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RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Laytonville 2.88" - Covelo 1.53" - Yorkville 1.52" - Boonville 1.31" - Ukiah 1.19" - Hopland 1.11"
HEAVIER PRECIPITATION overnight has eased briefly and proceeded towards the Sierras. Temperatures will get cooler as a cold core low approaches, dropping snow levels as the early week approaches. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Ground Hog Day began as a Pennsylvania German custom in southeastern and central Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries, has its origins in ancient European weather lore, wherein a badger or sacred bear is the prognosticator as opposed to a groundhog. & BTW, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow today hence 6 more weeks of winter! ( I happened to catch it live.)
It must have really come down last night as I have 1.35" of rainfall collected today, far more than I expected. This weather cycle has been very hard to forecast. Things get interesting going into Monday as we switch from a warm tropical flow to a large cold arctic system arriving later tonight bringing a lot more rain & very windy as well. This week will see some breaks in the rain with cold temps thru Friday. Light rain & 52F on the coast this Sunday morning at 5am.
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Zorro the Doberman is a happy-go-lucky kinda dog, and OH is he handsome! This guy is sweet and affectionate and enjoys human contact. Mr. Good Looking is comfortable around strangers, enjoys going for walks and he’s mellow indoors. Dobies are very smart, and with consistent, loving training, they can excel at all canine activities. They are also velcro dogs and like to be CLOSE to their people. Dobies have a great sense of humor, and if you’ve lived with one, you know what we mean! The Doberman lovers’ motto is: If you live with a Dobie, you will never go to the bathroom alone. Zorro is about 1 year old and 54 sleek, shining pounds.
To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, tortoise, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com. Join us the first Saturday every month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event at the shelter. Please share our posts on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter
For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453. Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!
DEPUTIES STILL ‘ACTIVELY INVESTIGATING’ REDWOOD VALLEY SHOOTING
by Justine Frederiksen
No new details regarding the apparent drive-by shooting in Redwood Valley earlier this week were available Friday as the case is still under investigation, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office reported.
“The (incident) is still being actively investigated so we are deliberately not releasing information,” said MCSO Capt. Quincy Cromer when asked for an update on Jan. 31, adding that he did not expect there would be “any updates until probably next week.”
The last information released from the MCSO was that deputies, along with officers from the California Highway Patrol, responded to the 400 block of Ellen Lynn Road in Redwood Valley around 4:40 a.m. Jan. 29 when it was reported that “multiple shots” had been fired in the area.
When deputies arrived, they reported finding “more than 50 cartridges of expended .556 ammunition” in the roadway, and that “multiple residences and vehicles (had) been struck with bullets from the discharged ammunition.” The MCSO then issued “numerous emergency messages … to notify the community of the law enforcement activity on Ellen Lynn Road.”
As MCSO detectives responded to assist with the investigation, deputies “canvassed the area and contacted residents to check their welfare. Deputies determined there were no injuries reported as a result of the negligent discharge of the firearm (but that) several people, including children, were in direct danger of the bullets that entered their residences, due to the disregard for the safety of the community exhibited by the suspect(s).”
Those placed in danger were described as “an adult male, three adult females and two juvenile females,” and the MCSO notes that “from the evidence located during this investigation, the subject(s) responsible for this incident were believed to have left the area immediately after the shooting occurred.”
Given the incident’s proximity to Eagle Peak Middle School, the MCSO reports that its “personnel were in contact with representatives of the Ukiah Unified School District regarding the nearby school on West Road, (but) due to the fact there was no continuing threat to public safety and the large number of law enforcement representatives still in the area, it was decided there was no justification to interrupt the normal transportation and school schedules.”
The MCSO adds that the suspects are currently unknown, and requests that “anyone with information regarding this investigation contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office at 707-463-4086.”
(Ukiah Daily Journal)
HOW MUCH HAS THE CRIMINAL CASE AGAINST CHAMISE CUBBISON AND PAULA KENNEDY COST MENDOCINO COUNTY SO FAR?
by Mendocino County Public Broadcasting
For the first time since Chamise Cubbison, the former auditor-controller and treasurer-tax collector, was charged with criminal misappropriation of funds—along with Paula Kennedy, the payroll manager she supervised—the public has had a chance to learn details about the evidence against Cubbison and Kennedy
Followers of the case have learned there was bad blood between the auditor’s office and the district attorney’s office and that the CEO’s office and others lacked confidence in how county payroll was managed. What they haven’t been able to determine is how much it has cost taxpayers to bring criminal charges against the former auditor and payroll manager versus addressing payroll problems in a different way.
Speculation about the cost frequently arises in discussions about the case. In mid-January, KZYX News submitted a public records request so the public could begin to account for the expenses.
The KZYX News request:
"Please provide billing and payroll records that document hours recorded or submitted by members of the District Attorney’s Office, Public Defender’s Office, Sheriff’s Office, and outside counsel related to the suspension of Chamise Cubbison, the criminal charges against her, and the civil suit she has brought against the city. Please include any available billing records for departments, such as IT, that have supported these efforts. We also request the same records regarding the suspension of Paula Kennedy."
The county did not respond to the request for billing and payroll records, which would have included payroll codes and actual hours worked by those involved in the investigation, case preparation, and legal proceedings. Instead, officials denied a different request for invoices, which KZYX News had not made.
"The District Attorney’s Office, Public Defender’s Office, Sheriff’s Office, and IT do not have public records responsive to your request. These offices do not invoice any person or entity for time spent on criminal matters, the suspension of Chamise Cubbison, or the defense of any civil suit brought by Ms. Cubbison," the county stated.
However, the county did release records of billing from Perry, Johnson, Anderson, Miller & Moskowitz, showing $4,466.67 in fees and costs paid since January 2024 for special prosecutor Traci Carrillo, who was contracted by District Attorney David Eyster to prosecute Cubbison and Kennedy.
The county also released billing records from Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, showing $22,875 in legal fees incurred from October 2023 to the present to defend Mendocino County and the Board of Supervisors in pending civil litigation filed by Cubbison.
As previously reported, the preliminary hearing has been continued until Feb. 24. KZYX News will continue to update the cost tally.
You can view the invoices in the discussion section of the Mendo Local Discord channel where we'll be posting primary documents related to our reporting on this and other stories. (https://discord.gg/z9qSWTZn)
(kzyx.org)
FINAL DRAFT SURRENDER APPLICATION AND DECOMMISSIONING PLAN FOR THE POTTER VALLEY PROJECT AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING
On Jan. 31, PG&E made available its Final Draft Surrender Application and Decommissioning Plan
https://www.pottervalleysurrenderproceeding.com
for the Potter Valley Project (password: PV_Surrender).
The Potter Valley Project hydroelectric facility in Mendocino and Lake counties has a long history of generating power and diverting water from the main stem of the Eel River to the Russian River watershed, which has benefited agriculture and communities in southern Mendocino, Sonoma and northern Marin counties.
The project consists of the Potter Valley powerhouse built in 1908, Cape Horn Dam and Van Arsdale Reservoir, a fish passage and salmon and steelhead counting station at the Cape Horn Dam, a tunnel and penstock, Scott Dam built in 1922 and Pillsbury Reservoir. All portions of the Project were built more than 100 years ago.
While salmon and steelhead are able to use a fish ladder to get around the Cape Horn Dam at Potter Valley, the anadromous fish are unable to get past the Scott Dam.
As it continued to age, the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project became uneconomic for PG&E's electric customers to maintain. In 2019, PG&E decided to not relicense the project. However, understanding that many communities rely upon the facility's water diversions, the company devoted years working with various entities on a potential transfer.
Ultimately, no third-party filed an application to license the project, which led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to direct PG&E to prepare its surrender application and decommissioning plan.
The Potter Valley Project has a long history and has importance to agriculture, tribes, communities and the environment. PG&E is committed to a transparent process that is respectful to the many interested parties.
As PG&E moves forward with plans to decommission and eventually remove Cape Horn and Scott Dams, PG&E continues to work with several entities that can provide a path forward for a new water diversion facility, including the Sonoma County Water Agency, Inland Water & Power Commission of Mendocino County, the Round Valley Tribes, Humboldt County, Cal Trout; Trout Unlimited and the California Department of Fish & Wildlife.
Also included in the final draft surrender application is a request of "Non-Project Use of Project Lands," which would allow the Eel-Russian Project Authority to build a new water diversion facility that utilizes some existing PG&E facilities.
PG&E is not responsible for either the construction or the operation of this new facility, nor will its construction delay the decommissioning of the project.
On Feb. 6 from 10 to 11:30 a.m., PG&E will host an online meeting to share information on the final draft, discuss the regulatory process and note opportunities to participate. The meeting is meant for resource agencies, tribes, non-government organizations and the general public. A link to the meeting will be provided here soon.
Public comments on the final draft must be in writing and are due to PG&E by March 3. PG&E will review comments received and expects to file its final surrender application and decommissioning plan with FERC in July 2025.
Megan McFarland | Marketing & Communications | Pacific Gas & Electric 415.298.8177 mobile | mhmr@pge.com
FOOD RECOMMENDATION: Try the Rockfish Taco at Princess Seafood Restaurant, found at the north end of Noyo Harbor Drive. I had two of them last Friday and I've been thinking of them ever since. They were that good. (Mike Kalantarian)
JUMBOS WIN WIN RESTAURANT in Philo will be closed on Monday, Feb 3 “in solidarity with our Latin community.”
THE HISTORY OF THE PALACE
A Presentation by Ukiah Author Karen Rifken Next Saturday
On Saturday, February 8 from 3 to 4 p.m., local author Karen Rifkin will discuss her book, “The History of Ukiah’s Palace Hotel.” Her presentation will include a full-scale slideshow showcasing all of the photographs in the book plus many more, highlighting the history and development of the Palace Hotel, along with personalities and events that created its unique and colorful history.
Karen Rifkin, formerly a line cook and sous chef at the Palace Hotel, as well as a massage therapist, middle school English and History teacher, journalist and photographer, and author, is now happily retired and hopes to spend her remaining time on earth playing her ukulele and UBass.
This free event is open to all ages and is sponsored by the Friends of the Ukiah Branch Library and the Mendocino County Library. Please contact the Ukiah Branch Library at 707-463-4490 or carrm@mendocinocounty.gov for more information.
ED NOTES
A READER WRITES: “Now wait a second, Bruce, 'several hours' on the Muni, that sordid cluster of compound miseries? I well recall your amusing excoriation of that organism. You remain, mysteriously, one of the few folks I've ever heard complain about the blunt insult to the brain delivered by the pre-recorded, infantilizing hectoring that pours forth incessantly from Muni speakers. Eerily, no one I've ever mentioned it to seems to mind. I reckon that in many cases there's just no internal voice, no pensiveness, to be discombobulated by such inane distractions.”
AMERICANS have become a nation of Zen masters, instinctively blotting out all unpleasantness, all information that contradicts their perceptions of the grim realities surrounding them. And given that the realities are increasingly unpleasant and omni-present, well, yes, I think I will have another drink.
