Mendocino County Today: Saturday 1/18/2025

Western maidenhair fern, *Adiantum aleuticum* (mk)

CONTINUED DRY through Thursday, with some precipitation potential toward Friday next week and into the following weekend. Chilly nights and mornings with areas of frost and patchy fog into mid-week next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 43F on the coast this Saturday morning. I saw a little blue sky but it sure never warmed up yesterday. Clearing is forecast for today & hopefully some warming, we'll see. The current pattern will be in effect the next several days. The NWS hints at rain next Friday, the Weather Underground does not. Another we'll see.

DANNY JOHNSTON SR.

Danny Johnston Sr. passed 01/14/25 .He had been living in Oregon with his sister and her husband. Mr. Johnston was a long-time resident of the Anderson Valley.

NORM CLOW ADDS:

Good man, good friend, married to my cousin Ann for many years. Danny was a valuable member of the Anderson Valley Volunteer Fire Department and was honored as the Fireman of the Year in the mid-1980s. Condolences to the family.

ED NOTES:

MARK SCARAMELLA: The first day of the workshop was “facilitated” by a professional facilitator from Sacramento named Yolanda Underwood of “CPS HR Consulting,” a former Social Worker turned Human Resources Consultant. Ms. Underwood got a whopping $4,800 for her one day appearance, plus an additional $720 to prepare an “action plan.”

ED NOTE: Remember the quaint old days when public officials spent public money as carefully as they did their own money? That was the prevailing maxim anyway, but not that many years ago $5,000 for a day of blah-blah would have been unthinkable. What happened?

SUPERVISOR NORVELL: Got my white board up.

AV UNIFIED NEWS

Dear Anderson Valley Community,

As you know, Anderson Valley Unified School District was thrilled to receive a $4.7 million Clean California Grant, awarded by Caltrans. The purpose of these funds is to create an all weather track as well as soccer and football field for the school and community. In the interest of transparency, I want to send out this community update.

School districts follow a required bidding process when awarding contracts for construction. Unfortunately, the bids we received in December came in higher than expected, resulting in a project cost that would exceed the grant awarded funds by approximately $2.7 million. Therefore, at the Tuesday, January 14, 2025 AVUSD school board meeting, the board rejected all bids.

This does not necessarily mean that the track and field project will not go forward. At this time, the district is working closely with our architect, facilities advisors, and Caltrans Clean California personnel to consider adjustments to the project. The district hopes to go out to bid a second time with a scaled back project that will meet the requirements of the grant as well as staying within the funding awarded.

We know that this project is important to the community and it is also very important to our school. We are committed to doing everything we can to successfully complete this project and we will keep the community posted as we move forward.

With respect,

Kristin Larson Balliet

Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

LOCAL EVENTS

CALTRANS AND CITY OF FORT BRAGG OFFICIALS DISCUSS SAFETY MEASURES FOR NOYO RIVER BRIDGE

Eureka – Caltrans and local officials announced today that they are collaborating on the feasibility of installing crisis prevention signs on the Noyo River Bridge. These signs would provide critical resources for individuals experiencing a mental health crisis.

Caltrans in partnership with the City of Fort Bragg and Mendocino County met on Thursday to discuss community concerns following the recent death of a teenager.

"We are grateful for the concern and ideas for solutions we've already received from community members, and we encourage the public to contact us with further input. We will continue to partner with Caltrans and others to implement strategies for avoiding future tragedy on the Noyo Bridge,” said Fort Bragg Mayor Jason Godeke.

“We’ve heard the community’s concerns, and we share a common goal of ensuring safety on the Noyo River Bridge,” said Caltrans District 1 Deputy Director Richard Mullen. “This is a collaborative effort, and we are grateful for the strong partnership with the City of Fort Bragg.”

In addition to considering crisis prevention signage, Caltrans will continue working closely with the City of Fort Bragg, Mendocino County and other stakeholders to explore additional safety measures for the bridge.

If you or someone you know needs support, please contact:

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-TALK (8255)

Mendocino County Mental Health Plan: (855) 838-0404

NEW ART EXHIBITION IN CLOVERDALE

The Cloverdale Arts Alliance Gallery, located at 204 North Cloverdale Blvd., offers its latest art exhibition, “FRIENDS” from January 18 through March 21, 2025. An Artists’ Reception will be held from 5:30 to 7:30pm on Saturday, January 18. Gallery hours are Friday - Sunday, 11:00 am - 5:00 pm, and by appointment.

The guest artist for this exhibit is Tali Marotz, Painting. Community Annex Artists are: Will McCoy and Xalvador Andrade. Resident artists are Laura Paine Carr, Trudi Folsom, Jane Gardner, Pamela Heck, Terry Holleman, Jason Taylor Morgan, and Jennifer Weiss. Jane Gardner is the featured resident artist for “SEASONS”.

https://www.cloverdaleartsalliance.org/gallery

THIS SPRING TERM, KEEP LEARNING WITH US AT ANDERSON VALLEY ADULT SCHOOL!

It's the perfect time to continue your education!

We invite you to join our classes in English, Computer, Child Development and more. There's something for everyone! Classes begin with Early Childhood Development starting January 21, followed by all other classes the week of February 2.

Why not take advantage of this opportunity?

You will not regret it!

We cordially invite you to our Open House, which will be held on January 26, from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Come get all the details, resolve your doubts, and discover how these classes can help you advance in your future.

This Spring, continue learning with us at Anderson Valley Adult School!

Now is the perfect time to keep advancing your education!

We invite you to join our classes in English, Computer Skills, Child Development, and more. There’s something for everyone! Classes begin with Child Development starting January 21, followed by all other classes starting in the week of February 2.

Why not take advantage of this opportunity?

You won’t regret it!

You are warmly invited to our Open House on January 26, from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Come learn all the details, ask your questions, and discover how our courses can help you move forward in your future.

Location: 12300 Anderson Valley Way, Boonville, CA 95415

Call: 707-895-2953

You can register online: www.avadultschool.org

A READER WRITES: Hope this Doug fir gets to be something beautiful in its next incarnation!

TIM BRAY

The Mendocino Coast Audubon Society and the Noyo Center for Marine Science are planning a half-day offshore marine life ecotour on Friday, January 24. We will board the Kraken and depart at 8 AM, planning to return around 1 PM. Cost will be $120 per person, payable directly to Anchor Charter Boats. Contact me off-List for more details.

We will be looking for all kinds of marine life, from whales to birds to plankton. Gray Whales are moving through right now and we should get good views. Dolphins, fur seals, and other marine mammals are possible. Seabirds such as Albatrosses, Kittiwakes, Phalaropes, Auklets and many others are also likely. We will have experts on board to spot and identify birds, marine mammals, and whatever else we encounter.

The marine forecast looks very good, with a long-period swell of less than 5 feet and little wind. Very few offshore trips have been run in January so this is an exciting opportunity.

UKIAH HIGH GRAD ONCE PLAYED FOR THE METS, HIT GRAND SLAM AGAINST THE GIANTS

by Justine Frederiksen

Before he became a professional baseball player, Kelvin Chapman was a Ukiah High School athlete who loved all sports.

“Football, basketball, baseball — anything with a ball, I loved playing,” said Chapman, admitting that while it was eventually baseball who came courting, “basketball was actually my favorite sport.”

After graduating from Ukiah High in 1974, Chapman was playing baseball at Santa Rosa Junior College when he impressed a visiting Major League Baseball scout, because by the end of 1975 the Ukiah native had been drafted by the New York Mets.

Nearly four years of minor league play later, Chapman had his Major League Debut at Chicago’s Wrigley Field in April of 1979, a night he recalls fondly.

“My parents were there, and I got two hits,” recalled Chapman, adding that he was given the game ball afterward. “That was a great night.”

According to Wikipedia, Chapman had “two hits in five at-bats in his debut” as the Mets starting second baseman that season, but then returned to the minors the next month. A few years later, Chapman returned to “The Show” in May of 1984, and that August he had another of his favorite baseball moments: hitting “a Grand Slam against the Giants” at Shea Stadium, a feat that helped the Mets win 11-6.

The next year, which would be Chapman’s last in professional baseball, Wikipedia has him returning to the Tidewater Tides after “playing his last Major League game in July of 1985,” and reports that while he could have remained with the organization, “Chapman, who had injured his knee during the 1985 season, opted to retire and return home to California.”

Once back in Mendocino County, Chapman said he stayed as close to baseball as he could, first operating batting cages in Ukiah for many years that he said were very popular but were “too seasonal” to offer steady income, so he moved on to coaching women’s softball for several years, “which I very much enjoyed.”

Now living in Redwood Valley with “30 acres of vineyards” while working part-time at Mendocino College and enthusiastically supporting local sports teams of all kinds, Chapman returned to the world of baseball last Saturday at Anton Stadium in Ukiah, where he signed baseballs and greeted fans of all ages for the “Small Town, Big Dreams” event presented by Ukiah High School Baseball and Ukiah Young Bucks Baseball Program.

When asked what he would tell all young people interested in playing professional sports, Chapman said to just play your best and give it everything you have, no matter the odds against you.

Though Chapman also warned that much of his time as a professional baseball player was far from glamorous, recalling “traveling everywhere in buses and sleeping eight guys to a hotel room. Also, when I was playing, the minimum salary was like $21,000.”

