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LIGHT RAIN SHOWER will continue through the weekend. A cold front and stronger pulse of rain will arrive around Monday. Snow levels will rapidly drop along the front bringing the potential for impactful now as low as 2000 feet by Tuesday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Light rain, a warm 50F & .38" of rainfall on the coast this Saturday morning. I have given up on a specific forecast let's use a broader brush: lighter rain this weekend, maybe bigger rain Monday then the tropical fetch gives way to colder fronts dropping down from the Arctic later next week. Cold air generally has less moisture than warm air so less rainfall totals likely later next week.
RAINFALL (Fort Bragg): Oct 1.26” / Nov 14.53” / Dec 12.05” / Jan 1.65” / YTD 29.49”
To: KZYX
Dear Ms. Polkinghorne, General Manager
For the last three mornings there has been an hour of dead air between 5 and 6 am and no announcement that I have heard why Radio Bilingue has not been on the air at a time when its content would be most crucial for Mexican and Mexican-American listeners and those who are concerned for their welfare. When can the listeners expect an on-air explanation of this and, unless I missed it, there has been no explanation to date
I also noticed this morning that the Feb. 25 board meeting will also be held on zoom. This does not fulfill the CPB requirement that all meetings of the station boards be open to the public, as published in Sec. 2 of its Compliance manual of June 1, 2021, a year after the beginning of the covid crisis In other words, holding meetings on zoom does not fulfill that requirement.
Add to that. for some time, KZYX management has ignored the existence and requirements of the Community Advisory Board as described in the CPB manual and listed on the check list for stations at the back of the manual. Clearly, we are and have been in a period where such a board would seem essential.
I know that I speak for others regarding all of the above and look forward to your response.
Thank you.
Jeffrey Blankfort
Ukiah
LOCAL EVENTS (today)
UNITY CLUB NEWS: Sheriff Kendall & FBI Agent Hawkins
by Miriam Martinez
Welcome Rain! It feels so good to these old bones to have the fog and rain return like a blanket. Those below freezing nights were challenging.
The February AV Unity Club Meeting will be held on the 6th and will be preceded by a Potluck luncheon at 12:30. The meeting will be held in the Fairgrounds Dining Room. Our Hostess crew will provide the Main dishes. They are Judy Nelson, Dode Robb, Miriam Martinez, and Mary Pat Palmer. So far we will have Vegetarian Chili, a Gluten Free Chicken dish, and a Casserole. Members are encouraged to bring a salad or dessert. Coffee, teas and lemonade will be served. If you care to, you may call Judy Nelson or Miriam Martinez to let us know what you plan to bring. You may also bring a friend or spouse, in keeping with tradition.
At 1:30 we will open the meeting and Welcome the Public to our Outstanding Program. It is an honor to have both the Mendocino County Sheriff, Matt Kendall, and FBI Agent Ann Trombetta Hawkins, Santa Rosa Office, in Boonville. They will present a program “Human Trafficking in Mendocino County” The program will have a brief Q & A period following. I wonder when we can expect a Resident Deputy Sheriff in Anderson Valley?
If you haven’t done so yet, please come prepared to pay your annual dues of $30. It breaks down like this: GFWC $15, CFWC $5, District $5, Unity Club $5. If you are unable to attend our Guest Luncheon, please mail your dues check to Jean Condón, treasurer.
Our Lending Library has a great selection of previously loved books for sale. I found ‘Woman Warrior’ by Maxine Hong Kingston for 50¢. I also found a murder mystery, hardbound, for only a $1. Our Librarian has new titles on the shelves just waiting for you to Check Them Out. The Library is located in the Home Arts Building and is open Tuesdays from 1 to 4 and Saturdays from 12:30 to 2:30.
Enjoy the pleasant rain. I hope to see you at our Guest Luncheon Potluck at 12:30 on February 6th.
FORT BRAGG CITY COUNCIL MEETING: All new coming to Fort Bragg: Booze outdoors, Five new murals, lots of new Police Gizmos, including see-all cruiser cameras
by Frank Hartzell
The biggest news from this week’s Fort Bragg City Council meeting was that Fort Bragg will get FIVE MORE murals this year. Hurrah! Murals have become the latest art wave across California. Dreary office buildings have turned into art attractions everywhere since the pandemic started, which is when the city launched the program to expand the mural program.…
TWO UKIAH TRIAL DEFENDANTS HANDED GUILTY VERDICTS
Two Mendocino County Superior Court juries returned from their separate deliberations Wednesday to hand down guilty verdicts on certain misdemeanor charges.
In the first trial, defendant Ricardo Nunez, Jr., age 18, of Ukiah, was found guilty of misdemeanor driving a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. He was also found guilty of misdemeanor providing false information to a peace officer.
Defendant Nunez was found not guilty of driving a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol of .08 or greater; and not guilty of hit-and-run driving.
The law enforcement agencies that developed the evidence used against Nunez at trial were the California Highway Patrol and the California Department of Justice crime laboratory.
The prosecutor who presented the People evidence to jury was Deputy District Attorney Joseph Hoppe. This was DDA Hoppe’s first jury trial in Mendocino County. He was previously in private practice in Sonoma County before joining Mendo DA.
Retired Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Jeanine Nadel presided over the three-day trial.
Defendant Nunez is now on summary probation with DUI terms and conditions for the next 36 months.
In a different courtroom, defendant Amanda Irene Figg Hoblyn, age 24, of Willits, was found guilty of misdemeanor driving a motor vehicle on a license suspended by DMV for being a reckless driver, said unlawful driving occurring in April 2024 in the Willits area.
Defendant Figg Hoblyn was found not guilty by the jury of a second count charging misdemeanor driving a motor vehicle in April with a blood alcohol .08 or greater.
After the jury was excused, Judge Faulder found in a separate hearing that defendant Figg Hoblyn had indeed driven in April with a blood alcohol of .08 or greater. He did so in the context of a probation violation proceeding which carries a lower burden of proof.
Having found that Figg Hoblyn violated her probation in April, Judge Faulder also stated on the record his belief that the defendant had lied during her testimony in front of the jury.
What was the probation for that defendant Figg Hoblyn violated in April? Defendant Figg Hoblyn was on summary probation for a 2022 conviction for, imagine this, driving a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol .08 or greater, information that was withheld from the jury.
The law enforcement agencies that developed the evidence used at trial against the defendant were the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, the California Highway Patrol, and the California Department of Justice crime laboratory.
The prosecutor who presented the People’s evidence to the jury at trial was Deputy District Attorney Sarah Drlik.
Defendant Figg Hoblyn is now on two grants of probation - the remainder of her 2022 DUI probation that will expire during the upcoming month of April, and a new grant of probation that will run for 12 months until January 29, 2026.
TOM SMYTHE:
Bruce Ketron brings up some good wildfire questions on the what, where and why of fires. As a volunteer firefighter and having been to LA on a strike-team of OES engines I saw firsthand Santa Ana wind driven wildfires in urban landscape. Water is so important when making a stand at a fire coming at a structure and you are there with an engine that only has usually 500-800 gallons. Two 1 1/2” lines at 75-100 gpm eats that up quick so having water at a structure is really important. It might be beneficial to new fire-hardening home upgrades is to require a cistern or underground tank much like a rural septic tank of 2500-3000 gallons to receive gray-water from the house or rain water. In Pacific Palisades where rainfall is minimal compared to here in Mendo land, a gray-water tank could make the difference for fire protection not to mention landscape or garden irrigation. Certainly technology is available to put sensors in tanks to monitor water level and with submersible pump (possibly battery backup) would help save water and make more available for fire protection.
ROSE ALANNA (facebook)
Local family of three looking for a rental in Anderson Valley. We have outgrown our current tiny home.
I grew up in AV and have family here. We would prefer to stay here, though we would consider closer to Ukiah if it were the right home for us. Looking for at least a two bedroom house.
We are clean, quiet, and respectful. We are non smokers and do not drink.
My partner could be an asset for a landlord looking for someone with a broad skillset in maintenance and repairs. Good credit and references.
Please send any potential rentals my way via facebook.
Thank you.
PETIT TETON FARM
Fresh now: Turmeric, chard, kale, broccolini, herbs, mizuna mustard. All the preserved foods from jams to pickles, soups to hot sauces, made from everything we grow.
We sell frozen USDA beef and pork from perfectly raised pigs and cows.
Squab is also available at times.
Contact us for what’s in stock at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com.
Open Mon-Sat 9-4:30, Sun 12-4:30.
18601 Hwy 128 - Mile Marker 33.39
SITTING JUDGES are always telling us that they cannot comment on judicial matters which might come before them as an excuse for their silence on even the most basic issues. But how can they justify not commenting or trying to defend the new courthouse which will clearly disrupt ongoing court proceedings, besides being ugly and grossly overpriced. Before he died, Judge David Nelson at least rolled out with his arguable reasons to justify the new courthouse. But not one other local judge has even tried to explain to the public how this wasteful monstrosity is good for Mendocino County.
