Mendocino County Today: Friday 2/21/2025

By AVA News Service on February 21, 2025

DRY AND WARMER weather continues today. Chance of rain returns this weekend and continues into early next week. Gusty southerly winds expected along the North Coast and over the interior mountains this weekend and early next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 39F under passing high clouds this Friday morning on the coast. Crescent City might get well over 4" of rain but while we might get a shower as the system stays to our north. We could see some rain Saturday night & some scattered chances next week but nothing of note. Do take care near the shore today as we have a beach hazard warning in place for "sneaker waves", the sudden large waves we should all be familiar with by now.

CUBBISON CASE SPECULATION

by Mark Scaramella

Item 3b: on the Supervisors Special Closed Session agenda for Thursday (Feb. 20) was: “Pursuant to Government Code section 54956.9(d)(1) - Conference with Legal Counsel - Existing Litigation: One Case - Cubbison v. County of Mendocino, et al., Mendocino County Superior Court, Case No. 23CV01231.”

Here’s the original Board resolution that suspended elected Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison without pay.

It is dated October 17, 2023, more than 16 months ago.

On Monday, February 24, 2025 the long-delayed preliminary hearing in the criminal case against Cubbison and former Payroll Manager P.J. Kennedy is set to resume, sometime after which Judge Ann Moorman is expected to make a decision on whether the charges should be dropped or if the case should continue almost indefinitely.

What are the odds that Judge Moorman will do the right thing and rule that the charges are bogus and that no crime has occurred, much less been demonstrated?

There’s obviously no evidence of criminal intent. There are missing emails. There’s confusion about the use of the obscure paycode involved and who approved it. There’s no personal gain on the part of Cubbison. The citation the Supervisors used to “suspend” Cubbison without pay was incorrect. Cubbison was suspended without being given an opportunity to respond to the “charges.”

Nevertheless, this is Mendocino County, so we’d set the odds at less than 1 in 4 that Moorman will end this costly fiasco.

If Moorman were to do the unexpected and stop the bleeding, what would happen next? Apparently, Ms. Cubbison wants her job back, with back pay. Would she come back with all the drama that would involve? Are there circumstances or settlement conditions under which Cubbison would drop her civil suit? Two of the key Supervisors who wanted Cubbison out are gone, replaced with Supervisors who were not in on the original suspension. One of the remaining Supervisors voted against suspending Cubbison with pay. Is there any chance the current board would try to settle the case? How would DA David Eyster react?

If Moorman does as expected in the sordid tradition of Mendo Justice and lets the case muddle forward, how long can the unelected/appointed “acting” Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Sara Pierce continue “acting”? What if Cubbison were to run for re-election when the time comes (with the case is still, possibly, ongoing), presumably against Pierce? How would a jury of ordinary Mendolanders see this case if it were to go to trial? (We don’t think the County/Supervisors would look very good, given what we’ve seen so far.) Is the public interest served by letting this ridiculous — and fundamentally very petty — situation drag on and on?

The speculation is, of course, endless, either way. We have barely scratched the surface of the implications, none of which are good, but ending it would be less bad than letting it fester.

In a sane County, the Supervisors and Cubbison would come to some kind of fair settlement and she would return to her independently elected job, albeit awkwardly. Burying the hatchet would put the entire fiasco behind us, albeit with some residual bad feelings.

Don’t the Supervisors have more important things to deal with these days? Is there no adult leadership in Mendocino County?

REPORT FROM A SMALL FARM IN BOONVILLE

Hi friends,

The weather's been erratic to say the least. After a completely dry January (our formerly rainiest month) we're making up for it this month. Looking forward at the ten day forecast it seems as though spring is coming which means all the stone fruits will bud out after the rain we just had. Let's hope it stays spring or a lot of buds will die.

Speaking of which, Oreo, our breeder male yak, died last weekend in the lower field. Juan found him on Monday. There was no sign of struggle and we hope he just keeled over with a heart attack. He was 18 years old and yaks can live for 20 or more. His mate, Kayak, is alone now and although we gave her the opportunity to join her children, five of whom graze in another field across the farm, she refused by jumping several fences several times to return to her old field. She must have become confused (or adventuresome) one afternoon because when I was putting the chickens to bed at dusk, I found her standing in our driveway in front of the house. That means she crossed the cattle guard to get there! It took a bit of cajoling and hypertension on our parts to keep her from heading down to the highway. We called Juan to come help and managed to get her into the swale area where some of the chickens live and the fences are good. Next morning, to block her, Juan moved two vehicles onto the driveway leading down to the road and let her out to walk back across the cattle guard (which she does easily!) and from there she immediately headed to her old field. She's now there alone. And all this time we thought cattle guards kept bovines from wandering and that yaks were herd animals.

There's little else to report. We are in cleanup and prep mode…pruning, grafting, seeding, sowing, and moving plantings, and, in the kitchen, jamming up all the cambros of frozen fruit saved from last year. Of course we are also keeping up with the news which has our country taking a flying leap from high places into the void. Face plants (the only kind of planting these folks do) are coming for the evil doers but first a lot of undeserving folks are being badly hurt. Hard to stomach. We do our best to support those fighting the evil and we're sure you do too.

Stay well, Nikki Auschnitt and Steve Krieg

Boonville

Petit Teton Farm, February 2025

Fresh now: Turmeric, chard, kale, broccolini, herbs, mizuna mustard

All the preserved foods from jams to pickles, soups to hot sauces, made from everything we grow.

We sell frozen USDA beef and pork from perfectly raised pigs and cows.

Squab is also available at times.

Open Mon-Sat 9-4:30, Sun 12-4:30.

18601 Hwy 128 - Mile Marker 33.39

WINE JARGON TRANSLATED

Editor:

I read the Press Democrat report on the jargon-filled Wine Industry Network. Listen to the language used by experts to describe the future of the wine business: “navigate coming consolidations,” “innovate and build strong trade partnerships,” “improving consumer sentiment,” “unwinding of pandemic-related distortions,” “change the psychology in the industry,” “decision-making paralysis,” “plan for a more pessimistic scenario,” “innovative marketing to stand out,” “seismic shift,” “embrace challenges as opportunities for innovation and adaptation.”

Whew, ever heard such a pile of bile?

I’m a small vineyard owner, and the shocking truth is that in the past three years every sector, segment and sliver of the wine industry, top to bottom, all tiers — everyone blew it. The job of wineries is simple: buy grapes, make wine, market wine, sell wine. The industry has been an abject failure in every aspect of its responsibilities and obligations.

The industry needs to adopt a new mantra and post it in bold letters all over every winery. It should be: We don’t react to the market. We make the market. Sell wine.

Tom Johnson

Redwood Valley

THE YOLLA BOLLIES

Mike Williams:

The Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness is worth the effort to get to. From inland Mendocino County the main access is through Covelo and on up to Indian Dick Station across Balm of Gilead Creek to Upper Glade. For the very hearty continue on to Frying Pan Meadow, the actual headwaters of the Eel River. An easier access point but longer drive is to go out to the valley to Corning turn back west to Paskenta and take the Forest Service road to the Square Lake trailhead. It’s only about a mile and a half to Square Lake where the feel is that of the High Sierra, on the edge of Mt Linn the highest point in the Yolla Bolly, over 8,000 feet. A couple miles farther is Long Lake and connecting trails to the Middle Eel River. Another entry point is to go north to Ruth Lake and then take the Forest Service road south to North Yolla Bolly Lake. This area is over 250,000 acres of remote undeveloped wilderness. You might not see anyone for days, at least that’s the way it was some years ago.

Kirk Vodopals:

A few years back I piled my family into the van and headed out to the Yolla Bollies. Our destination was Balm of Gillead Creek recommended by a friend.

We were heading up the M1 around dusk through a scorched landscape with the occasional burnt out vehicle when my wife turns to me and says nervously, “this is where all the murderers dump the bodies.”

We barreled on in the dark up the ridge about nine miles until they’d had enough of the bumps and the dust. I parked the van at a wide spot and hopped out with the dog to enjoy the stars and a beer. My wife promptly locked the door with her and the girls inside.

Woke up the next morning and, amazingly enough, we were at a (maybe the) trailhead. Hiked two miles down to the creek and found a small but lovely swimming hole. The missus and the girls packed as many slate rocks as they could as we hiked back up the ridge. Never found Balm of Gilead.

Spent one more night on a mosquito infested and warm ridge sipping champagne and eating snacks. Rolled out the next day hearing noises from the engine. Water pump broke in Ukiah. Called a friend and got a ride home. Great trip!

Also did another trip about 20 years ago with some high school friends. Never saw so many rattlesnakes in such a short hike ever. Interesting place!

ED NOTES

PEERING BACK through the mists of time, I think it was Jack LaLanne, who died at age 96 after years of yogurt and clean living. Yogurt was unknown. Exercise may have been known in the 1950s but few adults made daily aerobics integral to their lives, the paradox being that fat people were a rare sight.

IT WAS LALANNE who first got me thinking about diet and the vigorous life. I got a kick out of his television presentations, viewing him as the Liberace of physical fitness, kinda effete but the sucker was strong! He was always in the news lifting the back end of an Olds 88 or pulling a box car with his teeth. I have a vague memory of him swimming handcuffed from Alcatraz to Fisherman's Wharf.

IT ALSO struck me that a lot of the moves that Lalanne demonstrated didn't have much to do with fitness, but that far back, nobody seemed to know much about exercise, least of all the high school coaches I hoped would lead me to glory on the fields of play.

HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL was a benightedly inefficient regimen of, “OK, take a lap around the track and do twenty push-ups if you ever get back. Then we'll do a couple of nutcrackers and run through the plays none of you morons can remember.”

COACHES weren't much for handholding in those days. Self-esteem was unknown as a concept, and would have been sneered at if it was known.

BASKETBALL consisted of half-court drills with the only sustained running occurring in the games; and baseball, well, look at Babe Ruth. (Media note: In the 40s and 50s major league teams travelled by train. Sports writers had their own car. One of them remembered the night Ruth, naked, came running through their car, a nude woman brandishing a butcher's knife right behind him. “There goes another story we can't write,” he said.

