Mendocino County Today: Sunday 3/23/2025

By AVA News Service on March 23, 2025

A WARM, DRY pattern begins today as high pressure builds in. There is a high sneaker wave threat along the coast today. Precipitation chances increase Wednesday into late week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Sunday morning I have a cloudy 48F. Dry skies thru midday Wednesday then rain returns from then into the weekend. Yep, more rain. Be careful along the shore as the sneaker waves are happening today.

DA EYSTER CARRIES ON WITH STEAK HOUSE DINNERS

by Mike Geniella

Through the tumult of the last two years surrounding District Attorney David Eyster’s failed effort to prosecute County Auditor Chamise Cubbison there remains a constant.

Eyster continues to host steak house banquets for employees and their guests, violating county policies under the guise of labeling them “Continuing Education Staff Workshop Annual Debriefing” and tapping into a controversial asset forfeiture program to cover this year’s $3,600 one-night stand.

Internal documents obtained under California’s Public Records Act show County CEO Darcie Antle, a prime prosecution witness in the felony criminal case the DA filed against Cubbison, “pre-approved” Eyster’s most recent claim. Records show it was paid Feb. 13 a week before the banquet was held.

The payment to the Broiler Steak House in Redwood Valley was from a county budget account designated for the DA’s slice of annual asset forfeiture funds. Under asset forfeiture, local, state, and federal agencies can seize property, including cash, vehicles, or real estate, which is believed to be involved in or obtained through illegal activity, even without criminal conviction. In 2023, $376,776 from the program flowed into county law enforcement agencies, according to a state Department of Justice annual report.

The documents reveal Eyster submitted his latest claim three weeks before this year’s banquet using a secondary label: “Staff Workshop and Continuing Education.”

Asset forfeiture regulations allow use of seized funds for law enforcement training. Eyster claims the dinners are continuing education for his employees. However, he has been challenged by the Auditor’s Office in the past because non-employees were guests, and did not receive any “training.”

DA Eyster and CEO Antle did not respond to written questions about whether non-employees attended this year’s banquet, as in the past, or how the dinners meet asset forfeiture spending standards.

The California District Attorneys Association did not respond to written requests for how asset forfeiture funds are managed, and whether Eyster’s use conforms to statewide standards. However, a representative of a District Attorney Office that is considered a model statewide said the Eyster-style banquets would “never be allowed.”

The dinners are symbolic of DA Eyster’s past wrangling with the Auditor’s Office about office spending practices, including disputed travel expenses. Eyster has sought and was granted exemptions by the CEO’s office for travel-related requirements, but the county policy banning staff parties is still in effect. Since taking office in 2011, the DA has quarreled with three Auditors, including Cubbison.

The most recent banquet was held as the criminal case Eyster filed against Cubbison, a fellow elected official, was grinding to a halt in Mendocino County Superior Court after 17 months of a costly legal tug of war. The case was tossed by presiding Superior Court Judge Ann Moorman, setting the stage for substantial damages if Cubbison succeeds in a pending civil lawsuit accusing the Board of Supervisors of denying due process. Four days after Eyster in October 2023 filed a felony criminal charge against Cubbison, board members suspended her without pay or benefits or the opportunity to defend herself.

A few months later after initially resisting calls for his recusal from the case, Eyster hired an outside prosecutor at the rate of $400 per hour to take it through court hearings. Cubbison was forced to hire a private attorney, while a county public defender was appointed to represent Paula June Kennedy, the County’s former Payroll Manager who was accused by Eyster of paying herself an extra $68,000 over a three-year period during the Covid pandemic. Both women, veteran county employees, were charged by the DA with felony misappropriation of public funds.

Key prosecution testimony during the preliminary hearing was given by top county officials, past and present, including Antle, retired Auditor Lloyd Weer, and Human Resources Director Cherie Johnson.

Judge Moorman, in explaining her reasoning for dismissing the high-profile case, ripped the witnesses for displaying “willful ignorance” in the courtroom. Moorman found no criminal intent by Cubbison or Kennedy had been shown. In fact, Moorman found Cubbison functioned as a “whistleblower” by informing the County Counsel’s Office of a Kennedy threat to sue the county for excess hours in meeting twice-monthly payroll demands of 1,400 county employees.

The day after Moorman’s dismissal of the case a couple of weeks ago, Cubbison returned to her elected office at the County Administration Center.

DA Eyster regularly posts on social media about court results, but he has never commented publicly about the Cubbison case and its eventual dismissal.

Records show that five days before Moorman’s ruling to dismiss, Eyster greeted 72 guests at the latest banquet, most of them employees of the District Attorney’s Office; spouses, and other guests as usual were included. The DA’s Office was charged $50 per person.

Cubbison ran afoul of Eyster when she began to challenge DA office expenses including the annual dinner. “Are you going to get some training?” became an office quip in the days leading up to the banquet. Cubbison also questioned travel related claims, which so angered Eyster that he went around the Auditor and secured exemptions from the CEO’s Office that continue.

When former Auditor Weer retired in late 2021, he moved to name Cubbison as interim Auditor but Eyster appeared before the Board of Supervisors and successfully blocked her appointment. The DA followed that up with a secret plan emailed privately to a County Supervisor on how to block any Cubbison promotion, and outlining a way for the board to use a state law to force the merger of the county’s two top finance offices into one. Eventually, the Eyster plan called for a new Department of Finance to be created, with voter approval, and placed under control of the board and CEO’s office.

The board forced the proposed merger, but only one candidate — Cubbison — surfaced to be elected to lead the merged Auditor/Controller/Treasurer/Tax Collector offices.

However, within four months of Cubbison being sworn in, CEO Antle sought a Sheriff’s Office investigation into the Kennedy extra pay after consulting with Eyster. A year later, in October 2023, after having his own team of investigators work the case, Eyster finally filed felony criminal charges against Cubbison and Kennedy. The Auditor had refused his offer for her to resign for a misdemeanor charge.

Typically, Cubbison might have challenged the latest banquet payment and forced Eyster to take it to the Board of Supervisors for approval. However, she was still under suspension and facing criminal proceedings when the DA submitted his latest claim. Cubbison declined to address the most recent payment because she had not returned to the office before the Broiler invoice was submitted to then acting Auditor Sara Pierce and paid under Antle’s authorization.

