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MOSTLY DRY for the next seven days with the exception of potential light rain or snow late Friday night into Saturday morning for parts of central and southern Lake County. Chilly nights and mornings, especially this morning and Wednesday morning, and again for this weekend. Potential for gusty winds return to the area Friday through Sunday, focusing on the coast Friday, and then including interior locations Saturday into Sunday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 34F under clear skies this Wednesday morning on the coast. More of the same into the weekend then some colder & windy weather arrives. Colder??? Chances of rain later next week are fading at the moment, we'll see?
WES SMOOT MEMORIAL, SATURDAY, 2PM, BOONVILLE FAIRGROUNDS
Wes Smoot's Memorial was originally planned to be held at the Rose Room at Anderson Valley Historical Museum on February 1st. It will now be held at the Apple Hall at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds on Saturday, February 1st at 2 pm. Please help spread the word so we can honor this amazing man.
(AV Senior Center Press Release)
VIRGINIA SHARKEY
I’m honored my painting “Signatura” was chosen by the Portland Art Museum curator Grace Kook-Anderson to be one of the 80 out of 2500 works submitted for the Crocker-Kingsley Exhibition 2025. This is in the Sacramento area pictured here in the lovely Blue Sky Gallery in Roseville.
OLD PERCEPTIONS
by Marshall Newman
As a member of the Baby Boom generation, I am increasingly aware of how younger generations – Generation X (born 1964-1980), Millennials (born 1981-2000) and Generation Z (born 2001-2020) - perceive older folks.
Of course, “how” assumes these other generations are paying attention to Baby Boomers. In more than a few cases – with the exception of family – they are not. As another Baby Boomer lamented, “first they don’t hear us and then they don’t see us.”
And when they do see and hear Baby Boomers, the perceptions often are less than favorable. “Frail.” “Slow.” “Self absorbed.” “Out of touch.” “Closed minded.” “Entitled.””Okay boomer” became a pejorative in the late 2010s and it hasn’t faded yet.
Some of those perceptions are accurate; many folks in their 60s and beyond aren’t as sturdy, quick or up-to-date as those from younger generations. But to dismiss an entire generation because they got old is just plain wrong.
The 2023 U.S. longevity numbers from the Centers for Disease Control say the average male life expectancy is 75.8 years, while the average female life expectancy is 81.1 years.
So maybe Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z should revise their perspective. A lot of those Baby Boomers they see have beaten the odds. They have outlived half their contemporaries, handled everything life can throw at them, dealt with a variety of health issues (often more than one), and continue to create, contribute, love and laugh. Those Baby Boomers may not meet every expectation, but they deserve respect.
Generation Xers, Millennials and Gen Zers also should know that a fair number of them and their contemporaries will not beat the odds; they will die in their 50s, 60s and early 70s. Only the fortunate will reach the age of today’s Baby Boomers.
All Baby Boomers really want when dealing with the younger generations is for those generations to have an open mind. And by being open minded during those encounters, the younger generations may be surprised by how much Baby Boomers have to offer.
CAROLE BRODSKY
I’m really honored that HuffPost chose to accept this story.
For 27 Years, I Had Minimal Contact With My Abusive Mother. Then She Moved In With Me.
“Living with my mom was the last thing I ever thought I’d be doing as an adult.”
Carole Brodsky has been a freelance reporter and writer since 2006, when her mother was diagnosed with dementia. Following her mother’s death, Carole became an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Association and is now the Executive Director of Hospice of Ukiah, which provides free palliative and hospice care to members of their community in Mendocino County, California.
TRUMP’S BLANKET PARDON OF JAN. 6 RIOTERS INCLUDES THREE NORTH BAY RESIDENTS
The first day of President Donald Trump’s second term brought good news for a trio of North Bay residents who faced prosecution for their involvement in the riot at the nation’s Capitol four years ago.
by Austin Murphy
The first day of President Donald Trump’s second term brought good news for a trio of North Bay residents who faced prosecution for their involvement in the riot at the nation’s Capitol four years ago.
It came in the “full, complete and unconditional pardon“ Trump granted Monday to most of the nearly 1,600 individuals who were charged with offenses that occurred “at or near the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Just like that, pending cases were cleared, charges were dropped and rioters walked free.
On Tuesday, citing the president’s executive order, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia filed a one-page motion to dismiss “with prejudice” the charges against Teresa Conemac, the Napa woman who climbed a terrace at the Capitol, then spent three minutes inside the building.
Also deactivated were all links on the FBI’s website connected to the fugitive Evan Neumann, formerly of Santa Rosa.
That’s because Neumann — the Cardinal Newman High School student and Jan. 6 rioter who was photographed charging the barricades and accused of assaulting police that day, then fled the country to escape justice — is no longer a fugitive in the eyes of the government.
While certainly welcome, the pardon from Trump wasn’t quite as big a deal to Daniel Shaw, the Santa Rosa resident and Tubbs Fire survivor who pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor after spending 14 minutes in the Rotunda — during which time, according to his attorney, he politely asked a police officer to direct him to the men’s room, if one was open.
Elsewhere inside the Capitol, violence and destruction ensued as an angry mob of Trump supporters stormed the building and attacked officers in an effort to thwart certification of the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden.
Tasers, Hatchets, Bear Spray
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia, 1,583 defendants were charged with federal crimes associated with the attack, comprising the largest prosecution in Justice Department history. Some 600 were charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding” agents of law enforcement, including 174 charged with “using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”
More than 100 police officers were injured in the attack, which caused $2.8 million in damage to the Capitol.
Weapons carried on Capitol grounds that day included bear spray, tasers, axes, hatchets and knives, along with “makeshift weapons,” including fencing, bike racks, stolen riot shields, baseball bats, hockey sticks, flagpoles, PVC piping and reinforced knuckle gloves.
Trump, who described the insurrection as “a day of love,” and who called the prosecution of even violent rioters “a grave national injustice,” also commuted the sentences of 14 members of the far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, some of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their roles in the attack.
Trump's clemency to violent offenders and seditionists clashed with messaging from his vice president, JD Vance, who last week told Fox News, “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Pressed Tuesday by a White House reporter about why he’d cleared the militia members and whether there was a place for them in politics, Trump said, “Well, we have to see. They’ve been given a pardon. I thought their sentences were ridiculous and excessive.”
Fugitive Now Free To Return Home
In a text Monday night, Sasha Neumann described the executive order as “huge news.”
She is the sister of Evan Neumann, a longtime Santa Rosa resident who was indicted on 14 felony counts, including engaging in physical violence in a restricted building and assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers.
During these altercations, Neumann used not only his hands and fists to strike the officers, according to the FBI, “he also allegedly used a metal barricade as a battering ram” against police.
Convinced that he would not receive a fair trial in the United States, Neumann traveled to Europe a month after the insurrection, and hasn’t returned. In March 2022, he was granted asylum in Belarus, an ally of Russia.
In a January 2024 phone interview with The Press Democrat, Evan Neumann denied assaulting any officers. Evidence against him, he contended, is based on still photographs taken from videos, without context. He further explained that a photograph of his fist appearing to strike an officer could have been an attempt by him to ward off pepper spray or stop himself from falling.
If the barricade he was holding did move toward police, he added, that was a result of movement down the line of fence. He did not use it as a battering ram, he said.
The son of Santa Rosa hotelier Claus Neumann, who in 1962 found the Los Robles Lodge on Cleveland Avenue, Evan Neumann followed in his father’s footsteps, serving from 1996 to 2000 as general manager of the Hotel La Rose in Railroad Square, then owned by his parents.
As of last January, he was living in Brest, on the Polish border, and working to open a restaurant that would serve American cuisine.
He spoke then of missing his children two young teenagers still in California. He wanted very much to return home, he said.