BUT there was always Jack LaLanne saying things like, “Would you give your dog a cigarette and a donut for breakfast?” Probably, if that's what the dog wanted, but even back in the Dumb Days when doctors not only smoked, so did most pro athletes, but most of us knew, or at least intuited, that a smoke and a jelly donut was contraindicated.

MOM was still laying out from-scratch sit-down meals consisting of the major food groups in more or less their natural states — pan fried hamburger steak was still protein and the jello had fresh slices of carrot in it. And there was all the milk you could drink.

THESE DAYS, I see young mommies loading their kids up on negative food value items so vile that a cigarette and a donut look positively nourishing alongside churros and pepperoni sticks. And this packaged poison is expensive! The kid is already fat and pre-diabetic and destined for a wheelchair when he's forty.

OF ALL THE CLASSES disappeared from high school curriculums, the loss of home economics courses may have hurt the most citizens. Here in Boonville we were blessed with a highly skilled lady named Gloria Ross who taught kids the basics of healthy meal prep and how to eat well on modest outlays of cash. Mrs. Ross's home-ec class, along with mandatory PE, are long gone.

WE SEEM to be going backwards in the food and exercise department, even though exercise is refined these days to models of gainful efficiency on nifty machines and racks of dumbells. But lots of people still don't understand that eating right without exercise is a waste of time, and most people still don't work their bodies at all despite the daily barrage of How-To advice.

LIKE MOST PEOPLE, I've suffered through basic physical exams, which are more humiliating with the years when they aren't plainly infantilizing. Even at the very last stop on the actuarial charts, I easily beat the treadmill and ace the upper-bod strength tests, basking in the medical professional's faux amazement. “How old are you again, Mr. Anderson?” Shucks, ma'am, 112. (Your knees go, but vanity never does.)

PLEASE, Mr. Editor, you geriatric paragon, tell us how you do it. An hour a day of brisk walking, often uphill; that and lots of push-ups which, total time, occupy about an hour a day, even given my ongoing struggle with the debilitating consequences of my new econo-throat, the one that comes without a voice or the dual senses of taste and smell. There are days when I'm reluctant to push myself out the door for the hour-long trudge, but I see it as an opportunity to listen to books on tape, and off I go. If I miss a day, I feel off, way off.

DIET? Whatever, but granola and fruit breakfast and lunch, big salads for dinner, no processed foods if I can avoid them, an apple crisp when I feel the need to break the austerity barrier.

NOTE on what else is missing from the contemporary K-12 curriculum — penmanship. Watch a young person death-grip his or her pen like a dagger preparatory to plunging it in an enemy's chest. See the ensuing child-like script, a mix of block letters and swirling cursive, hearts over dotted i's if the writer is a woman, just the blocks if a man. Techno-life being what it is, the only handwritten letters we receive anymore are from prisoners, many of whom write a nice, if unique, hand developed script over years of isolation, paper and pencil.

FORT BRAGG MILL SITE REUSE WORKSHOP

Join us on Tuesday, Feb 25 at 5:00 PM at Town Hall for a public workshop starting at 5:30 PM. This is your chance to help shape the future of the Mill Site!

In-person only (no Zoom), so come ready to ask questions, share ideas, and get involved.

Can’t make it in person? Tune in live on the City’s website, Facebook, or Channel 3.

Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity to impact Fort Bragg's future! Full details: https://www.city.fortbragg.com/home/showdocument?id=6408

WRITERS READ IN UKIAH. THUR., FEB. 27

Poets & Friends,

Writers Read will meet on Thursday, February 27 at 7PM at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah. The featured reader will be Fort Bragg poet Larry Felson.

Larry Felson grew up in La Mesa, in San Diego County, and moved to the Bay Area in the 1960s, where he was introduced to the realms of poetry and revolutionary politics. He earned a BA and MA from San Francisco State University where he received the Academy of American Poets Award. Along the way, he worked on the docks and shipyards, was a taxi driver, taught creative writing at the Oakland Juvenile Hall, conducted writing workshops with Poetry in the Schools, and became a social justice activist. He participated in a long-standing Bay Area poetry workshop that included Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, George Stanley, and Steven Rood, taught English at Oakland High School for several years, and creative writing and Greek Literature at the Hellenic International School of the Arts in Paros, Greece.

Felson currently coordinates, with Joe Smith, the Poetry-At-The-Cobalt-Gallery reading series in Fort Bragg, Ca. He is a member of the Mendocino County Poet Laureates Committee, a contributor to Revolution Newspaper/Revcom.us., and a volunteer with the International Emergency Campaign to Free Iran’s Political Prisoners Now (IEC). He moved from Oakland to the Mendocino coast 8 years ago where he now resides surrounded by birds, trees, ocean, cliffs, and open space. “Living here, Pegasus arrives almost every day and night and insists on taking me for a ride to places I’ve never been, where I discover new flora and fauna, real and imagined, and explore dimensions of reality, feeling, and thought beyond the limits of the ‘possible’ in the ‘known’ world.”

Publications: The Engine of Light (Littoral Press, 2024), Dawn Out of Order, Littoral Press, 2022), Salt and Silver (Paroikia Press, 2004), Body Song (Elephant Press, 1970), and was featured in the anthology, Five on the Western Edge (Momo’s Press, 1977).

An open mic session will follow the featured reading. Maximum time for each reader is six minutes. Event will end at 9 PM.

Other Events

Friday, February 28, 6:30 PM. Grace Hudson Museum. Benefit reading to help publish Spirit of Place: Mendocino County Women Poets Anthology. $10 donation.

Upcoming Featured Readers

March 27—Devreaux Baker (rescheduled from rained-out reading of Nov. 2024)

April 24—Haiku Night (in connection with Sun., Apr. 27 Ukiah Haiku Festival)

May 29—Denise Low

June 26—Zida Borcich

July—No event. Summer break.

Writers Read happens on the last Thursday of almost every month and has been happening in Ukiah since 1999. This reading series is sponsored by an anonymous local writer, Colored Horse Studios, Michael Riedell, Dan Barth, the Poet Laureate Committee of Ukiah, the Grace Hudson Museum and donations.

Headland Cove, Point Lobos (2015) by Phyllis Shafer

JOIN THE RESISTANCE ON FEBRUARY 28TH

Dear Editor,

The insults to democracy keep coming. But those of us who are old enough remember, know that the people of America once stopped a war — the Vietnam War.

On February 28th, you can join the resistance. Do not buy anything! No Amazon, no WalMart, no nothing. (Emergencies like medication and such, are the exception). The American people are not powerless — the power of the pocketbook is huge and sends a message to the corporate overlords that they can’t ignore.

Continue demonstrating, continue contacting your representatives and tell the Democrats to take off the gloves. They don’t have to be polite to their spineless GOP colleagues, they need to call out the lies and executive overreach loudly in Congress and the Senate. Their job is to advise and consent, not to enable the take-over of our government by a bunch of rich billionaires, aka oligarchs.

We need to organize and learn to flex our political muscles. Withholding $$ is a good place to start. One time may not make a difference, but if we stand together and get enough people to do this regularly, the result will hit them where it hurts, the pocketbook.

February 28th! Fight back!

Julie Beardsley

Ukiah

THE EEL RIVER RECOVERY PROJECT TO HOST ‘FOREST HEALTH EXTRAVAGANZA' at Harwood Hall in Laytonville March 29th, 2025

Community Event will feature information and resources about Prescribed Fire

The Eel River Recovery Project and the Northern Mendocino Ecosystem Recovery Alliance are hosting a free community event at Harwood Hall in Laytonville on March 29th, 2025 to celebrate, motivate, and educate Mendocino County locals about the groundswell of forest health work happening in the region.

A growing network of groups, tribes and practitioners are changing the way we approach forest management, organizing among watersheds and neighborhoods for fire protection, and using large grant programs to collaboratively restore ecosystem vitality through thinning and the use of good fire. The Forest Health Extravaganza is an opportunity to meet experts working in the field, learn about the exciting work happening in our forests and watersheds, and find out how to bring vital restoration and fire protection resources to your own neighborhood.

This year’s Forest Health Extravaganza will begin with a keynote address by Margo Robbins, co-founder of the Cultural Fire Management Council and Yurok tribal member, who was featured in the recent documentary “Firelighters.”

The Extravaganza Program includes a report back to the community by ERRP about the ambitious Tenmile Watershed Forest Health Project, funded by a $5.9 million grant from CalFire, that is bringing together dozens of local landowners on over 900 acres to restore and protect woodlands in the Tenmile drainage. On another panel, local watershed groups and the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council will share success stories from across the county in their efforts to create firewise communities that “survive and thrive in our wildfire prone environment.” A third panel will feature Burn Boss Scot Steinbring of Torchbearr, Calfire MEU Chief Brandon Gunn, and other prescribed and cultural fire practitioners to share knowledge, resources and opportunities for integrating fire into restoration and ongoing land stewardship.

The following day, Sunday, March 30, ERRP will lead a site visit to the Vassar Ranch unit of the Tenmile Forest Health Project. If conditions are favorable, Torchbearr will conduct a hands-on burn at the unit. The community is welcome to join. Interested members of the public are encouraged to sign up for the site visit by clicking this link: March 30th 2025 Laytonville RX Burn Workshop RSVP

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cDzRpB46epz3zg6g2xqiss-tVLq20zUPGYAVA1RrFj8/edit?gid=1671326613#gid=1671326613

The Forest Health Extravaganza is free and open to all community members. Local nonprofits and the Cahto Tribe will have info tables, with many opportunities for networking and making local connections. Lunch and dinner will be served at no cost to attendees.

For more information please contact Extravaganza Coordinator Alicia Bales at abaleslittletree@gmail.com or Eel River Recovery Project Executive Director Pat Higgins at phiggin@sonic.net

BORN IN THE USA

by Sarah Nathe

With birthright citizenship everywhere in the news these days, it’s an opportune time to remember the local boy who set the first legal precedent in the process that led to the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court ruling affirming citizenship for children born in the United States.