Documents show the February dinner started at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 20, with Eyster giving welcoming remarks an hour later.

Eyster’s agenda included “longevity recognition” to employees including 25-year office veteran Shari Arrington, and Alex Johnston, a 10-year member of the staff.

According to the printed agenda, Eyster also gave an overview of changes in the law and Prop. 36, and he discussed 2024 calendar year goals, and an assessment on jury trial outcomes and state prison orders.

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Looking for a new playmate? Look no further! Rocky is a young, friendly, outgoing and energetic dog looking for a forever home where he can get all the love and attention he deserves. Rocky loves people and enjoys playing around — exploring everything he can see and sniff. He’s an intelligent and curious guy, always ready for an adventure, whether chasing a ball or finding the best spot in the park to roll around in. Though he loves playtime, Rocky is also mellow indoors, and seems to like the company of other dogs. If you’re interested in meeting Rocky, come on down to the shelter ASAP! This handsome dog looks like a Boxer mix. He’s 2 years old, and a svelte 70 pounds.

To see more Rocky and all of our canine and feline guests, plus the occasional goat, sheep, or tortoise, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com .

Join us the first Saturday every month for our MEET THE DOGS Adoption Event at the shelter.

Please share our posts on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter

For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453. Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

GIRLS BASKETBALL PLAYER OF THE YEAR: Cardinal Newman’s Kate Schat from Ukiah

The junior guard helped lead the Cardinals to the first North Coast Section Open Division title in program history.

by Kienan O’Doherty

It’s fair to say that Cardinal Newman’s girls basketball team had plenty of success this past season.

And while they had many contributors to that success, one player consistently showed up when it mattered most.

The junior guard, who averaged 18.3 points and 2.3 assists, helped lead the Cardinals to the first North Coast Section Open Division title in program history and as high as sixth in CalHi Sports’ state rankings.

For her contributions to Newman’s dominant season on the court, Schat is The Press Democrat girls basketball player of the year.

“It’s amazing — thank you for even considering me,” Schat said. “I couldn’t have done it without my teammates and coaches, really — I’d love to thank all my coaches in all my years of basketball, but especially my coaches at Newman and (head coach) Monica (Mertle). And of course, my family, for just being there and supporting me.”

While Schat had many superstar moments this season, perhaps no other player went on a run like she did in the SoCal Holiday Prep Classic tournament in December.

In a field of 90 teams, with Newman playing in the top division, Schat averaged 27.5 points in four games — including a high of 34 points with 10 three-pointers in a 68-45 win over Acalanes.

Schat was named tournament MVP. She also surpassed 1,000 career points in December.

She led Newman to a 28-3 record, which saw the Cardinals go on a 26-game win streak before falling to Folsom in the state playoffs.

For Schat, however, her favorite game of the year was the NCS Open Division title game, where the Cardinals beat San Ramon Valley 61-55. Schat had a team-high 18 points in that game.

“The first one that always comes to my mind is the NCS Open championship, because that’s just something that our program hasn’t done,” she said. “The emotions there were through the roof, and that one always comes to mind first.”

While Schat has one more year to go in an already successful high school career, she knows that the sky is the limit for next year’s Cardinals team, which will lose a large senior class but return a lot of key players.

“I think the first step is to continue pushing myself through the offseason,” Schat said. “And then come season, the first thing we do is build the team chemistry back up since it’s a new year. But we always want to go as far as we can, no matter what team we have.”

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

FOUR COMMENTS ON PG&E’S PLANS FOR ENDING EEL DIVERSION

What about the water rights that are being surrendered by PG&E? Interesting that there was no mention of that in the article. That is the crux of the whole issue. Dams or no Dams.

Gore talks about this going on for 10 years now, how is it that this is the outcome? If it is that important to “restore” the fish run after a 100+ year interruption, why not rebuild the supposed inadequate fish ladder?

Hard to believe that the cost of replacing a fish ladder costs more than the removal of the dam and the supposed building of a diversion device?

Why doesn’t the article report all the facts of the agreement with the Tribe or did they not get discussed at this forum?

The given reason of shutting down the Potter Valley hydropower of it not being economical is dubious. It’s more likely that this had to do with appeasing the proper political constituencies— the tribes and environmentalists who favor free flow of the Eel River. This buys PG&E political capital to continue to ask for rate increases.

Potter Valley will have to develop their own water storage or dry up. The rest of the downstream users would benefit from expanding Lake Mendocino. However, given Californian bureaucracy, permitting for this would likely take a decade and cost tens of millions before construction could even start.

What is missed here (in the deal that was signed a couple months ago) is the water rights are given to the Round Valley Indian tribe and the ones who need the water are at their mercy and have to pay through the nose to get water and also pay for Eel river restoration. If the stakeholders are going to pay for it it only makes sense that they own it.

Politicians all seem to be in the pockets of PGE and don’t care what the people they represent need. For once I wish they would listen. These town halls are nothing but just showing people that they care but in reality they really don’t. I have yet to see a town hall where it actually changed their minds. A total waste of time. The state could easily take over this property since PGE doesn’t seem to want it any longer.

Time to start voting differently from the city level to the top.

3 BEDS 2 BATHS - HOUSE

Single family home. 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house available for rent April 1st. Front and backyard with parking available. Kerosene unit heater . Located in town. NO PETS. $1000 deposit. DM me (facebook) for application information. (Selma Soto-Rhoades)

ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE: List of Events

COAST HOSPITAL DISTRICT:

Our hospital receives roughly 78% of its reimbursement from Medicare, Medicaid and Medi-Cal. While pledges have been made that no reductions will occur to Medicare (the program for Seniors), no such pledges have been made regarding Medicaid (the program that serves low-income and disabled individuals). Any reduction in funding of Medicare/Medi-caid at the federal level is a serious threat to the future viability of our hospital.

We urge all citizens of our community to voice your concerns to federal elected officials.

Congressman Jared Huffman: https://huffman.house.gov/contact/email-me

Senator Alex Padilla: https://www.padilla.senate.gov/contact/

Senator Adam Schiff: https://www.schiff.senate.gov/get-in-touch/

For more information about the impact of these potential reductions, check out these non-partisan analyses from the American Hospital Association and the California Health Care Foundation.