(Mark Scaramella)
EXHIBIT OPENING RECEPTION AT GRACE HUDSON: FEB. 8
On Saturday, Feb. 8, from 1 to 4 p.m., the Grace Hudson Museum will host a reception for its new exhibit, "Reclamation: Aboriginal Ancestral Homeland and Resilience of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe."
In 1925, famed anthropologist Alfred Kroeber incorrectly claimed that the Costanoan Native peoples of California had become extinct. Consequently, the Muwekma Ohlone — largely based in the southern regions of San Francisco Bay — lost federal status even though tribal members had been enrolled with the Bureau of Indian Affairs between 1928 and 1971 and had even served in the United States military. Through the images of tribal photographer Kike Arnal, this exhibition explores the traditions and vitality of the Muwekma Ohlone and their ongoing struggle to regain federal status and secure their own sovereignty.
The public is invited to help celebrate the opening of this exhibition, which is organized by members of the Muwekma Ohlone along with the New Museum in Los Gatos and the Dept. of Anthropology at San Jose State University. Pomo singers and dancers will be on hand as well as the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe Bay Area Feather Dancers. Light refreshments will be served.
The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah. The Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. For more information please go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call (707) 467-2836.
MUSIC FOR GAZA
Hello Community,
Join us next week for an unforgettable afternoon of music, and community as we come together to support families in Gaza who are receiving assistance through our local efforts!
We’re thrilled to host a special concert featuring New York-based cellist, Alejandro Acosta Acero, who will perform Bach’s Cello Suites I, II, & III. The concert will be interwoven with heartfelt stories about families in Gaza, shared by those who know and love them. It’s a beautiful opportunity to enjoy world-class music while making a tangible difference for families in need.
Saturday February 8th 2025, 2:00 to 5:00pm, Caspar Community Center (15051 Caspar Rd, Caspar, CA 95420)
Tickets are $10 and those 15 years and under are free.
There will be baked goods and food available for purchase, and a small market offering unique items for sale. 100% of every ticket, purchase, and donation will go directly to supporting these families.
Tickets are available for purchase here or at the door: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/will-you-free-my-palestine
Let’s come together for a meaningful cause! Enjoy an incredible afternoon of entertainment, connect with others, and help make a lasting impact.
If you’d like to contribute but are unable to attend, or if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at FundraiserForGFamilies@gmail.com.
This event is sponsored by Mendo for Palestine and Legacy, The Landscape Connection
RUSSIAN RIVER TELEMETRY STUDY
State Water Board staff from the Telemetry Research Unit will hold a meeting on the upcoming Telemetry Study in the Russian River watershed. The meeting will be online-only on Wednesday February 12, 2025 from 12:00—1:30 p.m. PST.
Water Board staff are conducting the Russian River Telemetry Study, part of the Telemetry Pilot Project, to research how telemetry can streamline data collection and analysis. The goal of the project is to reduce the burden on water reporters and improve the usability and availability of water data. Staff and contractors plan to install telemetered water monitoring equipment at about 100 volunteer sites, assess the cost and effectiveness of the monitoring, and evaluate data accuracy. Learn more about the project by visiting: waterboards.ca.gov/telemetry/pilot-project.html
LOCAL EBAY POSTCARD (via Marshall Newman)
INLAND COMMUNITY STAKEHOLDER MEETING ON FEBRUARY 12, 2025
The Mendocino County Department of Planning and Building Services and Division of Environmental Health invite all stakeholders to a meeting on February 12, 2025 at the County Administration Complex from 11 AM to 1 PM. This is an opportunity to provide constructive feedback regarding operations to each Director, ask general questions, and learn of important updates. Agenda Highlights include: Discussion of recent updates and proposed changes Opportunities for community feedback and suggestions Collaborative brainstorming for a more efficient and accessible process
The County values your input and collaboration, and this meeting will focus on discussing and improving the permitting processes in our departments. Your insights and feedback are crucial in helping us streamline and enhance permitting processes to better serve the needs of our community. We look forward to a productive and engaging discussion that will benefit us all. Wednesday, February 12, 2025 11 Am – 1 Pm Conference Room C at the County Administration Complex 501 Low Gap Road Ukiah, CA 95482 Join Zoom Meeting: https://mendocinocounty.zoom.us/j/88253812825 Meeting ID: 882 5381 2825
FORT BRAGG FOOD BANK CRAB FEED
The Fort Bragg Food Bank and the Mendo Food Network are excited to bring you our first Valentine’s Crab Feed on Feb 14th, 3pm-8pm
Hosted at Tall Guy Brewing, with fresh crab from Noyo Fish Company!
Join us for great food, live music, and a silent auction.
Get your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mendo-food-network-crab-feed-tickets-1116852298289?aff=oddtdtcreator
Can’t buy online? We have them available at Harvest Market!
Tickets are $60 for 1 or $100 for 2, so bring your Valentine to save! We’ll be offering dine in or takeout. Delivery is available between Fort Bragg and Mendocino with an extra fee, please purchase online before the 12th to ensure delivery.
We hope to see you there!
ED NOTES
JIM GIBBONS REMEMBERS: “The Big March you attended in San Francisco back in ‘68 after Martin Luther King’s murder caused me to flash back to 1967 in Milwaukee when comedian Dick Gregory was in town to march with Father James Groppi for Civil Rights. I had this beatnik friend named John Bentley who talked me into going to check it out and we turned out to be the only white guys besides Groppi, and talk about “race baiters shouting insults from the sidewalk.’ We marched to the South Side, a predominantly Polish neighborhood, which was all white and seemingly all pissed, especially at a couple of white guys hanging with the ‘niggers.’ Even the blacks seemed surprised at how hateful the whites were toward other whites, and needless to say, this naive 23-year-old was shocked and scared and never marched for no cause ever again.”
A DAY IN THE LIFE of an ancient beatnik. It started early ayem on the Lyon Street Stairs with me and my Feinstein and Blum story — Diane and Richard, both of them gone now. It’s not much of a story, and probably one shared by at least some of the other mortifiers-of-flesh who trudge aerobically up and down the Stairs past Feinstein’s and Blum’s fortified front door at ruling class ground zero, Pacific Heights.
I’M SURPRISED us grubby public is allowed so close to Feinstein’s five floors of deceptively secure, bourgeosie splendor. But there were two security cameras on the roof and undoubtedly a man with a gun inside somewhere. The Stairs pass so close I could see through one of the heavily screened windows a back-lit portrait of the Senator herself.
ONE MORNING I saw Blum, a nondescript, lumpy gent in a business suit moving slowly up the stairs with a phalanx of young people. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to describe his phalanx as “doting.”
BLUM looked at me like I should recognize him. “How ya doin’ today?,” I said when we were briefly side by side on the Stairs, me headed down, him up. I felt I had to say something in the face of what I took as Blum’s expectation, if that’s what it was. How easy it would have been to Mangioni the guy.
I KEPT on going, of course, having nothing more to say of a civil nature to an even more major enemy of the people than his wife.
I USED TO HIT the Lyon Street Stairs a couple of times a week, as did several professional athletes and their trainers. One of the jocks, a huge blonde blur of a kid with those world class fast-twitch muscles the gifted ballplayers are born with, moved past me one morning at an improbably fast pace, nudging me aside with, “On your left, gramps.” Other than a couple of unwitnessed stumbles, “Gramps” is the only insult I’ve suffered at that particular venue.
A LITTLE FARTHER up the hill there was often a young, plump, Mediterranean-looking woman togged out in mountain-climbing lycra. She walked backwards up the stairs in tiny slo-motion steps. I wanted to ask her to define the benefits of her workout. “Excuse me, miss, In your own words, what possible life-extending value is there in creeping backwards up and down thirty feet of sidewalk?”
THE ODDER people’s behavior, the more defensive they are about it, and you’ve got to watch it in that neighborhood — when someone in Upper Pacific Heights calls the cops they arrive instantly and from all directions.
THAT NIGHT, me and the missus went to see ACT’s production of the Caucasian Chalk Circle. In my early twenties, I used to see a lot of live theater. Then I and everyone else of ordinary means got priced out.
THESE TICKETS were a gift, a gift that kept on giving with about ten plays a year. I’d never seen a Brecht play. I’d read this one and looked forward to seeing it presented. I’d also read that the director was “ferociously inventive.” In the daily deluge of pure bullshit that fuels our fading country and ricochets around my head like a bb in a box car, “ferociously inventive” should have put me on red alert, but it wasn’t until I got to “gleefully irreverent and bracingly modern,” followed by “brand new translation” that I knew we were in for a rough two hours of theater.