But not if it meant going to prison.
Now his path home has been cleared.
In a text Monday night, Sasha Neumann said that after reading Trump’s proclamation, her brother “believes he is a free man.”
Plea Deal Now Moot
Daniel Shaw, a longtime resident of Santa Rosa, traveled to the Capitol with his teenage son to “witness an historic moment in D.C. — when the vote count would be corrected, and Mr. Trump would be named president,” according to a sentencing memorandum filed by his attorney.
Security video footage shows Shaw entering the Capitol through the ornate, wooden Rotunda Doors on the building’s east side. In a still photograph from the video, Shaw is holding up his cellphone, presumably filming, as he and a throng of rioters press through the doorway, passing between two Capitol police officers who are not resisting the flood of trespassers.
Initially charged with four misdemeanors, Shaw pleaded guilty to a single count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.
He was sentenced to 10 days in prison, plus two years’ probation and $500 restitution.
Requesting lenience, Shaw’s public defender cited his client’s physical challenges: 25 years as an operating engineer “running large equipment on solid rock” had left him permanently disabled. He became a widower in 2015. Two years later Shaw nearly killed himself in a drunk driving crash that resulted in a 3-month hospital stay.
Since that crash, Shaw has sworn off alcohol, his attorney wrote, and focused on “caring for his son’s well-being, his health, and for his property, especially after rebuilding his home that was burned down in the fires of in 2017.”
At one point while still in the Rotunda, the memo recounts, Shaw asked officers if a bathroom was available. None was, so the Shaws returned to their hotel room.
Shaw could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Conemac, an anti-abortion activist from Napa, pleaded guilty in November to two misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol.
Set to be sentenced on Feb. 7, her case was dismissed Tuesday. Her lawyer, Angela Chuang of the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of California, did not return a request for comment Tuesday.
Attempt To Rewrite History
Pardons have long played a role in presidential politics, said Steve Estes, a Sonoma State University professor who studies the social and cultural history of modern America.
Trump’s sweeping amnesty for Jan. 6 rioters, violent and nonviolent alike, is not normal, he noted. Nor is the nature of the crimes being excused.
“This isn’t like an individual committing fraud,” said Estes. “It was a collective act, meant to halt the peaceful transfer of power in the government.”
Ever since that day, he added, Trump has been trying to rewrite its history.
Monday’s proclamation “is a kind of legal way of using power of executive office to put an exclamation point on his revision.
“But that’s not the end of the story,” he said.
As a result of the hundreds of prosecutions, and the exhaustive work of a bipartisan House committee, there’s “a legal and historical record of the actions (rioters) took, and why we should not forget them.”
Trump can try to rewrite the history, “and he is the most powerful person in the United States, if not the world, right now,” said Estes. “But he won’t always be.”
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
THE COLD CASE DESK — FROM THE ARCHIVE by Bruce Anderson (November 2009)
Here at Boonville’s cold case desk, the phone will ring and an anonymous someone will ask, “Do you remember the murder of…?”
The caller seldom recalls the specifics of the terrible killing, but the deep shock, the pure horror inspired by it, lingers.
A woman recently called from Fort Bragg who wanted us to look into the unsolved killing of a young woman named Georgina “George” Pacheco. Miss Pacheco, 20, had been born in the conservative Azores to a traditional Catholic family, but grew up in unmoored America where even small towns like Fort Bragg are socially fragmented and drug-ridden, where even the most conscientious parents lose their children to influences as destructively incessant as the winds that blow in off the Pacific.
Georgina seems to have gotten lost in the transition from old world to new.
Well-liked and always employed, the energetic and always chipper young woman worked mostly as a waitress as she broke away from what she seemed to see as the unreasonable strictures of her old world Portuguese home. She began associating with estranged, unmoored young people deep into the drug life, one of whom murdered her.
Georgina Pacheco was found strangled to death on tranquil Pearl Drive south of Fort Bragg the morning of September 10th, 1988. She hadn't been seen for about a week. A man named Rodney Elam found her. Elam had been walking his dog in the early daylight hours when the animal drew his attention to Miss Pacheco’s nude corpse ten feet off the pavement. She'd been strangled and dragged into the brush. Police say it appeared that Georgina had been killed some other place, and that the lonely stretch of Pearl Drive was merely a place away from view where she wouldn't be found for a while.
The caller suspected that Georgina had been killed by well-connected delinquents, the berserk sons of the area’s professional class, maybe a half-dozen of them. There was indeed a small group of Coast high school boys who’d gotten off light, real light, for a series of property crimes, but there’s no evidence they were ever violent against people.
Miss Pacheco, from all the evidence, and there's enough to securely identify the killer if he should be just as securely identified, was probably murdered by a man acting alone. A couple of battered vehicles, a white van and a pick-up truck, one of which may have contained the killer, were seen leaving the area where Georgina's body was found around the time her body would have been abandoned there, but these reports were so vague as to be unhelpful.
Numerous suspects were interviewed, all of them drawn from the Mendocino Coast’s floating population of hometown drug users and petty criminals, among them at the time, a few transient carnival workers.
The police quickly eliminated Elam as a suspect, but have since come to believe that Miss Pacheco may have been murdered by John Annibel, a suspected serial killer, who lived in Fort Bragg from 1984 until he was arrested for the 1998 murder of Debbie Sloan of Laytonville.
Annibel remains in the state pen for the murder of Mrs. Sloan, a divorced mother of two who met Annibel at a Laytonville bar and made the fatally bad decision to spend what turned out to be her eternal night with him.
The killer was born to a Scotia logging family. He spent part of his youth in Fortuna before the Annibel family moved to Fruitland Ridge above Myers Flat. Annibel has a twin brother who has never been in trouble, a normal brother, a brother who recalls that John was “off” even as a little kid.
Before Annibel moved to Fort Bragg from his home area of Southern Humboldt County, he was the only suspect in the murders of two women in the Garberville area, one of them his fiancée, the other a teenager he’d known since she was a child. He may also have killed two more women — not known to him — in the Arcata area, but Annibel could never be linked to the Arcata killings even tenuously.
But he was definitely linked to the murder of his fiancée and the teenager, linked solidly enough to be prosecuted by Humboldt County if Humboldt County had ever gotten around to prosecuting him.
For reasons ranging from official inertia to official incompetence, Annibel was not charged with the murders of the two Humboldt County women, both of whom he is assumed to have strangled to death, both of whom were last seen in his presence.
After Annibel moved to Fort Bragg in 1984 he was not linked to another murder until 1998 when he confessed to the Thanksgiving weekend strangulation of Debbie Sloan in a Laytonville motel room. Odd that an assumed psycho killer would go for more than a decade without satisfying his terrible yearning to just go out and choke a female someone to death.
So, maybe Annibel wasn’t a serial killer in the usual sense. The one woman he admitted to killing, and the two others he almost certainly killed, seemed to be impulse kills. He was there, they were there, they were alone, he flipped out on them and choked them until they were dead. It’s not like he was driving around at night looking for hitchhikers or other isolated women to kill.
So far as is known, that is.
Annibel worked at the old L-P stud mill in Fort Bragg and for Harwood Lumber on the Branscomb Road.
After he’d strangled Mrs. Sloan in that desolate Laytonville motel room, he threw her body off the Branscomb Road not far from Westport. Annibel had driven west with Mrs. Sloan's corpse past his place of employment, the Harwood Mill, threw her remains away, and continued on home to his wife and two daughters in Fort Bragg.
That’s Annibel’s m.o. He strangles women he knows with his bare hands and throws them away.
But Georgina Pacheco was garroted. The man who killed her tied something around her neck, a ligature as it's called, and pulled it tight. There's other evidence the police are holding in reserve that would definitively tie the killer to his victim if a suspect more likely than Annibel should be revealed.