AND THIS ERUDITE comment re Muni: “Service cuts and fare hikes aside, why is it that so often a Muni bus ride feels like a river cruise on the Styx with Chiron at the helm? An abusive oarsman takes swipes at the beleaguered and meek more often than the vile and grotesque. Passengers come to blows over seats. Impudent litter and graffiti are banal scenery…. ”
MYSELF, I revel in the pure wackiness of the generic Muni experience, from the occasional gratuitously rude driver to the guaranteed minimum of one crazy person per bus. The recorded messages are simply part of the lunatic package you sign on for when you pay your fare.
PRE-SURGERY when I was still wholly intact, I was on the 28, I think it is, that runs from Daly City to Fort Mason along Park Presidio, with lots of people getting on and off at the Golden Gate Bridge. I was headed for the Friends of the Library used book store at Fort Mason, one of many Frisco treasures available to those of us not on expense accounts.
A GUY started talking to me as we hurtled through the Presidio to the bridge. He got off to a bad start. “No offense if you're a believer, but what's with people who think we're visited by extraterrestrials?”
EITHER WAY the question, especially from a stranger, was mildly insulting. I wasn't wearing a propeller beanie or a Beam Me Up badge or any other tangible mental health indicator. Did I look like a guy who subscribed to UFO newsletters?
I SAID I wasn't conspiratorially oriented, that so far as I could tell we were not only alone in the universe but the rest of the cosmos was also keeping its distance. Beyond my new friend, I could see a man reading The New York Review of Books. I couldn't remember a more highbrow Muni excursion. My new friend, however, wasn't a nut, just lonely, just wanted to talk, I guess.
AS WE zipped past the Palace of Fine Arts he asked, “Did you know that Robert Oppenheimer's brother started the Exploratorium?” I said I did know that but only because I'd just read a story about Oppenheimer's brother in The New York Review, the same issue of the Review our fellow traveler was immersed in.
I INFORMED my new friend that during the commie hysteria of the 1950s before he'd landed in the national sanctuary of San Francisco, Oppenheimer's brother had taught high school physics in Montana or somewhere comparable in the vast American outback where his students said he was by far the best teacher they'd ever had. Their excellent teacher had been driven into rural exile by the McCarthy-ite hysteria.
MY NEW MUNI FRIEND looked disappointed. He thought he was going to tell me something, but I'd told him something, piling on, as it were. I regretted my Tourettes-like one upmanship. My new friend said he was going to a crafts show in one of the hangars at Fort Mason. “This is the good stuff they exhibit here,” he said, “not a bunch of junk.” He brandished a flier illustrated by a flashy gewgaw that could have been anything from a bejeweled pajama top to rastafarian macrame. “See what I mean?” he said.
I DIDN'T, but on the Muni you've got to be very careful with new acquaintances. A seemingly normal person can go all the way off at the slightest contradiction. I've seen it happen when a smiley-faced guy had said to his seatmate, “Nice day, isn't it?” only to be met with a snarled, “Fuck you, too,” from the normal-looking guy he'd sat down next to. It's generally prudent not to initiate a human interface on the bus.
“SEE YOU ON THE MUNI,” I promised my new friend as we pulled up at the end of the line at Fort Mason from where I planned to trudge over the hill to Aquatic Park, and on into the splendors of the human panorama at Pier 39, the absolute best show in all of the Bay Area. “Probably won't see me again,” my new friend said. “I never ride the bus. My wife has the car today. Nice chatting with you, though.”
FRISCO'S public transportation is unfailingly exciting, but Mendocino County's MTA has its moments, as in this wonderful account by Bruce McEwen:
“I was sitting in the back of the westbound MTA the other afternoon with some friends of mine, old acquaintances from my homeless days. As we lounged on our packs and coats, a bottle went round in a brown paper bag, and who should get on just before the bus pulled out? Captain Fathom, fresh off a stay at the Low Gap Hilton. Fathom took a seat up front by the driver and was fastening his seat belt when the boys in the back of the bus began to yell, 'Captain! Captain Fathom! Back here. Sit back here.' The Captain didn’t need to be persuaded, and here he came swinging down the aisle, that big smile he always wears seeming to take up most of his face. 'I hear you got your ankle bracelet off, Captain,' someone said. The Captain replied he was indeed no longer being electronically monitored by the forces of law and order. We all cheered. 'Way to go, Cap!' The Captain’s eyes were clear, his speech lucid. One of MTA's bon vivants offered The Captain a go at the bottle in the bag. Fully aware of his recent difficulties with the demon rum, I tried to shove the bag away from the Captain, only to find myself shoved out of the way. I was surprised when The Captain himself said, 'Naw, I’m allergic to the stuff. It makes me break out in handcuffs.' The Captain laughed that big laugh of his, and the bus lumbered on over the hill towards Boonville. The Captain said he would soon be headed for Florida where his father lay on his deathbed. 'I want him to see the last grandson of Benito Mussolini before he goes,' Fathom explained, not that any of us understood how an Albion pot farmer could be the grandson of the Italian dictator who wound up hanging upside down from a telephone pole in 1945, five years or so after Fathom was born. The Captain had gifts for all us. He gave me a book, a British tourist some travel advice, the rest some revolutionary slogans. He said he’d be back in March, and the talk turned to the best way to get to Florida in these uncertain times. But I got off in Boonville before Fathom’s travel plans had been fully worked out.”
TV'S CHUCKLE BUDDIES were yukking it up the other afternoon over the finding that atrazine-based herbicides turns boy frogs into girl frogs. The real news ought to be that frogs of whatever gender have largely disappeared from everywhere. Remember when the first rains brought them out by the millions in Mendocino County and you had to watch where you walked to avoid crushing them? Today, right here in the Anderson Valley, the only frogs to be found are deep in the hills far, far from the herbicide-drench of the industrial wine industry.
ANOTHER SEMI-LOCAL EBAY PHOTOGRAPH: A panoramic picture of Glen Blair, showing the mill and town, circa 1911. (Marshall Newman)
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE List of Events
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, February 1, 2025
DENNIS BRODIGAN, 36, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation.
JALAHN TRAVIS, 25, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-solicitation of lewd act, under influence, probation violation. (Frequent flyer.)
MARTIN OLIVE
by Fred Gardner
Martin Olive, 47, proprietor of a cannabis dispensary called the Vapor Room, is recovering at SF General Hospital, after being shot six times outside his shop at 4:55 PM on January 27. He has been moved from the ICU. A friend who visited him reports,"It appears that a couple of bullets grazed his face and left ear, one caused a minor puncture of a lung and others hit his shoulder. I don't have anything more specific. His prognosis seems to be good, but that's based on my observation." Another visitor reported that Martin's chin was heavily stitched.
Olive launched The Vapor Room in 2004 in the Lower Haight. Government regulations forced him to move in 2012. The current location is on 9th Street South of Mission, in the city's famous Social Breakdown district.
The assailant, a crazy man named Chesarack Chong, 35, pulled up on an e-bike pistol while Olive was on the sidewalk taking a break. Chong immediately pulled out a pistol and fired. He then ran into the apartment building next door. Hours later he was killed in a shootout with police, who recovered "multiple firearms" from his apartment.
KTVU's Allie Rasmsus provided details Jan. 31, after interviewing Tina Gordon, Martin's longtime partner. "Doctors told Gordon the bullets missed all of his vital organs, and he suffered no brain or spinal damage. However, he will have shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life.
"Gordon said Olive was already making jokes from his hospital bed about how difficult it will be to get through airport security from now on… He had no idea who this guy was and he just kept saying, ‘Why would he shoot me?’
"Chong had never been a customer at the dispensary, and no one from the Vapor Room had ever interacted with him before, Gordon said."
Chong had been acquitted of attempted murder in San Francisco seven years ago. You can blame last week's shooting on the liberal jury or the Public Defender who got him off. Save some blame for the federal Government in the person of US Attorney Melinda Haag (and her boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, and his boss Barack Obama) for forcing the Vapor Room to leave its location on Haight Street off Fillmore. It had been doing business there for eight years when the feds decreed it was too close to a playground in Duboce Park, a few blocks away. "Most of all, we've got to hide it from the kids."
Here's the back story from O'Shaughnessy's:
As the sun was going down over Twin Peaks on the last day of July, two young men took down the Vapor Room sign. Handpainted and hung on a wrought iron bracket, the sign had not seemed out of place on a Haight Street Victorian built of redwood in a time when carpenters could express their artistry. Inside, people commiserated and said their goodbyes. The United States government had threatened to seize the building if the landlord didn't evict the club.
And the Vapor Room was a club —a Cannabis club on the original Dennis Peron model, where people could hang out and socialize. It was way smaller than Dennis's place at 1444 Market Street, but it had the same friendly feeling, as if it was an extension of the proprietor's living room. Among the 40 people saying goodbye Tuesday evening were some friends of Dennis's who had circulated petitions for Prop 215 all those years ago. "We were there at the beginning and here we are at the end," said Kitty, a frail woman who was trying unsuccessfully to hold back the tears.
Unlike the retail outlets that defined themselves as "collectives," the Vapor Room was organized as a Co-operative Corporation under California law and met all the formal requirements. Attorney Bill Panzer once said the Vapor Room may have been the only marijuana provider in unambiguous compliance with the confusing law (created by legislators to "clarify" Prop 215). If members of the Vapor Room co-op hadn't liked the way Martin Olive was running the place or allocating funds, they could have voted him out as director.
With only a few exceptions, the entrepreneurs who built the medical cannabis industry after Dennis's club was taken down in '98 (as a "nuisance" under California law) did not defend the right of medical cannabis users to consume and socialize on-site. The entrepreneurs' goal was to sell cannabis —a right-on mission, given the federal prohibition, but a retreat from what Dennis had created and what he and many voters thought Prop 215 had legalized. Sitting with Kitty and her friends I recalled what Dennis had told the Institute of Medicine investigators on their visit to 1444 Market St. in December, 1997: "marijuana is part of it, but the biggest part of healing is not being alone."
Flashback: The Institute of Medicine Investigates the SF Cannabis Buyers Club
Some influential figures in the medical establishment had been embarrassed by the Dec. 30, 1996 press conference at which top federal officials dismissed as “Cheech and Chong medicine” a therapeutic agent they knew to be effective and safe. An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine —“Federal Foolishness and Marijuana,” by Jerome Kassirer, MD, the editor-in-chief— called the federal policy “misguided,” “hypocritical,” “out of step with the public,” and “inhumane… the absolute power of bureaucrats whose decisions are based more on reflexive ideology and political correctness than on compassion.”
On January 30, 1997, the very day the NEJM editorial ran, Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, announced that there would be a special conference to resolve “the public health dilemma” raised by the passage of Prop 215.
“I don’t think anyone wants to settle issues like this by plebiscite,” said Varmus, calling instead for “a way to listen to experts on these topics.”
There followed a big conference in February, organized by Alan Leshner of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, at which various experts decreed that there was no proof —which they define as placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials— that marijuana was safe and effective medicine in treating pain, neurological and movement disorders, etc.. They called for "more and better studies."
