Mendocino County Today: Sunday 2/9/2025

By AVA News Service on February 9, 2025

COLD WEATHER ADVISORY remains in effect from 2am to 9am Sunday. Cool and dry conditions will continue through Tuesday. A moderate atmospheric river will then build in mid to late week with gusty south wind and rain. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 34F under clear skies this Sunday morning on the coast. More of the same but possibly longer than I earlier thought as the next rain has now been pushed back to later Wednesday according to the NWS, while the Weather Underground still brings it in on Wednesday morning? We'll see.

FUNDRAISER FOR TRISH BEVERLY, Former AV Teacher, Wife Of Bruce Patterson, Writer And Also Former Resident Of The Anderson Valley

by Abel Patterson

On December 17th, 2024, I drove out to visit my parents for Christmas. I met my father at the door, and he said he was going to the back room to get my mom. To my dismay and horror, he backed out of the bedroom with my mom holding his forearms for stability as she very slowly and unsteadily walked into the hall.

I soon learned that since I had seen her last, just two months prior when she was happily walking miles a day along the creek path, she had fallen several times, including in the supermarket, and was now unable to walk on her own and seemed to be quickly declining.

So we took her to the emergency room to at least start the process of finding out what was happening to her. They began a battery of testing—CT scans, MRIs, X-rays, blood work, cognition tests, brain scans, etc.. All the while she was unable to walk and therefore was dependent upon the nurses for eating, drinking, bathing, and going to the bathroom. At the end of all the testing, she was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (cancer), which had produced a tumor in front of her upper spine and had destroyed her vertebrae, cutting off her brain from her lower extremities and causing partial paralysis. It was also present in most of her bone marrow.

We had two paths-go straight to hospice or try to save her life. She wanted to live, and I was going to honor her wish, despite not knowing what that looked like.

What that would look like we were soon to find out. She was transferred from the local hospital to a larger hospital to have emergency surgery on her spine. Unfortunately, this operation was not life saving but only to spare her further pain from the tumor—the bulk of it was out of reach of the surgeon, in front of her spine.

So she was in recovery from the operation, enduring five days of radiation, wearing a very uncomfortable neck brace for the next month, and putting her through a second surgery to fix the hematoma (blood bubble), which was a complication from the first surgery. She required 24/7 care to help her with all of her bodily functions.

And during that time, she also had two very debilitating urinary tract infections, which caused her dementia to worsen to the point of nightmarish hallucinations and panic attacks where she didn't know where she was and why, culminating in large blood clots in her lungs and leg, swelling her leg to the point where it doubled the other leg in size and sending her back to the ER after I witnessed her have what I thought was a seizure, after which she passed out, slumped in her wheelchair as if she was dead.

All this pain and suffering for a woman who just wants to live. All this pain and suffering, just to be told that she was too weak to receive life-saving chemo. She is no stranger to pain and suffering—reading her list of diagnoses is like an encyclopedia of ailments: dementia, Alzheimer's, severe depression, epilepsy, anxiety disorder, hypothyroidism, and arthritis—all before the cancer. She lost her teeth as a side effect from the epilepsy medication she's been on since she was in her 20s.

This is a woman who spent her life helping others. From the time she was helping take care of her ten younger siblings, through her time in the Peace Corps and as an activist in the feminist movement, through raising me and my disabled younger brother, to being a special education, English-as-a-second-language, and kindergarten teacher, she has cared for others while ignoring her own dreams and desires.

So my job is to try to make the time she has left as pain-free as possible. From the time of her admission to the hospital on December 19th until she was released from the hospital on home hospice at the end of January, I've been her counselor, secretary, and medical advocate and representative. And now I am her caregiver. I've had to learn on the fly how to do bed-to-wheelchair transfers, catheter maintenance, bed baths, and helping her go to the bathroom and clean up afterward. I manage her medication, monitor her pain and confusion, make her food and drinks, and arrange visitors and phone calls.

I am a contractor with 20 years of experience, but no amount of physical exertion, no amount of dry rot or plumbing disaster cleanup, or 80-hour weeks compares to how exhausting my current job is. Those of you who have been caregivers know what I'm talking about. But adding to the difficulty is that this is a 24-hour-a-day job, and this is my mother. At the end of all my efforts will be tragedy, heartbreak, and mourning.

I started this fundraiser because I am no longer working, and caring for her is probably going to last for many more weeks if not months. Both my parents are on their way out, and I'll need to care for my disabled younger brother. The scenario where I navigate these things having exhausted my financial resources compared to the scenario where my finances remain strong is significant. The money will be used to pay my bills and help allow me to pay a caregiver or two for help if I need a break.

Thank you for hearing my story and for considering helping with my fundraiser.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/aid-a-family-in-crisis-cancer-and-caregiving

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Once this adorably goofy guy is comfortable with you, Shaboozey is friendly, playful, and outgoing. Give him some toys, and he will play and play. Indoors he’s a mellow kinda guy. Mr. S needs some leash work, but he’s a smart dog and catching on fast! Shaboozey came from a hoarding situation, and unfortunately he did not get much socialization with people. Shaboozey is looking for a guardian who will show him what love and companionship are all about. One look at this dog’s face and who could not fall in love? Shaboozey is a mixed breed male, 2 years old and 49 soulful 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!

AV EVENTS (today)

Free Entry to Hendy Woods State Park for local residents
Sun 02 / 09 / 2025 at 8:00 AM
Where: Hendy Woods State Park
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4372)

AV Grange Pancake and Egg Breakfast
Sun 02 / 09 / 2025 at 8:30 AM
Where: Anderson Valley Grange , 9800 CA-128, Philo, CA 95466
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/3899)

The Anderson Valley Museum Open
Sun 02 / 09 / 2025 at 1:00 PM
Where: The Anderson Valley Museum , 12340 Highway 128, Boonville , CA 95415
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4411)

R.D. BEACON

The information below, happened on Windy Hollow Road, a little bit east and north, of the city of point arena, the truck driver in this incident, took a detour, due to the fact, Highway one was closed northbound.

The photo is self-explanatory, it's obvious the driver of this particular truck should, not have a drivers license, he not only put his truck in jeopardy, along with whatever contents it might have been at, but it is obvious stupidity, to be delivering product, and this kind of weather, on a road that's normally close, in the wintertime, the other factors involved, or strictly environmental, between the oil and fuel, it is dumped into a working River, it endangers, fish, and other aquatic creatures, is unthinkable, to have this kind of disaster, the driver of this vehicle needs to have his drivers license suspended, and more than likely his bosses, will terminate his employment, especially after they get the bill, the cost of recovery what's left, of the truck, we can only hope, the US government, since the owner of the truck, a very large bill, for recovered the driver, and any other local agency involved, should also build the truck owner, for their time, for this is preventable, depending on what environmental issues, that may occur, from this stupid drivers, lack of responsibility, fish and wildlife should consider, heavy fines, against the owner of the truck, and the driver, the pollution to the river, for this was not an accident, but a deliberate, attempt to cross the road, that most locals know, is closed all winter long.

KATHY WYLIE

This is an announcement of a new group called Redwood Coast Connections - a discussion group for single seniors living alone to have a safe and supportive place to discuss the issues and challenges of living alone at this later stage of life. The discussions will be limited to topics related to seniors living alone and, hopefully, helping each other figure out ways to deal with life here on the coast. It will be an in-person meeting that meets biweekly (every two weeks) in the multi-purpose room at the Redwood Coast Senior Center (www.rcscenter.org) starting on Thursday, Feb 20 at 1:30pm. It will probably run for an hour, but I’m going to reserve the room for two hours, because I don’t want to cut off any great discussions. I am not a licensed therapist and am only leading this group because I want to discuss some of the challenges I have with others in the same position I’m in (seniors living alone). So I won’t be making any presentations or dominating the conversations. I’ll just get things started, and we can see what happens. I will try to keep the conversation on track, though. There’s no need to RSVP, but feel free to do so here, if you want. Come when you can, and let your single friends who live alone know about this meeting, too. See you on the 20th!

COUNTY MULLING ‘NEW TYPE OF TRANSIENT HABITATION’

At its next Tuesday meeting, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors will again discuss whether or not to allow a “new type of transient habitation” referred to as “Low Intensity Camping.”

According to the staff report prepared for the Feb. 11 meeting of the board, the supervisors are expected to discuss, and possibly provide direction to the Department of Planning and Building Services on allowing a “limited number of short-term commercial campsites on properties within the inland areas of the county.”

In their report, Planning and Building Services staff explain that they “sought preliminary direction from the Mendocino County Planning Commission on Nov. 7, 2024 and (are) now seeking preliminary direction from the Board of Supervisors before proceeding with any stakeholder/public meetings. During the review of the Inland Zoning Code Update, the Commission recommended against adopting regulations for this use type (and the) board did not adopt regulations for this use type as part of the Inland Zoning Code Update, but directed staff to come back with a subsequent ordinance amendment to regulate this use type.”

Staff explain that some of the reasons the commission did not recommend adopting Low Intensity Camping provisions at that time were: “Additional time is needed to hear comments from emergency service providers, especially fire districts, and resource agencies, [and there was] concern that separate regulations may be necessary for the western portion of the county that… is generally seen as being part of the Mendocino coast, which generally has greater demand for transient habitation and impacts to traffic and services in the Mendocino Coast area that already includes several permitted campgrounds.”

Other comments and concerns expressed by the commission included:

Traffic/transportation impacts to local roads and state highways.

Require more robust permitting process if located on a private road.

Notification to neighbors if located on a private road.

Impact on fire insurance policies both where campsite is located and adjacent landowners.

Fire risk.

Nuisance to neighbors from noise such as barking dogs, car doors closing, music, generators, etc.

Exclude residentially zoned properties or limit number of campsites.

Ensure solid waste removal from site.

Staff also listed several specific items they are requesting direction from the board on, including: “are there certain zoning districts that should be excluded from consideration, does the board desire to have a minimum parcel size requirement, a cap on the number of campsites that are allowed on any one parcel, a cap on the number of campsites allowed within areas subject to the Inland Zoning Code, and to have an on-site host requirement, essentially meaning that a dwelling unit shall be required and is occupied by a designated host, along with several other questions.”

The board meeting is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. on Feb. 11, and will be held in the Board of Supervisors Chambers, located at 501 Low Gap Road in Ukiah. Meetings are live streamed and available for viewing on the Mendocino County YouTube page, at https://www.youtube.com/MendocinoCountyVideo or by toll-free, telephonic live stream at 888-544-8306.

Comments can be submitted using an “online eComment platform at https://mendocino.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx. All submitted eComments will be made available to the Supervisors, staff, and the general public immediately upon submittal.”

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

Mark Scaramella Adds:

The UDJ’s unbylined summary of the euphemistically named “new type of transient habitation,” aka “hipcamps,” aka tent and RV camping (plus a few rustic cabins) on rented campsites, covers the basics from next Tuesday’s agenda item.

What it leaves out is 1) the breakdown of who’s for it and who’s against it, 2) the fact that it’s already going on in most of the unincorporated areas of the County, and 3) that the basic outcome is a foregone conclusion since the Board voted unanimously last year to support State Senator Mike McGuire’s pre-emptive state-level minimally restrictive hipcamp approval bill.

https://www.kzyx.org/2024-08-10/controversial-zoning-proposal-would-allow-commercial-camping-in-residential-neighborhoods

https://www.kzyx.org/2024-08-21/mendocino-planning-commission-recommends-against-legalizing-small-commercial-campgrounds

https://theava.com/archives/252148

The breakdown of the supporters and opponents is simple: Anybody who stands to make money directly or indirectly from “hipcamps” is for it for no other reason than it will supplement their incomes. Pretty much everybody else is either against the idea outright, or only if substantial restrictions and regulation are imposed — hence the problems listed by the Planning staff which were considered insurmountable by a majority of the Planning Commission.

Obviously, such camping is hard to restrict, regulate or tax. Of course, there are some well-meaning renters out there like Philo’s Kira Brennan who rents out her “Butterfly Landing” campsite and cabin via the hipcamp website and expects people to abide by her “leave it better” policy (although she says the policy is enforced by the “honor system”). And there are the, ahem, less well managed sites that are one step up from a homeless encampment.

A wide variety of unsanctioned hipcamps have already sprung up all over the County, generating both revenue and neighbor complaints as they go. Proponents argue that it will increase tourism, supplement the income of some rural property owners and generate revenue for the County if properly regulated. Opponents say it will create problems that will be nearly impossible to regulate and enforce.

Public comment as presented in Tuesday’s agenda packet ranges from, Okay “if properly managed,” to “only under strict limits and regulation,” to “outrageous.”

The agenda packet also includes several neighbor complaints about existing hipcamps and the less than effective follow-up that ensued.

Since it’s highly likely that the two new Supervisors — Madeline Cline and Bernie Norvell — support the idea as much as their predecessors did, the Supervisors will probably favor some kind of hipcamp proposal despite their own Planning Commission’s opposition. The only question will be what restrictions they might impose and how those restrictions would be enforced.

The unstated background for the idea is at least partly rooted in the ongoing decline of the local wine industry. We’ve heard several reports of large sections of local vineyards being ripped out for lack of grape buyers or grape prices dropping below the cost of production. It’s become so bad in some cases that vineyard owners are preparing to file to have their property reassessed to reflect the down market, a market which few think will recover anytime soon, if at all. Therefore, any vineyard owner suffering from Shrinking Vineyard Syndrome will see hipcamps as an easy way to supplement their declining revenues.