Annibel lived near Georgina in Fort Bragg, and like her he used methamphetamine. They undoubtedly knew each other, had associated with the same set of people. And Annibel became a known killer in 1998 when he confessed to the murder of Debbie Sloan.
If he didn't belong at the top of the suspect list he should be second.
A dozen men were interviewed and cleared, but among many locals the consensus killer was a man named Robert Parks, the estranged husband of one of Georgina’s sisters. Parks is believed to be the last man to see Georgina alive. There are cops who worked in the Fort Bragg area at the time who are convinced Parks was the guy, and there are cops who say Parks wasn't the guy.
To say that Parks was widely disliked hardly begins to explain just how thoroughly disliked he was. Lots of people wanted Parks dead, or at least wanted to thump him so bad he’d stop his thieving, lowlife ways.
One Fort Bragg man caught Parks in the act of ripping off fishing gear, followed Parks, confronted him, fought him, and almost died when Parks hit him over the head with a metal pipe. And would have died if a friend hadn’t come along and pulled Parks off him.
Parks would eventually be found shot to death in Morro Bay on a boat he’d stolen belonging to a Fort Bragg man. Someone had tied Parks up and put a bullet in him. An old timer who knew Parks said “Parks was capable of anything, and I mean anything.” The people who think Parks killed Georgina think he did it to get back at Georgina’s sister who no longer wanted anything to do with him.
But Parks is gone, as are most of the other likelies.
Fort Bragg in 1988 was awash in drugs and bad people, some of them pillars of the community, at least on their treacherous surfaces they looked like pillars of the community.
Among the unprosecuted crimes these seeming community pillars committed was a series of arson fires that cost Fort Bragg its library, its justice court, and the historic Piedmont Hotel. The fires were also the work of the heavily drug dependent, with the arsonists being paid partly in cocaine.
The 1980s in Fort Bragg saw several members of the Fort Bragg City Council take “loans” from a big boy developer, the credulous chased alleged Satanists out on Airport Road, and the Mendocino County District Attorney blithely remarked, “No one from Fort Bragg ever called me about prosecuting the Fort Bragg fires.”
It was a good time for bad people in Mendocino County.
Although Georgina was always employed, and always had a solid family backing her up, and probably would have outgrown her desire to walk on the wild side, she’d gotten into speed and bad men, hanging out in the parking lot of the old Sprouse-Reitz on Main Street when she wasn’t working. That’s where the bad boys and the drugs were, and that's undoubtedly where the killer was, too.
Other suspects included Victor Gray who, as it happens, I’ve known since he was kid. Vic and his brother Chris grew up in Boonville. When their mom, Jeannie, moved to Fort Bragg the boys went with her. Chris was shot one night in the Boonville Lodge by a rotund old hippie named Thaddeus “Thad” Thomas who lived up on Nash Mill Road. At least Thad looked like an old hippie. Or Santa Claus, take your choice, but he didn’t act like either one. Thad lived at the foot of a dark gulch deep in the hills east of Philo that matched his personality, and one night Thad turned on his barstool and shot Chris Gray pointblank. Chris had a bad headache, and he needed some basic reconstructive surgery, but he survived, and Thad Thomas died in jail while Thad's family's lawyers made sure Chris Gray never got the money Chris should have got for the harm done to him by the Troll of Nash Mill.
Victor Gray was Georgina’s last boyfriend. He, too, was quickly absolved of any responsibility for her death, which seemed to unhinge him, and Vic has had his troubles ever since.
All of the young men said to be close to Georgina at one time or another weren’t exactly marriage prospects, not the kind of young men a girl would bring home to meet her old world Portuguese parents, and when the suspects were systematically located by the police and asked about her murder, and cleared of it, the last suspect standing was John Annibel.
And Robert Parks.
In a brilliant series of interrogations by Mendocino County investigators Tim Kiely and Kurt Smallcomb, Annibel confessed to his Laytonville murder of Mrs. Sloan. He came close to telling the truth about his other Humboldt County murders, but close was as close as he got.
The gurgling sound of Mrs. Sloan dying that Annibel described for Kiely and Smallcomb, in such full psycho detail they could tell he yearned to hear it again.
Humboldt County was said to be seriously moving on Annibel for those two killings he was assumed to have committed prior to Mrs. Sloan, but he was never prosecuted for those two murders.
Local authorities were surprised and dismayed to learn that Annibel had already gotten a little ways out of prison when they heard he’d been assigned to outside firefighting duties. Fire camp is a prized berth in prison world, and only the best behaved convicts get it. But there’s nothing to stop a guy from walking away in the smoke, and this is one guy who shouldn't be outside prison walls, ever.
Annibel told Kiely and Smallcomb he’d moved to Fort Bragg to get away from all the bad people in Southern Humboldt, including a group he placed in Alderpoint that he identified as “the Weather Bureau,” a reference, it seems, to the Weathermen, a small group of uniquely estranged rich kids who became temporary revolutionaries in the 1960s. The Weathermen did spend time on the Northcoast, as did a group called Tribal Thumb, but the Weathermen, from much more privileged backgrounds than the leftist Thumbs, hid out in a posh home on the Mendocino Coast, an ocean view place, while the Thumbs worked out with small arms in the hot summer hills west of Garberville around Honeydew.
Class always tells, doesn't it?
There were all manner of organized lunatics roaming the redwoods in those days, and who knows how many freelancers. Annibel certainly wasn’t the only free range killer roaming the Northcoast vastness. But the organized loons, the political ones, are models of respectability these days, big shot Democrats and lawyers and professors and consultants whose names pop up in the news whenever the liberals need a professorial comment to round out a tepid paragraph.
“In all honesty,” Annibel told Kiely and Smallcomb, “I go home every night. And up until a couple of weeks ago, my wife worked nights. So I had my daughters every night. And working. I’m gone from my house thirteen hours a day. My day’s pretty well taken care of by the time I get home. And I’d help my youngest one with her school work and cook dinner. Believe me, when I went over there to Boomer’s (the Laytonville bar where he lethally encountered the late Mrs. Sloan) was the first time I’d been in a bar in a couple of years.”
The killer as homebody isn’t particularly convincing, but in his way, Annibel did seem devoted to his young wife — she’d moved in with him when she was 14, him 24. Last heard from, Mrs. Annibel and her daughters were living in Ukiah. She’d shed her dread married name but is still in the area. The Annibel girls would be young women now, older than the women dad murdered.
Captain Smallcomb commented that “unless we get a confession, I don’t think we’ll ever know who killed Georgina.”
But then…
CASE CLOSED
by Bruce Anderson (July 2013)
Robert Parks was found shot to death in Morro Bay aboard a boat he'd stolen in Fort Bragg. And from his remains confirmation that he'd murdered Georgina Pacheco.
Accompanied by a DNA analyst from the state's Department of Justice office in Eureka, Sheriff Tom Allman announced Tuesday that the 1988 rape and murder of Georgina Pacheco had been solved.
Robert James Parks, a Fort Bragg fisherman, and a brother-in-law of the victim, has been identified as the killer. Parks committed suicide in 1999 in Long Beach Harbor by chaining himself to a boat in 30 feet of water and sinking it. Parks was the last person to have been seen with Miss Pacheco. He'd picked her up at her place of work, the Sea Pal Restaurant in Fort Bragg.
The DNA science applied to the case was complicated. The FBI's samples taken from the murder scene had, over time, become unusable for identification purposes. But the persistence of Sheriff's detective Andy Porter, and DA's investigator Tim Kiely, persuaded the state's Department of Justice laboratory to take another look at the post-mortem rape kit. The lab soon found identifiable DNA on the wooden handles of swabs preserved at the time of the murder, a time when DNA as a forensics tool was in its infancy.
