicate that the early generations of Lansings were mostly landowners and lawyers, but like many New England youths, Lansing went to sea at an early age. His first long voyage was on board a whaler that spent three years in the South Pacific. The young Lansing proved to be an able seaman, and he became a captain in his early twenties, making many voyages around Cape Horn and meeting with moderate success as a whaler.

In 1849 Lansing, who had married Charlotte Whipple (also from Albany) in about 1840, gathered up his wife and two daughters (Mary, b. 1841 and Charlotte b. 1847) and sailed the barque “Hannah Sprague” from New York harbor via Cape Horn to the mouth of San Francisco Bay. They arrived on November 12, 1849. The entire voyage took 175 days to complete, consisting of 18,000 nautical miles. Not much else is known about Captain Lansing or his family during the years 1849-1852 other than that Charlotte gave birth to their third daughter, Francesca “Fanny” Lansing, while at sea in October 1849.

In 1852 Lansing became Captain of the brig “Ontario,” a ship of 557 tons built in New York in 1812. The ship was under charter to E. C. Williams, William H. Kelley, and J. E. Carlson and was to carry the machinery owned by Henry Meiggs for the building of a sawmill at Big River. Meiggs employed Lansing to pilot the ship to Mendocino Bay and then remain on as supervisor of shipping at the new undertaking. E. C. Williams was on board the ship during the voyage to Mendocino and in 1912 he penned the following account of the journey:

“(We) set sail early in June, 1852. We were not yet out of sight of land when trouble began. The ship which had been at anchor for a very long time had become dry at the waterline and as soon as it was put into the wind and headed up the coast the motion began to loosen the oakum in the seams and let water in, not much at first but (it) increased daily. The workmen became alarmed and wanted to turn around but Captain Lansing stated that with good weather no danger existed, the workmen agreed that if they were put on pay they would man the pumps and keep the ship free (of water). It worked and we made it to port without mishap. After the men hauled the ship inside the point with the stern close to the shore, they landed her cargo. Later the hold was filled with rock from the bank until the hull was fast on the bottom—our intention being to complete the filling of the hold and thus make a permanent wharf and breakwater. This, however, was deferred too long and the first storm separated the upper works from the heavily weighted portion and washed it up on the beach.” (from the Mendocino Beacon, 1912).

After Henry Meiggs left the country in 1854, five men—Alfred Godeffroy, William Sillem, John Freundt, J.B. Ford, and E.C. Williams—reopened the mill in 1855 and retained Lansing as harbor master and shipping superintendent until 1874. In his book “The Doghole Schooners” [Mendocino Historical Research, 1977], Walter Jackson noted that Lansing as harbor master spent many days in a rowboat locating dangerous underwater rocks and reefs in Mendocino Bay and marking them as hazards to navigation. Lansing often remarked that he had witnessed the deaths by drowning of at least 50 persons in the bay as the result of shipwrecks, capsizing rowboats, falls from cliffs, or from being washed off the rocks while fishing.

To be continued

— Excerpted and annotated from the Mendocino Historical Review, Spring, 1985.

(KelleyHouseMuseum.org)

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, December 26, 2024

RICHARD OLSTAD, 30, Fort Bragg. Parole violation.

MALISSA WARANER, 47, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JOHN WILSON II, 44, Willits. Elder abuse resulting in great bodily harm or death.

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‘POSITIVE CRITERIA’ NEEDED

Editor:

The California political reactions to Donald Trump’s deportation threats have unfortunately been knee-jerk defenses to protect all illegal immigrants. Such statements presumably include those convicted of violent crimes, which is hard to support with logic and unpopular for obvious public safety reasons.

It would be more productive for supporters of illegal immigrants to admit that we should make a distinction between convicted criminals likely to continue bad behavior (to be deported first) and those who have been positively contributing to our society (to have a path to legal residency).

As planning for the deportation process gets underway, and the financial and practical realities become apparent, priorities will have to be determined. Instead of rejecting all deportations, our politicians should put forward some positive criteria to guide the differentiation process. Extreme defensive positions reduce the chances that general agreement can be reached.

Robert Williamson

Santa Rosa

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AMAZON PRIME NOW STREAMING ‘AMERICANS WITH NO ADDRESS’

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THE BATTLE TO STOP THE DELTA TUNNEL AND SITES RESERVOIR CONTINUES

by Dan Bacher

It’s Christmas Day 2024 — and the battle by Tribes, fishermen, environmentalists, Delta Region Counties, family farmers and Southern California ratepayers to stop the ecosystem-destroying Delta Conveyance Project (Delta Tunnel) continues as imperiled salmon and Delta fish species are in their worst-crisis ever.