THIRD DISTRICT SUPERVISOR REPORT

by John Haschak

After the recent inauguration, many are asking what are we doing as a county to strengthen our communities.

Federal funding is a big unknown. We have several significant grants pending for wildfire safety. Also at risk are projects for creating second access routes. Money for senior centers and the various programs they run could decrease by over a million dollars. Social Services, bridge projects, and law enforcement grants are all threatened.

I appreciate Sheriff Kendall’s comments about all of us standing together for the well-being of all. The county upholds California’s Values Act, which limits local law enforcement use of funds and resources for federal immigration enforcement agencies, Trust Act limiting detainment, and Truth Act requiring local law enforcement agencies to provide basic due process and information about their rights to individuals.

I would certainly hope that schools and churches and other places are safe havens, not places creating more fear and uncertainty.

As a career public school teacher, I have seen children living in fear and heard their stories of ICE vans, whether real or imagined, disrupt what should be time focused on learning and childhood joys.

North Coast Resource Partnership (NCRP) held a conference in Rohnert Park. I am on the Leadership Council. NCRP represents seven counties and 35 tribes along the North Coast and interior. They are doing stellar work in collaborating to create healthy forests with prescribed burning, restoring watersheds, and making more resilient communities. Prop. 4 bond money will be directed through NCRP for water, fire, and climate change projects.

The two-day board workshop showed that all the supervisors share common concerns around public safety, economic development, and effective and efficient governance. I look forward to putting our commitment to respectful, open communication and our shared goals into action.

I will be at the Brickhouse on Feb. 13 at 10 a.m. for lively discussions. As always, you can communicate with me at haschakj@mendocinocounty.gov or 707-972-4214.

ED NOTES

FROM THE UKIAH DAILY JOURNAL of Monday, July 18th, 1960: “Three escape injury in light plane crash. Earl Voorhees, Gualala businessman, and his two children walked away from a crash landing in the John Farrer apple orchard Friday with nothing more serious than a broken tooth for one of the children. Voorhees, who was piloting the plane, crashed in the orchard as he was attempting a landing at the Boonville airstrip. The light plane crashed nose up after hitting an air pocket and going out of control. His seven year old daughter, Kathy Lynn, lost a tooth, and Gary Earl, age 5, and Voorhees escaped injury.”

THE JOHN FARRER apple orchard? Would that be the late Buster and Velma Farrer’s place on Anderson Valley Way, now home to dwarf olive trees? Or did the Farrers’ own property closer to the then-dirt airstrip which has since become Boonville International?

A SPECIAL NOT-GETTING-IT award goes to the guy who shot it out with the cops on Highway 580 one day. His mom said he was “mad at left-wing politics.” Mr. Dumbkopf, who was on parole, was wearing body armor and headed for? Who knows? Nancy Pelosi’s office? He was definitely on a mission when he was riddled with non-fatal bullets fired by, you can be sure, a platoon of delighted CHP officers, whose poor marksmanship spared idiot child. The problem with any analysis of the Trumpian “Marxist liberal” type is that there is no left-wing in America, let alone revolutionary Marxists. There hasn’t been a left-wing since, I’d say, around 1975, and that was a feeble and terminally ill left-wing, since deceased. The owning classes have won. At least for now. They and their media outlets, which is most of the big ones, have convinced the more volatile schmoes out there that liberals are left-wingers. Liberals are not left-wingers. Most liberals are barely liberals. (cf Mendolib.) One more time: liberals and right-wingers alike believe in capitalism as the basis for social organization. Left-wingers think capitalism should be killed before it kills US. Moderate liberals of the Obama-Pelosi type, and right-wingers of the Trump-Musk type, own the media and everything else, including the government. They’re on the same side. Most of the rest of US don’t own a damn thing except our credit card debt. The libs and the right-wing want to keep things as they are because they live high off the hog as the hog is presently butchered. And you and me, brothers and sisters, are the hog! Comprende? If that fool who shot it up with the CHP down on 580 knew what his own true interests were he’d be a left-winger.

RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Empire of the Summer Moon — Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.’ Quanah Parker’s mother, age 9, was captured by the Comanches. She was a tough kid. Had to have been because she survived the Comanche way of life — plunder, the torture and slo-mo murder of adult males, gang rape and murder for most non-tribal women, and the carrying off and Indian-ization of male and female children unless they cried a lot as they were being carried off and summarily decapitated or simply abandoned. The Comanches’ childcare practices were totally inappropriate, as we say here in Mendocino County. Only 9 the day of her abduction, Quanah’s mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, had witnessed the murders of immediate family members and, in the euphemism of those times, “many gross indecencies,” including the rape of her grandmother. Cynthia Ann Parker not only survived all this but thrived, becoming a Comanche herself. When Cynthia Ann was re-captured she spent the rest of her life trying to return to her adopted tribe. (No Indian ever ran away to become white, but lots of whites preferred to be Indians.) Mean time, Cynthia produced Quanah, a tactical genius as a Comanche warrior, the fiercest of the fierce, who became a kind of white man himself when his Comanches were finally put down. Or died from cholera or one of the other introduced plagues that carried off a lot more Indians than Whitey himself ever did.

Quanah did pretty well as a post-Comanche white man in Oklahoma. His mother had died unhappy, having endured a kind of house arrest after she was recaptured a second time.

The whole story is nicely told by S.C. Gwynne, complete with riveting descriptions of Comanche life, including a Comanche how-to on the taming of wild horses: “A Comanche would lasso a wild horse, then tighten the noose, choking the horse and driving it to the ground. When it seemed as if the horse was nearly dead, the choking lariat was slacked. The horse finally rose, trembling and in a full lather. Its captor gently stroked its nose, ears, and forehead, then put his mouth over the horse’s nostrils and blew air into its nose. The Indian would then throw a thong around the now-gentled horse’s lower jaw, mount up, and ride away.”

A SIGN on the Palace Hotel door well into the 1950s read, “No dogs, no Indians.”

HOYLE & THE BULGOS

by Bruce McEwen (July 2010)

Of all the international marijuana busts in 2009, the one high profile bust featuring the Bulgarians has developed an added angle — and more defendants.

Last October, when the case against the first Bulgarians was getting ready to go to trial, Special Agent Peter Hoyle returned to the scene to take some pictures where Hoyle found two more Bulgarians, Hristo Kolev and Vasil Ivanoff, in the act of transporting marijuana from the Bulgarian’s pot farm off Bentley Ridge Road east of Covelo.

Hoyle said he had just gotten out of his vehicle with his camera when a vehicle approached from the other direction. He waved them on, he said, but the vehicle stopped as its occupants pointed toward the property Hoyle was interested in, a property bisected by a US Forest Service road. Hoyle then approached the vehicle and smelled marijuana. He asked the driver how much marijuana they had and the driver handed him a 10 pound bag. He asked if they were armed; they said no. He asked the driver to get out of the vehicle and found a revolver tucked between the seats — and more marijuana. With Deputy Timothy Goss bringing up the rear, the two cops busted the two new Bulgarians who, it seems, were simply trying to help out.

Either that or they’re the dumbest Bulgarians of the four Bulgarians in Covelo.

Attorneys Ann Moorman and Jan Cole-Wilson were defending the Bulgos. They were arguing first that the evidence was legally insufficient (a 995 Motion) and secondly, it had been illegally obtained (a 1538.5 Motion).

Ms. Cole-Wilson said, “It’s our position that because the marijuana was never moved from the location where it was grown, it was never transported.”

“What constitutes a location?” Judge Leonard LaCasse asked.

Cole-Wilson replied, “The freshly harvested marijuana was removed from the grow area to the cabin area, all on a parcel, one piece of property. If I went out to my garden and brought some vegetables in to my kitchen, even if I load it on the Kubota, it’s not transportation.”

Judge LaCasse said, “You seem to be suggesting that it was a 100-acre tract.”

“Well, if I move it from the north 40, it’s all the same; so we have to look at what location means,” she said, agreeing with the judge.

Deputy DA Katherine Houston chimed in: “It may not be transportation to bring some vegetables from the garden to the kitchen, but this was marijuana and here we don’t know where they’re coming from, other than they were coming down the road in the vehicle.”

Judge LaCasse said, “I’m going to deny the 995 Motion. I’m persuaded that it was marijuana and it was in a vehicle being transported.”

The next step was the 1538.5 Motion to determine if SA Hoyle caught the Bulgarians fair and square. According to the local “marijuana cultivating community,” the legendary Hoyle has a reputation for audacious and sometimes devious maneuvers. Attorneys Cole-Wilson and Moorman seemed especially wary of Hoyle’s methods, as the hearing began with Ms. Houston’s direct examination, and her attempt to establish the location of the bust on June 25th of 2009.

View of Round Valley from Bentley Ridge Road

Hoyle: “I’ve been told it’s the Bentley Ridge Road.”

“Objection,” Ms. Moorman howled, shooting to her feet. “Move to strike!”

“Overruled,” LaCasse said. “It doesn’t matter what the name of the road is.”

Hoyle resumed: “Once you turn off the N1 Road, you follow Bentley Ridge Road a distance, and eventually you end up at the property. It’s a dirt road, it goes through the property and ends at the Eel River, a fork of the Eel,”

“Any structures on the property?” Houston asked.

“Yes, a cabin, a shed.”

“I think you said a house — ?”

“Yes, I may have. It’s a two bedroom living quarters and two other structures, one a frame covered with Visqueen.”

Visqueen is the plastic sheeting outdoor pot growers shelter their starts with.

Ms. Houston wanted to cut to the chase, but it took a couple of false starts to get the question framed to Ms. Moorman’s satisfaction. Finally she said, “What, if anything, happened after you arrived at the property?”

“Four people in a pick-up rounded the turn. They were stopped. Indicia in the vehicle showed they were staying at the property.”

Special agent Hoyle seems to know some Latin. Indicia means there was some stuff in the car indicating that the Bulgos lived in the nearby house.

“In the house?”

“Yes. It was unfinished, a cabin in the woods, with sleeping accommodations for four people.”

“Any weapons?”

“I’m going to interject an objection here,” Ms. Moorman said.

“The court has to consider the totality of the circumstances, so your objection is overruled,” LaCasse said.

“Yes,” Hoyle said. “There was a .38 caliber revolver on the two-by-four above one of the bedroom doors.”

“Was there any marijuana being cultivated on the property?”

“Yes, it was in the Visqueen structure.”

“Were the four people arrested?”

“Yes.”

“And a trial was set?”

“Yes, for October 29th of ‘09.”

“Did you later return to the property?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to take photographs for the upcoming trial.”

“So the following week you went back with Deputy Goss. Did you have a search warrant?”

“No.”

“And you parked on the road. Did you see any signs or obstructions?”

“No.”

“Did you block the road?”

“No.”

“What kind of vehicle were you in?”

“A Toyota pickup.”

“So you were in the process of taking photographs. Did something happen?”

“Yes. A vehicle approached, coming down the hill. It stopped about 30 feet away with two people in it. I looked at the driver and motioned for him to come around. The driver pointed and jabbed at the cabin, so I began walking toward the vehicle.”

“Why?”

“I was investigating that cabin and I was going to talk to him. As I approached I smelled fresh marijuana.”

Ms. Moorman objected. She didn’t think Hoyle could smell marijuana at 30 feet, but LaCasse overruled her saying that he smells it himself every time he goes out for a walk, and smells it from a lot farther than 30 feet.

Hoyle continued: “As I approached I showed him the badge around my neck so he wouldn’t think I was a robber or something and asked how much marijuana he had. He said he had about 10 pounds and handed it out the window to me. I then asked if he had any firearms and he said no. I asked him to step out of the vehicle, and when he did I saw a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver stuffed down between the seats. I notified Deputy Goss there was a gun in the vehicle and he removed the passenger.”

“Did the fact that he lied to you about the gun have any effect on — ”

“Objection.” Moorman howled. “Relevance!”

Judge LaCasse overruled Ms. Moorman, saying it was relevant.

“Anything else of interest in the vehicle?” Ms. Houston asked.

“Yes,” Hoyle said. There was second bag of marijuana and some ammunition for a rifle.”

“Was the Smith and Wesson loaded?”

“It was, yes. So after we detained the two we took the keys from the vehicle and made a protective sweep of the cabin and other structures.”

“Why?”

“These people indicated they were going to the cabin. I knew they were Bulgarian. Considering the fact there was a gun the first time, and now another gun, it was my intention to investigate.”

“So you took the keys from the ignition. Did you find anyone?”

“No. So I returned to the suspects. I wanted to see if they had authority to give consent, and consider the feasibility of locking down and going for a search warrant. The driver acknowledged he was the person responsible and I asked for his consent to search the cabin.”

“Did he have authority?”

“It seemed to me he did.”

Ms. Houston was curious about what Hoyle found in his search, and launched into a series of questions for each of the structures, but Judge LaCasse interrupted: “This seems to be lapsing into another matter. Why is it relevant what was in the other buildings? I’m trying to clarify what the issues are. I don’t know that I need to go beyond the initial stop. This is a 1538.5. I could be wrong but I need to know where you are going with this.”

“Well, then,” Houston said, “I don’t think I have any further questions.”