BRECHT was a communist. The play is about class warfare. It doesn’t need “irreverent,” and it doesn’t need a “brand new translation.” The production, as it turned out, was so scattered that if I didn’t know the story I’d have been completely lost. And it was boring, insulting even, with the “ferociously inventive” Mr. Doyle apparently telling the actors to go ahead and ad lib whenever they felt like improving on Brecht, the result being a lot of gratuitous vulgarity the playwright wouldn’t have tolerated. So it was a bummer, a waste of talented actors.
THE OLD BOY two seats from me kept being nudged awake by his wife. When she’d sat down she’d looked at me and said, “You look like Colonel Schweppes.” The liberties strangers take these days! Colonel Schweppes! I’m a lot closer to looking like Gabby Hayes, but I guess Schweppes was an upgrade.
I TOOK a closer look at this impertinent neighbor. She was swathed in layers of Magnin silks and, truth to tell, she looked like a madam of a high end brothel, but as a gentleman I couldn’t possibly say so. Of course you’ve got to be a million years old even to remember the ads with Colonel Schweppes, but there we were in the old Geary Theater teeming with elderly Marxists waiting to hear the master lash us guilt ridden winners of class combat.
OUT on the night time downtown Frisco streets beyond the comforts of the Geary, it’s more and more like medieval London, with beggars, street acts, cripples, and crazy people, and all of it more and more and faster and faster. But I was still shocked at seeing ten copies of R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis prominently displayed in the Marist’s book shop at Old St. Mary’s Church, California and Grant.
WE HAD DINNER at Max’s across the street from Brecht. I went for the chicken pot pie assuming it would appear in recognizable form like those little Swanson pot pies us television tray people used to eat when the ball game was on, but here it was the size of a literal basketball. I ate what I could and hauled the rest of it up to Boonville to show it to some gourmand guys. “Fifteen bucks, boys, and I’m still eating on it three days later!”
THE NEXT DAY I read Robert Hurwitt’s review of Caucasian Chalk Circle in the Chron: “But a degree of confusion seems to be built into John Doyle’s approach to Brecht’s parable about contested motherhood….” YES, BOB there certainly was narrative confusion, and I’ll bet Mr. Doyle laughed all the way home to England about putting another one over on US.
EARLIER IN THE DAY, after the Stairs workout, I’d embarked on my favorite bad weather adventure, the $13 Muni Day Pass, six hours on different bus lines from the Bay to Candlestick. And most points between. After several hours on Muni, the grandest tour possible of the world’s greatest city at the price, I was sitting in Washington Square thinking about Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio getting married at the nearby Peter and Paul’s Church where my old friend Warren Hinckle’s memorial service had been so crowded I couldn’t get in.
IT WAS LATE in the afternoon, but never too late for an Italian apple turnover from Mara’s genuine Italian bakery. As I ate I congratulated myself for having seized the day, confident I’d also seize the night inside the Caucasian Chalk Circle.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, January 31, 2025
JAMES ARIAS, (age unspecified), Ukiah. Controlled substance, getting credit with someone else’s ID, use of access card account info without consent, use of another’s ID with intent to defraud with prior, possession of more than ten IDs of other people, grand theft of access cards (four or more).
THOMAS BROGAN JR., 39, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
CHARRISE BURNS, 44, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.
JESSE GURROLA, 30, Covelo. Stolen vehicle.
ACEA HENDERSON, 24, Gualala. Vandalism, parole violation.
MONICA MCDONALD, 57, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, probation revocation.
JANINE PONCIANO, 46, Redwood Valley. Failure to appear, probation revocation.
SHADAYSHA WILLIAMS, 27, Redwood Valley. DUI.
DOUG’S GOOD READS
Five books you should oughta read: https://www.itsdougholland.com/five-books-you-should-oughta-read/
Jayne Thomas Adds:
My favorite book of all is Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It’s a beautifully written explanation of science as more than a body of knowledge; it’s a way of thinking to counter the pseudoscience confronting us everywhere. This book should be required reading in all high schools where hardly anyone is exposed to the tenets of critical thinking. And Doug, I think you’ll like Richard Dawkins’ praise: “He [Carl] is wise, humane, witty, well read, and incapable of composing a dull sentence. I wish I had written The Demon-haunted World. Having failed to do so the least I can do is press it upon my friends. Please read this book
Doug Holland adds:
Well, you talked me into it, and I thank you for taking the time and making the effort. The book goes on the list.
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was jubilantly brilliant. Every episode made me feel like I’d gained 25 IQ points, but obviously, like Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon, it didn’t last.
DEAL OF THE MONTH:
Nixon Roach clip, c.1974, $350 on EBay
(Steve Heilig)
COVID MEMORIES: GOING VIRAL
by Paul Modic
I drove up to town to get a little social interaction, voyeur division, and maybe buy a couple money orders to pay my house taxes. I was gonna stop out front and if there was a line just go on to the parking lot to hang out and listen to David Foster Wallace essays. The money orders were electives as the taxes weren’t due until February.
When I got to the post office there were no cars and no line. I stopped, grabbed my mask and, but no, I couldn’t find my mask! I rummaged around the passenger seat, looked in vain in the Cab Commander for the backup, then the glove box, and finally found it between the seats.
I grabbed it and lurched out of the car, but someone else had driven up and she was on the way. I started jogging but she was running to beat me! I gave up, walked up the ramp, waited outside, and thought, “Yeah, you better run, lady!”
My young friend was going to come by and visit last night. I texted her that I really needed a hug but it could be suicidal, and I joked that I could wrap her in saran wrap first. “So kinky!” I said.
She didn’t get the joke and admonished me for hitting on her.
When she arrived I said, “Could I just wrap a sheet around you and hug you?”
“No,” she said.
“C’mon,” I said. “It’s a clean sheet.” I motioned to the closet.
“No,” she said. “I don’t have it.”
“Well, maybe I do.” She laughed. I’m actually the safest person in SoHum as I’ve been quarantined for a month rehabbing a hip replacement.
When our visit was over, after she lectured me about all the herbs that could fight the virus, I couldn’t resist and took her in my arms for a quick healthy hug.
As soon as she walked out the door I stripped out of my clean clothes and threw them in the laundry basket. Then I washed my hands.
CONTACT CRAIG HERE
Warmest spiritual greetings, Awoke early at the homeless shelter in Washington, D.C., my commitment to be supportive of the D.C. Peace Vigil for the autumn season (and into winter now) having been accomplished; am presently free as a bird, and may go wherever I need to go and do whatever I need to do. I understand that crazy materialistic postmodern America offers me nothing, in particular the enemy of the people government of the United States of America. Contact me here:
Craig Louis Stehr, craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
WHAT WE NEED RIGHT NOW
Is just a dog deal
The kind that smells tastes so good
Just a good dog deal
That comfy something
That we can all bite into
Yeah that good dog deal
Dance on the lawn for
Back-rolling-on-the-grass for
Good dog deal that kind
That we’ve always craved
To chomp right down on that kind
The real good dog deal
Yes Bingo that kind
The kind we'd love to snarf up
Gotta have right now
Such a good dog deal
The kind your Mom promised you
Don’tcha want some now?
— Jim Luther
MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight on KNYO and KAKX!
Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight’s (Friday night’s) MOTA show is 6pm or so. Or if that’s too soon, send it later or any time during the week and I’ll read it on the radio next time. That’s what I’m here for.
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.
Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week’s MOTA show. By Saturday night I’ll put up the recording of tonight’s show. Also there you’ll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:
Edwardian beauty. Their noses grab your attention. And their satiny skin. https://www.vintag.es/2025/01/lallie-charles.html
There is somebody for everybody. https://www.vintag.es/2025/01/1970-couples.html
And a full documentary film about the most beautiful boy in the world. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-most-beautiful-boy-in-world.html
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
IN THE WONDROUS CABINET (NO, NOT TRUMP’S)
by David Yearsley
After weeks of bitter subzero temperatures, the Polar Vortex loosens its grip on Upstate New York. Far more tenacious and deadly was the Little Ice Age that kept Europe in its grasp for the entire 17th century and beyond. This Saturday night, music of crackle and warmth from those colden years will heat Anabel Taylor Chapel at Cornell University in a live-streamed concert marking today’s release of an album from False Azure Records.
The concert given by Martin Davids (violin) and David Yearsley (organ) begins at 7:30 pm EST on Saturday, February 1st.
As an exclusive CounterPunch prelude to that event, we present the program notes here:
In size and power, the church organ dwarfs the violin, and the two instruments might therefore seem unlikely, even irreconcilable duet partners, the one infamous in the popular imagination for a bombast that could easily overwhelm the other. Yet, in Europe’s richest organ center, one of the most celebrated musical pairings of the seventeenth century was the collaboration between organist Heinrich Scheidemann and the violinist Johann Schop, playing together from the organ gallery of cavernous St. Catherine’s church to the delight of locals and tourists, musical colleagues and clerics, civic grandees and townspeople.
