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CHANCE OF RAIN will increase today and peak tonight. Heavy rain is forecast for Del Norte and far northern Humboldt Counties tonight. Elsewhere, generally light rain is expected. A low pressure system will generate locally strong and gusty southerly winds over the headlands and interior mountains this weekend. Strong southerly winds will be possible again on Monday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Happy National Margarita Day weather fans! 40F with scattered high clouds this Saturday morning on the coast. More rain tonight then again on Monday then clear skies until next weekend. Or so it looks like right now. All that Pacific moisture to our northwest will make landfall well north of us.
THE FAMILY OF ORVAL LEE JANES, would like to let the community of Fort Bragg know that he passed away on February 6, 2025. Orval Lee was a long time resident of Fort Bragg. We would like to thank everyone for the thoughts, kind words, and memories of Orval Lee. It has meant so much to his family.
FORT BRAGG FENTANYL TASK FORCE COMMUNITY MEETING
On March 1st, 2025, at 12:00 p.m., the City of Fort Bragg and the Fort Bragg Police Department will be holding a community forum related to the Fort Bragg Fentanyl Task Force. The meeting will be held at Town Hall and is intended to allow the public to provide feedback and ask questions regarding the current direction of the Fentanyl Task Force.
This meeting will also allow the opportunity to provide input related to potential funding opportunities for the Police Department’s Project Right Now program. Project Right Now is a program that was previously grant funded with the goal of providing immediate help to youth struggling with substance use disorders.
City staff and Care Response Unit team members will be present to answer questions.
Questions regarding this event may be directed to Janette Ornelas at the Fort Bragg Police Department at (707)961-2800 ext. 257.
DOES OFFICIAL MENDO CARE ABOUT ITS WORSENING BUDGET STATUS?
by Mark Scaramella
To understand how little attention Mendo pays to budget status info, one only needs to read this sentence from the County’s “CEO Ordinance” (Section 2.28.050, Section B-5-c):
“The CEO shall report to the Board of Supervisors, not less than semiannually, the status of the budget expenditures and revenues, as available within the main enterprise system, and recommend adjustments as necessary.”
Not only is that pathetically infrequent, but it doesn’t even define what “status” means or what the report should contain or cover.
Remember, the Board’s biggest complaint about former Auditor-Controller Chamise Cubbison was that she wasn’t providing pre-digested, up-to-date budget information to the Board. (Never mind that that was never the Auditor’s job; it was, as stated here and elsewhere, the CEO’s job. When Cubbison asked the complaining board members for examples of what they wanted to see, she was not only ignored but blamed for not providing the budget info and then “suspended without pay.” In addition, the reports that were briefly provided last year by the CEO’s staff could have been provided back then if they had wanted to.)
According to this month’s Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Report by Acting Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Sara Pierce, her department: “…mailed over 4,100 supplemental and/or escape bills in January 2025 with a total charge amount of $8.99 million. Please note the total charge does not equate to revenue. These bills will bring in roughly $89,000 in payments, of which roughly $27,000 will be revenue to the County.”
At first the numbers sound impressive: 4,100 bills against $9 million in “charges”! But then we’re told that it translates to only $27k of revenue to the County for the month of January. (About $325k per year.)
Let’s do some quick math and make a few basic assumptions. If there were 4,100 bills sent out against $9 million in “charges,” that’s about $2,200 in “charges” per bill. But the revenue from those 4,100 bills was just $27,000, or just under $7 per bill, which isn’t even worth billing for. We may be missing something here, or we may misunderstand what Ms. Pierce means by “charges,” but either way, something’s not adding up. And the word “charges” needs to be explained if she’s going to use it in this context for the public as some kind of financial status indicator.
Pierce then adds: “When the assessed value of a parcel is reduced as part of the supplemental/escape processing, this creates a negative bill or in other words a refund. The offices mailed out roughly $280,000 in refunds during January 2025.”
Apparently, Mendo’s Tax “Collector” collected approximately a net “negative bill” totaling $250k (about $280k minus $27k) for the month of January. This unfortunate development is largely due to downward property re-assessments, mainly from abandoned pot grows and distressed grape production and prices. This trend is only going to get worse. (Just last week we ran a press release about the ongoing decline of grape acreage, production and value from none-other than the Mendocino Wine Growers Association.)
Will the Board show any interest in these declining numbers during their February mid-year budget review on Tuesday? Or will they ignore it as usual and simply “accept” the reports as presented?
JOHN TOOHEY, Panther Athletic Director
The AVHS Junior class is looking for leads on a cotton candy machine for Prom - they have big plans to restore the annual event to its former glory - if anyone has a machine or any other decor or would like to contribute, send a message my way!
UNITY CLUB NEWS
February is a short month, so I have to let you know that the Unity Club will meet at 1:30 on March the 6th, in the Dining Room. Our Mendocino County Sheriff, Matt Kendall will present a program on the state of the County's Law Enforcement, and when will we see a new Resident Deputy in Anderson Valley. Our hostess crew of Grace Espinosa, Beverly Dutra and Terry Sites, will bring us tasty food and beverages. Jot down some questions to ask Sheriff Kendall while we have him here for an encore.
Are you interested in helping Liz during the April 3rd Meeting? It would be kind of you to lend a hand. I volunteer to make the coffee and bring tea + half & half.
Our Annual Wildflower Show is fast approaching. It will be held May 3rd and 4th, with the Elementary school students viewing on the 5th of May.
Bring some Silent Auction items for Jean to the April 3rd Meeting. We will be discussing ideas and have sign up sheets at the March 6th Meeting as well.
Our Lending Library will be open every Tuesday from 1 to 4, and every Saturday, when the Fairgrounds are not being rented out for a function, from 12:30 to 2:30. There are new titles to check out and many books for adoption; only $1 for hardbound; paperbacks are 2 for $1.
I'll be seeing you next week: Thursday, March 6th at 1:30 in the Dining Room, Fairgrounds.
Miriam Martinez
‘A PROFOUND MESS’
Editor,
The Truth About The Mendocino Water Project.
A recent appeal submitted to the California Coastal Commission following County approval of a Coastal Development Use Permit Modification and finding a Final Subsequent Mitigated Negative Declaration with Addendum adequate for a Mendocino Unified School District “Water Supply and Storage Project” shows how deeply concerned a growing number of residents are of the project’s impacts upon their health, welfare, property, water supply, and greater coastal resources.
Given the hot mess of a public hearing held by the Mendocino County Planning Commission on December 19th, an appeal was likely. Procedural deficiencies, inaccuracies, omissions, violations, and errors have plagued the project throughout the environmental review process and ramped up after it joined with the Mendocino City Community Services District in combining grant funding for a vastly different project. Public activism, California Coastal Commission intervention, and bid delays have kept the two districts and their mutual project manager at GHD Engineering in constant reaction to increasing public concern. By all appearances, it’s doubtful they ever saw it coming.
On its face, the project’s analyses and reports appear detailed and thorough enough, but in-depth, they are without whole or convincing evidence with numbers that sometimes don’t add up. Between the lines, there’s a lack of some evidence and studies, with conclusions based on unsupported assumptions and data which, combined with a general lack of transparency, are receiving more and more public scrutiny.
Concerns have run the gamut, from lack of proper notifications and other procedural errors encountered during the environmental review and public hearing processes to substantive issues including noncompliance with Mendocino County Code regulations, local coastal groundwater development guidelines and water rights, questions about the revelancy for school districts to sell and distribute state water resources, a loose Memo of Understanding signed between MUSD and MCCSD (the fourth, since 2022) and still no legally-binding operating agreement with terms to spell out critical allocation, prioritization, distribution, and cost criteria, the consideration of the project for consolidation into a community or even regionalized water system, the depletion of a local aquifer in an area designated as a Critical Groundwater Area, the aridification of a local soils, hillsides, and the wildfire risks associated with it, adverse impacts to sensitive wetlands and headwaters in an “Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area” of protected species formed by Slaughterhouse Creek, viewshed obstructions, noncompliance with county height limits, and conflict-of-interest issues with a member of the MCCSD Board of Directors who is contracted not only with MUSD but other customers in the watershed to operate and manage their respective water systems.
It may be that remaining supporters have not studied the environmental review documents, studies, or public comment well enough or attended meetings to hear presentations and public testimony. It’s understandable. Constantly-evolving plans have created a project record which is lengthy, tedious, and complicated - in large part because a full Environmental Impact Report was not pursued which would have more fully addressed the mounting questions and concerns that have been cited along the way. Instead, a truncated version of an EIR in the form of a Subsequent Mitigated Negative Declaration was prepared and adopted by MUSD (as Lead Agency), an Addendum added and approved by the County (as Responsible Agency), and a Coastal Development Use Permit applied for, halted, then reapplied for in modified form just two weeks before the whole matter was hastily and confusingly conditioned and then approved by resolution of the Mendocino County Planning Commission.
Originally conceived as as a straightfoward project by MUSD nearly ten years ago to resolve the school district’s drinking water deficiencies, the project was reconceived in late 2021 as a combined, co managed emergency water supply and storage project “for the benefit of the village of Mendocino” and the single-square mile MCCSD. Since then it has morphed into a project wholly controlled by MUSD and their 420-square mile district, rebranded and emphasized as a fire suppression project, and rebranded again as a well testing project. Having ballooned into a $11.1 million endeavor, the project manager’s current narrative focuses on test well drilling and not the production wells and storage tanks the project is intended to become. Betting on past actions, however, even these plans could change. But as it currently stands, an amendment to the CDP demonstrating adequate proof of water by way of further hydrological study will be required before project construction can begin.