Ms. Moorman rose to cross-examine. “Detective Hoyle — are you a detective?”

“You can call me whatever you want,” Hoyle said obligingly.

“Now, in June you went to the property,” Moorman said, holding an open document in her hand, some pages curled over from a staple in the corner, “and you referred to a number… Can you give a street address?”

“I don’t know what it is — but it’s my understanding that it’s a parcel.”

“You made reference to a structure…”

“I did.”

“Is there another wooden structure on the same property?”

“That’s my belief, yes. It’s at least a 40 acre property.”

Ms. Moorman unfurled a hand-drawn chart, an exhibit from the preliminary hearing last year, and attached it to an easel. She pointed out some features on the chart and asked Hoyle if he remembered them, the cabin, the Visqueen structure, the shed, a road…

She said, “So the road runs through a portion of the property?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you go to the property with some understanding of who owns it?”

“I’d seen some papers but don’t recall the name.”

“So it was your understanding you’d entered onto private property?”

“Yes.”

“So you’d parked on the wrong side of the road?”

“Correct.”

She pointed to a feature on the chart and said, “So that’s pointing downhill?”

“Correct.”

“So it’s your understanding today, as it was then, that this is private property?”

“Yes. That’s my belief.”

“So you went again in October to get some photographs, and when you were, uhh…” Moorman studied some pages on her table briefly “…umm, so you went to the property for the purposes stated. Was there another officer with you besides Deputy Goss?”

“Yes, Deputy DeLosantos.”

“So when you got to the property you took some photographs?”

“Yes, ma’am. Some. But I was interrupted.”

“Yes, yes. By the approaching vehicle. Was the driver committing any infraction?”

“No. Other than there was no front license plate.”

“So you gestured for them to go on by but they couldn’t because you were on the wrong side of the road.”

“No, ma’am. There was room to go around. I was curious why they’d stopped so far away and when I waved them by they didn’t go on.”

“Did you pull your badge out then?”

“I think I did while walking toward the vehicle.”

“And Deputy Goss, where was he?”

“He was several feet behind me.”

“So you approached the vehicle — well, let me ask you this: Did you have any reason to detain the occupants?”

“It wasn’t my intention to ask for his driver’s license and vehicle registration because he didn’t have a front license plate, if that’s what you mean. I was merely going to have an Officer-Citizen talk.”

“So the two of you walked to the vehicle on either side?”

“Yes.”

“Who initiated contact?”

“I did.”

“Isn’t the first thing you did was to identify yourself as a police officer?”

“I did that in transit.”

“And when you got to the vehicle you detected marijuana.”

“I smelled it before I got there.”

“So your testimony is that you detected marijuana several feet away.”

“I did.”

“You asked if he had marijuana.”

“I did.”

“You cuffed him as soon as he got out and Deputy Goss cuffed the passenger.

“No. That’s not true. You’ve got the sequence wrong.”

“You cuffed Mr. Ivanoff immediately after he got out, then you noticed the firearm.”

“Yes. Then Deputy Goss cuffed the passenger.”

“Were they placed face-down?”

“Yes. Initially, they were. While we conducted the protective sweep.”

The Bulgarian defendants looked like they were at a tennis match. Their heads moved in unison from their interpreter to Hoyle.

At this point in the hearing, Judge LaCasse called a recess to give the Bulgarian language interpreter a break. “It’s very hard work,” the judge said of the interpretation effort.

After the break, Ms. Moorman put SA Hoyle to work on the chart, filling in details. She had him draw a diagram of the cabin, mark where the generator was, electrical cords, water lines, a storage shed.

Moorman asked, “There was food in the storage shed?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Food for humans?”

“Yes. It was Bulgarian food.”

I waited for someone to explain what Bulgarian food was. Nobody explained. I made a note to look up “Food, Bulgarian.”

“Can you estimate the distance from where you were parked to the cabin?”

“I can, yes. It was 100 feet or so.”

“And in your mind all these structures were associated with the property?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now, the road through the property — have you driven through and are you aware that it dead-ends?”

“Yes. It dead-ends at the Eel River.”

“Now, after you made the protective sweep you returned and determined their identity?”

“Correct.”

“So it was your understanding they were both living there and after you ascertained they each had been staying on the property you decided to move everyone down to the front of the cabin?”

“Yes.”

“I take it you never got a warrant for the search in October.”

“That’s correct.”

“I have no further questions.”

Jan Cole-Wilson had a go at cracking hard-boiled Hoyle’s shell.

She said, “Detective Hoyle, about your memory of going back to the location in October: When asked if you went at the request of the DA, your answer was no.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Do you recall Ms. Houston asking you at the preliminary hearing if you’d gone to the property at her request?”

“No.”

“The reason you went up there was she asked you to.”

“No, I don’t believe I did. I went up there on my own.”

Ms. Cole-Wilson produced a transcript from the prelim and showed it to Hoyle, pointing to the relevant paragraph. Hoyle put on his glasses and read it.

She said, “Would you agree that that’s what the transcript says?”

“It does,” Hoyle said. “That’s what the document says. But that’s not my recollection of the event.”

“Were you telling the truth during the prelim?”

“I was.”

“Now, Detective Hoyle. You indicated you’d taken some photographs before you saw the vehicle.”

“I believe I had taken some initial photographs before, yes. I don’t recall, but that was my intent.”

“What part of the area had you taken photographs of?”

“Again, I don’t recall. I was out of the vehicle, and I was going to take some photographs.”

Cole-Wilson had a thick sheaf of copy paper with color photos printed on the pages. She presented the packet of pictures to Hoyle and he put his glasses back on, making him look less like Fu Manchu and more like Confucius.

“I can’t tell with certainty when I took the photographs but ultimately I did take those photographs.”

“They were taken by you.”

“Correct.”

“And they were taken when the gentlemen were still on the ground — ?”

Apparently, one of the photos showed one of the Bulgarian gentlemen’s legs prone in the dirt by the Bulgo-mobile. The pictures were numbered.

“Is this the first photograph you took?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t recall that these were the first photographs you took — ?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Did you change the sequence?”

“I don’t know how to do that.” (The photos were downloaded from a computer.)

“You didn’t change the sequence?”

“Correct.”

“Then the DA would have that disk in their file… Now, if the disk showed that sequence” —

“I know for example that there’s photographs I took that are not here…”

“Well, would it be fair to say that disk would contain the sequence of the photographs?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And so you arrived at the property and parked by the Visqueen structure?”

“I turned around there.”

“Is that your vehicle in the corner of this photograph?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Well, was there any other vehicles up there?”

“No.”

“So it would be your vehicle?”

“Correct.”

“Then, uhm, these photographs indicate that you were at the cabin area before encountering Ivanoff and Kolev. And this one, number 24, taken at the south side of the cabin — when were you down here? — what was the time frame?”

“I don’t recall going down there before the SUV. But if you’re saying the sequence is correct, then I obviously did, but I don’t recall taking those photographs before they arrived.”

“In March of 2010 were you telling the truth?”

“I am today, also,” Hoyle said pointedly, but he showed no sign that the repeated aspersion rankled.

Ms. Cole-Wilson then produced a US Forest Service map. It was established that the road in question was not Bentley Ridge Road, but the Timber Ridge Trail.

“That runs off Bentley Ridge Road,” Hoyle said, and the judge called a recess for lunch.

During lunch an emissary from the DA’s office had consulted with the lawyers and they stipulated that the sequence of the photos was accurate.

When the hearing resumed, Ms. Cole-Wilson went over much of the previous testimony again, trying to catch Hoyle in what she perceived as contradictions. She had a problem with the consent to search the cabin, but Hoyle said that at first his tape recorder malfunctioned. Then there was the question of impediments.

She said, “You also testified that there were no gates.”

“That’s correct,” Hoyle said.

“But isn’t there in fact a gate?”

“I didn’t see one.”

“And isn’t there No Trespassing signs on the road?”

“I don’t recall seeing one. There are Private Property signs on this particular property, although I couldn’t tell you where one is today.”

Ms. Cole-Wilson had nothing further, but a long discussion ensued concerning US Forest Service easements through the property, and whether a Walter and Wanda Johnson had once owned the property, which became very heated.

“Are they the predecessors,” Judge LaCasse asked.

“Yes,” Ms. Houston said.

“There’s no evidence of that,” Ms. Moorman screeched with emotion out of all proportion to the matter under discussion.

“That’s what I’m going to decide,” LaCasse said calmly.

The US Forest Service map was moved into evidence, and a BLM map, as well.

LaCasse said, “The court can find the N1 Road and the Bentley Ridge Road on it. The section 21 referred to in the deed to Mr. Kolev and depicted on the Forest Service and BLM maps …”

The Bulgarian language translator seemed only to be translating brief phrases — for all anyone knew he could have been relaying borscht recipes. One of the Bulgos looked like he was asleep. The other noticed I was observing them and said something that roused his co-defendant who looked daggers at me. We’ve had representatives of most of the Earth’s peoples angry at our publication, but these were the first Bulgarians. Ms. Moorman was pacing around furiously, both hands full of documents.

Ms. Houston said the easements were designed so the BLM and USFS could access government property. “All are, in fact, unrestricted,” she said.

“Not exclusively,” Moorman insisted vehemently.

Houston agreed, but said it corroborated Hoyle’s testimony that there were no blockages. “It’s open to the public for recreational activities,” she said.

LaCasse and Moorman quarreled over the easement law. Finally, LaCasse said, “So what’s your objection?”

“There’s no evidence the court can use to conclude — ”

“What?! That there’s more than one road — ”

“So you can’t conclude from the evidence before you — ”

“There’s the other roads” —

“You can’t conclude” —

“Why can’t I?”

“The easement may not include this road!”

“So what? What’s your point?”

“Well it’s not relevant! And even if it is I have two other objections.”

“It’s given to the US government.”

“No! It doesn’t mean that at all!”

“But — ”

“There’s absolutely no evidence in this proceeding — ”

“Well, I’m gonna take a giant logical jump, here,” said LaCasse, and conclude that the legal description indicates that they’re related and connected! Hoyle is standing on a road — a public road! He waives the vehicle by — ”

Moorman said something so heated and fast I couldn’t catch it.

LaCasse did.

He said, “What difference does that make? We’re not trying the title here. The question is: Did Hoyle have a right to be there? You say it’s an unlawful detention in your brief, and I don’t even see a detention!”

“I’m not limited to that.”

“It’s your brief!”

“I think it is a detention. I think you’re drawing inferences from the prosecution,” Moorman added tartly.

Ms. Moorman, if you came in late, has been elected judge. She will replace LaCasse who is retiring. The Moorman-ites consider LaCasse a conservative. They consider themselves The Elect.

The Bulgos were suddenly alert, astounded, it seems, at the intensity of the proceedings. The translator was barely murmuring, and having trouble translating.

LaCasse said, “That’s your characterization of the evidence. I’ll let somebody else make that inference. These are not one-lane jeep trails. I mean, this photograph does not persuade me a car can’t get by. It’s not inconceivable a guy can’t just go around, even if he wants to turn in to the property. It’s just not very persuasive. I mean, why did the guy stop? Hoyle waved ‘em by then he smelled the dope. I went jogging this morning and I can smell the stuff all over. It smells like dead skunks. You smell pot and you see a gun, that’s probable cause.”

“I disagree!”

“Your objection is overruled!”

I glanced at my watch — my bus was leaving. They were still shouting at each other as I ran out of the courthouse.

Early Tuesday morning, a law enforcement raid team shot an armed man to death in a marijuana garden on Boardman Ridge, not far from Rancho Bulgo.

CUT DRUG COSTS

Editor:

Medicare is a substantial portion of the federal budget, and drug costs are a substantial portion of the Medicare budget. Drug costs in America are substantially higher than those paid by the rest of the world and contribute to bankruptcy in America caused by medical bills. If Donald Trump and Elon Musk truly want to make an impact on government spending, they should mandate by executive order that the United States will only pay the price for drugs that is paid on average by the rest of the world. Put people first.

Joe Clendenin

Santa Rosa

CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, February 8, 2025

KIMBERLY BAKER, 60, Ukiah. Registration tampering, probation revocation.

ALEX CORTINAS, 40, Willits. Embezzlement-leased or rented vehicle, probation violation.

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

MATTHEW FAUST, 50, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs. (Frequent flyer.)

DEREK HADDON, 53, Redwood Valley. Domestic abuse, false imprisonment.

DOUGLAS WHIPPLE III, 38, Ukiah. Parole violation.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

If Bill Clinton hadn’t blatantly lied to us all, thus railroading Gore in his wake, If Hillary and DNC had not been so arrogant and entitled, railroading Bernie, and if Jill Biden had had just a teeny tiny hint of shame and been humbled and thankful by the fame and fortune she received, I believe we would not be here. Please stop blaming folks who are simple and half educated and could not stomach the arrogance and disdain of financially comfortable and educated “elites,” themselves shocked that the “regular folks” take issue with college student loan forgiveness and tax dollars paying for prisoners and military members gender transitions. It’s not as simple as “I didn’t vote this way and I told you so.” But here we are, and maybe we should march in the streets with pitchforks, and soon, given the lack of any other apparent checks on the insanity.