Look Tin Eli was born in 1870 in the back of his father’s grocery store on Mendocino’s Main Street (kitty-corner from where Gallery Books is). He was sent to his father’s home in Guangzhou, China in 1879 so he could learn the language and become familiar with the culture. Three years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed to bar most Chinese people from entering the country and ban them from becoming naturalized citizens.

Upon Look’s return to San Francisco in 1884, he was denied entry because he lacked the necessary paperwork prescribed under the 1882 act. At the time, birth certificates were not yet regularly issued in the U.S. and passports were rare. Look challenged the decision to detain him at Angel Island and won his case in the U.S. Circuit Court of San Francisco. The ruling by Justice Stephen Field enlarged upon the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had been adopted in 1868 to grant citizenship and equal rights to African Americans and emancipated slaves with the umbrella phrase: “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” Field declared that children born in U.S. jurisdictions are citizens regardless of ancestry.

Look Tin Eli and his brother, Look Poong Shan, in a photograph taken at a Fort Bragg studio circa 1900. (Photographer: W. T. Fitch; Gift of Mrs. Archie Gordon in 1973)

Look went home to his family in Mendocino, where he attended the Big River Township public school. In 1888, when he was 18, he graduated from the intermediate division, which was equivalent to 6th grade nowadays. Thereafter, he worked in his father’s grocery store and, when his father died in 1894, he and his brother, Look Poong Shan, inherited the store and ran it. At about the same time, Look began his association with import-export businesses in San Francisco and undertook a few working trips back to China. In time, Look established the first Chinese-American bank in San Francisco, had a large hand in the resurrection of Chinatown after the 1906 earthquake, and started a steamship company that carried goods between the U.S. and China. His was a Chinese-American success story.

Look Tin Eli: The Mendocino Visionary Who Helped Shape the Chinese-American Experience, by Robert S. Becker and Jane Tillis

The life of Mendocino-born visionary Look Tin Eli was one of national significance. As a teenager returning home from China in 1884, his illegal detention instigated a court battle, culminating in the state's legal precedent granting full citizenship for all native-born Californians. After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, he was instrumental in establishing Chinatown as a business center and tourist destination. He founded the first Chinese-owned bank, the Canton Bank of San Francisco, and he started the China Mail steamship company. With almost fifty historic images, this first book-length profile of Look Tin Eli brings to life the cultural and commercial achievements of this remarkable trailblazer. $30.

https://www.kelleyhousemuseum.org/product/look-tin-eli-the-mendocino-visionary-who-helped-shape-the-chinese-american-experience/

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, February 20, 2025

KENNETH BUTTREY, 66, Willits. Failure to appear.

SERJIO GONZALEZ, 48, Ukiah. Parole violation.

SUMMER GREENLEAF, 47, Willits. Under influence, resisting.

MOUNTAIN JAMES, 19, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-solicitation of lewd act.

CARISSA MORTON, 28, Nice/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

KENNY NAGLE, 40, Redwood Valley. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.15%.

MICHAEL OWEN, 36, Ukiah. Robbery, taking vehicle without owner’s consent, resisting.

JASON PITTMAN, 39, Gualala. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

PAUL SCHOCK, 24, Philo. Probation revocation.

WILLIAM YOUNG, 36, Willits. Under influence.

MARY CALLAHAN, LONG-TIME PD REPORTER, THE EXIT INTERVIEW

by Chris Fusco

Press Democrat reporter Mary Callahan walks up a coastal hillside while gathering information for a story north of Jenner on Thursday, October 27, 2022. (Christopher Chung/The Press Democrat)

When you think about The Press Democrat, it’s hard not to think about Mary Callahan, who retired last week after 32 years covering everything from government to crime to the environment, with flair, fairness, toughness and grace.

Thankfully, Mary is allowing her husband, Press Democrat visual journalist John Burgess, to stay on our payroll, so we’re hoping she’ll stop by our newsroom periodically to visit us.

Mary’s editor for the past three-plus years, John D’Anna, suggested we devote an “In the Newsroom” newsletter to Mary. D'Anna is full of good ideas, and this is another one.

So with that, here’s the Mary Callahan exit interview, edited for clarity and length:

Q: You took an interesting career path into journalism, growing up outside St. Paul, Minnesota, then attending high school in the South Bay, then becoming a professional ballet dancer, and then becoming a journalist. Tell us about that.

A: I had a very influential teacher in high school – an almost completely white, affluent school – who sort of opened my eyes to the implications of that, and to injustice and inequity in the world. I became very idealistic after having been somewhat sheltered as a kid. I thought that I wanted to do something other than change things, but I was also ballet dancing very seriously, seven days a week. While I planned to attend UC Berkeley after high school and eventually pursue journalism, I couldn’t bring myself to quit dancing. So I ended up going to New York, got a scholarship for the American Ballet Theatre school, retrained and danced professionally with a couple of smaller companies for several years. I was pretty skilled but never attained the level I dreamed of, and I had this bad right hip. (It’s still bad.) It was in an acute stage and I just quit, quite abruptly, moved back home to start college and sort of fell right back into journalism.

Q: How old were you?

A: I was 24. … My parents lived in the South Bay, and I moved back in with them. I went to junior college, with a brief interlude to dance with a modern (ballet) company for a season. Then I went to San Jose State, where we had a daily newspaper that was an incredible training ground.

Q: So what was your first newspaper gig after internships?

A: I got approached by the Gilroy Dispatch. … I covered City Hall. Gilroy had been a farm community for ages but was becoming a bedroom community for the Bay Area, growing commercially and encountering more urban problems and issues, so it was pretty interesting. And then I got a job at The Press Democrat.

Q: You started in the Mendocino County bureau in Ukiah in 1992 and eventually worked your way into the main newsroom. I know 32 years is a long time, but can you recall your most memorable stories?

A: I covered so many murders and weird crimes in the early years. For one I had to drive to Humboldt County in the dark and pounding rain because of a long-haul trucker named Wayne Adam Ford who had walked into the sheriff’s office with a severed breast in a plastic bag in his pocket. It turns out he had murdered at least four women – hitchhikers and sex workers – dismembered them and left them around California. Some of their body parts he kept frozen in the freezer in his trailer, then partially buried some of them at a campsite he made in rural Trinidad. I spent several days walking in his footsteps, covering the arraignment, and trying to find out about this guy. It was a really wild case. That was in 1998.

The next year, a North Coast mom, her teenage daughter and a teenage friend from Argentina disappeared on a Valentine’s Day trip to Yosemite. They were missing for a while, then their car was found, and eventually all the victims were found dead, one sexually assaulted. I was pregnant and traveling back and forth to the Yosemite area for several months. At one point, I had just gotten back to the newsroom, learned police had found the car and turned around and went back. They caught the guy right before I went on maternity leave, and it was the last story I wrote. It was incredibly sad. The grandparents held down the search center in Modesto, and I got to know all the families well.

I think I’ve had two favorite days on the job. One was spending a day in 2009 with former Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan and a bunch other people from the Apollo missions at the Peanuts Museum, which hosted this daylong event about Snoopy’s connection to the moon missions. It was amazing. The other was July 1, 2013, a daylong marathon of same-sex weddings at the Sonoma County Clerk's Office after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act.

Covering the last drought was super interesting because it was so severe and so dire, and there were really profound impacts for agriculture that got really involved in terms of water rights and stuff. I’ve been kind of obsessed since high school with how much we take our water supply for granted, and how little clean water there is in the world, and how it’s declining. It felt really important for people to understand what was at stake.

I’ve also been involved in ongoing coverage of ocean health and the collapse of the kelp forest, in part due to a marine heat wave a decade ago that contributed to large-scale changes in the ocean ecosystem right in our backyard. I think it was so profound because it was happening below the water, unbeknownst to most of us, and had such extensive ramifications. I kind of couldn’t believe either was happening. One of the researchers I’ve worked with later likened it to the disappearance of the remaining redwood forests and related wildlife. Before 2014 or so, the kelp forests supported a rich ecosystem, with life stretching from the sea floor to the surface, and up the food chain, supporting recreational and commercial fisheries and some of the North Coast’s most iconic wildlife, including abalone. Abalone fishing has completely closed down now for years. That was a $44 million-a-year industry that was a huge tradition on the North Coast.

Q: You covered the trial of Richard Allen Davis, who eventually was convicted for the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas. Ten years later, he agreed to an interview at San Quentin State Prison. Your husband, Press Democrat visual journalist John Burgess, told that story at your newsroom sendoff. I’d like to hear your version …

A: I had thought it would be what you see on TV, where you got on the phone and the glass separates you. But it turns out there’s this giant, multiunit cage in the death row visiting area, and you have to sign a waiver that says you know that they won’t negotiate if you’re taken hostage. You’re allowed plain paper and two pencils, and then they lock you in this little cage with him and bring him in and take his handcuffs off through little gap in the bars. … I learned some really interesting things over the course of five or six hourlong interviews: Davis’ dysfunctional childhood and his anger toward his mother are so profound and obvious, but he’s just a slippery guy who messes around with the truth a lot. … One of the things that I’ll always remember is him telling me that his mother told him that “the best part of you was left on the bed, left on the sheets,” when he was born, and I just thought that was the cruelest thing a mother could say to a child. I couldn’t conceive of how that would affect someone psychologically. … I wanted to pull the threads together somehow and figure out why he did what he did to Polly, but I never got it out of him.

Q: What’s your advice to the next generation of reporters?

A: It’s hard to say because they’re so good. But when I interviewed at The Press Democrat, I said, “I know the world likes to see things in black and white, and I will always see the world as gray … or at least start with that premise that things may not be as black and white as they appear.” I think we’re so cynical at this point because we’ve seen so much fraud and betrayal in our society, but as a reporter I always wanted to treat people like people first. Maybe there were times that held me back in my reporting, but I still think it’s important. … You’re going to see people make decisions that defy understanding, but it’s not always because they are bad people (though of course, sometimes they’re awful.) So I guess I want the next generation to think about that, especially at this time in our country’s history.