That DNA was matched with that of Parks ex-wife and daughter and, by extension, Parks himself, and 25 years later we have, if not justice, at least some solace for the Pacheco family who now know who murdered their daughter.
The technical marvel of DNA science got him.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, January 21, 2025
ERIK BURGESS, 41, Covelo. County parole violation.
MARCO FUENTES-SALDIVAR, 63, Gualala. DUI, no license.
ANGELA LEBERT, 55, Willits. DUI, probation revocation.
JAIME MARIN-JUAREZ, 27, Ukiah. Community Supervision violation.
ANTHONY NIETO, 28, Fort Bragg. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.15%.
COLE PARKIN, 35, Ukiah. Probation violation.
KENNETH PARTRIDGE, 56, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, concealed dirk-dagger, unspecified offense, offenses while on bail.
THERESA QUASCHNICK, 40, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery, probation revocation.
SAI SARA, 35, Fremont/Ukiah. DUI.
JOEL TOLEDO-ALVAREZ, 29, Laytonville. Domestic battery, criminal threats, witness intimidation.
TOUR DE CHAOS
Editor:
Watching the disaster in Los Angeles unfold, part larceny, mostly incompetence, reminds me of our local government. They don’t plan, they react.
The main things we worry about are water, electricity, money and quality of life. It doesn’t look like any of these concerns follow a plan. Housing: Build 100-unit tower with no parking in the vicinity. You can’t find a parking space with a Geiger counter. These will have multiple families living in each unit. No water, no infrastructure, no grocery store, but box checked. We are already experiencing planned power outages; PG&E is too busy plowing in power lines to increase output if they could.
To accommodate a few enthusiasts, let’s turn over half the road to bicycles. You’ll occasionally see a few guys ride by looking like Tour de France riders. Beyond that, nobody is using the lane. How about using that money to fix the potholes? Our roads are a disgrace.
Traffic is awful, importing poverty and crime isn’t helping at all. We have platoons of folks wandering around at night trying doors and cars, stealing tools and bikes. We are looking more and more like “a good try equals success” L.A.
David Haynes
Santa Rosa
FRED GARDNER
The New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt shows Elon Musk beaming as he gets sworn in alongside an eclipsed Donald Trump. The artist flatters Musk, smoothing out those deep, ugly notches that flank his lower lip (the result of too much snarling and botched plastic surgery).
Musk has tweeted "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), head of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has said that Dr. Anthony Fauci could be charged with perjury based on his testimony to Congress about the origins of the Covid virus and the National Institutes of Health's handling of infectious disease research.
Fauci was given a preemptive pardon before Joe Biden shuffled off. Whoever wrote the accompanying statement explained an aspect of how things really work: "Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances." (This point was driven home to pot partisans when the Medical Board of California investigated eight of the first nine MDs to join the group now known as the Society of Cannabis Clinicians.)
Fauci retired in 2022. Because of ongoing death threats, he and his family remain under federal protection. Beth Mole summarized his career on the Ars Tehnica site: "For nearly four decades, Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He advised seven presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan and, among his many accomplishments, played a crucial role in the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Fauci was a leading architect of PEPFAR, the global AIDS response program begun by President George W. Bush that is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Fauci served as Biden's medical advisor until his retirement."
Blowing a Lay-up
Stephen Rosenthal is missed. How could he kick the AVA habit? Who else might dispute my observation that Julius Randle, who loved playing in the Big Apple, sulking in Minneapolis… The over/under on the Bills-Ravens game was fifty-one and a half. The Bills won 27-25. How do the bookies do that? And how many millions of dollars were riding on the game-tying pass that Mark Andrews let slip through his hands?
Blowing a lay-up
is a moment in hell
it's a blow to the soul
cause you can't get the roll
You're ahead of the field
in apparent control
just don't blow the lay up…
Saturday mornin on
the neighborhood court
you don't have to be great
I am proud to report
You don't have to be black
you can even be short
just you don't blow the lay up…
Once I had cut for
a beautiful pass
and faked "Doctor Meat"
right down on his ass
Displaying my handle
Rising in class
Just don't blow the lay-up…
Blowing a lay-up
is a moment in hell
A blow to the soul
The loss of a goal
Geometry's simple
Watch out for the pole…
Put back the rebound.
JULES FEIFFER Self-Portrait. He died a few days short of 96.
I interviewed him for the Harvard Crimson in 1962 and we hit it off. I used to visit him in Brooklyn Heights. His collaborator on The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, lived downstairs. Feiffer's wife, Judy Sheftel, was too hot to handle, was in Lillian Hellman's circle on Martha's Vineyard. After my split with the fake left in 1970 I never tried to get in touch with him, just assumed he would have heard the worst... I thought about having a business card printed that said "Not all the slanders you may have heard about me are true."
TRUMP ISSUES EXECUTIVE ORDER TO DIVERT MORE DELTA WATER TO BIG AGRIBUSINESS, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
by Dan Bacher
Yesterday President Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled, “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California,” repeating many of the falsehoods about California water and the Delta smelt that he stated in a post on Truth Social earlier this month.
“I hereby direct the Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of the Interior, in consultation with the heads of other departments and agencies of the United States as necessary, to immediately restart the work from my first Administration by the National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and other agencies to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply,” the order states.
This memo amounts to an outright attack on recreational and commercial fishing communities, California Tribes, conservationists, Delta communities, family farmers and businesses fighting for the restoration of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
It repeats the canard of “putting people over fish” that corporate agribusiness has been pushing for many years, completely denying the fact that the California recreational and commercial fishing industry and Delta businesses desperately need the water for their livelihoods that depend on healthy fisheries. The order also denies the crucial role that the Sacramento River, its tributaries and the Delta play in the culture and livelihood of California Indian Tribes.
Recreational and commercial salmon fishing on California ocean waters and recreational salmon fishing on California rivers has been closed for the past two years, putting thousands out of work, due to the collapse of the Sacramento and Klamath River fall-run Chinook salmon populations. The collapse is largely due to massive water diversions from the Sacramento River and the Delta for corporate agribusiness on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California water agencies.
On the Klamath River, a significant amount of water from the Trinity River, the Klamath’s largest tributary, is diverted over to the Sacramento River through a tunnel in the Trinity Mountains to be used to irrigate crops on drainage impaired land in the San Joaquin Valley. Due to the Klamath salmon fishery collapse, the Yurok and Hoopa Valley Indian Tribes were allowed only a small amount of subsistence and ceremonial fish for their use over the past two years.
We're definitely in for a long, rough ride under the second Trump administration.
You can read my piece here about Trump falsely blaming the LA wildfires on Delta protection and the Delta smelt:
https://chico.newsreview.com/tag/la-wildfires-not-connected-to-the-delta
You can also read my piece here about Delta smelt and the California water wars here:
Zero Delta Smelt Found In Annual Survey As California Water Wars Heat Up
It is significant that zero Delta smelt were caught in the survey despite the release of tens of thousands of hatchery-raised Delta smelt by Dan Bacher
Zero Delta Smelt, an indicator species that has been villainized by Donald Trump and his corporate agribusiness allies for supposedly being a “worthless fish,” have been caught in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl Survey in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta for the seventh year in a row.
I break down the four falsehoods that Trump made in this post here:
NEWSOM HAS 11-WORD RESPONSE — WITH A FOUR-LETTER WORD — TO TRUMP’S CLIMATE MOVES
by Julie Johnson
Gov. Gavin Newsom shot a concise rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s early executive actions to reverse federal policies focused on combating climate change, which Trump has previously called “a hoax.”
“If you don’t believe in science, believe your own damn eyes,” Newsom said.