As I’ve stated so many times, the Delta Tunnel is a zombie project that keeps getting resurrected from the dead by California governors. The previous incarnation of the project, the peripheral canal, was overwhelmingly defeated by the voters in 1982. Then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger resurrected the project in 2007 as the twin tunnels under the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.

Governor Jerry Brown continued and expanded Schwarzenegger’s planning for the twin tunnel project, renaming it the California Water Fix, during his third and fourth terms from 2011 to 2019. When Governor Gavin Newsom took office in 2019, he transformed the twin tunnel boondoggle into the single tunnel boondoggle, the Delta Conveyance Project (DCP).

In the latest episode in this long struggle, the SF Baykeeper, the Golden State Salmon Association (GSSA) and coalition partners, including Tribes, environmental groups and fishing organizations, appealed the Department of Water Resources’ (DWR) consistency determination for its 2024-2026 geotechnical activities related to the Delta Tunnel.

“On December 19, a public hearing was held in Sacramento where our coalition challenged DWR’s strategy of fragmenting the Tunnel’s impacts into narrow segments to bypass the legal requirement for a comprehensive analysis under the Delta Reform Act,” reported Scott Artis, Executive Director of the Golden State Salmon Association (GSSA).

“This approach by DWR obscures the Tunnel’s potential harm, disregards the clear intent of the law, and seeks preferential treatment from the Delta Stewardship Council, violating the statutory and regulatory obligations all parties must follow,” said Artis. “DWR’s submission was criticized as incoherent, asserting that a minor component of the project qualifies for consistency determination under the California Environmental Quality Act, even while claiming that the action has no impact on the Delta Reform Act’s coequal goals or the policies of the Delta Plan.”

In case you’re not familiar with it, the proposed 40-plus mile long underground tunnel would divert water from the Sacramento River at Hood to facilitate the export of water to agribusiness in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California water agencies.

The parties filing the appeals include the following organizations, tribes, water agencies and counties:

C20242-A1 – San Francisco Baykeeper, Winnemem Wintu, Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, California Indian Environmental Alliance, Friends of the River, Center for Biological Diversity, Save California Salmon, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, Golden State Salmon Association and Restore the Delta.

C20242-A2 – South Delta Water Agency

C20242-A3 – County of Sacramento, Sacramento County Water Agency, Sacramento Area Sewer District, City of Stockton

C20242-A4 – County of San Joaquin, Central Delta Water Agency, Local Agencies of the North Delta

The December hearing followed a “California Jobs First” press event on December 10 in Colusa County where Governor Gavin Newsom appealed to President-Elect Donald Trump to support his campaign to build Sites Reservoir and the Delta Tunnel. At first, he discussed his “streamlining” of the process to build Sites Reservoir.

“We did a new judicial process as it relates to just concluding the process,” said Newsom. “Let us know yes or no. Can we move forward? And the first project that won under the framework that was established under SB 149 was Sites.”

“And what could have taken quite literally and was intended by those that oppose Sites years and years took only months because of that streamlining. It worked. We now want to expand that streamlining, and this is what you heard from Karla (referring to Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth) to groundwater replenishment as well,” Newsom stated.

“And we’re gonna get Sites done and we’re gonna continue to advocate for federal resources. Donald Trump this is your kind of project (chuckles). We’re gonna continue to advocate for local water agencies to enthusiastically embrace this.”

Then the Governor launched into his appeal to build the Delta Tunnel, in the process comparing Delta Tunnel opponents to flat earth proponents.

“The Delta. I know it’s controversial. I know not everybody here is, you know, agrees the world is round (laughter) or flat. So I respect the difference of opinion. I have a strong opinion. I think the Delta Conveyance is the most important climate adaptation project in the USA.”

The project is opposed by a big coalition of Tribes, fishing groups, conservation organizations, Delta residents, Delta counties and water districts, scientists and water ratepayers. Opponents say the tunnel, by diverting Sacramento River water before it reaches the Delta, will drive already imperiled Delta smelt, longfin smelt, Sacramento winter-run and spring-run Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon and other fish species to extinction and have a devastating impact on Tribal, fishing, farming and environmental justice communities.

Niria Alicia Garcia, organizer with the Winnemem Wintu Run4Salmon, points out the big picture of what the tunnel would do in the context of the destruction of Mother Nature.

“Humans belong to a larger ecosystem of life that’s interconnected with many other species,” Garcia stated. “We can't continue destroying Mother Nature without considering the negative impacts this will have on the more than human world. The aquifer of the Delta would be completely destroyed and that can't ever be replaced. The destruction to the Delta is unconscionable. The salmon need the natural springs to survive, along with all the other water beings who need the Delta to be restored, not destroyed.”