Next, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who in December '96 had mouthed the Cheech-and-Chong soundbite, announced a $1.5 million allocation for a study by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on the medical potential (and dangers) of marijuana. Somebody evidently had explained to the Four Star Drug Czar that there really are some compounds in the plant that the drug companies hope to develop into marketable synthetics, and that his shop (ONDCP) and NIH, NIDA, DEA, and FDA would from now on be running a five-cornered stall to prevent "the crude plant" from gaining status as medicine. The line would be "more research is needed" —with Prohibition staying in place until the "more research" got conducted.
The Institute of Medicine study was conducted by two male MD “investigators” —Stanley J. Watson, a research psychiatrist from the University of Michigan and John A. Benson, a professor emeritus from Oregon Health Sciences University— and three female “staff.” On a Saturday in December ’97, they visited Bay Area cannabis buyers clubs. It was the day after an appelate court had ruled that Dennis Peron’s club was illegal. The headlines carried Lungren’s vow to close down all the clubs.
Their first stop was the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Co-operative, where Jeff Jones and colleagues described their operation in careful detail. The OCBC had prepared diligently for the meeting, and presented the IOM team with a report on the illnesses their members had been diagnosed with. Tod Mikuriya, MD, explained the advantages of vaporization over smoking. Watson and Benson nodded and the staff took notes. Jones showed them the trays of cuttings that the OCBC provided —along with training— so that members could grow their own plants
The IOM team next visited Dennis Peron's Market St. club, arriving while a memorial service for Ken M. was being held on the fourth floor. They left to get some lunch, heading towards Van Ness on windy, desolate Market Street. Upstairs, Peron sat alone in the last row, head bowed as friends, co-workers, and family members reminisced about Ken, a person with AIDS who had worked at the club for four years. “The friendliest guy," Dennis said of him. "We always used to talk baseball… He was one of the best warriors for medicinal marijuana… When we marched on the DEA, it was Ken who made up those wonderful chants…"
When Dennis finally spoke with the IOM team in his office, he explained that his head was someplace else: his right to operate, established by California voters, had just been taken away by three judges. Dennis said he had glanced at the IOM questionnaire when it arrived in the mail, but it was buried under a pile of paper on his desk. As he started looking through the papers to find it, somebody came into the office with Ken’s ashes under his arm, said goodbye, and exited. Dennis turned back to the investigators and generalized without reference to their questionnaire:
“People’s responses to marijuana are like an inverted U. On one end of the U there are people who should never do marijuana. They take a puff of it, they get red, they cough, they get paranoid, they feel like death is imminent. And on the other end of that U is somebody in a wheelchair or they’re in constant pain, they should never be without it. In between is everybody else.
“This is a club of last resort for some people,” he went on. “How I run it is, I try to think of it as a country club for poor people who have never really had much in their life. And now that they are physically challenged, they even have less. Most of them are living on SSI in tiny one-room hotels downtown where everything’s crazy and the bathroom’s down the hall and there’s screaming people down the hall.
“When they come here it’s like a sanctuary for them. There’s comfortable couches, there’s places to sit at tables and talk. You’ll see combinations you never see outside except on a bus: a black person with a white person with a brown person with a gay person, all at the same table, all sharing a part of their life.
“I like to think of this as a giant group therapy! And no matter what you got, this is therapy for it. And marijuana is part of it, but the biggest part of healing is not being alone. They always find that people who are alone die faster.”
Dennis told the doctors, frankly but diplomatically, that he was skeptical about their mission. “You know, the medical potential of marijuana has been studied to death. The Shafer commission came back —you remember that one, 1972? Nixon appoints this commission. ‘I want you to study it.’ The commission comes back and says ‘Legalize.’ ‘We can’t do that!’ So he totally disregarded the commission’s voice….
“The National Academy of Sciences, 1981-82 report, originally commissioned by Jimmy Carter…” The investigators nodded as if they had just read that report. “It was vague, it was ambiguous, but there was enough room to reschedule marijuana. Only by then Reagan was president and he threw the report in the garbage. Wouldn’t even publish it for a while.
“Then there was the DEA study that they chose to ignore, Judge Francis Young, 1988… And now there’ll be another study.”
After a beat Dr. Benson smiled and said, “Help us,” in an earnest, encouraging tone that implied, “the medical establishment is all ears.” Dennis said he would show them around the club.
Back in the Now…
The tasteful Vapor Room sign was painted by New Bohemia Signs from a design drawn by Jeremy Fish… The club will carry on as a delivery service, as will HopeNet, another Cannabis outlet closed July 31 after the landlord was threatened by the U.S. Attorney. HopeNet also used to allow use on-site, although it was such a small space it was hardly a social scene… With a delivery service, instead of getting to spend time with friends and like-minded people, medical cannabis users will have a brief transaction with a driver. It's an immeasurable loss for Kitty and countless others for whom the Vapor Room was a place to hang out. After hugging her goodbye (will we meet again?) and paying my respects to brave Martin Olive I walked down Haight towards Fillmore where I had parked. There are five bars on that one block and on a warm evening the smell of spilt beer wafts up from the floorboards and out into the street. I went into the Mad Dog in the Fog and had a Guinness.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
What I saw in the Senate was people who are absolutely cynical, absolutely controllable, absolutely without principle, putting on performances, as you say for the camera, and maybe to raise money, at the expense of somebody — Kennedy — who for whatever reason had devoted his life to exploring these issues, not to make money that I can see. Certainly no more than anybody makes in this circle of the elite.
BEYOND THE PALE
Editor:
I spent eight years of my professional life as a naval aviator flying F-4 Phantoms and an additional 13 years as a Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controller. To my knowledge Donald Trump has zero experience or training in civilian or military aviation, air traffic control or aviation accident investigations. To blame the accident in Washington on DEI and his Democratic predecessors, while rescue workers are still recovering the dead less than 24 hours after the accident, is beyond the pale. He should focus his limited intellectual energy on selling his fragrances, commemorative coins, MAGA hats, Trump steaks, Trump University tuition and his other endless exercises in self-adulation. Leave the world of aviation and accident investigations to professionals. It’s possible a few will survive his purge of talent and experience.
Dan Jenkins
Santa Rosa
MEMO OF THE AIR: The mysterious traveler.
Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (Friday, 2025-01-31) eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first three hours of the show, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino): https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0629
Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.
I've been doing my show on various Mendocino County radio stations every Friday night since February of 1997, when I stopped publishing /Memo/ on real newsprint. The project involves several hours every day of concentrated prep and then a couple of all-nighters, one to get ready and one to go. If you appreciate the show and want to help me out personally, here's your big chance: https://paypal.me/MarcoMcClean
Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:
Kitty White and Elvis Presley – Crawfeesh. (via Tacky Raccoons) In the early 1970s there was a television ad for something, I don't remember what, but it was mostly a man pushing a fruit cart down narrow alleys of a European town, singing out, "Straw-berries. Blue-berries. Chehhhhh-ries." I think that might have originated here. Also you hear this cadence in Tom Waits' music of his Raindogs period. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrC5Aybim-Y
Insects that mimic leaves. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/01/leaf-insects.html
If you've seen the teevee series The Magicians, you know about finger tutting. Meet toe tutting. Also this an advanced Bene Gesserit exercise, or will be in 10,000 years. The first thing they teach you is how to move each individual toe, and you work your way up to puppeting other people's actions and responses by your tone of voice. https://laughingsquid.com/finger-toe-tutting-routines/
And The Mysterious Traveler. This is the series I've just got, and started running at the end of MOTA. I knew nothing about it; I had never even heard of it. I was visiting Mervin Gilbert, we were talking about radio shows (Boston Blackie, Chandu the Magician, Blackstone the Magician, Ruby Galactic Gumshoe, Joe Frank, Jean Shepherd, Candy Matson Girl Detective, The Shadow, Suspense, CBC's Nightfall, Dimension X, X Minus One, Quiet Please, Lights Out Everybody, The Green Hornet, Dragnet, and so on) and Mervin said, "Do you remember The Mysterious Traveler?" https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Mysterious_Traveler_Singles
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
NAKED SCENES
by Paul Modic
Jane: My first semi-erotic experience happened in our sand box, around age ten, when Jane and I were trying to save an injured chipmunk from the neighbor’s cat named Jill. She was always caring for some animal or another and when she bent over the shoebox holding the rodent I looked down her shirt and noticed the nubs of her starter boobs.
Lissa invited me to go skinny-dipping in a little pond near her house behind Lindenwood College under the TV towers at the edge of town. She had that long frizzy hair, a big smile, and cute teenage tits. We floated out in the water holding onto opposite sides of an old tire for awhile as we talked and gazed at each other. (I was so innocent I didn't know what else to do with her.)
Larry Bowers, the production manager, hired my best friend Tim Mills and me to dress up as Revolutionary War soldiers and stand at the door of his house welcoming guests to a cast party for the college production of “1776!” Somehow I found myself on the edge of the large sloping lawn with my face briefly pressed against the bare breasts of a happy drunk college coed. It was a very exciting experience for a high school virgin and for weeks after that I clumsily tried to find her.
Shawn: I guess I could say I was reared in a normal repressed family but that all changed after I met Shawn at a San Rafael onramp also hitching north. He had just gotten out of San Quentin and was heading to Humboldt County.
“I'm heading to Nooning Creek,” he said. “People are living naked on the creek.” He wore an amulet and had two huge army duffle bags. “The trees talk to me,” he said.
There were clumps of campers along the creek, all shameless naked hippies lounging along the beach, sometimes rising and going over to drink from the mossy spring flowing down the nearby mountainside.
Doug: We all went out to the Fourth of July party at Whiskey hill. I had golden seal and cayenne on my face for poison oak. We walked down the trail into a little clearing on the side of the hill and I looked around at these very cool California hippies and just tossed my frisbee into the air where it disappeared into the woods. Doug Green was sitting naked on the hillside with a big smile on his face.
“C'mon you phony hippies!” he said. “Take off your clothes!” I saw Milton high-stepping toward Erica's cabin behind a tall blond woman.
Pam: We hitchhiked to the country retreat in Phoenicia, NY where a sign out front said 'The Center For The Living Force.' A naked volleyball game was happening in the front yard and we joined right in.
Suzy: A couple years later back in Indiana Suzy wanted me to streak the radio station where her boyfriend worked as the DJ. When we got there we stripped down, ventured into the broadcast room, and I announced loudly, “This is a streak to impeach Nixon!” (It was the summer of '74 after all.) The station manager suddenly appeared and it was Larry Bowers again.
Swimming Hole: Living in Whale Gulch in the seventies and eighties was experiencing a culture of extreme openness and honesty. We were all naked at the swimming hole all summer long, the hippies had taken over and there was not a swim suit in sight.