Scheidemann was renowned for his ability to express his lively humor on the four manuals and pedals of St. Catherine’s organ, a massive color-machine boasting impressive strength, but also equipped with a vibrant palette of registers imitating other instruments of the age: cornettos, viols, recorders, and dulcians. Flying over the stacked keyboards of the organ’s ornate console, Scheidemann’s famously “fast fists” launched bright figurations and witty echoes into the vast architectural space of the church. Scheidemann molded his buoyant musical temperament under his teacher Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s tutelage in Amsterdam from 1611 to 1614, but the great Hamburg organist also learned from his partnership with Schop, whose violin playing was praised for a liveliness rife with unexpected ideas and sparkling flourishes and for the occasional retreat into melancholic shadows.
The contemporary poet, hymn writer, and music-lover Georg Neumark was one of the duo’s most ardent admirers; in his Poetisch- Musikalisches Lustwäldchen (Poetical and Musical Pleasure Grove) published in Hamburg in 1652, he praised a performance by Schop and Scheidemann at a St. Catherine’s vespers service when both musicians were at the height of their individual and collective powers. For Neumark, these Hamburg compatriots outshone even mythic musicians of Antiquity.
How Am I thus enraptured? Who can so bend my
Heart with such beautiful pipework? Whose is the beautiful tone,
That permeates all my senses? Is it you Hipparchion,
And your companion Rufin, who with gentle violin
Makes the artful playing of the organ playing yet more pleasing?
No, you two are not up to the task. It is Schop and Scheidemann.
The widely traveled Philipp von Zesen lofted a similarly effusive paean to the pair in a volume of poetry published in 1651:
Whenever Schop und Scheidemann
Marry their art,
Melancholy flees as fast it can,
All my senses leave me.
Indeed, the entire air
Puffs, full of sound.
It was not only the beauty and ease of the Schop and Scheidemann duets that so captivated these listeners, but also their ability to raise the spirits, even during the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War that devastated Germany during the first half of the century when both men were in their prime. Indeed, another of the most famous Lutheran poets of the period, Johann Rist, called Scheidemann the “outstanding Amphion of Hamburg”—a reference to the mythical musician of Antiquity, who, with his voice and lyre, built Thebes by charming the blocks of stone to move themselves and form buildings. After his own house and its lavish garden in Lüneburg had been destroyed by marauding Swedish troops, Rist sought refuge in secure Hamburg and he thanked his friends Schop and Scheidemann for lifting him from sadness with their music from the organ loft.
Most of Scheidemann’s surviving keyboard works were rediscovered little more than a half-century ago, and since then his music has been prized by modern organists—as it was in his own time—for its optimism and grace. These attributes come immediately to life on an instrument such as the Anabel Taylor organ, whose case is based on that designed by Arp Schnitger for the large church in the German town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld. That historic instrument was commissioned in the last years of the seventeenth century by the Lutheran pastor Caspar Calvör, a collector and curator of Scheidemann’s music, who attended to its preservation and cultivation even several decades after the composer’s death. It is thanks to Calvör that Scheidemann’s work survives in sufficient quantity to enjoy and appreciate the composer’s unique gifts.
Much of what Schop and Scheidemann played together was improvised; only poetic testimonials to these frequent, evanescent collaborations remain. Their joint music-making was conducted in the favored forms of the day, diverse and engaging. There were variations on dance tunes such as the ever-popular Spanish Pavane, a favorite among north German musicians and across Europe. The pair would also have joined together on florid elaborations of the greatest hits of European vocal music, such as Giovanni Bassano’s popular Easter motet Dic nobis Maria (Tell us, Mary) and Alessandro Striggio’s self-pitying, lovesick evergreen, the madrigal Nasce la pena mia (My torment begins …). Required of all musicians was the ability to decorate John Dowland’s Pavana lachrymae, certainly the most popular of all of these models, arranged many times for lute and keyboard by a diverse composers across several decades. We offer an antidote to this delightful dolor with a Galliard originally by another Englishman, John Bull; this lively dance is artfully elaborated by Scheidemann and further animated by his characteristic panache. While Schop’s untitled sonata (sine titulo) in the Italian vein shares many technical and stylistic attributes with his glosses on Striggio, the violinist’s own composition attests to the increased freedom and fantasy unleashed when he allowed himself independence from venerable models.
Schop was the first violinist in northern Europe to secure the prestige of having his work published. His music for violin and continuo comes down to us in a sumptuous Amsterdam publication of two volumes from mid-century entitled ‘t Uitnemend Kabinet; his voluminous consort music, from which we have arranged our Intrada, was published in Hamburg in the 1630s. Scheidemann, by contrast, left his keyboard music in manuscript, the bulk of it preserved only by Calvör. But as was doubtless customary in seventeenth-century Hamburg, Martin Davids and I have granted ourselves a good measure of interpretative license in expanding on and arranging this music—treating these pieces as templates rather than as works. Our versions of Scheidemann’s intabulation of Bassano’s motet and two-verse setting of the Lutheran chorale Christ lag in Todesbanden and his Canzon in G import into these pieces our own dialogues and occasional digressions conducted in the spirit of the Schop-Scheidemann partnership.
Like the other poets quoted above in praise of the illustrious duo, Rist was a prolific composer of hymn texts and enlisted Schop to write many of his melodies, the most famous of which is Werde munter, mein Gemüte (Be cheerful, my soul), later used by J. S. Bach in somewhat altered form in the cantata movement known in English as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—a piece that has, as a favorite of modern wedding ceremonies and Christmas-tide compilations, sashayed its way into the unconscious of global millions. We introduce our fantasy on Werde munter with Schop’s Praeludium, the first published work for solo violin which appeared as opening number of the first volume of ‘t Uitnemend Kabinet, as if to proclaim Schop’s status atop the first generation of northern European violinists. Our ad hoc fantasy—varied phrase-by-phrase reflections by the organ followed by a coda with violin—is offered up in the spirit of our seventeenth-century predecessors, a small tribute to the joyous skill, varied art and good humor of Scheidemann and Schop. From these pious joys of the spirit we charge into the dance-till-you-drop thrills of Schop’s Pavaen de Spanje, unabashedly exuberant music of, and for, friends.
For more on the performers and their new recording: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/31/in-the-wondrous-cabinet-no-not-trumps
(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.)
WHO IS ‘ZIZ’? How a mysterious group with roots in the Bay Area is linked to six deaths
by Michael Baraba, Matthias Gafni, Rachel Swan, Cassidy
Ziz was dead. Or at least it seemed that way.
Just before midnight on Aug. 19, 2022, the Coast Guard steamed through San Francisco Bay after an alarming report. The eccentric computer programmer and blogger, born Jack Amadeus LaSota before adopting the name Ziz and feminine pronouns, had fallen from a boat. For hours, rescue crews searched by air and sea. They found nothing.
An obituary appeared in a newspaper. A probate case was filed in court, citing witnesses to the death.
Then, almost five months later and 2,500 miles away, Pennsylvania state troopers swarmed a hotel near Philadelphia International Airport. The elderly parents of a woman close to LaSota had been shot to death in their home several days earlier, and the troopers thought the daughter — who was staying at the hotel — might have the murder weapon.
Inside Room 111, the troopers didn’t locate a pistol but found something else: LaSota. She lay unmoving on the bathroom floor with her eyes closed. She was alive, but now playing dead.
LaSota, a 34-year-old Alaska native who once joined the tech pilgrimage to the Bay Area, is today at the center of a bizarre and sprawling mystery.
Law enforcement officials are investigating six deaths linked to associates of LaSota, the flagbearer of a small group of well-educated computer whizzes and devout vegans — referred to by some critics as the “Zizians” — who splintered away from the Berkeley circles of an intellectual movement and subculture called rationalism that seeks to understand human cognition and is concerned that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity. Her whereabouts are unknown.
The deaths include the Pennsylvania couple, a U.S. Border Patrol Agent killed in a recent shootout in Vermont, a Vallejo landlord recently stabbed to death, and two people with ties to LaSota.
The Chronicle relied on interviews, police records, court documents and online writings to examine the string of violence — and what may have led to it. A picture emerges of people operating under profoundly paranoid and abstruse views of society and technology.
For years, LaSota, in rambling blog posts, set forth her beliefs on topics such as machine learning, veganism, the importance of dual personalities and the natural gifts of transgender women, luring a considerable number of followers — and critics — into the dark canyons of her mind. Her early posts had titles like “self-blackmail” and “engineering and hacking your mind.”
In a way, LaSota burst into public view in November 2019. She and three associates drove into the woods in Sonoma County, where they blocked off exits from a retreat hosted by a prominent nonprofit rationalist organization, the Center for Applied Rationality.
They wore black-hooded robes and masks, and before they were arrested, they passed out fliers accusing CFAR and another Berkeley-based rationalist group, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), of betraying them. “They tried to seize the keys of agency, flinched at what they saw and burned the path behind them,” the fliers read.