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GROWING UP HIPPIE

by Adriana Barton

Growing up in my family was a trip. At any time I could be hauled off to an impromptu gathering overrun by urchins with names like Gaia, Tao, Cinnamon, and Raven. We once visited some back-to-the-land friends on a 100-acre plot in rural Quebec where our weaver hostess greeted us wearing nothing but a smile. With a dozen families wandering around naked, the choice was to stand out in a sundress or bare my awkward, 11-year-old body with mosquito-bite breasts.

My sibs and I tried not to stare at all the exposed flesh. Instead, we passed the time by hooking a bass and grilling it in coconut body oil by the lake, then hanging out in a sauna fashioned from a canvas tent and bonfire-heated rocks. Every so often a grown-up would sprinkle pot leaves and water onto the hot stones. I remember wondering if I would get high.

My mother and her friends considered themselves artists, not hippies. But to everyone else they were flower children. Maybe it was the Mexican and Indian peasant clothes they wore — even on formal occasions like weddings — or their childlike belief in the magical powers of plant foods: goldenseal for flu and pickled plums for sore throats. My mom even tried to cure my vision problems with eye exercises (“place your palms on closed lids and visualize spirals”), until a teacher persuaded her that it was time to get me glasses.

The counterculture was a strange world to be born into. Or, more specifically, to fall into — in the arms of my yogi/mathematician father, who delivered me without benefit of medical training. (I was the second of my mother’s four home births.) Like many hippies, my father had led a nomadic existence. In 1965 and 1966, he was featured in a series of Toronto Star articles documenting his spiritual journey overland to India in a vintage Cadillac and describing his goal to found what the newspaper called an “ashran.” Sadly, he died of cancer when I was a year old.

After his death, my 26-year-old mother bundled up my older sister and me and hit the road. We shared a ride from Toronto to Vancouver, where we spent a winter near Kitsilano’s hippie haven, now yuppified West Fourth Avenue. Then she piled us into an old truck rigged with a camper and headed for Mexico. En route, she and her new boyfriend, a dropout from Berkeley, held “spontaneous music workshops” for patients with mental disabilities.

In the villages of Chiapas, Mom went native. She ground corn by hand to make tortillas and embroidered her own designs on blouses, much to the amusement of the Mayan women. She and her boyfriend held jam sessions with Mayan musicians, a radical activity for gringos back then. “What we were doing was revolutionary,” she recalled recently. “We were part of the revolution!” One of her boyfriend’s goals was to set up a Mayan-run radio station. He succeeded after we left him there when I was 3.

Mom returned to Ottawa to live with my future stepfather, Russell. He was one of the men behind the Wasteland, a coffeehouse that drew counterculture heroes like Bruce Cockburn and John and Yoko. Drugs were surely in the background of this scene, but my strangely puritanical parents avoided them. They didn’t live in a commune, indulge in group sex, or drop LSD. The only hydroponic thing in our household was the commercial alfalfa sprout farm in our basement — 15 bathtubs full of seeds that I watered in return for an allowance.

My assumptions about life, from relationships to morality, were shaped by these people, who quoted Zen Buddhism and traded tips on building yurts — those circular Mongolian tents that were a hippie obsession. Though less notorious than their Haight-Ashbury counterparts, my mother’s crowd also represented an iconoclastic and influential radical ethos. They were spiritual seekers, committed to personal and social transformation and abstemious to the point of asceticism. Their life choices were part of a continuing social experiment, from earnest meditation practices to a willingness to go on welfare rather than compromise their values. As their own purse-lipped parents would say, “That’s all fine and good for them, but what about the children?” Nobody knew how offspring of the Age of Aquarius would turn out.

Well, I do.

From childhood embarrassment to adolescent conformism, it was hard not to rebel against my parents’ free-wheeling ways. A week before starting first grade, I begged my parents to buy me a lunch-box: a spanking new plastic one with a picture of Sesame Street or Barbie, the kind every other child in school would bring. For days I lobbied, emphasizing that it came with a Thermos, but my mom and stepfather couldn’t understand why I wanted such a tacky, commercial thing. On the morning of the big day, they presented me with a plain cardboard box with a thick wire for a handle. Inside was a jar of milk, an apple, and a whole-wheat sandwich. Pleased with their ingenuity, my parents beamed. I was crestfallen. At noon hour I sat in a corner, trying to avoid the stares and snickers.

Desperate to be normal, I rarely invited kids over. They would see the outboard motor stored in plain view in our dining room. They would see my hyperactive six-year-old brother leaping around the house, naked as a monkey, slowing down only to retract his foreskin to gross us out. My friends would inevitably turn up their noses at the snack food they were offered. I’m not making this up: To a tent full of seven-year-olds my mother once offered a late-night treat of pickled eggs.