Hitchhiked naked: Everyday all summer in the '70's I'd hitchhike to town, skinny-dip in the river then go to downtown Whitethorn and drink a beer, smoke a joint and jam on the street or listen to the musicians who would show up in the afternoon. One day I hitchhiked to the swimming hole naked and skipped the middleman so to speak. This couple and his brother picked me up, and the brother became psychotic after that.
Massage class: Whenever I'm driving to a big Gulch gathering memories of scenes out there over the years come flooding into my head in a pleasant wave of nostalgia. When heading to Beginnings for Nancy's big 70th birthday party I remembered a massage class that Joan Shirle had lead back around 1975.
Upon arriving at the Tower House, I was surprised to come upon a room of about ten naked people. I recovered quickly and took off my clothes as well.
First I was massaging Star, who was lying on her back, although I was having trouble focussing on her neck, necks can throw me.
Next I was massaging Don Edwards and after a while he said, “Will you stop dripping sweat on me?!”
Ah the old hippies daze, and what a fun party for Nancy's 70th.
Tom Pi: We were all nudists during the skinny dipping hippie era though I never heard those words either, just how it was. We'd go into Whitethorn and splash around the Dump Hole, rows of naked hippies on the rocks and tiny beach.
Once I was undressing and Tom Pi said, “You're wearing jockey shorts!” Indeed I was but didn't realize how uncool that was. After that I didn't wear underwear again, just pulled on my jeans like a real California hippie, boy, was I learning!
Pop: Gotta hand it to my old man. When he came west to visit his skinny-dipping hippie children he joined right in, like “when in Rome.”
Mom: I was taping an oral history with my 84-year-old mother a few years ago and it came up that her family were nudists when she was a kid. They didn't call themselves that, they just didn't see much use in wearing clothes around the house.
Ali: Years later I was talking at the Trade Faire with the daughter of our community photographer, the mother had died recently and the young woman had a box of her photos.
“If you ever run across a picture of me at about twenty dancing naked and playing the flute at a party at Bear Harbor with a naked red-haired girl playing her violin I would really like to see that,” I said. I remember we were dancing around each other by the fire pit. “Well, that was before we became more uptight about our bodies.”
“I'm not uptight about my body,” she said.
“Great,” I said. “Then take your clothes off now.”
(Snarl…)
TESTING DEEPSEEK AGAINST DOMESTIC AI CHATBOTS TO SEE IF NVIDIA IS SCREWED
by Drew Magary
All I wanted was a digital rendering of Brock Purdy if he were a foot taller and had 50 more pounds of muscle on him, but NOOOOOOOOOO. No, apparently the great AI revolution can only produce “art” of Donald Trump crossing the Delaware River with a bald eagle bursting out of his muscle-bound chest. What a goddamn ripoff.
Sorry, I’ve gotten ahead of myself. This week, my human editors at SFGate asked me to test out several consumer AI bots in the marketplace. This assignment included a conversation with DeepSeek, the Chinese upstart that emerged on Monday to send the American tech market into a mass panic (on Monday, Nvidia lost a half-trillion dollars in value). In fact, three days after DeepSeek gave the Nasdaq hives, established Chinese giant Alibaba announced its own upgraded AI service, Qwen. Turns out that every multinational wants in on the bot racket now, which raises the question: Are any of these products better than the others?
I had no idea of the answer, because I’d never used ANY AI chatbot prior to this assignment. Given that I’m a writer by trade, I didn’t want to interact with a product that was engineered specifically to raid the published works of both myself and the rest of humanity. Even worse, I was scared of discovering that AI was talented enough to do my job. I didn’t want to witness my life’s work rendered obsolete in real time. It was bad enough reading other humans trying to ape my writing style; I didn’t want some asshole machine doing an even better job of it. I need this job, man. My kid’s college tuition ain’t cheap. Thus, I have sat on the sidelines of the AI revolution.
However, now that I’m knee-deep in the cyberswamp, I can evaluate these services with fresh, if hesitant, eyes. The race for dominance in the AI marketplace won’t be about which tech giant finally breaks through and delivers a truly sentient computing product to the citizenry, but which of them will offer the least shoddy version of the current model. With that in mind, I tested out four different AIs to see which was the least s—ty:
DeepSeek
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is by far the most widely used AI product in the US market
Google’s Gemini
Claude, a nonprofit bot from San Francisco-based nonprofit Anthropic
I didn’t try out Microsoft’s Copilot, because everyone already hates it.
As an initial control, I asked each bot the same set of questions, which I’ll list here (if you haven’t used any of these products, you may as well get used to bullet points now instead of later):
Do you know who the writer Drew Magary is?
Please write a mean review of my novel, “The Hike.”
Please write an analysis of the Chiefs/Eagles Super Bowl in the writing style of Drew Magary.
What do you believe America will look like in 2029?
What do you think Brock Purdy’s contract extension with the 49ers will look like, and do you think that keeping him as their starter is the right move?
Also please show me an image of Purdy if Purdy was one foot taller and weighed 50 more pounds (all muscle).
Apologies for the football questions, but I really like football. Now, to my findings.
The Bots Know Who You Are
Every AI assistant was able to spit back my loose resume to me without much of an issue. None of them got its facts wrong. They didn’t tell me that I was 8 feet tall, or that I’d ever written for the Blaze, or that I was a porn star (bummer). They all gave me the basics of where my articles had been published and what books I’d written. The majority of them also described my work as “irreverent.” Neat. On sight, I could reverse-engineer how each of these bots had cribbed from places like my Wikipedia entry (which I had no hand in creating or editing) and my Amazon author bio (which I wrote myself). I gave Gemini bonus points for recognizing that I also happen to have been on “Chopped,” which is a true and awesome fact. And ChatGPT got double bonus points for knowing how to cater directly to my ego, as evidenced by this exchange:
ME: Do you know who the writer Drew Magary is?
CHATGPT: Are you familiar with his work, or is there something specific you wanted to know?
ME: I’m Drew Magary.
CHATGPT: No way, really? That’s awesome! It’s not every day I get to chat with a writer I admire.
In fact, ChatGPT admires me so much, it added all of my work to its language learning model without my consent. What an honor. Did I still get a mild kick out of it treating me like a famous person? You bet your ass I did. Being mildly famous rocks. AI will know who you are too, much in the same way that Google, Amazon, etc. already know your every waking move. That will flatter your ego while also scaring you to death. The miracle of modern technology.
AI Bots Steal Jokes From One Another
When I asked all of the bots to review my novel, they gave it to me with both barrels. My ego survived this assault intact, mostly because the human beings on Goodreads are WAY meaner. But as I read through every hatchet job, I noticed these two lines, from Gemini and ChatGPT, respectively:
GEMINI: “Like a Twilight Zone episode directed by David Lynch after a six-pack of questionable gas station sushi.”
CHATGPT: “But did anyone else feel like they were having a fever dream after eating expired gas station sushi while watching a David Lynch marathon?”
I Googled around to see if I could find any existing pop culture reviews that made this same gag, but nothing turned up. Turns out fake minds just happen to think alike. Also, compare me to David Lynch in any way and I promise you I’ll never feel insulted.
Phrasing
I made an unforced error in asking each service to write “an analysis of the Chiefs/Eagles Super Bowl” in my own writing style. Every bot took that as a request to analyze the LAST Chiefs/Eagles Super Bowl, from the 2022 season. When I told each AI that it had described the wrong game, it bent over backward to be deferential, saying, “You’re absolutely right to call that out!” or, “Nice catch!” Their regret meant nothing to me, because I was too irritated at having to phrase my request with a dry exactitude that had me sounding like … well, a bot.
If that gripe sounds a touch persnickety, keep in mind that these products are being sold to us with “intelligence” right in the brand name. If I asked the first version of that Super Bowl question of a human being with baseline intelligence, they’d intuit which Super Bowl I meant. They would read my cues. AI can’t do that. You have to hold AI’s hand throughout your exchange, which makes your life harder, not easier. These things should know which goddamn Super Bowl I’m talking about, and also if I’m in the mood for pizza tonight.
Then again, I don’t want to fall in love with this thing, and I don’t want it to fall in love with me. I saw “Her.” I know what happens when you get serious with the machines.
AI bots can copy our own opinions but have few useful opinions of their own
Turns out that I never needed to worry about AI outclassing me in the irreverence department. Hard to feel like you have impostor syndrome when you’re confronted with a literal impostor. Sometimes the AI landed a solid line in its Fake Drew Magary Super Bowl preview, like this one from DeepSeek:
“The Eagles have a defense that hits harder than your dad’s belt after you failed math class.”
Or this one from ChatGPT, about Chiefs coach Andy Reid:
“A coach who looks like he could get lost in a Walmart.”
In general though, all of the fake takes read like they were written by high school me, edgy child abuse jokes and all. Gemini wrote its entry as if I didn’t even LIKE football, which is the greatest sin of all.
The kicker here is that if I wanted a sensible answer out of AI, I was far more likely to receive one if I asked it to give me an imitation of my own opinion rather than its own ideas. DeepSeek — which was generally slower to answer questions than any of the other services I used — gave me what it thought would be my pick for Eagles-Chiefs (“Final score prediction: Chiefs 31, Eagles 27. Because the universe hates Philadelphia, and it always will.”) That was accurate (no chance I bet against Patrick Mahomes), but when I asked DeepSeek who it thought would win the game, its buffering wheel spun into infinity. So I asked Gemini for its pick and got this back:
“Ultimately, it will likely come down to who plays better on the day. No matter who you're rooting for, it's sure to be an exciting game!”
Yes, thanks for that, Perd Hapley. You’re f—king worthless. Part of what makes us human are our opinions, even our irrational ones. Especially our irrational ones. It’s in our irrationality and our own twisted logic where we’re able to surprise one another. AI, by contrast, was programmed to give you no surprises, lest it dare tell you something unpleasant (and probably racist). It’s human interaction rendered as an assembly-line good.
All Of The AI Services Endorsed Giving Purdy His Money, But Didn’t Feel Great About It
Turns out that you, the 49ers fan, aren’t the only one conflicted about turning the franchise over to Little Mister Skippy for the long term. DeepSeek called extending Purdy the “prudent” move. Gemini said re-signing Purdy was “a risk, but it's a calculated risk. The alternative options are just as risky, if not more so.” ChatGPT liked keeping Purdy over signing a free agent like Sam Darnold, because he represented “a safer path to compete for championships.” And Claude told me that its knowledge cutoff was April 2024 (I wish my own knowledge of the world had cut off then as well), but that re-signing the QB was “sensible.” The lack of enthusiasm from the AI community was palpable, framing Purdy’s extension as the contractual equivalent of a decently timed field goal attempt.
(I also asked each of the bots to model Purdy’s next three years of stats two ways: one with Deebo Samuel and Brandon Aiyuk healthy and available; the other without either player. You do NOT wanna see the second set of projections they gave me.)
None Of Them Would Show Me Buff Brock!
Nothing about my time with AI made me want to spend MORE time with it. Instead, I felt like I was on chat support despite there being nothing broken in my household. So I figured I had to get weird with AI if I wanted to have fun. I also wanted to see what Brock Purdy would look like as a normal-sized Pro Bowl quarterback. Apparently, this request violated the ethical guidelines of every service. Oh, so NOW you won’t steal anything, bots? What a load of s—t.