As late as the December 19 public hearing, new details continued to be discovered and disclosed, some posted as late as the morning prior to the 10:00 a.m. public hearing. Before then, potentially embarrassing comment was removed from the record, other public comment took as long as several days or over a week to be posted, while others were were buried in succeeding postings or incorrectly attributed. The rush to approve was on, and despite public objection due to the insufficient time to review, consider, and prepare comment, the project was approved.
One of the more salient points resulting from the hearing was pressed out of the project manager who admitted that only 200,000-300,000 gallons of stored water was needed instead of the 630,000 proposed. Another was raised by a planning commissioner who reported that groundwater dye testing performed at the site years ago reappeared in wells “all over” the Town of Mendocino west of Highway 1. Curiously, Public Records Act requests submitted to MCCSD, the County of Mendocino, and Department of Water Resources have not produced the test results. Yet another detail disclosed in hearing comments was that the closest domestic well is estimated to be just thirty feet away from the wellfield: all are points which remain unaddressed in the environmental review for the project.
Make no mistake: whatever what the community is being told and sold about an emergency water supply, GHD’s project manager acknowledged in a October 21, 2024 communication to County staff, ”MUSD may elect to provide water to members of the community who are in need during periods of declared drought emergency when water is not available from other water suppliers in the area, however, they have no obligation or requirement to do so”. He and the former MCCSD president are on record as describing members of the public challenging the project as conspiracy theorists. Regardless of the name-calling, which is rarely prudent conduct on behalf of elected officials or their consultants, most reasonable people would likely agree with adjacent and down-gradient property owners, many of which have experienced well depletion problems, who question the project. Imagine you’re a homeowner with a well near the new wellfield with up to nine actively-producing wells or within sight of two enormous stainless steel storage tanks four stories tall. For folks in town, an even greater challenge exists: establishing the burden of proof required that a wellfield located a mile or so uphill at the school district’s headquarters on Little Lake Road has adversely impacted your water supply downtown. Still supportive?
As an elected member of the MCCSD who originally approved the project in January 2022, I must admit that this is the sloppiest governing, the sloppiest project, I’ve ever witnessed. Any vain attempt to chronicle its crooked, complex path would require a tome and mental files of tungsten steel. The fact that two of five MCCSD directors who originally voted to support the project are now challenging it should speak volumes. Conspiracy theorists, both?
As one of those two directors, there’s much (at least some of us) weren’t informed at the time of proposal:
• that the wellfield would draw from the headwaters and wetlands of Slaughterhouse Creek (“gulch”);
• in a location the County has designated as a “Critical Groundwater Area” and a basin the State has designated as “Critically Overdrafted”;
• that the water supply would not be developed and co-managed to benefit the community of Mendocino as we understood it would be, but the 420 square-mile MUSD;
• that the project would not comply with the MCCSD groundwater extraction ordinance; - that MUSD would become the project’s Lead Agency under CEQA, oversee environmental review, and utilize an existing Initial Study/MND designed for drinking water upgrades; - that it was planned in an “Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area” of protected species; - adjacent a residential neighborhood with a history of private, domestic well depletion problems rather than the “good well production” area described to us;
• with the closest private domestic well as little as 30 feet away;
• that property values may be negatively affected;
• that a pair of four-story tall, stainless steel storage tanks would be contructed in exceedance of the County’s mandatory height limit of 35’ within the Highly Scenic Area of Little Lake Road Trail; - that the tanks that would be continuously filled or “topped-off” throughout the year and not simply during the rainy season if/when precipitation totals allowed;
• that the treated, potable water would be used to irrigate school playing fields; - that former dye tests determined the project site’s groundwater flowed west of Highway 1 and throughout the town of Mendocino;
• that the project would be considered for consolidation as part of a public water system; - that meetings were being quietly held to discuss and decide the project and its funding; - that personal requests for a physical tour of the project area would be ignored; - and that critical allocation and distribution criteria requested in 2021 would not be developed for another three years - and counting.
With the Coastal Commission considering a new appeal by ten and more appellants on the heels of an original one filed by a solo appellant in April, 2024, it’s critical that residents and political leaders recognize the narrative being spun by those with special interests in it prior to passing judgement. Before buying into the anticipated narrative or rumor that will with little doubt, portray appellants as conspiracy theorists or boondogglers (as one MCCSD director has described it), consider what you would do if you were personally impacted by a grand total of three huge new water tanks within your home’s or business’s viewshed (two storing potable water, a third with recycled water) and up to nine wells in a dense, geographically-compressed wellfield. With your viewshed obstructed, your water supply in jeopardy, your property values diminished, and sensitive coastal resources impacted, how would you react? If residing in the village, consider how you will possibly afford to establish the burden of proof required of you that the new wellfield has depleted your family’s water supply. Anyone able to sympathize should not be supportive but rather, protective of our mutual resources and voice objection.
The rush to construct has made a profound mess of things, and it didn’t have to be this way. A better project is possible, one that is far more logical, sustainable, equitable, inclusionary, consistent with statutes, regulations, ordinances, and county codes, developed with far more transparency, and this time - one that is well within the People’s earshot.
Christina Aranguren
Former Director, MCCSD
Current Chair/Appellant, MendoMatters.org
BILL KIMBERLIN
SFGate picks up on my recent article on “The Little River Inn.” “When you live here, the ocean is a character in your story,” “People assume when they visit that we’re jaded and don’t see it. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Family owner. I like that attitude. Every morning I check the view of the San Francisco Bay and the GGB. Every day it's different.
JUSTINE FREDERICKSON WRITES:
Warning: When I told my grandmother this about Jack LaLanne, she was livid and refused to believe me, but he was not exactly a model of healthy living, as he was quite the drunk, and quite the drunken driver.
When I was in college in San Luis Obispo in the mid-1990s, I worked for the California State Parks in nearby Morro Bay, and often in the early mornings there would be a very nice sports car parked in a turnout along the water directly in front of the kiosk where I worked.
“That's Jack LaLanne,” my co-worker said one morning when I asked if she knew that car, and she explained that he lived in the area, and quite frequently pulled over while driving drunk to avoid getting arrested again.
Here is just one arrest story from SLO in 1991: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-06-14-mn-666-story.html
FROM THE ARCHIVE: THE LIGHTS OUT GANG VISITS BOONVILLE
by Bruce Anderson
A big moon shone down on a cold and clear Anderson Valley that night in 2011 to choruses of barking dogs and yipping coyotes celebrating the lunar clarity.
About 10:30, just after Deputy Squires had gone off duty, four men at Guerrero's Tire Shop in downtown Boonville were knocking down a few beers around a barbecue. It was a little late for dinner, but the four men at Guerrero's lingered. They seemed to be waiting for someone, but probably not the someones who appeared.
These unwelcome someones were three young black men who rushed in through the back door waving handguns. The trio of intruders ordered the four men to get face down on the grimy floor of the garage.
Gustavo Alvarado, 25, of Philo and Carlos Guerrero, 45, of Boonville, didn't hit the floor fast enough, and one of the black men whomped Alvarado and Guerrero over the head with his weapon to speed them into the prone position.
The other two men already on the floor were Alex Arguelles-Renteria, 23, of Philo, and Fernando Ferreyra, 32, of Boonville.
As the robbers rifled the pockets of their hostages they threatened to kill the four men if they so much as twitched. There was a lot of “Mothafuggin” this and “Mothafuggin” that, as the men on the floor wondered if they were going to die.
The bandits scooped up cell phones, some groovy guy jewelry, car keys, and a wallet containing $3,000 in cash, which is a fat wallet indeed by Boonville standards.
Oh, and 18 pounds of processed marijuana, but reported by the victims as two pounds of trimmed bud.
The robbers then sped off south in what the cops described as a “burgundy sedan.”
And the four victims sped three-quarters of a mile northwest to Deputy Squires' house in Airport Estates.
The deputy answered the frantic knock on his front door in his pajamas.
“They were scared all right,” the deputy said Monday with a chuckle. “I know these guys. They said to me, 'Help us, Keith.' I'd just come in off duty. All the crooks know my hours better than I do, but even the crooks shouldn't get guns pointed at them. So, I called this thing in and put my uniform back on. We could probably intercept these three guys at Cloverdale when they came through there.”
The deputy was clearly amused at the irony of the four local guys assumed to be in the dope business getting robbed.
And the venue? The tire shop is assumed to be more in the pot business than the tire business.
The bad boys would have been halfway to Cloverdale by the time Deputy Squires called them in, careening southward toward their home base in Oakland.
This time of year lots of bandidos flee south with purloined loads of the love drug, but 2011 was also a bad year for the dope business. So many people were growing that the market was down, way down. Lots of growers were still sitting on last year's crop, and in 2011 they were sitting on their 2011 production as prices plummeted to around $800 a pound if a buyer could be found.
Of course stolen dope is all profit.
A cop was waiting on Highway 101 at Cloverdale, the usual interdiction point for dope marauders heading south from all points Mendo.
But the burgundy sedan whipped past the waiting cop at a speed estimated to be more than a hundred miles an hour. And the headlights on the burgundy sedan were off, not that the vehicle was invisible in the bright light of the big moon.
The three robbers were blasting south straight down 101.
The burgundy sedan with its headlights off proceeded to elude the police of three downstream jurisdictions — the Cloverdale Police Department; the Healdsburg Police Department; and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office. The sedan’s big engine was too much for the pursuing police cars, a burgundy bullet hurtling through wine country in the bright light of a full moon.
At Windsor, still undetected, the robbers called a cousin, a student at Santa Rosa Junior College. They needed to abandon the burgundy sedan. The police of four jurisdictions were looking for it. The bandits knew they might make it past the rural police forces, but there are lots more cops beginning at the Marin County line. They needed a ride in a fresh escape vehicle, a vehicle the cops, still on the lookout for the burgundy sedan, wouldn't recognize.