Like many adult children of hippies, by the time I hit university I had turned to therapy to try to make sense of my family and to adapt to mainstream society. My current therapist is an expert on perfectionism. He believes people develop this trait as children in the attempt to create order out of a chaotic environment. For me, this took the form of a boot-camp approach to life. As a 12-year-old, I kept color-coded logs of when I exercised, what I ate, and how much I practiced my cello, down to the minute.

In high school, I would turn down dates because boys might interfere with my regimen as a classical musician-in-training. By 16, I earned a music scholarship to a prestigious American university. At 22, I had already performed with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

But raised to value creativity and originality above all, I was devastated when it dawned on me that I had never played for pleasure or made my own music. So I dropped the cello entirely. This may seem like a waste, but for 17 years the rigid, high-performance world of classical music had provided a refuge of structure and consistency so lacking at home.

One had only to see my bedroom in high school to get the picture: It was as orderly as that of a Victorian spinster, a beacon of neatness amid the piles of paper strewn about every surface of the dining room, the mess of my Mom’s in-home painting studio, and the crumbs ground into the threadbare antique Chinese carpet my grandmother had left us. My compulsive tidiness was a form of rebellion, a goad to a disorganized mother who had fought hard to escape the oppressive spotlessness and formality of her own privileged childhood. The intergenerational pattern continues.

Every stick of furniture in my parents’ house was secondhand, long before recycling became hip. So were my decidedly unfashionable clothes, mostly from Salvation Army thrift stores. To this day, my mother is more likely to invest in pottery and paintings than something as banal as a new couch. Buying furniture seems so suburban.

I recently bought a mattress, one with coils and box spring — something no one in my family has ever owned. Before it was delivered, I was plagued with unease. Money wasn’t the issue, as a magazine editor I can afford it. Rather, a vague sense of imprinted guilt crept in, accompanied by images of distended coils rusting in a landfill. What if everyone on the planet had a mattress like this? Where would all the mattresses go when people had finished with them?

I am 32 years old and still not sure how to feed myself. I blame it on Michio Kushi, the Japanese guru who brought the Zen macrobiotic diet to North America. My parents lived in one of Kushi’s Boston houses for a time, attempting to heal my birth father of terminal illness. Following this diet based on the laws of yin and yang, my mother would add a handful of salt to greens with all the water pressed out and call it “salad.” Despite my father’s death at age 29, her faith in the macrobiotic way never wavered.

As I grew up, food was imbued with powers of good and evil. Sugar was excessively yin and naturally verboten, but seemingly innocent foods were equally suspect. Potatoes, along with tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, were found to be in the same family as deadly nightshade and therefore viewed as toxic.

Sugar became my drug of choice. Today I can mainline up to three packs a day of Werther’s Originals, those diabolical butterscotch candies. I swear off them for months at a time but, like a woman obsessed, I inevitably fall off the wagon. Last night I enjoyed a dinner of brown rice, tofu, and salad — followed by a bag of licorice and jujubes.

Living with hippie parents wasn’t all bad. Despite our modest means, I grew up in an exceptionally rich cultural environment. My mother painted exuberantly and my community-minded stepfather funded multicultural arts groups as a bureaucrat and taught fiction writing. I was surrounded by sculptors, poets, musicians, and intellectuals. My accomplishments as musician, writer, adventurer, and friend are directly related to the values I grew up with.

At least one study bears this out. In the early 1990s, after many hippies’ kids had graduated from high school, Thomas Weisner, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported that “a strong parental commitment to one’s family lifestyle can contribute positively to children’s school achievement.” This was certainly true for my older sister and me, who were placed in enriched and gifted classes in grade school.

Being a hippie kid was cool in some ways. While classmates zoned in front of the idiot box (mostly off-limits to me), I spent my free time crocheting Rasta-style hats, playing make-believe, and pounding clay. By 13, I was sewing my own clothes and working my way through my parents’ boxes of books, from Siddhartha to The Joy of Sex. And whatever my siblings and I might say today about the care we got from that free-spirited generation, we always knew we were loved.

I was raised with a combination of intense care-giving and benign neglect, a contradiction to which many scions of hippiedom can relate. One of my best friends is a granola-fed high achiever who similarly spent years hiding her counterculture origins. She too had to teach herself basic life skills because her mother was either busy finding herself or had never learned. Both of us endured restrictive diets, weird home remedies, “voluntary simplicity” (involuntary in the kids’ case), and parents who treated us more like peers than children, confiding in us about everything from money woes to their love lives.