California Hospital Association Report: https://calhospital.org/congress-must-protect-patient-care/

American Hospital Association Report: https://www.aha.org/…/2025/01/AHA-2025-Advocacy-Agenda-20 250114.pdf

ED NOTES

IF THERE’S ONE EPISODE that perfectly summarizes what the cops have to deal with on a daily basis, it’s this one:

I WAS IN FORT BRAGG on my way to meet a person who could be counted on to tell me more than I wanted to know, but needed to know for professional purposes, about that perennially intriguing little town.

IT WAS ABOUT 11am. In front of me on Main Street a female Fort Bragg cop was pulling over a small, camper-shelled pick-up truck. I stopped to watch. Soon, three officers were on-scene, and just as soon all three were trying to pull a large, bellowing woman out of the vehicle, her “sovereign” vehicle, she was insisting, as her snarling dog, maybe a 40-pounder, bounced around in the cab yipping and biting at the three cops, two large-ish men and the woman who’d made the initial stop.

THE BELLOWING woman had immediately gone off , nutted up it seemed to me, with no calm prelude, as in the usual version of, “What’s the problem, officer?” Nope. It was instantly as if she was being kidnapped. “Get your hands off me, you bastards!”

I ASSUMED she was drunk. She had a death grip on her steering wheel and was shouting, “You have no right to do this,” with a lot of profanity where the exclamation points go.

I THOUGHT for sure the cops would have to taze or pepper spray the beast to pry her out of her truck. I wanted to see how they managed the extraction.

BUT DARNED if Fort Bragg’s Finest didn’t soon have their frothing, red haired, 200-pound antagonist up and out with what seemed to me remarkable restraint and a minimum of force. And off she went in handcuffs. And, because he’d bitten one of the officers, off went Loyal Dog to Ukiah Animal Control for a period of quarantine to see if he was rabid.

PUNCTUALITY being my sole remaining virtue, and the show apparently over, I hurried on for my eleven o’clock appointment, but a week later I read in the Ukiah paper about a woman named Jessica Rachelle Armstrong and an “unidentified male companion” had pulled off a pretext raid on Animal Control to free Loyal Dog from custody. The couple had distracted Animal Control’s Bliss Fisher with a question about the County’s spay and neuter program. While Bliss hustled off to get the information, the unidentified male companion raced into the dog impound and grabbed Loyal Dog.

ALL THREE of the absconders were running out the door when Bliss returned with the spay and neuter info. Sheriff’s deputies soon contacted “Ms. Armstrong,” the dog’s owner, by phone. She said she was “home quarantining” Loyal Dog at an undisclosed location in Lake County and had no intention of bringing either him or herself back to Mendocino County.

MS. ARMSTRONG subsequently identified herself as Jurrassica Raptorsaurette Armstrong, and her place of work as Amazon Warrior Goddess of Valhalla. (Her history seems off here; life on Earth was barely into the Frog Age in Jurrassica times.)

ARMSTRONG-JURRASSICA had been stopped in Fort Bragg because she was not wearing her seat belt. She said she didn’t have to. “Show me where the Constitution says I have to wear a seatbelt or possess a driver’s license.” And so on.

TO ONE on-line critic Jurrassica replied, “Are you a Communist? I live in a free country where you don’t have to show the nazis your pay-pahz (papers) and you don’t have to beg your slave masters permission to travel.”

JESSICA JURRASSICA wrote in capital letters, managing to sound like she’s yelling even in print. To another critic she explained, “I was not charged with any crime. There has been no warrant issued for my arrest. Therefore, I will not be going to court. And I have been sitting at home since last Thursday. I believe I told you all this twice now. Please pay attention.”

JURRASSICA claimed she was indeed wearing a seatbelt when the female officer pulled her over. “Maybe if the Fort Bragg cops would refrain from stealing people’s dogs, they wouldn’t get bit,” she wrote, adding, “The Fort Bragg cops beat me up and stole everything I had.”

IN FACT, the Lake County crackpot was back behind the wheel of her camper truck in a couple of hours, and she certainly had not been beaten. The cops took the beating in that one, from her and her dog.

THE AWESOME FILES, Jeff Costello writes: “When Jim Gibbons’ son Eli was about 13, he was whacking away on the MacPlus, the very same machine I used to write my first letter to the AVA, which puts us in 1988 or 89. I commented on the kid’s rapid-fire attack on the keyboard and he said, ‘I’m an awesome typist.’ The abuse of the word goes back a way. I told Eli that ‘awesome’ was more aptly applied to things like volcano eruptions or supernovae, but the admonition fell on deaf ears. The language is changing, like it or not. And I don’t, but that’s where it’s at. By far, the current most awesomely overused word, at the end of the day, is ‘iconic.’ If you will.”

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: A Hopland correspondent reports: “I was in the pet food aisle of a Santa Rosa store where I started a conversation with a woman who said she was 65 and grew marijuana so she can afford pet food. She teared up and said, ‘I never thought it would come to this.’ Who would have thought an old lady would have to grow weed to feed her cats?”

THE MUSHROOM PIRATES

by Crawdad Nelson

The first time I made money picking wild fungus for the restaurant trade was when a friend offered to let me keep all the gambones (boletus edulis, aka cepes, aka porcinis) I could pick on his parcel of land on the Coast in exchange for keeping other people away. The next thing you know I was rooting around in the underbrush, clearing a hundred bucks a day, tax free, and kicking out the local tweekers who knew a good thing when they dug it out of the leafmold. What I sold went to a buyer who lived in a shack out in the pygmy forest and drove an old blue Ranchero down to the Bay Area once or twice a week.

Within a few weeks I had extended my effective range into a State park, and become a pirate myself. That first winter, as I followed the seasons deeper into the woods, I began to glimpse a world few civilians have any idea exists. Least of all, I am quite sure, those fine diners who pay through the nose for the snobbishly appealing wild mushroom risotto.

By the next year, I had gone pro, but also learned what to do with the odds and ends I was sometimes stuck with.

Each mushroom has its own distinctive character, and none of them are in the least like the bland white meadow musrhroom (agaricus bisporus) the average consumer gets at the local market. Some are subtle, with emotional overtones capable of loosening panties at twenty paces, others more assertive, and demanding of true culinary skill. I discovered, slowly, exactly what chefs do to make fungus delectable.