SF CHRONICLE OWNER EYES PURCHASE OF RIVAL BAY AREA NEWSPAPER

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat has been under local ownership for 13 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process.

by Kevin Truong

Hearst Corp., the New York-based private media conglomerate that owns the San Francisco Chronicle, is nearing an agreement to purchase the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, according to sources close to the deal.

The acquisition would include not only the Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom — which produces the largest newspaper in the North Bay — but Sonoma Media Investments’ other associated properties, including the Petaluma Argus-Courier and the Sonoma Index-Tribune.

Sources said the deal — which is still being negotiated — would be in the low eight figures and could close in a few months.

Both the Chronicle and the Press Democrat would keep their independent newsrooms as part of the tie-up, but their back office and business functions would be merged and consolidated, the sources said. Hearst believes it could save millions annually through the combined operation of the two organizations, while expanding its coverage into the North Bay, according to the sources.

The Press Democrat was founded in 1897 and was under local ownership for nearly a century before it was sold to the New York Times Company, which sold it to Halifax Media Group in 2011.

Darius Anderson, a local real estate developer and political fixer, purchased the paper in 2012 with help from partners including billionaire banker Sandy Weill; Jean Schulz, wife of the late “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz; and former Dolby Sound CEO Bill Jasper. The acquisition was meant to stabilize a valuable news source for Sonoma County and return it to local ownership.

During that time, the Press Democrat Guild agreed to freeze its pension program to enable the sale. The new group assembled about $15 million in debt and equity to purchase the newspaper and, in 2019, announced that the business was debt-free and had paid back its original investors.

Douglas Bosco, a former U.S. congressman, is a member of the Press Democrat’s ownership group. When reached for comment, he did not deny that a sale was in the works but said he had no details.

“I will say this, the original investor group, including myself, is aging, and there has been general discussion about passing off or selling the newspapers to some financially capable entities,” Bosco said.

Anderson, who serves as managing member of the ownership entity, Sonoma Media Investments, did not respond to a request for comment. Hearst did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to a Press Democrat readership statement in October, the paper prints an average of 20,200 copies daily and serves approximately 19,600 digital subscribers. It employs around 80 people.

Derek Moore, a former Press Democrat reporter and California vice president of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, said the union is concerned about the prospect of new owners with few ties to the region.

“Our preference is for our North Bay news outlets to remain under local ownership, one with a demonstrated belief in quality journalism, community, and treating employees fairly and with respect,” Moore said in a statement. “Hearst, as a billion-dollar empire, has a troubling history of antagonistic relations with employees, undermining their unions, outsourcing and consolidating operations, and generally seeking the bottom line in how it conducts business.”

The Press Democrat Guild’s current contract runs through the fall of 2026.

The prospective acquisition builds on a partnership struck in 2022 in which the Press Democrat outsourced printing operations to the Chronicle’s production site in Fremont as part of an effort to cut costs and divest from real estate holdings. Around 40 part-time and full-time employees were laid off as part of the move.

The deal would also mark a new phase in an extended rivalry between a longstanding big-city newspaper and a smaller, regional competitor.

When both newspapers put forward their coverage of the 2017 Wine Country wildfires for Pulitzer Prize consideration, the Press Democrat was selected as the winner in the breaking news category.

But the Chronicle came out ahead in 2021 with a blockbuster investigation into former Windsor Mayor Dominic Foppoli, who was accused by multiple women of sexual assault. The story, which led to Foppoli’s resignation, was co-authored by a former Press Democrat reporter who brought the information to the Chronicle after her editors failed to pursue it.

Hearst was one of two main suitors that put in failed bids for the newspaper last year, along with controversial Sonoma County developer Bill Gallaher, sources said. A source close to the deal said Gallaher’s offer was “substantially larger” than Hearst’s at the time, but both deals fell apart.

Gallaher and his son-in-law Scott Flater sued the Press Democrat for defamation over reporting about campaign spending during the 2016 Santa Rosa City Council election. The case was dismissed in 2019 by an appellate court, which ordered the plaintiffs to pay the paper’s legal fees.

The acquisition of the Press Democrat would mark Hearst’s biggest move in Northern California since 2000, when the company purchased the Chronicle and sold off its flagship daily the San Francisco Examiner.

Hearst recently announced that it would relocate the Chronicle newsroom as part of its plans to purchase a downtown San Francisco office building and redevelop a portion of the newspaper’s current complex.

Maya Chupkov, media and democracy program manager at California Common Cause, said the advocacy nonprofit has placed a special focus on the issue of outside owners taking over local newsrooms by private equity firms, as Alden Capital did with The Mercury News and East Bay Times.

“A trend we’re seeing is an acquisition tied to immediate layoffs, stripping of assets, and raising subscriptions in a way that don’t serve the communities where they’re located,” Chupkov said.

Common Cause is weighing legislation in California that would create a 120-day waiting period for acquisitions of local news organizations by an out-of-state entity. Similar laws have passed in Illinois and Maryland.

(SFStandard.com)

LITTLE SAQUON

How about this picture of Saquon Barkley in elementary school growing up in the Lehigh Valley! Now he could have the greatest season ever by a running back.

A FAN'S NOTE: Tomorrow's Superbowl holds some interest with two very good teams meeting. Saquon Rasul Quevis Barkley is an amazing running talent. I've never see a back spin and run backwards through tacklers like he does. And Mahomes and the Chiefs exhibited a remarkable quality this year to do just enough to win almost all their games. It's like they have preternatural control of what happens on the field and scoreboard.

HARVEY READING (Wyoming)

“Ducati screams rebounded off the hillsides…”

During my mid-to-late teens, the crew I grew up with were into riding bikes, it being the 60s, when bike popularity really took off, accelerated by all the Japanese bikes that were very popular. I first had a Harley “Scat”, a 10 cubic inch (160cc), one-lunger, two-stroke Harley, with a three-speed tranny. The only way to start it cold was to coast it downhill, then pop the clutch. Once it warmed up, the kick starter sufficed. It was a weird bike, with wheels and tires that looked like those on a hog. Mixing the gas and oil was a nuisance, too. It would do maybe 70 miles per hour, tops. Later, I had a Yamaha 250cc Big Bear Scrambler, which was slightly faster, had a five-speed transmission, and reached its top speed much more quickly. Plus it mixed the gas and oil itself with an oil injection system, called “AutoLube”, if I remember correctly. Finally, in my early 20s, I got a used BSA Firebird Scrambler, a 650cc twin with upswept pipes, essentially a Lightning with different trim to make it look like a scrambler, and a transmission that jumped out of third gear under anything more than moderate acceleration. The latter didn’t really matter, since fourth gear had plenty of torque that made up for only having three dependable gears.

Oh, and I lost all real interest in bikes by the time I was 30. Lower back pain from riding accelerated the loss of interest. Last time I was on a bike was about 12 years ago. My neighbor, and buddy, had a souped-up Yamaha dirt bike that he insisted I try out. Well, I wobbled down to the graveyard and back, being careful not to attempt any forceful acceleration, which would have caused a wheelie that would have probably killed or injured me badly. By the time I got back, my neighbor was gone, so I leaned the bike up against an exterior wall of his house, where he kept it, walked to my place, and went into my house.

Back in time to my main point: My buddy, two years my senior, had a Ducati 125. The little cutie was a work of art to behold. The trouble was, it broke down a lot.

MEMO OF THE AIR: Traish LaRue and the ass-clowns of Ganymede.

Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (Friday, 2025-02-07) 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-0630

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 work and want to help me out personally, now's your 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:

Reading the English translation of this haunting song about a fraught gazelle makes me think of Watership Down and the prayers the rabbits say to Great Frith. (via Bold Eagle) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r69nsxvLFJA

1950s Super Panavision The Matrix. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-matrix.html

On one hand, think of all the trouble in the world that comes from our species being like these contentious children, but on the other hand, we might not have survived if we weren't like this a little bit. I remember a Larry Niven story from the 1970s about a purely scientific interstellar expedition from Earth after we've solved war by breeding aggression and competition out of ourselves. But our ship is detected and attacked by Kzinti, a spacefaring warlike race of tiger-headed people, who are overconfident because their ship's psychic-officer reports that the humans are gentle prey animals and don't even have weapons, so the Kzinti are literally surprised to death when the human captain, who has /just a little, just enough/ aggression left in him, spins our ship around with the fusion engine switched on full-blast and silently slices the Kzinti ship in half like a katana through a watermelon. That story was pre-light-saber. https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/02/taking-game-seriously.html

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

LEAKED DOCUMENT SAYS ‘LARGE SCALE’ IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT ACTION COMING SOON TO LOS ANGELES

by James Queally and Brittny Mejia

Federal law enforcement agents are planning to carry out a “large scale” immigration enforcement action in the Los Angeles area before the end of February, according to an internal government document reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

The operation, which would be spearheaded by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will focus on people who do not have legal status in the country or who already have pending orders of removal, according to the document, which was circulated among some federal law enforcement officials this week.

Although immigration operations have been ramped up across the country since President Donald Trump took office, no sweeping actions have taken place in L.A., a city Trump repeatedly criticized during both his presidential campaigns.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

A federal law enforcement source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said agents with the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Los Angeles field offices are being called in to assist.

“They needed more bodies,” the official said.

A former federal law enforcement official, who said they had been informed about the recent preparations but spoke on the condition of anonymity fearing retaliation, also said FBI agents were being ordered to participate in pending ICE “raids” in Los Angeles. Neither of the officials could provide an exact time frame for the potential actions.

The active federal law enforcement official warned that plans could change due to the “chaotic” nature of the Trump administration’s first few weeks in power and expected pushback from within some of the agencies that will be required to aid ICE.

“Just because certain information is being given doesn’t mean it’s the administration’s plan, because they know some agents are going to be resistant,” the official said.

Thousands have flocked to downtown Los Angeles in recent days to engage in demonstrations against Trump’s mass deportation strategy. Protesters briefly blocked the 101 Freeway this week, and a person was stabbed during a fight near Spring Street on Friday afternoon.

ICE’s Enforcement Removal Operations in L.A. has posted regularly on X recently about people they’ve arrested, including a Mexican national convicted of lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14, another wanted for murder in Mexico, a woman convicted of driving under the influence and an alleged Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang member.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller declined to comment on any upcoming large-scale operation, but said the agency has been assisting in immigration operations since the end of January.

“We’re primarily a supportive role for these operations,” she said.

Other federal agencies have been assisting ICE since last month, including the DEA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The DEA L.A. last month posted on X that it had participated in an operation tied to immigration enforcement.

“When asked to support immigration enforcement actions, we will review the capabilities and shift resources as necessary to provide support,” Matthew Allen, who leads the agency’s L.A. office, said in a statement.

Ginger Colburn, a spokesperson for the ATF, said Friday in an email that the agency has been assisting the Department of Homeland Security and other federal law enforcement partners with immigration enforcement efforts in Southern California since Jan. 26.

“To ensure operational security and the safety of our agents and partners, ATF does not disclose details of enforcement activities,” Colburn said.

Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, this week blamed the leak of an immigration operation in Aurora, Colorado, as having reduced the number of arrests of Tren de Aragua gang members and other criminals.

“This is not a game,” Homan told Fox News. “To have this type of interference puts our officers at great risk.”

(LA Times)

THE POT OF GOLD AT AMERICA’S WESTERN EDGE

I couldn’t help but think: ‘Why would anyone leave this fantastic place?’ even as we prepared to do so ourselves.

by A.M. Hickman

The boughs of the pomegranate bush clattered in the morning wind, branches drooping with heavy, frost-bruised fruits. The bush lilted her morning greeting to the rows of olive and grapefruit and palm, nodding to the yerba santa and the blue oaks. My own eyes seemed to be covered in a golden gauze as I rose to survey the variegated domain of fertile hills sprawling out before me. Everything was yellow with the spicy nicotine and ocher diamonds of the impossible California skies.

For those who have never been to California before, picture this: a heady sabbatical in Tuscany with Dr. Seuss. Everything in this westernmost state seems to ebb and flow in brief fits and starts through manicured vineyards, blossoming pastures, ranch roads, and hazardous gravel switchbacks slung high above dusty, half-filled reservoirs. It is America’s shimmering Eden, her promised land, the trophy of our young Republic that stands proudly as proof that every ounce of westerly motion was worth it.

To the pioneers, it was the end of the road. It was as far as a wagoneer could travel, cresting high over the infamous Donner Pass, if they had not yet succumbed to madness or scrofula, nor to hunger, smallpox, or cannibalism. Catching sight of the Pacific Ocean, the good earth bowed for the pioneers and did her curtsy. God Himself was the conductor of this symphony of holy life and sun-kissed valleys and endless deep-green ridgelines—and at the end of His great rhapsody, a frontiersman would build his fence lines and furrows and aqueducts.

In some sense, California is the mother of the very particular, feverishly intense, and unstoppable optimism that makes the United States what it is. All Americans are Californians at heart. We are, at our best, a fanatically optimistic sort of people—who might push for a half-year’s time across rough country just to see if the rumors of gold might be half true.

And in the case of California, the rumors were true: There was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. From the earliest “salad days” of these western farmers to the oil booms, the mining frenzies, the rise of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and later, the heady madness of Silicon Valley’s technological revolution. The incredible winnings of California’s early settlers course through the blood of Americans the whole country over, whether they have each seen California for themselves or not.

It all began the first moment that the pioneers caught sight of the poppies along the Sacramento River.

