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CONTINUED DRY through Thursday, with some precipitation potential toward Friday and into next weekend. Chilly nights and mornings with areas of frost and patchy fog into mid-week. Potential for gusty winds exists for Lake County Monday. Potential for gusty winds return for much of the entire area Friday and Saturday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): I do not recall it ever being as cold with fog as it was yesterday? A switcheroony on the coast this Monday morning with 34F under CLEAR skies, go figure? Clear & cold is our forecast for the next several days. A hint of rain 10 days out, we'll see.
FRAN KOLINOR
For the ones who may have known her, you may want to know that Fran Kolinor has passed away. One of a kind. A great friend, teacher, human and more. She will be in our memories and hearts. Rest in peace my beautiful friend. (Facebook post, AV Watch)
REPORT FROM A SMALL FARM SOUTH OF BOONVILLE
The farm is doing well. Our peak season, the holidays, was good, we have a new person to help in the kitchen, and we may be able to join another AIM farmers' market by summer. Since the abundant rains in November and December, the weather has been very dry, very cold, and very warm for this time of year. The temp swings between frozen in the mornings to mid sixties by afternoon…quite a wallop for us and the plantings. At least we're getting enough frost hours for the fruiting trees.
We hope you've all come through the holidays regenerated and ready for the coming year.
Stay well and keep your coping mechanisms well lubed.
Nikki Auschnit & Steve Kreig
JENNIFER POOLE (Willits Weekly):
The eight candidates Willits City Council will consider for appointment as a councilmember next week include: (1) Franklin Rockwell. (2) Robin Leler. (3) Raghda Zacharia. (4) Sherrie Ebyam, (5) Bruce Burton, (6) Daniel Sansom, (7) Ithaca Moore, and (8 Garrett Moore. The appointment item, item 9a, is set for the Wednesday, January 22 meeting. The new councilmember will fill the rest of Greta Kanne's term, through 2026.
RICARDO SUAREZ (Redwood Drive-In, Boonville)
Hello Boonville
Here we go, as always hitting the comal. What is anti ha? Tacos shepherd, asada, Tripita, caveza, fajitas, menudo, enchiladas. You just don't say. Pure Redwood Drive-In 1-707-895-3441.
SAVE THE DAMN DAMS
To the County Supervisors, Local Media and General Public:
The proposal to remove the Potter Valley water project dams is one of the most misguided ideas of our time. These dams, which divert water from the Eel River through the Potter Valley tunnel to the Russian River, have provided immense benefits to millions of people, protected communities from devastating floods, and turned arid lands into thriving agricultural hubs. Removing them would undo more than a century of progress.
When these dams were originally constructed, their primary purpose was flood control for the Eel and Russian River regions. Before their installation, seasonal floods caused widespread destruction in villages and towns near Humboldt Bay. Over time, these dams not only mitigated flooding but also created valuable reservoirs, including Lake Pillsbury and Lake Mendocino, which support communities, agriculture, and ecosystems.
Today, over 7 million people depend on this water supply for drinking, farming, and irrigation. The water has transformed the region, enabling the cultivation of grapes, fruit, vegetables, and other crops in Marin, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties—areas now renowned for world-class wine production. Without this reliable water source, these agricultural industries would collapse, taking with them the livelihoods of countless farmers, workers and the general public.
The broader impact of dam removal:
Removing these dams would have disastrous consequences:
- Property Values:
- Homes and properties near lakes and rivers would lose 40-50 percent of their value.
- Wells, currently shallow and reliable, would need to be re-drilled at a prohibitive cost of $1,000 per foot.
- Flooding Risks:
- Without the dams, flooding will return to the Humboldt Bay and Eel River areas, putting homes, infrastructure, and lives at risk. Who will be responsible?
- Agriculture:
- Farmers currently pay around $20 per acre-foot of water. Without the project, irrigation costs could skyrocket to $100-$200 per acre-foot, forcing many out of business.
- Economic Losses:
- Lower property values and diminished agriculture will devastate local economies and strain county budgets, including funding for reassessing properties. Where will we get the money for this?
Environmental misconceptions
Some argue that the dams are harming salmon populations, but the reality is more complex. The decline of the salmon industry began in the late 80’s and 90’s, due to international overfishing practices, not because of the Potter Valley project. In fact, the dams have coexisted with sustainable salmon runs for most of the century.
A better solution
Rather than dismantling these vital dams, we should focus on preserving and enhancing the water project. PG&E, which has operated the project for years, plays a critical role in the region’s infrastructure. If maintaining the project is financially challenging for PG&E, a small surcharge—just $1 per month—on water bills in the affected areas could generate $12 million annually to sustain operations.
Additionally, as a gesture of fairness, Lake Pillsbury and surrounding government-owned shoreline could be deeded to Native American tribes for housing, recreation, and cultural development. In exchange, tribes could manage and maintain the lake and dams, preserving this essential resource for future generations.
Let’s build, not destroy
At a time when water shortages are growing more severe, removing dams is counterproductive. Instead, we should focus on increasing water storage capacity. For instance, raising the height of Lake Mendocino’s dam by just 10 feet would double its storage capacity. We need forward-thinking solutions that address our water needs, not short-sighted actions that harm our communities.
In closing, I urge you to consider the following questions:
- Who will pay for the removal of these dams, and who will profit from the process?
- Who will be held accountable for the flooding and property damage that will inevitably follow?
- Why has Lake County, home to Lake Pillsbury, been excluded from many of these discussions?
Rather than dismantling critical infrastructure, let’s work together to preserve it. The Potter Valley water project has served us well for over 100 years. Let’s ensure it continues to benefit our communities for generations to come.
Phillip Ed Nickerman
Potter Valley
WITH $15M GRANT, TWO-BASIN SOLUTION GETS GREEN LIGHT TO TRANSFORM EEL RIVER
Today, U.S. Representative Jared Huffman (CA-02) announced that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has awarded Round Valley Indian Tribes and the Sonoma County Water Agency $15 million toward implementing the Two-Basin Solution.
The funds through the Inflation Reduction Act will fund a major Eel River estuary project supported by the tribes and put a down payment on construction of a new wintertime diversion to the Russian River following the removal of two salmon-blocking dams on the Eel.
“This funding shows what can be accomplished thanks to the strong partnerships in the Eel and Russian river basins. We’ve now reached a significant milestone in restoring salmon and other aquatic life in the Eel River while protecting a key water supply for communities in Mendocino, Sonoma, and Marin counties,” said Rep. Jared Huffman.
The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. plans to remove Scott and Van Arsdale dams that no longer produce electricity but prevent salmon from reaching 200 miles of spawning habitat. Round Valley Indians Tribes and Sonoma Water worked together on the application and are also working with Mendicino Inland Water and Power Commission on a plan that will benefit both basins.
“This award is a critical step towards achieving the co-equal goals of the Two-Basin Solution and is needed to begin the process of restoring the Eel River fishery and community healing for our people,” RVIT President Joseph Parker said. “I commend the leadership of Congressman Huffman and that of Commissioner Touton and the Reclamation team in working with Round Valley and Sonoma Water to obtain this funding. The even split between basins is a historic first and establishes the precedent of equality that Round Valley, in conjunction with our partners, have been pursuing for many years.”
“The Bureau of Reclamation funding will help ensure a Two-Basin Solution can be achieved for Eel and Russian river basin communities. This funding will provide needed resources to secure regional water needs while restoring fisheries,” said Sonoma County Supervisor and Sonoma Water Director Lynda Hopkins. “We are thankful for the leadership of Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Touton and Representative Huffman for securing these critical funds.”
LITTLE RIVER IMPROVEMENT CLUB & MUSEUM:
Railroads may be scarce in Mendocino County now, but during the logging heyday, coastal railroads were found all along the Mendocino Coast. From the southern Gualala rail line through the multi-line Albion Branch (pictured, 1920) to the northern rail line at Westport, trains moved logs from the deep forests to local mills, and connected to other lines to transport lumber inland to far away places.
DON’T BLAME GREEN ENERGY
Editor: The Legislative Analyst’s Office just published a report on California’s steep electricity rates. Not surprisingly, the three investor-owned utilities — PG&E, San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison — top the list of the highest rates. And not surprisingly, the report blames California’s green energy policies for a lot of the costs.
Looking more carefully at the report, however, we find that the investor-owned utilities “are overseen by corporate boards and, as such, have a responsibility to their shareholders to maximize their profits.” The report also points out that the utilities pay for “various other activities.” Let’s stop blaming green energy for our bills and take on the investor-owned utilities.
Paula Fogarty
Santa Rosa
PLEASE DON'T ACT like everyone loved my father. He was assassinated. A 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in America. Most hated. Many who quote him now and evoke him to deter justice today would likely hate, and may already hate, the authentic King.
— Bernice King
ED NOTES
ONE YEAR, I CELEBRATED Martin Luther King’s birthday by paying HBO $46 on a Saturday night to watch Mike Tyson knockout Francois Botha. I’d better say here that I think it’s way past time to either ban boxing or require that the pros wear protective headgear like the amateurs are required to do. Anyone who can look at what boxing did to great athletes like Mohammed Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson, not to mention the hundreds of lesser known pugs like the tragic Jerry Quarry and Tommy ‘Hurricane’ Jackson and still defend boxing as a sport would seem to be deficient in the humanity department. But the Tyson-Botha undercard was pretty good, too.
MIKE TYSON is probably a better gauge of the state of race relations in the country than the innumerable, rote MLK memorials underway across the country. The local remembrances seem to me to miss most of what the man stood for, consisting of a lot of weepy declarations of brotherhood — not that they can hurt — and Family of Man-quality rhetoric. Now that most white people are liberals on race — even Maga Man claims to be — at least in public, there’s a widespread tendency to ignore the ongoing class and economic realities of this country, a basic fact of American life that Martin Luther King seldom failed to point out and probably gave up his life for saying. King persisted in demanding that wealth be fairly apportioned among all citizens. He emphasized that a country as rich as this one should not tolerate deprivation whatever the color of the people deprived. The primacy of economics in King’s vision of a color blind society is left out of the celebrations of his remarkable, too brief life.