I discovered this because I soon found that the buyers a wildcrafter depends on are cheats, charlatans, liars and impostors, most of whom live underground lives and come out only when the skies are overcast and the days brief, in darkest winter.

In general, the best recipes are the simplest. Sautee your beauties in some butter with shallots or garlic and serve with rice or pasta. Gravies, sauces and the like are easily created, and if you like you can make a wonderful risotto or whatever without much trouble. The stronger-flavored varieties hold up well to red meats, though chicken probably takes up flavor better without overwhelming what you’ve added to it. You really can’t go wrong unless your overcook the dish or add a lot or irrelevant spices. Salt and pepper and maybe some cream or sour cream usually suffice.

Of course, and I hope it goes without saying, if you aren’t 100% sure of what you have, don’t eat it. Toxic mushrooms kill very slowly and painfully from what I’ve heard. They usually attack the nervous system which is really a bad way to go, and undignified at that.

So I started taking my catch directly to the restaurants and bargaining for the best price I could get, anywhere from $6 to $15 a pound for the good stuff. Sometimes I ended up trading straight across for fine dinners, which got me into places with starched tablecloths and delicate, expensive wines I otherwise would have never seen.

I worked two California coastal counties over about 15 years, which happened to be the era when wild mushrooms started to show up in the markets, alongside the commercially-grown varieties, which also expanded in number. It has become a true cottage industry, supporting dope habits up and down the coast.

Around this time of year, the buyers are setting up shop in motel rooms in Willits, which becomes, for a month or two, the epicenter of the mushroom world. I’ve stood in line with some of the shadiest characters this side of Washington DC to be cheated, swindled and lied to by a bunch of intinerant degenerates, fungal in nature and capitalistic to a fault.

I’ve seen two of these characters trade baskets of mushrooms back and forth, at the whim of their brokers, trying to hook each other for a 25¢ per pound profit, at my expense, naturally, as if I wasn’t even in the room. And I once got swindled out of $200 that wasn’t even really mine because I got talked into “minding the store” and buying from other pickers as they wandered in out of the Eureka gloom.

It all went sour when the broker decided he had advanced my buyer all the cash he was going to, and left me holding the shitty end. It was a transaction with deep ramifications. Let’s just say, when I was helping my first wife move out, I found one of her diaries, open, quite by accident, to the page where she confided that she hoped I’d break a leg in the mushroom woods and die miserably of exposure, to save her the trouble of going through a quite inevitable divorce.

I once got involved with a buyer who promised to take me to the top of the mushroom world. We did this by driving all night through snow, sleet and black ice to Portland, Oregon, where we waded out in the slush at daybreak in a nice neighborhood, and delivered a fine batch of hedgehogs (dentium hydnum) I had picked the day before in a secret place I know about but am willing now to sell to the highest bidder. It’s a proven moneymaker, so the coordinates won’t come cheap. I’ve seen patches sold for $500 or more, a pittance compared to what they can earn over the course of a few seasons.

It’s cheaper but not easier to find your own patch. What you do is drive up a dirt road until the No Trespassing signs look sincere but neglected, get out of your beat-up old rig, and walk up the nearest road until your feet are soaked with dew and it looks like rain. Then cut cross-country until you can smell the chanterelles (cantarellus cribarius) and black trumpets (cantarellus cornucopiodes). Then you get down on your hands and knees in the gloom and start making money.

The third-most exciting experience I had as part of this career was driving a beat-up old Ford Courier up a dirt road along a cliff just as a storm was hitting, while lightning and snow, always a thrilling combination, raked the Coast Range. I made it to Willits after about three hours, got cheated but still walked away with several hundred entirely untraceable dollars, stopped at Safeway for grub and liquor, and headed north up 101 an hour or two after dark. Just about the time I hit Rattlesnake summit, the truck crapped out cold and I spent the night freezing in the front seat, with big rigs roaring past about every half hour and flurries of snow and sleet freezing the windshield to a solid block of ice.

Finally a little after dawn, a CHP officer stopped and let me get in his car for the ride back to Laytonville. I had to keep the (now-frozen) bag of weed in my pocket, because of all the things I was supposed to bring back to camp, that was the most important.

Once in Laytonville, I bargained with a garage to get the heap of bolts and primered fenders towed in, then set about hitchhiking north again. Although the night had been sheer misery, it was a vacation compared to standing on the side of the road in wet boots and snow flurries, trying to get back to Garberville to meet up with my partner in the van.

I eventually did get back to camp for more rummaging about in damp woods with melting snow now falling out of the trees in big clumps down the back of my neck. Yeah, it was natural.

The first and second most exciting moments were so illegal it doesn’t behoove me to mention them, and the fourth involved a Simpson Timber security guard who knew I was there, the way a dog knows he has a rat cornered but can’t spot him, crouch though he may. But it was Thanksgiving after all so he eventually drove away and left me to go about my business. I think he was a little afraid, since he didn’t know what I was up to, and that section of road is notorious for harboring some of Humboldt County’s most dangerous crank labs. Another good reason to buy your goods at the local store.

This all came back to me the other day when I stopped by the produce aisle at Sacramento Natural Foods and Co-op to inspect the fungus. A nice lady was filling up bags with two or three kinds for her feast, probably a hundred dollars’ worth in hand. She could see the look in my eye and asked me if I knew my mushrooms. I only told her enough to help her plan a good meal, and kept the details to myself.

For sheer contrast and irony, it’s hard to match the difference between what it takes to get these items into the kitchen, and what happens when a good chef gets his/her hands on them. The consumer, with his conspicuously consumptive but very tasteful dinner, steaming and delicate, can hardly guess at the sheer human misery and subterfuge involved. But it doesn’t matter at that point. Money not only talks, it makes up the rules as it goes along.

Moving Houses in San Francisco, 1974 (Dave Glass)

GET YOUR CCW PERMIT ON THE MENDOCINO COAST!