And since very few of those who try for “The Show” will actually make it there, Chapman advised all athletes to have a back-up plan, urging them to “go to school, either a college or trade school, and learn a skill, maybe get a teaching degree.”

As for his own kids, Chapman noted proudly that both of his sons, Jason and Brett, “were very good baseball players,” and while Brett was sidelined early due to an injury, Jason was “drafted by the Cincinnati Reds, though he was never signed.”

When asked about his brush with a professional baseball career, Jason Chapman, who now works for the Ukiah Police Department along with his brother Brett, said he was glad for the experience, describing it as “not a disappointment at all, and something cool I can tell my kids.”

Also attending Saturday’s event in Ukiah were Devin Kirby of the Minnesota Twins, who was born in Ukiah, and Michael Petersen of the Toronto Blue Jays, whom organizer Shaun Hoben said “played college ball with Antonio Lopez, who is our Ukiah High JV coach.”

FROM THE ARCHIVE: THE CHINKS IN THE SUPERINTENDENT'S NIGGARDLY EDUCATION

by Bruce Anderson (November 2009)

It all started last March when Dennis Boaz, Ukiah Unified Teachers Union rep, wrote to his union that Ukiah Unified had made only niggardly offers to teachers during labor negotiations.

Bryan Barrett, an assistant superintendent for the Ukiah Unified School district, was deeply offended by Boaz's communication, especially by Boaz's description of Ukiah Unified's pay and benefits offer to district teachers as niggardly.

Barrett wrote to the Ukiah Teachers Association:

“This memo is formal notice to UTA that Mr. Boaz's communication is insulting and unacceptable and undermines his credibility as a spokesperson for UTA. Racism or suggested racism has absolutely no place in this district, in relationships between the district and the union, and in negotiations… As you may know, several teachers have personally apologized and we have to question whether Mr. Boaz can continue as a spokesperson for teachers and for the negotiating team. His credibility and integrity are certainly at issue.”

A veritable Klansman was representing the Ukiah teachers!

The scholarly Barrett, accumulating linguistic support from several of the more righteous Ukiah teachers as he went, and perhaps imagining himself as John Brown on the march to Harper's Ferry, quickly enlisted the aggressive support of none other than the Mendocino County Superintendent of Schools, Paul Tichinin, previously not known to rouse himself for anything other than raising his annual compensation of some $120,000 for doing, well, whatever it is that he does.

Tichinin was also outraged that this particular N Word had been deployed by a local teacher, and boldly deployed in print at that, lying boldly on the page like it belonged there.

This Boaz fellow had to be stopped.

Tichinin, cutting his usual two hour lunch back to an austere ninety minutes, gathered his “leadership team” around him and, together, they crafted this emphatic message for Mr. George Young, California Teachers Association representative:

“The words [Boaz] used were completely unacceptable. The comments are racially charged and show a complete lack of respect and integrity [sic] towards Dr. Nash, Ukiah Unified District Superintendent.”

Dr. Nash is black.

She hadn't complained because, it seems, alone among the school superintendents of Mendocino County, she knows that niggardly is not an ethnic slur.

The thoroughly vilified Mr. Boaz teaches at South Valley High School. He has now sued Ukiah Unified in small claims court for the small claims maximum of $7,500. He says he's suffered “loss or injury to his reputation, character and feelings” by being accused by Barrett, Tichinin and unnamed kindred illiterates of “racism” or “suggested racism.”

Mr. Boaz has indeed been libeled.

Of course, he may also be the slyest provocateur seen in Ukiah for many years. He had to have known his bosses were educationally handicapped, if not learning impaired. The briefest exposure to edu-prose, a few seconds of their fractured rhetoric and one is aware one is in the presence of boobs, if the ladies present will please accept boobs as synonym for dummies, not an inelegant reference to female breasts.

Certainly Mr. Boaz had to have anticipated… Surely he knew that the educational leadership of this county was… Then, again, niggardly has never offended an educated person before — well, there was that depressing case in Washington D.C. — but who could have imagined that the men and women responsible for the education of children in progressive, enlightened Mendocino County would not know…

Boaz forthrightly admits he wrote that the “tenor of the negotiation tactics of the D.O. (district office) has become increasingly negative and niggardly,” innocently assuming the offending word is an adverb meaning “In a niggardly manner, parsimoniously, grudgingly, sparingly,” three synonyms certain to also send Mendocino County school administrators scurrying for grants to buy dictionaries, probably the ones with pictures.

Boaz says he's suffered “emotional distress, resulting in loss of sleep for a period of more than a month,” and is “emotionally distressed” whenever he thinks about, well, thinks about being described as a racist by defectively educated educators.

There was nothing niggardly about Tichinin's errant denunciation of Boaz as a racist. Tichinin not only upped and did it, he got his fellow dunces to sign on: Gary Barr of the Potter Valley Unified School District; Mark Iacuaniello of the Point Arena School District; J.R. Collins of the Anderson Valley School District; Don Armstrong of the Fort Bragg Unified School District; John Markatos of the Laytonville School District; Catherine Stone of the Mendocino Unified School District; Dennis Ivey of the Round Valley Unified School District; Cindy Biaggi-Gonzalez of the Manchester School District; and Debra Kubin of the Willits Unified School District. [Now Superintendent of Ukiah Unified]

It will take more than a few applications of Spic ‘N Span to disguise the chinks in the niggardly educations of Mendocino County’s spooked school administrators, especially if the faggots of their bitched educational breastworks ignite and the dikes of their deficient learning can't retard the steep slope of their deficiencies and they all go poof.

For God's sake, don't tell Tichinin that all over Mendocino County cafeteria ladies are sneaking shitakes into our school's salad bars!

Fish Ladder, Van Arsdale Dam (photo by Jack Schafer)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, January 17, 2025

ADDISON BOUDREAU, 30, Willits. Domestic battery, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, probation revocation.

ANDRU CAMPBELL, 25, Ukiah. Domestic abuse with prior damage of communications device, controlled substance, paraphernalia, tear gas, parole violation, resisting.

RICKIE CURTIS, 51, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

JAMES HEYWOOD, 48, Sonoma/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

MANUEL LOPEZ-GALVEZ, 29, Redwood Valley. Suspended license for refusing DUI chemical test.

MICHAEL MCGEE, 36, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

ALEX MORA-WHITEHURST, 37, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, parole violation.

ADOLFO MORENO-QUIROZ, 23, Healdsburg/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

HUGO MUNIZ, 33, Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for DUI.

MATTHEW PATEREAU, 40, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

CELIA RODSETH, 27, Willits. Domestic abuse.

RANDY SAINE, 38, Willits. Disobeying court order.

HASKELL STORY JR., 56, San Leandro/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ROBERT VALADEZ, 36, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, county parole violation, probation revocation.

NICHOLAS VANHORN, 46, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

GUSTAVO ZAZUETA, 39, Ukiah. DUI with prior, controlled substance, no license, suspended license for DUI.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

New Yorker who recently moved to California here. My impression of my new neighbors is that a lot of them enjoy living the daydream. It’s why they’re here, to experience life in a blissed-out, dreamy (in many cases CBD-enhanced) bubble. Even the ones who seem to have been gifted with good brain matter in a material/genetic sense have their thought processes switched to Off. It’s quite bizarre to me how checked out of reality they are. Reality’s the enemy! Take it away!!!

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight on KNYO and KAKX!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. Or if that's too soon, send it later or any time during the week and I'll read it on the radio next time. That's what I'm here for.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:

American History Comics. https://boingboing.net/2025/01/15/tom-the-dancing-bug-the-fourth-branch-of-the-united-states-government-dumbass-billionaires.html

About the It's A Good Life episode of Twilight Zone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m03tMsNTyhE

And how the blind cook. https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/01/how-blind-cook.html

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

RAISED IN BOONVILLE

S.F.’s Public Health Chief Steps Down As New Mayor Daniel Lurie Reshapes City Hall

by J.D. Morris

Dr. Grant Colfax, the San Francisco public health director who helped steer the city’s response to COVID-19 and the fentanyl epidemic, is resigning after almost six years on the job.

Colfax is the second city department head to step down since Mayor Daniel Lurie was elected in November and the first to do so since Lurie took office last week. Jeffrey Tumlin announced his departure as head of the Municipal Transportation Agency in December. Lurie also recently named a new fire chief.

A longtime leader in HIV research and care, Colfax was named by former Mayor London Breed to run the Department of Public Health in 2019. The following year, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, upending the city as Colfax and Breed told residents to stay home to stop the spread of what was then a novel virus.

While San Francisco was praised for its early pandemic response, the city was simultaneously hit with another public health crisis as fentanyl use exploded among local drug users. In 2020 and 2021, about twice as many people in San Francisco died from drug overdoses than COVID-19, with fentanyl accounting for a majority of the deaths. Colfax was at the center of the city’s public health response to both COVID-19 and fentanyl, winning praise for his work to contain the virus and expand substance use treatment services.

In a statement announcing Colfax’s exit on Thursday, Lurie heralded him as someone who “contributed to saving lives of San Franciscans during one of our city’s most challenging times.”

“His dedication and work to the health and wellbeing of our city’s communities is remarkable,” Lurie said. “His leadership has enabled … our recovery, and I thank him for his service to our city.”

However, the health department under Colfax also came under scrutiny from some who argued it too heavily favored a harm reduction approach to the drug crisis over abstinence-based programs or other approaches to treating addiction. Breed said last year, “Harm reduction, from my perspective, is not reducing the harm.”