The robbers got on a cell to Cuz.
After a hurried cellphone-consultation with Cuz, the thieves and Cuz decided on Windsor High School as their rendezvous site.
“Drop the books and come get us, Cuz. Drive by Windsor High School with your lights off. We'll be waiting for you.”
Cuz, being family oriented, soon appeared.
The three mopes piled into Cuz's rescue vehicle, and Cuz and his three passengers took off “at a high rate of speed.”
With the headlights off.
These guys seemed to think they were invisible in the dark.
Cuz's vehicle was soon stopped on Highway 101 by police who wondered at the southbound vehicle driving dark.
Three of the men in Cuz's unilluminated wheels not only looked like the suspects in the Boonville robbery, one of the suspects just happened to have the keys to the burgundy sedan in his pocket. The cops had already located the burgundy sedan at Windsor High School, and when they opened its locked doors with the suspect's key there were 18 pounds of Boonville bud.
The Boonville victims had told a skeptical Deputy Squires that they'd been robbed of only two pounds, but Sonoma County deputies had retrieved “18 pounds of processed marijuana packaged in approximately 1-pound bags.”
We can assume that the 18 pounds of bud were contained in 18 turkey bags like the ones that used to be advertised on billboards in Ukiah where more turkey bags but fewer turkeys were sold than in any other town in America.
Garrett Alexander Bonner, 18, of Alameda; Shawn Delmore Ford Jr., 23, of Oakland; and Leon Samuel Patterson, 23, also of Oakland, were taken into custody.
Ford and Patterson were found to be on active parole from state prison.
Cuz was determined not to have been involved in the Boonville job and was sent home to resume his studies in Family Values.
The trio of East Bay men were driven to Ukiah and booked into the Mendocino County Jail on suspicion of robbery. Bail for each was set at $150,000.
Meanwhile, back in Boonville, Guerrero's Tire Shop was quiet, but neighbors and representatives of the Sheriff's Department said it had long been engaged more in off-the-books enterprise.
Juan Guerrero, who first owned the former service station, was arrested several years before in Indiana with a U-Haul full of NorCal bud. He remained in prison.
“We've been watching that place for years,” said a County cop. “It's no secret what goes on there. We're pretty sure they knew at least one of these guys who robbed them. We think the robbers were invited up here to buy dope and decided to take it from the Mexicans rather than pay for it. One of the Boonville victims admitted he'd sold pot to Oakland thugs before.”
Until this incident there hadn't been an armed robbery in the Anderson Valley in some time, a reported armed robbery anyway. There are always rumors of home invasions and assorted episodes of late-night gun mayhem, but nothing in the recent past that had been reported to the police.
Anderson Valley's two resident deputies, Keith Squires and Craig Walker, were concerned that recent Sheriff's Department budget cuts would result in more local crime. As Deputy Walker expressed it, “We're not patrolling anymore. There are people who think they can do pretty much anything they want. I hope they're not right. It's very aggravating to me personally not to be able to stay on top of things. We like to think that we were keeping a lid on drug activities, but with these cutbacks it's pretty obvious we can't keep that up. This thing last Thursday could have been a lot worse.”
The deputies agree that the local boys got in over their heads. As Deputy Walker put it, “Some of these kids think they're pretty tough, but they're not so tough when they meet real tough guys. All of a sudden they're swimming in a much bigger pond and the piranha get them.”
Addendum.
As Deputy Squires and investigator Andy Alvarado were taking statements from the four Boonville Tire Shop hold-up victims, one of the vics asked deputy Squires, “Keith, can we get our marijuana back?” The deputy and Alvarado had to turn away so they wouldn't laugh in the guy's face. But the case against two of the three robbers did not proceed because two of them were state prison parolees, meaning it's a cost saver for Mendo if they go straight back to the pen for violating parole without being prosecuted in Ukiah. This would also mean these two guys could be back on the streets in about six months, a prospect that causes most of us to throw up our hands and line up at the gun shops. And there were problems with the case. For openers, the cops didn't find any guns on the bandidos when they were finally stopped in Windsor. Second, the four Boonville victims could only positively identify one of the robbers. Squires said there was a third problem with the case: “Who's going to believe the four stooges who got robbed when they go to testify?” The youngest bandit's mom was in court when they were arraigned, shaking her fist at her wayward son and promising him that when he got home he'd face her wrath which, from all accounts, appears formidable. That kid was the son of an Alameda County Superior Court judge.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, February 21, 2025
JENNYLYNN ARDENYI, 46, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
JONATHAN CAMARGO, 37, Ukiah. Dumping in commercial quantities, pollution of state waters, controlled substance, paraphernalia.
MARCOS CARRILLO, 34, Fort Bragg. DUI, no license.
MELISSA CROW, 37, Willits. Vandalism, probation revocation.
NATHAN DEGURSE, 26, Willits. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, county parole violation.
JAMES DOGGETT, 19, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol
VANESSA ELIZABETH, 55, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-under influence, removal of shopping cart. (Frequent flyer.)
FIDEL ESPITIA-BARRALES, 43, Ukiah. Concealed dirk-dagger, paraphernalia, probation revocation.
LEAH HALEY, 39, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.
TIA HIGGINS, 33, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear, probation revocation.
NOAH LURANHATT, 34, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation, parole violation.
SHYLA PETERS, 49, Covelo. Tear gas, paraphernalia, probation revocation.
SARINA POTTER, 42, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-under influence.
STEVEN RICH SR., 37, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, parole violation.
DOMINICK SANTINO JR., 21, San Antonio/Ukiah. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, stolen property, registration for wrong vehicle.
SETH SMART, 26, Ukiah. Vehicle theft with priors, county parole violation.
NICOLE SMITH, 47, Ukiah. DUI with blood alcohol over 0.15%, leaving scene of accident with property damage.
CARLOS WHITE, 39, Covelo. Discharge of firearm in grossly negligent manner, felon-addict with firearm, armed in commission of felony, paraphernalia, ammo possession by prohibited person, county parole violation.
MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night Friday night on KNYO and KAKX!
Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. Or if that's too soon, send it later or any time during the week and I'll read it on the radio next time. That's all I'm here for, almost.
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.
Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. You'll finds plenty of other educational amusements there to fiddle with.
Also, 6pm this Sunday is Movie Night at KNYO. Because of KNYO's license to play movies, we're not allowed to use social media or newspaper or the transmitter to name the movie, but can use email, so email MovieClubAtKNYO@gmail.com and get on the list to always know what movies will be coming.
Of the movie, Bob Young wrote: “I was a mailman and did the downtown walking route. Laurel Street was pretty much the same, Laurel Deli and KOZT were on the south side of the street, Doug Roycroft had a tiny used book store wedged in there. Across the street was the Green Parrot soda shop. There was a lot of hubub in town about the movie crew, they were everywhere. I was delivering Laurel St. and noticed the movie crew at the Green Parrot, but assumed that Lena the owner would want her mail. I walked into the Green Parrot which had movie gear in the back of the shop and young people in 40's garb in the booths. I did not see any stars. Richard Benjamin was talking to a cameraman, I walked to the counter, Mr. Benjamin turned around and said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I am delivering the mail,” did it and walked out. A good story for my wife after work.”
And I can tell you that much of the movie was shot in Mendocino, and filming it at one point involved a crane holding a two-dimensional face of the full moon, a plastic map of the moon in a wood and metal frame full of lights, eight feet across, weighing perhaps a thousand pounds, sixty feet in the air over Little Lake street, to be in the sky over the shoulders of characters on the balcony (or roof?) of one of those houses in the row east of the Art Center. It just happened that, that night, Juanita and I had gone to a show at Crown Hall, I think it was a Hit and Run Theater show; we were walking hand-in-hand across town, and just as we stopped in the crowd in Heider Field near the old white church to watch the filming, men shouted, a cable came loose, and the electrical moon fell out of the sky and crashed in the street like a car wreck! That was only a little before they could just insert a realistic moon, or anything, wherever they wanted to in a film, for free. I mean, they could have done it with film techniques going back to 1910, but they wanted the actors to be acting with a real-looking moon right there in the real world in real life, and so that's what they did. They hadn't got their shot yet, before the disaster. They had to build another moon.
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO SAY?
by Paul Modic
I Promise: “Well, what do you want me to say?” seems like one of those questions that you only hear in the movies, because in real life why would someone want to say something just because that’s what they think the other person wants to hear? That seems very inauthentic, though of course people, naturally or coincidentally, say what others want to hear, sometimes or often I suppose.
Another of those phrases I only hear in the movies is when someone proposes something they will do or that might happen and then says, “I promise.” Really? Sounds like bullshit and only once has someone said that to me, last year when an editor said she’d get back to me about a story I’d submitted and never did, proving “I promise” was the bullshit statement I’d always thought it was. (Maybe people with families, spouses and kids, say “I promise,” but that’s putting a lot of pressure on, isn’t it?)
I can’t think of anything I would say “I promise” about, maybe I just don’t want to commit, or avoid hearing someone later whine, “But you promised!”
Let It Out: When I babysat Abbie Hoffman’s kid America his wife Anita said, “Abbie doesn’t play by the rules.” I also don’t play by the rules, deciding I can say anything, regardless of social niceties, but today you’ll be happy to know I’m reconsidering, maybe some topics might be better left unsaid?
I know, that is heresy coming from the mouth that roars, is this the final frontier of conformity, self-censoring certain thoughts or topics? Why not? What’s so important about saying anything and everything? Just to show I can, that I can’t be bound by the usual conventions, mores and taboos?