That was the entirety of Newsom’s statement, which was accompanied by photographs of firefighters valiantly battling wildfires.
On his first day in office, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders directing the federal government to dramatically shift its stance toward climate change. These include pulling the United States out of the landmark Paris Agreement, an international climate accord among countries committed to slowing global warming.
Trump pulled the country out of the agreement during his first term. President Joe Biden reinstated the United States’ involvement.
Trump’s executive orders on the environment also included policies to encourage more oil and gas drilling and extraction, halt offshore wind development and repeal regulations promoting electric vehicles.
Trump also signed an executive order to repeal birthright citizenship, which automatically confers citizenship upon children born in the United States or who have one U.S. citizen parent.
Newsom — not normally known for his brevity — also had a concise statement on Trump's intent to repeal these rights: “This is unconstitutional.”
Birthright citizenship was defined and established in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868.
(SF Chronicle)
TRUMP HAS EVERYONE JUST WHERE HE WANTS THEM
by Maureen Dowd
Inaugural Addresses ordinarily dwell on the art of the possible.
But one of Donald Trump’s most revealing lines on Monday was about the art of the impossible.
“Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback,” said 45 as he morphed into 47. “But as you see today, here I am. The American people have spoken.”
Here I am. It was both a boast and a warning.
When the reality show star burst onto the political scene in 2015, flouting all the rules, he was regarded as a clown by some and a dilemma by others, including many Republicans.
When he was elected in 2016, many assumed he was an anomaly, a deviation from the new political movement that Barack Obama represented.
But now it is the Obama coalition that looks like the anomaly and Trump who is the page-turning force in history.
He’s riding back into town as master and commander of the entire fleet, with de facto control over all three branches of government, with Republicans more compliant than ever and Democrats helpless in the face of his dominance. Trump has them all just where he wants them.
Ever since he came out of Queens, a pushy kid ensorcelled by the Manhattan skyline with family money but few social tools to climb the society ladder, Trump has been obsessed with larger-than-life men who dominated others. He modeled his behavior on them.
Flash back to the ’70s, when Trump dressed in a three-piece burgundy suit with matching shoes and a matching limousine and hung out with Roy Cohn and George Steinbrenner. His biographer Gwenda Blair said Trump was like “this strapping lad from the provinces who comes to the city, like a figure out of Balzac’s ‘Lost Illusions.’”
But on Inauguration Day, those illusions were found. Here were America’s tech tycoons, members of his court, in a pantheon at his second Inaugural Address, directly across from the former presidents and in front of Trump’s presumptive cabinet. Many members of Congress, the actual elected government, were relegated to the cheaper seats.
The men who control Americans’ communications, eyeballs and, often, emotions got the choicest seats; several have scarfed up big mansions in Washington to be closer to the Oval.
Elon Musk sat behind the vice president’s mother, pumping his arms and giving two thumbs-up when Trump said he’d put an American flag on Mars, where Musk wants to die (just not on impact).
Google’s Sundar Pichai was near Don Jr. and next to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, who were near Ivanka and Jared. Shou Zi Chew, the TikTok C.E.O., sat next to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s intended director of national intelligence. Tim Cook of Apple was close to Barron Trump. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, was also at the inaugural but — perhaps because of his legal duel with Elon — was in the overflow room with Ron DeSantis, Eric Adams and Conor McGregor.
“The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump crowed, but it’s more like the second Gilded Age, given the flock of billionaires in his posse. In the old days, the robber barons dealt in railroads and steel and oil, things America needed to grow. These tech giants have warped America with their social media sites and may end up destroying it with unregulated A.I. (They’re developing A.I. too fast to find a kill switch.)
Trump’s 2017 inaugural was sparse on celebrities and titans. Now he’s grooving with the Village People, saluting a member in erotic chaps. With his undeniable electoral triumph, he has finally flipped the dynamic, and he is the most powerful of them all. His nose is no longer pressed against the glass. And he relishes rubbing our noses in it.
“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”
Across from the joyous tech gods was the bitter band of fallen foes. You could see in the faces of Trump’s predecessors and vanquished rivals that they still couldn’t accept that Trump was more in touch with America than they were. They were left to use a buddy system of whispered asides and frozen stares to get through the noon hour, and soon they were gone.
Eight years ago, Trump’s “American carnage” speech was a blowtorch to the body politic, wildly off-key from the standard patriotic, aspirational swearing-in fare.
But that was a bouquet of lilies compared with the detailed, explicit, radical and transformational-cum-transactional vision of America that Trump outlined Monday.
He claimed that “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda,” which is not true. It’s just that Democrats are flatlining right now; they’re in shambles.
He signed a pack of executive orders that are bound to divide, including withdrawing from the Paris climate accords and World Health Organization and attempting to end birthright citizenship. To keep people guessing, he did make a few feints at harmony, saying he would strive to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream a reality.” Michelle Obama was smart to skip the speech.
Trump started with a repudiation of everybody sitting in the front two rows on his left. As Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, the Clintons and George W. Bush listened, trying to keep muted expressions, Trump unleashed a withering denunciation of American leaders who have created a “crisis of trust.”
Hillary broke character, laughing derisively when Trump vowed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. But his audience did not take it as a joke; they cheered.
“For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair,” the newly minted president said, ignoring the irony of the pack of rapacious moguls beside him. “We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”
He said he would backtrack on what those sitting next to him had wrought.
“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place,” he said.
And that mandate, he said, is not only from the voters; it is nothing less than divine.
“Just a few months ago, in that beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear,” Trump said. “But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
While the Inaugural Addresses of J.F.K. and Obama were about new generations rising to power, propelling America into the future, Trump’s speech played to nostalgia: It was designed to reassure Americans who are alarmed at perceived radical social change, who think that our society has been moving too fast, making them feel alienated in their own country.
He promised to restore the name of Mount McKinley from its Indigenous name, Denali, and threatened to take back the Panama Canal. He evoked the glory days of the space race when he vowed “to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” He dismissed D.E.I. programs, promising to make society “colorblind and merit-based,” and also declared, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
The last time Trump took power, he was treated as the rube from reality TV about to get a schooling in the way real power works. His big promises and brazen musings, his impulsive executive actions and disregard for process were viewed as vulnerabilities by an establishment confident that he would fail. He had raved about getting rid of the Electoral College, and the establishment was happy to have him preoccupied with dead-end distractions.
At his second inaugural, Trump was no longer the outlier and accidental president. He is now the consummate insider who knows better how to exercise power.
Democrats complain that Trump and Melania are grifters who used the occasion of the inauguration to launch their cryptocurrency meme coins and rake in millions. Amazon also paid $40 million for Melania’s documentary.
But labeling the Trumps as grifters does not have the same punch when Joe Biden followed up his pardon of Hunter with Inauguration Day pardons of his three siblings and two of their spouses. Which raises the question of why his siblings needed the pardons. The news broke just before Trump started talking.
Brimming with confidence, master of his domain, Trump gave a second speech in Emancipation Hall, used as the overflow room, where Republican governors and other B-listers were gathered.
This was his sweet spot, an “Inside the Actors Studio” analysis of his first speech, including praise for the “best acoustics I think I have ever heard in a room” and the 72-degree temperature in the Rotunda, which he declared was far better than the freezing weather outside.
First, naturally, he gave himself props, saying, “We’re getting great reviews on the speech.”
Ever the showman, he said he would give this audience “the A-plus treatment,” not the “A treatment, the B treatment, the C, the D or the F. You know what the F is? ‘Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here. Bye-bye.’” But as we all know, Trump is a man who loves to talk about himself, Castro-esque in his volubility, so he never does an F treatment.