The health department said Colfax’s last day leading the massive city agency will be Feb. 7. Dr. Naveena Bobba, a deputy director in the department, will become acting director after Colfax leaves. Lurie will appoint Colfax’s replacement after considering nominees forwarded by the city’s Health Commission.

Colfax began his career with the city as a medical intern at San Francisco General Hospital in 1993. After completing his medical training, he got a job conducting HIV research for the city’s AIDS office in 1998, an area where he became a leading public health expert. In 2012, then-President Barack Obama tapped Colfax to be his national HIV/AIDS adviser.

Colfax said in a statement that, during his tenure, the city health department had “produced results, increased accountability and improved health equity while driving change.” He invoked the fentanyl crisis, COVID-19 and the Mpox outbreak the city also responded to while he was leading its public health efforts.

“We have accomplished much in the past six years, and there is no doubt that the dedicated, hard working and compassionate staff at DPH will continue to deliver for San Francisco,” Colfax said.

Colfax was credited with helping to add 430 beds to treat people struggling with addiction and mental health issues. The department also launched programs to support people seeking treatment for substance use disorder and lobbied the state and federal governments for reforms to make methadone, a synthetic opioid used to treat people struggling with addiction, more readily available.

The health department said in a statement that, on Colfax’s watch, residential treatment admissions for substance use had risen 35% in the past year while the median wait time for a bed had fallen by half. Methadone usage was also up and overdose deaths declined more than 20% last year, the city noted.

Colfax drew on his background in HIV care to help the city distribute more than 55,000 Mpox vaccines during an outbreak that began in 2022. Also, last year, San Francisco recorded its lowest-ever rate of HIV infections.

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi called Colfax “an extraordinary public health leader” in a statement.

“From our city’s COVID response, to saving Laguna Honda hospital, to expanding primary care and treatment for substance use disorders, Dr. Colfax has led with a data driven, community-centered focus that benefits all San Franciscans,” Pelosi said.

DOCTORS AND NURSES SHOULD GET READY FOR MASS DEPORTATIONS

by Danielle Ofri

It was hardly two weeks after the election when a doctor in our clinic received a letter from one of her patients, an undocumented immigrant who feared that Immigration and Customs Enforcement might detain her under a second Trump term.

The patient had diabetes and suffered from rotator cuff tendinitis, which makes reaching backward quite painful. “Is there any possibility you can write a letter,” she asked, “stating that if they handcuff me, can they please handcuff me with my hands in front of me?” She was also panicked about her diabetes. “I am scared that they will not allow me to take any medications in the immigration camps.”

The patient asked that if the doctor needed an in-person visit with her, “may it be scheduled before January?” She would do only virtual visits after Trump took office. “I’m scared I.C.E. will be in train stations and bus stops,” she said.

As a physician, it was hard to read this without feeling sickened. It brought back the tumultuous months of 2017, defined by the first Trump administration’s travel bans and vitriol against immigrants. So many of our patients were terrified by the rhetoric; anxiety levels and blood pressure skyrocketed. But what seemed like an electoral aberration now feels like an American retrenchment. Tom Homan, tapped to become the so-called border czar, has promised “shock and awe” on Day 1.

To be sure, every presidential administration for the past 30 years has deported undocumented immigrants, though mostly at or near the border. What feels different about this upcoming term — and why medical professionals will need to play a more active role in protecting their patients — is the scope. The specter of mass and potentially indiscriminate roundups feels more akin to the shameful internment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens during World War II.

Historically, health care workers have not always risen to the occasion when our patients have been targeted. Our recent history is tarnished by failures to report abuses or intervene at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, as well as by forced sterilizations of prisoners, women of color and people with disabilities.

But patient advocacy is integral to health care. Medical professionals constantly battle insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers to get our patients’ medical treatments covered. We tussle with our own institutions to expedite CT scans and medical appointments. We write advocacy letters for things like walkers and dental clearance and problems with bathroom mold and jury duty. But in this upcoming era we may have to face off against our own federal government.

From a medical perspective — as our patient’s letter poignantly illustrates — no law even needs to go into effect for harm to be done; fear alone can keep patients from seeking care. The only safe option this patient can imagine is to hole up at home.

Even if policies are directed, for example, only toward immigrants with a criminal record, the effects could be far-reaching. A study in the journal Health Affairs found that after episodes of increased deportations by I.C.E. there was a noticeable drop in primary care checkups for Hispanic patients as a whole, regardless of immigration status. (Non-Hispanic patients did not register any decrease.) Other data suggest that increased I.C.E. activity is associated with a drop in Medicaid enrollment for children who were eligible.

Frightening people away from medical care is a sure way to increase expenses when controllable conditions such as diabetes explode into medical emergencies. It also has the potential to kindle outbreaks of infectious diseases. As Covid surely taught us, our health is intimately intertwined with our community’s. Managing emerging infections such as bird flu as well as stalwarts like tuberculosis, syphilis and measles will be hampered if people are too afraid to seek medical care.

Health care workers have an obligation to help protect our patients, reassuring them that our primary duty is to them and their health. Simple actions, such as posting signage indicating all patients are welcome, can help. We can reiterate that exam-room conversations are confidential and that privacy laws protect information in the medical record, including identifying details. As a practical matter, we should avoid commenting on our patients’ immigration status in our notes, in case such laws are changed.

If patients feel uncomfortable coming to our facilities, we can offer telehealth options. When in-person care is necessary, appointments and tests should be consolidated into a single day to minimize travel. If our patients are admitted to the hospital, we should inform them of their right to decline being listed in the hospital registry.

Medical personnel can also decline to participate in immigration enforcement, such as the recent Texas executive order requiring hospitals to ask patients about immigration status. Even before the question is asked, explicitly informing patients that they are not required to answer it can be an effective way of defanging such tactics. We must insist that medical facilities and their immediate surroundings continue to be treated as “sensitive areas” like schools and houses of worship, and remain off limits to I.C.E. No one should be arrested or deported while obtaining medical treatment.

As a profession, we should not be afraid to publicly oppose government policy. Doctors who feel hesitant about stepping in the fray should remember that the American Medical Association’s code of ethics charges us with a “responsibility to seek changes in those requirements which are contrary to the best interests of the patient.” The nursing code of ethics stresses the duty “to protect human rights.”

For every patient who has the courage to reach out to a doctor with their deepest fears, there are many who are too afraid. Medical professionals should reassure all of our patients of our commitment to care for them, no matter the political environment, and be ready to do more than assuage our patients’ fears about which way they might be handcuffed.

(Danielle Ofri, a primary care doctor at Bellevue Hospital, is the author of “When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error.”)

LA/GAZA NUMBERS

Number of destroyed or severely damaged buildings in LA (so far): 20,000

Population of LA County: 10 million

Number of destroyed or severely damaged buildings in Gaza (so far): 80,000

Population of Gaza: 2.1 million.

— CounterPunch

EMPTY HYDRANTS

Editor:

So, the governor is calling for an investigation into the water supply in Los Angeles. As a retired fire chief, I could save him the trouble: 10,000 severed water supply connections to burned-out structures free-flowing into the street at a conservative flow rate of 10 gallons a minute is 100,000 gallons lost from the system per minute. No system could successfully provide an adequate firefighting water supply with that big of a leak.

The only city in California that learned from a disaster like this is San Francisco. While rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake, they installed a dedicated water system for firefighting use only. That system protects the city today.

This disaster in Los Angeles could be an opportunity to install a system like that in the really fire-prone areas and get federal money to help pay for it, but they won’t. They will spend money on an investigation that makes the governor look like he is doing something. Someone has to run for president in 2028.

Frank Treanor

Windsor

I LOST MY HOME IN A CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE. HERE’S WHAT I WISH OTHERS KNEW

by Jess Lander

In the early hours of Sept. 27, 2020, I was jolted awake by a neighbor in Napa Valley knocking frantically at my door, yelling, “Fire!” I ran to our back deck and discovered a bright-orange plume of smoke and flames in frighteningly close range.

We had a few minutes to grab the cat, some essentials and precious items before evacuating to my in-laws’, who only three years before lost everything in another Napa Valley fire. Two days later we received the news we were expecting, but dreading: The house had been reduced to rubble.

The months that followed are largely a blur, but what I’ll never forget is how so many people — family, friends, strangers and community members — came to our aid. Generosity took many forms; it was kind messages, money, clothing donations, homemade quilts and home-cooked meals. Acquaintances put us up in their homes as we searched for permanent housing in a constricted market. For the first year after the fire, friends were our landlords.

Yet there’s an inconvenient truth about that generosity that, at the risk of sounding ungrateful (I’m not), I feel compelled to share in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles fires. As people look for ways to help displaced loved ones, they should know that some gestures are more helpful than others. Some, though well-intentioned, can even cause more strain.

Here are five things you can do to make the most impact.

Don’t Ask, Just Do.

It’s natural to ask, “What can I do to help?” However, the problem with this phrasing is that it adds to the victim’s mental load by essentially asking them to assign you a task. Moreover, many people like myself don’t feel comfortable asking for help, even when they truly need it. So instead of asking how you can help, or what they need, just do something.