We crossed that river on a speeding train, with the desert well behind us and the pelicans flying above. Out the train window, the tall, slender cypresses stood like church spires, and below them, there were oranges and lemons, rice paddies and palms, hothouses bursting with lettuce and berries. A night train to Modesto followed.

Christmas came at a lovely older couple’s Central Valley estate. They were friends from Twitter we’d never met offline before, but they graciously took us in and treated us as if we were family. We stayed for a few days, picking our breakfast fruit from the citrus trees in the yard. The thick, humid, sun-warmed air hung along our skin like a blanket of youthful vapor. Everywhere on the streets of that city—whose incredibly apt motto is “Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health”—we were greeted as friends.

A cousin called from back East: five feet of snow, negative 15 degrees, a broken furnace—Merry Christmas. As he related this tale, I lazed beneath the lemon tree by the bougainvillea. I told him that it was 72 degrees where I was sitting; sun-drenched, in the fountain of youth. He grunted, and through the phone, I could hear him cracking open a noon-hour can of beer in the whipping winter wind.

I was born in California, at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach in 1994. The product of a Renaissance Faire romp between a traveling circus worker—my father—and my mother, who was a Navy Seaman stationed at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach. Weeks before my birth, my father denied I was his child, and my mother tried to run him over with a car on the streets of Long Beach. He’d soon disappear in a drug-addled fugue, and would join the White Aryan Resistance, a Nazi skinhead gang. With a Nazi SS tattoo on his neck, he’d spend the next 30 years operating the Ferris wheel and the Tilt-A-Whirl with an itinerant crew of “carnies.” The affairs of the Aryan Resistance, traveling carnivals, and hard drugs would be at the center of his life for decades to come. Fatherhood, however, would not.

I wouldn’t even meet him until I reached the age of 30. He’d been in jail when I was born, and days later, I was removed to the East; far from California and the bad memories that lingered there for my mother and I.

Despite that, I’d make my way back to the Golden State many times in my early 20s. I’d hitchhiked up and down Highways 1 and 101 more times than I could count, and I was a two-time winter resident at “Slab City” a lawless shantytown full of squatters near the Salton Sea, between Palm Springs and Mexicali. There, I’d lived in a mud hut, subsisting on food I’d pulled from the dumpsters, camping in the sand with anarchist dropouts and drug-addled convicts.

I’d picked dates and oranges with the campesinos in El Centro, quaffed stolen liquor in dilapidated shacks in the high desert, brawled with junkies in a Mendocino beach town. In those years, I was overwhelmed by California’s many faces.

All that felt like a lifetime away as I awoke in an aging, creaky room in a Victorian hotel, high up in a village in the foothills of Yosemite in the first days of the New Year. The hotel porch lent us a vista of the strange landscape—sharply steep hillsides coated in moss and oaks; deep-red manzanita trees standing crooked in the orange dawn light. Below us on the street, the traffic was thick for a town of only 5,000 residents. In the village quadrangle, ski bums waited for the bus to the mountains, sluggishly puffing torch-sized blunts; their ski boots sank into the moss-green mud in the park. And across the way, a Spanish Mission-type church stood tall above the village. I headed down to check out of the hotel. At the desk, a teenager sat, vaping profusely, telling me he’d come to California from Punjab, India, to become a millionaire.

“You know, big money—millionaire,” he told me. “I want to get into growing weed commercially. I want to be the Donald Trump of ganja.” As we walked out onto the street, he waved and smiled warmly, his blue eyes bloodshot, through a big cloud of smoke.

In one frame, California felt like Mexico; in another, Sicily—and in still another, it was a land of strip malls, condos, and ranchettes. The state is so large that it feels almost like multiple foreign countries melted together, with an American flavor whisked in. There are a thousand Californias, all pulsating minute by minute across this giant state.

Just as a teenager in the Central Valley rides his dirt bike along the earthworks by his family’s blooming walnut grove, a drug addict is picking aluminum fins off of unexploded bombs in the Imperial Valley’s Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range to trade for meth. Meanwhile, a corporate meditation retreat takes place in the hills around Sonoma, while a Persian immigrant gets married at the courthouse in Rancho Cucamonga. An aging call-center worker sighs in an office in Anaheim, and a crew of Mexican cementeros pour a concrete shrine to the Virgin Mary on the side of the interstate in El Centro.

Soon, a farmer we’d met at a conference in New York, in the Catskills two months before, came to pick us up for a weeklong stay at his place.

As we rolled up the labyrinthine web of steep, twisty dirt roads, I saw that the pattern of settlement here was unlike any other rural region in the U.S. I’d ever seen.

Mini farms dotted the countryside; goat pens edged up to manicured, suburban-looking yards — dried-up aqueducts slashed across junkyard mountainsides and scraggly fields of brush where prizewinning bovines rambled and chewed. At the gas station, a dreadlocked yoga teacher kissed her roughneck cowboy boyfriend, but not before making him spit his chewing tobacco out into the sandy landscaping. Now, the sun was blazing a fierce heat in spite of dawn’s early chill, and the good farmer deposited us in front of a small cabin. In the distance, waggish goats brayed and tackled one another beneath the olive trees. We dropped our packs and felt awash in the bliss of this place.

We had not come to this place so much as we’d entered into it, for the map of California’s hilly regions is not two-dimensional. From the warm, agricultural flatlands of the Central Valley to the hills, we delved upward layer by layer, being folded into a network of unmappable roads and pathways, down steep ravines, across seldom-seen valleys. Once we’d arrived at our destination, the ranch gate clicked shut behind our backs, enveloping us in a feeling of privacy so deep it feels like secrecy.

Strolling up to the farmhouse, I leaned over to the brawny, suntanned farmer: “You really seem to be living the most idyllic sort of life a human being could ever hope to live.” He beamed, nodding his head wordlessly. I couldn’t make out what he was actually thinking.

The Californian’s mode of expression can be a little hard to place; the Golden State’s people are smiley and warm—yet their hearts seem to be somehow hidden. It seemed to me that there is a certain sense of seclusion and privacy etched not only into the Californian’s land but also into his mind: a deep, impenetrable interiority that reclines behind hedgerows and palm trees and thickets of yerba santa and lemon. No matter where you go in California—from the ritzy beaches of Malibu to the rugged mountains of Humboldt County—this sense of privacy pervades.

For generations, it seems, residents of the Golden State’s hinterlands and foothills have instinctively sought to protect their impossible piece of paradise. Once the gamble has been won, a good fence and a long, unmarked driveway might be required to protect it.

But however idyllic a place this may be, experience had shown that it was simply not for me. I find the endless sunny days unnerving, and the price of real estate is appalling. Traffic-choked freeways, decade-long droughts, riots, earthquakes, wildfires—the many strange and unexpected drawbacks of the California lifestyle make for trouble in paradise.

Perhaps owing to these drawbacks, these days, the old route west to California seems to have been reversed. All across America, lifelong natives of the state to which the Okies—refugees from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s—once fled are fleeing again, this time eastward. From Vermont and Maine to Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Texas, it seems one finds another Californian has moved in each day, having left their home state due to a combination of astronomical home prices, far-left politics, and the abject decline of the quality of life in the large cities. As the recent wildfires in Los Angeles have shown, if none of the social, political, or economic factors drive certain Californians to leave—natural disasters often will.

Still, at that cabin on the farm in the high hills, no decline was remotely palpable. If anything, this place seemed every bit as heavenly as it must’ve in its earliest days of human settlement. I couldn’t help but think, Why would anyone leave this fantastic place?, even as we prepared to do so ourselves.

The farmer offered his point of view. “Just like America, Europe used to be a frontier, too. Eventually, the value of land settled out into something fairly static as the population increased. The real estate system went from being a free-for-all to an inheritance-based system,” he told me. “I think the same thing is happening with California; there’s only so much of it to go around.” He explained that he thinks California is transitioning from a “new world” settlement pattern to an old one. You can either afford land, inherit land, or you leave.

He was saying that there’s only so much gold in the pot at the end of the rainbow. No amount of optimism can increase the land area of California’s most desirable regions, from San Diego to Sacramento and beyond. While the moment one finds their gold is a mythically charged moment of delirious optimism and hope at day’s end, gold is still gold. It is scarce. Those who have it wish to hold it, and those who lack it will make their own voyages to head out and find it for themselves. And so it is that so many of the Golden State’s native sons depart from the land of ranch fences and palm beaches and holy hedgerows—to live out the story of their forebears again. To become “reverse Okies.” To find California, again.

Eastward to Arizona, the bus rocked along the Mojave Desert’s empty highways. Foggy, cream-colored cosmos spun overhead above the barbed wire and cacti. The Greyhound bus felt like one big, motorized covered wagon. America’s story hadn’t ended in California, after all. Here I was, catching a glimpse of its latter-day form.

Two men sat in the seat beside ours, chatting and sipping liquor out of a glass bottle jacketed in a paper bag. They were headed to Texas, driven out because they couldn’t afford homes in California, nor find jobs. “California part two,” one of them mused. “Fresh start.” They sounded like pioneers.

ED NOTE: I’d like to congratulate myself for living in California. Thank you, Me, for bringing off the correct residency.

TAIBBI & KIRN

Matt Taibbi: So we obviously did a show on Monday night, and that’s when the USAID, Pandora’s Box started to open, and I think you actually predicted that the media would become a subject of all of this.

Walter Kirn: I predicted it that night, and many people came back pretty much the next day or the day after to say, it’s happening,

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and it’s kind of panned out, kind of, sort of. A lot of media companies, it turns out, were accepting the USAID money. Now, to be fair, which we absolutely should be, media companies very often have large government contracts because they’re often some of the biggest customers of media companies. Same with firms like NewsGuard, they have big government contracts because every government outlet has a NewsGuard subscription, which is one of the reasons I can’t stand it because it’s making every public library in the country use those sorting systems, but everybody subscribes, every government outlet subscribes to the New York Times and a bunch of other outlets, and it’s a nice little chunk of change for media companies.

And that’s a nice little scam for the mainstream press, that’s not available to the alternative press, and good for them, I guess. But it gets a little weird when the numbers get super high, right? And Politico, I think is the one that stands out this week. They had, I think it was eight million dollars for … was it this year and then 8.2 million. And if you add up all the contracts, if you look at it all, I think it’s like 34.3 million. And I can’t think of a way that that … Can you think of a way that number makes sense as subscriptions or something like that?

Walter Kirn: Well, I mean, as a publisher, myself of County Highway, I can only tell you that if that kind of money were to flow in or anything proportional to that kind of money for us at our size, it would be a huge obligation to keep it coming. It would be a debt, both moral and financial in some ways that once accepted would guide a lot of decisions. So the idea that they can remain independent while this kind of flow comes in is ridiculous to me. One major advertiser at a newspaper magazine, speaking up can be a problem for you editorially. And remember, they do have advertisers, and among the advertisers is this other interest, the US government. So the idea that these places can in any way, I don’t know, just pretend to be detached from that is absurd.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, so there’s an interesting contrast here between the New York Times, which got caught up in this briefly because some people … there were some computational errors with how people ran the searches. They actually received over a period of time, about a million and a half dollars from DOD and other agencies, which roughly makes sense if you figure every government outlet in the Pentagon is subscribing to the New York Times. But if you compare that number to the overall income of the New York Times and all their subscribers, it’s not a massive, massive amount of money. But for Politico, which has a much smaller staff, it doesn’t put out a physical paper.

There’s a much more concentrated benefit there. And in the internet world, it can be roughly equivalent in impact, right? So you can see a Politico story that will circulate all over the place in the same way the New York Times story will, but the Times is putting on a much larger volume of stuff compared to Politico. Does that make sense?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: So I guess what I’m saying is eight million dollars a year or 34 million dollars over a period of years to Politico is exponentially bigger … an exponentially bigger amount of money than the amount of money that would go to the New York Times, say, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: And then, you start thinking about the stuff that Politico has covered over the years, and it’s a real head scratcher, right? I mean-

Walter Kirn: Yeah, like Russiagate?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I mean, so just to bring up some of the greatest hits of Politico over the years, they were a big proponent of the … let’s count how many people have ever watched the Russian-subtitled movie or so they had … the Russiagate scandal, as presented in 17 graphs, that was one of my favorites. All of Trump’s Russia ties … It’s seven charts, okay? Yeah, they were a real proponent of the sort of Starburst graphics with Putin and things coming out of his head. They had another one that was really great, I think it was called … the original title was something like the 100 and something people connected to the Trump-Russia scandal, but now it’s 332. And so they just continually added all the connections between Trump and Russia.

And then of course, later they became famous for the Hunter Biden stories, Russian disinfo piece, that was fed to them directly by John Brennan. Actually, John Brennan’s, deputy Nick Shapiro. And this was the famous 51 spies letter that went straight to Politico. And there’s a lot of other stuff too. I mean, Politico did a lot of pretty aggressive reporting on, let’s say, vaccine critics, critics of lockdowns. I don’t know, Walter, what’s your general impression of … I mean, because I don’t think the scam is, “All right, this is an outright front for the intelligence services.” We’re just going to do all these pieces as dictated to us by the NSA or whatever it is, but at minimum, we have to worry about our big customer, right?

Walter Kirn: Well, okay. The reason I made that prediction on Monday, that accurate prediction, was that I was in Washington two weeks before, and at one point, I was talking to an intelligence source, associated with one of the agencies, and that could be verified. It wasn’t one of the freelancers at a bar who tells you they are, and they just listed a bunch of places that were friendly to them, publications. Very friendly. So far, none of them have appeared on this list.