Redwood Practical Shooters CCW Information. We are pleased to announce that we will be holding CCW classes in 2025, and our schedule has CalFire approval. March 22nd & 23rd May 17th & 18th July 12th & 13th September 21st (Renewal only) November 15th & 16th. Use this link to get to all the CCW classes. (at Redwood Practical Shooters/Facebook)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, March 22, 2025

JESSICA ASBURY, 33, Willits. DUI, child endangerment, leaving scene of accident with property damage.

ELLE MARTEENY, 46, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

JEROME MCMURPHY, 54, Ukiah. Parole violation.

JACOB MULLINS, 21, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun.

SHERRI ORNBAUN, 70, Ukiah/Willits. Battery with serious injury, resisting.

JORDAN POYNER, 29, Sacramento/Ukiah. DUI.

EMILIO REYES-OSORIO, 19, Ukiah. DUI.

BLANCA VILLAGRANA, 40, Covelo. Bad check.

ANN WEIGT, 45, Redwood Valley. DUI.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO TELL A STORY, come with some attitude, man. Don’t be all corny with it.

— Miles Davis

Opening weekend of Star Wars at the Coronet Theatre in San Francisco. (1977)

MEMO OF THE AIR: Why do we have to fight all the time? Why can't we just relax and digest our prey?

Here's the recording of last night's (Friday, 2025-03-21) 8-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first three hours, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino). Local announcements, poetry, theater, fantasy, science fact and fiction, journalism of all shapes and sizes; then at the end, for this International Alien Abduction Week, some true stories of space alien intervention in human affairs, and Firesign Theater's /Everything You Know Is Wrong/, which [spoiler] culminates in all of humanity parading down into the hole left by a back-story comet to the sun at the center of the Hollow Earth, leaving behind a single man who had been waiting his entire life for space aliens, trying to get people to believe, but here they are at last, one minute late. "Where did everybody go?" they say to him, then, "Oh, well," and they fly away in their flying saucer full of blue moss and pianos. I was at Juanita's again for this show, which explains why I'm hoarsely whispering the whole time with the microphone very close, so not to arouse the malevolent presence of the downstairs neighbor. I'll be back in Albion next week and several weeks after, where I can pull out the stops, clear the pipes and express. Compare and contrast. Anyway, here, my 1,405th all-Friday-night show: https://tinyurl.com/knyo-mota-0636

Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

Aerothrust! https://newatlas.com/urban-transport/aerothrust-motor-prop

105 photos of Stonehenge unboxing and assembly. (Scroll down and down.) https://www.exposingtruth.com/105-photos-stonehenge-constructed-modern-times/

Rerun: The scene in Stargate (the 1994 documentary) of the stargate being revealed by archeological excavation in 1928. One more stargate was found on Earth in 1997 in a cave beneath the ice in Antarctica. Carter and O'Neill nearly died when they were redirected to it and not to the one in Cheyenne Mountain. They had no idea where they were, on what planet; they had no supplies, O'Neill was injured, they were freezing, and the DHD was inoperable. That was a close one for our heroes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCLQRZmD1EE

Alex Bosworth is in poor health now, thirteen years on a non-OEM liver, homeless-sheltered in Southern California, in legal distress. Thirty years ago he was making a living as a wedding and event video guy. He's written stories all his life, and he was sending them to be printed in my paper /Memo/. (Many of them appear in his book /Chip Chip Chaw/.) Back then, he sent me a VHS tape of Crayon Productions, maybe a dozen stories he read into his editing deck then added crayon-on-butcher-paper illustration. Here, for the beginning of baseball season, is /Hardball/ from that scratchy VHS tape, in the voice of way before everything went to hell for him, Your headphones aren't broken; the sound is only in the left channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI2LSCLLsJg

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

‘I grabs a jet and get to the Chicago airport and little after seven thinking somebody would be there to meet me. Nobody is there. Tony forgot to send somebody. Well, I take a cab and there’s the big sign in front of the joint, ‘Tony Zale’s Bar. Welcome Rocky Graziano!’

You know Tony. He’s one of those serious guys, a physical culture nut, always in good shape. Me, I’m a good-time Charley. I drink and eat and have a good time with the crowd. When I’m feelin’ my drinks I say to Tony, kidding like, ‘Ya know I got a good notion to throw a few punches at you for all those tough licks you hit me with in those three fights.’

Zale thinks I mean it and he immediately squares off. Here I’m his guest, travel a thousand miles on a minute’s notice to help him open the joint and he wantsa fight me! When I explain everything is a joke, he laughs, too. I’m glad he did. I don’t want to sample no more of his punches. He hit like a mule!’

— Rocky Graziano

LOVE LETTER

for John Barth (May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024)

For the artist with obsessive compulsive disorder at the old Springfield State Hospital in Sykesville, Maryland, who painted more than 100 abstract Mona Lisa paintings,

for artists who need to make lots of art or die,

for seemingly catatonic mental patients with active inner lives, vivid imaginations and hallucinations that hurt no one,

for state mental hospital patients making "outsider art" (self-taught artists making visionary art, intuitive art and naïve art),

for "low art" artists and "art brutalists",

for Jean Dubuffet, who collected the work of untrained artists, like outsider artists, and made collecting their work a "thing" for galleries and museums,

for artists diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder,

for artists who have endured electroconvulsive treatments, insulin coma treatments, lobotomies, skull drilling or Haldol injections,

for singers and actors, like Judy Garland and Patty Duke, who were certifiably nuts, and who sang and acted well past their prime,

for singers, like Amy Winehouse, who died in their prime,

for dancers with osteoarthritis,

for Isadora Duncan, who, in her late 40s, depressed by the deaths of her three young children, spent her final years financially struggling, moving between Paris and the Greek island of Corfu, running up debts at hotels — but who, nevertheless, kept on dancing,

for the generation of dancers lost to AIDS — all the famous ones, like Rudolf Nureyev, Christopher Gillis, Alvin Ailey, Michael Bennett and Robert Joffrey, of course, but also all the local anonymous dance teachers and directors who seemed to disappear overnight, their cause of death obscured by fear, ignorance and homophobia,

for DJs, remixers and record producers, tapping their hands and feet to high-powered, metronomic "dance trak" beats that only they can hear inside their bipolar brains,

for poets and writers — my tribe!