Now, the cascade of violence has repulsed, perplexed and transfixed the community of rationalists centered in Berkeley that LaSota and others left.
LaSota, who has not been accused of any crimes in connection with the six deaths, did not respond to an email request for comment. Reached on the phone, her father, an AI researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, declined to comment.
Jessica Taylor, a former research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, said she met LaSota and others who believed in the “Ziz theory” through the Berkeley rationalist scene around 2016. Taylor said these people adopted the most extreme versions of ideas shared by those in the community.
“Ziz theory is combining these things like rationalism, timeless decision theory, transgender related ideas, brain hemispheres and left-anarchism,” Taylor said. “A lot of these ideas on their own are normal.”
“They are,” she added of the Zizians, “just very intense.”
Drawn To The Tech Scene
LaSota earned an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, interned with NASA and developed a puzzle game called “Dystheism” before moving to the Bay Area in 2016 to work in tech, according to an online profile.
“The first startup, after other dishonesty, fired me after 4 days after I moved to the Bay for them, because I said I couldn’t implement a payment system for their game… in 2 days, and because I walked out of the office after 8 hours of work,” LaSota wrote on her blog.
She joined a niche scene of several hundred rationalists in Berkeley. They often lived in communal homes, spent time theorizing and shared a core belief that AI would become so advanced that without safeguards it would destroy humanity.
“I came to the Bay Area because all the smartest people I knew said there was a global emergency in the neglect of ethics and even care for the future by AI researchers,” LaSota later said in a court declaration.
Immersing herself in the movement, LaSota moved into a split-level house in South Berkeley with a group of grad students, tech workers and bohemian types who were all loosely interested in rationalism and AI safety, according to a person who frequently visited the house and moved in after LaSota moved out.
The resident, who asked to withhold their name out of concern for their safety, described the house and larger community as open and welcoming, regularly hosting dinners and board-game nights. LaSota attended these, but appeared aloof.
LaSota began publishing philosophical musings on her blog, Sinseriously.blog, under the name Ziz in late 2016.
“So how can you be incorruptible?” she wrote. “You can’t. But you already are. By your own standards. Simply by not wanting to be corrupted. And your standards are best standards! Unfortunately you are not as smart as you, and are easily tricked. In order to not be tricked, you need to use your full deliberative brainpower. You and you need to fuse.”
In the summer of 2018, LaSota participated in an apprenticeship program run by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.
“LaSota was a young person who was hanging around and who I suspect wanted to be important,” said Anna Salamon, the executive director of CFAR. She said that while LaSota generally subscribed to MIRI’s beliefs about AI, she also developed “a strange psychological theory” about the two hemispheres of the brain.
LaSota explained the theory on her blog, saying the hemispheres can hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.” She wrote: “Reaching peace between hemispheres with conflicting interests is a tricky process of repeatedly reconstructing frames of game theory and decision theory in light of realizations of them having been strategically damaged by your headmate.”
Instead of attending sessions on math and computers, LaSota would pull people aside to pitch ideas and engage in intense conversations, frequently insisting that MIRI should use the hemisphere theory as a rubric for who to hire, Salamon recalled.
“I was not willing to recommend to MIRI that they use LaSota’s psychological theory, nor that they hire LaSota,” Salamon said, surmising that LaSota revolted after realizing she would not consolidate power and influence within MIRI. LaSota then apparently used the theory of hemispheres to entice her own followers, Salamon said, and “manipulate a number of smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated.”
In court records, LaSota explained her version of the rift. She said she found “corruption” among the rationalists, particularly in how the community responded to veganism.
LaSota leveled other more serious allegations against CFAR, but provided no evidence. She said she tried to warn donors away, without success — before coming up with a more drastic plan.
A Protest Backfires
Around 3:40 p.m. on Nov. 15, 2019, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputy Brian Parks responded to a report that some sort of religious group had descended upon Westminster Woods, a 200-acre property along the Bohemian Highway north of Occidental.
Inside the grounds, CFAR members had arrived for the group’s annual retreat, which included team-building and ropes courses. Outside, LaSota and three colleagues blocked the exit, spoke on walkie-talkies and wore Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the “Anonymous” hacktivist group and the dystopian superhero film “V for Vendetta.” They distributed fliers railing against MIRI and CFAR.
“MIRI is violating basic principles of friendliness,” the fliers read. “MIRI missed the rapidly oncoming global catastrophic threat of fascism.” The fliers said trans women were being discriminated against, despite “being naturally inclined/gifted in mental tech development.”
Deputies called in a SWAT team and an armored vehicle to evacuate attendees, while arresting the four demonstrators — LaSota, Alexander “Somni” Leatham, Emma Borhanian and Gwen Danielson. They would all be charged with criminal counts including conspiracy, obstructing an officer and wearing a mask for an unlawful purpose. LaSota would later tell a judge she had hatched the protest idea to damage fundraising for CFAR.
“I would end this dangerous organization by financially starving it,” she said in a declaration.
Once in custody, the quartet gave various accounts of “torture” at the hands of responding deputies. LaSota said her clothes were cut off her body and she was thrown into a padded “suicide cell.”
Within days, all four bailed out, with LaSota’s parents paying her bond. Freed, they bounced around Airbnbs, at least until the hosts recognized them from media coverage of the protest and called the cops, LaSota said in court records.
She said her parents told her to “never to talk to my friends again,” and she lamented the failed protest and how police had treated her. “As time went on a gloom of guilty silence and collapsed illusions settled over the community,” she said in court records. “I was disappointed to see that no more than a small handful of new community members sided against the organization.
“I will actually never be able to trust society, even in a limited respect,” she said, “like trusting cops to not torture you for literally doing nothing wrong again.”
That distrust manifested in Sonoma County Superior Court, where the case languished. For three years, the four defendants ran through numerous attorneys, pushed to have judges dismissed, requested a change of venue, and leveled accusations of transphobia.
The foursome had difficulty finding lawyers because they only wanted to hire vegans, said Dan Kapelovitz, a Los Angeles-based defense attorney who specializes in animal-rights cases and described LaSota as a “kind and thoughtful” person.
In the end, Leatham, who uses feminine pronouns, would represent herself and, at times, the others. She filed numerous legal motions, all denied. The research mathematician at one point complained that a judge violated her right to protect herself from COVID after she showed up on a Zoom hearing in a hazmat suit and a gas mask and the judge asked her to show her face. Another time, she called the judge “a member of a cis-supremacist cult” with “omnicidal intent.”
Then on Aug. 23, 2022, the case took a turn. LaSota’s then-attorney, Kapelovitz, told the judge over Zoom that his client was dead.
Lost In The Bay
Days earlier, just before midnight on Aug. 19, 2022, the Coast Guard had gotten the call of a person overboard in the bay.
In declarations later filed in San Mateo County Superior Court, two people — LaSota’s sister, Naomi, and Borhanian, who had been at the Westminster Woods protest — said they had been on LaSota’s boat, the Black Cygnet, when LaSota fell into the water at about 11 p.m. while working on the motor.
“I lost sight of Jack while looking for a life preserver,” Borhanian wrote. She and Naomi searched the water, she stated, and called out for their companion, to no avail, ultimately using the boat’s radio and Naomi’s phone to call for help.
As rescue teams descended on the 55-degree waters, Naomi and Borhanian were towed back to shore. The following day, at 5 p.m., Coast Guard officials informed Naomi that her sibling’s chances of survival had expired.
While no body was found, and no death certificate issued, an obituary for Jack LaSota appeared in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and on Legacy.com. “Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed,” said the posting, accompanied by a smiling photo of LaSota with sunglasses and long blond hair.
Tributes flooded in, with one mourner writing, “Jack, you were one of this age’s visionary philosophers.”
With LaSota apparently dead and co-defendant Gwen Danielson missing, the two remaining defendants in the Westminster Woods case — Leatham and Borhanian — continued fighting the charges. But the case was about to take another startling turn.
Weeks later, Borhanian was killed. And Leatham was charged with her murder.
Nightmare Tenants
In the early morning hours of Nov. 15, 2022, Vallejo landlord Curtis Lind was lured to one of his tenants’ trailers to fix a purported water leak.
Lind, then 80, had rented the space to several young people, including LaSota, who he had first met in 2017. He was living on a boat in Half Moon Bay when the group pulled in from Alaska on a 94-foot tug boat named Caleb. The group lived as anchor-outs for a time, and at some point decided to relocate to Vallejo, where Lind had decided to open a lot to renters of trailers and other makeshift homes, Lind recalled in an interview he gave last year to a documentary filmmaker.
A ramshackle property on a Vallejo cul-de-sac where several young people lived for a few years before allegedly attacking the owner and landlord, Curtis Lind.
His tenants were initially friendly, if unconventional. They lived in trailers and box trucks and had a collection of samurai swords. He would see them around the yard, dressed in all black. They were men transitioning to women, he said.