Matt Taibbi: That’s interesting.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, but I thought, well, when this started coming out, we’re going to start getting into media organizations. Now also, understand we haven’t finished with this process. We’ve just started it. We haven’t gotten into the Health and Human Services people. So except it does seem that a lot of that times money was coming from Health and Human Services, the New York Times money.

Matt Taibbi: Some of it.

Walter Kirn: Some of it. In any case, all we’ve got is USAID and some other things, at this point. We’re going to get more. What do I think it means? For me, it utterly discredits these publications, utterly discredits them. These are publications that ran stories that would have people believe that for $100,000 in Facebook ads, Russia-

Matt Taibbi: That’s right. I forgot about that.

Walter Kirn: Tipped our election. So they made $100,000, the benchmark, as far as I’m concerned, for corrupt practices in America. Anything below that, who knows? Anything above that can influence a presidential election according to them. So now, by their own standards, they are many times Putin, like four Pinocchios, four Putins, 34 Putins. And so, I can’t think of anything in my recent history of scandal hunting or scandal watching that has upset me more. First of all, they’re quiet about it.…

https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-feb-7-2025-the

THE TRUMP II ADMINISTRATION

by John Arteaga

Okay everybody, welcome to the Trump II administration. My God, it’s certainly getting off to a bizarre and dystopian start; Trump is not a businessman, much less a politician. The only occupation he has ever had, and one in which he is clearly an idiot savant, is that of grifter, swindler and professional litigant. His legal strategies were honed at the feet of one of the greatest (that is the worst) exploiters of the flawed legal system we all live under, the infamous Roy Cohn, one time top aide of Joe McCarthy, then infamous mob lawyer for decades.

A careful observation of Mr. Trump’s interactions with this nation’s legal architecture constitutes a master class in all that is wrong with a legal system that, however you feel about it, we all depend upon for our safety, security and the determination of who is at fault in all manner of criminal and civil conflict.

What we can see clearly, and most apparently under the Supreme Court as it is presently constituted, is that our legal system is ill-equipped to distinguish between fair and reasonable conflict resolution on the one hand and cynical exploitation of legal technicalities and processes, on the other hand, to either indefinitely prolong proceedings with appeals, etc. to put off, often permanently, justice being rendered in whatever matter.

Similarly, it seems like no one can be so innocent as to escape life changing legal jeopardy, requiring one to lose one’s job, mortgage their house etc. in order to defend themselves in court against what may in fact be completely trumped up (no pun intended) charges designed to punish one for displeasing somebody in a position of authority who has access to unlimited prosecutorial resources.

It has been a long and painful four years since we all saw with our own eyes Trump whipping up his insurrectionist mob. I mean, if intentionally bringing to Washington this gaggle of indoctrinated followers of the Trump cult and directing them to, “fight like hell, or you won’t have country” isn’t a major crime deserving of serious prison time, then what is?! At least they could have followed the clear wording of established law and disqualified him from ever running again for political office! Sheesh!

They say that justice delayed is justice denied, and the fact that Obama’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, as Atty. Gen., could never bring Mr. Trump to a court and a jury in all that time constitutes total failure; a truly broken system. How could it possibly take four long years! I don’t know what excuse Mr. Garland has for this endless procrastination, but it’s no wonder that he was recommended to Obama by none other than right wing Republican Orin Hatch, as someone who might garner a few Republican votes to get him past the Senate and into the Supreme Court.

And what can one say about the clown car full of the absolute worst raging bulls to be put in charge of each individual China shop cabinet position? Let’s start with Pete Hegseth; besides being a woman abusing drop fall drunk who has to be carried out of the strip club by his coworkers in the wee hours so he can get to work at his early-morning Fox News anchor spot, even his own mother wrote an incredibly damning email about his treatment of wives and girlfriends. A father of seven! (IMO, a crime in itself given the state of the earth these days) He seemed to have a hard time during his pro forma questioning by Congress recalling all the names of his pitiable offspring. Apparently he has festooned his body with innumerable white Christian nationalist symbol tattoos. Never having run anything more than a spot on a Fox News talkshow, how bizarre is it for him to now be put in charge of the 3 million souls employed by the Pentagon, with its almost $1 trillion annual budget?

Then of course, we have the preposterous nomination of Matt Gaetz for, of all things, Attorney General! That is, the top law man in the country! One has to believe that Trump was really just seeing how far he could push his nihilistic agenda, just testing the waters to see exactly how much crap he could feed his devotees. Fortunately, Gaetz was a bridge too far; credible allegations of drug use with underage prostitutes and his whole Jeffrey Epstein-like modus operandi thankfully scuttled this particularly nauseating nominee. However, true to form, The Donald turned to the blonde bimbo in waiting for the job; Pam Bondi, former Florida Atty. Gen., most famous for considering whether Florida wished to join the many other states who ended up suing Trump for his entirely bogus Trump University which fleeced many thousands of apparently clueless marks of their pricey tuition for an utterly worthless degree, a suit that eventually brought about the closure of this ‘University’ and the payment of $25 million to its victims.

Anyway, before Ms. Bondi decided whether to take part in the suit, she received a nice $25,000 check for her reelection campaign from The Donald, and then, guess what? She decided that Florida would not be joining the other states taking part in the suit, thus losing who knows how many millions of dollars for swindled Floridians.

Tulsi Gabbard, another you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up nominee to be head of ‘homeland security’, is another piece of work; the daughter of dyed in the wool Hare Krishna devotees who moved the family to Hawaii to be part of a Hare Krishna offshoot cult that would do such things as eating the toenail clippings of and the sand upon which their guru trod for their spiritual advancement.

Homeschooled by these nut cases, it’s no wonder that Ms. Gabbard seems to have become a devoted follower of both Trump and Putin, for whom she has expressed such great admiration. Director of Homeland security?! Oh my God.

I could write a column this long every day with the firehose of madness coming from the West Wing these days, like the presidentially ordered dumping of billions of gallons of water out of two already low reservoirs for a photo opportunity of Trump ‘releasing the water!’ Even though it did nothing but run down past farms that didn’t need irrigation this time of year, not to mention being of no use to LA, where they had no access to it and the fires were already out from the recent rains.

Of course none of this matters to the followers of the Trump cult; they’ll all just call it fake news and believe whatever pack of lies he has to tell them each day. God help us!

For this and other columns; https://inarationalworld2.blogspot.com/2025/02/justice-delayed.html

(John Arteaga is a Ukiah resident.)

MUSK’S LOST BOYS AND TRUMP’S MEAN GIRLS

by Maureen Dowd

Tom Stoppard wrote in “The Real Thing,” his enticing play about infidelity: “To marry one actress is unfortunate. To marry two is simply asking for it.”

Here’s a political corollary: To elect one Emperor of Chaos is unfortunate. To let two run the government is simply asking for it.

Presidents Trump and Musk have merged their cult followings, attention addictions, conspiratorial mind-sets, disinformation artistry, disdain for the Constitution, talent for apocalyptic marketing and jumping-from-thing-to-thing styles.

With a pitiless and mindless velocity, they are running roughshod over the government — and the globe.

Queasy D.C. denizens are waiting anxiously to see if judges can save the country from the scofflaws running it.

The two unchecked and unbalanced billionaires are entwined in a heady and earth-shattering relationship.

“I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” Musk posted on X on Friday.

He may simply be offering affection to ward off any jealousy Trump felt when he saw Time’s new cover illustration: Musk in the Oval behind the Resolute Desk.

Elon Musk is brainy but he’s not your usual presidential brain trust.

Although everyone in Washington, including some in Trump’s inner circle, expect the two pathological narcissists to barrel into each other, they both seem to be getting what they want from the relationship.

Trump loves to be admired by the elites, and he adores money. Musk has gotten the keys to the American kingdom so he can attack “the woke mind virus,” which Musk says “killed” his “son,” who transitioned as a teenager. Both men are driven by revenge to smash up the government.

The president and the tech lord even have progeny, little Elons: the lost boys of DOGE, a gang of Gen-Zers in jeans with backpacks and bags of Doritos bursting into federal agencies to gut them and force bureaucrats to justify their existence.

Their backgrounds and work are shrouded in secrecy, even as they access the government’s most sensitive information.

“Muskrats,” as the bureaucrats they call “dinosaurs” named them, are rifling the government’s computers. A 19-year-old with the internet pseudonym “Big Balls” lost an earlier internship for leaking company secrets; a 25-year-old was ousted over racist posts. He wrote on X, “I was racist before it was cool,” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate.” Even though he is married to an Indian American, Vice President JD Vance rescued the “kid,” as he called him, and helped him get his job back.

It’s not that we don’t need to rein in spending, including what is spent on risibly P.C. programs. But the disdain for Congress and the rule of law, and the glee at erasing so many jobs and programs, as if there is no human cost, is reprehensible. We are, after all, only carbon-based beings.

The lost boys of DOGE fit in well with the “Mean Girls” attitude of Trump’s Washington. On Friday, the DOGE X account posted before-and-after pictures of the U.S. Agency for International Development entrance; they had stripped it of all identification. Their post even trolled Kamala Harris, using her viral phrase: “Unburdened by what has been.”

The Silicon Valley digerati don’t care about the old world in Washington, D.C., churning out meddlesome regulations, laws and taxes. They are cocky about creating a new world, shaped by a new species, A.I.

Donald and Elon are emotional time bombs, lashing out in the crudest and cruelest ways. Trump’s amoral, puerile, wrecking-ball style is now squared by Musk’s.

It’s rich that the world’s richest man is rooting around trying to wipe out vast numbers of government workers, saying, “Sorry, you can’t have your $85,000 a year job and your health insurance.”

“They don’t care if the government delivers food or comes in and rescues your town from a flood or teaches poor kids in the inner city because they don’t have to live through any of those things themselves,” said the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “They’re rich and powerful, so they’re insulated from consequences of their actions.”

Trump cares about being popular and Musk doesn’t. So their relationship will probably remain strong until Elon cuts so many benefits from the Trump faithful that they tell Trump they no longer love him.

And the bromance may not end with a bang. It could very well end with a bot.

When Trump turns 80, as a birthday present, Elon and the lost boys could create an A.I.-fueled Trump bot, a real-time video head trained on his news conferences and everything he has ever tweeted.

Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, slyly says that Trump would be “an unusually easy person to plausibly fake.”

“Gradually it’ll be normalized,” Lanier told me. “People will get used to it more and more, and then it’ll actually start to be treated as the president. If you look at it on your phone or your computer, it would look just like him. The underlying software could be presented as a hologram onstage. It might even run in the next election. And they’ll go to the Supreme Court and say, ‘We know that the president can only have two terms, but this isn’t really the president. This is the Trump bot and A.I.s are people, too.’ Essentially allowing a continuation of the same administration into a third term.”

All Hail President Trump Bot, engineered by Elon Musk.

THE CONSTITUTION OUT LOUD

“Listen up, People.
It’s me, your Constitution,
Speaking to you now.

“Legislative power
Belongs to Congress, not Musk
Nor the President.

“To give them that power
You’ll have to amend me first.
Otherwise, you can’t.

“You can’t just do it.
If you try, I’ll stop you cold.
Take that to the bank."

— Jim Luther

LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

Why Federal Courts May Be the Last Bulwark Against Trump

A Quick Guide to the Lawsuits Against the Trump Orders

Federal Financial Watchdog Ordered to Cease Activity

Some White South Africans Cheer as Trump Amplifies Claims of Persecution

Early Crypto Traders Had Speedy Profit on Trump Coin as Others Suffered Losses

Trump’s Blueprint for Bending the Media Has Nixon Written All Over It

RESIDENT BEAN EXPERT

by Jesse Childs

At a canteen in Leningrad in December 1941, a man queued for two hours, handed over his ration card, received a bowl of soup and a bowl of porridge, ate the soup and died. A crowd formed around him, not out of concern but in the hope of acquiring extra food. Leningrad under siege was a pitiless place. Two in five people succumbed in the first winter and the streets were littered with corpses. Most citizens trudged past them without a backwards glance. All that mattered was the next meal.

This was der Hungerplan. After reneging on the Nazi-Soviet Pact and invading Russia in June 1941, Hitler ordered Army Group North to advance on Leningrad, the former capital once known as St Petersburg. As a Baltic port and centre of industry, it was a sound strategic choice, but as the cradle of ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism it aroused Hitler’s special ire. Its foundation, he said, ‘was a fatal event in the history of Europe; and it must therefore disappear utterly from the earth’s surface’. On the eve of the invasion, he informed his troops that they were fighting for Western civilisation.

Four days later, German commando units stormed key bridges south-west of the city. By 8 September, the last road link was severed and, with the help of the Finns in the north, Leningrad was besieged. The only outlet was Lake Ladoga, but German Junkers ruled the skies. There was no question of feeding the city’s two and a half million mouths, since the Fatherland needed food. Better, the Nazis reckoned, to plunder Soviet land and ‘starve the lot’. German soldiers were told to think of the enemy as Untermenschen, the opposite of ‘everything that is noble in humanity’.