for poets and writers who are "seekers of simple peace" and who never find it except in their work,

for poets and writers who surprise and dazzle the world (and themselves) with their own brilliance and genius,

for depressed poets doing brilliant work,

for brilliant poets who become hysterical, agitated, crazy, distraught, frantic, frenzied, spasmodic or psychoneurotic, if they do not publish,

for poets and writers who lend their voice to angels and saints,

for poets and writers who lend their voice to demons,

for poets and writers who write in streams of consciousness,

for poets and writers who draw deep from the well of the subconscious mind,

for poets and writers who resist psychoanalysis, but who, instead, write as if their lives depended on it (because it does),

for Sylvia Plath,

for Anne Sexton,

for those poets and writers who surrender to affirmations, autosuggestion, binaural beats, hypnosis and subliminal messages,

for postmodernists, like Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth, who have toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism, and who have remote viewing abilities, especially into the historical past or into childhood trauma — and who have imported these things into their metafiction and unreliable narration,

for literary investigators, like Joe McElroy and Don DeLillo (self-avowed "writers and quants"), who have investigated those parts of quantum physics that underlie quantum information science,

for David Foster Wallace,

for actors performing sock puppet parodies in their heads,

for producers, directors and actors, (even actors making cameo appearances) in low-budget indie films, where not a single bit of blocking, or a single camera move, or a single word of dialogue, is frivolous or accidental — little perfect gems of film, all obsessively crafted and expertly executed, for audiences who will never see them, and

for deceased artists, singers, actors, dancers, other performing artists, filmmakers, poets and writers (am I missing someone?), who deserve a eulogy on the steps of the Vatican or the banks of the Seine, and

for one writer, in particular, Jack Barth, my teacher, who would choose to hear no eulogy whatsoever, but who would, instead, choose to hear the lapping tidewaters of his much beloved’d Cambridge, Maryland, with its distinctive dialects of early colonial English, which are gradually disappearing, and also the native tongues of the Algonquian-speaking Choptank Indians,

I write this love letter to you.

John Sakowicz

Johns Hopkins, Dept. of Writing Seminars, BA, 1977; MA, 1979

A STATE VISIT TO SCOTLAND

Editor:

I had a dream in which King Charles III welcomed President Donald Trump to Balmoral:

Charles: “Welcome to Scotland, Mr. President.”

Trump: “Hi Chuck.”

Charles: “Actually, you may address me as Your Majesty”

Trump: “Whatever.”

Charles: “May I offer you lunch, Mr. President? We have haggis, or perhaps you would prefer a sandwich?”

Trump: “A Big Mac and fries with a Diet Coke would be great. You have a McDonald’s here?”

Charles: “Ah, yes. Mr. MacDonald lives at the bottom of the hill. Actually, there are several of them. Are you sure about the haggis? It was freshly stalked this morning on the moors, and Mr. Zelenskyy rather enjoyed it.”

Trump: “Zelenskyy was here?”

Charles: “Rather good chap, had to run home to deal with some nasty business with the Russians. Don’t worry, we changed the sheets.”

Richard L. Gulson

Santa Rosa

MATEHUALA CHICKENS

by Paul Modic

Humberto Fernandez lives in a semi-fortress on the edge of Matehuala, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. His house is surrounded on three and a half sides by a tall stone wall with a big bent green gate out front. A piece of rope sticks out of the wall attached to a bell up in a pecan tree a hundred feet away. There is also a tiny door built into the wall for fresh milk deliveries.

Within the gate the driveway is paved with red patio stone, to the left are old cars and trucks which Humberto has collected and/or worn out over the years. The road leads into a sidewalk to the house surrounded by an orchard of pecan trees as well as a few pomegranate, orange and lime trees. Aloe vera and bamboo grow along the wall and off to the right are the chickens: a few hundred cages containing fighting cocks being bred and raised for battle. They crow from dawn till dusk, ratcheting up the sound when the boy comes to feed them.

* * *

There is excitement in the air as all roads lead to the chicken fights on the edge of town. The pedestrian traffic is one way from the downtown area and the neighborhoods. The Matehuala feria is in town: wildly noisy with the sounds from the rides and the barkers calling the people in to see the two headed chicken while an auctioneer bellows rapidly into a raspy microphone.

The crowd surges from the Faire into the palenque for the annual Christmas chicken fights, hundreds of Mexican men, and some women, walk down the white steps to their blue cement seats in the noisy and smoky arena. The cock fights themselves last only a few minutes followed by an hour of bingo, betting, eating, drinking, and musical entertainment: on the biggest night of the fights national stars sing in the ring. A slit tennis ball containing a betting slip is thrown from the ring up to the better in the stands who puts money in it for its return trip down. Vendors rove through the crowd selling bingo cards, Pepsi, beer and peanuts.

The rich fat powerful Mexican men sit in the front row watching the handlers warm up the fighting cocks called “los gallos.” They exercise them, attaching little sharply curved knives called gaffs to the birds’ ankles. Finally the red chicken is released to fight the white one, they run at each other leaping into the air in a ruffle of bloody feathers. The crowd cheers the victor and jeers the loser, or coward. One chicken is down, then both are back in the handlers hands getting their faces blown on furiously, then sent back against each other. Finally one is down on its back, leg twitching in the air. The crowd roars its disapproval, a common sentiment as most fights are mismatches here in cowboy country, the Mexico Midwest.

(Later, Hollywood came to Matehuala, Humberto got a small part in the movie “The Mexican,” and the director Gore Verbinski brought him to Los Angeles a few years later for a part in a “Pirates of the Caribbean” flick, also featuring Keith Richard.)

PROTESTERS DESCEND ON YOSEMITE, CHANNEL ISLANDS AND 91 OTHER NATIONAL PARKS

by Olivia Hebert

At least 93 national parks across the U.S. are expected to see a new wave of protests this weekend, as activists and National Park Service employees push back against widespread staffing cuts, hiring delays and funding freezes.

The demonstrations, organized by Resistance Rangers — a coalition of more than 1,000 off-duty park service employees — follow a national day of action toward the start of March that drew thousands of supporters to more than 170 park sites, including Yosemite, Joshua Tree, and the Channel Islands.

“Rallies and teach-ins will be held at park sites across the country,” organizers said in a statement. “Attendees are encouraged to reflect on what parks mean to them, and to share those stories — with each other, and with their elected representatives.”