It can be simple. Some friends and family sent cash via Venmo, mailed gift cards or delivered baked goods. One close friend set up a GoFundMe; it’s something I was reluctant to do myself, but that was extremely helpful in our recovery. Think beyond essential needs, too. I was desperate for distractions from my new reality that made me feel normal. Send a gift card to their favorite restaurant, book them a spa day or, if you have the means, buy them a plane ticket to visit you. For me, a long weekend in Joshua Tree with two girlfriends was the best medicine.

Send Food.

The first few weeks after the fire were like being first-time parents to a newborn. Your emotions are all over the place, you’re hardly sleeping and all forms of self-care, including basic needs, fall to the bottom of the priority list. Figuring out what to eat each day felt like a herculean task my brain didn’t have the capacity for. Plus, we didn’t always have access to a full kitchen to cook something.

Reach out and arrange to drop a home-cooked meal, enough for leftovers if they have a full-sized fridge. If you’re far away, send a DoorDash gift card or schedule a delivery order from a restaurant they love. Even better, create a MealTrain, a platform that enables family and friends to sign up to provide meals on specific days.

Hold Onto Your Goodwill Bags.

One of my greatest needs after the fire was clothes, but I was quickly overwhelmed by giant bags of donations from friends, and even people I barely knew. It took hours to sort through the used clothes, most of which didn’t quite fit or weren’t really my style. I ended up having to take several trips to Goodwill.

Be more selective with your leftovers. Choose a couple of seasonally appropriate items in good condition that you’re pretty sure they’ll like and will fit. Or, invite them over to try clothes on at your place. Ultimately, new is better. The best thing someone did was take me on a shopping trip to Target.

Be Careful What You Say.

People always meant well, but some sentiments shared felt incredibly out of touch and even made me angry. Please don’t tell fire victims that they are “lucky” — lucky to be safe, lucky to have saved some belongings or lucky that while their home is unlivable, it didn’t burn to the ground. Trust me: They are immensely grateful to have made it out, but they also don’t necessarily feel lucky. Statements like that diminish their grief.

Don’t say “Everything is replaceable” either. Family photos and videos that haven’t been digitized are not replaceable, nor are family heirlooms, antiques, handwritten love letters, wedding dresses or anything that has sentimental value attached to it. Similarly, don’t say, “At least you have insurance,” because the payout likely won’t cover everything and it can’t bring back the irreplaceable. Lastly, if the person is not particularly religious, avoid telling them that “Everything happens for a reason” or that the fire was “part of God’s plan.”

Continue To Check In.

In a few weeks, the country’s attention will move elsewhere, to another climate disaster, scandal or other tragic event. But it will be months — and, more likely, years — before the Los Angeles fire victims feel resettled. Check in often and continue to do so in the months ahead. (We’re all busy, so set a calendar reminder if it helps.) It’s important to recognize that while the world has moved on, they’re still very much navigating tremendous loss, physically and emotionally. If you don’t know what else to say, a quick text that reads, “Thinking of you,” is enough.

(SF Chronicle)

STATE FARM’S FINANCES WERE A WORRY EVEN BEFORE L.A. FIRES. WHAT ABOUT ITS ABILITY TO PAY CLAIMS GOING FORWARD?

by Megan Fan Munce

Months before the Los Angeles wildfires sparked, State Farm’s California arm was already in trouble, it told state regulators.

Its policyholder surplus — the cash it has on hand to pay out claims — had dropped from more than $4 billion in 2016 down to just $1.3 billion as of the end of 2023. It reported a net loss of $880 million in 2023. Company leaders, and regulators in its parent company’s home state of Illinois, were worried that California’s largest home insurer could be on the road toward insolvency.

Then last week's wildfires consumed thousands of expensive homes in neighborhoods where State Farm insured up to 30% of the total number of residential policies. Conservative estimates have put the insured losses from the fires, for all carriers, at around $20 billion.

On its face, the math seems concerning. Experts say between the company’s reserves and its own insurance, known as reinsurance, State Farm General — the name for the California subsidiary of the national insurer — should have enough to make sure all of its customers are made whole. But there’s an open question of how the event could impact the insurer’s future actions, given that it already hasn’t offered new policies in California for over a year and is in the process of non-renewing tens of thousands of customers statewide.

State Farm, for its part, has given no indication that it’s worried about its ability to handle claims from the fires or is contemplating a further pullback from the California market.

As of Thursday morning, State Farm has received more than 7,850 home and auto claims totaling more than $50 million, according to the company. In a Wednesday interview with the Chronicle, spokesperson Sevag Sarkissian said the insurer was anticipating more claims coming in as residents return to their properties. Sarkissian did not comment directly on the company’s financial state, but said, “We’re built for this.”

“We are prepared to respond to these needs and to pay what we owe under the policy. We’re here putting money back into the hands of our customers, and we’re going to continue to be there for them all the way through the recovery,” Sarkissian said.

State Farm — the largest insurance company in the U.S. as well as in California — has the biggest claims force in the insurance industry, Sarkissian said, and the company has set up customer care sites in Los Angeles and Pasadena to help survivors with questions and claims advice.

On Wednesday, the company also announced it would voluntarily comply with California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s request for insurance companies to rescind pending nonrenewal notices for all of its homeowners in Los Angeles County. Records show the company initially planned to nonrenew about 3,747 policies in the ZIP codes in the fire perimeters, as well as thousands more elsewhere in the county; it’s unclear how many of those nonrenewals went through before the fires. State Farm is the first company to make such a commitment, according to Michael Soller, deputy insurance commissioner with the Department of Insurance.

Soller said the department is actively monitoring the financial condition of all insurers at the moment, including State Farm and the California FAIR Plan — which also has thousands of policies in the fire zone — and is working to gather data about each insurer’s potential exposure to fire losses.

For the most part, California home insurance companies are financially strong. Just two major companies have put a hard stop on writing new policies — State Farm and Allstate. And all but four companies in the state have an A- rating or higher with AM Best, a global credit rating agency specializing in insurance companies.

Of those four companies, the only major insurer is State Farm General, a State Farm subsidiary that only operates in California offering home and other property insurance. Its AM Best rating was downgraded to a B+ last March, though it still has an AA from another rating agency, Standard & Poor’s.

State Farm General was split off from its national parent company, State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, in the 1990s. The separation means the company’s California losses are confined within the company itself.

So, when State Farm General’s surplus continued to decline, it did not turn to its wealthy parent company, but rather to its policyholders.

In June, State Farm General submitted requests to the Department of Insurance to raise rates for its homeowners by 30%, condo owners by 36% and home renters by 52%. Its request makes use of a specific, and rare, piece of insurance code that allows insurance companies to raise rates more than typically allowed by the state, in order to prevent possible insolvency. No other insurer has made such a request in recent years.

At the time, Lara said that State Farm’s request raised “serious questions about its financial condition.”

The request is still pending, and filing records show the department has submitted several requests for more information. The company has provided additional details but has been hesitant to disclose its reinsurance agreement with its parent company, writing that such agreements are “confidential and (a) trade secret.”

State Farm has faced criticism from the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog for its reinsurance contracts. Last November, the group accused State Farm Mutual of overcharging State Farm General for reinsurance in order to funnel profits out of California.

State Farm General refuted the allegations, writing in a statement that it purchases some of its reinsurance from its parent company due to a lack of other reinsurers willing to take on the risk. The contracts governing that agreement are reviewed for fairness and legal compliance by the Illinois Department of Insurance, it wrote.

Depending on its losses, the Los Angeles wildfires could force State Farm General to tap into that reinsurance. But it’s also possible that its parent company could step in in another way — to reinject capital into its struggling subsidiary.

Experts are divided on how likely that is.

Such a move would require approval from regulators in Illinois. In its filings with the state, State Farm General wrote that the solvency of each State Farm subsidiary is managed separately and that funds are “not freely transferable” between different affiliate companies.

“That’s not the way it works,” said Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, an industry group. “State Farm General Insurance Company is a standalone company that insures California, and they have the capital that they have.”

Others, including Amy Bach, executive director of the consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, said it’s simply unfathomable to think that State Farm would let itself go insolvent in California, one of the largest insurance markets in the world.

“It’s time for the parent company to step in,” said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog. “State Farm policyholders should expect their claims to be paid. That’s the promise of that reinsurance contract.”

If State Farm General were to truly go insolvent, policyholders would still get their claims paid through a mechanism through which other insurance companies would step in to pay what State Farm could not. That would cause cascading effects on prices and potentially availability throughout the industry.

There’s another option: State Farm Mutual might make sure its subsidiary has enough money to pay out its claims by itself, but may not give it the money to keep going beyond that, said David Russell, a professor of insurance at CSU Northridge.

In its filings with the Department of Insurance, State Farm has been reluctant to offer any signs of when it might begin offering new policies again. But it also hasn’t made any indication that it would take additional action such as further reducing coverage in the California market.

The company said Thursday, “Our focus is on continuing to meet our customers’ needs and working closely with the State of California to create a sustainable insurance market. This is an evolving situation, and our focus remains on our customers.”

None of the experts interviewed by the Chronicle felt State Farm was at immediate risk of insolvency due to the Los Angeles wildfires. But the question moving forward is not just how the company will weather these fires, but how it will weather future winter storms and fires, Russell said.

There are various ways State Farm, or any insurer, could respond to large fire losses, Russell said. The company could cut back on the number of policies it writes. It could ask to raise rates for existing customers — perhaps even beyond what it is already seeking to do. It could also nonrenew customers in high risk areas not under current moratoriums. It could do a combination of the three, as many insurance companies have in the past few years.