What kind of parents will we be? When it comes to creating families of our own, we Adult Children of Hippies border on 1950s-style reactionary. The other day my friend and I were mulling over how to have children in the current economic climate, and what sort of men we should choose for this momentous commitment. Sipping tea with us, her mother was baffled. “We never thought about things that way,” she giggled. “Babies just sort of happened.” Her generation had always gone with the flow — why would motherhood be any different?

It helps to remember that my mother was widowed with two kids when she was barely an adult herself. She has long since finished growing up. Today, she is a confident woman whose paintings are shown in prominent galleries and purchased for major art collections. I now turn to her with creative dilemmas, as well as issues ranging from office politics to my sex life. My mother and my stepfather have each come to resemble the parent I craved and now aspire to be: warm, attentive, inspiring, and actively engaged in the outside world.

Mom spent last year showing her work in locations ranging from Newfoundland to the Netherlands. In the same period, my own wanderlust took me to Brazil and the Middle East, where I found warmth and intellectual colleagues in the heart of the Arab world. Co-workers thought I was nuts to hop on a plane to Syria just weeks after 9/11, but my open-minded parents supported my decision to attend the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture in the Islamic World. Before I left, Mom reminisced about her 1966 honeymoon with my birth father in Greece and nearby Turkey, where they backpacked through ancient towns, meditated on ruins, and showered under waterfalls.

In Jordan, after skinny-dipping in the Dead Sea at sunset, I could no longer deny being my mother’s daughter. Hadn’t I hung out and jammed with musicians in Brazil and Cuba, in unwitting imitation of her Mexican odyssey? Hadn’t I learned that “normal” is overrated? As an adult, I was happiest when life was a variation on a bohemian rhapsody. After all those attempts to hide my hippie past, this insight was music to my ears.

(Adriana Barton lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.)

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THE ONE WORD THAT SIGNALS WHETHER YOU'RE FROM NORCAL OR SOCAL

Most people generally agree that the language quirk originated for one reason

by Tessa McLean

We’ve all been there. Sitting in a snarl of California freeway traffic, staring up at the green directional signs in despair, watching brake lights blink on and off. Known for its car culture, California is a place where people spend a lot of time on the road — but they may talk about the experience differently depending on where they live in the state.

If you take the 101 to the 134 to the 5 and get off at Stadium Way, you’ve made it to Dodger Stadium for a baseball game. But you are also obviously in Southern California. Adding “the” before a numbered freeway is one of those linguistic oddities that separates Northern and Southern California. It’s led to endless internet arguments about its origins and even prominence in a beloved recurring “Saturday Night Live” sketch. More than one theory exists on why Southern Californians insert the additional definite article, but most people generally agree that the language quirk originated for one reason.

Southern California built some of America’s first freeways, paving the way quite literally for the culture that would come along with it. Those first freeways didn’t have standardized route numbers, though, and instead had names that told the driver about the route itself. If you took the Hollywood Freeway, you traveled to and from Hollywood. If it was the Arroyo Secco Parkway, often cited as the first LA freeway, the drive was along the river with the same name. Early maps of the city used these names over numbers (though some did have numbers, too, and often more than one set of numbers, making things more confusing). Soon, that regional system became engrained in the local lexicon.

Dating back to the 1930s, these roadways weren’t yet part of the standardized U.S. freeway system, which didn’t come about until President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956.

“It was not unusual even in the 1930s for people to drive long distances within what was at that time America’s most spread-out metropolis,” wrote linguist Grant Geyer in his article “‘The’ Freeway in Southern California,” which discussed the linguistic habit in the journal American Speech in 2001.

When the roads finally switched over to the standardized numbering system, it was a turning point, finally simplifying a dizzying list of names to systematic numbering. But the “the” simply stuck.

“Locals generally preferred the old, time-honored street or road names instead of numbers in conversation,” Geyer wrote.

It took decades for all the signs to switch over to the new numbering system, so it’s not surprising that it took until the 1970s for Californians to start more commonly adopting the numbers over the names. Traffic reporters continued to include “the” and use both names, further implanting the terminology into local speech, particularly as Southern Californians became increasingly car-dependent.

Meanwhile, the Northern California freeway system wasn’t as extensive and developed later, so the language wasn’t as deep-rooted. Alternative modes of transportation were frequently used, as well — like the Bay Area’s BART system — and so, a Bay Area resident typically just takes 80 east to Oakland, for example.

“Since language is often used to show group belonging, even small quirks can become powerful indicators of social identity,” Daria Bahtina, a linguistics professor at UCLA, told SFGate in an email. “… Over time, this split [between Northern and Southern California] has become a kind of shibboleth — a linguistic marker that signals which group someone belongs to, in this case, geographically.”