He offered the inside story of his Inaugural Address, saying that Melania and JD Vance had persuaded him to take out praise for the Jan. 6 rioters, whom he referred to as “hostages.”
It certainly would have been creepy if he had said he was pardoning them while he was making his address in the very Capitol they ransacked — an attempted coup that led to Trump’s second impeachment. (He would commute the sentence of Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia, and pardon roughly 1,500, nearly all of those charged in the attack, before the Commander in Chief Ball.)
There was a vivid reminder of that bloody day when Mike Pence walked into the Rotunda with Dan Quayle. When Trump was pressuring Pence not to certify Biden’s win, Pence called the former vice president and fellow Indianan to ask his advice. Quayle told him, “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away.”
Setting aside his promise of unity, Trump trashed his foes who tried to hold him to account for Jan. 6, including Liz Cheney (“She’s a crying lunatic”), Adam Kinzinger (“a super crier”) and Nancy Pelosi (“guilty as hell”). He was more benign about Hillary, noting “She didn’t look too happy today” but allowing that she’s “a very nice person.”
Then, giving us whiplash, he reverted to a flight of fancy about himself as a unifier, saying he told Chuck Schumer, “Chuck, I think it’s time we all start getting along a little bit, because it doesn’t make sense.” He added to the crowd, “I mean, we literally never get a Democrat vote. They never get a Republican vote, almost.”
Trump lapsed more into meandering — or “the weave,” as he calls it — by the minute. He shared some breaking news about Melania: While she may walk better in five-inch heels than anyone on Earth, as the Vogue bella figura André Leon Talley said, she does sometimes feel the pinch. (Stars, they’re just like us!)
“I shouldn’t say this. I’m going to get hell when I say this, but her feet are absolutely aching,” he confided to the crowd. “You know, those heels.” He added, “She said, ‘Darling, I love you so much, but my feet are killing me.”
Trump no longer seemed afraid of what he didn’t know about Washington. Now he was happy to tout what he knew to Washington.
Seeing Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, in the crowd, he went on a very long exegesis about building the border wall in Texas. He sounded like a beat poet of concrete.
WHAT DONALD TRUMP HAS REVEALED ABOUT OUR COUNTRY
by Ralph Nader
The rise of Donald Trump from a widely publicized, if failed, business boss to a two-term President has taught us a great deal about our society. He will teach us even more as his dictatorial regime, starting January 20th, 2025, further unravels what is left of the civilized norms, our democratic institutions, and the purported rule of law.
Democracy and the rule of law rest for their proper functioning on countervailing checks and balances and institutions that further a just society. Look at how these bulwarks of democracy have enfeebled themselves to permit the ascension of Trump and Trumpism operating above the law and securing a hard autocracy that is slouching toward fascism.
- The utter failure of Congress to safeguard and use its exclusive constitutional authorities vis-à-vis the executive branch is shameful. These include the declare war clause, the appropriations power, confirmation, information duties, critical oversight of the executive and judicial branches and the responsibility to provide wide access to the citizenry from whom it receives its delegated power by “We the People.”
The decline of Congress into a rubber stamp has reached a disgraceful depth where it will not enforce its subpoenas (over 125 Congressional subpoenas during Trump’s first term were defied with impunity) and will do nothing to curb rampant violations of statutes, the Constitution and treaties by administrations of both Parties.
However, Trump’s defiance of Congress and his usurpation of Congressional authority have been more overt, brazen and daily than his predecessors, including active and regular obstruction of justice by his White House.
- The crumbling of the Democratic Party, the sole opposition to Trump’s GOP in an enforced two-party duopoly, has had a decades-long history of decay. For over fifty years, the Democratic Party has allowed campaign money to increasingly erode its fealty to working families, distancing itself ever more from the working class – the base of FDR’s repeated electoral victories. This has debased the recruitment of Party leaders to levels below mediocrity.
These “leaders” managed to turn a national party into a regional party abandoning half the country (the red states) including six mountain and prairie states that used to have Democratic Senators. It is hard to win national elections for the Presidency and workable majorities in Congress with such a decisive handicap.
This ditch that the Party dug for itself has led to scapegoating its losses onto the tiny Green Party while telling its doubting voters that they have nowhere to go. “Don’t you know how bad the Republicans are?” goes the immolating refrain.
- The labor unions – weakened by job-exporting corporate globalization, automation, and weak, entrenched leadership have tied unconditionally its fortunes to the corporate Democratic Party which gives workers little or nothing in return. No labor law reform to facilitate organization, no real push for a livable wage, no rigorous regulation of workplace health and safety and little protection against corporate theft of private pensions. Lately, the AFL-CIO unions have been further inhibited by more of their members becoming Republican voters. Labor leaders have not developed a counter strategy.
- The legal profession, its bar associations and law schools – ideally the first responders against lawlessness – have been compromised by lucrative corporate clientele and the prospects of such riches. We have tested these institutions with repeated challenges to step up against government illegalities, to no avail. To say they are AWOL is to engage in impermissible understatement.
- The organized church has traditionally been the custodians of the norms and standards that bind members of society together. The “Golden Rule” is one of the greatest precepts ever dedicated to guide human and institutional interactions. The Ten Commandments have served a similar secular purpose to the extent they are observed. Trump as the worst destroyer of norms in American history has chronically violated these principles in his personal, business and political careers.
When I asked the National Council of Churches why they don’t take the kinds of stands they took during the civil rights period in the 1960s, their reply was that they were deterred from such positions by the sizable minority of evangelical churches within their membership. Compare this to the approach of the Courageous Baptist Jimmy Carter!
- The citizenry, as the ultimate savior of a just, practicing democracy, has been neglected and exploited by corporate power and indifference. There is a toll exacted on people who were never given a civic education and civic experience in elementary and secondary school. The citizenry pays the price of powerlessness when up against abusive treatment from corporate employers and corporate lobbyists. These same corporations envelop people in consuming spectator sports, mass corporate entertainment on their screens and now fingertip addictions to various forms of gambling – not exactly the preconditions for a thriving town hall turnout or a smart voting citizenry doing their pre-election homework.
Couple these dulling interfaces with the desperate daily effort of many people to pay their bills, the constant indebtedness, so many chronic illnesses and the drain of home health care in the only Western country without universal health insurance and one sees how little discretionary time or self-regard is left to perform civic duties.
What local and national citizen advocacy groups there are in the fields of action are impeded by being largely ignored by the mass media and excluded by elected and appointed officials (See The Incommunicados report at incommunicadoswatch.org).
Now is the time for assessing the assets of the citizenry and putting them to work. We still have the sovereign power, still out-number the opponents of democracy by a wide margin, still can rise to control those 535 members of Congress who can be summoned to citizen-shaped town meetings, still can see one percent of really active citizenry representing majority opinion, often liberal and conservative coalitions, turning tide after tide in Congress and much more.
For operating details, strategies and success stories, I can only refer you to three of my books: Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, and Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People. (In addition, also see the unprecedented 2016 Constitution Hall proceedings at BreakingThroughPower.org).
Yes, friends, like other worthwhile endeavors, an operating democracy takes work, but when it works its blessings are very impressive.
Hand touches the opposite shoulder/chest, then arm extended vigorously up at a 45 degree angle with the hand pointed. Twice. It’s in the video clips, even the comparison to actual nazis doing the salute. It doesn’t appear to be a mistake and it would be damn hard to do it by accident. Twice.
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I predict that, in less than a century, the good old USA will be gone. Instead it will be divided into five countries: Northeast, South, Midwest, Mountain, and Pacific States of America. And, to no one's surprise, they will declare war on each other. That, in my opinion, will be Trump's ultimate legacy.