IT ISN’T HARD to imagine what King would have thought and said about contemporary economic and social policies, but I won't forget Maya Angelou claiming on national television that Bill Clinton, acclaimed as a surrogate black person, was being “lynched” over his Lewinski interlude. Lynched? I still don’t think that’s the word we want here, Ms. Angelou.
THE TWO PARTY stranglehold on the throats of the people of this ever more precarious country, whatever their race, is a much more effective enemy of black people than Bull Connor ever was, and working people of the racial rainbow haven’t had more relentless adversaries in the White House since Calvin Coolidge.
WHAT WE get in the Martin Luther King memorials is a lot of slobbery rhetoric of the Love-One-Another-Or-Die with an emphasis to keep the dissent “non-violent.”
MOST OF US would settle for simple ethnic tolerance without the appended admonition to love one another. And some of us are also aware from bitter personal experience that the bigoted personality type is as plentiful among liberals as it is among conservatives.
BUT RACE RELATIONS are the one area of American life where progress is a matter of verifiable, objective fact. Race relations are better — a lot better — than they were when King was alive.
SO THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS and government take another paid day off, which is about all Martin Luther King’s life means these days just as a solid 40% of the population slides into a kind of permanent hopelessness. Now that black heroes like King have been co-opted into the great consensus, the great fight for equality of opportunity is over.
THE MSM'S editorial lab rats can be depended on to waddle into editorial print every MLK Day with a denunciation of some black sports figure or a rapper for their perceived deleterious effect on the nation’s youth, with Mexican gang bangers coming on strong as ultra-menace, civic division. Read a biography of Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb some time for a lesson in the silliness of making athletes into role models. Cobb was a lot crazier than any contemporary sports figure, and Ruth, who was not a racist, managed somehow to emerge into adulthood unaffected by modern civilization. (Another example of flagrant prose racism, albeit on a much higher level than the Press Democrat’s, is Tom Wolfe’s best-selling novel, ‘A Man In Full.’ It’s right up there with the film version of ‘The Color Purple.’)
ONE MORE PARENTHETICAL: I forget the name of the sports writer, but when baseball teams carried writers with them on their train commutes between cities, a bunch of writers were sitting around the club car one night when a naked Ruth comes running through, a naked woman with a big knife in hot pursuit. The writer comments, “There goes another story we can't write.”
IT’S SURPRISING that given all the attention Tyson gets that nobody has offered up an academic paper called something like, The Black Athlete and His Psychic Search for Family — A Psycho-History of Mike Tyson. After he dispatched Botha in the fifth round that long ago Saturday night, Tyson gave a big hello to a Brooklyn gang, apparently his stand-in family at the time.
THAT SATURDAY NIGHT the ringside crowd included a delighted old lady who seemed to be with her daughter and her granddaughter. Three incongruous lookalikes sitting side by side. The old lady’s attentions were riveted on the ring action; she looked like she knew her boxing. Daughter and granddaughter’s attentions seemed to wander to movie stars seated nearby. The three of them looked like money, but then again maybe the grand dame had put aside a little out of her social security checks to treat the family to a night of live mayhem.
AMERICA is wonderful in its unmatched variousnesses. Also at ringside was a little Chinese girl of 9 or 10 or so. She was seated next to her mother, I assumed, and later in the evening sat in mom’s lap when dad showed up to take the kid’s seat. At one point early on in the first of three fights on the evening’s card, the child became aware that the television cameras were on her and jumped up out of her chair to wave and mug at it. Mom pulled the kid emphatically back into her seat. A fully assimilated American child would have been allowed to perform endlessly, probably with mom and pop elbowing her out of the way to get their pusses into range of the magic eye.
THE FIXED camera angles made these intriguing people unavoidable on-screen, so we saw a lot of them and wondered about them. Everyone else looked like the kind of people you’d expect to see close up at a retro bloodsport, complete with girls in bikinis strutting around the ring holding up round cards while men wolf-whistled at them. I hadn’t heard a live wolf-whistle since the last time I watched a fight on TV, and I haven’t heard one in person since about 1955.
THE REFEREE for the Tyson-Botha fight was roundly booed when he was introduced because he has a reputation for stopping fights short of death. The ref smiled at the boos. An ironist. Botha, who looked exactly like my late friend Ted Bertsch of Ukiah but twice Bertsch’s size, was introduced as the “White Buffalo.” For being a white guy willing to be knocked out by a black guy he picked up $1.5 mil.
TYSON, for serving so well as white America’s worst black nightmare, picked up $10 mil without breaking a sweat. The announcer described Botha accurately if unkindly as “a morass of flesh,” while Tyson was described accurately as “sculpted.” I couldn’t make out Botha’s tattoos but Tyson’s are Chairman Mao on one arm and Malcolm X on the other, which may make sense to him, but don’t quite mesh in any socio-political historical sense I’m aware of.
THE CHAMP came into the ring wearing a T-shirt inscribed “Be Real,” another psychological tipoff to the man’s preoccupations, and further evidence of an integrity superior to most of the people writing about him. As the Tyson entourage made its way to the ring, some kind of kill-’em-all rap music filled the auditorium.
THE WHITE BUFFALO entered the ring to cowboy music. The first round had the mob on its feet because Buff and Mike continued to punch each over after the bell ending the first round. But a few minutes later, in round five, the inevitable happened. The morass of flesh — not much more skilled as a fighter than the big guy at the end of the bar in Anywhere USA — went down in a heap when he walked straight into a Tyson right that Tyson seemed to bring all the way up from the floor, and had pivoted into with all his strength directly onto the White Buffalo’s fully exposed chin.
BUFF went down like he’d been poleaxed, which he had, and when he tried to get up he fell through the ropes. Tyson hustled over to help Buff regain his feet, then gave him a big hug and told the announcers he admired Buff’s heart. Then Mike said a big hello to the Brooklyn gangsters.
EARLIER IN THE TELECAST, perfectly organized into a three-hour program with Mike and Buff preceded by two prelims guaranteed to each last 12 rounds because none of the four fighters had ever been knocked out and only rarely knocked off their feet, Tyson talked about how he’d just learned that Cus d’Amato, the only person in his life who liked Tyson for himself, had put away money for him in a secret account only recently revealed, but now worth $200,000. d’Amato was the last person in Tyson's life with the authority to pull him back into his seat, and Mike has been in trouble ever since he left the old man's home.
REWRITING HISTORY: It’s 7pm the day before Martin Luther King’s birthday and I still haven’t heard a true word about the guy, the last truly progressive national figure our odd country has produced. The waves of pure mawk coming at me from the television set and (of course) pseudo-public radio KZYX, remind me that no one voted for Nixon, everyone was for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, no one supported the war on Vietnam, and Martin Luther King wanted people of different races to be nice to each other.
IN FACT, by the time King was murdered in Memphis, the mass media had turned against him big time and had never been too keen on him in the first place because he was connecting too many social-economic dots for too many people. He was aggressively opposed to the war on Vietnam, pointing out it was the latest chapter in a long history of imperial murder of non-white peoples and he was for democratic socialism, and had even gone so far as to speak the forbidden S-word on national television. So long as he stuck to preaching racial harmony, even the closet Klan types of the rightwing of the Republican Party couldn’t denounce King who, after all, was certainly preferable to the scowling leather lungs in dark glasses who were thrilling the white suburbs with a lot of wild talk about how, with a few photogenic bad boys out front, 12% of the population was going to off on the national pig.
AS GREAT WAVES of pure bullshit rolled over America in 1968, Martin Luther King was calmly pointing out that a few fundamental social guarantees would make America a much less violent place and a far more ethnically harmonious country. If people were guaranteed food, shelter, work, health care, and education they would be less inclined to harm other persons. Once achieved, social and economic justice would cool everyone out. It would, too, and Martin Luther King was murdered for preaching it, not that much of anybody seems to remember the most important two-thirds of King’s message.
YOU’LL never hear it said by the kind of weepy liberals who dominate the national and local media but it was Jock World and the Armed Services where the greatest advances in race relations were made in this country. It was at the ball game and in boot camp where lasting and loyal cross-ethnic friendships were first made in a mass way in this country. Since, as a trip to any downtown area in any town in America makes obvious, millions of Americans of all races enjoy loyal and affectionate relations where virtually none existed in 1950.
RACE RELATIONS aren’t bad at all considering that we’ve moved in less than 90 years from wholesale lynchings and a nearly South African-quality apartheid to unharassed inter-marriage and generally non-lethal relations among America’s rainbow family. What isn’t better is economic relations, not that you’d know it from most of the media. Average income folks find it harder and harder to get by in what is still billed as capitalism’s finest hour, with magic money everywhere except where much of the real work gets done. And “liberals” of the Democratic Party type have managed to exacerbate race relations by defining people as “oppressed” whose grievances hardly amount to oppression in any historical sense of the term.
NEXT TIME, A GREYHOUND
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
I told my wife we’d have to leave early in the morning to catch our flight back to North Carolina, and she shot back a cold, level look.
“How early,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
I said, “So early that we might as well just stay up all night so we don’t have to get out of bed at 4:30 tomorrow morning.”
So early that I already packed all my stuff up and put it in the car last night and now I don’t have any deodorant. Hard to face the day without Old Spice Smoldering Campfire scent guarding my sweat glands.
So I use my wife’s instead and now I smell like an ice cream cone.
Airports are my maximum discomfort stations in life. I am always on edge prior to a flight and by “prior to a flight” I mean prior to buying a ticket. And realizing I’ll be forced to go to the airport if I buy a ticket means odds are even I just won’t buy a ticket.
Me rolling down 101 on my way to SFO is like you rolling down the hallway on a stretcher at Ukiah Adventist on your way to surgery.
Last time we flew out of SFO I left my suitcase in the taxi. I should have left my suitcase on the sidewalk and snuck back into the taxi myself.
Nothing goes right for me at an airport. My brain blanks because I’m nervous. I get in the security line and someone tells me to show a boarding pass and open my carry-on bag, and I forget the definition of “boarding pass” and how to operate a zipper.