This habit is both a point of cultural identity for Angelenos and a source of linguistic curiosity for outsiders. Bahtina even supervised a student project in 2021 that analyzed this language divide in California. Examining Reddit posts mentioning US-101, which runs through both LA and the Bay Area, the UCLA students found “members of the Los Angeles subreddit did, in fact, use the determiner ‘the’ more often when referring to U.S. 101. In LosAngeles, 16 out of the 23 posts collected referred to U.S. 101 as ‘the 101’, whereas in r/BayArea, only 3 posts did so in the same sample size.”

Author Colleen Dunn Bates grew up in Los Angeles and remembers that when she got her driver’s license in 1974, most people still referred to freeways by names rather than numbers. She said she emulated how her parents, native Californians, spoke about the roadway. They had grown up using the names, not the numbers.

Now, she’s switched over to using the numbers like everyone else, she said, but using “the” before a freeway name is an important identifier to a true Southern Californian. Dunn Bates even included a page dedicated to the phenomenon in her book “Talk Like a Californian: A Hella Fresh Guide to Golden State Speak.”

There are other theories about the origin of this language quirk. One Redditor suggests that adding “the” before freeway numbers helps to alleviate the chaos that can arise from LA’s extensive reliance on numerous freeways. This hypothesis seems plausible, as saying “take the 110 to the 10 to the 2” sounds clearer than naming the numbers alone.

Another Redditor suggested that “the” is important because there are so many freeways in LA that they have distinct personalities. I can’t say I disagree, though that’s hardly the likely reason for this linguistic quirk.

Saul Rubin, a journalist and author of several books on the Golden State, including “You Know You’re in California When …”, moved to California in the 1980s and also remembers using the freeway names just as much as the numbers, even through the ’90s. He’s lived in Southern California for 30 years and said now if he tries to say a freeway number without “the,” it “doesn’t sound right. It just doesn’t sound grammatically correct.”

“People might think it’s strange because you usually reserve ‘the’ for something that’s really culturally significant, like the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty,” Rubin continued. “Maybe it sounds pretentious but, for better or for worse, we’re dependent on freeways. And it’s such a key part of our life here that maybe we do have this reverence for the freeway that people from outside of the area don’t have.”

(SFGate)

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BALDWIN’S SPELL

In James Baldwin’s writing and public appearances, the social and personal, the spoken and written dissolve into one.

by Darryl Pinckney

Harlem histories tell us that the black churches followed their congregations uptown after World War I. I used to put on a suit on Sundays in order to blend in with worshipers at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street and avoid being sent up to the balcony with the casually dressed white tourists. I’d come for the famous swells of music, for the thump of gospel choirs. But when the music stopped and the pastor began to strut and shout I found myself wedged into a dark place where the Holy Ghost did not know how to behave.

Meanwhile the oldest black denomination in New York state was reported to be having trouble surviving. Dynamism has departed from Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. A Gothic Revival structure on West 137th Street, Mother Zion’s Harlem home was completed in 1925. Its aging membership has not recovered from the subtractions of the pandemic. The ranks of street vendors in bow ties of the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, The Final Call, also seem to have thinned. Harlem has more marijuana shops than storefront churches these days.

When black people first started to move uptown, the principal crosstown artery of Harlem was 135th Street. Harlem spread. White people realized too late what was happening and made the best of the deal by overcharging. Overcrowding in New York called for attitudes of transience, poor people working to move on to a better elsewhere, but that didn’t happen. The color-blind textbook definition of blight was an area of metropolis that had lost out on the utilities and services sweepstakes. Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1966) is the history of a slum, not a cultural Mecca.

The Jazz Age that blasted out of World War I coincided with the Negro Awakening. Harlem became the capital of the Negro world, but that was for a comparatively brief period. Instead, Harlem was for much longer the “symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation,” as Ralph Ellison said in the essay “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948). Harlem continued to spread, up out of its valley, onto the West Side’s rocky ridges. What made Harlem scary in the decades after the riot of 1964 that left bullet holes in the painted terra-cotta of the Hotel Theresa was its ghost town aspect, the dread of what might be lurking behind boarded-up façades.

Uptown’s neglect was not preservation, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts asserted in Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (2011), a haunting work about the district in transition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was as if she had looked up everything about Harlem that she could at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue and then gone outside to see how much of its legacy had survived.…

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/01/16/baldwins-spell-james-baldwin-jimmy/

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I AM COMMITTED to looking reality in the face and speaking about it without pretense. It is because I reject lies and running away that I am accused of pessimism; but this rejection implies hope — the hope that truth may be of use. And this is a more optimistic attitude than the choice of indifference, ignorance or sham.