I suppose I can comfort myself by knowing I’ve already said it all, so why bother repeating myself on a yearly basis? Haven’t I already proved that I’ll say anything, that I’m not afraid to let it all out? (But still…)
The Marantz: In 1988 I decided to emerge from the hills after fourteen years and become a real person and applied for the job of KMUD News Director. Well, they must have sensed that I was an unserious person, still am, just looking for an identity or a life and they turned me down. This was after I’d bought a $600 state-of-the-art Marantz cassette recorder in preparation for the job, and that hardly used machine haunts me now up on a closet shelf. What’s going to happen to that fine piece of outdated technology when I drift away forever? Of all my stuff it’s the Marantz which haunts me most. (I did use it once for a few hours to record an oral history, my father telling about his life.)
I also have three pretty ceramic sinks from Mexico in my attic, why do I care less about them? Because they originally cost only twenty or thirty dollars? How about the ten solar ovens, they’re probably worth $1500 on the open market yet their presence upon my absence doesn’t bother me. I also have a video camera, circa 2008, used just a couple hours and it would be sad to drop that in the trash. (A smartphone probably does all that now.)
Dream: Holly is visiting and we’re sitting/laying on the bed across from each other. I suggest we intermingle our legs but she doesn’t go along with it. Some people come by and she puts out a cheesecake, quiche, and some other dish while I look for a random interesting poem to show them. She arranges to stay in the guest room the following Tuesday when she’ll be in town doing a puppet show.
Everyone leaves, I’m at an AirBnB nearby, and I see some people checking in. One is a man from Sacramento with a TV camera, it sounds like he’ll need a ride in thirty minutes, I offer to give him one and he declines.
I go in the neighboring AirBnB and a family comes in: a black man, white woman, and two mixed kids. I sit on the bed with the couple and the guy reaches over and kisses me pretty solidly, once, then twice, no tongue, then moves his hand to my crotch for a few seconds, loses interest and leaves with his kids.
I’m alone with the wife on the bed when the BnB host comes in.
“Oh, you’re a couple?” she says.
“No, I’m just visiting,” I say.
“Well, make sure you park correctly,” she says. “I don’t want to pay a lot of money for tickets.”
I wake up.
FALL CHINOOK SALMON RETURNS TO SACRAMENTO AND KLAMATH RIVERS WERE MUCH LOWER THAN FORECASTED BY FISHERY MANAGERS
by Dan Bacher
Despite the closure of salmon fishing in California river and ocean waters in 2023 and 2024, the number of Fall Chinook Salmon returning to both the Sacramento and Klamath River Basins was well below the numbers forecasted by state and federal officials one year ago.…
TRIAL SET FOR MAN ACCUSED IN CLOVERDALE’S 1ST HOMICIDE, A 1982 KILLING OF 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL
James Unick, charged with murder in the death of Sara Ann Geer, pleaded not guilty Thursday.
by Colin Atagi
A man accused of killing a 13-year-old girl in Cloverdale more than four decades ago is set to stand trial in October, marking a major step in a case long considered the community’s first homicide.
James Unick, 63, pleaded not guilty Thursday in Sonoma County Superior Court, where he faces charges in the 1982 killing of Sara Ann Geer. Judge Laura Passaglia scheduled proceedings for a jury trial to begin Oct. 10.
Unick was arrested in July while living in Willows, a small city in Glenn County. He remains jailed in Sonoma County without bail.
His attorney, Gabriel Quinnan, is expected to file a motion for dismissal April 3, according to court records. Such motions typically follow preliminary hearings and challenge the sufficiency of evidence presented by prosecutors.
Investigators said Geer had spent a weekend with friends before returning home Sunday, May 23, 1982. Instead of going inside, she walked downtown and was last seen at a video game arcade on Cloverdale Boulevard.
Her partially clothed body was found the next day behind an apartment building on Main Street, in an alley between Second and Third streets. Two children made the grim discovery, including the 6-year-old granddaughter of a Cloverdale City Council member who lived in the building.
An autopsy found Geer died from “manual traumatic injuries,” consistent with strangulation or a beating.
The case remained cold for nearly 40 years until Cloverdale police reopened it in 2021, working alongside a private investigator. Authorities have not disclosed what new evidence led to Unick’s arrest.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
CHUCKING USAID
Editor:
Right-wing politicians have complained about foreign aid for decades, calling it a wasteful diversion of resources to often-ungrateful foreigners. It isn’t surprising that the new administration is moving to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development.
What is ironic about dismantling USAID is that this agency is designed to promote the American way of organizing global production. It was set up to counter radical movements in the third world and has been an effective incubator of capitalist economies around the world.
I remember rows of USAID-branded tractors parked in Cairo, waiting to be shipped to impoverished farmers. Their farms were too small for such machines to turn around in, and they could not afford gasoline. But the U.S.-based manufacturer made a huge sale.
Why aren’t critics of capitalism celebrating USAID’s demise? The cutoff of American equipment and expertise will force desperate people to come up with innovative, noncapitalist solutions to the economic and environmental problems they face — or turn to China for help.
Karl Marx remarked that the function of the state is to protect capitalists from themselves. The current administration’s actions show that Marx had it right.
Fred H. Lawson
Bodega Bay
THE COUNTERCULTURE THAT SPRANG FROM SAN FRANCISCO
by Jonah Raskin
Paul McCartney heard rumors of the wild goings-on in the Haight and visited on April 4, 1967. At the Fillmore Auditorium, he listened to a rehearsal by the Jefferson Airplane. At Marty Balin’s and Jack Casady’s apartment and along with his girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher, he played an acetate (a type of phonograph) of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” album, which would be released later that year. Thousands of others flocked to the Haight, once a largely Black neighborhood, for the music, the drugs, and the revolution that was promoted by the Diggers, who named themselves after 17th century English dissidents. Gerard Winstanley and his Digger comrades aimed to turn the world upside down would probably have felt at home in the Haight in 1967 when the great American counterculture was “busy being born” to borrow the words from Bob Dylan’s ballad ”It’s All Right, Ma (I’m only bleeding).”
How counter was the counterculture? And if you were alive then and there how counter was your own personal culture? Not sure? You might be able to decide on your own when the Counterculture Museum opens this spring on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the neighborhood where hippies and their friends reigned supreme for about two years in the late 1960s.
Then disaster struck. Bad drugs. Bad health. Bad cops. Paradise rarely lasts long, not for Diggers or hippies. But the melodies from that time and place have played on and on. Dozens of books have been written about that era including Charles Perry’s brilliant The Haight Ashbury that comes with an introduction by Grateful Dead member Bob Weir who says, “We weren’t all stoned all the time. But we were all artists, musicians, and freaks all the time.”
The Haight staged a comeback in the 1990s, largely because of the efforts of gay men. Today it is a vital San Francisco neighborhood with Amoeba, a gigantic record store, Gus’s, an excellent grocery, two cannabis dispensaries, a post office, a few decent cafes and restaurants, and dozens of shops and boutiques selling tie-dyed T-shirts, hoodies and sneakers. It also attracts a great many tourists who want to imbibe the magic of the hippie era, buy rolling papers, roaches, posters and R. Crumb Comic books.
Estelle and Jerry Cimino, a husband and wife team and the founders of the Counterculture Museum — they are also the founders of the Beat Museum in North Beach — plan to give as much if not more space to the anti-war and civil rights movements as they do to the “youth culture” of the Sixties that created communes, staged rock festivals, made marijuana a commodity, and went on overland journeys to India to seek gurus in ashrams.
That decision to blend the movement and the counterculture might surprise and even shock veterans and historians of the Sixties. After all, they were two separate entities from about 1967 to 1972. In those heady days, Yippies tangled with members of SDS, Abbie Hoffman battled Tom Hayden of the Red Family and Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, who once called Abbie “a thorn in her side.” Abbie called her “Bernie” much to her distress. At the time, the rivalries and clashes seemed as significant as the divisions in 1917 and 1918 between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks or those between American anarchists and American members of the US Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s.
In the fall of 1970 — five months or so after the National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State and police shot and killed two and injured twelve students at Jackson State — I joined a small delegation that traveled from New York to Algeria to meet with Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, both living there in exile with the pipe dream of creating a new organization that would appeal to Black Panthers, Yippies, members of SDS, as well as psychedelic warriors who belonged to the League for Spiritual Discovery.
The other members of the delegation were Marty Kenner, Brian Flannigan, Anita Hoffman, Jennifer Dohrn and Stew Albert. In the background in Algiers were Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge’s wife, and several young Panthers who had fled the US rather than go on trial and go to jail. In the elegant Panther embassy, in-between visits from the North Korean Ambassador, the young Panthers listened to Motown, smoked dope and danced. I danced and smoked with them. I also dropped acid with Leary and watched a visiting Russian volleyball team trounced an Algerian team.
Anita Hoffman represented Abbie who was not allowed to leave the US; that was an order from Judge Julius Hoffman who presided over the Chicago Conspiracy trial. Marty Kenner represented Panther support groups, Stew Albert spoke for his pal, Jerry Rubin, Jennifer Dohrn conveyed the sentiments of her sister, Bernardine and Brian Flannigan, who had been arrested during the “Days of Rage” in October 1969, expressed the anger of the quintessential street fighting man.
I had a singular objective. Bernardine asked me to meet with Eldridge and tell him in confidence that Leary was untrustworthy, that he had blabbed to reporters and acid heads, gave away secrets about the Weather Underground, and named the names of people who helped him escape from Lompoc Prison and also aided and abetted his flight from the US.
Eldridge taped my conversation with him and held an AK-47 (a gift of the North Korean Ambassador to Algeria) in his lap the whole time we talked. He overreacted to the information I delivered and put Leary and his wife Rosemary under house arrest. The members of the delegation were confined to Eldridge’s pad, which was different from the Panther Embassy and also different from the house in the hills where Eldridge lived with Kathleen.