LEAD STORIES, WEDNESDAY'S NYT
Twenty-two States Sue to Stop Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order
Bishop Asks Trump to ‘Have Mercy’ on Immigrants and Gay Children
Hegseth Ex-Sister-in-Law Tells Senators He Was ‘Abusive’ to Second Wife
One Family in Gaza Returned Home. But Home Was Gone
Rare Snowfall Snarls Cities as Deadly Cold Stalks the South
“HISTORY is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’
EDWARD ABBEY, from Desert Solitaire (1968):
A familiar and plaintive admonition; I would like to introduce here an entirely new argument in what has now become a stylized debate: the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny What reason have we Americans to think that our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions?
This may seem, at the moment, like a fantastic thesis. Yet history demonstrates that personal liberty is a rare and precious thing, that all societies trend toward the absolute until attack from without or collapse from within breaks up the social machine and makes freedom and innovation again possible. Technology adds a new dimension to the process by providing modern despots with instruments far more efficient than any available to their classical counterparts. Surely it is no accident that the most thorough of tyrannies appeared in Europe’s most thoroughly scientific and industrialized nation. If we allow our own country to become as densely populated, overdeveloped and technically unified as modern Germany we may face a similar fate.
The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with the technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism. Rural insurrections can then be suppressed only by bombing and burning villages and countryside so thoroughly that the mass of the population is forced to take refuge in the cities; there the people are then policed and if necessary starved into submission. The city, which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp. This is one of the significant discoveries of contemporary political science.
How does this theory apply to the present and future of the famous United States of North America? Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people – the following preparations would be essential:
- Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste.
- Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment.
- Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations.
- Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals.
- Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority.
- Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order.
- Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns.
- Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots.
Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.
IN GOYA’S GREATEST SCENES WE SEEM TO SEE…
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1958)
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
And they do
Only the landscape is changed
They still are ranged along the roads
plagued by legionnaires
false windmills and demented roosters
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more strung-out citizens
in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America
MY LIFE WITH THE WAVE
by Octavio Paz
When I left that sea, a wave moved ahead of the others. She was tall and light. In spite of the shouts of the others who grabbed her by her floating skirts, she clutched my arm and went leaping off with me. I didn't want to say anything to her, because it hurt me to shame her in front of her friends. Besides, the furious stares of the larger waves paralyzed me. When we got to town, I explained to her that it was impossible, that life in the city was not what she had been able to imagine with all the ingenuousness of a wave that had never left the sea. She watched me gravely: No, her decision was made. She couldn't go back. I tried sweetness, harshness, irony. She cried, screamed, hugged, threatened. I had to apologize.
The next day my troubles began. How could we get on the train without being seen by the conductor, the passengers, the police? It's true the rules say nothing in respect to the transport of waves on the railroad, but this very reserve was an indication of the severity with which our act would be judged. After much thought I arrived at the station an hour before departure, took my seat, and, when no one was looking, emptied the tank of the drinking fountain; then, carefully, I poured in my friend.
The first incident arose when the children of a couple nearby loudly declared their thirst. I blocked their way and promised them refreshments and lemonade. They were at the verge of accepting when another thirsty passenger approached. I was about to invite her too, but the stare of her companion stopped me short. The lady took a paper cup, approached the tank, and turned the faucet. Her cup was barely half full when I leaped between the woman and my friend. She looked at me in astonishment. While I apologized, one of the children turned the faucet again. I closed it violently. The lady brought the cup to her lips:
“Agh, this water is salty!”
The boy echoed her: Various passengers rose. The husband called the conductor:
“This man put salt in the water.”
The conductor called the inspector:
“So, you've placed substances in the water?”
The inspector called the police:
“So, you've poisoned the water?”
The police in turn called the captain:
“So, you're the poisoner?”
The captain called three agents. The agents took me to an empty car, amidst the stares and whispers of the passengers. At the next station they took me off and pushed and dragged me to jail. For days no one spoke to me, except during the long interrogations. No one believed me when I explained my story, not even the jailer, who shook his head, saying: “The case is grave, truly grave. You weren't trying to poison children?” One day they brought me before the magistrate. “Your case is difficult,” he repeated, “I will assign you to the penal judge.” A year passed. Finally they tried me. As there were no victims, my sentence was light. After a short time, my day of freedom arrived.
The warden called me in:
“Well, now you're free. You were lucky. Lucky there were no victims. But don't let it happen again, because the next time you'll really pay for it:..
And he stared at me with the same solemn stare with which everyone watched me.
That same afternoon I took the train and, after hours of uncomfortable traveling, arrived in Mexico City. I took a cab home. At the door of my apartment I heard laughter and singing. I felt a pain in my chest, like the smack of a wave of surprise when surprise smacks us in the chest: my friend was there, singing and laughing as always.
“How did you get back?”
“Easy: on the train. Someone, after making sure that I was only salt water, poured me into the engine. It was a rough trip: soon I was a white plume of vapor, then I fell in a fine rain on the machine. I thinned out a lot. I lost many drops.”
Her presence changed my life. The house of dark corridors and dusty furniture was filled with air, with sun, with green and blue reflections, a numerous and happy populace of reverberations and echoes. How many waves one wave is, and how it can create a beach or rock or jetty out of a wall, a chest, a forehead that it crowns with foam! Even the abandoned corners, the abject corners of dust and debris were touched by her light hands. Everything began to laugh and everywhere white teeth shone. The sun entered the old rooms with pleasure and stayed for hours when it should have left the other houses, the district, the city, the country. And some nights, very late, the scandalized stars would watch it sneak out of my house.
Love was a game, a perpetual creation. Everything was beach, sand, a bed with sheets that were always fresh. If I embraced her, she would swell with pride, incredibly tall like the liquid stalk of a poplar, and soon that thinness would flower into a fountain of white feathers, into a plume of laughs that fell over my head and back and covered me with whiteness. Or she would stretch out in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until I too became horizon and silence. Full and sinuous, she would envelop me like music or some giant lips. Her presence was a going and coming of caresses, of murmurs, of kisses. Plunging into her waters, I would be drenched to the socks and then, in the wink of an eye, find myself high above, at a dizzying height, mysteriously suspended, to fall like a stone, and feel myself gently deposited on dry land, like a feather. Nothing is comparable to sleeping rocked in those waters, unless it is waking pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that withdraw laughing.
But I never reached the center of her being. I never touched the nakedness of pain and of death. Perhaps it does not exist in waves, that secret place that renders a woman vulnerable and mortal, that electric button where everything interlocks, twitches, straightens out, and then swoons. Her sensibility, like that of women, spread in ripples, only they weren't concentric ripples, but rather eccentric ones that spread further each time, until they touched other galaxies. To love her was to extend to remote contacts, to vibrate with far-off stars we never suspect. But her center… no, she had no center, just an emptiness like a whirlwind that sucked me in and smothered me.
Stretched out side by side, we exchanged confidences, whispers, smiles. Curled up, she fell on my chest and unfolded there like a vegetation of murmurs. She sang in my ear, a little seashell. She became humble and transparent, clutching my feet like a small animal, calm water. She was so clear I could read all of her thoughts. On certain nights her skin was covered with phosphorescence and to embrace her was to embrace a piece of night tattooed with fire. But she also became black and bitter.
At unexpected hours she roared, moaned, twisted. Her groans woke the neighbors. Upon hearing her, the sea wind would scratch at the door of the house or rave in a loud voice on the roof. Cloudy days irritated her; she broke furniture; said foul words, covered me with insults and gray and greenish foam. She spat, cried, swore, prophesied. Subject to the moon, the stars, the influence of the light of other worlds, she changed her moods and appearance in a way that I thought fantastic, but was as fatal as the tide.