— Simone de Beauvoir

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LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT

South Korean Lawmakers Impeach Acting President as Crisis Deepens

How the Impeachment of South Korea’s President Will Continue

E.P.A. Promotes Toxic Fertilizer Whose Risks It Knew About Years Ago

Finland Suspects Russian ‘Shadow Fleet’ Vessel Cut Undersea Power Cable

Israel Bombs Yemeni Airport and Ports After Houthi Missile Launches

Syria’s Alawite Minority, Favored by al-Assad, Looks Nervously to the Future

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

At a minimum we have had a front row seat to man's malignant nature. History is filled with similar and far more vicious periods of slaughter and backstabbing. Good men will continue to rise up to stop evil men, and all men will strive to survive and thrive in a world of conflicting interests and limited resources. Often it's enough to do no harm, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but not always. Evil inevitably rises up to take the place of order and stability, and the battle goes on. Life is truly a mystery.

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MAKING AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN

by Bernie Sanders

Yes. In the wealthiest country on Earth let us Make America Healthy Again. We should be leading the world in terms of life-expectancy, happiness, and productivity. This is some of what we have to do.

• Medicare for All. Every American, regardless of age or income, must be entitled to health care as a human right. It is not acceptable that over 60,000 Americans die each year because they can’t afford the health care they need.
• Lower the cost of prescription drugs. As Americans, we should not be paying, by far, the highest prices in the world for life-saving medications. It is absurd that one out of four Americans cannot afford to purchase the prescription drugs their doctors prescribe. We must cut prescription drug prices in half by making sure that we pay no more for medicine than the Europeans or Canadians.
• Paid Family and Medical Leave. Workers should not have to go to work when they are sick. Mothers should have ample time to stay home with their new-born babies. A parent should not get fired when they stay home with a sick kid. We must guarantee at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to every worker in America.
• Reform the food industry. Large food corporations should not make billions in profits addicting children to the processed foods which make them overweight and prone to diabetes and other diseases. A good place to start would be to ban junk food ads targeted to kids and put strong warning labels on products high in sugar, salt, and saturated fat.
• Raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Millions of workers should not have to worry how they’ll pay the rent or buy food for their kids. Working class Americans live far shorter lives than the rich because of the stress of trying to survive on a paycheck to paycheck existence. We must raise the minimum wage to at least $17 an hour.
• Lower the work week to 32 hours with no loss of pay. People will live longer and healthier lives if they can spend more time with family and friends and have the opportunity to enjoy leisure time activities. Advancements in technology, automation, and artificial intelligence must benefit workers, not just billionaires on Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

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NOW IT CAN BE TOLD… AFTER ALL THE HARM HAS BEEN DONE

by Norman Solomon

Timing is crucial in media and politics—and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report on atrocities.

This week, The New York Times reported that the U.S. government made war in Afghanistan while helping to “recruit, train, and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities.” Those militias “tortured civilians, kidnapped for ransom, massacred dozens in vendetta killings, and razed entire villages, sowing more than a decade of hatred toward the Afghan government and its American allies.”

Written by a former Kabul bureau chief for the Times, the article appeared under a headline saying that “U.S.-backed militias” in Afghanistan were “worse than the Taliban.”

Now they tell us.

The new reporting made me think of a chapter in my book War Made Invisible titled “Now It Can Be Told.” Here’s an excerpt:

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Timing is crucial in media and politics—and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect: Now it can be told—years too late.

Virtually the entire U.S. media establishment gave full-throated support to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in early October 2001. Twenty years later, many of the same outlets were saying the war was ill-conceived and doomed from the start.

Immediately after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, with very few exceptions, even the mainstream news organizations that had been expressing trepidation or opposition swung into line to support the war effort. Two decades later, many of the same media outlets were calling the invasion of Iraq the worst U.S. foreign-policy blunder in history.

A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized.

But such framing evades the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings. War is so normalized that its casualties, as if struck by acts of God, are routinely viewed as victims without victimizers, perhaps no more aggrieved than people suffering the consequences of bad weather.

What American policymakers call mistakes and errors are, for others, more aptly described with words like catastrophes and atrocities. Attributing the U.S. wars to faulty judgment—not premeditated and hugely profitable aggression—is expedient, setting the policy table for supposed resolve to use better judgment next time rather than challenging the presumed prerogative to attack another country at will.

When the warfare in Afghanistan finally ended, major U.S. media—after avidly supporting the invasion and then the occupation—were awash in accounts of how the war had been badly run with ineptitude or deception from the White House and the Pentagon. Some of the media analysis and commentaries might have seemed a bit sheepish, but news outlets preferred not to recall their prior support for the same war in Afghanistan that they were now calling folly.