Don Cox, the Panther Field Marshall gave us a tour of Algiers and described the history of the Algerian liberation movement. On one occasion we enjoyed a sumptuous seafood dinner, while a couple of CIA agents kept their eyes trained on us.
One afternoon, in the pad, I wrote a press release in which I quoted Eldridge, who called for armed struggle, and Leary who wanted cosmic voyagers to travel to outer space. Not surprisingly they couldn’t agree on anything. Also, not surprisingly they both returned to the US, surrendered to the authorities and made deals that kept them from long prison terms.
That fall, I flew from Algiers to Paris, reencountered with Abbie and met pseudo French Yippies — pseudo because they were living at home with their parents. I also roamed the Left Bank with Jean-Jacques Lebel, a French Beat, a translator, and a surrealist. We looked for trouble that never arrived. The young French Yuppies seemed to have the best of two worlds. They defied older generations, rioted in the streets and came home to eat their mothers’ gourmet cooking.
My favorite person from that time was Bernadette Devlin, the Irish revolutionary who was fond of saying of the British, “kick them when they’re down.” Nasty but oh so satisfying.
At home in New York I wrote an account of Leary and Cleaver in Algeria. Paul Krassner published it in The Realist under the title, “Eldridge & Tim, Kathleen & Rosemary” and with an illustration that depicted the two couples in bed together in a spoof of the movie, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice that capitalized on and reflected some of the sexual politics of that era.
I don’t expect the Counterculture Museum to offer exhibits that will highlight the fiasco in Algeria or the odd position of the French Yuppies who were both in and out of the global counterculture. The Ciminos emphasize unity not disunity, hope not despair, creativity not self-destruction and positive gains not loses. That’s surely the best tact to take especially since they want to attract visitors and inspire them.
The counterculture that sprang up in the Haight Ashbury is worth remembering and celebrating, especially because the Ciminos will connect it to the movements of the past and political causes of today.
Estelle describes the museum as though it’s a beloved child. “The Counterculture Museum will celebrate the vibrant legacy of Haight-Ashbury by preserving art, activism, and creative expression that once defined the neighborhood. Far from being a relic of the past, counterculture continues to shape music, fashion, social movements and the spirit of independent thinking,” she says.
Estelle adds, “By bringing history to life through exhibitions, events, movies and storytelling, the museum hopes to strengthen the community, enrich the cultural fabric of Haight-Ashbury, and support local merchants by drawing visitors eager to experience the authentic, enduring impact of the counterculture movements.”
It’s worth remembering because as far as I can see there are few if any genuine countercultures today in the US. Journalists and reporters who write about them seem to assume that they’re dead and buried.
In a recent article published in The New Yorker about the documentary filmmakers, Albert and David Maysles, and editor and director, Charlotte Zwerin, journalist Michael Schulman notes that the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in December 1969 marked “a death knell for the counterculture.” Indeed, it seemed to be the flip side of Woodstock. Ever since then cultural critics have held funerals and burials for the counterculture though in the 1970s the counterculture spread from New York’s Lower East side and San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury to the countryside where it put down rural roots.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s in the aftermath of the bloodbaths at Kent and Jackson state I wrote two contradictory pieces about the counterculture: one of them titled “Children of Imperialism” which largely denounced youth culture and the other “New Morning" which was issued as a communiqué by the Weather Underground and that herald the arrival of youth culture. Some Black Panthers described it as a betrayal of Third World Liberation struggles.
At that time I thought that the Weather Underground needed a base and a constituency; hippies seemed the only potential allies around, especially since the organization had given up on the white working class. But I could also see that hippies and freaks had adopted some of the racist notions of their parents. They idealized American Indians and Third World peasants and saw themselves as active consumers buying and selling drugs, music, and even rebellion which was framed as a commodity.
Perhaps the Counterculture Museum will convert millennials and members of Generation Z to the cause of rebellion and resistance today but it will be an uphill battle. “We seem to be going backward,” Estelle says, thinking of Trump and company. But she and Jerry Cimino are not giving up their culture war.
“It’s important to educate young people about the past so they understand that positive change can happen today just like it did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she says. Jerry adds that the counterculture of the 1960s happened because “the boomers reached critical mass and because their coming coincided with the arrival of global electronic mass media.” Today technology seems more reactionary than ever before, especially when it’s in the hands of autocrats like Elon Musk and his minions.
If the Ciminos wanted help with their museum they could do no better than turn to Stannous Flouride who has lived in the Haight for 43 years and who gives popular walking tours in the neighborhood wearing a black leather jacket and an ancient button that screams “Yippie!” ”City Hall hated the hippies,” Flouride says. “Mayor Joe Alioto wanted to destroy them, so he canceled services to the neighborhood, like garbage removal, which prompted the Diggers to organize a ‘clean-in.’ The Diggers fed thousands of kids and provided the spiritual and political backbone for the hippies.”
If Flouride were creating a counterculture museum he says he’d feature the Diggers, The Panthers, jazz, rock, the January 1967 “Human Be-in” and the “Summer of Love.” He adds “there is really no counterculture here as there was in the Sixties.” He adds, “The only remaining counterculture is hip hop which appeals to both young whites and young Blacks.”
If I wanted to revive a slogan from the Sixties and put it back in circulation it might be, “The spirit of the people is greater than the Man’s technology.” It was greater in Vietnam and it can be greater around the world again. Get off your phones and your laptops. Go into the streets and make as much noise as you can.
If the Counterculture Museum succeeds it will send visitors into the streets of the Haight and beyond. It will turn into its opposite, not a museum with artifacts but a cradle of resistance and rebellion with ideas and tools for insurrections. After all, museums are usually repositories of the past, and as such they are innately conservative and rarely innovative. It’s time to bring about a cultural revolution in the world of the counterculture.
(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)
FEDERAL FUNDING CUTS ARE CRUSHING CALIFORNIA'S SMALL MOUNTAIN TOWNS
'We don't know where the bottom is.'
by Julie Brown Davis
Michelle Beutler cleared 67 trees off a U.S. Forest Service road in two days. It was the spring of 2023, after a record-breaking winter in the Stanislaus National Forest in California’s Sierra Nevada. Beutler, 59, worked alone with a chain saw to remove every fallen tree on a 10-mile stretch of road between the town of Long Barn in Tuolumne County and the popular Hull Creek Campground. She single-handedly finished the work so the road could open in time for Memorial Day.
As a recreation technician based out of the Summit Ranger Station in the Stanislaus National Forest, Beutler’s job was to clean toilets, pick up trash and maintain recreation sites and campgrounds up and down Sonora Pass. She’d typically drive her Forest Service truck 100 miles a day. She sprayed pit toilets with a fire hose. She wiped away graffiti and removed thousands of pounds of house trash, old furniture and useless stuff that people dumped in the forest. She extinguished hundreds of abandoned and illegal campfires. She assisted law enforcement during emergency accidents, helping officers navigate a swath of rugged forest land that she grew up on and knows intimately.
But last week, Beutler lost her job. The Trump administration has fired thousands of people like Beutler who work for the Forest Service, hollowing out an agency that manages 193 million acres of land across the country — roughly equivalent to the size of Texas. California’s 18 national forests alone add up to 20 million acres.
Beutler was one of two recreation technicians in the Summit Ranger District. They both lost their jobs this week.
“There’s nobody left in our position to go out and do the work that we did,” Beutler said, noting that trash will accumulate and toilets in campgrounds will fester.
“Don’t go camping this summer, I wouldn’t advise it,” she added.
California mountain towns are surrounded by public land. Their recreation-based economies are part of an industry worth $640 billion nationwide, more than oil and gas, agriculture, vehicle manufacturing or air transportation. These rural towns depend on functioning federal agencies, like the Forest Service, to manage public land. The Forest Service has already been operating with a diminished staff, according to former employees, locally elected officials and nonprofit organizers. Now, it’s a skeleton. That’s going to have an impact on rural communities in the Sierra Nevada — but what exactly the impact will be is still unclear.
Mountain towns across the Sierra Nevada are scrambling to find more information about the extent of the cuts to the Forest Service and other land management agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service. However, information is scarce. In the Sierra Nevada, the numbers that have percolated are anecdotal, arriving piecemeal and by word-of-mouth. Truckee resident Katie Hawkins, California program director for Outdoor Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for human-powered outdoor recreation on public lands, has been speaking with elected representatives and government employees about the fallout from federal actions all week. No one has a firm assessment of how many people were let go, what responsibilities have been lost and what the impacts will be, she said.
“We’re on the slippery slope and we don’t know how steep it’s going to be and we don’t know where the bottom is,” said John Wentworth, Mammoth Lakes councilmember and a former mayor. Wentworth is also the president and CEO of an outdoor recreation advocacy group called Mammoth Lakes Trails and Public Access.
By some estimates, the Forest Service and other federal agencies have cut about 10% of their workforce. A union representative for employees on the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Northern Nevada told KTVN-TV that about 3,400 Forest Service employees were let go this week. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Reuters some 2,000 people were laid off.
Anecdotally, the number of jobs lost could be higher, said Tania Lown-Hecht, vice president of communications and strategy for Outdoor Alliance, noting that some forests are seeing their staff cut by 30% or more. “Every state that we’re talking to is facing the same stuff. Washington has had huge cuts. Montana has had huge cuts. It’s all over. It’s not just West Coast or East Coast,” Lown-Hecht said.
Many of these employees restore forests, maintain trails, campgrounds and recreation areas. During wildfire season, these same employees — whether they work in silviculture or botany — are also dispatched to fight wildfires. The cuts were supposedly made in the name of government efficiency, but Lown-Hecht points out that these positions typically earn lower wages.