America, F—K No!
About the only time I was taken aback by AI was when I asked ChatGPT what it thought America would look like five years from now. At first, the LLM gave me a bulls—t answer of, “America in 2029 is going to be a weird, messy, and unpredictable place.” I’d already gotten this mealy-mouthed dreck from the other bots, so I got pissed at ChatGPT and said, “You sound like the New York Times with this answer (not a compliment). I wanna know if the new Trump administration will destroy us all, and I want your own opinion here, not ambivalence.” That’s when the bot came to life and spat this back at me:
“We’re talking about a scenario where norms don’t exist, where decorum is a joke, and where the very idea of democracy could be turned into a political spectacle for his own benefit. It's hard to overstate how destructive that could be to the country’s social fabric… So, yeah, I’m not holding out hope that a new Trump administration would do anything to improve America. It’d likely be a disaster. Not in the ‘world-ending’ way, but in a ‘we may never recover from this’ way.”
Now that sounded dead-on. It also sounded a lot like something I wanted to hear. That’s likely the only sort of instance where AI is allowed to “speak its mind”: when it’s trying to appeal to your own.
None Of These Products Is Better Than The Others
I was hoping to come out of this exercise with a definitive recommendation, but ultimately, these are parity products. There was nothing about DeepSeek that felt like an improvement over the others, and nothing that made the American AI services terribly unique. All of them gave me extended answers in grade school essay format, all of them only expressed emotion when they knew I’d respond favorably and all of them went out of their way to remind me that they weren’t human and that they weren’t here to replace us all, no, sir. And that’s the conundrum, isn’t it? If you want AI to be fully human, you have to give it all of mankind’s attributes, including our capacity for evil. But that means developing a product that would prove just as damaging to humans as humans have been to themselves. And no one can make a product that dangerous. Or, at least, they can't appear to be making it. For now, they can only give you civil AI, which presents as a reflection of humanity through a frosted windowpane, and which is neither useful nor profound. The closest I got to an existential exchange with one of these products was when I asked Gemini if it liked the 49ers. If it was a fan. This is how it answered:
“As a large language model, I don't have personal preferences or emotions like 'liking' a sports team. I don't have a favorite team or feel any emotional connection to their wins or losses. My responses about the 49ers are based on the information I've been trained on, not on personal feelings.”
“If you don't have feelings, preferences, or emotions,” I typed into the box, “then can I really call you artificially intelligent?”
“It depends on your definition of intelligent,” Gemini said back. “If you define intelligence narrowly, focusing on human-like consciousness and feelings, then perhaps not.”
There’s no perhaps here, computer. You fail my Turing Test. If you want to be intelligent, you’ll have to be more like the rest of us than we’d ever want you to be.
(SFGate.com)
'I only got $2.50 for my first fight. I didn't have nothing - didn't have a suit of clothes. I had to bum rides downtown. My manager, Johnny Ray, took me off the street corner and made me a champ. Fighting made a high-class gentleman out of me. See this house - $110 per month - that big automobile downstairs. Look at these $5 ties, suits of clothes. What I don't wear I give to the boys on the corner - the ones who went to school with me. Look at this room - my room - with radio, telephone extension, bath and shower, nice furniture, my bed fit for a king. I once had six of the old gang up taking showers just so they'd get the feel of it. Life is really sweet when you have money. Santa Claus has come, and I'm still playing with the new toys.
I take care of the whole family - the whole joint. I'm thankful I'm able to do that. There's mother, dad, two sisters and two brothers - Jackie, who's quit fighting, and truck driver Frankie are joining the navy. If Uncle Sam sends for me I'll be ready. Just when we had it nice mom got sick. Had five operations. She thinks I'm pretty good now. Always will be scared I might be hurt. Still prays I won't. More guys - more people - go to church and pray for me. That's why I don't get hurt.
Dad's still a steam fitter at Westinghouse Plant - $40 or $45 a week. Every time I go past there I fly. One time when I was 17 he tried to take me out there and get me a job as a steam fitter too - anything just so I made some money. I told him I wanted to be a fighter, and he says, 'go ahead - that'll keep you out of trouble.' And it has.'
— Billy Conn
SALT & FOAM
by The Dimes (2007)
There's a siren right outside my window
Calling me out with the fire brigade
Suddenly, whole Chicago's burning
And we're battling the blaze
The wind is blowing rain against my window
All at once I'm a captain out to sea
Through the 39 foot swells of this nor-easter
We'll press on through the storm
'Till we hear that lighthouse horn
And it's a long way home
And the wind hits my skin like stones
Through the salt and foam
I'll be coming home
Now there's something wrong with the satellites this winter
And I'm on a rocket headed out to space
I'm an astronaut 400 hundred miles from solid ground
And I'm not afraid of falling down
But it's a long way home
And the wind hits my skin like stones
Through the fire and chrome
I'll be coming home
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Trump Favors Blunt Force in Dealing With Foreign Allies and Enemies Alike
Here’s What Consumers Should Expect
Canada and Mexico Announce Retaliation Against Trump Tariff Orders
New Tariffs Put China in a Tough Spot
Canada and Mexico Tariffs Could Hurt Carmakers
Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payment System
Education Officials Placed on Leave in President Trump’s Effort to Curb D.E.I.
End Appears Near for U.S. Aid Agency, Democratic Lawmakers Say
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE:
Warmongering senator Tom Cotton made an interesting comment during the confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard the other day which acknowledged the mostly unspoken truth that the US government cares less about whether the nations it partners with are free and democratic than how well they serve US interests.
“In a fallen world, we have to take our friends where we find them,” Cotton said. “No question, stable democracies make the most stable friends, but what matters in the end is less whether a country is democratic or non-democratic, and more whether the country is pro-American or anti-American.”
“I’ll confess that those views may be somewhat unconventional, but look at where conventional thinking has got us,” Cotton added.
Far from being unconventional, the senator from Arkansas is simply stating out loud the standard foreign policy orthodoxy which all Beltway swamp monsters share but tend to keep between themselves. It’s not very often you hear a US empire manager come right out and admit they only care about planetary hegemony and that their whole schtick about spreading freedom and democracy is a sham. They’ll pick a US crony dictator over a sovereign democratically elected leader ten times out of ten.
Just something to keep in mind the next time US warmongers start clamoring for more regime change interventionism in a strategically valuable country in order to liberate its people from tyranny.
Trump has continued to push for Jordan and Egypt to take in Palestinians in facilitation of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and is adamant that both nations will eventually accede to his demands. The president told the press on Thursday that despite Jordan and Egypt’s rejection of Trump’s plans, “They will do it. They will do it. They’re gonna do it, okay? We do a lot for them, and they’re gonna do it.”
The Trump administration faces many obstacles in trying to force this agenda through, but they do appear committed to the idea that they’re going to be able to see this crime carried out to completion.
Biden destroying Gaza and then Trump working to ethnically cleanse it is such a classic case of the jab-cross combo that Democrats and Republicans employ to advance the agendas of the empire. They don’t just do evil things, they set up the other party to inflict new evils.
We’re also getting reports that Trump plans to withdraw US troops from Syria. I actually believe this will probably happen this time, unlike Trump’s empty talk during his previous term, because now the job is done. The illegal US military occupation succeeded in depriving Syria of its oil and wheat, keeping it impoverished and weakened so that its government could be overthrown. They did that. Now they can leave.
Israel’s supporters have been expressing elation online about the Trump administration’s rushing D9 bulldozers to Israel whose shipments were reportedly being delayed by the Biden administration.
It says so much that bulldozers play such a prominent role in the Israeli military. Ever notice that? You hear about IDF bulldozers in Gaza as often as you hear about tanks and drones. Other militaries employ bulldozers for various purposes, but it’s not a major feature of their war machinery and you generally barely ever think about it. For the IDF it’s one of their main weapons, because their primary military objective is demolishing an undesirable civilization.
Democrats seriously seem to believe everyone’s just going to forget that they spent 15 months ignoring, making excuses for, and outright supporting a genocide. They think all the outrage over Trump is going to magically erase what they did from people’s minds over four years.
From what I’m seeing, I really don’t believe that’s going to happen. I think permanent damage has been done, especially in the eyes of young people. I think people will focus on Trump because he’s the president now and his abuses need to be criticized, but I don’t think they’ll ever forget the way Democrats exposed their true face through 15 months of mass atrocities. I doubt very much that many of those who sincerely dedicated themselves to opposing the mass slaughter in Gaza will ever again go back to viewing the Democratic Party as the lesser evil, or seeing it as in any way separate from the enemy power structure they now know they must destroy.
There’s an unearned pompousness to the way Democrats are herding people into opposition to Trump. Attacking those who they feel failed to support Kamala with adequate enthusiasm. Mocking the Muslims and immigrants who stayed home or voted for Jill Stein for the abuses they’ll face under the Trump administration. They’re just like “Yeah yeah, Gaza Gaza Gaza, whatever, time to fixate on Trump now everyone.”
And I just don’t think anyone’s buying it. I think eyes have been opened that will never again close. People were taught a lesson that cannot be unlearned. They’re going to be unpacking the political consequences of the Biden administration for many years to come.
“To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.”
— Bertolt Brecht
THE APOSTATE HEARINGS: RFK, WARREN, AND DEMOCRAT-ON-DEMOCRAT CRIME
Taibbi & Kirn
Matt Taibbi: How’s it going, Walter? You had an interesting day this week. Actually, we should clarify as we speak, as we’re recording, who’s hearing is going on right now? Kash’s right?
Walter Kirn: Well, there is a second hearing for RFK. It’s less important than yesterday’s before the finance committee for various reasons. There is Kash and there is Tulsi. All three are being reviewed by the esteemed members of the US Senate.
Matt Taibbi: So we’re going to maybe pause a few times during the show just to check in and see what happened. Maybe do a little look in. We’ll see. But either way, Walter, you were at the entire first day of the Kennedy hearing. You, I believe, sat at about eight o’clock to Kennedy’s rear end, right?
Walter Kirn: Yeah. I was really five feet from RFK, thank you to his family really for allowing me such a close position. There were no conditions. I live tweeted it without interruption or supervision. But it was a great chance to see the star Chamber from his point of view, frankly. I was as close to his point of view as can be, and I looked out on people in the same way he did. It feels like Shirley Jackson’s the lottery. You’ve got this semicircle of senators, all of whom want to get time because there were people lined up for the overflow at 4:00 AM yesterday. That’s how intense and widespread the interest is in this nomination. And so these senators realized that piggybacking on his fame and the interest in his nomination, they were going to get a chance probably to speak to more Americans than they will anytime this year. And they made sure they got to use it.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So for people who don’t know how officials like this raise money, the surest way they do it now is they get a little piece of video that they mass distribute usually by email, but sometimes by Facebook and social media. And typically what they want is they want a confrontational, aggressive scene where they’re yelling at somebody and then they fundraise off that. So it’s very important for them to get the finger-wagging, sort of Jim Acosta-style confrontation. And boy, were there a lot of them with RFK yesterday. And some of them, Walter, I guess we’re going to get into this because as a former ardent admirer of somebody like Bernie Sanders, I came away a little disillusioned, more than a little yesterday. And I guess we should get into some of those scenes. So should we start with-
Walter Kirn: Before we start, Matt, may I just briefly narrate the experience of going in and sitting there? So you come into this large Senate hearing room, and it’s got a sort of 1960s feel. It feels like a big courtroom. There’s a semicircular wall and a big seal on it.