“They’ve got some choices they’re going to need to make,” Russell said.

(SF Chronicle)

BEZOS' WORTH

by Basho Parks

When the worth of the second wealthiest human on the planet matches the worth of one winter wildfire month’s extraordinary damages, we need to talk.

2025 Los Angeles County wildfires with projected damages hitting a jaw-dropping $300 billion are an eye-opener to how unprepared our systems are for the realities of a changing landscape and consolidation of wealth.

Put into better perspective, the estimated damage is equivalent to the net worth of Jeff Bezos right now. The sheer scale of the destruction in lost homes or charred landscapes is the beginning of this conversation regarding the incredibly fragile foundations of our economy and society at present. Insurance companies like State Farm, already retreating from high-risk markets since 2021 are now on the brink. And make no mistake: when they collapse under the weight of these claims, it won’t just be us California homeowners caught holding the bag. The ripple effect could destabilize local economies, disrupt entire industries, and force the federal government into yet another bailout for a private sector that has failed to evolve with the times.

If that happens, we need to take a hard look at how we got here and what a federal intervention really means. A bailout can’t just prop up a broken system; it has to be tied to real reform. We can’t keep insuring and rebuilding in the same fire-prone areas without addressing the underlying risks. This is about more than money—it’s about responsibility. Developers shouldn’t be allowed to build in high-risk zones without implementing fire-resilient designs. Insurers must factor in mitigation efforts when pricing policies, rewarding those who take proactive steps to protect their homes and communities. A federal bailout without accountability is just kicking the can down the road, and the road’s already on fire. It’s time we demand systemic changes that put people ahead of profits.

The question is, do we let this crisis deepen our dependency on unsustainable practices, or do we seize it as a chance to build something better? Maybe it’s time to consider bold alternatives, like a federally managed public insurance option for natural disasters – something designed to balance immediate relief with long-term resilience. And beyond that, let’s keep beefing up investment in wildfire prevention, community hardening, and ecological restoration. These aren’t luxuries anymore; they’re necessities for societal survival in a forced oasis that was a desert 150 years ago. The price of inaction’s been written in the ash and the smoke of Los Angeles County right now. If $300 billion doesn’t wake us up, what will? Let’s stop treating disasters like surprises and start treating them like opportunities to rewrite the rules.

A NEIGHBORHOOD’S DEATH FORETOLD

by Stephen F. Eisenman

Remembrance of things lost

News about the fire arrived in fragments. First, that the blaze in Eaton Canyon was spreading rapidly, then that a few homes in the foothills were consumed, then whole neighborhoods, including my former one on the southern perimeter of the Angeles Crest National Forest. The house I owned on Jaxine Drive, designed in 1959 by Randell Makinson, burned to the ground. The loss to the current occupant is obviously much greater than mine. I hope that she finds solace in the love of family and friends, and that she may rebuild if she chooses.

I haven’t lived in Altadena for more than 25 years, and most of my friends from there have also moved on. But the place still figures large in my memory. It was there that the sweetness of life in Southern California was revealed. Of course, the distance of time and space enhances flavors, so there may be some unintentional exaggeration in what follows.

Life in Altadena felt easy — il dolce far niento. My (former) wife Mary and I entertained friends – mainly artists and academics — on the redwood deck of our house, beneath the shade of a 400-year-old oak tree. About 200 yards up the road lived Bill (a lighting and set designer) and Joyce (a sculptor). They often invited us over to use their pool or for a barbecue. Their rambling house, cluttered with Mexican artesanias and other folk art, was often filled with the music of the Grateful Dead – Bill was a dedicated Deadhead. Their little boy Matt liked to play with our daughter Sarah, and because there was almost no traffic on our cul-de-sac, they could walk up or down without supervision.

Our neighborhood was in a shallow canyon that contained no more than about 30 houses. Updated fire regulations banned any new building in the area. We were surrounded on three sides by mountains and the national forest. The word “forest” gives a misimpression. Most of the terrain was chaparral with occasional oak thickets and pine woods. Its predominant color was not green but the tan of decomposed granite. That changed in the late winter and spring – assuming the rains came – when there was green everywhere. But much of the verdure was foxtail, a tall grass annual that when it ripens, sheds barbed seeds that stick to shoes and socks and can get lodged in the noses of dogs. (Foxtail actually describes several, similar species of grass.) In the summer and autumn, it goes from green to brown — and can easily catch fire. When it does, it races up and down hills like a lit fuse, sparking other flammable material.

From my front door, I’d could jog about 500 yards to reach a steep trail that led up into the National Forest, then down another trail to Millard Canyon campgrounds, and then up along a fire road, and down again toward Arroyo Seco Park and the Rose Bowl. But that would be about 10 miles and too far for me to run. So, I usually turned around at the top of the fire road or else took an entirely different route into the mountains, up a steep trail toward Echo Mountain, the site of the former Mt. Lowe tramway. The Alpine Tavern and other facilities at the top, including the funicular itself, were destroyed by fire and the Great Depression. But the view from up there is terrific – you can see the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island.

Along the trails in the spring were yellow/orange monkey flowers, white Matilija poppies, purple lupins, yellow tower mustard, purple nightshade, and blue California lilacs. Sometimes I bent down to snack on the abundant miner’s lettuce. In rainy years, small streams crossed the paths in several places, requiring me to leap to clear them. Still, today, when I want to fall asleep, I imagine myself bounding down the eroded trails, springing from rock to rock, and over streams without fear of falling. I still run, but it’s mostly flat here in Norfolk and muddy – in any case, my days of bounding are over.

During my decade in Altadena, I taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles, about eight miles away. It was a good job – excellent colleagues, a diverse and energetic student body, and a handsome campus, mostly designed in the 1920s by Myron Hunt. But the absence of graduate students was frustrating – one could teach up to a certain level, and no higher. Plus, I had to do all my own grading. While running down steep trails remains a recurring dream, slogging through hundreds of “bluebooks” (a blue-covered paper book used for answering test questions) is a recurring nightmare. Nevertheless, it was with regret that I left Oxy in 1998 for a position at Northwestern University. They hired Mary too, in the Department of Anthropology – the offer was too good to refuse.

In the decades that followed, successive writing and research projects brought me back to Altadena, and to the city of Pasadena, its larger, wealthier neighbor. My friends Peter (a brilliant studio musician) and Irmi (a manager at the Goethe Institute) offered me use of their guest cottage, just a block from my old house. And even when my gigs in Pasadena ended, I kept coming back — for the last decade and a half with my wife, Harriet. She’s less keen on Los Angeles than I am, but Altadena and Pasadena always pleased her. She enjoyed the sight of the mountains looming above both communities (snowcapped in the winter), the historic Craftsman and mid-century architecture, the museums, and especially the hikes in the forest, including Millard and Eaton canyons.

There were portents of disaster. In 1993, the Kinneloa fire burned the slopes of Eaton Canyon and a few dozen homes. We could see the smoke from our house and the leaping flames from Bill and Joyce’s. At one point, Bill climbed up on his roof with a garden hose to extinguish any cinders that landed. I thought he was crazy. “The biggest risk for you is falling off the roof,” I shouted. Between the sound of branches jostled by Santa Ana winds, and the steams of water, I don’t think he heard me. Mary and I (Sarah wasn’t yet in the picture) retreated to our house, packed a few essentials, including a favorite etching by Goya, and drove off to spend a couple of days in a motel by the beach in Santa Monica. Our homes were all spared.

The neighborhood generally practiced good fire hygiene. We planted xerophytic gardens, scrupulously raked leaves in fire season, and plowed under fields covered with foxglove. (The county did this for a fee.) For several years, Bill and Joyce kept a pair of goats to munch the grasses on slopes that couldn’t be reached by their bush-hog. We all knew, however, that grazing animals weren’t the solution. If a big fire arrived, our mostly wooden, mid-century houses would go up like matchboxes.

Altadena History, In Brief

It’s a silly name, a real estate promoter’s name. Alta in Spanish is the feminine form of “tall”. “Dena” signifies nothing. Put together, they were supposed to mean “above Pasadena.” Pasadena is an Ojibwe word meaning “valley”. The Ojibway tribe flourished 3,000 miles away in the Great Lakes region, and Pasadena is not a valley. But what’s in a name when there is money to be made? By the 1880s, a group of real estate entrepreneurs, including John and Frederick Woodbury, had bought up a huge tract of agricultural land and enticed some rich businessmen from the East and Midwest to plant stakes. Among them was the Chicago printing mogul Andrew McNally. His stately Queen Anne on East Mariposa Street was constructed in 1887. It burned down last week. So did the Arts and Crafts style Scripps Mansion built in 1904 for the newspaper magnate William Armiger Scripps. (For decades, it’s been used as a Waldorf School.) The 1907 Woodward home designed by Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey — a little later the residence of the popular writer of American westerns, Zane Gray — also burned.

The 1920s was a major period of residential building in Altadena, especially low-cost craftsman and Spanish revival bungalows. The developer and con man E.P. Janes built several hundred cheap houses in a mashed-up craftsman, Spanish, Tudor and Queen-Anne style. They generally had tall gables, arched doorways, trowel-swept stucco walls, cement terraces, and dormer windows. In 1926, he left town in a hurry, leaving behind several hundred unfinished (but paid-for) houses and a pile of debt. The houses were eventually finished, and “Janes Village” became a sought-after Altadena address. Last week, dozens of these houses were destroyed by fire.