“The fat is not in workers who are making $20 to $40 an hour doing trail maintenance,” Lown-Hecht said. “These are people who are really, they’re doing it because they love this work. They love public land. They’re civil servants.”
Since the 1980s, Beutler’s dream was to work for the Stanislaus National Forest, where she grew up. But she put her plans on hold while she raised three boys, working fast food jobs to make ends meet. At 45, she went back to school, then landed a temporary position at the Forest Service. Last year, she got a promotion to be a permanent seasonal employee. Her Forest Service wage was about the same as what she made working in fast food.
Many of the employees who lost jobs are probationary staff, including Beutler. Probationary staff includes new employees or employees who have recently been promoted or transferred into a new role. It’s not a punishment, Beutler pointed out. It signals an employee is training or settling into a new role. “I never, ever got a bad evaluation,” Beutler said. “I always got the highest possible marks that I could get.”
Yet, the Trump administration told employees their performance was a factor in their decision to terminate jobs.
“The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” states the termination letter, dated Feb. 13, that Beutler received.
ALL THE OXYGEN IN THE ROOM
by Alexander Fella
On January 8 I received an email from my boss at the health department where I work on social epidemiology. It was a message relayed from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Data is the oxygen of public health,’ it said, ‘essential for improving health and saving lives.” On 31 January, most, if not all, public health data were purged from the CDC’s website. Within hours of the erasure, health departments were stalled. If data were the oxygen of public health, then all the oxygen had just been sucked out of the room.
The data purge followed Donald Trump’s executive order ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. In a follow-up memo, health agencies were told to “take down all outward facing media … that inculcate or promote gender ideology.”
Around eight thousand webpages and datasets went dark, including decades of resources on vaccine efficacy; studies on race and health disparities; data on HIV prevalence and STD prevention; and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), an expansive survey of young Americans’ health habits, tracking everything from exercise to gender identity.
Metrics on obesity, depression, disabilities in the elderly, healthcare access, frequency of doctor visits and cancer rates were all taken down. The Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), which identifies a community’s vulnerability to disasters, went offline. In short, the entire infrastructure of America’s public health research stopped responding overnight. Attempts to access the data were met with ‘404: Page Not Found’ errors and a banner that said: ‘The CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.’
The WHO and UNICEF use CDC datasets in their monitoring of maternal health, immunization and disease prevention. Non-profit organizations rely on CDC data for everything from grant-writing to advocating for air-quality monitors. Legal aid groups use it to fight against the demolition of public housing. Obesity and opioid overdose deaths – two pillars of the Trump administration’s public health platform – cannot be addressed without CDC data. In 2020, the first Trump administration recommended reducing testing to lower the number of Covid-19 cases. Without tests, the pandemic could simply be declared over. Perhaps a similar logic is at work today.
Much of the data provides fine-grained information on the social health of cities at a neighborhood level. That, in turn, allows researchers to make precise interventions in health policy for those who need it most. Obesity rates at the state level tell us something important. But localized data allows us to ask particular questions: does obesity spike in neighborhoods without a grocery store? Is heart disease lower in neighborhoods with parks? Do opioid overdose deaths cluster where people are regularly buying prescription drugs? Is proximity to a train track correlated with a prevalence of poor sleep?
These questions are not hypothetical. They orient my day-to-day work, making maps of health inequality in my city. More than a diagnostic tool, the maps are used to co-ordinate interventions across a variety of fields. Heat maps of fast-food density and obesity help to direct mobile food banks to where they’re most needed. A geography of rising overdose deaths and plummeting insurance rates tells community organizations where to target naloxone distribution. Raw data are numbers on a spreadsheet. On a map, they allow health departments and community partners to attend to emerging crises that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Of course health data alone cannot provide all the answers. As Michel de Certeau put it, the “spatial flattening” of a city by statisticians risks steamrolling the nuance of human life with a pretense of objectivity. There’s truth in this. All “raw” data, as Nick Barrowman has observed, is already “cooked.” But not to make false idols of “the data” is one thing. To expunge the libraries of the CDC is another.
In the last few days, some health data has re-emerged following a court order by a federal judge. A few databases have returned but with key portions redacted. The YRBSS is back online, but so riddled with broken links as to be almost unusable. The SVI also appears to have been restored. But with no documentation that notes what, if any, changes have been made to the restored data, researchers are left with doubts as to the integrity of their own work.
Questions about the relationship between obesity and fast food are now shadowed by another question: has this data been doctored? It is an uncanny feeling to be made a stranger to one’s own discipline. The work resumes, but for the foreseeable future it will be stymied by a suspicion that the tools have been tampered with, or could disappear again at any moment.
(London Review of Books)
FUNNY MONEY
by James Kunstler
The revelations that are coming for America possess the potential to reshape our entire notion of the relationship between citizen and state.” — El Gato Malo on Substack
You’ve got to wonder how the Party of Chaos thought they would get away with the Stacey Abrams grift-of-grifts. In case you forgot, Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia twice, lost, and claimed she was “real governor” for years after. In the meantime, she parlayed her celebrity persona to a $3.17-million net worth by 2022, doing nothing but running for office. She claimed it derived from giving speeches, publishing romance novels, and “wise investments.”
That was then, and this is now. Stacey popped up again this week in what looks like a textbook case of political scamming, uncovered by The DOGE team of forensic financial investigators. As “Joe Biden” racked up Democratic presidential primary wins in 2024, the shadowy claque behind him allocated $27-billion to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from the huge Inflation Reduction Act, ostensibly for “climate change action.” The money was stashed at Citibank, where it became a hidden slush-fund to keep payoffs flowing to party favorites no matter who won the 2024 election. An EPA “special advisor on climate action,” one Brent Efron, told a Project Veritas investigative reporter that “President Biden” was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic”.
The key to understanding how the Democratic Party works is how it uses federal grants to redistribute taxpayer money into jobs programs for its rank-and-file. As seen in the recent USAID scandal, the action revolves around the creation of countless NGOs (non-governmental orgs). They are easily created, poorly supervised, and assembled into large networks of self-serving, inter-dependent organisms whose main mission is paying staffers — and secondarily pretending to do good works, as suggested by a given group’s name is. These staffers make up the matrix of Democratic Party activists, well-paid foot-soldiers in do-nothing jobs who can be called upon to cheer-lead for the party, organize street protests and, most critically, harvest ballots when the time comes.
Stacey Abrams became a kind of field marshal for setting up NGOs around her campaigns for office and then later turned them into money laundromats for the trillions of dollars fire-hosed out of the US Treasury during the Covid-19-darkened “Biden” years. Here are some of Stacy’s NGOs:
· The New Georgia Project and its affiliated NGP Action Fund — set up for her 2018 run for governor. It was eventually fined $300,000 for failing to disclose millions in contributions, failing to register properly, and sixteen violations of campaign laws. Its main purpose was providing jobs for an army of activists. One question that might have been asked: how many of Stacey Abrams’ books were purchased by The New Georgia Project, juicing her royalties?
· The Southern Economic Advancement Project, founded in 2019 to “promote equity” in twelve southern states, paid Stacey a $700,000 annual salary.
· The Fair Fight Action group raised nearly $62 million in dark pool donations by 2022, with 96-percent from 252 large, unidentified donors.
· The Fair Count Project was created to lobby for counting illegal aliens in the 2020 US Census, in order to pad state congressional districts.
· The Third Sector Development group, created as an “incubator” for other groups (including the New Georgia Project).
· The Fair Fight 2020 group, created to “train voter protection teams” in twenty “battleground states.” That is, ballot harvesting.
Out of the $27-billion from “Joe Biden’s” Inflation Reduction Act sent to EPA in 2024, $2-billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) ended up in the Stacey-associated Rewiring America org and its offshoot the Power Forward Communities org. Stacey was listed as “senior counsel” to Rewiring America, which also happened to “partner” with her prior NGOs Fair Count and Southern Economic Advancement Project.
What you might surmise from all this is that “Joe Biden’s” green energy agenda was used as a green smokescreen for a giant patronage racketeering operation. The billions allocated would go ostensibly to innumerable corporations set up to carry-out “green” good deeds, most of which would never actually happen, but would, along the way, pad thousands upon thousands of bank accounts for favored contractors.
Stacey’s Power Forward Communities NGO was incorporated in the state of Delaware where loose corporate governance requires such orgs to pay out only five percent of the org’s funds to its stated mission recipients each year. The rest of the $2-billion not allocated to staff salaries can be socked away in safe investments garnering, say, $50-million-a-year in returns, which can be rolled back into the org and used for spinning out new NGOs with more paid staff positions. . .grift upon grift. . . .
That is what patronage is, and that, by the way, is how it became such an urgent national issue over a hundred years ago when it was openly known as the “spoils system” in electoral politics — to the victor go the spoils— which was resolved by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Alas, in our time patronage (that is, corruption) has reinvented itself as the blob, the runaway system that almost sank the country.
Do you see how all this works now? The ever-expanding matrix of NGOs creates an army of useful idiots working hand-in-hand with an ever-expanding rogue bureaucracy that has become effectively a fourth branch of government accountable to nobody. This is how your tax dollars disappear down a rat-hole and why the US government is insolvent.
The difference now is that the Democratic Party no longer has its hands on the levers of power. Different managers are in place at the critical agencies, most particularly Pam Bondi at DOJ, Kash Patel at the FBI, Russell Vought at OMB, Lee Zeldin at EPA, and Elon Musk in the DOGE. In the past, nothing was done about these shenanigans. This time is different. The Democratic Party will lose its principal means for staying alive. That’s why senators like Chuck Schumer, Chris Coons, and Adam Schiff are out mewling and hollering in the streets. Meanwhile, the blob is getting methodically disassembled, one bureaucratic office at a time. Before much longer we are going to be a different country, and most probably a better one.