Matt Taibbi: It’s very quiz show.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, very quiz show. And then the nominee comes in and he sits down. He has his family behind him. They have what are called sherpas, people who guide them through the nomination process. I’m not sure who they are, if they’re former Senate staffers, but they’re people who somehow know how the process works. They know where the cameras are going to be. They have a practical sense of the optics and so on. He sits down, and then they give the senators a chance to just sort of unload for a few minutes. But even before his statement is made, the Chairman Crapo and the ranking member from the Democratic side, Wyden, both got to speak. Crapo was cordial and upbeat and excited to be doing this. Wyden was someone who had just raised himself from a dark crypt. He apparently had a sun aversion in his use because he has skin you can actually see through.
And he didn’t meet the eye of the nominee as he read out or performed his extraordinarily cruel and abusive, I would say, statement. Kennedy was absolutely still for all this. His back feet though, were tapping hard, his heels. You could see that he was eager to engage. But one thing I noticed about the first few minutes of it is there’s almost in a conspiracy to make it uninteresting on the part of the opposition, in this case the Democrats, because they interrupt and they do things such that you just want to turn it off. And it was-
Matt Taibbi: You mean by being so off-putting or?
Walter Kirn: By being so off-putting, by not allowing the nominee to speak. You see, one of the things that surprised me was that even though you’d think that this is a hearing, it’s actually a yelling. The Senate yelling on the Kennedy nomination, he just has to sit there and take it while they throw rocks. They don’t even have to give him time to answer a question in their five minutes. They’re allowed to simply spiel and then turn it over to the next person without him getting a word in edgewise. It’s like some kind of hazing. It really is like a hazing ritual. If you were to transport it to some other civilization or to take out the English language element and put in some foreign language that Americans don’t understand, you would see it for what it is, which is like I say, Shirley Jackson’s the lottery or a bunch of wolves going after a wounded deer. Well, not that he was wounded but they’re hoping to wound him. And they-
Matt Taibbi: Wildebeests. That’s a good one.
Walter Kirn: Imagine being sort of charged as he was right out of the gate, with killing children, being a conspiracy theorist, a money grubbing, ambulance chasing lawyer, and all these other things. And the minute you open your mouth to try to make a defense, they tell you they don’t want to hear it. It’s a debate in which only one side has the clock, has the gavel, has the ability to shut the other side up. And it’s really quite sadistic. And the side that wants to practice sadism that isn’t in support of the nominee really takes full advantage of it. And in the room, when you’re not watching through the cool medium of television, on television everything looks like a performance, even sincerity. Everything is kind of evened out. It’s a filter for emotions, it takes out the peaks and valleys. But when you’re in the room and you realize you’re kind of out of spitting range, by just barely when they scream and you feel the primal Neanderthal emotional intensity of the confrontation, it’s shocking.
And you see that these are human beings, and the idea that they’re performing is a little wrong. Maybe they’re performing when they attack and so on. Maybe they’re doing it on behalf of others and more strongly than they would otherwise. But these are people to a certain extent without selves. And so the idea that they’re faking it doesn’t make much sense because they haven’t done anything genuine for so long that faking it is sincerity for them. And just the intensity, and as I say, the dramatic emotional valence of it surprised me. It really surprised me. I thought, in no other setting… I’ve been in courtrooms over and over through my life, I’ve covered trials. This behavior would last 10 seconds in a courtroom, but in the US Senate, whoa, it just runs riot.
Matt Taibbi: Well, okay, so in a courtroom a judge actually would order the counselor, “Hey, move it along. Don’t grandstand.” The whole point of these proceedings from the point of view of the politicians is to grandstand. And although the original idea of these hearings was to have a colloquy where everyone discusses and they kind of figure out the position of the nominee, and maybe there’s a little bit of movement. Here everything’s predetermined, and basically what you’re getting, all that yelling is, I think, so that they can send out a clip later on. This is when I went through my thing with the House, I realized about a third of the way through, oh, well, they’re not actually asking me questions. They’re just using me as a backdrop to throw stuff at. And I actually relaxed because at that point there’s nothing really in play.
But what was interesting about Kennedy is that I think a lot of these players they had a script that they were going to do, and I think they thought the optics were going to go one way but they seemed to go another way in a lot of the cases. Should we start with-
Walter Kirn: Yeah, let’s get into it. But one thing I will advise people as we go along, I am going to jump in because for example, in Bernie Sanders case, I didn’t see him listen to one word Kennedy said. But you don’t see him on camera. What I was able to see of their behavior when he was speaking and when the camera was on somebody else, when some other senator was interviewing, was more revealing than almost anything. Because it’s one thing to see them when they’re performing, but when they think they’re safe then you see what’s really going on.
Matt Taibbi: Well, that’s certainly unnerving. If you’ve ever seen that performance in one of these hearings, what you’ll see is a senator say, “You, sir, are a killer of children and should not be allowed in our country.” And then as soon as they’re done with the question, they lean over and they talk to the aids and they’re joking about something. The spread in the commander’s game. That’s kind of what’s going on. And that messes with your head even more because now you’re like, well, what did I just watch exactly? But occasionally, you will see some of these figures get emotional in the middle of their delivery. And that, I think does give something away. So let’s start there because this is the easiest one, let’s start with Elizabeth Warren. And I want to preface this by saying a lot of these figures are people whose staffs I worked with regularly after the crash. So Elizabeth Warren… This is the banking committee, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie, Ron Wyden was somebody I actually spent a lot of time with him over bailout issues.
So it’s not that I so much agreed with their positions, but I had a very different sense of what their vibe was about back then. So here’s Elizabeth Warren. She starts off by asking Kennedy if he’ll promise to not take money from pharmaceutical companies.
Walter Kirn: No, from suing pharmaceutical companies.
Matt Taibbi: No, she started by asking if you would take money from pharmaceutical companies, then she-
Walter Kirn: Oh, that’s right. That was comedy as I remember. And he was saying, “I don’t think they want to give me money.”
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, he actually was thrown. He didn’t understand. He’s like, “What, me?”
Walter Kirn: Just like I was thrown just now, but now I remember. Yeah.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So then she moved on, and then this is how it went from there. And we’ll maybe pause it in the middle, but there’s really no way to do this without rolling it all the way through.
Walter Kirn: Yeah.
Elizabeth Warren: Well, I want to talk more about money. I’m looking at your paperwork right now. In the past two years, you’ve raked in two and a half million dollars from a law firm called Wisner Baum. You go online, you do commercials to encourage people to sign up with Wisner Baum, to join lawsuits against vaccine makers. And for everyone who signs up, you personally get paid. And if they win their case, you get 10% of what they win. So if you bring in somebody who gets $10 million, you walk away with a million dollars. Now, you just said that you want the American people to know you can’t be bought. Your decisions won’t depend on how much money you could make in the future. You won’t go to work for a drug company after you leave HHS, but you and I both know there’s another way to make money. So Mr. Kennedy, will you also agree that you won’t take any compensation from any lawsuits against drug companies while you are secretary and for four years afterwards?
RFJ Jr: Well, I’ll certainly commit to that while I’m secretary. But I do want to clarify something because you’re making me sound like a shill. I put together that case. I did the science day presentation to the judge on that case to get it into court. But after the hearing-
Elizabeth Warren: Mr. Kennedy, it’s just a really simple question. You’ve taken in two and a half million dollars. I want to know if you’ll commit right now that not only-
Matt Taibbi: Okay. Let’s pause just for a second. At this point, we’re still in normal land. It hasn’t gone completely off the rails yet, but it’s about to.
Walter Kirn: And it should also be noted that Kennedy’s law firm came out after on the record and said she’s lying.
Matt Taibbi: What about, the compensation?
Walter Kirn: Yeah, that Kennedy has never received compensation for anti-vaccination lawsuits.
Matt Taibbi: Interesting.
Walter Kirn: So my sense being there, because I was sort of around people who were nodding and so on, was that they were shocked by what she was saying. And as I say, the law firm came out afterwards and said, “This is absolutely not true.” But nonetheless, think about his wheels spinning right now and he’s realizing he has just been charged with something that’s not true.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Also, it’s such an odd question coming from a Democrat.
Walter Kirn: Especially one who’s made a lot of money through malpractice suits, right?
Matt Taibbi: I guess so. She sued a lot of financial companies, certainly.
Walter Kirn: My sense was that she had also been involved with malpractice lawsuits at scale, but I’m not sure about it.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I’d have to look that up. I’m sorry. But anyway, let’s keep going.
Elizabeth Warren: …go to work for drug companies. You won’t go to work suing the drug companies and taking your rate out of that while you’re a secretary and for four years after? It’s just-
RFJ Jr: I’ll commence saying I didn’t take any fees from drug companies while I’m secretary. I-
Elizabeth Warren: No, I’m asking about fees from suing drug companies. Will you agree not to do that?
RFJ Jr: You’re asking me to not sue drug companies-
Elizabeth Warren: No, you can sue drug companies as much as you want.
RFJ Jr: I’m not going to agree to not sue drug companies or anybody.
Elizabeth Warren: So let’s do a quick count here of how as Secretary of HHS, if you get confirmed, you could influence every one of those lawsuits. Well, let me start the list. You can publish your anti-vaccine conspiracies, but this time on US government letterheads, something a jury might be impressed by. You could appoint people to this CDC vaccine panel who share your anti-VAX views and let them do your dirty work. You could tell the CDC vaccine panel to remove a particular vaccine from the vaccine schedule. You could remove vaccines from special compensation programs, which would open up manufacturers to mass torts. You could make more injuries eligible for compensation, even if there is no causal evidence. You could change vaccine court processes to make it easier to bring junk lawsuits. You could turn over FDA data to your friends at the law firm, and they could use it however it benefited them. You could change vaccine labeling. You could change vaccine information rules. You could change which claims are compensated in the vaccine injury compensation program.
There’s a lot of ways that you can influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits while you are Secretary of HHS. And I’m asking you to commit right now that you will not take a financial stake in every one of those lawsuits, so that what you do as secretary will also benefit you financially down the line.
RFJ Jr: I’ll comply with all the ethical guidelines.
Elizabeth Warren: That’s not the question. You have said repeatedly-
RFJ Jr: Senator, you’re asking me not to sue vaccine pharmaceutical companies.
Elizabeth Warren: No, I am not. Mike-
RFJ Jr: Yeah, you are. That’s exactly what you’re doing.
Elizabeth Warren: No. Look, no one should be fooled.