In Northwest Altadena, fire damage was equally significant, consuming hundreds of homes, schools and churches, including the United Methodist Church. The fact that its congregation is primarily Black, tells another significant story about Altadena. Because it was unincorporated, the community lay outside the redlined zone established by the Federal Home Owners’ Loan Association during the New Deal. (De jure segregation was not only a Southern thing.) Nevertheless, Altadena’s Black population remained small until the 1960s and ‘70s. That’s when fair housing laws spurred white flight in both west Altadena and adjacent parts of Pasadena. The non-white population surged again a decade later with the completion of the 210 (Foothill) freeway. It destroyed or divided several, primarily Black neighborhoods of Pasadena, with many of the 3,000 displaced folks moving a half-mile north to Altadena. The Black population surged to 43% by the mid-1980s, about the time we arrived. Today, its 18%.

Overall, 58% of residents in Altadena are people of color, including 27% Latino. The Eaton fire destroyed homes that, in some cases, had been passed down for two or more generations. It also eliminated hundreds of affordable apartment rentals in a region with a severe shortage of them. But with home prices in Altadena now averaging about $1.5 million, it’s unclear whether a new generation of middle-class property owners or lower-income renters will ever again be able to move there. With little new home building and an unregulated rental market, Altadena was rapidly gentrifying. The fires will only hasten the process – the vultures of disaster capitalism have already alighted.

Why Altadena Burned

The fires in Southern California, including the Eaton fire, began as forest wildfires and quickly spread into what’s called the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI) – the potentially hazardous zone where homes or other structures abut or mix with undeveloped wildland. Contrary to suggestions that fire victims bear some responsibility for their predicament by choosing to live in the WUI, residents of Los Angeles are less likely to live in a WUI than people elsewhere in the country. In California, about a third of the population (over 11 million people) live in the WUI, consistent with the national figure. In Los Angeles, the number is about 15%. While significant parts of Altadena (as well as Pacific Palisades and Malibu) do abut or reach into the WUI, the real cause of the disaster was dryness, heat, and strong, Santa Ana winds, all exacerbated by climate change. The failure of emergency responders is another factor. There were simply too few of them, and when Altadena burned, they were nowhere to be found.

2024 was globally the hottest year on record. Los Angeles experienced its warmest summer ever, following a decade of record heat. To make matters worse, a succession of stationary high-pressure systems prevented the arrival of seasonal rains. New research indicates this may be the consequence of record-high ocean temperatures disrupting or blocking the usual path of the jet stream. The same kind of perturbation may have been the cause of the excessive heat and drought that brought brush fires last year to parts of New York City. In addition, “hydroclimate whiplash” – large, sudden or frequent changes from very dry to very wet conditions – appear to be an additional consequence of global warming. Los Angeles was subject to two years of drenching “atmospheric rivers”, followed this year by drought – just four millimeters of rain have fallen this season. In California, 17 of the largest 20 fires in state history occurred in the past 18 years, with 5 of the 6 largest coming since August 2020, not including the Palisades, Malibu, and Eaton conflagrations. The recent fires may prove to be the most damaging and costly in U.S. history. Estimates are approaching $200 billion.

In addition to global warming, poor land and fire management practices have also contributed to the extent and severity of the destruction. There is considerable debate about this, but otherwise intelligent writers, including David Wallace-Wells, offer too easy and often mistaken formulas for fire prevention. Historically, the U.S. Forest Service employed fire suppression for all wildfires, including those that don’t threaten people or structures. This led to artificially high fuel loads and fires of much higher intensity than otherwise. In recent years, the Forest Service reversed course and began to use prescribed burns in areas with a more than-average fuel load. Then this year, it stopped its program of burning in California for budgetary reasons.

The best research (contra Wallace-Wells) indicates that most woodlands should simply be left alone to burn or not burn, except for areas immediately contiguous to homes. Logging and grazing in forested lands – often proposed as a means to reduce fire risk – actually increases it. The former by removing larger and more valuable trees that resist fires, and the latter by removing native grasses that burn slowly, while promoting the growth of invasive grasses – like foxtail — that burn faster and hotter. In addition, thinning forests tends to increase wind speed in woodlands, fanning any flames that erupt and carrying embers further than otherwise. Also, the fuel load in burned forests is quickly replenished, meaning that burns need to be repeated on a massive scale, and with few evident benefits. The forests surrounding Altadena (mostly chaparral) have had multiple fires in recent years – they did little, if anything, to prevent the latest blaze. More frequent burns, as George Wuerthner recently observed, would only destroy the chaparral ecology, making space for invasive species with even greater flammability. More important than prescribed burns is fortifying individual homes and neighborhoods against the flying embers from inevitable fires.

Wildfires ignite homes in three possible ways: embers, heat, and flames. Embers are the most common. Depending on the type of fuel and wind speed, embers can travel upwards of 20 kilometers, igniting new spot fires far from the original flame front. Under conditions of high wind, fuel breaks – highways, rivers, ditches, prescribed burn areas — are useless. Embers fall in a blizzard and quickly accumulate on structures or infiltrate homes through windows, vents, or other gaps. They may also inflame vegetation or other fuels around a home. Doorbell videos from Altadena show wind-blown embers raining down on houses and businesses and quickly igniting them. Once a structure starts to burn, its heat may suffice to ignite buildings within the approximately 30-meter home ignition zone. Contact with direct flame of course, whether from vegetation, piles of firewood, fences, cars, or other structures, spreads fires even more rapidly. Once a single house goes up in flames, the one next to it will go, and so on until fuel sources are exhausted, fire engines arrive, or it starts to rain.

If there had been fire trucks on the scene, many of the fires in Altadena could easily have been extinguished. Stories of homes saved by people with garden hoses prove the point. (Doing so, however, can be deadly.) As one eyewitness and videographer reported, “there were no fire personnel anywhere.” On Jan 14, The New York Times reported:

“Carlos Herrera, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department,…said that by the time the Eaton fire had broken out on Tuesday, all resources were already dedicated to the raging Palisades fire across town.”

If confirmed by further investigation, the fires in Altadena – an unincorporated community of 40,000 that is nearly 60% non-white – may have been a victim of environmental racism as well as climate change and bad luck. The irony is that the wealthier and whiter residents of Pacific Palisades fared no better. They may, however, better afford to rebuild.

It’s possible to protect homes in the WUI better than currently. In addition to having well-supported fire services, local and state governments can mandate (and support with grants where appropriate) defensible zones around properties. This entails separating houses from vegetation and any flammable attachments, such as decks and fences. Home and apartment owners should also use structural elements that are fire-resistant. Windows that are not outfitted for wildfire conditions – for example vinyl — can easily melt, break, or ignite if exposed to radiant heat, flames, or ember buildup. Roofs are one of the most vulnerable parts of a home. While any roofing material can be treated to make it fire resistant, metal or tile roofs are best, however, testing has found that the latter (common in Southern California) are vulnerable to ignition from showers of embers due to spaces between the tiles. (Homeowners can install rooftop sprinkler systems.) Vents are also common entry point for embers to flow into a home. Noncombustible mesh coverings can help slow down penetration. The exterior siding of a home, though less important than other structural features for wildfire resilience, is sometimes the weak link. Noncombustible or ignition-resistant materials such as metal, adobe, or fiber cement should be used if a house is located in a vulnerable WUI or within 30 feet of another house or combustible vegetation. There are many other ways to make homes safer, but zoning, construction, and insurance regulations have not kept up with the increased level of fire risk due to climate change.

The Future In The Past – Gregory Ain’s Park Planned Homes

Because I’m especially interested in art, architecture and design, I’ve been struck by the destruction of so many fine buildings in Altadena. I mentioned some earlier. Here’s another loss, the remembrance of which could offer a guide to Altadena’s successful rebuilding: Park Planned homes by Gregory Ain and landscape architect Garett Eckbo. (21 of 28 Ain houses were destroyed.)

The complex was designed and built in 1947 to solve a problem: How to provide affordable homes to returning, limited income GIs and their families at a time of housing and material shortages. Ain’s solution, developed in Altadena and then a little later in Mar Vista and Silver Lake, entailed use of standardized plans; common finishes, hardware and appliances; easy access to the outside; and privacy sufficient to affirm the American ideology of individualism while still suggesting communalism. Each house was about 1350 sf, (considered generous at the time), and contained an open plan with adjacent kitchen, dining and living rooms. A built-in closet/cabinet, separating the living and dining areas, stopped well short of the ceiling to allow the passage of light and air. Three bedrooms are accessed by a corridor.

The houses are symmetrically paired along Highview Avenue, but mirrored, creating a sense of different-but-same. Each has a shared patio/driveway in front (partly divided by a low wall) and a private garden in back; property lines are thereby both denied (in the front) and affirmed (in the back). Neighbors may be either welcomed or not, as determined by circumstance. The building type looks back at once to the formerly ubiquitous L.A. bungalow courts of the 19teens and twenties, and the much larger Siedlungen (collective housing) from the same period, made by Bauhaus architects for the Weimar Republic.