HOW TO FILTER WATER

EUREKA FEDERAL EMPLOYEES WERE FIRED OVER THE WEEKEND. AGENCY SPOKESPEOPLE CAN’T OR WON’T SAY HOW MANY.

by Ryan Burns

On Monday afternoon, the Outpost was contacted by a local federal worker asking us to report on employees at Redwood National Park and Six Rivers National Forest who’d been fired over the weekend.

“The Trump/Musk administration sent them termination notices citing their insufficient fitness and qualifications for their positions, which is categorically false,” the tipster reported. “Park operations are officially in jeopardy and it’s going to have significant impacts on the tourism industry, not to mention the health of our public lands.”

Over the past few days, the U.S. Forest Service has fired about 3,400 recent hires while the National Park Service fired about 1,000 workers as part of President Donald Trump’s push to cut federal spending and bureaucracy. The layoffs left some fired workers suddenly without housing and sparked alarm among conservation agencies.

“Allowing parks to hire seasonal staff is essential, but staffing cuts of this magnitude will have devastating consequences for parks and communities,” National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) President Theresa Pierno said in a statement.

Employees were blindsided by the move. …

https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2025/feb/19/local-federal-employees-were-fired-over-weekend-ag

OPERATION GREENSWEEP

by Paul Modic

It's the 30th anniversary of Operation Greensweep when the army invaded to wipe out marijuana gardens on the Northcoast. The formerly dirty hippies transformed into upstanding citizens by the good ol' do re mi, had been riding the boom for fifteen years and were shocked to see the copters dive right through the fog to look for plants.

Every afternoon for a week when the helicopters got too noisy a hundred nouveau riche hippies drove up to the staging area to demonstrate, chanting “U S out of Humboldt County!” It was the classic growers protesting the cops.

Ray Rafael wrote a story about it for “High Times.”

Then it was off to Shelter Cove for brunch at the Pelican's Landing.

Those were the days, demo and brunch!

And now the Weed Report

It's been another weird year in weed.

When it was really dry last June someone sold a three year old pound for 12.

Others were getting over 13 for last year's no-name flavors.

You could wait and try to get more later but ya never know how the market will be — it's a crazy business, sell it now for whatever you can get.

STEVE HEILIG:

Well, can’t say I quite grasp what y’all talkin’ about poor Bob here [on the AVA comment line], he has always refused all labels, esp. political, but on a more local level here’s a little slice from West Marin, c1973….

Peter Rowan: I had moved to Stinson Beach on the coast, north of San Francisco, where I was reunited with Earth Opera partner David Grisman. David was producing my two younger brothers, Christopher and Lorin, for Columbia Records. Dave and I were starting to jam with Jerry Garcia in what became the bluegrass band, Old & In The Way.

I got a call from Seatrain lyricist, Jim Roberts, over in Bolinas. Bob Dylan had shown up at his door. [He] must have been on a walkabout from life as a rock and roller! Jim said that Bob was looking to replace his favourite guitar, which had been stolen. I had my treasured 1936 Martin 000 Sunburst guitar and [he wanted to know] did I maybe want to sell it to Bob? Well, Bob got on the line and we talked. But I still thought it was a hoax, a prank, a joke on me.

I gave Bob directions how to find my place, Old Sheriff Selmer’s barn-workshop-home. ‘Yeah, ya just follow the Bolinas Lagoon south and turn at the first unpaved road that heads towards the ocean, Stinson Beach. Call from the phone booth right there.’ So he called. ‘Okay, ya see that wooden tower just to your right? Drive up and park in front of it, the big yellow barn. Calle del Ribera. That’s me upstairs in the window!’

I watched the blue van pull up. Out stepped a man in brown corduroy clothes and cap. I watched him find his way and listened to his footsteps on the wooden stairs. In the room was my partner Leslie, and Milan and Mimi Melvin (aka Fariña), just returned from Tibet. We were used to visits from various world travellers and alias members of the Free Mexican Airforce. We waited. Only Bob’s nose entered the doorway, sensing like radar the vibes! I went to greet him, he seemed taller than expected, wearing shades. ‘Someplace we can go?’ he asked quietly. We went downstairs to the empty front room with ocean light filling it. We both were wearing Ray-Ban shades against the glare of the wave-tossed sea outside.

I took the old Martin 000 out of the case and handed it to him. He strummed it gently and hummed a melody. He handed it back and said, ‘Here, you play it.’ Really? So I sang him one of my songs, and asked him for one. He took the guitar and started to sing all the material from the unreleased Blood On The Tracks. We sat there for hours trading songs. The ocean outside with wild-horse waves, the glinting afternoon light reflecting on the old wooden walls of the room. It grew dark, and still the songs came! My brother [Lorin] showed up. It was dark and the candle lit, and still he wore his shades, so I kept mine on! Upstairs was silent, not a shoe scrape. ‘Hey, ya know where Jerry Garcia lives?’ And he went on his way in the blue van …

Late the next day I went up to Garcia’s house and his wife Caroline – [the] ‘Mountain Girl’ – and I were talking. I tapped an ash into a full ashtray and she said, ‘Careful, those butts are Dylan’s cigarettes!’

DELTA TRIBAL ENVIRONMENTAL COALITION SLAMS NEWSOM'S LETTER CLAIMING DELTA TUNNEL IN PUBLIC INTEREST

by Dan Bacher

Governor Gavin Newsom’s campaign to build the Delta Tunnel amped up on Feb. 19 when the Governor sent a letter to the State Water Resources Control Board claiming that the petition to amend water rights permits to accommodate the proposed Delta Conveyance Project, aka Delta Tunnel, would be in the “compelling public interest.”…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/20/2304941/-Delta-Tribal-Environmental-Coalition-Slams-Newsom-s-Letter-Claiming-Delta-Tunnel-In-Public-Interest

BILL KIMBERLIN

This is a poster I saw in an antique shop in San Anselmo. The Wright Brothers with only high school educations solved the mystery of "controlled flight" which people had been thinking about for a few thousand years. The experts at the time said it was not possible, but without any outside investors and using their own money from their bicycle shop they prevailed.

‘COMMUNITY IS ON EDGE’: Blips of Trump world bleed into everyday life in S.F.

by Michael Barba

As each day of the second Donald Trump presidency goes by, signs of his administration challenging democratic norms at the national level are beginning to creep into everyday life in San Francisco.

No matter whether you’re eating tacos in the Mission or working a desk job at City Hall, the past two weeks of MAGA sightings around town have shown that you might just encounter a civilian wearing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement jacket or three men posing as members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — even in San Francisco.

The sightings are glimpses of the turmoil unfurled by President Trump on the national stage, echoing his promises to unleash mass deportations and his emboldening of Musk to comb through sensitive federal databases in search of government waste and fraud. They come as the local immigrant community is already on edge, and have elicited contempt and a sense of bewilderment from onlookers and officials at City Hall.

To some, the “Make America Great Again” incursions into life in the deep-blue city may be humorous. But others see their actions as frightening and potentially criminal.

“A thing we saw in ‘Trump 1,’ and that we are going to see more of in ‘Trump 2,’ is that some of the most unhinged elements of society start believing that they have permission to really lean into their unhingedness,” said Rafael Mandelman, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. “It’s concerning. The tone right now is about as bad as I can remember.”

The blips of Trump world include two encounters Friday afternoon, first with a group of men posing as a DOGE team who demanded sensitive information from employees at City Hall, then one at a nearby school district office, where staffers were harassed.

The three men, wearing DOGE shirts and MAGA hats, filmed themselves as they entered both public and private spaces at City Hall through unlocked doors, according to a memo circulated by building management that was obtained by the Chronicle. They told people they were from DOGE and that they wanted to “insert flash drives to download evidence of corruption.”

“They did not present a judicial warrant, and therefore, had no authority to access computers or non-public spaces,” the memo reads.

They were turned away and fled before deputies could stop them, authorities said.

A week earlier, on Feb. 6, a man was spotted eating at a taqueria on Mission Street — a hub for the local immigrant community — wearing a “Trump won” hat and an ICE windbreaker, spurring Supervisor Jackie Fielder to deride him as a “terrorist” seeking to intimidate. The man has since been identified as Daniel Goodwyn, the leader of a local Republican fringe group and one of the many convicted and later pardoned for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Even Richie Greenberg, a local Republican who once ran for mayor and supports DOGE, saw nothing funny about the recent incidents.

“Many people have been calling for deep dives and investigations into San Francisco spending,” Greenberg said. “But there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Not to just go in and demand records, to make a copy of transactions onto a USB drive.”

“I mean, come on,” he said.

Greenberg took particular issue with Goodwyn wearing the ICE jacket, accusing him of giving local Republicans a bad name.

“It’s surely, surely a troll,” Greenberg said. “You can do trolling in a funny way, in a sarcastic way, in a prank for late-night TV shows. But when it’s trolling in a malicious way that fringes on illegality, and actually could break the law, that’s a whole ’nother thing.”

Goodwyn hung up when reached by phone and did not respond to a subsequent text message.

Bill Hing, an immigration professor at University of San Francisco, said he is taking the MAGA sightings “very seriously.”

“The community is on edge,” Hing said. “None of this is good.”

Hing said wearing an ICE jacket could be considered a crime for a civilian, depending on whether the person is behaving like law enforcement.

“I’m hoping that the police are investigating,” said Hing, a former police commissioner.

Hing feared that the DOGE impersonators showing up at City Hall and the school district, which is attended by many immigrant children, could create the false perception that San Francisco is cooperating with federal authorities, despite being a sanctuary city.

The sightings are already having a real-world impact. Since he learned about them, Hing said he has been more cautious about advertising the locations of trainings he hosts to prepare immigrants for possible encounters with ICE, as to not invite any unwanted guests.

“I’m hesitant to tell you where they even are,” Hing said.

(SF Chronicle)

WHAT I'M READING

Marchesi Antinori, the famous Italian wine company that now wholly owns Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, bought Arcadia Vineyard in Napa’s Coombsville, reports James Molesworth in Wine Spectator. It’s a fitting purchase, since Arcadia was owned by Warren Winiarski, the late Stag’s Leap founder, and now the two entities will be under the same ownership again.