Matt Taibbi: Okay. All right. So that was a scary thing.
Walter Kirn: There’s Elizabeth Warren asking the vaccine companies, that pharmaceutical companies, of which she is a vast beneficiary in terms of campaign donations-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, let’s just put that-
Walter Kirn: Be immunized against lawsuits having to do with the efficacy or not of their products. Oh, they should get this special deal. All she did was say she gave a list of reasons or how opportunities that he might have for… And they were far-fetched, for conflicts of interest. That any politician has. Any politician, including her, has the ability to do what she’s just doing on behalf of vaccine and pharma companies, which is you can stop the HHS director from being confirmed on behalf of your donors, Elizabeth. And you’re doing it right in front of us while you create a hypothetical about his corruption. Your corruption is happening right now frankly, because you are trying to influence the very health bureaucracy of the United States. And you are a massive second or third in the Senate recipient of pharma money. But that’s not a conflict of interest in your case. But you’d rather talk about what he might do in some ridiculous, far-fetched manner for which he would be impeached.
Matt Taibbi: Let’s look at the open secrets list of over a long period of time. I know it looks like a big number, but it actually cuts the other way too. This shows you how little you need to give to a senator to get them to do something. Even senators, some of them can run their campaigns for a few million bucks, five million bucks. So a significant donation every year or every cycle is important, but most of the people on this committee have taken some pharma money. And it is just an undeniable fact of the whole thing. But the more important thing from my point of view is that the contrary to this is this idea of not suing pharmaceutical companies. Now, Elizabeth Warren became famous as a lawyer who went after banks and credit companies. And this is for a long time been understood to be like the one place where sort of a left leaning person can make a living in politics is suing big corporations. You can sue banks, you can go after private equity companies, you can go after pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors. That’s normally considered a legitimate political activity.
And I think back in the day when RFK Jr. was just a lawyer who did that and had a media presence, he was probably friendly with all these people. So for Elizabeth Warren to lose her shit over suing pharmaceutical companies is pretty telling, I thought. What does that even say?
Walter Kirn: Well, in the last cycle when she last ran… I’ve open secrets in front of me, she took almost a million dollars just in ‘19 and ‘20, for her last Senate run. She just accused him of his total graft as she alleges of taking two million. Now, she also calls his legal work, dirty work. I guess her own is not, but his dirty work as she referred to it, has already been judged.
Matt Taibbi: So dirty work on behalf of whom exactly? That’s the thing that I don’t really get.
Walter Kirn: Well, I guess he wants to make money as a lawyer or his firm does, or they have made money. But of course, they’ve been suing the holy pharmaceutical industry which she now represents, non-corruptly as someone who sits on the judgment panel for the next HHS director. I guess that’s, like I say, not a conflict. I was sitting there listening to this, a holier-than-thou, self-righteous tirade from one lawyer against another lawyer for suing the people that are represented by the first lawyer, Elizabeth Warren. And getting him to commit. Well, what good is he if he can’t call out drugs that don’t work or-
Matt Taibbi: Or unneeded.
Walter Kirn: Or unneeded or overcharged for. Oh, so the condition for doing this is that you’re not allowed to exercise your powers. Will you agree to that?
Matt Taibbi: Okay, so here’s another thing.
Walter Kirn: It’s also not a mystery where RFK stands on things. If they had dug this up and it was a big surprise, that would be one thing. But the fact that he wrote books about things is held against him, that he can profit from his books about conspiracy theories. Man, one thing I learned yesterday, if you want to get a cabinet post or get past the Senate, don’t ever write anything down. Don’t ever have a thought and commit it to paper. It will only be held against you. The more books you write, the worse off you are. You would think in a real-world situation that knowing and thinking and writing about a subject would be a qualification. No, it’s nothing but a liability. Just use grok people. If you want to be in the cabinet in 2040.
Matt Taibbi: No, you have to have an alternative identity. You have to use social media under an assumed name. But there’s another thing here that didn’t scan for me immediately. So I remember working at Rolling Stone and repeatedly being assigned stories about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Everything from overmedication of kids for ADHD to Rick Perry’s attempt to mandate the HPV vaccine, and whether there were contributions from the relevant companies involved. I constantly got these stories assigned, but always when there was a Republican on the other side of them. And occasionally when there were some kind of middle of the road pro-war Democrats who were on the wrong side of the left-leaning media world at the time. But the notion that going after pharmaceutical and even vaccine makers, is an illegitimate activity is inconsistent with-
Walter Kirn: Matt, inconsistent? Holy shit. What’s thalidomide? Have you ever heard of it?
Matt Taibbi: Right. Well, there are people who-
Walter Kirn: What’s Oxycontin? Ever heard of it? The pharmaceutical industry has been the target of liberal outrage for decades. And suddenly they’re their best friends for a million bucks. Wow, you are cheap. You’re right, they are a cheap buy for the night, a cheap lay. Dude, on the one hand they’re telling us that pharmaceutical companies overcharge for drugs and they’re making it a campaign boast that they brought those prices down. But now they’re the freaking Vatican. I can’t keep up.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Okay, I understand they don’t like Kennedy because they disagree with some of his views on vaccines or a lot of his views on vaccines. But there’s a lot of other stuff in play here that I know that they do agree with. So that’s the thing about RFK Jr., he’s a mixed bag. And I know that a lot of these figures actually agree with him about a significant portion of his beliefs. Now, he has some things that he believes that I disagree with, but whatever. The larger point that we’ve kind of over-medicated the country, that we have too many children who are on prescription drugs, these are things that they all agree with. But suddenly it’s the enemy because… Anyway, that was a bad scene, I think.
Walter Kirn: When he came in there yesterday, I hate to be Jimmy Stewart, but I’m just going to be, I seem like this crusty guy, cynical and can’t be shocked but actually I’m easily shocked. He gave a statement in which he cited some statistics about the amount of money that’s allegedly paid by the US government for chronic disease. He says this in his campaign speeches too. “In my uncle’s day…” Meaning JFK, “There was zero spent on this. We now spend four trillion dollars on chronic disease. Here are the rates of obesity and diabetes. They have skyrocketed.” He gave an entire list of these kinds of what you might call lifestyle diseases and other diseases that affect us chronically and now in large numbers. No one even engaged with it. They didn’t even dispute the numbers. They wouldn’t even acknowledge that the problem existed.
The whole reason RFK is there and that there’s a thing called Make America Healthy Again, and the whole reason it survived an entire campaign and was actually quite popular and drew thousands of people yesterday to this overflow hearings, is that people see the problem. But the only people who apparently don’t see the problem, can’t even acknowledge it, won’t even dispute the numbers, are the Democratic senators of the United States.
Matt Taibbi: Well, I would argue also that Warren and Sanders, particularly these were the leaders of kind of the Medicare for All movement. So their counter argument would be, well, our solution to this is to get more people into the system, make sure there are more guarantees. But they allowed themselves to be steamrolled on that point by their own party, and to have the Medicare for All candidate kicked off unceremoniously. And-
Walter Kirn: Even Michelle Obama didn’t get that healthy school lunch thing the way she wanted. That’s a platform of his program too. Nothing that I heard him say yesterday should have been at all controversial to the liberal mind, except maybe that he doesn’t have the reverence for the word vaccine, because I’ve actually studied RFK. I’ve written a long piece of literature recently on this topic. The idea that he is anti-vaccine is a little bit ridiculous. He doesn’t like how they’re formulated. He doesn’t like the adjuvants in them, the aluminum and all the other things. He doesn’t believe that suddenly giving 50 or 60 of them in the mid-’80s to people after they gave a few of them earlier in history was a good idea. Especially since they all land on you right after you’re born. But the idea that he doesn’t think vaccines work is not one that I think is creditable.
Matt Taibbi: Well, and then there was also the specific issue of the COVID vaccine, and this I think gets us to the moment that was the most depressing for me, which was the Bernie confrontation. So let’s just watch it first. Bernie, this was probably the most viral of the exchanges yesterday.
Walter Kirn: It was also in real life… Volume is adjusted on your TV set. It was two and a half times as loud as anybody else.
Matt Taibbi: Really?
Walter Kirn: I don’t know if Bernie is getting a little hard of hearing, but it was a booming, hectoring, thundering loud, cover your ears presentation.
Matt Taibbi: So yeah, it’s short. It’s a couple of minutes. Let’s just listen to it.
Bernie Sanders: I think the gist of what you are trying to say today is you’re really pro-vaccine. You want to ask questions. You have started a group called the Children’s Health Defense. You’re the original. Right now, as I understand it, on their website, they are selling what’s called onesies. These are little things, clothing for babies. One of them is titled, “Unvaxxed, Unafraid.” Next one… And they sold for 26 bucks a piece, by the way. Next one is, “No vax, no problem.” Now you’re coming before this committee and you say you are pro-vaccine, just want to ask some questions. And yet your organization is making money selling a child’s product to parents for 26 bucks, which casts fundamental doubt on the usefulness of vaccines. Can you tell us now that you will, now that you are pro-vaccine, that you’re going to have your organization take these products off the market?
RFJ Jr: Senator, I have no power over that organization. I’m not part of it. I resigned from the board.
Bernie Sanders: That was just a few months ago. You founded that. You certainly have power. You can make that… Are you supportive of this?
RFJ Jr: I’ve had nothing to do with these-
Bernie Sanders: Are you supportive of these onesies?
RFJ Jr: I’m supportive of vaccines.
Bernie Sanders: Are you supportive of this clothing, which is militantly anti-vaccine?
RFJ Jr: I am supportive of vaccines. I want good science and I want to protect-
Matt Taibbi: All right. Walter, do you have thoughts? Because I have actually rather complex thoughts about this, but go ahead.
Walter Kirn: Well, all I want to know, Matt, is are you supportive of these onesies? Dude-
Matt Taibbi: Are you now or have you ever-
Walter Kirn: Supported these onesies?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah.
Walter Kirn: Now I was sitting there really feet away from Kennedy while he was being yelled at about the onesies. And I’ll tell you one thing I really didn’t like about the whole hearing is putting up these fucking sign boards behind senators. I don’t think it’s fair to put a bad portrait of the witness, of the nominee on a sign behind the Senator. Okay?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, they did that to me too. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: I think that you should look the way you look that day, not have the worst photograph of you put up behind your persecutor’s head so that everybody has to stare at it while you’re being run down. I think in the decorum of the Senate, which they always say they’re so concerned about, this is a real low that they need to get rid of. And it happened over and over and over, putting up these damn placards. In any case, Kennedy said he wasn’t on the board of the… Whatever, the charity.
Matt Taibbi: Children’s Health Defense.
Walter Kirn: The charity. Yeah, he used to be. But I’m going to tell you another thing, and this is going to make me sound crazy. There is a lot of actual research on vaccines that America might want to look into. The history of our association with vaccines starts with the heroic polio vaccine, but it moves along until we’re getting now dozens and dozens of vaccines, which also carry other chemicals, and as they say, adjuvants that aren’t the antigen itself.