Ain’s project was only partially realized; he originally intended to build twice as many Park Planned Homes. But the fires in Altadena suggest his plans ought to be rescued from the archives and reanimated. Or, more appropriately, new sets of architectural plans developed using modular or pre-fabricated elements that can be assembled in a factory or workshop and quickly assembled on site. They must, of course, be fire resistant. Burned public properties should be made available for the siting of attractive, new housing – a mix of rentals and low-cost owner-occupied units. Ain’s mostly destroyed Park Planned Homes, with their assertion of the value of both community and individuality, can thereby support the rebirth of Altadena as a community of mixed-income and ethnic diversity.

(Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism,” (OR Books). He is also co-founder and Director of Strategy at Anthropocene Alliance. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu. (CounterPunch.org))

GOOD NIGHT DAVID LYNCH (1946 - 2025)

"Some thoughts are just more interesting than others. I’ll have an idea to go get a cup of coffee, for instance. Or for a scene in a film. Or for making a chair. This is why daydreaming is so important to me. All the thoughts just flow."

— David Lynch

REMEMBERING DAVID LYNCH

A Blue Velvet Story: One time in my life I was miserable and depressed in Sheffield, UK, the 80’s. I had no social life except this one person who was bad for me (but to be clear, not bad to me, not abusive) and, whenever there was nothing to to, which was often, he would call me and ask if I wanted to go to Blue Velvet again. It ran in Sheffield’s small arts theater (The “Anvil”) for what must have been a year or so. I cannot count how many times I saw it - and it was always something new each time. One night, during the scene where Dorothy, after being asked why always the same song, replies “I like to sing Blue Velvet”, and I heard “I like to see Blue Velvet”, and I realized I was, um, in the film. This sounds crazy, but there used to be a reddit called David Lynch Saved My Life - check it out. Ten years later, entirely by chance, I ended up living in Wilmington, NC where it was filmed. Some of the extras (the “babysitters/backup dancers” from the candy-colored clown sequence) were still there, as well as the iconic buildings. Yes, this comment is “Lynchian” - isn’t everything?

— M. Bator

I GOT INTO BED, opened the bottle, worked the pillow into a hard knot behind my back, took a deep breath, and sat in the dark looking out of the window. It was the first time I had been alone for five days. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me. I took a drink of wine.

~ Charles Bukowski, Factotum

DECENSORED NEWS

We reconstructed Sam Husseini’s viral confrontation with Antony Blinken by combining footage from multiple sources. This was the culmination of months of State Dept stonewalling.

“Why aren't you in The Hague??”

pic.x.com/QRWQ1xz4Rv

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JOE BIDEN: AN ASSESSMENT

by James Kunstler

Power is the capacity to compel loyalty and obedience, under conditions of duress. Authority is the capacity to inspire loyalty and obedience, under conditions where free will obtains — Aimee Terese

You’re aware, I’m sure, that a lot of people thought “Joe Biden” was being play-acted in the White House over his four years there by a series of look-alike actors. You saw those news items comparing “JB’s” earlobes to the old gaffer who showed up at the podium on a given day. Hmmmmmm… I was not persuaded by any of that. “Joe Biden” has simply been impersonating himself — play-acting the role of “president.” The mystery is how he got there.

You can expect very shortly, probably only a matter of weeks, to see a raft of news stories, soon-to-be big-money books, revealing the utter sustained chaos that churned behind the pathetic, half-animate figure pretending to be “chief executive” of the US government lo these dismal four years past. You will learn who was pulling his strings day-to-day since 1/20/21, probably a gang of 25-year-old, ambitious, Cluster-B staffers too disorganized to even amount to a cabal — but sufficiently united in their mission to destroy the country by any means necessary.

Whose idea was it, anyway, back in the spring of 2020, to retrieve this broken hack from the dumpster of discarded Democratic Party primary candidates and jam him into the role of nominee for president? You’d suspect Barack Obama, of course, since the former president had set-up a war-room across town from the White House during the Trump interregnum, and had openly bragged that he’d love nothing better than to someday kick back in a warm-up suit and phone-in governing orders to a stand-in dummy occupying the oval office.

Except Mr. Obama famously disdained his former veep. The few duties “Joe Biden” had in that role (under poor supervision apparently), he converted into a money-laundering and grift operation — most notoriously his adventures in pre-war Ukraine, where First Son Hunter played bag-man from his seat on the Burisma gas company board. That racket evolved quickly and neatly so that at just about every airport around the world that Air Force Two landed, Hunter and “Joe” were clocking-in fat bribes, supposedly for “influence.” That was the joke, of course, because “Joe Biden” had no influence with his President Obama, who regarded him as an idiot, a bumbling Inspector Clouseau, of whom he famously said, “Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up."

Yet, somehow, the old crook got maneuvered into “winning” the 2020 Super Tuesday multi-primary — abracadabra! Ballot magic! — while some little birdie flew around and persuaded Elizabeth Warren, Mayor Pete, Amy Klobuchar and the rest to drop out. Meanwhile, the Deep State blob had delivered the gift of Covid-19, whatever it was, a lab creation, a seasonal flu, or just a mass of PCR-test fake positives, and Mr. Trump was snookered into lockdowns by the same public health blobsters who engineered the “pandemic” crisis: Fauci, Birx, Francis Collins, Alex Azar, et al., with Bill Gates, Ralph Baric, and Klaus Schwab lurking somewhere in the background.

You can’t overstate the fervency of the Democratic Party in 2020 to eject Mr. Trump from office, considering the threat he represented to all of DC’s business-as-usual — especially after he escaped the perfidious impeachment trap engineered by legal assassins Mary McCord and Norm Eisen. Ergo, The USA slid haplessly into an ethos of grotesque institutional lying and election fraud because, you see, something else had evolved ominously backstage since 2016: the criminal activities of the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and Pentagon (major blob tentacles) in the drawn-out RussiaGate scam. Many people needed to shield themselves from potential prosecution.

“Joe Biden” hit the campaign trail like he was Rutherford B. Hayes, back in the day when candidates for president barely strayed beyond the front porch of their home. To say he hid in his basement was only a slight exaggeration. The few public events his handlers dragged him into attracted the public in embarrassing double-digits. He was already widely suspected of being in clinical dementia. Despite the blob’s best efforts, the content of Hunter’s laptop was already leaking onto the Interwebs, photos of Hunter naked with whores, guns, and drugs, deal memos between shadowy foreigners and Hunter’s Rosemont-Seneca money laundromat. But, of course, the news media buried all that and social media censored it.

And so, more election magic! The blob’s “Big Lie” trope — employed to this day even in the latest cabinet confirmation hearings — was itself the biggest lie, a complete inversion of the truth, which is that the 2020 election was a total and comprehensive fraud. It was an orgy of crime carried out across many states. Those of us who stayed up late the night of November 3-4, 2020, watched the numbers slip-and-slide from one column to the other right in our faces, saw the videos of fake ballots in Fulton County, GA, the shenanigans in Philadelphia, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Mark Zuckerberg had laid nearly half a billion dollars on swing states to switch-out election officials with Democratic Party activists and to fund ballot “harvesting” ops. Yes, you can state with certainty that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen for “Joe Biden.”

The four years of “Joe Biden” term-in-office that followed have induced the most severe disordering of the collective American mind in our history, lost in a fog of perfidious mendacity unmatched in scope by the Civil War, or any other national crisis. “Joe Biden’s” government went to war against the people of this land, at the same time it sold-out our vital national interests to the CCP, the WEF, the WHO, and other parties seeking our nation’s destruction. Four years, we have been forced to swallow absurdities such as unsafe and ineffective vaccines, drag queens in the grade schools, borders wide-open to saboteurs (declared to be “secure”), and a stupid war against Russia that has destroyed the sad-sack nation of Ukraine.

“Joe Biden” has been a disaster and an embarrassment, easily the most damaging character to ever creep onto the US political scene. His one talent was for fakery. Even with sclerosis eating through his brain, he was able to go through the motions of faking it, reading his script off the teleprompter — though he was no longer up to casual questions in a news conference setting. The slime trail of crimes he leaves behind would be easy to follow by law enforcement officials actually interested in crime. He’s likely to pardon himself at the last moment, and pardon a long roster of federal officials who have committed crimes with and behind him. One way or another, they are going to be found out, even if many manage to evade prosecution. But at least we are going to learn a lot more about who was pulling “Joe’s” strings, and exactly what they did, and how — including the trick of making the news media hostage to their crimes.

So, adios, “Joe Biden,” you miserable, treasonous bastard. History will record you as the one president so far who was consciously a villain outright, in true self-knowledge of his own wickedness. You left your country a wreck in every dimension: in national security, national bankruptcy, national pride, and national confidence. Go back to Delaware and sit in the dim light of your room with the curtains drawn so you won’t have to hear about the gruesome discoveries to come of what you left behind. And when the day arrives for your funeral, be advised that it will not be much better than your campaign stop in Darby, PA, in June 2020, when you maundered pointlessly to a nearly empty room… before going out for ice cream with your secret service detail.

EVERYONE HAS THEIR REASONS

by Jan-Wermer Muller

In the run-up to Trump 2.0, the speed with which former opponents of the once and future president are adapting to his re-election and displaying anticipatory obedience has been greater than anyone could have, well, anticipated. Prominent examples include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and congressional Democrats who seem to think that performing bipartisanship by loudly declaring their willingness to work with Trump might somehow be rewarded. But nobody likes to think of themselves as an opportunist; everyone wants to tell themselves (and the world) a story to justify their change of tune. As a character remarks in Jean Renoir’s movie La Règle du jeu – among other things, a profound study of the moral collapse of the French Third Republic – ‘there is something appalling on this earth, which is that everyone has their reasons.’