A major change in French inheritance tax laws will make it much easier for winery owners to pass down their businesses to their children, reports Oliver Styles in Wine-Searcher. Burgundy winegrowers had been vocal proponents of the shift, arguing that the current situation left many winery heirs with such large tax bills that they were forced to sell to large corporations.

Patrick Comiskey, always a great writer on California Rhone wines, documents the stylistic shift in California Grenache in recent years in the New Wine Review. As winemakers have moved to cooler climates, “an entirely new style has emerged,” Comiskey writes, “transparent and lean, aromatic, mineral, lifted.”

— Esther Mobley (SF Chronicle)

FEBRUARY 20

What if time were just an illusion?

What if time were not the steady, constant thing we think it is, but was instead a trick of our minds as we try to perceive the quantum state of the universe?

What if time were not linear, where events are laid out on a nice straight line of past-present-future, but instead past-present-future all existed simultaneously?

What if time were a continuous loop?

What if time did not conform to our need for order, reasonableness and sanity, but instead we had the courage to face down the “dada” part of all life and write poems from it that are full of echo and syncopation, and half jazz and half sutra.

John Sakowicz

Ukiah

OUGHTA BE, an on-line comment:

The burden has been shifted to the working class. Right after WWII we had a more progressive tax structure where the burden was paid by the richest. The vast majority of wealth in this country is inherited, not earned through any type of labor. Tax it. Right now if you and your partner work two jobs and pay rent you pay 30% of your income in taxes. The wealthier you are, the more crazy tax loopholes you can find. Don’t want to be taxed in California? Leave your Malibu mansion now and then and stay at your apartment in Manhattan, or the “cabin” in Jackson Hole. I qualify for MediCal and paid more personal income tax than Donald Trump. It’s not a conservative or liberal thing. Gavin Newsome’s wealth is inherited from his dad who was a wealth manager for the Getty family. Their “job” is avoiding taxes and investing inherited wealth. Meanwhile using our firefighting resources, natural resources, federal airports for private jets, highways for expensive cars, etc…

The wealthy, non-productive class should pay more.

HOW DID THE DEMOCRATS STRAY FROM FDR'S PRINCIPLES?

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Public schools were a huge benefit for generations of American kids, from Brooklyn to Topeka! Some of these kids went on to do great things, big and small, making America better. Public education gave them the keys to unlock their potential.

Most parents did not, and do not, have the means to send kids to good private schools.

Many (most?) public schools are failing now (actually since the late 60s, and the decline really started to accelerate in the late 80s) because of numerous factors, both external (society, lack of parental oversight and discipline at home, using public schools to indoctrinate rather than educate, Smart Phones, expelling religion in general and Christ in particular) and "internal" (schools are too big, teachers unions, rewarding administration rather than teaching).

I don't have a quick good solution. However, private schools are probably not a good answer for people of modest means. Home schooling mixed with supervised interaction like sports and church?

BIPARTISAN COALITION FINALLY TELLS EUROPE, AND THE FBI, TO SHOVE IT

While J.D. Vance was speaking in Munich, the U.K. was demanding encrypted data from Apple. For the first time in nine years, America may fight back

by Matt Taibbi

Last Friday, while leaders around the Western world were up in arms about J.D. Vance’s confrontational address to the Munich Security Council, the Washington Post published a good old-fashioned piece of journalism. From “U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts “:

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post..

[The] Home Secretary has served Apple with… a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies… The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand.

This rare example of genuine bipartisan cooperation is fascinating for several reasons. Oregon’s Ron Wyden teamed up with Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs to ask new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for help in beating back the British. While other Democrats like Michael Bennet and Mark Warner were smearing Gabbard as a Russian proxy in confirmation hearings, Wyden performed an homage to old-school liberalism and asked a few constructive questions, including a request that Gabbard recommit to her stance against government snatching of encrypted data. Weeks later, the issue is back on the table, for real.

The original UK demand is apparently nearly a year old, and Apple has reportedly been resisting internally. But this show of political opposition is new. There has been no real pushback on foreign demands for data (encrypted or otherwise) for almost nine years, for an obvious reason. Europe, the FBI, and the rest of the American national security apparatus have until now mostly presented a unified front on this issue. In the Trump era especially, there has not been much political room to take a stand like the one Wyden, Biggs, and perhaps Gabbard will be making.

The encryption saga goes back at least ten years. On December 2, 2015, two men opened fire at the Inland Center in San Bernardino , killing 14 and injuring 22. About two months later, word got out that the FBI was trying to force Apple to undo its encryption safeguards, ostensibly to unlock the iPhone of accused San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI’s legal battle was led by its General Counsel Jim Baker, who later went to work at Twitter. One flank of FBI strategy involved overhauling Rule 41 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure.

The FBI’s idea was that if it received a legal search warrant, it should be granted power to use hacking techniques, if the target is “concealed through technological means.” The Department of Justice by way of the Supreme Court a decade ago issued this recommendation to Congress, which under a law called the Rules Enabling Act would go into force automatically if legislation was not passed to stop it. In 2016, Wyden joined up with Republican congressman Ted Poe to oppose the change, via a bill called the Stopping Mass Hacking Act.

Two factors conspired to kill the effort. First, the FBI had already won its confrontation with Apple, obtaining an order requiring the firm (which said it had no way to break encryption) to write software allowing the Bureau to use “brute force” methods to crack the suspect’s password. While Apple was contesting, the FBI busted the iPhone anyway by hiring a “publicity-shy” Australian firm called Azimuth, which hacked the phone a few months after the attack. The Post, citing another set of “people familiar with the matter,” outed the company’s name years later, in 2021.

The broader issue of whether government should be allowed to use such authority in all cases was at stake with the “Stopping Mass Hacking” bill. It was a problem for the members that the FBI called its own shot in the San Bernardino case, but the fatal blow came on November 29, 2016, when the UK passed the bill invoked last week, called the Investigatory Powers Act . This legal cheat code gave agencies like Britain’s GHCQ power to use hacking techniques (called “equipment interference”) and to employ “bulk” searches using “general” warrants. Instead of concrete individuals, the UK can target a location or a group of people who “share a common purpose.”

The law was and is broad in a darkly humorous way. It mandates that companies turn over even encrypted data for any of three reasons: to protect national security, to protect the “economic well-being of the UK,” and for the “prevention or detection of serious crime.”

Once the Act passed, American opposition turtled. How to make a stand against FBI hacking when the Bureau’s close partners in England could now make such requests legally and without restriction? The Wyden-Poe gambits were wiped out, and just two days after the IPA went into effect, changes to Rule 41 in America did as well. These granted American authorities wide latitude to break into anything they wanted, provided they had a warrant. As one Senate aide told me this week, “That was a game-over moment.”

Once the British got their shiny new tool, they weren’t shy about using it. The Twitter Files were full of loony “IPA” dramas that underscored just how terrifying these laws can be. In one bizarre episode in August of 2021, Twitter was asked to turn over data on soccer fans to a collection of alphabet soup agencies, including the Home Office and the “Football Policing Unit .” The Football Police informed Twitter that “in the UK… using the ‘N word’ is a criminal offence — not a freedom of speech issue.”

Twitter executives scrambled to explain to football’s cyber-bobbies that many of their suspects were black themselves, and tweets like “RAHEEM STERLING IS DAT NIGGA” were not, in fact, “hateful conduct.” (The idea that British police needed American executives to interpret sports slang is a horror movie in itself.) Accounts like @Itsknockzz and @Wavyboomin never knew how close they came to arrest.

British overuse was obvious, but Twitter elected not to complain. They also kept quiet when American authorities began pushing for the same power. Though the Apple standoff aroused controversy, 50% of Americans still supported the FBI’s original stance against encryption, which seemed to embolden the Bureau. Senior officials began asking for the same virtually unlimited authority their friends in the UK (and soon after, Australia ) were asserting. Donald Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, seethed about encryption in a keynote speech at an International Cybersecurity Conference on July 23rd, 2019. The Justice Department was tiring of negotiations with tech companies on the issue, Barr said:

While we remain open to a cooperative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited. Key countries, including important allies, have been moving toward legislative and regulatory solutions. I think it is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.

God knows what he meant about a “major incident” that “may well occur at any time,” but Barr was referring to the Investigatory Powers Act and imitator bills that by 2019 were being drafted by most U.S. intelligence partners.

Even without a central “incident,” European officials have been pursuing the dream of full “transparency” into user data ever since, often with support from American politicians and pundits. It was not long ago that Taylor Lorenz was writing outrage porn in the New York Times about the “unconstrained” and “unfettered conversations” on the Clubhouse App. As Lorenz noted, Clubhouse simply by being hard to track aroused the hostility of German authorities, who wrote to remind the firm about European citizens’ “right to erasure “ and “transparent information”:

Providers offering services to European users must respect their rights to transparent information, the right of access, the right to erasure and the right to object.

Eventually, the EU tried to submarine end-to-end encryption through dystopian bills like “Chat Control,” which would have required platforms to actively scan user activity for prohibited behavior. This concept was widely criticized even in Europe, and in the States, which was mostly still in the grip of “freedom causes Trump” mania, TechCrunch called it “Hella Scary .”

Chat Control just barely stalled out in October, thanks to the Dutch , but Europe’s feelings about encryption were still more than made clear with this past summer’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov . That event was largely cheered in the U.S. press, where Durov was accused of actively “hiding illegal behavior,” and turning his platform into a “misinformation hot spot “ used by “far right groups,” “neo-Nazis,” and “Proud Boys and QAnon conspiracy theorists.” The consensus was Durov himself was helping sink the concept of encryption.

“If we assume this becomes a fight about encryption, it is kind of bad to have a defendant who looks irresponsible,” was how Stanford Cyber Policy Analyst Daphne Keller described Durov to the New York Times after his arrest.