When the blitz began, the food depots on Kievskaya Street were the first to be hit – three thousand tons of flour and two and a half thousand tons of sugar went in a flash. Survivors remembered the reek of burning sugar for decades afterwards. They were the lucky ones. By a conservative calculation, three-quarters of a million people died in the siege, four times the combined number killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It lasted for almost nine hundred days and in that time, especially during the early months when the ration was cut five times and temperatures plummeted to below -40°C, the blokadniki (‘besieged’) became bestial. Their skin changed colour and roughened. Their vocal cords atrophied. Their lips receded so that they drooled. Fingers froze and legs swelled with oedema. Pathologists conducting postmortems on starved bodies found that the mass of a human heart was reduced by up to a half. ‘I am becoming an animal,’ one teenager confided in her diary. ‘There is no worse feeling than when all your thoughts are on food.’

Sieges don’t change much. Communications are cut off, calories are withdrawn, disease, disinformation and bombs are thrown in. Nerves are shredded and life becomes absurd. This siege, like all sieges, contained elements of farce: concerts continued even as chandeliers shook from bombardments, while at the Hermitage tours were conducted as if the paintings were still hanging in their frames, even though the Old Masters had been evacuated before the blockade. The descriptions were so lively, one witness recorded, that ‘they could almost see Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son and da Vinci’s Madonna.’ But the skein of civilisation quickly unravels – one reason why so many writers are drawn to sieges, from Laurence Sterne and J.G. Farrell to Ismail Kadare and Zbigniew Herbert, whose ‘Report from a Besieged City’ captures the wretched kernel of hope inside every siege: ‘We look in the face of hunger the face of fire face of death/worst of all – the face of betrayal/and only our dreams have not been humiliated.’

The betrayal came from the top. Stalin, neglecting the relevant intelligence and then focusing on Moscow, all but abandoned Leningrad, while his apparatchiks appeared at public baths milky and fat in their privilege. The man in charge of the city, Andrei Zhdanov, enjoyed butter on his bread and lashings of caviar while those in his care ate their pets, sometimes their neighbours, and fashioned tagliatelle out of slow-boiled strips of leather. Nor did the Soviets acknowledge the extent of the suffering. State broadcasts told of ‘hardship’ and ‘shortage’ – not ‘starvation’ and never ‘famine’, a word that had been criminalised a decade earlier when the government’s collectivisation policy killed millions. The accepted word was distrofia, or dystrophy. Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old botanist found dead at his desk at the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding just off St Isaac Square in the centre of the city. He was holding a packet of almonds. Why he didn’t eat them, or give them to other starving citizens, is the question at the heart of Simon Parkin’s book.

Shchukin and his colleagues at the institute dreamed that plants would save the world. Not only could they feed and heal people in the present moment, but their genetic traits, stored within their seeds, could be propagated for the benefit of future generations. The ultimate goal was a resilient, high-yield super-crop that might have the capacity, even in Russia, to end hunger for good. After an abortive start caused by the 1921 famine, during which the starving staff ate the collection, the institute acquired a galvanising new director, Nikolai Vavilov, who set about establishing the world’s first seed bank, ‘a treasury’, as he put it, ‘of all known crops and plants’. Armed with a fedora and burlap sack, this indefatigable explorer-scholar collected wild and primitive specimens from all over the world:

“…naked-grained barley found on the plateau that borders Turkestan, India and Afghanistan; wild perennial flax picked from Iran; orange and lemon pips collected on the road to Kabul; radishes, burdock, edible lilies and chrysanthemums from Tokyo; sweet potatoes from Taiwan … Korean soy beans, Spanish gorse, Egyptian clover tobacco.”

GRAVY

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.

Gravy these past ten years:

Alive, sober, working, loving and being loved by a good woman. Eleven years ago he was told he had six months to live at the rate he was going. And he was going nowhere but down. So he changed his ways somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?

After that it was all gravy, every minute of it, up to and including when he was told about, well, some things that were breaking down and building up inside his head. "Don’t weep for me," he said to his friends. "I’m a lucky man.

I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.

— Raymond Carver

TRUMP SAYS HE WILL SEND SOME OF OUR BAD BOYS TO THIS PLACE

by David Jones

Sunk deep into shaven and elaborately tattooed skulls, a hundred pairs of eyes – hollow and dark – are boring directly into mine. The men they belong to have committed crimes evil almost beyond comprehension.

Members of two of the most savage rival gangs the world has seen, El Salvador’s Ms-13 and Barrio 18, they raped and tortured, murdered and mutilated, cut bodies to pieces and strewed them around the streets to strike terror in the neighbourhoods they controlled.

On my journey to the world-renowned prison that holds them, the Latin American country’s new Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), my government escorts had shown me photographic evidence of their grisly handiwork.

One man had been impaled with a tree branch through his torso before being decapitated; another was anally gang-raped before being tied to a car and dragged to his death.

Standing a few feet away from the cage holding 100 perpetrators of this kind of savagery – one of 32 mass cells that line Module 8 in the vast fortress prison – is a deeply unnerving experience.

Under the men’s intense gaze, cold sweat trickles down my spine, and I feel waves of revulsion and fear. And yet, counter-intuitive though it might seem, these emotions are tempered by a degree of pity.

I think anyone with a modicum of compassion who witnessed the harrowing scenes that confronted me this week, when I became the first British journalist allowed inside this godforsaken place, would share that sentiment.

Everyone has their own vision of hell. For George Orwell, in his dystopian classic 1984, it was a boot forever stamping on a human face. However, I can imagine no greater torment than being consigned to CECOT, with no hope of ever being released, like the inmates here whose sentences range from 60 to more than 1,000 years.

Death would be infinitely more merciful. A thought that might concentrate the minds of the violent US criminals and lawless migrants Donald Trump aims to banish here, under the terms of an unprecedented deal agreed with El Salvador’s president this week. I will come back to that.

One of the world’s biggest prisons, with a 40,000 capacity (equivalent to almost half the UK’s current prison population), CECOT was built two years ago amid a huge crackdown on the gangs destroying the fabric of Salvadoran society.

Its director Belarmino Garcia declined to tell me how many prisoners are currently held there, but there are many thousands of the worst of the worst gangsters.

As the heavy gates clang behind them and they are X-rayed by sophisticated machines, they still bristle with the machismo untouchability that made El Salvador, a mountainous country the size of Wales with a population of six million, their fiefdom.

Within a few days, however, they are behaving as obediently as timorous laboratory beagles.

Some of the eyes that stare at me may still carry a malevolent glint, but for the most part they are hollow voids, for every shred of defiance and ego has been stripped away.

Pointing to the 266 prisoners said to have died behind bars since President Nayib Bukele began his much-vaunted purge, two years ago, the human rights lobby claims that brutal means are used to bring them to their knees. Garcia, a menacingly squat, stone-faced man, denies this. The total acquiescence I witnessed is achieved, he says, by enforcing an ultra-hard regime that brooks no dissent.

Having visited the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and the Robben Island prison where Nelson Mandela was held, the system at CECOT certainly seems harsher. Terrorists held in ‘Gitmo’ are at least afforded some privileges and can undergo rehabilitation programs.

They have access to books and writing materials, can interact with one another, exercise in the fresh air, communicate with family members, and look forward to occasional visits.

In CECOT none of those things are permitted. The sole aim is subjugation.

For 23-and-a-half hours of the day, the men are obliged to squat on mattress-less metal bunks, stacked four-storys high, like shelves in a B&Q store.

They are permitted to speak only in whispers. Conversations with outsiders such as me, and the sinister-looking Darth Vader clones who guard their cages in visored black helmets and riot gear, are also forbidden.

One might liken this to a human zoo, but zoo animals are at least given stimuli.

Trapped in a permanently strip-lit, antiseptically clean netherworld, these men will never smell fresh air or see natural daylight again. They are fed three meals a day in their cells – of rice and beans, pasta and a boiled egg – their water is rationed by the guards who hand it to them and they use a communal lavatory.

They are only permitted to scuttle out of their cages, shackled hand and foot with heads bowed low, for a small number of reasons.

They are evacuated when the guards charge into the module brandishing machine guns to stage a ‘forced intervention’ and search their bunks. While this clean sweep takes place they must crouch on the floor in perfect rows, with their legs wrapped tightly around the man in front of them and their head pressed against his bare back, forming a human jigsaw puzzle. Anyone who spoils the pattern by fidgeting receives a sharp baton jab to the ribs.

They also sit cross-legged on the spotless module floor for a daily 30-minute Bible reading and calisthenics session.

And when their turn comes, they are removed to one of the small rooms used as courts, for remotely conducted ‘trials’ which, in almost every case, end with a guilty verdict.

They are also taken out of their cells for medical examinations. For anyone foolish enough to break a rule, the windowless punishment cell also provides a terrifying change of scenery. Such is the mental torture of being isolated in the echoing darkness of this concrete dungeon, furnished only with a stone slab and toilet, that the maximum permitted detention period is 15 days.

However, director Garcia tells me no one has been able to withstand more than ten days without being deemed ‘too ill’ to remain there, which I take to mean that they had been driven to the brink of insanity.

Invited to experience how it felt, I lasted a couple of minutes before banging on the iron door.

This, then, is the life of a captured Salvadoran gang member. A life spent sitting on a tray staring vacantly into space. It will be their existence for as long as they continue to breathe.

They can’t even commit suicide by hanging themselves because spikes prevent them from threading bedsheets through gaps in the cage roof.

Should they die here, as inevitably they will, years could pass before their relatives are informed, if they are told at all.

Determined to crush the cult that once surrounded El Salvador’s most notorious gangsters, President Bukele has banned tombstones glorifying their memory and had any existing ones smashed with sledgehammers.

The media are not given any information about the prisoners, and strongly discouraged from writing about them at all.

Shut away in this void, in a subtropical volcanic valley two hours from the capital, San Salvador, with no wifi or mobile signals, these men have effectively ceased to exist. They are the living dead.

My tour of CECOT was granted only after a lengthy negotiation with the El Salvador government, but it couldn’t have come at a timelier juncture. For the previous day, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had visited Bukele at his lakeside estate, and the pair laid the groundwork for Trump’s latest audacious deal.

In return for generous funding, the baseball-hatted Salvadoran leader – who styles himself ‘the world’s coolest dictator’ and was the first leader in the Western hemisphere to be called by Trump after his election – offered to accept and incarcerate deported American criminals.

Rubio’s spokesman described it as ‘an extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country’.

Bukele even pledged to accept members of Latin America’s most fearsome crime syndicate, Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua, which plunders tens of millions from human trafficking, drug-smuggling, and extortion rackets.

Details of this proposal are yet to be thrashed out, and it will inevitably meet strong human rights opposition.

If it does go ahead, however, many of the deportees are sure to be kept behind CECOT’s forbidding walls, topped by razor wire surging with 15,000 volts, for it is believed to have ample space to house them.

So how does this tiny country find itself in the front line of Trump’s war on undesirable migrants?

The story begins in the 1980s, when a million or more Salvadorans fled to the US to escape grinding poverty and a bloody, 13-year civil war.

Many settled in gang-blighted Los Angeles ghettos where they formed their own crews, MS-13 and Barrio 18. When they returned home, in the 1990s, these mobs also took root in

El Salvador. They divided the country into territories where they extorted protection money from businesses, eliminating anyone who refused to pay or who strayed onto their turf, and often their families with them.

By 2015, El Salvador was the world’s murder capital, with 106 killings for every 100,000 of its six million population: a rate more than 100 times higher than Britain’s.

But the nadir came in March 2022, when 87 people were butchered in a single weekend. It prompted the youthful Bukele, then three years into his first presidential term, to launch his massive purge.

Declaring El Salvador to be under ‘a state of exception’ which still pertains, he sent military snatch-squads to reclaim gang strongholds and passed sweeping hardline decrees.

Simply sporting a gang-related tattoo was sufficient to earn a 20-year jail sentence. Child gangsters as young as 12 were summarily hauled off the streets, phones were bugged, hotlines were set up for neighbours to shop one another.

As of last month, 84,000 alleged gang members and associates – roughly two per cent of the adult population – were in jail.

Bukele’s gangbusting model is now being copied by governments throughout Latin America, and its £100 million bastion is the supposedly escape-proof CECOT.

From having the world’s worst murder rate, El Salvador now has one of the lowest, projecting a ratio of less than one per 100,000 this year.

And as I have seen this week, the societal transformation is little short of astonishing.

Driving along the Golden Highway outside San Salvador, my fixer, Claudia Zaldana, told me she regularly saw dumped bin-bags stuffed with body parts when she took this route a few years ago. Today it is a pleasant thoroughfare.

Before the mass arrests, the city centre was a virtual no-go zone. Now it is the hub of a burgeoning tourism industry.

On Tuesday night, I sauntered through the central square, with its handsome cathedral and palace, and a vast new 24-hour library (one of several projects funded by China), feeling as safe as in any of the 100 or so countries I’ve visited.

Earlier we went to La Campanera, a once-feared suburb whose homes were often commandeered by MS-13. Isabel Garcia, 75, told me that in the past she was permitted to stay only by paying dope-smoking mobsters who controlled her alley a ‘tax’ whenever she left the house.

Returning from church one night, she saw the gangsters heaving four heavy bags along the street. The following day she learned they contained the bodies of murdered rivals.

Such sights are now a distant memory. La Campanera has been reclaimed as a vibrant residential area, with a new school and colourful murals replacing the gangs’ scrubbed-off graffiti.