There are different types of reason for capitulating to Trump, and an excellent guide to the typology is the historian Niall Ferguson. As Pankaj Mishra pointed out many years ago, anyone who wants to understand which way the wind is blowing will find Ferguson’s output, both quick and enormous, very instructive. In 2021, Ferguson described Trump as a ‘demagogue and would-be tyrant’. Last month he was dancing to ‘YMCA’ at Mar-a-Lago. A recent interview with the Times gives some insight into how Ferguson and others have learned to stop worrying and love the Donald.

The storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 is the biggest obstacle to any conversion to a pro-Trump position. Consequently, 6 January cannot have been what it seemed to be at the time (and was later confirmed to have been by Jack Smith’s report for the Justice Department). It was apparently not an insurrection aimed at keeping Trump in power; rather, according to Ferguson, ‘we were all treated to a theatrical event with an amateur cast that really one would be stretching the English language to call a coup or even an attempted coup.’ The relatives of those who died as a result of 6 January might take exception to the word ‘theatrical’; and history shows that amateur action can have serious consequences. The main argument, however, is a well-known GOP talking point: because, in the end, there was a transfer of power, all the efforts to steal the election, even the most violent, can be forgotten or trivialised.

‘With the passage of time,’ Ferguson says, ‘one realises that the episode really belongs, along with the George Floyd riots, in a chapter called the Madness of the Pandemic. The lockdowns created an atmosphere of near collective madness. Things were pretty crazy on both sides.’ Ah, ‘both sides’. In one stroke, the insurrection is explained by an irrational Zeitgeist – everyone was doing it! – and the millions who went out on Black Lives Matter demonstrations are treated as pathological cases: you see, everyone – far left, far right – was stir-crazy after such long confinement.

At the time, Ferguson called 6 January a ‘coup, putsch, autogolpe’. But now he looks back on it as a ‘combination of a genuine belief on [Trump’s] part that the election was stolen and a catastrophic failure of policing that doesn’t look entirely accidental’. Never mind that Trump’s own people – from his attorney general, Bill Barr, downwards – were telling him there was no evidence of voter fraud. What matters is that his belief to the contrary, however baseless, was ‘genuine’. Only the police, not the Trumpists, had agency. And there may have been something else going on ‘that doesn’t look entirely accidental’ (a deniable wink to those who suspect the ‘theatrical event’ might have had directors behind the scenes).

Pleading the genius exception in modern democracies is at least as old as Napoleon. Ferguson isn’t economical in his praise for Trump (‘What doesn’t kill him, makes him stronger’), but the greatest garlands are bestowed on Elon Musk, ‘the great colossal figure of our times … Elon’s ability to see not just around corners, but around galaxies, is truly dumbfounding.’ If someone can see around galaxies, it’s only fair that they should also see into all institutions of the state, in the name of achieving more ‘government efficiency’ – without petty concerns about conflicts of interest or old-fashioned worries about the accountability of unelected actors (‘unelected bureaucrats’ are a problem; unelected entrepreneurs are genius).

As Musk well knows, ‘free speech’ justifies everything, including taking free speech away from other people. Zuckerberg, in his genuflection speech, said he’s going to ‘get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse’. He described the election as a ‘cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech’. Ferguson agrees, saying that ‘peak woke’ is ‘in the rear-view mirror generally’. Never mind that the margin was close, or that Trump didn’t win more than 50 per cent of the popular vote, or that many of those who voted for him were most concerned about inflation (which has not only come down without Trump’s help, but mysteriously dropped out of ‘mainstream discourse’ too).

Referring back to the presidential election – whose meaning is not objective beyond giving us one winner and one loser – does extra work in quelling any remaining worries about the assault on the US Capitol. ‘The American electorate was collectively smarter than I was,’ Ferguson says, ‘in seeing that 6 January was not quite the earth-shattering event that was presented.’ Vox populi vox justitiae. But citizens, for better or for worse, take cues from elites. And right-wing elites, from senators to Supreme Court justices (not to mention propaganda channels), told people that 6 January hadn’t been a big deal. Voters can be forgiven for thinking that if he really were a would-be tyrant, surely someone would have done something to keep him off the ballot.

‘I’m convinced that whatever impulses he has or has had in the past,’ Ferguson says, ‘the system can contain them as it was designed to.’ Maybe. But it’s a fact that aspiring autocrats are much more dangerous the second time they come to power. They certainly don’t like that the system ‘contained their impulses’ the first time. They will have new people, new ideas – about destroying the ‘deep state’, for instance – and perhaps also new impulses. And, as many historians and social scientists have been saying, the norms and institutions of ‘the system’ are not self-reinforcing. It takes people to do the inconvenient, unpleasant, perhaps outright dangerous work of containment.

Simple folks may think that Trump is ignorant, prejudiced, an agent of chaos etc. Smart observers see method in the madness. The ‘madman theory’, a term supposedly coined by Richard Nixon, really is a thing in the study of international relations: if you come across as unpredictable, or outright irrational, your foreign adversaries will treat you with caution or make concessions (whereas people on the inside also know that, if matters get out of hand, ‘the system’ will contain you). Scholars disagree as to whether simulating madness truly works. As Daniel Drezner has pointed out, there is little evidence that Trump’s different threats concerning North and South Korea yielded much. But the madman theory comes in handy for anyone wanting to make excuses for a strongman: even the most outlandish behaviour might be a move in a game of six-dimensional chess. In any case, Trump’s willing chessmen are lined up and ready for his opening gambit next week.

(London Review of Books)

MONTANA WINTER, circa 1908. The solitary Crow tepee had leather thongs that secured the tepee poles for transport by horse. The Crow Indian Reservation, southeast of Billings (Montana), is home to 8,000 enrolled members. Joseph K. Dixon, a former pastor, had worked in the camera department at the first Wanamaker department store. Dixon helped organize three expeditions for Rodman Wanamaker to draw attention to the plight of Native Americans and to help obtain their citizenship. Text and digital restoration of photo by Gary Coffrin.

9 Comments

Mike Jamieson January 18, 2025

There’s a special report tonight centered around the testimony and film and sensor documentation by a former special forces operator, Jacob Barber, and two colleagues. According to retired Pentagon official Lue Elizondo, Barber received approval to share all this by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review. (This review doesn’t by itself confirm the validity of the info, necessarily….it assures nothing classified is shared.). News Nation’s special report, hosted by Ross Coulhart at 5pm Pacific time, will feature testimony and documentation of the retrieval of an egg shaped, SUV-sized, extraterrestrial craft. Film of this will be shown.

For the last 9 years, Barber has been a private citizen operating Royal Helicopter Service out of Exeter CA.

He has been vetted over the last couple of years by Senate Intel Cmt staff. Barber has also briefed the Pentagon UFO office.

Other persons with first hand involvement with UAP related special access programs are reportedly planning on coming out.

- Harvey Reading January 18, 2025
  
  Just more wishful-thinking propaganda to deflect us from seeing the real world we observe around us. Why would ETs need to be sneaky and furtive if they have the ability travel around the universe? What you peddle is very similar to what Kunstler peddles: pure nonsense.
  
- Chuck Wilcher January 18, 2025
  
  “There’s a special report tonight centered around the testimony and film and sensor documentation by a former special forces operator, Jacob Barber, and two colleagues.”
  
  When and where will this “special report” be seen? Is this a YouTube thingy or do we have to get ourselves inside Area 51?
  
  - Mike Jamieson January 18, 2025
    
    News Nation channel 5pm pacific
    
Lee Edmundson January 18, 2025

I’ll believe this when I see it. No AI CGIs please.

- Mike Jamieson January 18, 2025
  
  Last night, when Chris Cuomo was interviewing Coulhart and Elizondo, we learned that Barber had shared his film and sensor documentation with the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office when under the direction of Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. The current director, Jon Kosloski, couldn’t find it. Kirkpatrick has been caught lying multiple times and has written hit pieces in the Scientific American and LA Times. Kosloski testified before a Senate Armed Services subcommittee in November and told Senator Gillibrand that he was urgently trying to gain the trust of the over 40 whistleblowers who had gone to the Inspector Generals and Senate Intel Cmt staff but had avoided AARO under Kirkpatrick. Looks like Barber is one who has done so.
  
  These whistleblowers were found by David Grusch initially when Col Grusch (AF intelligence officer borrowed by Jay Stratton, director of a pre AARO UFO task force, from his NRO assignment), was tasked with finding Special Access program participants.
  
Norm Thurston January 18, 2025

ED: Your comment about public officials no longer being frugal with public funds is spot on. I attribute it in part to the general “greed is good” attitude that has grown in our society. But there has also been a move away in many local governments from hiring administrative staff with professional accounting backgrounds. And it has also become popular with some politicians to simply dismiss solid advice from the “bean counters”, when it doesn’t align with their political objectives.

David Svehla January 18, 2025

More genius in the AVA! Thank you Misters Eisenman on Altadena and Mr. Kunstler with his huge and eloquent FJB!

Bob Abeles January 18, 2025

Wish You Were Here

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell
Blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
And how we found
The same old fears
Wish you were here

–David Gilmore, Roger Waters

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