The Durov arrest may have marked the moment of peak influence for the cyber-spook movement. Though the Investigatory Powers Act was a major political surveillance tool, it was far from the only important law of its type, or the most powerful. The IPA was in fact just one of a long list of acronyms mostly unfamiliar to American news consumers, from France’s LCEN to Germany’s NetzDG to the EU’s TERREG as well as its Code of Practice on Disinformation and Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online, among many others. American authorities usually followed the pattern in the case of encryption and the IPA, doing informally what European counterparts were able to effect openly and with the force of law.

Now however it looks like efforts by government officials to completely wipe out encryption have failed, and events have taken a new turn. “Wild,” is how the Senate aide characterized the Wyden-Biggs letter, resuming another bipartisan fight put on hold nine years ago. “I’d forgotten what this looks like.”

(racket.news)

"I think of myself in the oral tradition--as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of a campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered--as a storyteller.”

— Louis L’Amour

LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT

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With Coffins and Taunts, Hamas Hands Dead Hostages to Israel

Multiple Bus Explosions in Israel Put Country on Terrorism Alert

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McConnell Announces He Won’t Seek Re-election

Botched Care and Tired Staff: Planned Parenthood in Crisis

MEDITATIONS ON THE NOTION THAT OBAMA “NEVER HAD ANY SCANDALS”

Obama committed all kinds of atrocities while president that would be considered scandalous if we lived in a world that is even remotely sane.

by Caitlin Johnstone

Now that Trump is back in office I’m again seeing Democrats posting fondly about Barack Obama and how wonderful it was to have a president whose worst scandal was wearing a brown suit once. During the first Trump administration such sentiments were a great way to go viral on Liberal Twitter.

And the thing about this genre of tweet is that they’re kind of right — Obama didn’t have any “scandals” of the level we see from Trump. But the fact that the evil things Obama did weren’t considered scandalous says profoundly ugly things about the kind of society we are living in.

Obama committed all kinds of atrocities while president that would be considered scandalous if we lived in a world that is even remotely sane. Destroying Libya and leaving it a smoldering crater of humanitarian disaster. Tearing apart Syria with the dirty war that featured pouring weapons into the arms of al-Qaeda affiliates. Initiating the US-backed incineration of Yemen. Lighting the fuse for the ruination of Ukraine with the US-backed regime change op in 2014. His notorious drone program. The list goes on.

But none of that stuff registers for the average Democrat. They don’t care about it. They don’t think about it. It’s not even a blip on their screen. All they are interested in is the feelings Barack Obama made them feel inside about their favorite political faction. That’s all they’ve been trained to focus on.

The typical westerner inhabits a mental universe that is completely divorced from reality. Atrocities are only committed by foreign states that their government doesn’t like. Propaganda is something that only happens to people in other countries, or to people with different political ideologies. Scandals are whatever controversies the imperial media choose to focus on and inflame. The actual things that are happening in our world don’t register.

This happens because we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where public thought, speech, and behavior are aggressively manipulated by mass-scale psyops in the service of the powerful. The news is propaganda. The search algorithms are wildly slanted. The social media platforms herd us into isolated ideological echo chambers. Nobody who meaningfully challenges the information interests of the powerful is allowed to ascend to fame and influence. Hollywood is just a PR machine for the empire.

So most westerners are kept from forming an accurate picture of reality in their minds, which is what allows them to hold absurd beliefs like “Barack Obama never did anything bad.” They’re cut off from seeing all the immense suffering that’s inflicted upon the world by the empire they live under and the sociopaths who rule over it, and in its place a crude crayon drawing of a world which confirms their power-serving biases has been inserted into their minds.

They can’t see Libya. They can only see the feelings they felt while Obama was in office, and contrast them with the feelings they feel under Trump. This is the way they have been conditioned to relate to the world. Mass-scale psychological manipulation has turned them into drooling infants. And nobody benefits from this but the powerful.

We won’t be free until our minds are free. We can’t have a healthy world as long as we are thinking in the ways the powerful have trained us to think.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

THE COMEDIAN LOOKING FOR SOMETHING ALL OF AMERICA CAN LAUGH AT

Roy Wood Jr. performs in small clubs from Georgia to Wyoming, finding humor in the moments that leave us humbled and confused.

by Ismail Muhammad

Partway through his latest special, “Lonely Flowers,” the comedian Roy Wood Jr. tells the story of the time he accidentally hired a white photographer. Or, as he corrects himself, he hired a photographer who he did not think would be white until he showed up. Whenever he travels to a city for a gig, he explains, artists who live there reach out to him to offer their services. He respects their hustle and sometimes accepts those offers, like the one he got from a guy who wanted to take some pictures of him. “Come on take the pictures,” Wood wrote back. “I’ll see you next week, Deon!”

Wood drops Deon’s name casually, letting the audience pick up on the joke before he has to explain it. As they start to lose it, Wood joins them in astonishment. Pitching his body forward, throwing his arms out and bugging his eyes, he yells: “You see what I’m saying? I don’t know no white Deons either! Never met one!”

Deon ends up being a bald, unimaginably chiseled military veteran with menacing tattoos consisting of “an animal, a death threat then a Bible verse” decorating his arms, the kind of white man that a Black person might not want to be left alone with. Wood is terrified of him — he makes sure to pay him up front — but he finds him unexpectedly sympathetic. It turns out that after returning from service abroad, Deon feels intensely isolated, and photography gives him a sense of purpose.

Onstage, Wood is unhurried, an amiable man who, despite being 46, has the countenance of a churchgoing grandfather who still starches his Sunday suit. He is a master of the leisurely, even comforting, story that plays to his audience’s expectations of what is good, kind and virtuous, only to foil those expectations with a well-timed word or mischievous glance.

When I first watched “Lonely Flowers,” I could feel this story about Deon teetering toward the saccharine: Maybe we can all get along, or at least get along better, if we just listen to one another. But then Wood lets us in on a disturbing detail: “I like the camera,” Deon told him, “ ’cause, you know, I get to look down the crosshair and still shoot people.” Wood’s look of earnest sympathy dissolves, and we’re left wondering how to feel about Deon after all.

Then the joke rounds yet another corner: Wood turns serious again, recalling how sincerely Deon thanked him in the greenroom, shaking his hand firmly and looking him right in the eye. “I was like, Wooowww,” Wood says, his voice dropping to a stage whisper, seemingly humbled by the interaction. But then we reach the other side of his pause: “He was about to kill some people.” Wood imagines Deon at home, cleaning his rifle right up to the moment Wood contacts him. “We’ll never know how many lives I saved,” Wood says triumphantly, “because I took a chance on a white man!”

The story is typical of the special, a civic-minded cri de coeur on social atomization and the degradation of communal life in America, though it’s a lot funnier than that makes it sound. Wood’s complaint comes from a roguish sensibility that was shaped by his unique artistic trajectory: He got his start on the Black Southern comedy circuit and eventually made his way onto Trevor Noah’s iteration of “The Daily Show,” where he filtered contemporary social issues through his downbeat, absurdist logic.

His humor now straddles those worlds: the bawdy, contrarian style of Black comedy institutions like “Comic View” and “Def Comedy Jam,” with its love for life’s vulgar, politically murky particulars, and the bien-pensant liberal comedy popularized by “The Daily Show” and its descendants. Though he became famous for his “Daily Show” work, the Black vernacular is his bread and butter. You see it in the exaggerated physicality he adopts in the Deon story, the way he thrusts his head out and stares down the audience with an expression reminiscent of Bernie Mac; or in the distinctly Southern phrasing he’ll adopt when playing one of his many characters. The cross-pollination yields a brand of comedy whose values are clear but that never loses sight of life’s unpredictability. Where so much of contemporary comedy is steeped in certainty, trading jokes for smart points, Wood is interested in the moments that leave us humbled and confused.

With “Lonely Flowers,” Wood is taking that sensibility to a national audience now mired in a politics of mutually assured destruction. He is wearied but stays firm in the notion that his job isn’t to badger and demean the half of the country that disagrees with him. He isn’t necessarily hopeful. The special turns on a shouted refrain: “We ain’t gonna make it!” There’s an unspoken question at the special’s heart, though: In the meantime, as we meander toward whatever it is that awaits us, how are we going to live together?

In person, Wood is funny but sedate, speaking in a deadpan carried along by a prankish undercurrent. Last fall we met in Midtown Manhattan, where he was preparing to tape an episode of “Have I Got News for You,” a CNN political game show that he hosts alongside the comedians Amber Ruffin and Michael Ian Black. After makeup and a haircut, he ran downstairs for a late lunch before returning to his dressing room, where he strategized with writers about how to introduce the day’s guest: the former Republican Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger. The problem was how to make Kinzinger’s career trajectory — following a vote to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the House of Representatives in 2021 rather than run for re-election — funny.

“He’s the former Republican congressman who once tried …” he muttered before stopping, his voice rising into an exploratory vaudevillian shout. “Who once voted to impeach Trump. He lost his job, and now he’s stuck doing shows like this!” Without pausing, he wondered if it was all right to wade into self-deprecating humor and searched for the precise turn of phrase that might make the audience giggle rather than groan at a political tragedy.

“Have I Got News for You,” an adaptation of a long-running British show, is Wood’s first television project since he left “The Daily Show” in the fall of 2023. As a correspondent, he became beloved for his irreverent takes on the racial politics of the Black Lives Matter era. His set at the 2023 White House Correspondents’ Dinner combined an earnest defense of journalists and their profession with piercing humor. (After a joke falls flat, he quips that the reaction doesn’t faze him. “I’m like Mitch McConnell: I ain’t got no soul.”) The dinner created a groundswell of popular support, with critics and fans casting him as a favorite to succeed Noah on “The Daily Show.” But as the process dragged on and Comedy Central’s intentions remained unclear, Wood was anxious that he would miss the window to have his own show.

Wood was careful in speaking about why he left “The Daily Show.” “That is the great inevitability of every job: Sooner or later you leave,” Wood told me. “Thinking about what’s next after eight years was not a premature thought.” If he was going to secure another hosting gig, he decided, he had to make his move before the 2024 presidential election got into full swing.