But when the pandemic hit, they stopped paying rent, and things took a turn. After Lind took the group to court for back rent, he said, one of them took out a pocket knife and patted the blade while smiling at him. Lind’s daughter said the squatters overtook the property, placing locks on trailers intended for other people.
Lind began carrying a pistol in his jacket pocket. But that wasn’t enough. “I should have been smarter,” he said in the video interview.
The morning Lind’s tenant asked him to check the leak, he said he walked to the back of a trailer and was struck over the head.
“The next thing I remember is standing up with three of them right next to me around me,” Lind said. “I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds, I think around 50. I couldn’t see out of my right eye. It had been punctured three times. The back of my neck had some severe cuts like somebody was trying to cut my head off.”
Lind had a sword sticking through his chest, he recalled. He said he pulled out his gun and started shooting, killing Borhanian, who was then 31, and critically injuring Leatham. Prosecutors later charged Leatham and another member of the group, Suri Dao, with murder, under the theory that it was their actions — not Lind’s self-defense — that directly caused Borhanian’s death.
It’s not clear exactly where LaSota was during the violence. But hours after the incident, Jerold Friedman — who had represented LaSota in a civil suit against Sonoma County over the protest response — received a surprising email from a Solano County prosecutor.
“I just wanted to reach out and let you know that Jack Lasota was contacted by police in Vallejo [California] this weekend,” the prosecutor wrote. “Lasota was on scene, alive and well.”
Though she was on Lind’s property at some point during or after the incident, and was handcuffed at gunpoint by police, LaSota was never charged. She was taken to Vallejo police headquarters, where a homicide investigator said she faked a medical emergency and was taken by ambulance to a hospital.
A month after the Lind attack, at a hearing on the Sonoma County protest, Borhanian’s attorney alerted the court that she was dead. Prosecutors dismissed her charges.
“As far as how this case deteriorated, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Friedman said. “I’m very sorry that Emma lost her life. And wherever the other three are, I hope they figure things out.”
Friedman would receive another call about LaSota a few months later. A state trooper from Pennsylvania contacted him to say LaSota had been arrested in that state. Could he provide any information?
‘He Would Not Speak’
On Jan. 2, 2023, Pennsylvania state troopers responded to a home in Chester Heights west of Philadelphia for a welfare check. Inside, they found the bodies of Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69.
Investigators determined the couple — the parents of Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, an associate of LaSota — had been killed in the home three days earlier.
Two weeks later, on Jan. 13, 2023, state troopers investigating the killings raided two rooms in the Candlewood Suites hotel in Chester, Pa., where Michelle Zajko was staying. They were in search of the murder weapon, a 9mm pistol, according to transcripts of court testimony obtained by the Chronicle.
According to the transcripts, police knew Zajko — who would later be named a “person of interest” in the case — had a pistol similar to the one used in the killings because she had, days earlier, allowed a trooper to hold it during an interview. Now, investigators had legal authority to seize the gun, and they wanted her DNA, too.
The troopers had entered a second room associated with Zajko when they encountered LaSota and a second person, identified as Daniel Blank. Blank put his hands behind his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands, but LaSota “did not do any of that.”
“He had his eyes closed,” a trooper testified, using masculine pronouns. “He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground. … He had to be carried out.”
LaSota was jailed and charged with misdemeanor counts of obstruction and disorderly conduct, court records show. She was released on bail in June 2023, but stopped showing up for court, prompting a judge to issue a warrant for her arrest. To this day, her case is pending.
LaSota’s behavior around this time led to concern online from some in the rationalist community. A Medium post that listed facts, rumors and theories about Ziz and her friends began, “Some people in the rationalist community are concerned about risks of physical violence.”
The Key Witness
For more than a year, LaSota, facing active warrants in California and Pennsylvania, was nowhere to be found. The Pennsylvania double murder remained unsolved, with detectives never even discussing a potential motive.
But in Vallejo, the case involving the landlord attack moved forward. After two alleged escape attempts by Leatham and one by Dao, a judge ordered the pair to receive mental health examinations, but eventually ruled them competent to stand trial.
At multiple hearings, according to court transcripts, Leatham fought with bailiffs and yelled the same statement over and over: “This is a show trial designed for the genocide of transgender people!”
On Jan. 16, a Solano County prosecutor pleaded with a judge to push the case toward trial, explaining that the key eyewitness, Curtis Lind, was now 82 years old with a fading memory.
The following day, witnesses told the Chronicle that a man wearing all black put his arm around Lind in the elderly man’s cul-de-sac and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest. They said the assailant ran off, covered in blood, only to return and slit Lind’s throat.
Solano County prosecutors charged Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old affiliated with LaSota’s fringe group, with killing Lind in an attempt to silence a witness.
Three days after Lind was fatally stabbed, on the afternoon of Jan. 20, federal agents on a highway near the Canadian border in Vermont pulled over a blue Prius.
Inside were two more young people with ties to the breakaway rationalists: Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German national and quantitative trader who appeared to have an expired visa, and Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old computer science student. She had recently applied for a license in Washington state to marry Snyder, with whom she attended an elite private high school in Seattle.
State and federal authorities had been surveilling Bauckholt and Youngblut for days after an employee at their hotel reported them over their odd attire — all-black, tactical-style clothing — and because Youngblut was openly displaying a gun in a holster.
Later, investigators watched Bauckholt wrap items — phones, apparently — in aluminum foil.
Stopped on the highway, Youngblut quickly pulled out a handgun and fired at the border agents, at least one of whom returned fire, authorities said. The fusillade killed both Bauckholt and Agent David Maland and injured Youngblut, leading to her arrest.
After the shootout, investigators who searched the car reported finding a cache of tactical gear, including a ballistic helmet, a night-vision device, face respirators, two-way radios and dozens of hollow-point bullets. They also located Youngblut’s journal, which according to prosecutors contained “cypher text” and writings about her psychedelic experiences.
“‘This lsd trip seems pretty mellow,’ she allegedly wrote. ‘i fell kinda high vibrationy maybe more so than other lsd trips? ‘
Taylor, the former research fellow at MIRI, said she met Bauckholt at a rationalist event in New York and became close to her in 2022. She was a “fan of ziz theory,” Taylor said.
“She was trying to be systematic and trying to think through things and make good decisions, but was pretty nonconformist and didn’t understand normal people very well,” Taylor said.
It remains unclear what Youngblut and Bauckholt were doing in Vermont. But they both allegedly carried guns purchased by Michelle Zajko, who lived in Vermont and was identified as a “person of interest” in the killing of her parents in bulletins distributed by law enforcement agencies. The bulletins say officers who encounter Zajko — whom the Chronicle could not reach for comment — should consider her “armed and dangerous.”
Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, said in court papers that Youngblut had been in frequent contact with an unnamed individual who was briefly detained in the Pennsylvania killings. That individual, prosecutors said, is also a “person of interest” in Lind’s slaying in Vallejo.
Whether prosecutors were referring to LaSota is unclear.
For now, Ziz has gone silent, in courtrooms and online. The last time she appears to have posted on her blog was back in the summer of 2022, when a follower praised her writing as fascinating and “steeped in culture.”
She replied, apparently checking to see whether they were vegan.
“Do you consume the flesh of the innocent?”
(SF Chronicle)
OUR RULING CLASSES everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future. A small group has more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, & they have no vision, no strategy, no plan. The climate crisis, migration crisis and pandemic have shown us the truth about how supposedly democratic states react to globally threatening events: they pull up the drawbridge.
— Mike Davis
UNCHAINED MELODY
by Hy Zaret (1955)
Oh, my love, my darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time
Time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me
Lonely rivers flow
To the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea
Lonely rivers sigh
"Wait for me, wait for me"
I'll be coming home, wait for me
GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY UNDER TRUMP UPDATE:
Cost per migrant deported on US military flights to Guatemala: $4,675
Cost of a one-way first-class ticket on American Airlines from El Paso, Texas, to Guatemala City: $853
In 2021, ICE reported its deportation flights cost around $8,577 per flight hour. But because Trump wanted to highlight using the military for deportation purely as a performative gesture, the most recent flights using C-17s cost $28,500 per hour.
— CounterPunch
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
It’s so comforting that in the wake of the worst US air disaster in decades, while bodies are still being pulled from the water and families suffer, and with the investigations into causes of the crash barely begun, our chief executive is seizing this opportunity to try to console and unite a nation sunk in grief by blaming everything on DEI.
Great work, Consoler-in-Chief.
LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT
Trump’s Tariffs Would Reverse Decades of Integration With Mexico
How Could the Tariffs Affect the U.S., Canada and Mexico?
Trump Officials Fire Jan. 6 Prosecutors and Plan Possible F.B.I. Purge
Ethics Pledges by Trump Cabinet Draw Questions and Skepticism
Trump Officials Release Water in California That Experts Say Will Serve Little Use
Latin America Gets Into Deal-Making Mode for Rubio’s Visit
IT’S OFFICIAL - REP. ANNA PAULINA LUNA INTRODUCES BILL TO CARVE TRUMP’S FIGURE ON MT. RUSHMORE
by Dan Bacher
I first thought this was a joke when I heard about it, but it isn’t.