The protests come days after a federal court order authorized the National Park Service to reinstate roughly 1,000 probationary employees who were dismissed in February. According to the nonpartisan National Parks Conservation Association, the fired workers included rangers, law enforcement officers, firefighters and other essential personnel.

The Feb. 14 job terminations were part of a cost-cutting effort led by the White House advisory group known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The team, backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has championed a series of government reductions under the Trump administration. Thousands of seasonal park workers were also notified in January that they wouldn’t be rehired — a decision that was later reversed following public backlash.

“Illegal firings and delayed seasonal hirings WILL impact public lands,” Resistance Rangers said in a statement. The group argues that staffing gaps are already disrupting park operations, reducing visitor services and stalling conservation efforts ahead of the busy summer season.

Organizers have also raised concerns over cuts to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) programs. The rollback, they say, will “make public lands less safe and work groups less innovative.”

“National Parks are for ALL people,” the group stated, calling for restored funding and staffing not only within the park service but across all federal land management agencies.

The demonstrations come as local economies brace for the summer tourism season. In 2024, national parks drew 331.9 million visits, an all-time record that was downplayed by the Trump administration. In previous years, the park service has released visitation statistics alongside a report focusing on the economic benefits of park visitation to surrounding communities. This year, that report was conspicuously absent, but in 2023, national parks added $55.6 billion to the economy and provided 415,400 jobs in nearby communities.

This weekend’s events are expected to be peaceful. Organizers have asked participants to follow park rules and “Leave No Trace” principles. A full list of protest sites is available on the group’s website and social media channels.

“I would not be the person I am today without America’s national parks and public lands,” one Resistance Ranger said in a statement. “The National Park Service preserves the best of this country, from our wild spaces to our cultural heritage — the stories and landscapes that show us who we are, and who we want to become.”

As the peak tourism season approaches, the fate of public lands — and the people who care for them — remains a flashpoint in the broader political debate over government priorities. Protesters this weekend are hoping their message will echo from trailhead to Capitol Hill.

Resistance Rangers organizers say they do not represent the National Park Service or the Department of the Interior and that all views expressed in their materials are their own.

(SFGate.com)

TAIBBI & KIRN

Matt Taibbi: So you predicted that Luigi would come back and that he wouldn’t get out, that he wouldn’t be convicted, right?

Walter Kirn: That’s still to come, but I hold to that prediction.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Look, there was a very recent… Well, let’s talk about the comeback. One of the few magazines where it’s still important to be on the cover in America is People Magazine. And Luigi recently got on the cover. Okay, it’s not People Magazine, but he was on the cover of InTouch Magazine, Luigi Mangione.

Walter Kirn: Which is an explicitly celebrity-based magazine. In other words, even more than People, People does a lot of human interest stories about a fisherman who found a golden slipper or something. InTouch only does people who are meant for mass consumption as Hollywood or other style celebrities, and here he is right next to Meghan Markle.

Matt Taibbi: I mean, he’s been covered pretty extensively in People too, and it’s unbelievable. It’s almost like he’s a member of somebody’s royal family or he is our royal family.

Walter Kirn: Well, and look at what the story is, “Will he go free?” Whenever they ask a rhetorical question on the cover of a tabloid, it’s either because it’s not true, like, “Are aliens about to take over the White House?” That’s a way to make it seem plausible, even though it’s probably impossible. This is a way to make what people find implausible plausible, because it’s going to happen. Only one person in America was crazy enough to predict that the Luigi storyline ends with Luigi found either not guilty or let go in a hung jury or on some kind of legal technicality, at which point he becomes a political figure. He’s already a political figure, I was right about that. He’s already being cited by all the activists and protesters and so on who are committing these vandalism sprees at Tesla dealerships and so on. Bill Burr already said, “Free Luigi,” on a YouTube video about a week ago.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, did he?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. About a week ago, he suddenly turned in the most inorganic planned way, went, “Free Luigi.” The creation of a political American revolutionary. You know what? He’s obverse Oswald. Oswald was an assassin who became a villain. This is a villain assassin who’s becoming a hero. They dressed him like in the same sweater that Oswald used when he was actually shot by Jack Ruby. They have cited and alluded to and sampled, let’s say in the language of rap and recording, every major American sort of anti-establishment rebel in building this character. The reason I knew he was going to come back from the moment he came out was that he was an obvious op against the oligarchs, Elon in particular. So they gave him some space to be in jail for a while, but now as his trial approaches, we’re going to see this stuff ramp up, we’re going to see an intense sort of almost Beatlemania meets Charles Manson-style cult of personality around him. And that’s what he is to me, is Beatlemania versus Manson. If you did an AI study of American anti-heroes, you would come up with Luigi.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And they’ve been leaking out things almost weekly about the weakness of the case against him. But let’s back up just quickly, let’s hear Bill Burr on Luigi.

Bill Burr: “But CNN and Fox News are not going to bring up the insurance companies that are just going to keep everybody’s premiums and still give themselves a bonus, yes. Free Luigi. I love how they acted surprised. ‘Why did that happen?’”

Walter Kirn: So Bill Burr-

Matt Taibbi: It’s slightly ironic, slightly.

Walter Kirn: What a phony.

Matt Taibbi: Don’t you think?

Walter Kirn: What a freaking phony, what a paid shill for whoever is running the Luigia. First of all, the Luigia puts the onus for America’s healthcare problems on insurance companies rather than the pharmaceutical companies right now, which are doing everything, I assure you, in their power, I’ve talked to people just in the last few days, to make sure that RFK Junior does not dent their motorcycle.

Matt Taibbi: Right, right, there’s a lot of rice bowl guarding going on right now.

Walter Kirn: Dude.

Matt Taibbi: It’s unbelievable.

Walter Kirn: But this guy is the most convenient character to come along. He came along at the same time as the New Jersey drones. He was a big distraction. I predicted before Christmas that this would happen. I gave a speech to a think-tank in early December in which I predicted it all to a very high toned inside audience. I’m going to stick with it because I know I’m right. I know when I’m seeing a TV show turned into a supposed domestic set of headlines and concerns. This is artificial news and he’s an artificial character. And people say, “Does that mean he didn’t do it? Or he did do it?” Well, that really doesn’t matter. What matters is his utility to the political culture. And after a devastating loss for the Democrats, he had a lot of utility. He appeals to young people, he appeals to women. They’ve set him up.