Wood isn’t one to let an opportunity slip through his fingers. “I ain’t from the land of dreams,” he told me this past fall. He was raised in Memphis, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala., and his father was Roy Wood Sr., a radio-journalism pioneer who reported on Black platoons in Vietnam, South African apartheid and the civil rights movement for the Black Chicago radio station WVON before helping found the National Black Network, the first Black-owned radio news service, where he was the news director. His mother, Joyce Dugan, was a respected teacher. Though his parents were highly regarded in the community, Wood’s childhood was sometimes shaped by a sense of scarcity and limitation. “We were raised by people who were fortunate to be able to vote, to drink from the same water fountain,” Wood said. “They were so exhausted from that battle that all they wanted was a house and a fair wage. The idea of dreaming beyond that was not commonplace, and in a lot of instances it was frowned upon. In the South, you dare to dream beyond the horizon.”

His father’s work presented one model for how Wood might dare to dream. When he enrolled at Florida A&M University in 1996, he decided he wanted to work in broadcast journalism, a major that required he take classes in public speaking. He discovered that every time he spoke in front of his classmates, he got laughs without even trying. Wood liked the feeling those laughs gave him, and he started studying the acts of comedians like Adele Givens, Sinbad, Chris Rock and D.L. Hughley. George Carlin, he says, was canon for the fearlessness of his topics and concision with which he expressed opinions that audiences might otherwise find outré. “I used to listen to ‘You Are All Diseased’ once a week, listening to the wordplay and the inflections. It was just perfect. Then I would immediately throw on some Master P.”

In 1998, Wood was arrested after buying clothing with stolen credit cards and was suspended indefinitely from Florida A&M. This youthful indiscretion yielded an unexpected blessing: Wood still received the financial aid he would have used for his tuition, and that money — along with a job as a server at the buffet restaurant Golden Corral in Tallahassee — bankrolled his fledgling comedy career. He took buses across the South, sleeping in bus stations between gigs. When he returned to Birmingham to perform at an open mic at the Stardome, one of his mother’s students saw him and told her about it. She was infuriated and insisted that he focus on getting back in school. Wood eventually did, and even graduated, but he didn’t quit stand-up. Instead he drove out — in a car his mother bought — to cities like Charlotte, sleeping in the passenger seat when he had to. Sometimes, when venues canceled on him, he would take day-labor jobs on construction sites to pay for gas.

Wood’s style was molded by the difficulty of finding his voice in Black clubs across the South. His own middle-class experience of Blackness wasn’t necessarily aligned with his audience’s, and his early jokes — routines about the annoyance of a roommate’s eating your food, for example — didn’t always land. Working those rooms taught him how to craft observational humor in a way that would resonate for everyone from older Black professionals to gang members. But he also learned not to talk down to people. “A Black audience will go with you anywhere on any journey,” he said, “if you make it funny.” He learned to embrace his off-kilter humor without condescending. “That’s what I know about,” he said. “I don’t know about selling weed. That’s not my experience, and my job as a comedian is to present to you my experience. And mine is a weird one.”

Eventually he found himself in front of increasingly diverse audiences, too. “One night I’m performing for drug dealers, the next night I’m performing for coal miners in eastern Kentucky — what are the unifiers?” he recalled. His task, as he saw it, was to find the joke that would make both groups laugh. One of his best jokes from those days, he told me, was about being pulled over by the police and figuring out whether or not you’re going to jail based on how long it takes for an officer to get back to you after he runs your ID. It was a perfect bit, he said, because it could unify the room. “White people got friends that go to jail!” he said. “Especially rednecks. Poor white people deal with the same stuff that Black people do.”

Wood’s focus on social issues was a natural outgrowth of that comedic approach, which he hones to perfection in “Lonely Flowers.” Early on, he riffs on the absurdity of shopping at stores where it’s impossible to find someone who works there. “Only time you see an employee at the grocery store is when you do self-checkout wrong,” he jokes before launching into a chorus of voices: the checkout machine telling you that you made a mistake, the tottering and elderly employee overseeing the checkout stations, the grocery-store cashiers who provide some of the only social interaction for lonely and unstable people. This morphs into a bit about pharmacies where everything is under lock and key and you have to fend off other customers after you find an employee to unlock all the merchandise. “When you find an employee in the store, you got to hold they hand,” he says, holding a phantom hand, strutting, warning off phantom rival suitors with a possessive stare.

Wood’s critique — the way technology has left us prone to dysfunctional loneliness — is trenchant, but his approach is fundamentally goofy. There’s a strange way, too, in which the goofiness reinforces the melancholy at the heart of his joke, a yearning for an entire range of interactions that have fallen to the wayside in a world that doesn’t have use for them.

When I called Wood in late January, he was midway through a mini-tour through Wyoming, Colorado and Oklahoma, driving to six Air Force bases in nine days. Before that, he attended the premiere of “Love, Brooklyn,” in which he has a supporting role, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. A few days after the mini-tour, he would visit his alma mater in Tallahassee and continue to New York to begin the new season of “Have I Got News for You.” I wondered why a comedian of his stature would submit himself to such a grueling run.

“It feels familiar, it keeps me grounded,” he told me. Those trips reminded him of his early life on the road, when he would perform at the Comedy Zone in Ozark, a small town near an Army base in southern Alabama. Those days put him in touch with the profound weirdness of America. In Ozark, he said, “the town is troops and foreigners. Wherever you got deployed, you came home with a wife of that race, so it’s one of the most diverse cities in Alabama — Asians and Indians and Arabs, and they all sound like they’re from Alabama because they came over here, didn’t speak English, and the English that they learned was Alabama English.” From Ozark, he would move on to audiences of college students at Fort Walton Beach, Fla., and retirees in Biloxi, Miss. “And then Tuesday I’m in Atlanta at Uptown with Earthquake and Nard Holston” — two popular Black comics — “and a couple strippers in the club, booing me.”

Contemporary comedy, he said, doesn’t necessitate that kind of encounter. Social media, podcasting and platforms like YouTube have changed the landscape, allowing comedians to target audiences that will be most responsive to their humor and make substantial money doing it. In a world where you can earn half a million dollars off a podcast, he said, why would you go to Ozark for $150? For him, though, refining his act in front of all sorts of audiences grounds him in a specific ethos.

“I spent the first decade of my career meeting Americans where they were, figuring out what was important to them and figuring out how to make those things funny,” he told me. “Every armpit, every factory town, every we-used-to-make-something-here city — I’ve done it. So you start realizing that a lot of people are all individuals, and to a degree most are harmless.” People are only dangerous, he believes, when they allow their selfishness and ideological rigidity to blind them to the suffering of others. His touring feels like a shield against that selfishness, an investment in a connection with his fellow Americans.

44 Comments

Julie Beardsley February 21, 2025

Send a strong message to your representatives! Musk must be removed, and Trump must obey our laws. The American people have a huge political muscle they just need to flex:
Feb 28th – total boycott. No buying anything.
March 7-14th – boycott Amazon
March 21-28th – boycott all Nestle products
April 7-14th – boycott Walmart
April 18th- total economic boycott’s #2
April 21-28th – General Mills boycott
Resist!!

Reply
- Call It As I See It February 21, 2025
  
  I think it was you who wanted the County audited not long ago.
  But because Elon Musk is the person auditing, you want everyone to not spend money at businesses.
  
  What land are you from?
  
  You have serious TDS and need help.
  
  Reply
  - Julie Beardsley February 21, 2025
    
    If you think what Musk is doing is an “audit”, I got news for you. They’re rooting around looking for things to cut so they can use that money to keep the tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals in this country. They have already made some cuts to Medicare, and I guarantee you this will continue, and they are coming for your Social Security. If you think the GOP gives a rat’s ass about you or this country, you’re the one who is delusional.
    
    Reply
    - Julie Beardsley February 21, 2025
      
      Sorry if that seems rude, but Trump loving up to Putin is about as much of horse crap as I can take.
      
      Reply
  - pca67 February 21, 2025
    
    The only TDS is by the MAGA cult!
    
    Reply
Tooloose L. February 21, 2025

D affodils

The Romans are thought to have brought daffodils to Britain from the Iberian Peninsula, where the largest variety of daffodil species are found.

Everywhere
You are,
Sun
kissed 😘
Earth
Saying,
I love you.

Reply
- Tooloose L. February 21, 2025
  
  The most well-known member of the daffodil family is the trumpet daffodil. To classify as a trumpet daffodil, the flowers must have a trumpet (also known as the cup or corona that is as long as or longer than, the petals.
  
  Just like a herald blows his horn to announce the King’s arrival, so the “horn” of the trumpet daffodil announces the fact that spring has truly sprung.
  
  https://www.dutchgrown.com/blogs/the-dutchgrown-blog/featured-variety-trumpet-daffodils
  
  Reply
George Hollister February 21, 2025

If you are one that believes our national debt will eventually become a crisis, then what you see Trump doing with our government, and the direction of the country will be our country’s first attempt to deal with that future debt crisis, except on a larger scale.

Reply
- Norm Thurston February 21, 2025
  
  George – Do you have any links or other evidence that Trump has plans to reduce the national debt? I think the truth of the matter is he is making reckless cuts to current spending in order to continue and enhance his huge income tax cuts to large corporations and wealthy individuals.
  
  Reply
  - George Hollister February 21, 2025
    
    Trump might think he has plans to reduce the national debt, but unless the cost of the two largest sources of long term debt are addressed, the national debt will continue to rise. Social Security, and Medicare are the two largest costs, and the largest contributors to our long term debt. Like everyone else, Trump won’t touch these. The third largest cost is interest on the debt, which puts a floor on interest rates everywhere else in the economy. At this point, neither Trump or the Fed can control that. The fourth largest cost is the military, which Trump is trying to control by cutting waste, reducing international commitments, and having our military incursions pay for themselves, making places like Ukraine into colonies. Trump’s intentions of increasing the vigor of the private economy by less regulation, and lower taxes is good, but whether that can fix the top three government sources of debt is likely wishful thinking. Trump is only going after the low hanging fruit of government waste, and over regulation. This is a natural inclination if the chief sources of debt can’t/won’t be addressed.
    
    Reply
    - Call It As I See It February 21, 2025
      
      Well if we’re still paying people from the ages of 100 to 159. That’s a start for Social Security to figure out who is actually alive.
      