And I left my carry-on in the taxi. Oh wait—that was the other time we were in the airport, but never mind I won’t need luggage, I’ll just buy clothes when I get where I’m going. A pleading look at Trophy the wife: “Tell me again: Where am I going?”
So simple: baggage, tickets, timetables, gates, connecting flights, me with a sprained back and Trophy with a freshly broken right arm, plus we have a dog.
Longtime readers may remember we’ve had previous airport adventures with Sweetie, our highly trained and deeply reliable Therapeutic Service Animal complete with her bright red “THERAPY DOG! STAND BACK!” vest, a gold badge, documents, passport and the ability to speak three languages.
This morning is her second time strolling the concourse to Gate B-23, and both times I have walked directly behind her and both times she has, while prancing along briskly, extruded large steaming logs onto the polished floors. Maybe she’s trying to send me a message.
She drops these bombs without slowing, pausing, squatting or any other indication she’s about to engage in a bowel evacuation maneuver. Sweetie just skips along la la la and out they pop. I’d like to know how she does it; I could use a weapon like that.
Then the flight and the terrific in-flight meal of a mini-bag of mini-pretzels, the exciting arrival at the Charlotte airport in pitch dark followed by a fun drive home.
And finally we relax and enjoy all the comforts of our lovely cabin nestled in the cozy warmth of the American south. Except it was snowing.
Trophy, a lifelong California lass who thinks “cold” begins at the point you can’t go swimming in your neighbor’s backyard pool, is literally shocked at temperatures in the mid-20s. She insists the 12-second walk from the car into the house gave her frostbite.
Well, when you’ve got lemons, as the old saying goes… So I tried making ice tea from the icy pellets. The 22-degree temperatures were harder to convert into cheerful winter wonderland singalongs, and our morning conversations have all been quite frosty, heh heh, since we arrived.
The Fire This Time
1) Has anyone considered the possibility the fires eating Los Angeles are acts of terrorism?
2) How does the removal of dams and their abundant reservoirs of water look now? Yes indeed, a natural, flowing, dreamy river flowing lazily into a placid pond through a water treatment facility is very nice and might make a nice photo in the 2026 California calendar.
Photos of a dead and still smoldering LA might not.
But as my pappy always told me, “Before you tear something down, make sure you know why it was put up in the first place.”
And maybe it’s not too late for Northern California to halt its reckless plans to rip up old dams, and not just for potential fire protection. When the dams are removed the years of sludge get washed downstream and all the fish you were bragging about saving get killed.
MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker): Mendocino & Headlands
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, January 19, 2025
DANNY CHRISTENSEN, 58, Ukiah. Reckless driving.
MONTALVO LOPEZ, 39, Covelo. More than six pot plants.
NANCY MCLELLAND, 83, Carson City, Nevada/Ukiah. DUI.
DONALD ROBERTS, 29, Cloverdale/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs with priors.
BARAQUIEL RUIZ, 38, Lakeport/Ukiah. Under influence.
NOE SALDANA, 37, Ukiah. DUI causing bodily injury with priors, suspended license for DUI.
COLTON SMITH, 36, Ukiah. Controlled substance with priors, paraphernalia, vehicle registration tampering.
IT IS BORN
Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
— Pablo Neruda
A READER WRITES:
Report from yesterday’s People’s March in San Francisco…
People gathered at noon at 24th and Bryant. The weather cooperated by delivering a bright and sunny Mission District January day in the 60s. I was pleasantly surprised to see a fairly large number of people, perhaps several hundred. I searched for the friend who invited me, one of the few neighborhood survivors who got through the wave after wave of gentrification. The “Women’s March” had been folded into this march. The same friend had invited me to the Women’s March (recall the distinctive pink hats) back in 2017 when it was primarily about Donald and Hillary. I declined the invitation back then. “I don’t go to pro-war marches.”
I quickly found my group, a small lake of white hairs assembled near the paint store. As I walked up they were in the middle of the Recitation of Ailments. I attempted to add some of my own before being told “are you kidding!?” with a smile and a jab. Everyone in the group is a war baby (born pre-’45) except for me. As the crowd grew to 2000-3000 people, we marched to Dolores Park.
The usual tropes of a San Francisco Mission protest were there… the Aztec dancers, Loco Bloco on the rolling stage, the inevitable lady who doesn’t understand that you don’t point a bullhorn at someone’s ear. While the crowd was large the mood was a bit subdued. They managed to roll a few of the standard chants off their tongues (A slogan, depleted, should never be repeated). The collection of causes seemed almost like a last-ditch consolidation of the tribes before the unstoppable wave of settlers comes over the hill.
Lots of Palestinian flags. One guy draped in a rainbow flag with a white Star of David on it. A lady holding up three leafy twigs with a small sign that said “Three branches!” (I’m not sure she’s aware that the frowning fascists control all three now.) A few people with small signs that say “Deny, Defend, Depose!” as a shout-out to Luigi. A random Honduran flag. A sign that said “I’ve been holding this sign since 1967!” Several signs and posters centered around TDS. One had a picture of Trump and said “Trump hates women!” I went up to her and said “I love your sign! But Democrats bomb women – just like Republicans do,” which got me a ‘talk to the hand’ gesture. A small group of TERFs stood at the entrace to the park handing out anti-trans literature and engaging in some discourse which managed to remain civil. The MC thanked the elected officials who attended (their names flew in one ear and out the other).
There’s still some ‘there’ there. See you at Cafe La Boheme.
DETROIT LIONS LEARN WHAT 49ERS KNOW: THERE IS NO PAIN LIKE A POSTSEASON DEFEAT
by Ann Killion
Step aside, 49ers fans. There’s a new poster child for NFL heartbreak.
The 49ers — franchise and followers together — have spent the past year wallowing in their own special flavor of postseason pain: the hurt of coming from ahead to lose another Super Bowl to the same opponent for the second time in five years, in overtime no less. Deebo Samuel went so far as to say on a podcast that he’d rather not even make it to the Super Bowl and lose; if he knew ahead of time that would be the outcome he’d prefer a loss earlier in the playoffs.
He made that statement on a podcast hosted by Amon-Ra St. Brown, the Detroit Lions’ fabulous receiver. I would imagine that right now St. Brown would take exception to Samuel’s words. Because the 49ers’ collective pain pales compared to what the Lions and their beleaguered fan base are feeling.
The Lions — who won 15 regular season games, earned the NFC’s No. 1 seed, home-field advantage and a first-round bye in the playoffs — stumbled off the field hollow-eyed and in shock Saturday night after a stunning 45-31 loss to the upstart seventh-seed Washington Commanders. Many of Detroit’s devoted fans, who had paid top dollar to watch Lions’ history made, had already fled Ford Field, the heartbreak too much to bear.
The forlorn NFL championship banners from 1935, 1952, 1953 and 1957 fluttered in the rafters. They won’t be getting company any time soon.
“It’ll probably bother me forever, honestly,” Lions left tackle Taylor Decker said.
Decker, 31, is a nine-year veteran who has played his entire career with the Lions. I can assure him that he is correct: no matter what happens for the rest of his career — even if a championship comes his way — this missed moment, this blown golden opportunity will indeed haunt him for the rest of his life. I know men with Super Bowl rings, like Steve Young, who remember the bitter losses far more acutely than the glorious wins.
As Vin Scully once said, “Losing feels worse than winning feels good.”
That’s not to discount how good Saturday’s win feels for the Commanders, a team few expected to do anything at the beginning of the season but who have now advanced to the NFC Championship Game for the first time since 1991 (where they, ironically, beat the Lions). The turnaround, at the hands of former 49ers executive Adam Peters and Kyle Shanahan’s former Atlanta boss Dan Quinn, has been flat-out astonishing.
It’s a testament to what can happen when a team is freed from toxic, greedy, self-absorbed ownership (as well as a toxic, racist nickname), and led by smart, competent people.
While Washington had plenty of wretched times under former owner Dan Snyder, their misery — actually no other fan base’s suffering — can compare to that of the Lions. The Lions are one of the oldest NFL teams, founded in 1930, but have never even been to a Super Bowl. They have been to just two conference championships in the Super Bowl era: that loss to Washington 33 years ago and the loss to the 49ers last year.
After that loss to the 49ers, coach Dan Campbell said, “I told those guys this may have been our only shot. Do I think that? No. Do I believe that? No. However, I know how hard it is to get here. I’m well aware. And it’s gonna be twice as hard to get back to this point next year. That’s the reality.
Yet it looked like the Lions would get back. They had everything going for them. Until they didn’t.
The wildly entertaining game came down, as most postseason games do, to turnovers. Detroit turned the ball over five times; Washington never gave the ball away. Three of the Lions turnovers were converted into Commanders’ touchdowns; a fourth prevented the Lions from scoring just before the half. That was too much to overcome.
A year ago you could place the blame for the Lions loss to the 49ers squarely on Campbell’s shoulders; his decision to go for it on fourth down, rather than kick a field goal that would have given the Lions a three-score advantage in the third quarter was likely the difference maker.
This loss is equally shared. The defense, ravaged all year by injuries, couldn’t stop Washington. And Jared Goff, the Marin County product who was in the midst of his own redemption story, reverted to his worst self with a terrible game, throwing three interceptions and losing a fumble.
“Had I played better, do we win?” Goff wondered. “Possibly. And that’s the part that’ll eat me alive for the whole offseason.
“We were on top of the world.”
Goff took a brutal shot to the head late in the first half and never again looked the same. Saturday’s games were a lesson in the fickleness of officiating: the hit on Goff, which should have nullified a pick-six, wasn’t penalized. In contrast, in the earlier game, Patrick Mahomes was the beneficiary of two phantom personal fouls on the Texans — roughing the passer and unnecessary roughness — that led directly to the Chiefs’ success.
As the game went on, the Lions got tighter and tighter and started imploding. And suddenly, their magical season was over. The best division in the NFC was left with no entrants in the conference championship.
Afterwards, a choked up Campbell had no big, sweeping statements after this loss. But his words from a year ago still stand. The Lions are in for big changes, possibly losing both their coordinators. Rosters always change. The NFL never stays the same.