She began to complain of solitude. I filled the house with shells and conches, with small sailboats that in her days of fury she shipwrecked (along with the others, laden with images, that last night left my forehead and sunk in her ferocious o time! But my boats and the silent song of the shells were not enough. I had to install a colony of fish in the house. It was not without jealousy that I watched them swimming in my friend, caressing her breasts, sleeping between her legs, adorning her hair with little flashes of color.
Among those fish there were a few particularly repulsive and ferocious ones, little tigers from the aquarium with large fixed eyes and jagged and bloodthirsty mouths. I don't know by what aberration my friend delighted in playing with them, shamelessly showing them a preference whose significance I prefer to ignore. She passed long hours confined with those horrible creatures. One day I couldn't stand it anymore; I flung open the door and threw myself on them. Agile and ghostly, they slipped between my hands while she laughed and pounded me until I fell. I thought I was drowning, and when I was purple and at the point of death, she deposited me on the bank and began to kiss me, saying I don't know what things. I felt very weak, fatigued and humiliated. And at the same time her voluptuousness made me close my eyes because her voice was seer and she spoke to me of the delicious death of the drowned. When I came to my senses, I began to fear and hate her.
I had neglected my affairs. Now I began to visit friends and renew old and dear relations. I met an old girlfriend. Making her swear to keep my secret, I told her of my life with the wave. Nothing moves women as much as the possibility of saving a man. My redeemer employed all of her arts, but what could a woman, master of a limited number of souls and bodies, do, faced with my friend who was always changing — and always identical to herself in her incessant metamorphoses.
Winter came. The sky turned gray. Fog fell on the city. A frozen drizzle rained. My friend screamed every night. During the day she isolated herself, quiet and sinister, stuttering a single syllable, like an old woman who mutters in a corner. She became cold; to sleep with her was to shiver all night and to feel, little by little, the blood, bones, and thoughts freeze. She turned deep, impenetrable, restless. I left frequently, and my absences were more prolonged each time. She, in her corner, endlessly howled. With teeth like steel and a corrosive tongue she gnawed the walls, crumbled them. She passed the nights in mourning, reproaching me. She had nightmares, deliriums of the sun, of burning beaches. She dreamt of the pole and of changing into a great block of ice, sailing beneath black skies on nights as long as months. She insulted me. She cursed and laughed, filled the house with guffaws and phantoms. She summoned blind, quick, and blunt monsters from the deep. Charged with electricity, she carbonized everything she touched. Full of acid, she dissolved whatever she brushed against. Her sweet arms became knotty cords that strangled me. And her body, greenish and elastic, was an implacable whip that lashed and lashed. I fled. The horrible fish laughed with their ferocious grins.
There in the mountains, among the tall pines and the precipices, I breathed the cold thin air like a thought of freedom. I returned at the end of a month. I had decided. It had been so cold that over the marble of the chimney, next to the extinct fire, I found a statue of ice. I was unmoved by her wearisome beauty. I put her in a big canvas sack and went out into the streets with the sleeper on my shoulders. In a restaurant in the outskirts I sold her to a waiter friend, who immediately began to chop her into little pieces, which he carefully deposited in the buckets where bottles are chilled.
(Translated by Eliot Weinberger)
Seated in front of a guest computer at the Drop In Center located behind Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter in northeast Washington, D.C., with the laundry in the dryer, it is noteworthy that the views and analysis regarding the re-inauguration on Monday is much different than the perspective in the District of Columbia. Martin Luther King Jr. day was celebrated with appropriate solemnity and reverence, while the re-inauguration was ignored. Aside from the absurd amount of security everywhere, much of it far away from the rotunda in the Capitol building, particularly the miles of fencing all over the downtown area, and teams of security personnel at the Metro train stations, the re-inauguration was irrelevant to local residents. In fact, the entire spectacle of the federal government is of no interest, with most district residents wishing that the Federal government would move to St. Louis! The second Donald J. Trump presidency might as well be taking place on the moon, insofar as Washington, D.C. residents are concerned. It is weird living here, in the midst of this American schizophrenia. Otherwise, stop identifying with the body and the mind, and your problem is solved! That is all. ~The End~
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
September 22, 2025 Anno Domini
Doesn’t sound like identifying with body and mind are solving your problems.
I’ve officially stopped reading Mr. Stehr. A prime reason is he uses the ancient and rare “Reverse Racism” term. Nonsensical!
‘ Robert Parks was found shot to death in Morro Bay aboard a boat’ , ‘Parks committed suicide in 1999 in Long Beach Harbor by chaining himself to a boat in 30 feet of water and sinking it. ‘ Which one is it?
The latter, maybe.
That confused me too.
Silver Raven
Have you seen the silver raven?
She has wings and she can fly
Far above the darkened waters
Far above the troubled sky
Have you seen the changing rivers?
Now they wait their turn to die
But they turn their tide upon you
When the sea begins to cry
Have you seen the changing windows?
Of the sea beyond the stars
And the sky beyond the sunbeams
And the world beyond your dreams
Have you seen the old world dying?
Which was once what new worlds seem
Have you seen the silver raven
She has wings that barely gleam
They barely gleam, they barely glimmer
As she circles past the sun
And she tries to tell her sister
That her trials have just begun
Have you seen the silver raven?
She has wings and she can fly
Far above the darkened waters
Far above the troubled sky
Have you seen the changing rivers?
Now they wait their turn to die
But they turn their tide upon you
When the sea begins to cry
— Gene Clark
Let’s not over think Trump being elected. He won in 2016 against the worst candidate for president from a major political party in US history. He won in 2024 against the worst performance from a sitting political party in US history. Swing voters decide elections, and swing voters went for Trump not because Trump was good, but because the alternative was worse.
How many people who voted left the presidential part of their ballots blank, or wrote in a candidate? I know of one, for sure… As far as I am concerned, TRUMPLES is the worst candidate EVER to run for the US presidency in my lifetime.
You must have been asleep the last four years! Bidenomics and Build Back Better was a real success.
And, your point is…?
+1
From yesterday’s MCT … Though I have not personally vetted the data myself:
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NotALandslide.jpg
That link leads to these numbers:
31.78% for Drunptf
30.84% for Kamala
1.06% third party
36.33% Did Not Vote
I’m an independent myself, maybe I am truly alone in this world 😳
Shout out to the non voters! More than a third (33.33%) (1/3) (50-60 million-ish of you, eligible voters?) Boooo!
Bottom line, most of the whiners can suck it up an deal. Cuz if ya don’t vote ya can’t bitch! Now thanks to your non-involvement we’re going to see 30 articles a day or more about the Orange Douche
Thanks
Here’s another source:
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-15/how-many-people-didnt-vote-in-the-2024-election
“For operating details, strategies and success stories, I can only refer you to three of my books: Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, and Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People.”
I think Ralph is coming around to DJT method of thinking, what a pleasant surprise’ good job Ralph, keep it up!!
RE: We’re definitely in for a long, rough ride under the second Trump administration.
—>. Impeach, not revolt which would play into T. Rump suspension of Constitution?
Fred Gardner
“Not all the slanders you may have heard about me are true.”
Nixon, et al
Gentlemen to have let the ladies walk inside the red carpet. Nixon hogged the spotlight walking inside the narrow red carpet, and Ford walked on wet grass.
Upcoming documentary shows former govt UAP task force director Jay Stratton saying he’s seen ET craft and beings and includes what looks like revelations from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper:
https://youtu.be/DkU7ZqbADRs?si=194B1QU17PNNTx3s
Clapper previously has said, on CNN, that non transparency on this has been a crime that he’s guilty of.
A detailed report on the above upcoming documentary:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/age-of-disclosure-ufo-documentary-trailer-sxsw-1236114831/
I think I saw Elon click his heels together…
He needs to work on his soft shoe routine next
I saw him doing something way more frightening than that. Twice, inside of 12 minutes. Yikes!