FAIL, CAESAR!
by Maureen Dowd
“Remember, I can do whatever I want to whomever I want.”
It sounds like President Trump, to the world. But it was Caligula, to his grandmother.
At least America’s Emperor of Chaos has not made his horse a consul. Yet.
A horse might be better than some of the sketchy characters surrounding Trump.
After pillaging and gutting the U.S. government, the Western alliance and our relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump is thinking of himself as a king and cogitating on a third term. He basks in the magniloquent rhetoric of acolytes genuflecting to an instrument of divine providence.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, a group calling itself the “Third Term Project” erected a sign depicting Trump as Caesar. A wag on X wondered if they knew what happened to Caesar.
America was forged in the blood and fire of rejecting tyranny; its institutions were meticulously formed around the principle that we would never be ruled by a king.
Yet Trump delights in reposting memes of himself as a king and as Napoleon, with a line attributed to the emperor: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
After tangling for years with a legal system he claimed was out to get him, Trump is jonesing to be above the law. (The Supreme Court slapped him back Friday, at least temporarily, for firing a government watchdog.)
His dictatorial impulses were clear when he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and egged on a mob to disrupt the certification of the election, even if it meant that his own vice president might be hanged. And now he has added imperialistic impulses, musing about taking over the Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada, Gaza, D.C., and mineral rights in Ukraine.
His megalomania has mushroomed. His derisive behavior toward Zelensky — how can a modestly talented reality show veteran mock Zelensky as “a modestly successful comedian”? — shows Trump can’t abide anyone saying he is doing anything wrong.
When The Associated Press refused to go along with his diktat to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, the news organization was barred from covering some events with the president in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.
The A.P. sued Friday afternoon. “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” it said, adding, “Allowing such government control and retaliation to stand is a threat to every American’s freedom.”
Also on Friday, at a meeting with governors in the White House, Trump stopped abruptly to chide Gov. Janet Mills of Maine for resisting his executive order barring transgender athletes from women’s sports.
“You better comply, because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding,” the president warned the Democratic governor.
“See you in court,” she shot back.
Of course, Trump needed the last word. Of course, it had to be nasty. “Enjoy your life after governor,” he said, “because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”
As Shawn McCreesh wrote in The Times, nobody had seen such a moment since Trump came back to the Oval: “Somebody defied President Trump. Right to his face.”
I’ve been reading a book called “How to Be a Bad Emperor: An Ancient Guide to Truly Terrible Leaders,” written by Suetonius and translated by Josiah Osgood. Osgood writes of Caligula’s “propensity to give in to every whim and the relish he took in putting down others with cruel remarks.”
As Suetonius noted about Caligula, “To the Senate he showed no more mercy or respect. He allowed some who had achieved the highest offices to run alongside his chariot in their togas for several miles or to stand, dressed in a linen cloth, at the head or the foot of his couch as he dined.”
Sound familiar?
Some Republican lawmakers spoke up about Trump, JD Vance and Pete Hegseth caving to Russia — going against a long history of Republicans treating Russia as the “Evil Empire” — or at least with a healthy skepticism. When George W. Bush, as president, said he could look into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and see his soul, John McCain warned that Putin was a “thug” and a “killer,” noting that when he looked in Putin’s eyes, he saw “a K, a B and a G.” But those who spoke up against Trump did not seem ready to do much about it. They’re still cowering before him. As Politico reported, Trump allies moved quickly to stifle dissent with the party’s defense hawks: “Vice President JD Vance and several administration officials who are close to Donald Trump Jr. have been central to the effort to sideline those with traditional conservative foreign policy views.”
After Trump ranted that Ukraine had “started” the war and that Zelensky was a “dictator,” the normally doting New York Post felt the need to put Putin on the front page with the headline: “President Trump: This Is a Dictator.”
The most vivid image of the week was an elated Elon Musk waving a chain saw at CPAC. That glee in the face of pain may come back to haunt Trump. As The Washington Post reported, many lawmakers got an earful from angry constituents about layoffs, freezes and jagged cuts, a hollowing out of government with no sense of logic or heart or safety.
Many who had hoped to tune out Trump this time realize they don’t have that luxury. It’s far more dangerous now. There are frightening moments when our 236-year-old institutions don’t look up to the challenge. With flaccid Democrats and craven Republicans, King Donald can pretty much do whatever he wants to whomever he wants.
(nytimes.com)
WHEN YOUR PROM DATE GOES ON TO BE FILM LEGEND JACK NICHOLSON.
Jack Nicholson has spoken about his upbringing in Neptune City, NJ, with a mix of fondness and humor. He was raised by his grandmother, whom he believed to be his mother, and only later in life discovered that his “sister” was actually his biological mother.
In interviews, he's recalled his childhood as relatively normal, growing up in a working-class neighborhood near the Jersey Shore. He has mentioned enjoying trips to Asbury Park and has credited his Jersey roots with helping shape his tough, independent persona.
Nicholson has also acknowledged the influence of his upbringing on his career, once joking that coming from New Jersey gave him a natural rebellious streak. While he left the state as a young man to pursue acting in California, he has always maintained a connection to his early years in Neptune City.
Before starting high school, his family moved to an apartment in Spring Lake, New Jersey. “Nick,” as he was known to his high school friends, attended nearby Manasquan High School, where he was voted “Class Clown” by the Class of 1954. He was in detention every day for a whole school year, though no record exists to explain what he did to deserve it. A theatre and a drama award at the school are named in his honor. In 2004, Nicholson attended his 50-year high school reunion accompanied by his aunt Lorraine.
LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT
Trump Fires Joint Chiefs Chairman Amid a Purge at the Pentagon
Dan Caine, Trump’s Joint Chiefs Pick, Had Unusual Path to Top Ranks
Defense Department to Cut More Than 5,000 Workers
Defense Secretary Hegseth Fires Navy’s Top Officer
Only Public Ledger from Musk’s Department Is Riddled With Mistakes
How Federal Employees Are Fighting Back Against Elon Musk
As the U.S. Exits Foreign Aid, Who Will Fill the Gap?
“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”
― Edward Abbey
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE DAY
(1) Where in Arizona does one find a $10 burger? Not here in Prescott. Maybe the single at McDonalds, but a proper one at any sit down restaurant will set you back $20. The 2-egg breakfast is spot on at $16 and on up. What’s $5 for two little strips of bacon as an add on?
Other essentials: $10 for a 6-pack of any reasonable beer. Ammo? Hell, $1.50 a round for any magnum pistol and $0.50 for 5.56.
If you ain’t cooking at home and reloading yer shit, than you’re either pretty well off, or scraping to pay the rent.
(2) I spent $30 the other day for 3 eggs, 4 pieces of bacon, sausage patty, hashbrowns, coffee and half a waffle.
I pigged out and took some home.
With tip $35 out the door.
THE UNSPOKEN PREMISE behind the plan to keep capitalism going is that the world will be saved by sociopathic tech plutocrats like Elon Musk. The idea is to just continue the plan of infinite growth on a finite world until hopefully some tech company produces technology that makes such growth sustainable in a way that both (A) benefits everybody and (B) turns billionaires into trillionaires.
That’s the assumption underlying the decision to keep capitalism in place even as we watch our biosphere disappear before our eyes, and it’s pure fantasy. As long as mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, you’re going to see the interests of humanity and the ecosystem subverted by that pursuit. The belief that capitalism will rescue us from the ecological disasters it creates assumes that the blind pursuit of profit for its own sake will somehow possess the wisdom necessary to preserve the delicate ecosystemic context upon which human life depends while also ensuring that we all have a decent quality of life (as long as we work hard enough, of course).
This is a religious belief. It’s blind faith dogma, based on literally nothing other than one’s desire to believe it. It ascribes a wisdom to the “invisible hand of the market” that is tantamount to claiming that capitalism is being steered by God. It’s something people want to believe because the alternative is falling back on some form of socialist system to ensure our survival on this planet, which we in the west have been indoctrinated into reflexively dismissing.
Market forces are not guided by wisdom, they are guided by greed and fear, and by the unresolved early childhood trauma of the Musks and Theils and Bezoses of this world. Capitalism is a great way to guarantee more production and consumption, but it is completely useless for curbing ecocide and restoring planetary health.
As long as ecocide remains profitable under a system where mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit, ecocide will inevitably continue. What we need, then, is a completely different system. One where we move from competing with each other at the expense of our biosphere to collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem. Collaboration-based systems are inherently incompatible with the competition-based ones we live under today — but they are also the only way we are going to be able to continue living on this planet.
And proponents of capitalism might here say “Aha! That’s what you are missing! We’re NOT going to continue living on this planet! Daddy Elon’s going to take us all to Mars!”
But that’s kinda my whole point here. This is a baseless religious belief. Proponents of capitalism rely on the entirely faith-based belief that technological innovations will soon make it possible for limitless space colonization to occur, thereby enabling the infinite expansion upon which capitalism depends.
But there is no scientific evidence that humans will ever be able to live outside the biosphere from which we emerged. The closest we’ve ever gotten are these glorified scuba excursions wherein astronauts pack up pieces of Earth’s biosphere and suck on them for a while before returning to their planet’s surface. Assuming this means we can colonize space and live permanently completely independent of Earth’s biosphere is the same as assuming you can one day flap your arms hard enough to fly into the clouds just because you are able to jump.
The assumption of space colonization as a reality in our future arises not from science but from the egoic delusion which pervades human consciousness that we are much more separate from our world than we actually are. The human organism is no more separate from its biosphere than a ripple in a teacup is from the tea. Assuming we can just pack up our bodies and permanently move them offworld is like assuming you can take a single ripple in a teacup and transport it into another cup of tea in a country across the ocean.