This may have been their best shot. Their only shot. Instead, the Lions’ unique stretch of futility and heartbreak continues.
And, in that competition, every other fan base is vying for second place.
(SF Chronicle)
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
–David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)
Photo by Francisco Ontañón
‘STRENGTHEN THE BREAST AND OPEN THE PIPES!’ BYRD, CALLAS AND THE CALL TO SONG
by David Yearsley
Movie stars are singing again. From across a century of sound cinema there have been many leading women and men who have been winning vocalists, from the first talkie generation of James Cagney and Claudette Colbert to the Dolby days and nights of Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway.
Many of these actors had significant youthful training that equipped them with the excellent skills at singing and dancing that are crucial to their personal entertainment brands.
But the stories behind the two recent blockbuster biopics devoted to music legends, one living one dead, tell different tales of musical growth and awareness that might even usher in a broader popular renaissance in singing.
Much praise has been heaped on Timothée Chalamet’s performance in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Impressive indeed was the actor’s dedication to the task of learning to play the guitar and also to discovering his own singing voice in the process of doggedly modeling it on Bob Dylan’s. Both the accuracy of Chalamet’s vocal imitation of his model and his assiduity in attaining a convincing musical competency have been universally applauded. This particular set of talents had remained undeveloped by Chalamet until he undertook the project of becoming Bob on screen. The Bard himself even seems to have offered laconic, though still obscure, approval of his screen epigone’s efforts.
Those watching Chalamet do Dylan might now be encouraged to pick up a guitar on eBay or at the local Salvation Army Store, download a chord chart or the relevant apps, and get bardic themselves. It was this ethos of possibility that fueled the post-war folk revival and, thanks to Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, might just spawn a Second Great Awakening of Song.
Though some might be daunted, even discouraged by Chalamet’s apparently nonchalant ascent to the summit of songdom, anyone really can become a serviceable, guitar-wielding folksinger performing for the pleasure of self, family and friends. Learning just a couple-three chords, and with them opening up endless vistas onto myriad tunes and lyrics, is the work of hours.
To become an opera singer is, by contrast, a Herculean labor of years and even decades. In Pablo Larraín’s Callas (now streaming on Netflix), screen diva Angelina Jolie portrays the opera diva in her last week in Paris, moving through, and remaining still, in a world of aural and visual illusion, wandering through a labyrinth of memory and fantasy, ecstatic song and vocal failure.
In contrast to Chalamet’s unalloyed voice, Angelina Jolie’s ventriloquizes Callas’s with the aid of digital magic that artfully melds her singing voice with that of the exalted diva’s. The result is a pleasing mix of the two, a vocal fabrication that persuasively emerges from her speaking voice.
Where Chalamet had been at his Dylan musical studies for five years before shooting the movie, Jolie did a scant seven months of “intensive” vocal work in advance of Callas. Much of her tuition involved learning proper pronunciation and shaping the mouth properly in the various languages sung—Italian, French and German. Breath support and vocal production were also crucial to making her look believable on screen. Jolie was not an operagoer nor had ever sung in public before she embarked on the title role in Callas.
Jolie could never come as close to Callas’s sound as Chalamet gets to Dylan’s. Still, she has become an ardent convert and proselytizer. Famous arias now dominate her personal playlist and in many promotional interviews for the movie she has extolled the benefits of singing.
Last week she told ClassicFM that singing had transformed her in mind and body: “To be forced to get past that and make a full sound again was almost like shaking me out from years of holding, and having to confront and release a lot. It was really a gift. It’s very freeing. That’s why I say everybody should do it. I’m encouraging everyone [to learn to sing].”
Callas is as much about the body as the voice, which are, after all inseparable, even if the latter escapes the former in its journey to the ears of others. Callas’s extreme battles with her weight are obliquely portrayed in the movie when she hides pills in the pockets of the many sumptuous garments hanging in her vast wardrobe which are discovered, then confiscated, by her fondly severe butler, Ferruccio Mezzadri (Francesco Favino). The film depicts her fitful attempts at a comeback, following her to rehearsals in an empty theater where she is accompanied by her repetiteur (Steven Ashfield) at the piano. On the stage of the empty hall her voice has shrunk like her emaciated frame.
In a conversation with the film’s director Pablo Larraín hosted by Vogue, the Callas director begins by asking the actor if she is going “to open up a center” —Jolie responds with advice that must have echoed from the Hollywood Hills across the LA Basin and throughout the movie industry: “Skip therapy for a year and just go to opera class.”
The bodies of celebrity women have long been toned and tended to, modified and mocked, tailored for objectification on screen and red carpet, the fodder for tabloids and fanchat. But the voice has been neglected, and good on Jolie for bringing awareness to it.
But Larraín’s conjuring of a center immediately makes one wonder whether the current fitness trends, from spinning to rucking to hot Pilates, will now be complemented by vocal calisthenics. Will Muscle Beach become the site of weekly concerts with Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the well-oiled Barbell Choristers, blasting the Anvil Chorus out over the Pacific? Will home gyms from sea-to-shining-sea and across the smoldering plain be retrofitted as music rooms a la Jane Austen?
Canny capitalists must now be mobilizing in order to profit from what could be a huge new craze in self-improvement—monetizing the singing voice, that echo from our species’ distant past when melody and human language were born together—or so the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined.
An idealist might hope that these movies and the uplifting pronouncements of their stars will lead not to exploitation but to an explosion of choral singing and of individual expression—even to political revolution.
But these movies reject community, lauding Dylan for lifting the middle finger to the people and spirit of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and sympathizing with Callas as she collapses into herself and her own legend.
There is nothing new under the ever-hotter sun. Back in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, the towering Elizabethan musician William Byrd answered his own rhetorical question about the value of singing with eight airtight reasons that hit on all of Jolie’s, including pronunciation, circulation and breath, and mental health (in this case the proper worship). Let the world take this musical titan’s advice to heart, even as we await a Byrd biopic and the Psalmes, Sonet, & songs app:
Why Learne to Sing?
Reasons briefly set down by th’author, to perswade every one to learne to sing.
First, it is a knowledge safely taught and quickly learned, where
there is a good Master, and an apt Scholler.2 The exercise of singing is delightfull to Nature, & good
to preserve the health of Man.3 It doth strengthen all parts of the brest, & doth open the pipes.
4 It is a singular good remedie for a stutting and stamering in the
speech.5 It is the best means to procure a perfect pronounciation, & to
make a good Orator.6 It is the onely way to know where Nature hath bestowed the
benefit of a good voyce : which guift is so rare, as there is not one
among a thousand, that hath it.7 There is not any Musicke of Instruments whatsoever, comparable
to that which is made of the voyces of Men, where the voyces are
good, and the same well sorted and ordered.8 The better the voyce is, the meeter it is to honour and serve
God there-with : and the voyce of man is chiefely to bee imployed
to that ende.“Omnis Spiritus Laudes Dominum”
Since Singing is so good a thing, I wish all men would learn to sing.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
BETSY CAWN
Regarding “L.A. Fire Lessons,” by Albert Wellman, Santa Rosa:
Lake County began studying the merits and feasibility of added fire suppression water supplies stored in uphill tanks, joined at the lake level by a massive down-slope conduit to an energy generating turbine system that would be used in non-emergency conditions to make electricity fed into the PG&E grid, purchased by third party investors whose speculative earnings are achieved by aggregative buyers and sellers of electrical power (a financing scheme that leaves the County — as the project lead agency — carrying no debt for the lifetime of the project).
Trane Corporation’s innovative business engineering division designed three such projects for Lake County: one in Middletown, one in North Lakeport, and one on the Northshore (probably in Clearlake Oaks).
Primary water supply for the setup/startup facility would come from groundwater sources, during the peak of high lake levels (when shoreline adjacent, lake “influenced” basins) or from the lake itself (paying Yolo County Flood Control & Water Conservation District by the acre foot, as is standard for all of Clear Lake’s surface water customers with licensed water distribution systems around the shoreline).
Installed at the lower elevation end of the tank-to-generator conduit will be multiple tanker truck hose fittings, allowing the firefighting water trucks to rapidly refill and redeploy to any ongoing wildfire location.
The North Lakeport site would also generate power that can be used during a “Public Safety Power Shutdown” to keep the Jail, Office of Emergency Services building, and Animal Control facilities on line. If feasible (when all the costs are shaken out), additional electricity would be transmitted to the Upper Lake area, where one of PG&E’s transmission stations is sited.
The proposal went into the “hold” pattern similar to the project delivering ultra-sound emissions from anchored buoys placed in areas with high algae and cyanobacteria production (final discussions last year settled on 14 units in the Lower Arm of the lake, where City of Clearlake residents get the worst of the blooms every summer) to interfere with the natural phyotosynthetic cycles of algae, which settles on the lakebed when it’s nighttime and rises to the surface when sunlight is available. The system works well in areas around the world, and District 2’s Supervisor was hoping to get the project funded and begun last year, but it drifted somehow off the charts, like the Trane proposal did.
Of course, state budget failures and the threat of new presidential funding denials have tabled critical water supply and disaster recovery program funding needs, which will now be massively drained by the L.A. fires.
The weighing of competing needs for SoCal water demands and Northern California supply sources will whip up new reform (same old reform) ideas, but it seems that the utility industries have us all by the short hairs — the outgoing Biden administration just handed $15 Billion dollars to PG&E in a “loan” that the company claims “will save its customers close to $1 Billion over the life of its financing.”
“The funds will go toward a portfolio of projects [PG&E] including refurbishing hydropower plants, adding battery storage and upgrading transmission lines.”
Dilemmas that plague us here are exemplified by the lack of fire suppression systems (transmission mains and hydrants) in agriculturally valued Scotts Valley, which would be “growth inducing” and is contraindicated by the City of Lakeport’s General Plan development goals (creating a kind of zoning buffer between the valley proper and the Sphere of Influence plans of the “urbanized” hub of essential facilities and commercial enterprise in Special Study Areas of unincorporated territories on the north, south, and west of the city proper.