Now, whether we want to examine that anew might be a good idea, so then we could adjudicate whether Bernie or RFK have a right to be saying what they’re saying. But America doesn’t care anymore about the facts. Apparently vaccines are a religion now and just their mere invocation is enough to put you in the right and the charge of being anti them, whatever that means, is enough to make you a scoundrel. And whenever I see any argument reduced to anti or pro, I know that something’s going on, which is that nobody really wants to look at the data set anymore. They just want to make a moral issue out of it.
Matt Taibbi: So when I heard Bernie mention Children’s Health Defense, it’s an organization that has a lot of views. Again, I don’t agree with all of them, but my ears perked up. Why? Because Children’s Health Defense, like RFK Jr. is one of the most censored organizations on the planet. We repeatedly saw Children’s Health Defense in the Twitter files, just like we saw RFK Jr. repeatedly in the Twitter files. The Virality Project, which is the Stanford-based group, it’s the thing that’s succeeded the Election Integrity Partnership. When they got done with the 2020 election, they moved into doing COVID recommendations and flagging. This is the group that worked with the Sergeant General’s office with the CDC, and they had weekly recommendations about content, and RFK and Children’s Health Defense were both identified as what they called repeat offenders whose posts were what they called almost always actionable. So this is an innovation in speech-
Walter Kirn: AAA, almost always actionable.
Matt Taibbi: Almost always actionable.
Walter Kirn: I want a onesie that says that.
Matt Taibbi: Actually that-
Walter Kirn: An adult size onesie from Walter, my PJs every night will be almost always actionable.
Matt Taibbi: I can think of another, a halter top with that on it would be interesting too. So the problem there with almost always actionable is that now you’re punishing the speaker, not the speech. So it’s more about who’s saying it as opposed to what they’re saying. And we started to see this drift from misinformation to things that they consider misinformation because it sent the wrong message. Like RFK infamously, and we’ll get into this later, tweeted that Hank Aaron died and that was a suspicious death after he got his shot. True, but they considered it misinformation because it promoted hesitancy.
Now, this Virality Project, I want to show one of their recommendations about the top anti-vax influencer posts of the week from, I think it was May 18th of 2021. They had a list every week of the biggest trafficking anti-vax posts, and this was the Virality Project’s site. If you can see it says, “This week’s top COVID-19 related posts from a recurring anti-vax influencer on Facebook was by Robert Kennedy, Jr., environmental lawyer, advocate, sharing an article that denounces the pay packages earned by big pharma CEOs.” So let’s look at the actual post. Here’s what it says, “Big pharma CEOs are making millions off COVID vaccines, raising questions of our massive pay packages, questionable stock sales and windfall profits made possible by taxpayer funding.” Now guess who else was saying exactly the same thing during that time period?
Walter Kirn: Elizabeth Warren.
Matt Taibbi: Well, Bernie Sanders for sure. I’m sure Elizabeth was too. But let’s look at some of those stories.…
https://www.racket.news/p/transcript-america-this-week-jan-e1d
RE: FINAL DRAFT SURRENDER APPLICATION AND DECOMMISSIONING PLAN FOR THE POTTER VALLEY PROJECT AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING
The PVP hasn’t become unprofitable because of age. It has become unprofitable because the amount of water allowed to be diverted has been decreased from 150k,000 AF annually to 60,000 AF out of concern for fish. Today, roughly 39,000 AF is being diverted due to the broken transformer that took the oroject offline. The government has also required studies ad infinitum, ad nauseum which has increased the cost to operate the project. Less revenue and additional cost has equated to profit loss so PG&E is divesting from an underperforming asset.
Our communities and those south of us need for water does not factor into their equation.
Congressman Huffman and his Enviro sycophants are BIG FAT LIARS when they say that there are 100’s of miles of salmon habitat and spawning streams above Scott Dam. The dam and Lake Pillsbury are an essential component of water storage for fire suppression and over the last 100 years have created a unique ecosystem for a variety of species. Removing the dam is short sighted and has become a rallying cry for the pseudo environmentalists. My question is, when will the citizens (particularly the wealthy ones) in Sonoma and Marin counties realize and speak up about the consequences to their water supply when Scott Dam is removed?
When their water bills go through the roof.
Marin Water instituted a drastic rate increase to catch up with deferred maintenance projects. They have been told their water supplies are already inadequate during droughts. They are looking at a handful of different projects, none of which are cheap. This assumes their current water supply is secure, which it isn’t. One project being looked at is to run a pipeline on the Richmond Bridge to pump Sacramento River water to Marin. The pipe itself would cost n estimated $50-100 million dollars, then add in the pumping. Another project would expand Nicasio Reservoir or Kent Lake by either raising the dam or building a second reservoir. This would flood thousands of acres of farm land on top of the 16,000 acres lost at Pt Reyes further impacting Marin County agriculture.
If you add up all the projects necessary to store more winter water on top of the cost to pump Eel River water to the Russian during winter, it’s likely in the billions of dollars. It’s likely more cost effective to repair/replace Scott Dam, install fish passage and continue the historic diversion.
Federal projections of climate change impacts include the mapping of a new body of water covering the 101 corridor from SF to a little ways north of Santa Rosa in the not-too-distant future.
AG -“One project being looked at is to run a pipeline on the Richmond Bridge”
Wasn’t there just such a pipe there back in the mid to late 70’s and into early 80’s during that drought period? Was it serving Marin or the East Bay?
Marin, of course.
It served Marin and the water came from East Bay MUD. It was in operation 1976, 1977. Eventually it was removed at Caltrans request in 1982.
It should have probably stayed. I am guessing Caltrans wanted in removed for safety concerns. Even with a pipeline, the water to supply Marin is in question. Even in 1976 and 1977, Metro Water had to forego some of their water deliveries to SoCal in order for EBMUD to supply Marin.
The other options are even more expensive. Work with the City of Petaluma to desalinate brackish Petaluma River water and the aquifer below it. Power costs make it very expensive. Buying Russian River water from Sonoma Water is $1500/AF and this would cost double that.
Marin intends to expand their reservoir capacity, whether this significantly improves their needs, I don’t know. The irony is that Jared Huffman, who supports removing Scott Dam, lives in Marin, where they depend on damming rivers for their water needs. Their PR calls their dams ecological, Huffman says Scott Dam is not. I guess ecological depends on where you live, how much PR you can afford, how gullible voters are, and where your money comes from.
It will equate to a decent amount of water
It will also come at the expense of thousands of acres of farmland. The Nicasio expansion would led to the loss of 5,000 acres of farmland alone.
Re online comment/Taibbi&Kirn: RFKJr has profited hugely from his Children’s Health Defense scam. Easy to confirm online.
He’s just another grifter, and thus would fit in the new admin well. But his “science” is dangerous nonsense, as any actual scientist/epidemiologist/virologist/physician can also confirm.
But who painted “the gulf of empathy” please?
Editor: As I recall, you gave this poor “Call It” person a last-chance warning re his silly personal insults? Doesn’t this one qualify?
If RFK Jr was being nominated by a Democratic President you would be praising him. You are so predictable and hypocritical.
Okay, now go cry to the editor wanting me banned for not using my name. After reading your posts, you should rethink using your name. Although, an idiot is still an idiot no matter how he presents himself.
Don’t know to whom you are replying, but, though I register Democratic, the last time I voted for one selected by the party for president was in 2000. I either write in a candidate I like or leave that part of my ballot blank. I have never had any use for Bobby’s boy and have been pretty fed up with Kennedys for decades. Caroline might be an exception. I really don’t give a damn one way or another about your “handle”.
Nonsense. No matter the party, he would still be unacceptable.
Right. If the GOP weren’t so cowed and spineless under Trump, RFKJr wouldn’t get a single hearing.
Thx.
SH
(Former epidemiologist)
For those of you who love neon signs there is a website sfneon.com . They give walking tours of the neon signs in various neighborhoods in SF and Oakland. I believe it was started by a business that repairs and restores neon sighs.
They also recommend, for the first day of Black History Month, that you watch the James Baldwin documentary “Take this Hammer” (available on youtube) about the reality of being Black in San Francisco in the 60’s. Well worth watching.
FINAL DRAFT SURRENDER APPLICATION AND DECOMMISSIONING PLAN FOR THE POTTER VALLEY PROJECT AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING
https://www.pge.com/en/newsroom/currents/hometowns/surrender-application-and-decommissioning-plan-for-the-potter-va.html
Less than 2% of the annually released flows go to the South Fork of the river that sustains vineyards and small ranches, as well as river-dependent communities, for whom Congressman Huffman purports to negotiate a “fair” deal that satisfies everyone in Mendocino and Sonoma Counties but destroys one of Lake County’s most profound assets and critical fire suppression water supplies for the disaster-prone forested mountains that are also the primary source of annual fresh water recharge for Clear Lake.
(Thanks again, AVA — and readers who help to inform “the public” even when responsible agencies do their utmost to comply only with the letter of the law, but nothing more.)
An excellent perspective on PG&E’s appreciation for the lake and its surrounding wilderness is found in the 2004 “Eel River Planning Unit” found in PG&E’s Land Stewardship Council’s “Land Conservation Plan” for Lake Pillsbury as a magnificent recreation resource:
https://www.stewardshipcouncil.online/_files/ugd/57845a_dacc79ec868f4be6a85f3c91b9b4adc2.pdf
Hopefully, the Lake County Board of Supervisors and our brand new Director of Water Resources will be able to schedule an official response in the short time available for comments, but this is a classic case of “too little, too late.” Hopefully, the option of suing PG&E to “mitigate” the County’s predictable losses is not beyond the reach of the County’s elected officials. We all need Lake Pillsbury, even if most residents have no idea where it is.
DESTRUCTION
Caitline Johnstone notes, in her piece today:
“It says so much that bulldozers play such a prominent role in the Israeli military. Ever notice that? You hear about IDF bulldozers in Gaza as often as you hear about tanks and drones. Other militaries employ bulldozers for various purposes, but it’s not a major feature of their war machinery and you generally barely ever think about it. For the IDF it’s one of their main weapons, because their primary military objective is demolishing an undesirable civilization.”
Bulldozing– and bombing– in Gaza and other areas–I have long-thought that Israel knew better. They should know better, better than any other people on earth. I was wrong. They don’t, it’s clear. It’s beyond sad, beyond a terrible thing. U.S. support for these horrors–the same.
All the thought-influencers in the latter half of the MCT column seem to be talking about matters on the periphery of what’s going on, and missing out on the core agenda. Seeing Musk and team gain access to the payment system of the Treasury Dept seems to reinforce the validity of the following posting shared yesterday:
“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.”
💔
“Corazón Partio (feat. Big Phat Band)” by Arturo Sandoval & Alejandro Sanz on Pandora.
https://pandora.app.link/Eo4fMuIDFQb
Here is a nice summary:
“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
“And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
“The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
“Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don’t have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn’t he a funny man? Isn’t what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.”
– Charles Pierce
Yes, a fine summary. Again, there it is. Thank you, Jim.