The police station, which had been humiliatingly requisitioned by MS-13, is serving the community once again.

All this has made Bukele hugely popular. Slyly circumventing a constitutional rule that prevents El Salvador’s presidents serving more than one, five-year term, he was re-elected last February with 85 per cent of the vote.

For a sizeable minority, however, the nation’s deliverance from the gangs has come at a heavy price. They are the ones wrongly detained for alleged gang participation or collusion, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence.

The mother of one such boy claims police took him to be a gangster purely because of his haircut. He has since disappeared. Whether the liberation of six million people justifies such iniquities is a matter for debate.

Serving us coffee in a ramshackle cafe near the summit of San Salvador volcano, waitress Yamileph Diaz, aged 20, relates a story that encapsulated the dilemma.

When the gangs controlled this mountainside, her family defied their demands for protection money, and she feared they would carry out a threat to rape her.

Then, in 2019, her brother Jonathan, 27, vanished, never to be seen again. When their tormentors were rounded up, therefore, she praised the president.

But during the first wave of arrests, in 2022, another of her brothers, Joaquin, 25, was accused – unfairly, she insists – of gang activity, and he has been held without trial ever since.

‘So, you see, I have seen both sides of this, and it’s a difficult balance,’ she says. ‘But those men were so terrible, I would still say life is better now than before.’

When those dead eyes stared out at me in CECOT, the following morning, Yamileph’s story came back to me.

Director Garcia ordered some prisoners to stand before me as he reeled off their evildoing.

Number 176834, Eric Alexander Villalobos – alias ‘Demon City’ – had belonged to a sub-clan, or clica, called the Los Angeles Locos. His long list of crimes included planning and conspiring an unspecified number of murders, possessing explosives and weapons, extortion and drug-trafficking. He was serving 867 years.

In 2015, prisoner 126150, Wilber Barahina, alias ‘The Skinny One’, took part in a massacre so ruthless that it even caused shockwaves in a country then thought to be unshockable.

Five builders were kidnapped and put to death simply for working in the ‘wrong area’. For this he was doing 160 years.

Two other gangsters paraded before me had assassinated soldiers and police officers.

As the prison commandant exhibited them they stood like dehumanized statues, motionless even when he prodded their naked torsos to explain the significance of their tattoos.

It struck me, bizarrely, that these intricately inked etchings were the only works of art in the soulless, grey hangar.

Yet along with the symbols of allegiance, and the names of girlfriends and children they would never again see, they depicted images of devil worship and ritual slaughter.

I was permitted one, three-minute interview with a prisoner, but his answers to my questions were so robotic that they seemed to have been scripted.

Sitting before me in a plastic chair with his hands manacled, Marvin Ernesto Medrano confessed to committing ‘many murders’, but said he had been convicted only of two ‘minor’ ones.

In a flat, emotionless voice, he said he was treated well and had his basic needs met.

There was no contrition, no emotional message to his children or show of despair.

Only the bland resignation that he was here for eternity, and a trite message to young people to ‘live a good, family life’ and not follow his example.

Would he rather be dead than serve out his 100-year sentence? He shook his shaved head.

‘You know the saying: if we are alive, we still hope,’ he said, though his words had an empty ring. Then he was led away.

In a ploy designed to ensure gang members don’t band together in their cages and hatch some whispered plot, MS-13 and Barrio 18 rivals have been forced to intermingle.

So far, this policy appears to have paid off, for according to Garcia there have been no attempted insurrections, nor any troublesome outbreaks since the prison opened.

Whether that will change if, and when, Trump sends plane-loads of America’s worst to El Salvador remains to be seen, but the director is confident he and his Darth Vader guards can handle every eventuality.

‘The authorities will decide what happens, but we are ready to receive any kind of criminals, no matter what their profile,’ he told me with a mirthless smile, adding: ‘I am ready!’

Perhaps so. But as this typically Trumpian social experiment unfolds, governments with their own migration crises – among them, of course, Britain – will doubtless follow its progress with keen interest.

For my part, I will never forget those dark, fathomless eyes.

(DailyMail.uk)

WHEN WE GET OUT of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

— D.H. Lawrence

16 Comments

Brian Wood February 9, 2025

Mark writes: “We’ve heard several reports of large sections of local vineyards being ripped out for lack of grape buyers or grape prices dropping below the cost of production. It’s become so bad in some cases that vineyard owners are preparing to file to have their property reassessed to reflect the down market, a market which few think will recover anytime soon, if at all. Therefore, any vineyard owner suffering from Shrinking Vineyard Syndrome will see hipcamps as an easy way to supplement their declining revenues”.

Really? Ripped out vineyards in Anderson Valley? Where?

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- Casey Hartlip February 9, 2025
  
  The last couple of years Valley Foothills vineyards……between Roederer and Navarro has removed numerous very old vines that have been declining. Now is when brave forward thinking owners replant when the market is so far down. You plant now getting ready for the next upswing……. Hopefully.
  
  Reply
  - Mark Scaramella February 9, 2025
    
    From what I’ve heard, most of the vineyard removal is inland/Ukiah-Redwood Valley area, so far.
    
    Reply
Harvey Reading February 9, 2025

HARVEY READING (Wyoming)

My buddy’s was black, with some “golden” trim paint, and, as near as I can remember, came closest to looking like this in terms of shape–https://www.autoevolution.com/moto/ducati-125-aurea-1958.html#aeng_ducati-125-aurea-1958-124. Been a while since I saw one. In fact, his was the only Ducati I ever saw up close.

For a while, in the early 70s, I coveted owning a Norton Commander (750cc). They were quiet, and very fast…but the BSA met my needs and was affordable. The fastest I ever had it up to was 110mph, according the the speedometer on my Brother-in-law’s Pontiac…the one on the BSA was broken beyond repair when I bought it.

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- Chuck Dunbar February 9, 2025
  
  Those were the days, young, brave guys–me too–on fast, fun motorcycles! (I know, many girls these days ride, too.) Thanks, Harvey, for the remembrances.
  
  Reply
Harvey Reading February 9, 2025

THE POT OF GOLD AT AMERICA’S WESTERN EDGE

Fool’s gold if you ask me. I never want to see the state where I was born, having watched it turn into a total POS over the course of the 52 years I spent there. Subdivisions, businesses, and water diversions sprang up like some weird, imported weeds throughout my residency there. How many beautiful vistas were destroyed during that time…the number is greater than I care to imagine. I NEVER want to see the place again. I would only become further appalled if I ever traveled back to that yuppified garbage dump.

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Kimberlin February 9, 2025

THE POT OF GOLD AT AMERICA’S WESTERN EDGE

“California’s population is growing after a period of decline. In 2024, California’s population increased by almost a quarter of a million people, which is close to the record-high levels before the pandemic.”

You have to have some brains but if you do, you head to either New York or California where the opportunities for either art or commerce are at heights rarely seen in past generations. In the early 1900’s there was talk of closing the U.S. Patent Office because “everything has already been invented”. Such is the logic of this article.

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- Bruce McEwen February 9, 2025
  
  Do Re Mi
  Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
  Contact Publisher – TRO-Essex Music Group
  
  Lots of folks back East, they say, is leavin’ home every day,
  Beatin’ the hot old dusty way to the California line.
  ‘Cross the desert sands they roll, gettin’ out of that old dust bowl,
  They think they’re goin’ to a sugar bowl, but here’s what they find
  Now, the police at the port of entry say,
  “You’re number fourteen thousand for today.”
  
  Oh, if you ain’t got the do re mi, folks, you ain’t got the do re mi,
  Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
  California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;
  But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot
  If you ain’t got the do re mi.
  
  You want to buy you a home or a farm, that can’t deal nobody harm,
  Or take your vacation by the mountains or sea.
  Don’t swap your old cow for a car, you better stay right where you are,
  Better take this little tip from me.
  ‘Cause I look through the want ads every day
  But the headlines on the papers always say:
  
  If you ain’t got the do re mi, boys, you ain’t got the do re mi,
  Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
  California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;
  But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot
  If you ain’t got the do re mi.
  
  © Copyright 1961 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI)
  
  Reply
David Stanford February 9, 2025

THIRD DISTRICT SUPERVISOR REPORT

by John Haschak

“The county upholds California’s Values Act”

Only in California and Chicago

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James Tippett February 9, 2025

Thoughts on Bukele’s CECOT prison:

One: in 1981, Ronald Reagan installed anti-communist warrior Thomas Ostram Enders as ambassador to El Salvador, part of his campaign to extirpate communism from Central America following the overthrow of murderous U.S. backed dictator Antonio Somoza in Nicaraugua by socialist Danie Oretga. Enders had made his “bones” in the foreign service as deputy Chief of Mission in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he was responsible for the targeting of Nixon and Kissinger’s secret bombing of Cambodia, killing an hundreds of thousands of Cambodian villagers and leading to the rise of the Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia, killing between 1 and 2 million more Cambodians. (William Shawcross. “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia”. 1979)

In El Salvador, Enders was instrumental in giving the American okay to the paramilitary death squads, the “White Hand of Death,” which killed an estimated 71,000, 1-2% of El Salvadorans and led to an influx of refugees from the rampant killing, fleeing to El Norte in the hopes of finding peace. Out of the children of those refugees and their trauma arose MS-13 and Barrio 18, whose members, deported back to their home country, exported gang violence with them, eventually resulting in Bukele’s questionable, but effective solution, the CECOT prison.

Two: Seeing the lines of subjugated and psychologically defeated men on the floor of the prison reminded me curiously of the “Unsullied” of Game of Thrones. Given sufficient nutrition, physical conditioning and military training, Bukele’s convicts could make a savage fighting force, should climate or other factors sour their jailers attitudes toward El Norte. Another case of “blowback” in waiting?

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Katherine Houston February 9, 2025

Bruce McEwen:
Thanks for the memories of the prelim and motions in the case of the Bulgarian pot growers up in the national forest. Regardless what the defense attorneys thought of him, doing a court hearing with Pete Hoyle was a pure pleasure. He was always prepared, and fully aware of the limits of the Constitution on his conduct. And I enjoyed doing motions with Ann Moorman and Jan Cole-Wilson as well; both are outstanding attorneys. I miss your reporting on criminal matters, more so now that I’m retired.

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- Bruce McEwen February 9, 2025
  
  Delighted to hear from you, my dear Ms Houston, a Scotswoman after my own ken and a loyal reader, one of many fine denizens of the courthouse I could count on for coffee money in ex change for a fresh AVA , hot off the press, delivered with a smile and once as I was hawking my hacks in front of Schat’s with a lean and hungry look, I espied Agent Hoyle going in the back door and meeting my eye he summoned—wait, strike that— he beckoned me over to show me the “evidence” in the Bulgo case: $360,000+/- US currency in a Raley’s grocery bag. Those were heady days. And it looks like there’s more action to come.
  Again, absolutely delighted to hear from you, Katherine Houston. Hope your team wins today!
  
  Reply
- Eric Sunswheat February 12, 2025
  
  Spot On Mr. McEwen
  
  RE: Regardless what the defense attorneys thought of him, doing a court hearing with Pete Hoyle was a pure pleasure. He was always prepared, and fully aware of the limits of the Constitution on his conduct. — Katherine Houston
  
  —> According to the local “marijuana cultivating community,” the legendary Hoyle has a reputation for audacious and sometimes devious maneuvers. Attorneys Cole-Wilson and Moorman seemed especially wary of Hoyle’s methods, as the hearing began with Ms. Houston’s direct examination… — Bruce McEwen
  
  Reply
A Harpy February 9, 2025

TRUCK IN WATER

‘The photo is self-explanatory…🤔 I hadn’t noticed the truck in the water…
should also build the truck owner🤔, for their time for this is preventable depending (KEY WORD) on what environmental issues – that may occur, from this stupid drivers (MORE THAN ONE?) lack of responsibility, fish and wildlife should consider heavy fines against the owner of the truck, and the driver, the pollution to the river, for this was not an accident, but a deliberate, attempt to cross the road, that most locals know (DRIVER IS MOST PROBABLY NOT LOCAL) is closed all winter long.

I remember Hurricane Alicia in 1983. I was visiting my parents in Houston in 1983, when Alicia made landfall as a category 3 hurricane on the west end…the eye passing over the western half of the Houston Metropolitan area.

My new boss made going to work MANDATORY, so, I took off in my 1966 VW.

I remember big-‘ole-trucks passing me at about 100 miles an hour, I decided to drive a different way. I got off the beaten path, and went into a neighborhood, not knowing it was River Oaks, the most exclusive neighborhood in Texas, where homes are built up high. I climbed up, and over their front yards, and travelled across until I found myself downtown (no pun intended).

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David Stanford February 10, 2025

THE TRUMP II ADMINISTRATION
by John Arteaga
(John Arteaga is a Ukiah resident.)

So am I John,
you are a nut job, and you are letting the DONALD live in your head rent free, maybe you should charge him rent for all the problem you are having with him, good luck PAL, you should unplug for a while before it ruins your view and enjoyment on life!!!!!!

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David Stanford February 10, 2025

MUSK’S LOST BOYS AND TRUMP’S MEAN GIRLS
by Maureen Dowd

I think she is coming around to the Donald’s point of view, he can be very persuasive with his E.O.’s!!!!!!

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Mendocino County Today: Sunday 2/9/2025

16 Comments

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