Vegetation “management” — removal of roadside trees and shrubs — completes with the compelling need for “healthy forest” management to restore the invaluable watersheds that provide an estimated 70% of annual stormwater recharge to the lake.
Long-term Goals, Objectives, Policies, and Implementations being developed for our new (2050) General Plan and Local Area Plans will have to weigh these priorities in order to also meet the down-sized economic ambitions of our County government while finally addressing 30+ years of environmental neglect and thoughtless allowance of badly designed subdivisions and haphazard “neighborhoods” found in Very High Fire Hazard areas served by the state Department of Forestry & Fire Protection (CalFire) “State Responsibility Areas.”
Surely, as Mr. Wellman explains, there are practical ways to make better use of wastewater flows and elevated impoundments, expanding water main capacities, and “constructing a new water supply exclusively for fire hydrants” (instead of using more more costly treated drinking water supplies), as we try to stay on point during the soon-to-be grueling years of “long term recovery.”
FACT CHECK: THE RESNICKS DO NOT OWN 'MOST OF CALIFORNIA'S WATER'
by Dan Bacher
As a longtime researcher on the operations of Stewart and Lynda Resnick, billionaire owners of the Wonderful Company, I have to point out that a number of false memes and media reports have been circulated widely about the amount of water the Resnicks control.
For example, a Facebook post by Dolores Peers stated: "The Resnicks have ownership of most of California's water. No single entity should own most of the water in any state. Water should be publicly owned."
Likewise, Likewise, the More Perfect Union proclaims on their podcast: "One billionaire couple owns almost all the water in California": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SU9A0mwdhE
Here are the actual facts: the Resnicks, the largest orchard fruit growers in the world and major players in state and national politics, own a 57 percent stake in the Kern Water Bank, not "most of California's water" or "almost all the water in California."
The Kern Water Bank has a capacity of 1.5 million acre feet of water. But up to 6.68 million acre feet of water from the Delta have been exported annually to agribusiness and water agencies in any year through the State Water Project and Central Valley Project.
Water managers reduce export targets in dry years and increase them during wet years. The record water export year was in 2011, when 6.68 million acre feet of water was exported by the state and federal water projects: https://viewperformance.deltacouncil.ca.gov/pm/water-exports
The second largest water export year was in 2017, when 6.46 million acre feet of water was exported by the State Water Project and Central Valley Project. Both 2011 and 2017 were wet years.
5.39 million acre feet of water was exported by both projects in 2023, a wet year. 3.66 million acre feet of water was exported in 2020. 1.65 million acre feet of water was exported in 2021 and 2.18 million acre feet of water was exported in 2022, both drought years.
Overall, water exports from the Delta account for about 8% of the water used in the entire state (Delta Plan, p. 75).
Fish advocates believe that the maximum amount of Delta water that can be exported in any one year without significant impact on the aquatic ecosystem is 3 million acre feet. Yet the average amount that has been exported in recent years is around 5 million acre feet.
Due to these massive water exports and other factors, including drought, pollution, toxics and invasive species, Central Valley salmon and Delta fish populations are in their worst-ever crisis now. Salmon fishing in California ocean and river waters has been closed for two years and the Delta smelt has become functionally extinct in the wild.
I have exposed this massive diversion of Delta water for over three decades in hundreds of articles, beginning with interviewing CDFW biologist Frank Fisher who established the relationship between the dramatic collapse of winter run Chinook salmon and increased export pumping from the Delta back in 1992. He coined the term "Black Hole of Death" to describe the entrapment of salmon caused by reverse flows spurred by the state and federal pumping facilities.
California's interconnected water system serves almost 40 million people and irrigates over 5,680,000 acres of farmland. As the world's largest and most controversial water system, it manages over 40 million acre-feet of water per year.
Again, 57 percent of 1.5 million feet of water out of 40 million acre feet of water is NOT most of the state's water.
I completely support the statement that "water should be publicly owned." Nobody should be allowed to own a 57 percent stake in a water bank supplied by the State Water Project.
The Resnicks have donated many millions of dollars to both the Democratic and Republican parties and to candidates for both parties over the years. They were instrumental in the creation of the Monterey Amendment, a 1994 pact between Department of Water Resources and State Water Project contractors, that allowed them to obtain their 57 percent stake in the Kern Water Bank: https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/monterey-amendment
The Resnicks are among the largest contributors to Gavin Newsom and in fact hosted his 2022 anti-recall campaign in a fundraising letter. In 2019 they made a donation of $750 million to CalTech and in 2022 made a $50 million donation to UC Davis, in addition to contributing millions to UCLA, CSU Fresno and other universities over the years.
The Resnicks have donated a total of $431,600 to Governor Gavin Newsom since 2018, including $250,000 to Stop The Republican Recall Of Governor Newsom and $64,800 to Newsom For California Governor 2022.
Newsom received a total of $755,198 in donations from agribusiness in the 2018 election cycle, based on the data from www.followthemoney.org. That figure includes a combined $116,800 from Stewart and Lynda Resnick and $58,400 from E.J. Gallo, combined with $579,998 in the agriculture donations category.
The Resnicks have pushed for increased water exports from the Delta for agribusiness and the construction of the Delta Tunnel for many years.
But the fact is the Resnicks do not own most of California's water supply.
I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist. Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. It was really time to grow up and sell out as Lenny Bruce once advised. So I told my editors “OK, I'll write a book about the mafia, just give me some money to get started.”
— Mario Puzo
JIMMY CARTER, ADMIRABLE FIGURE IN MANY WAYS
by John Arteaga
A great deal has been written about the passing of an extraordinarily decent former president; Jimmy Carter. He was indeed an admirable figure in many ways. He walked the walk of his Christian faith, doing for others as he would have them do unto him. Rather than the more typical post-presidential lives we have seen, amassing wealth and influence and building their ‘legacy’, the apparently brilliant nuclear engineer, naval officer and gifted politician chose instead to put on a tool belt and sweat in the sun with hard-working ordinary people who aspired to home ownership and had the gumption to invest sweat for equity in their dream.
What I found so frustrating about the coverage of his passing was the glaring omissions of so many key facts about his administration. While much was made of his ‘breakthrough’ Camp David Accords between Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, they really did next to nothing for the people there; soon Rabin was assassinated by one of the rabid settler colonial Zionists and Sadat was soon liquidated as well. Any hope for peace was snuffed out along with their lives. Israel scarcely paused doing what it has always done, committing the sometimes slow, other times rapid, genocide of the Palestinians and the one by one destruction of all of Israel’s neighboring Arab countries. All of this has always, for some reason, been backed, unconditionally, by the world’s greatest superpower, the big dog that is wagged by the all-powerful tail of AIPAC and the political contributions of wealthy Israel firsters.
Listening to an old interview with Carter on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, she asked him about the curious fact that the moment that Ronald Reagan put his hand on the Bible to replace him as president, all of the of US Iranian hostages were wheels up on their way home from Tehran. This, after Carter had spent years negotiating their release; I couldn’t believe that even with the perspective of all those years of hindsight, neither he nor Ms. Gross made mention of the well documented fact that Reagan (or those who ran him) had sent their minions to treasonously negotiate with the mullahs to hold onto our hostages until he won the election, and that he would find some crooked way of repaying the favor with generous supplies of arms for our supposed sworn enemy.
Even though Carter’s presidency was a relatively benign one, in terms of civil rights and the environment, his administration demonstrated the seamless continuity of so many terrible US tendencies that hardly change at all whether the president has a D or an R in front of their name; the regulation of airlines, trucking, banking etc. would have been proud accomplishments for any Republican and ended up, predictably, with profits going to the fatcats and the public paying a hefty price.
His appointment of Paul Volcker at treasury, a true believer in the harshest kind of ‘neoliberal’ economic policies, brought on ridiculously high interest rates and economic misery for most Americans. But arguably the worst influence that he brought into what could have been an enlightened administration, was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a mad dog cold warrior bent on sparing no public expense in his crusade to do everything possible to combat and destroy the Soviet Union, and after that entity folded its cards, Russia. The dismissal of the SALT II treaty was a classic example of how his obsession with doing everything possible to ‘go after’ Russia made us all less safe, just as the whipping up of the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists to battle the Russians in Afghanistan only brought destruction and misery to that poor country (and many years later led to 9/11). Apparently that didn’t matter to Carter and Brezinski, all they cared about was giving the Russians a bloody nose; to give them their own Vietnam.
Apparently, no matter how well-intentioned a new president might be, there must be, like, some ‘very serious’ people who have a little heart to heart talk with each incoming president, to inform them that their first duty must be to go to war with the rest of the world; to be the tip of the spear of global capitalism, systematically stamping out, in however bloody a fashion was called for, any pesky outbreaks of small-d democracy, among those people foolish enough to think that they should have some say over their own land and resources. Of course an incoming president may not want to go along with the full panoply of bloodsoaked political solutions, in which case these Very Serious Men must point out the fact that the one president who actually attempted to stand up to the CIA and the war making machinery of his day, JFK, was, himself, dealt with rather harshly. One might expect something similar to befall one’s own family, should one be too uncooperative.
Interestingly, of the many millions deprived of their lives by the US’ perpetual war for unfettered capitalism, the overwhelming majority have been in the global South, people of black, brown or yellow complexion, while white Europeans have been permitted to institute highly socialistic policies without suffering invasion and mass slaughter by the US Marine Corps.
Indonesia itself lost at least a million people to our capitalist crusade there, and I will never forget the years of helplessness as we send more and more arms to fuel their genocide on the East Timorese.
Just about every Central and South American country has, at one time or another, suffered a bloody US sponsored coup d’état, and in Africa, Carter doggedly supported Jonas Savimbi’s bloodthirsty Unita guerrillas, enemies of the anti-apartheid ANC.
Perhaps all of Jimmy Carter’s admirable post presidential work, supporting democratic elections worldwide, helping to provide food medicine and shelter etc. was his way of atoning for all the horrors that he apparently felt obliged to commit as president. Kudos to him for that. May he rest in peace.
BERNIE SAYS TO GET READY
Inauguration day is approaching, a day that many of us have dreaded.