      Reply
      - Bruce Anderson February 21, 2025
        
        Social Security is a very efficient bureaucracy with a minimal fraud rate.
        
        Reply
        
        George Hollister February 21, 2025
        
        To a point this is true. Money for retired people should be efficient, and should have minimal fraud. SS payroll taxes are still paying the way, but within the next ten years SS is projected to be running a deficit, and the government will have to be borrowing money to continue paying its obligations. SS Disability is a different matter, this system is gamed and broken. My limited experience with Medicare has me concluding that there is significant fraud there. Fraud is what makes the system work.
        
        Reply
        
        Bruce Anderson February 21, 2025
        
        A Boonville kid I knew was crazy as hell, visibly deranged every which way. And unhoused, dependent on locals who gave him food and just enough money for a meal here and there. I encouraged him to apply for SSI, and even offered to drive him over the hill to the SS office. “But I’m not nuts,” he would say, which I would counter with, “Doesn’t matter. Just pretend you are.” Finally, he did, and was instantly approved. He lives in Ukiah these days and pops up in the Sheriff’s log occasionally for minor stuff. There are armies of this guy out there, as any cop can confirm, unattended, harmless but dependent, and bad for public morale because they’re often in public bumming citizens out. Used to be Mendo maintained a County Farm out on Low Gap where the dependents were compelled to live….
        
        Reply
      - Julie Beardsley February 21, 2025
        
        That turned out to be untrue. The teenaged programmers rooting around in the IT systems didn’t understand the “ancient” coding language.
        
        Reply
      - Marshall Newman February 21, 2025
        
        Very simple. Show your evidence or be known as a liar.
        
        Reply
  - Call It As I See It February 21, 2025
    
    That’s ridiculous, Norm. You need proof that Trump is going to pay down the debt. WOW!
    So you’re willing to ignore all the DEI money going to foreign countries while
    Americans in North Carolina and Los Angeles received $700 from Biden.
    
    You people amaze me.
    
    Reply
    - Bruce Anderson February 21, 2025
      
      How much DEI money is going overseas, and to which countries is it going?
      
      Reply
      - Call It As I See It February 21, 2025
        
        Really! Just as I told Norm, your responses to me are ridiculous. You’re the big newspaper guy I shouldn’t have to answer your biased questions. I thought you have journalistic integrity. Oh wait, this is the home of the Libtard, my bad!
        
        Reply
        
        Mike Jamieson February 21, 2025
        
        Well, I’ll be: there’s another word I wasn’t aware of before…but it’s not also accurate and fair as true conservatives aren’t “retarded” (b/c they don’t subscribe to fascism like Trump and a portion of his followers do).
        A dictionary note re “libtard” and “conservatard”:
        
        “Sensitive Note
        The word libtard is intended to insult someone by linking the person’s liberal political views and their expression to an intellectual or developmental disability: as the etymology indicates, the last part of this compound comes from retard, a profoundly demeaning term for a person with such a disability. Reliance on the disparagement of people with disabilities makes libtard, and its much less frequent companion insult conservatard, doubly offensive.”
        
        My note:
        Anyone calling Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan or William Buckley a “conservatard” likely would suffer broken noses in doing so.
        
        Reply
        
        Mike Jamieson February 21, 2025
        
        OTOH, it seems that
        “Libtards” mostly laugh off or ignore name-calling taunts, recognizing them as signs of mental illness.
        
        There just isn’t a sting due to overuse perhaps.
        
        Reply
        
        Call It As I See It February 21, 2025
        
        Well, it seems to fire up most users of this rag. And your esteemed editor has me censored because of it. As we speak, I’m being monitored on all posts.
        
        As for Ms. Beardsley, your gaslighting and hypocrite. Sorry if that’s rude, but it’s called honesty.
        
        Mr. Newman, not my job to educate you. Look it up. Your fingers aren’t broke.
        
        Mikey J. yes Libtard is being used in the fashion you describe. After all their lies and corruption, they earned the title.
        Christ, they put a dementia, diaper wearing figure head in the oval office, knowingly. All because of control and power.
        
        Never thinking of America. And you morons believe their lies and defend them. All because you hate Trump more than you love this Country.
        
        Reply
        
        Marshall Newman February 21, 2025
        
        No Mr. Anonymous, your job is not to educate me. But if you make statements that suggest something is true, you should be able – and willing – to back those statements with evidence. Otherwise you are just some nameless, factless blowhard.
        
        Chuck Wilcher February 21, 2025
        
        “Christ, they put a dementia, diaper wearing figure head in the oval office, knowingly. All because of control and power.”
        
        Maybe, but this one has a spray tan and a dyed comb over.
        
        Call It As I See It February 21, 2025
        
        Then prove I’m wrong! See I can play your game. If I’m a factless blowhard then you hate our Country. That’s how stupid your statement is. Everything I’ve said is fact unless it’s opinion. And believe me I have plenty of those. You know what you really hate, is I refuse to identify myself to all you nut jobs.
        
        P.S. Cuck Wilcher just made my point. Uh, good one, Chuckie.
        
        Why is T-Up so shabby and low-budget? SAD! February 21, 2025
        
        Good point, I’ve noticed that commenters here ARE biased against anonymous trolls.
        
        Julie Beardsley February 21, 2025
        
        Exactly whom am I gaslighting?
        To date, Trump has over-stepped the authority of the Executive Branch. A President (or some unelected stooge) cannot simply eliminate departments that Congress has authorized and funded.
        
        Marshall Newman February 21, 2025
        
        Not my job. YOU made the statement, so YOU have the responsibility to offer the evidence.
        
        Kirk Vodopals February 21, 2025
        
        i think you should change your name to “Fart Umpire”
        
        Reply
        
        Mike Jamieson February 21, 2025
        
        There’s an old adage expressing wisdom about the relative impact of concrete stuff (like sticks and stones) vs abstract stuff (like names).
        
        Reply
        
        Chuck Wilcher February 21, 2025
        
        Ergo, You don’t have any proof. You parrot Elon’s ketamine-fueled made up nonsense.
        
        Reply
    - Norm Thurston February 21, 2025
      
      I only asked if he had a plan or stated his intentions, aside from the daily Trump hyperbole. I’m not sure if proof of something that has not occurred is even possible (I’d say “no”). If someone is sincere about making major financial changes, a solid plan is the first step to success. And no, alienating all our trading parties by imposing arbitrary tariffs is not a solid plan. Apparently he has no plan. I get your point about DEI money going to foreign countries, in the same way I understand little children fearing the bogey man. I have no idea what you are talking about with the $700 comment, though I suspect its origin has something to do with the fantastic propaganda you inject yourself with every day.
      
      Reply
- Harvey Reading February 21, 2025
  
  Crisis? Ha, ha. Just raise the tax rate to 90 percent for all income in excess of $200,000. Hell, the “national debt” is just money the country owes itself, and the robber barons can afford to pay it off. Charge a “visitor fee” to Musk of half a billion per week. Then maybe he’ll skedaddle back home.
  
  Reply
  - Norm Thurston February 21, 2025
    
    The national debt is real debt the USA has incurred by issuing various forms of bonds and notes. The money is owed to individuals, corporations, state and local governments, various retirement plans and foreign countries, all of which purchased the bonds as a safe investment. For example, if you had an extra $1,000 you wanted to invest in a low-risk interest-bearing vehicle, treasury bonds would be a good choice. If the government defaulted (said they were not going to return your money) you would be out that money. The fact that you do not recognized it as legitimate debt does not change the fact that is just that. The USA needed to issue the debt to cover cash requirements it could not otherwise pay. US bonds and notes have long been considered the world’s safest deposit vehicles, though it is not as well regarded as it once was.
    
    Reply
    - Harvey Reading February 22, 2025
      
      it’s real debt we owe ourselves. Let the robber baron portion of the population, who ran it up, pay it off. They are the ones who reaped the benefits and connived the spending schemes that produced benefits for THEMSELVES, with maybe a relative trickle dripping down to the rest of us.
      
      Reply
David Stanford February 21, 2025

“JOIN THE RESISTANCE ON FEBRUARY 28TH
February 28th! Fight back!
Julie Beardsley
Ukiah”

Julie you have it all wrong, you need to make as much money as you can and run for the hills, enjoy life and share your riches with your family!!!!

Reply
- Julie Beardsley February 21, 2025
  
  You may be right on that one!
  
  Reply
- peter boudoures February 21, 2025
  
  And that’s why we have doge
  
  Reply
David Stanford February 21, 2025

“COMMUNITY IS ON EDGE’: Blips of Trump world bleed into everyday life in S.F.
by Michael Barba”
“They did not present a judicial warrant, and therefore, had no authority to access computers or non-public spaces,” the memo reads.
They were turned away and fled before deputies could stop them, authorities said”

You are so suckered, get real about life, it is short so make it worth wile to enjoy, you only have one go round, don’t worry about what you cannot control, let go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reply
Me February 21, 2025

The last time an adult was in charge in Mendo was probably when Jim Anderson was CEO. He’s a great guy. He honestly with integrity did the best anyone could do.

Reply
Kimberlin February 21, 2025

” OBAMA “NEVER HAD ANY SCANDALS” Catlin Johnstone.

This nonsense is the flip side of, “Hitler did some good things” and it makes about as much sense.

Reply
- Harvey Reading February 21, 2025
  
  It appears to me that you took the quote out of context.
  
  Reply
  - Kimberlin February 23, 2025
    
    “Obama committed all kinds of atrocities while president”. Caitlin Johnstone.
    
    This nonsense is the flip side of, “Hitler did some good things” and it makes about as much sense.
    
    Reply
Craig Stehr February 21, 2025

Digesting a Whole Foods salad bar and soup breakfast, while standing in front of a guest computer at the MLK Public Library in Washington, D.C. Time to go to the library cafe for a chocolate brownie and cup of coffee. I’m “being here now”. Now what? Where’s my senior subsidized housing, O America? Craig Louis Stehr (Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com)

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Friday 2/21/2025

44 Comments

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