A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized from America’s foreign-policy leadership or major news media, let alone its political economy. On the contrary: the forces that have dragged the United States into an array of wars in numerous countries still retain enormous sway over foreign and military affairs. For those forces, over time, shape-shifting is essential, while the warfare state continues to rule.

The fact that strategies and forms of intervention are evolving, most conspicuously in the direction of further reliance on airpower rather than ground troops, makes the victims of the USA’s firepower even less visible to American eyes. This presents a challenge to take a fresh look at ongoing militarism and insist that the actual consequences for people at the other end of U.S. weaponry be exposed to the light of day—and taken seriously in human terms.

Despite all that has happened since President George W. Bush vowed in mid-September 2001 to “rid the world of the evil-doers,” pivotal issues have been largely dodged by dominant U.S. media and political leaders. The toll that red-white-and-blue militarism takes on other countries is not only a matter of moral principles. The United States is also in jeopardy.

That we live in one interdependent world is no longer debatable. Illusions about American exceptionalism have been conclusively refuted by the global climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the ever-present and worsening dangers of thermonuclear war. On a planet so circular in so many ways, what goes around comes around.

(Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, ‘War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine’ https://thenewpress.com/books/war-made-invisible, was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.)

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ISRAEL IS KILLING CIVILIANS IN GAZA ON PURPOSE

by Caitlin Johnstone

Just so we’re all clear, it is a fully established fact that the IDF is directly, deliberately killing civilians in Gaza. There was a time in the early days of the genocide when this could be disputed, but that is no longer true. The facts are in and the case is closed. It’s happening.

Israeli soldiers are telling the press that they’ve been knowingly killing civilians and then falsely categorizing them as terrorists afterward. Countless doctors have testified to routinely encountering dead and wounded children who’ve been shot in the head by Israeli snipers. Israeli media reports have revealed that the IDF is intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and using AI systems to specifically target suspected Hamas members when they are at home with their families instead of out on the battlefield.

The debate is over. The “human shields” argument has been completely, thoroughly debunked. If you still deny that this is happening, its because your worldview is so false that it requires you to deny facts and reality.

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We were fed lies about what happened on October 7. We were fed lies about the Israeli abuses which led to October 7. We’ve been fed lies about what’s been done for the last 15 months under the justification of October 7. And yet Israel’s defenders still expect to be taken seriously when they babble about October 7 in response to criticisms of Israel’s actions.

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It doesn’t have to be this way. We’re fed mountains of stories by the rich and powerful explaining why things must remain as they are — but they are only stories.

Every sociopolitical status quo throughout history has had power-serving narratives explaining why things are as they are and justifying why the people in charge live so much more comfortably than the ordinary folks doing the real work in this world. People used to be told that kings received their authority directly from God, and were therefore better and more worthy than the unwashed masses. Today we have different rulers with different narratives justifying their rule and explaining why vast inequality is fine and good, but those narratives are exactly as fictional as the old stories about the divine right of kings.

Today we are trained to believe that the plutocrats who rule our society attained their vast fortunes through hard work and clever innovation, and are entitled to every penny because they are the most productive members of our society. Just as the peasants of old were taught about the divine right of kings, we are taught that capitalism is the most fair and equitable of all possible systems and that the US-led world order ensures that freedom and democracy will be protected and promoted for the benefit of all.

These are all made-up stories, no truer than the story that monarchs were imbued with magical king powers by an invisible deity because their blood was special. But they are treated as serious facts by those who are responsible for training us how to think, and by those who swallow this indoctrination.

In reality we can change how things are whenever we want, and there’s no good reason not to. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of our rulers, and the oligarchs and empire managers who currently hold the steering wheel are destroying our biosphere while increasing inequality and exploitation and pushing us toward nuclear war on multiple fronts.

We have the ability to wrest that steering wheel away from them any time enough of us work up the will to do so. All the stories to the contrary we might believe are just fictional thought-fluff that our rulers put in our minds for their own benefit.

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There’s nothing wrong with being politically homeless at this point in history. Humanity as a whole is still wildly confused and dysfunctional in this particular slice of spacetime, and even the very best political factions are dominated by highly neurotic people who take no responsibility for their psychological state and internal clarity. If you’ve found a political party or faction you trust then that’s great, but if you haven’t then it is perfectly fine to stand as an individual while throwing your support behind worthy causes and movements on a case-by-case basis as they emerge without permanently hitching yourself to anyone else’s wagon. 

We’ve still got a long way to go in maturing as a species, and it might be a while before a unified political faction arises that you can trust to consistently move in the highest interest.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

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