On Monday, Jan. 28, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna [R-FL-13] introduced a bill, HR 792, to “direct the Secretary of Interior to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial.”
The bill was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources the same day.…
SIX WAYS FROM SUNDAY
by James Kunstler
Was it the miasma of cognitive dissonance blackening the air-space over the DC swamp that caused the deadly collision of AA Flight 5342 and a Blackhawk Helicopter this week — an impenetrable fog arising from the fetid exhalations of so many hyperventilating swamp creatures brooding between the urges of fight-or-flight as Mr. Trump deploys his chosen pest-controllers across the Potomac Basin?
Altogether, these many parasitical swamp creatures make up the greater DC blob, and the blob convulsing and fibrillating is what you witness in these committee hearings with Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. For instance, fake “progressive” Bernie Sanders (D-VT) faced with the reveal that he leads his colleagues in pharma “contributions” (just under $2-million) … or fake Cherokee Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a fugue state over the perceived threat of Mr. Kennedy to pharma profits… or presidential pardon recipient Adam Schiff (D-CA) lecturing Mr. Patel on ethical behavior. . . or Ms. Gabbard enduring the meltdown of Senate Intel Committee tool Michael Bennet (D-CO).
Behind these histrionics by the big gators and peccaries of the collapsing Democratic Party is pure scintillating fear. They are afraid that all of their hoaxes and lies of recent years will be exposed in the months ahead. And they fear that such exposure might lead eventually to legal complications for them. All of that implies loss-of-power, the single element that demonically drives their careers.
The fact is they have already lost their grip on the levers of power and, for the moment, that is all that matters. They especially no longer control the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, the many public health agencies under Health and Human Services, and the many-footed intel “community,” as it styles itself. These agencies are where the truth about our national affairs has been locked up. Now, the citizens will either see what’s there, or find out what has been deliberately destroyed — such as the internal agency email correspondence over RussiaGate, the Covid-19 operation (and the deadly vaxx campaign), the J-6 affair (and the pipe-bomb sideshow), the weird, documented irregularities of the 2020 election, the Ukraine War money-laundering shenanigans, the manifold janky DOJ prosecutions of Mr. Trump, and much more.
Every day now since January 20, heads explode all over DC as the executive orders roll out and the insanity of whatever lurked behind “Joe Biden” gets systematically expunged from the order of things. And as this happens, the more plainly deranged the past four years looks. Did they really believe that men dressing-up as women would improve the US military? Or was it a traitorous effort to weaken and demoralize our armed forces? Was DEI a public ethics exercise or a massive jobs program for incompetents?
In what way did “Joe Biden’s” Department of Homeland Security imagine that funneling known criminals, certified lunatics, and saboteurs across the border squared with their duty to protect and defend the country? And how did it happen that US taxpayers’ money got shelled out to fake “religious” NGOs in Mexico minting debit cards for border-jumpers, handing them wads of cash, cell phones, airplane tickets, fully-equipped backpacks, and apps for evading arrest? In effect these NGOs took over the exact job description of “coyote” formerly performed by the criminal cartels — leaving the cartels free for the more lucrative rackets of dealing fentanyl and trafficking women and children.
The corruption in all this has been supernatural, and the fact that, until late 2024, seventy-million Democratic Party American voters thought this was all okay is extra-supernatural. What happened to their minds? The cliche of “Trump derangement” doesn’t really answer that. What it probably comes down to was the stunningly successful mind-fucking operation run by the blob (the CIA and the darker elements of the DOD in particular), in league with captured news media, to bend and distort the consensual perception of reality — all of which leads to the question: why?
The two main answers to that seem to be 1) Some organized entity seeking to destroy the country for instance, the Chinese Communist Party, or the World Economic Forum, or 2) that the blob had evolved into such an overt criminal racketeering operation that it increasingly and desperately needed to keep covering its mighty ass. Thus, the Democratic Party became the blob’s enforcer and the news media became its propaganda arm. And the “thinking class” of America especially got ignominiously hosed by all that.
There’s a pretty good chance that blob agents in the Senate will successfully block the confirmations of Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. They are all superlative candidates for the particular jobs at HHS, ODNI, and the FBI. But know this: excellent as they are, there are a great many other worthy, dedicated, and stalwart warriors in this land who can take their places if necessary. The blob has already lost in the political battle-space. All they can manage at this point is some rearguard action.
ABOUT THOSE ONESIES
by Matt Taibbi
Dear Senator Sanders,
I’m writing to express frustration after your exchanges with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., this week. I understand you’re an advocate for guaranteed health care, and (as would be the case with any Republican president’s nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary) Kennedy does not represent progress in that direction. However, you share common ground in many other areas, which made the hostility of these exchanges puzzling.
Regarding your “Are you supportive of these onesies?” questioning: the organization that makes those products, Children’s Health Defense, does indeed list Kennedy as a founder and former CEO. It’s also one of the most censored organizations in the world, a distinction the group shares with Kennedy, one of the most censored individuals.
You and Mr. Kennedy were both cited by one of the leading government-partnered “anti-disinformation” groups during the pandemic, the Stanford-based “Virality Project.”
The Virality Project was the successor organization to Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, which ostensibly focused on election misinformation in 2020 and partnered with the Departments of State and Homeland Security. The second project focused on Covid-19 “disinformation” and partnered with the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC.
The Virality Project identified Kennedy as a “well-known repeat offender,” meaning an actor whose posts are “almost always reportable.” This is a key innovation of the content moderation movement, in which platforms punish the speaker rather than the speech.
Platforms are urged to look at the “totality” of a person’s message, not specific statements, and on that basis to deamplify or remove their accounts.
On May 12th, 2021, the Virality Project published its weekly bulletin, also sent to its six platform partners by email. These bulletins were compiled by analysts focusing on “real-time detection, analysis, and response to COVID-19 anti-vaccine mis- and disinformation.”
Kennedy’s name was mentioned twice. The first was in conjunction with a Children’s Health Defense post Kennedy re-tweeted about a CDC announcement from April 16, 2021. The CDC had changed its reporting policy, listing “only vaccine breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization or death.” Not until after President Joe Biden went too far in July 2021 and said “You’re not going to get Covid” if you get vaccinated, did outlets like ProPublica and The New York Times report on the CDC’s change in reporting policy.
The second Virality Project mention of Kennedy in that bulletin was under the headine: “This week’s top COVID-19 related post from a recurring anti-vax influencer on Facebook.” Kennedy’s offending post sounded a lot like something you or your staff might have written.
Big Pharma CEOs are making millions off COVID vaccines raising questions over massive pay packages, questionable stock sales, and windfall profits made possible by taxpayer funding.
You were saying similar things during that same time. After denouncing the “profit-driven” approach of vaccine-makers earlier that year, you said in May, “It’s not my job to tell parents or kids to get vaccinated.” That last comment was enough to earn you a mention in the Virality Project’s next weekly briefing, from May 18th, which listed your comments as one of its misinformation “events.”
The episode with Kennedy and the Virality Project took place just months after the Biden White House sent a letter to Facebook asking “if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP,” and after your Senate colleague Brian Schatz of Hawaii sent a similar letter to Twitter. White House aides also asked Twitter to remove New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, whose offending post read, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”
Many who (like you) who opposed mandates lost jobs, were removed from the Internet, or denounced as “anti-vax.” Others lost services, like the protesting truckers who had online fundraisers blocked. You did not speak in defense of these people. Many concluded that there were no defenders of free speech left in the Democratic caucus.
I covered both of your presidential campaigns and as you know, have been closely following your career since the mid-2000s. By the outset of the 2015-2016 electoral cycle it was clear there was a burgeoning populist movement that was going to emerge somewhere. After the 2016 election you and I spoke, and while you were fiercely critical of Donald Trump, you also pointed out that his election showed how effective he’d been at harnessing that populist energy. “Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of politics. Let’s give the guy credit where credit is due,” you said. In the eight years since, your second presidential run failed — was crushed, really — while Trump rebounded from a multitude of scandals to lay a near-exclusive claim to that populist vote. Your campaigns fell short for a variety of reasons, many not your fault, but if I had to point to one area where you gave support away, it was in failing to support the rights of people with whom you disagreed ideologically. You offered a tepid defense of Joe Rogan after groups like MoveOn denounced him, but said nothing while the Biden administration asked platforms to remove content of figures like Berenson and Tucker Carlson, to say nothing of the FBI targeting reporters sympathetic to you like Aaron Mate.