Our opposition to Trump is based not only on our profound disagreement with him on most of the important issues facing our country but, even more importantly, the lies, fear mongering, bigotry and xenophobia which underlay those policies. Democracy flourishes where differences of opinion are respected and debated. Democracy is severely undermined under the barrage of bigotry, hate and disinformation that Trump and many of his acolytes propagate.
Further, as Trump returns to the presidency, there is deep frustration with the inability of the Democratic Party to provide a clear alternative to Trumpism. It appears that most Democrats have learned little or nothing from the recent disastrous elections. It’s just not good enough to critique Trump and right-wing Republicans. That’s been done for the last 10 years. You have to stand FOR something. You have to provide an alternative to a status quo economy and political system which is just not working for the average American.
This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world and major advances in technology can make us even wealthier. There is no rational reason why 60 percent of Americans should live paycheck to paycheck or why we have massive and growing income and wealth inequality. There is no rational reason why we are the only major country not to guarantee health care for all, and why we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. There is no rational reason as to why 800,000 Americans are homeless and millions of others spend more than half of their limited,income to put a roof over their heads. There is no rational reason why 25 percent of seniors in America are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less, why we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any wealthy nation, why young people leave college deeply in debt, or why childcare is unaffordable for millions of families.
We can do better. We must do better. But, in order to effectively move forward, we need to explain to the American people the role that Oligarchy and corporate greed have played in destroying working class lives in this country. We need a progressive agenda that addresses the many crises that working families face and points us forward to a better life for all.
Short-term, as Trump comes into office, we must call his bluff. In the recent campaign he ran as an anti-establishment populist prepared to take on the political class and act on behalf of working families. Well, let us hold him to his words and demand that he do just that. If not, we must expose him for the fraud that he is.
During his campaigns Trump has said that the pharmaceutical companies are "getting away with murder" and that he wanted to lower the cost of prescription drugs in this country. If that is true, we should be willing to work with him to make that happen. We have made some good progress under Biden in this area but much more needs to be done. If Trump is unwilling to stand up to the power of the pharmaceutical industry, we must make that clear.
At a time when many financially strapped Americans are paying 20 or 30 percent interest rates on their credit cards, President Trump stated that he wants to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent. I agree and will soon be introducing legislation to do just that. Let’s see if he supports that bill.
Trump has rightfully pointed out that disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA and PNTR with China have cost us millions of good-paying American jobs as corporations shut down manufacturing in this country and moved abroad to find cheap labor. As someone who strongly opposed those agreements I look forward to working with him on new trade policies that will protect American workers and create good paying jobs in our country. Is he serious about this issue? Let’s find out.
Some of Trump's nominees have also made important points. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that food corporations are “poisoning” our young people with highly processed foods that are causing obesity, heart disease and other serious health problems. Is Trump willing to take on the greed of major food corporations that are making record breaking profits? I doubt it, but let’s give him the opportunity.
Trump’s Labor Secretary nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been supportive of the PRO Act, which would protect a worker’s right to join a union and bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions. She is right. Workers must have the right to join a union without illegal interference by their bosses. Will the Trump Administration stand up to corporate interests and work with us to pass the PRO Act into law. Stay tuned.
No one denies that we must end waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. Elon Musk, for example, is correct when he points out that the Pentagon has failed seven audits and cannot fully account for its budget of over $800 billion. We must make the Defense Department far more efficient. If we do that we can save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year and cut Defense spending.
While we should be prepared to work with the Trump administration in areas where we can find agreement, we must also be prepared to vigorously oppose them in the many areas where they are not only wrong, but are bringing forth extremely dangerous policy.
We must vigorously oppose Trump, his multi-billionaire cabinet and Republicans in Congress when they try to pass massive tax breaks for the rich while cutting Medicaid and other public health benefits desperately needed by working families.
We will oppose them when they try to privatize or cut Social Security, the Veterans Administration, Medicare, public education, the postal service and other important public agencies.
We will oppose them why they try to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away health care from millions of Americans.
We will oppose them when they represent the needs of the fossil fuel industry and try to rollback climate protections that put at risk the very habitability of our planet for future generations.
We will oppose them when they try to further take away the rights of women to make health care decisions about their own bodies.
If there were ever a time when progressives need to make their voices heard, this is that time.
We must oppose them as if we were fighting for our children, for future generations, for democracy and for the very well-being of our planet -- because that is precisely what is at stake.
Let us not forget that Republican margins in the House and Senate are very slim. If we mobilize effectively we CAN stop some of their worst proposals. It was not that long ago, for example, that people making their voices heard all across the country saved the Affordable Care Act from Trump and a Republican majority.
It is also critically important that we never stop fighting for our vision for the future -- one in which we have a government that works for all of its people, and not just a wealthy few.
Can we, one day, create an economic system based on the principles of justice, not greed? Yes, we can.
Can we transform a rigged and corrupt political system and create a vibrant democracy based on one person, one vote? Yes, we can.
Can we make health care a human right as we establish a system designed to keep us healthy and extend our life-expectancy, not one based on the profit needs of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? Yes, we can.
Can we, in the wealthiest country on earth, provide free quality public education and job training for all from child care to graduate school? Yes, we can.
Can we combat climate change and protect the very habitability of our planet for future generations, and create millions of jobs in the process? Yes, we can.
Can we make certain that artificial intelligence and other exploding technologies are used to improve the quality of life for working people, and not just make the billionaire class even richer. Yes, we can.
And even though we are not going to succeed in achieving that vision in the immediate future with Trump as president and Republicans controlling Congress, it is imperative that vision be maintained and that we continue to fight for it.
Let’s not kid ourselves. This is one of the most pivotal and difficult moments in the history of our country. What happens in the next few years will impact this country and the world for decades. Despair is not an option. We must aggressively educate and organize and go forward together.
Thank you for standing with me in that fight.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
TRUMP BRINGS A CHILL TO WASHINGTON
by Maureen Dowd
For many moons over the Potomac, the protocol for inaugurations has been as immutable and dignified as the words of presidents engraved on their monuments.
Leaders and luminaries would put aside their grudges and come together to celebrate democracy. This day marks the deepest conviction of the American experiment — that power must pass peacefully from one commander in chief to the next.
But what if you are coming to honor a man who tried to overthrow the government and steal an election? A man who riled up his followers to sack the Capitol and then lumbered out of town, a sore loser in a vile humor, skipping the inauguration of his successor?
Does he merit the usual privileges? Should everyone honor him in his moment at the center of the sacred traditions he desecrated?
When Michelle Obama and Nancy Pelosi blow off Donald Trump on his triumphant day, are they being rude and unpatriotic? Or are they justified, given his incendiary words, misogyny and racism, his defilement of this tradition at the heart of America?
The weather will not be the only bitter chill in town. Besides Michelle’s and Nancy’s cold shoulders, Barack Obama and the Clintons are skipping the inaugural lunch.
Trump is returning as a colossus. He has brought Washington — Democrats and Republicans — to heel, teamed up with Elon Musk and slapped a gold “Trump” sign on Silicon Valley. The lords of the cloud helped fund the coronation, and they are making a pilgrimage here to bow to their new overlord. (This includes the C.E.O. of TikTok, who is surely hoping that his company’s sponsoring of an inauguration party and his online flattery about Trump’s 60 billion TikTok views will lead the new president to save the social media platform.)
But not everyone is looking forward to what’s in store.
It will be hard to forget Trump’s day of infamy, Jan. 6, as he gets sworn in at the Capitol, which was smeared with blood and feces by rioters recast by Trump and his acolytes as “hostages,” “patriots,” “tourists” and “grandmothers.”
The wintry cold is ordinarily part of the inaugural tradition. William Henry Harrison got pneumonia and died a month after his 8,445-word speech in March 1841. John F. Kennedy did his speech without an overcoat in a 7-degree wind chill. Ronald Reagan came in from the cold for his second inaugural. Trump posted on Friday that the “Arctic blast” would force the shindig inside, to the Capitol Rotunda. But given Trump’s obsession with crowd size, many wondered if he was just shivering at the thought that the weather would keep spectators away.
An X account belonging to a beloved D.C. dive bar, Dan’s Cafe, dryly posted about the shift to the rotunda: “Good thing his supporters already know how to get inside.”
Trump’s last inauguration was marred by his meltdown over crowd size; he called the National Park Service director the next day to press him to produce additional photographs of the crowds on the Mall after the agency shared photographs showing that Obama had a much larger crowd at his inaugural than Trump did. The one-day-old president also sent out his White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, to bluster falsely about how Trump’s crowd was the largest ever to witness an inauguration.
That set the tone for the highchair king’s first term: Reality must take a back seat to ego stroking — or else.
The mood in Washington is very different this time around. Instead of a rowdy resistance and a women’s march that drew nearly 500,000 here and some five million across the globe — an international swath of pink hats — we have Republicans who have gotten even more sheeplike and Democrats who still seem deflated and flummoxed, with no compelling ideas or pols to lead them out of the wilderness.
And this as Trump is surrounded not by advisers, generals and a daughter trying (and failing) to temper him but by fervent loyalists who will help him toss out executive orders the same way he tossed out paper towels in Puerto Rico, with no worries about who might be hit.
When she was trying to lure Joe Biden out of the race last summer, Pelosi said he had been such a consequential president, he belonged on Mount Rushmore. And Biden has made several speeches this week trying to buff his accomplishments.
But he will be merely a footnote in the vertiginous saga of how Trump won the White House again, despite a hail of impeachments, lawsuits, insults and lies and an attempted coup that put his vice president, lawmakers and police in danger.
The chip on Biden’s shoulder devoured his judgment about what was good for him, for his party and for the country. His narcissism trumped his patriotism.
A new Times article, “How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President,” reveals that Biden was encased in the same sort of delusional bubble as Trump. Mimicking Trump’s self-serving sycophants, Biden’s staff ginned up positive comments from allies to show the boss and protected him from negative stories.
Many noticed that Biden was in a fog, or “dans les vapes,” as an aide to President Emmanuel Macron of France called it. But challenges to the Panglossian narrative about the president’s stamina and mental fitness were met with hostility. Jill Biden and advisers spun a Trump-like web of deceit around the White House.