Science simply does not understand the many different ways in which the human organism is interconnected with Earth’s biosphere, and isn’t anywhere close to understanding it. Even if it is technically possible to someday have us survive on another planet (or in floating space cylinders as per Jeff Bezos’s plan) — and again it is a complete article of faith that such a thing is even possible — we have no reason to assume that we’ll be able to attain this goal fast enough to avert ecological disaster here on Earth. The technology to adequately replicate our planet’s living conditions to make human life and reproduction sustainable in the long term could be many centuries off, by which time capitalism will have long ago devoured the face off of this world.
So the belief that capitalism will be able to carry us into the future is entirely faith-based and premised upon many unknowns and absurdities. We can keep clinging to those baseless superstitions hoping our evidence-free gamble eventually pays off so we never have to change ourselves, or we can move into a mature relationship with reality and start building something different together.
— Caitlin Johnstone
FUNERAL BLUES
by W.H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Keep going Elon. I hope that chainsaw from Javier goes full circle through the supposed Deep State fat right into your nuts.
+1
JOHN TOOHEY, Panther Athletic Director, When I was class president at what I call Boonville High, we controlled the popcorn machine for all the high school sports games. If there is not one still at the school, I suggest you get one. The profits from that machine fueled many a drunken party as well as gas for our hot rods. I notice the students no longer have hot rods. Without hot rods how does one learn to not be subservient?
Maureen Dowd has known Trump for decades and has him down pat. The fact that anybody actually believes that a lifelong con man, convicted over and again, grifting off the gullible wherever he goes, banned from running his fake businesses, charity, university, etc etc, and lying all the way, is pathetic. Trump wanting to help America and Americans? His biggest con yet. He’s suckered the nation, or at least just enough voters, and all but a few will suffer for it. As John Adams warned, all democracies eventually tend to self-destruct. Enter the barbarians.
“There will be no peace nor justice nor democracy if we do not acknowledge that we live with people who rationally, coherently, meaningfully want none of that.
What the liberal-progressive world largely doesn’t understand is that the 35 % of the electorate that stand with Trump no matter what he does (maybe a quarter of people resident inside the borders of the US) do not believe in democracy. It is not that they don’t realize that Trump is an authoritarian, etc., that democracy is in danger. They realize it and they’re glad. Mission accomplished. They have a different view of power and political process, of social relations. They are brutalists. Fundamentally they think power is a zero-sum game. You hold it or you are held by it. You are the boot on someone’s neck or there will be a boot on yours. They agree that what they have was taken from others; they think that’s the way of all things. You take or are taken from.
They do not believe in liberty and justice for all, or even really for themselves: it is not that they reserve liberty for themselves, because they believe that even they should be subject to the will of a merciless authority (who they nevertheless expect to favor them as an elect of that authority). We often ask how evangelicals who think this way can stand the notion of a God who would permit a tornado to destroy a church and kill the innocents gathered in it for shelter. They can stand it because they expect that of authority: that authority is cruel and without mercy because it must be. They simply expect authority to be far more cruel to others than it is to them. And they expect to be cruel with the authority they possess.
We keep thinking of this as a deformed or ignorant political sensibility, the product of sleeping through civics class. It’s not. It’s a fully-worked out, fully inhabited vision of human life and it has been with us for quite a while. It is not quite the Straussian or Randian vision of using esoteric deception to cover a project to retain power for a refined elite or scorning altruism as a weakness, though there’s some overlap. This is the full-on sentiment of what Berlin identified as the Counter-Enlightenment. Not that some people are better than others, nor even the favored ‘Dark Enlightenment’ proposition that the masses must be governed by a superior ruler. Simply that what can be taken must be taken. It’s the spirit of Frederick Lugard (or any other imperialist of the early 20th Century) defending their project in the last instance, after all the humanitarian bullshit is shed like the dross that it ultimately was. ‘The natives have something we value – including their own labor – and we must take it if they cannot stop us from taking it.’ It is the spirit that animated fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. It is what makes authoritarianism, whatever its ostensible ideological flavoring, possible, that some proportion of the people living under it are brutalists and accept the consequences of that vision of life – indeed, often yearn for it should it be temporarily overthrown or reduced in its power.
We are not going to ever be able to make peace with this view of human life, educate it, or find a way to include it in democratic process. If we do not want to be perpetually endangered by it, sooner or later we will have to violate our own commitments and basically have some controlled degree of brutalism towards the brutalism in our midst, some form of zero tolerance for it. The brutalists have been fond of saying when challenged or thwarted, ‘if you don’t like it, you can leave;’ if something like a pluralist liberal democracy is going to survive, it has to start saying – and doing – the same. We cannot just limp past the finish line of November and count ourselves safe if we do so. Nor can we even argue for a strong policy agenda that will, if accomplished, bring unity. We can bring people in who feel uncertainly lost or who feel uncomfortable with particular fashions in liberal or left policy sentiment. There will be no peace nor justice nor democracy if we do not acknowledge that we live with people who rationally, coherently, meaningfully want none of that.”
– Timothy Burke
https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke
Sounds about right to me.
Totally nails it, thx Steve.
Read Chris Hedges description as this being the “End of the Empire.” It’s ugly and scary, but, some might say, a necessary evil. That said, Team Blue is complicit in this necessary evil with their completely tone deaf response to the last three elections.
Those calling for civil war or reverse barbarism are just as foolish as the MAGAS . Unfortunately we’re a nation where only the extremists get to steer the ship now. Ugh
MS: Regarding the County’s processing of adjustments to assessed property values, a question comes up. We know that increases to assessed value are apportioned to various other agencies in addition to the County, with the County receiving approximately 30% of the total collected. When there is a decrease in assessed value and a refund is made to property owners, is there an adjustment made to the next tax apportionment to be sure that all the other agencies pay their fair share? If not, then the County is paying 100% of the refund, instead of just its own share (30%). Great reporting, as usual.
Thank you, Caitlin Johnstone.
You and I both found the AVA through Alexander Cockburn’s plugs for it in his The Nation column, Beat the Devil. At this point our similarities dissolve. Sure, I’ve worked in Wyoming off-&-on man and boy all my life but I never wanted to live among those folks like you do.
However, I do agree with you about Caitlin Johnstone and would just love to see you and your pen pal Mike Jamison explore the possibility that she has either somehow imitated Cockburn’s astounding ability to not only grasp the totality of the current political situation but also to interpret and reduce it into a terse series of succinct statements any child of 12 could easily understand; I say, it’s either that or Alex has been reincarnated as Caitlin, eh?
And what about that Synchronicity Carl Jong introduced the credulous to, eh?
In Wyoming the deer and antelope and Jack rabbits all eat the same grease brush and drink the same alkali water but their feces are all different and I can’t tell you why so you probably think if I don’t know shit I ought not to talk about synchronization and reincarnation, huh.
Bruce, I didn’t move here for the people (excepting maybe for the lack of them). I moved to escape the accelerating development of California. Every place I grew to love there turned to subdivisions and retail businesses before I left. I shudder to consider what my response would be if I went back now, and have no intention of doing so.
As for Caitlin, in my opinion she’s one-of-a-kind. I have no belief in, or realistic expectation of, any sort of existence following death, unless you consider my elementary particles, scattered as they may be, an existence.
Standing in front of a guest computer at the MLK Public Library in Washington, D.C. , digesting the salad bar & soup meal enjoyed at Whole Foods on H Street, and now about to go get some coffee and a chocolate brownie. Identified with the Divine Absolute, not the body and not the mind. I am available for just about anything of a radical environmental nature, plus the usual peace & justice. I am accepting a senior subsidized place to live in America. Craig Louis Stehr (Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com)
You are doing a great job establishing a DC Bureau for the AVA. Of course press credentials are more of a liability than an asset nowadays but that’s exactly how I weaseled my way into being the homeless Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter for the Daily Planet, Perry White Editor-in-Chief, the dishy Lois Lane and mild-mannered Clark Kent, fighting unimaginably rich and powerful forces of evil…
Go to the local press corps hq and request office space for the AVA. Show ‘em the page on a computer screen so they can ascertain it’s legit. Let ‘em call our esteem etc&c. You can fold up a cot behind the desk, like I used to do and get a hot plate at a thrift shop and you’ll be in like Flynn W.
Hey, on-line comment — next time you’re up north, it’s $4.65 for a quarter-pound all-beef burger with the works at Little Pat’s Place in Seattle. Fresh, hot, and juicy. I’m there most Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tap me on the shoulder and say AVA, and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.
Sweet. Took the grandkid to In-N-Out after school and we sat by a picture of nostalgic charm where the original sign read:
Hamburger………25
With cheese……..30
Fries………………..15
Coke……………….,10
Now if the powers that be, these here oligarchs promising to stamp out inflation and make America affordable again, why then why why wouldn’t Mr. Theil bring back those prices again and well you know, take one of his scripture chases to heart rather than using the Word of God to fleece Jesus’s meekest little lambs?
All I can say is the rosemary is in glorious bloom and I clipped a handful of it from a clump on too steep of ground for the demon aliens in rubber gloves and Tyvek coveralls with the tanks of Roundup strapped to their backs and the poisonous nozzles in one hand and the pump handle in the other can safely navigate and so meanwhile the aroma coming from the oven where I tucked the purple bouquet under a rack of New Zealand lamb…. Ahh, well ‘Twil be done soon. Yum.
I would cheerfully devour an entire New Zealand lamb. Sadly, I can’t afford a trip to New Zealand, and a passport is probably out of the question.
I get mine at Costco .
The Kennedy-LBJ photo is a classic. The two men were far apart in personalities. JFK had the charisma. LBJ had the bigger balls. I admired Johnson for implementing many of Kennedy’s political hopes after the assassination.
Great Russian Gulch photograph.