Even Children’s Health Defense would have been defended by a true political liberal. Most of its supposed “disinformation” incidents involved true claims: incidents of death or injury after vaccination, publication of VAERS statistics, and posts questioning the need for pregnant women or children to be vaccinated. Some of its views were questionable, but undeniably it turned out to be right about some things. Protecting such minority views was once the essence of American liberalism. I wouldn’t buy the onesies, but even those are protected speech, and there you were this week, asking a future Executive Branch official to “take these products off the market.” What’s a civil libertarian to think? The Trump administration already has its own issues on the speech front, but why side with the same censors who’d be targeting you if you’d won the nomination?
Am I the only one who finds it horribly ironic that the worst air disaster in decades happened at the airport named for the president who destroyed the air traffic controllers union leading to lower safety standards.
With the current administration putting more and more self serving idiots in positions of power and authority, we the general public, will be paying the price for a long time to come.
I question if that is correct. The number of crashes per mile flown has actually gone down, and flight controller mistakes are seldom the cause for crashes. An interview with Tim Kaine on Brett Baier was revealing on the problem with Reagan. Washington decision makers, and VIPs. want to use Reagan because it is closer to the capital, and doesn’t require an hour drive through busy traffic as Dulles and the airport in Maryland do. The result is decisions have been made to allow Reagan to expand its use, despite it being in a known overcrowded airspace. Pilots have complained about it for years. There have been a number of near misses at Reagan in recent years, in this last case it wasn’t a miss. Mistakes will happen, and the closer to edge you live the more likely a mistake will turn into a tragedy.
Why should they improve? Fewer politicians and bureaucrats of the caliber we have today would be a blessing. A new crop of them might be a real improvement. Maybe the best solution would be having poorly programmed AI robots take over running Reagan. They could test them out using Air Force One, fully stocked with Trump and his disgusting appointees, on a daily basis.
Matt Taibbi is spot on as usual. In the case of both Bernie Sanders, and RFK Jr, they both have the advantage of a provided platform, but let them speak all they want. There is a saying in advertising, “The best way to kill a bad product is good advertising.” That is a lesson that both ideological competitors, and ideological proponents never seem to learn.
“The best way to kill a bad product is good advertising.” Great saying, never heard it before. Should have been the end of Trump long ago, but we are in strange times, and that didn’t work. So here we are watching the show…
Good advertising killed Trump the second time he ran. Of course he would never admit that. Many voters have now gotten used to his constant blather, and off the cuff decision making. Trump winning also says a lot of how deep a hole the Democratic Party got itself in. More voters decided to go with the blather, than there were voters who wanted another 4 years of the same. On top of that, there were many voters who voted for the Democrat only because they could not tolerate the blather, not because they liked the last 4 years.
You’re right, George, that’s about it.
I have to add, George, admitting something I had resisted. You were dead right some time ago when you asserted that Trump is the “most consequential” president since FDR. As his second term begins, that clearly will be true, irrespective of right or wrong, for better or worse. But I’ll add that he of course is not anywhere near the equal to FDR in most every way. FDR was one of our greatest leaders, guiding us through a time of terrible troubles. Trump may still end up–I’d bet on it–as one of our worst.
I have been down in the desert area for the last couple of months and returned home to see the Palace is in the same state if not worse than when we left. Any news on that front?
Lyons Street Stairs… Perhaps more security could have prevented the hammer attack that badly injured Paul Pelosi, wife of Nancy Pelosi. I lived near those stairs for many years. I have also visited the Getty Mansion across the street from the Robert Mailer Anderson mansion. Recently Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of late Steve Jobs, bought a record setting $70 million dollar mansion just across the street from the Anderson mansion, however you would have to add $100 million dollars in value to purchase the Anderson one. This whole neighborhood has private security. I have gone past them several times going to evening events there. A gentleman in a well turned out suit says, “Good Evening” as you pass on the sidewalk. What was that all about you think. “Oh, I get it, private security. ” There is no war on these palaces, in fact they are never mentioned.
“GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY UNDER TRUMP UPDATE”
“Cost per migrant deported on US military flights to Guatemala: $4,675
Cost of a one-way first-class ticket on American Airlines from El Paso, Texas, to Guatemala City: $853
In 2021, ICE reported its deportation flights cost around $8,577 per flight hour. But because Trump wanted to highlight using the military for deportation purely as a performative gesture, the most recent flights using C-17s cost $28,500 per hour.”
In total, the gross cost of illegal immigration now total $183 billion, up more than 35.7 percent since 2017. The cost incurred per illegal alien (including their U.S.-born children) has increased as well, now totaling $8,776 annually
Sounds like we have a few more flights needed to get to this total
Military coup time? I am praying my little atheist prayers that there are enough good people in the military who honor their oath to defend the Constitution.
And why is Elon Musk accessing personnel records of Federal employees? We are witnessing a coup in our lifetime, and it will be too late to say “I told you so” to all who voted for this happy horseshit when Social Security and Medicare/ Medicaid are gone.
Most of the high-ranking military officers take their oath very seriously. Those are the ones that Trump would like to fire.
Musk is also trying to access the systems controlling payment of most federal expenditures. This is not shaping up well for the USA.
Yes, a very dangerous time, yes to both comments here. Nixon now looks like a paragon of virtue compared to Trump. Outrageous attempts at subversion of the law and norms and good government practice. Unbelievable, and for now resistance is uneven, but I have great hopes that opposition and resistance will soon become strong and ongoing.
A lot of retired military officers were in govt when Sec Condolesa Rice introduced “Diversity at State” and they lost their pensions due to a sudden influx of “diverse” applicants seeking “inclusion” and forcing early retirements — these are the people our president is connecting with when he dredges up the DEI specter….👺☠️🙀
The word ＴＲＡＩＮＩＮＧ sunk in the Potomac River, apparently. The Black Hawk Heli was on a training mission.
Helicopter involved in fatal crash was on army training drill
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/01/army-helicopter-dc-plane-crash-continuity-of-government-drill?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
An intriguing hypothesis re Trump/Musk alliance, written by Conrad Goehausen on Facebook:
I thought people might like to know what Elon Musk and Trump have planned for the country, and it’s shocking that no one is talking about their real agenda here. All we see are threats to completely end so many government programs and agencies and spending, seemingly as simple hatred of government and retribution to those who opposed Trump or didn’t vote for him, along with massive cruelty to all sorts of people, from immigrants to people who rely on government benefits. Terrible as that is, it’s not what’s really going on.
Musk’s plan, that he’s convinced Trump to commit to, is to transform the entire way our government works, by running it as a giant series of AI programs.
No, that’s not science fiction, and it’s not me going paranoid crazy. It’s what Musk is planning to do. And fast.
Musk has been building giant AI programs and massive AI computing centers for years now. He just finished building Colossus in Tennessee, the world’s largest AI computing center. Colossus was just launched in September 2024. It’s a part of Musk’s xAI company, which he intends to use to completely revamp how the federal government works. All these reductions in the federal workforce and bureaucracy are a prelude to putting the entire government in the hands of his AI company, and other subcontractors.
This is technofascism on a massive scale. Musk intends to make trillions from this, and probably give Trump a piece of the pie. Would that be illegal? Sure, but Trump can’t be prosecuted for this, thanks to the Supreme Court’s rulings. He has immunity even to charges of bribery.
I think this explains Musk’s huge role in Trump’s government, and his focus on DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), which by executive order has been given immense power across the government at every level.
Trump could never do any of this on his own, much less even think of it. But Musk has dreamed of this for decades, and he has convinced Trump to back it to the hilt.
In the next few months, were going to see it happen. It won’t be noticed at first, because it’s quite complex and our journalists and media are cowered by fear and narrowness of vision. But it’s already happening. And this explains the outer confusion as to what Trump is planning, what his end game is. Turns out it’s not Trump’s end game, it’s Musk’s. And Musk is way ahead of everyone on this.
Call me crazy if you like, but this is what’s really happening behind the scenes. Trump will say all kinds of crazy shit to distract from it, do crazy things as well, but this is the real program. Don’t get caught up in all the cruelty and threats and BS being thrown about. That’s bad enough, but it’s not the real point.
Turning the government of the United States into a technofascist AI kleptocracy that enriches the investor class even more is the point. And this is why all the techno-oligarchs like Bezos and Zuckerberg and Ellison are all now gung-ho Trumpers. They will get even richer themselves through the AI government programs Musk will oversee.
Trump himself is just a distraction from the real powers remaking our country. A simple pawn enriching himself in the process of turning democracy into a computer algorithm controlled by the techno-oligarchs.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Musk has gained control of the payment systems of the Treasury Dept.
Trump is destabilizing the world wide economy now, inflation and job losses (especially auto manufacturing) to escalate.
DOJ, FBI purges and revenge is eroding public trust in the justice system.
This includes erosion of trust in local based justice.
Cops endorsed Trump, some now perhaps realizing their mistake?
Overall, things seem like they’re going great! I’m sure the drug-addled, richest guy on earth will fix things.
Maybe a compromise with Mexico would be to rename it Golfo de América.