Even Biden himself now admits that he isn’t certain he could have made it through four more years. “Who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?” he recently told USA Today’s Susan Page.
But he persisted with his fiction that he was hale and hearty long enough to ensure that Democrats had no time to choose a ticket with a real shot at stopping Trump.
As Biden, baked in Washington tradition, dutifully follows the script on Monday, he should ponder what his legacy will truly be: resurrecting Trump.
(NY Times)
“I’m teaching my last class in a few hours. I’ve been a professor of textile design for twenty-something years, but it’s sort of on an ‘as needed’ basis. And there’s been a decline in enrollment, so I don’t think I’m needed anymore. I’ll have to figure out what else to do with my time. I don’t want to just start binge-watching Netflix. I could always go work as a receptionist somewhere. But I’d like to think I have something particular to express, and that if I pour my energy into it, and I’m disciplined enough, then something will come out of it. But it takes bravery to be creative, right? You know, you look at Pinterest or whatever, and it looks like everything’s been done already. It’s easier to find the confidence when you’re 25, or 35, or even 45; you can kind of convince yourself that you're cool and hip and, you know, of the moment. If I was still in my thirties maybe I’d invest in going to art school or something. But at this age, it’s kind of like: is that really worth the investment? At an age where most people are thinking of retiring? It’s a question of time. Because how many more years do I have of actually working, creating? But also, it’s a self-worth question. If I do a two-year degree, I’m almost sixty. If I do a four-year degree, I’m definitely sixty. You worry about investing all that time, all that money, all that energy. And then kind of being mediocre, you know, at that thing. And that would be hard to swallow at this age, right? You kind of want to finish on top.”
“TRUMP has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: ‘MAGA doesn't realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years’.”
— Heather Cox Richardson, historian
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Biden is a symptom, and not the cause, of why America is fucked. The entire project is a careening car on Dead Man’s Road. Over that reality is superimposed a doctrine that reflects the core beliefs of those in power at the moment that doesn’t seem to address or correct our real problems but only contradict previous solutions that didn’t work, etc, etc. The whole message of America has been reduced to one big, incessant Warning about Everything.
IT’S NOT THAT TRUMP IS GOOD, It’s That Biden Was Just That Bad
by Caitlin Johnstone
TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration’s ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement.
Remember this: it’s not that Trump is good, it’s that Democrats are just that bad. Biden’s completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline.
Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuse of the US empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end.
❖
Do yourself a favor and spare yourself the indignity of thinking the ceasefire and suspending the TikTok ban indicate that Trump is going to be a good president. You don’t get to become the US president unless the powers that be trust you to inflict the evils necessary for running the empire.
The system does not work. You cannot vote your way out of the tyranny of the empire, and the president is not going to save you. Trump will do many evil things as president, because that’s what US presidents do.
Don’t believe me? Then watch and pay attention. And learn the lessons you failed to learn last time.
❖
It’s possible that Trump’s term will constitute another swing from Bush-level depravity to Obama-level depravity.
It isn’t normal for the US empire to be as openly depraved as it has been in Gaza. Normally its evils are much more well-disguised, because it is in the empire’s interests to preserve its image in the eyes of the western public. You only see the really in-your-face acts of monstrosity when a coalition of forces within the swamp are able to seize on a rare opportunity to shove them through, as we saw in the wake of 9/11 and again in the wake of October 7.
The rest of the time, the empire likes to be a lot subtler about its abuses, like it was during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. Starvation sanctions. Staging coups. Secretly arming proxy forces. Drone assassinations. Covert ops. It prefers these means over the Hulk Smash ground invasions like we saw during George W Bush’s first term, and the overt genocidal atrocities like we saw during Biden’s.
The Zionists, war profiteers and empire managers seized on the rare opportunity presented by October 7 combined with a senile lifelong Zionist in the White House to push through agendas in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon that they had wanted to push through for years, but they greatly damaged the empire’s propaganda interests in the process. We can expect the empire to try to move its ugliness out of the spotlight as swiftly as possible in the coming years and attempt to restore its false public image as a force of good in the world, while continuing to advance its psychopathic agendas in sneakier ways.
❖
Young Americans can take the same lessons from the TikTok ban that they’ve taken from Gaza: that they live in a tyrannical dystopia, and that the Democratic Party is not their friend.
❖
To be clear, when you hear people saying that US lawmakers voted to ban TikTok in order to shut down criticism of Israel among young people, it’s not some antisemitic conspiracy theory; they have openly admitted that this was in fact what they were doing. Legislators like Chris Murphy, Mitt Romney, Mike Gallagher and Mike Lawler are all on record saying they supported the ban because of the prevalence of pro-Palestinian content on the platform.
❖
One of the most politically interesting developments in recent days has been Americans flocking to the Chinese app Red Note in response to the looming TikTok ban and interacting with people in China for the first time in their lives with the help of translation technology.
If you had asked me last month what country I wish ordinary Americans would start communicating with at mass scale, I would have said China without a moment’s hesitation. If this keeps up it’s going to cause some real problems for the empire propagandists down the track.
(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)
THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS
by Langston Hughes
I've known rivers.
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than
the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
Went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its
muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT
Trump Aims for Show of Strength as He Returns to Power
Gazans and Israelis Dare to Hope as Cease-Fire Takes Hold
TikTok Engineered Its Shutdown to Get Saved. But Trump’s Solution May Fall Short
How a Monument to Women Finally Won a Place on the National Mall
FIRST THREE ISRAELI HOSTAGES FREED UNDER GAZA CEASEFIRE
Thirty-three people were set to be released during the first phase of the agreement, including female soldiers and civilians, children and men over 50.
by Natan Odenheimer, Ephrat Livni, Talya Minsberg & Maatthrew Mpoke Bigg
Three hostages have been freed in the first phase of the cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel.
The hostages, all women, were released into Red Cross custody in Gaza on Sunday and were transferred to Israeli forces, who took them to meet their mothers, the Israeli military said.
About 100 hostages, living and dead, are thought still to be held in Gaza, most of them taken in the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Thirty-three of them will be released during an initial six-week phase of the cease-fire, including female soldiers and civilians, children, men over 50 and sick and wounded people, according to the agreement.
“The vast majority” of the 33 hostages to be released in the six-week first phase of the cease-fire are alive, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said Sunday in a discussion on social media.
Video released by the Israeli military showed the three hostages being reunited with their families at Sheba Hospital in Israel.
In one clip, one of the returned hostages, Romi Gonen, is surrounded in an embrace by members of her family as they tearfully comfort one another. Yarden Gonen, her sister, who had traveled around the world in the past year to lobby for Romi’s release, jumps up and down in the video as the family hugs. In another clip, another released hostage, Doron Steinbrecher, tearfully embraces loved ones.
Romi Gonen
Ms. Gonen was 23 when she was captured as she was trying to leave the Nova music festival in southern Israel when Hamas attacked. She was speaking at the time to her mother, Meirav Gonen, who said she had been shot and was bleeding.
Last February, Meirav Gonen released a recording of her last phone call with her daughter. She told the Israeli news media that Romi was a strong and happy person who often went to raves.
In the early weeks of the war, her mother expressed concern that Israeli military operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages.
Romi Gonen’s older sister, Yarden, told The New York Times in February that she regularly went to a plaza in Tel Aviv where families of hostages have held vigils.
“None of us is doing anything remotely related to our previous lives,” she said.
Emily Damari
Ms. Damari, 27 at the time she was captured, is the only hostage with British citizenship who was still being held this month. She was taken from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Azza in southern Israel and was seen by a neighbor in her own car, driven by a militant, heading toward Gaza.
Ms. Damari was raised in Israel but traveled to Britain often, according to her mother, British-born Mandy Damari, who was in Israel last month to speak with officials and the news media and to plead for a hostage and cease-fire deal. She said that her daughter had been shot and that she feared for her life, telling the BBC that she had welcomed the threats from President-elect Donald J. Trump that there would be “all hell to pay” if no deal was reached by his inauguration.
Last January, a hostage who had been released from Gaza, Dafna Elyakim, told the Israeli news media that she and her younger sister had been taken into Hamas’s underground tunnels, where they met other female hostages, including Ms. Damari.
On the eve of the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, Mandy Damari spoke at an event in Hyde Park in London, where she described her daughter as a soccer fan who enjoyed a drink and had “the classic British sense of humor, with a dash of Israeli chutzpah thrown in for good measure.”
On Sunday, Mandy Damari thanked “everyone who never stopped fighting for Emily throughout this horrendous ordeal.” But, she said in a statement, “for too many other families the impossible wait continues.”
The Israeli military also released a picture of Emily Damari and her mother that showed her missing two fingers on her left hand. Ms. Damari was shot in the hand on Oct. 7, 2023.
Doron Steinbrecher
Ms. Steinbrecher, who was 30 when she was captured from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Azza, is a veterinary nurse with Romanian and Israeli citizenship. According to Israeli news media, she was in touch with her family on the kibbutz when the militants attacked, telling her parents that they had smashed her windows and shot into her room.
“They’ve arrived, they have me,” she said in a subsequent voice message sent to friends.
Last January, Hamas released a video clip of Ms. Steinbrecher and two other captives, Daniella Gilboa and Karina Ariev, in which they pleaded for their release.
Last March, on her 31st birthday, the Jewish News Syndicate published an interview with her mother, Simona Steinbrecher, who said that she had looked pale and thin in the video. She said she was concerned that Ms. Steinbrecher was not getting the daily medication she needed, though she did not specify what that was.
“She’s a strong woman, but it’s terrible being there,” Simona Steinbrecher said.
On Sunday, the family of Doron Steinbrecher issued a statement celebrating her release that thanked the Israeli people and expressed gratitude to Mr. Trump “for his significant involvement and support, which meant so much to us.” The statement did not mention President Biden or any Israeli leaders.
(NY Times)
Some New York Times Choices Today
TikTok, RedNote and the Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet
China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.
The Chinese social media app RedNote is full of cute, heartwarming moments after about 500,000 American users fled to it last week to protest the looming U.S. government ban on TikTok.
Calling themselves “TikTok refugees,” these users paid the “cat tax” to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos. They answered so many questions from their new Chinese friends: Is it true that in rural America every family has a large farm, a huge house, at least three children and several big dogs? That Americans have to work two jobs to support themselves? That Americans are terrible at geography and many believe that Africa is a country? That most Americans have two days off every week?A Letter
To Be From L.A. Is to Know Its Twin Temptations: Beauty and Danger
A Times climate reporter reflects on a city, its mythology and a reckoning with disaster.
Often when you’re visiting Los Angeles, you walk up the 282 steps to the Baldwin Hills scenic overlook. You pass the sagebrush and the primrose. The high rises of downtown come into view. Then, as you stand under a live oak and take a swig of water, you notice the oil wells, those nodding donkeys pumping grease out of the ground, symbols of the oil-hungry economy that birthed this sprawling city and now makes it more flammable.
You don’t dwell on the oil wells. You know they’re there. They’ve always been there. You focus your gaze elsewhere. The Santa Monica mountains reveal their crowns as the marine layer lifts. You see a flash of the Pacific. You are distracted by a monarch butterfly.
Texas Has a Perverse Idea of Religious Freedom
The Supreme Court of Texas just heard oral argument in a case challenging a remarkably punitive and malicious attack on religious liberty by the state of Texas. That attack isn’t just dangerous on its own terms, it’s also a potential preview of President-elect Donald Trump’s second term. MAGA’s cruelty toward immigrants and its disregard for civil liberties are on full display in the Lone Star State.
Last year, on Feb. 7, lawyers from the Texas attorney general’s office showed up at Annunciation House, a religious nonprofit founded by local Catholics that provides food, shelter and clothing for migrants in El Paso, and demanded “immediate access” to its records regarding its past and current residents.
I Was an Undocumented Immigrant. I Beg You to See the Nuance in Our Stories.
Almost 14 years ago, I risked the life I had built for myself in the United States by coming out publicly as an undocumented immigrant.
This past Christmas, I took an even greater risk: To find my way to a stable legal status in this country, I had to leave the place I have called my home for over 30 years. I had no promise of being able to return.
In front of me was an opportunity I almost stopped hoping to find. For me, like many undocumented immigrants, immigration reform — on both a wide scale and a personal one — can seem impossible. On the campaign trail all year we heard endless plans that too often vastly oversimplified the reality of immigration. In this country, immigrants, with their complex, nuanced lives, have seen their stories flattened through misinformation and fear.
The Delights and the Challenges of Expat Life
Readers discuss a guest essay by Paul Theroux about his experiences as an American expat.
To the Editor:
Re “The Hard Reality That American Expats Quickly Learn,” by Paul Theroux (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 5):
Mr. Theroux’s description of the “existential, parasitical, rootless” nature of expat life struck a chord with me. Despite living in Germany for decades, I will never be a German. I never planned to stay permanently. A university exchange program blossomed into a German romance, husband, son, friendships, career and mortgage.
Mexico Is Getting Ready for Trump. Here’s What’s Different This Time.
President Claudia Sheinbaum is detaining more migrants, seizing more fentanyl and positioning her country as a key ally against China. But the U.S. stance has shifted, too.
For the second time in less than decade, Mexico is preparing to negotiate with President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is threatening the neighboring country with sky-high tariffs, mass deportations and military strikes on cartels.
The stakes are huge for Mexico’s 130 million people. Among major economies, Mexico is exceptionally dependent on the United States, sending about 80 percent of its exports to the American market.
Mexico’s top negotiators are adopting an assertive stance to negotiating with Mr. Trump this time around. Some of them can draw from experience dealing with the first Trump administration: Mexico’s populist president at the time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, forged a warm relationship with Mr. Trump, and Mexico avoided steep tariffs while acceding to demands to curb migration.
Opinion piece in 1/19/25 WSJ, Joe Biden’s Legacy Of Deceit :
“Call it what you want—deception, disinformation, gaslighting, spin. Whoppers were the hallmark of the Biden administration. The most consequential was that the president himself was fit as a fiddle when everyone could plainly see he was struggling against the limitations of age and infirmity. His dreadful performance at the June debate confirmed what most Americans already suspected. The stage lights were on and the band was still playing, but Elvis had left the building.”
Congressman Huffman is a liar. I have hunted the Lake Pillsbury basin area since the 1980’s. There are not 200 miles of salmon spawning habitat above Scott Dam. All of the tributaries, creeks and streams that feed the lake are dry by late July and early August.
RE: 200 miles of salmon spawning habitat above Scott Dam…
dry by late July and early August.
—> November 30, 2022
Throughout the winter months and into spring, Chinook salmon, coho salmon and steelhead trout will be spawning throughout Humboldt County, especially in the Eel River…
Chinook salmon typically spawn earlier than coho and steelhead, and will likely spawn until the end of December, when coho and steelhead begin spawning more. The entire spawning season is usually wrapped up by May.
https://www.times-standard.com/2022/11/30/spawning-season-underway-in-eel-river/
DIFFERENT TIMES
Have been hearing this song off and on in my head—then played it real loud on repeat on CD—over the last few days. Haunting in a way, it felt. And for good reason. One wonders, pondering Dylan’s epic words from 1964—how to take them now, 61 years later. The title is true for sure, lots of change coming. Beyond that, I don’t pretend to know—the times are so different, the future not so hopeful…
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’
Love it. Here’s one of my favorite covers, seems appropriate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ4lM9K7__w
The young Tracy Chapman, very nice–thanks, Norm.
What I’m reading in the AVA today
ED Notes
Tommy Wayne
Langston Hughes poem
Normally I don’t miss ANYTHING by Maureen Dowd,
but not interested in anything Trump
Why are we all paying for water systems that give cheap water to agribusiness? It’s not like they use it to feed people. Nut crops are the largest ushers of this subsidized water and 2/3 of this crop is exported of of the country.
On another note, if you like standup comedy, check out Dave Chappelle from his opener on SNL, it’s available on YouTube. He absolutely kills for over 15 minutes.
John Arteaga notes Paul Volker, who indeed was a significant figure appointed by Jimmy Carter. Likely the most significant. It was the economic results of that appointment that likely led to Carter’s defeat. Volker said he would stamp out inflation, and he did. His predecessor, Arthur Burns, raised interest rates after presidential elections, and lowerred them before creating a predictable cycle of inflation and an economy that depended on that. Volker ended that cycle and in so doing caused the bankruptcies of many businesses, big. and small, and forced a change in the economic mindset of investors. He also ushered in the longest period of uninterrupted growth in US history that Ronald Reagan took credit for.
“The funds through the Inflation Reduction Act will fund a major Eel River estuary project…”
Estuary? First mention in all the talk.
Professor Yearsley —
When I was a kid, ‘40s and ‘50s, everybody sang (or whistled, or tapped out their own spontaneous percussive accompaniment to any air that happened their way).
Pre-TV, radio hot, Broadway bizzy, great show tunes that my parents loved, both playing the piano (sheet music was still a popular commodity), and on Sunday afternoons they’d have a bunch of neighbors over for a few cocktails and rousing renditions of Singin’ in the Rain.
American Band Stand, soft “rock” that gave way to new influences of old styles, Rag, Blues, Soul, and a lot of a capella corner combos you could dance to, spontaneously, and led to the entirely original stars like Elvis and the Beetles and the Stones.
Who didn’t know and sing all the words to Love Me Tender, Yellow Submarine, and I Can’t Get No?
Somewhere in the 80s, a frustrated white collar commuter privately “venting” while driving — now there’s a real safety hazard! — who knows where the impulse came from, out pops “The Red Red Bobin,” bob bob bobbin’ along, and my tears of vexation gave way to a smile, no more sobbin’ for sure.
America the Beautiful, that old bourgeoise hymn to capitalism, patriotism, and the American Way, reflected in the barren freeway landscape seen dimly through the purple haze of low-lying smog, segues into Every Sperm is Sacred, or the Low Spark of Highheeled Boys. Have fun, open up those airbags, blow out all the stops!
A bit of good news today, mentioned almost in passing at the very end of an article I read on Biden pardoning his family at the last minute… Biden commuted Leonard Peltier’s sentence. He will be released from prison and spend the rest of his sentence under home confinement. After 50 years, he will be reunited with his family and those that have supported him.
Biden also posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey. Today, Black Americans aren’t allowed to have authentic leadership. Those that have attained political power are beholden to one of the two terrorist political parties. Athletes and even rappers are held up as ‘role models,’ but if they try anything real they met the usual fate. Nipsey Hustle (real name Ermias Asghedom) tried to leverage his success into creating a black economic zone in LA. He was gunned down and murdered. The establishment secretly liked MLK when they though they could control him with a supply of White women (see also, Jawaharlal Nehru), but when he turned against the war that all changed. In 1999 a US civil court found that King had been assassinated as a result of a conspiracy that included “government agencies.”
The good Jimmy Carter happened after he left office – declaring Israel an apartheid state and building homes for the poor. The bad Jimmy Carter co-founded Al-Qaeda, committed genocide in Indonesia, supported apartheid South Africa, and began the Neoliberal deconstruction of the economy and society.
Hamas gave the three released hostages a nice parting gift. Described by the media as “young women” they are all veterans of the IDF. Hamas gifted them a necklace with a pendant in the shape of Palestine, a map of Palestine, a certificate of completion for learning Arabic while they were guests of Hamas, some photos of their time in Gaza, and a nice schwag bag to carry it all.
The news of Peltier’s commutation is welcome, not to mention long overdue.
George Will’s ending words to his commentary on the new president today made me smile at its blunt truth:
“….Most people, however, realize, around age 7, that the universe under its current administration produces many disappointments. Then they shrug and get on with their lives. Today, many emotionally dilapidated obsessives experience either despair or euphoria about the inaugurations of presidents, who come and go. Both groups should rethink what they expect from politics, and why they do.”
Washington Post, 1/20/25
The Editor’s Note is often the high point for me, but this time especially it soared and sang. I’m really looking forward to reading it on KNYO Friday night.