Matt Taibbi: Just because he’s good looking? Is that the whole thing?

Walter Kirn: Good looking goes a long way in America.

Matt Taibbi: I guess it does.

Walter Kirn: I was once told by a Hollywood producer, in casting, it always comes down in the end if you have two actors for a role to hot or talented, always pick hot.

Matt Taibbi: That explains a lot of movie casting decisions.

Walter Kirn: It sure does.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So, all right, well, just to tie into some news that is relevant to what you’re talking about, there was a guy named Daniel Brennan Clark Pounder.

Walter Kirn: Clark Pounder is his born name. He just stuck a couple others in front of it to disguise that.

Matt Taibbi: I mean, they really should have made one of his middle names Quarter, I think, you know Daniel Brennan Clark Quarter Pounder. So he’s arrested and he is now one of the controversial figures, and I think he tried to set a Tesla charging station on fire or a bunch of units on fire. What’s the name? Yeah, exactly. ‘Accused Tesla Charging Station Arsonist’s Letter…’ That’s a mouthful of a headline already, ‘Referenced Suspected Health Exec Shooter, Luigi Mangione.’

Walter Kirn: That might be the most unreadable English sentence I’ve ever seen…

KETAMINE GUY

by Elvin Woods

Circus clowns
In flaming cars
Burning down
All that's ours

Safety nets
Taken away
While Elon gets
To stalk his prey

Social Security
Medicaid too
Racial purity
Will deport you

Food banks close
And children die
Who the hell voted
For the Ketamine Guy

LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

SpaceX Is Positioned to Secure Billions in New Federal Contracts Under Trump

Kennedy Instructs Anti-Vaccine Group to Remove Fake C.D.C. Page

Britain’s Keir Starmer: ‘We’ve Known This Moment Was Coming’

Four Takeaways From Keir Starmer’s Conversations With The Times

The Scammer’s Manual: How to Launder Money and Get Away With It

We Went to a Scammer’s Den. Here’s What We Found.

THE LAST CHAPTER OF THE GENOCIDE

Israel has begun the final stage of its genocide. The Palestinians will be forced to choose between death or deportation. There are no other options.

by Chris Hedges

This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially bobby trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

Since Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed. This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly sixteen months of incessant attacks were awful. But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.

Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair. Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.

“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:

The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.

The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18). Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.

The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the sixteenth day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.

Israel refused to honor the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza

Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.

The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalized or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.

Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.

That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.

(chrishedges.substack.com)

Rockaway Beach, August 24, 1958 (Ed Clarity)

TRUMP is butchering children in Gaza, stomping out free speech in the US, bombing Yemen for Israel, and preparing for full-scale war with Iran in plans which reportedly include the possible use of nuclear weapons.

And from what I can see, Trump supporters are mostly fine with it. Everything the so-called MAGA movement claims to stand for is a lie.

“MAGA” is just Republicans doing Republican things. Ten years ago the GOP started wallpapering over its shattered reputation from the Bush administration with a right wing populist message which purported to oppose neoconservative war agendas, support free speech, seek to drain the swamp, and put America first. In practice what we are seeing is Trump murdering and warmongering in the middle east just like Bush, rolling out freakish authoritarian agendas in the US just like Bush, advancing longstanding neoconservative agendas just like Bush, and putting Israel first just like every Republican for decades.

Trump is all the most evil things Bush was, but MAGA morons pretend he’s something different because he put on a red hat. Dumbest, most pathetic and fraudulent political faction in existence.

— Caitlin Johnstone

CAPITALISM: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

— Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1990)

THE STRANGE, POST-PARTISAN POPULARITY OF THE UNABOMBER

When Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto appeared 30 years ago, the internet was brand-new. Now his dark vision is finding fans who don’t remember life before the iPhone.

by Charles Homans

Several years ago, James R. Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. agent, found himself rereading an abstruse tract of political philosophy called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” written by a former University of California mathematics professor named Theodore John Kaczynski.

Fitzgerald first encountered Kaczynski’s treatise in July 1995, shortly after Kaczynski anonymously mailed the typewritten manuscript to The Times and The Washington Post, demanding its publication in exchange for his promise to stop killing people with package bombs. Fitzgerald’s photocopy of the original was dog-eared and marked up with color-coded annotations he made while trying to discern clues to the identity of the author, then known only as the Unabomber.

To this day he has no particular sympathy for the author. But there had always been passages in Kaczynski’s indictment of technological civilization that gave him pause. “Boy, I don’t really disagree with this comment,” he recalled thinking, “and I don’t really disagree with this statement — but damn it, he’s a killer, and we’ve got to catch him!”

When we spoke recently, Fitzgerald recited one of Kaczynski’s numbered paragraphs, 173, which had been on his mind in light of artificial intelligence’s rapid advance: “If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave.”

And there was Paragraph 92, which Fitzgerald remembered, and reconsidered, amid the Covid-19 vaccine mandates of which he was personally skeptical. “Thus science marches on blindly,” Kaczynski wrote, “without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”

“You know what?” Fitzgerald said to himself. “Old Ted was maybe onto something here.”

Online, there is a name for this experience: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure. To encounter Paragraph 156 (“new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology”) after asking Alexa to order new socks and think, That’s not so crazy. To read Paragraph 174’s warning of a near future in which “human work will no longer be necessary” and “the masses will be superfluous,” while waiting for the A.I. assistant to whip up the PowerPoint for your afternoon meeting, and think, Maybe an off-grid cabin in Montana wouldn’t be such a bad investment.

Most of the Tedpilled stop well short of Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, who gave “Industrial Society and Its Future” a four-star review on Goodreads — “it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out” — some months before the assassination. The more judiciously Tedpilled treat Kaczynski’s ideas with a wink and more than a few caveats. Of course it’s true, they begin, that Kaczynski was an irredeemable criminal who, his own voluminous diaries suggest, murdered at least as much out of misplaced revenge and spite as he did out of ideological commitment. Of course his victims did not deserve to die, as three did, or to live with permanent disfigurement or other lasting wounds, as 23 more did.

And yet: “The Unabomber: bad person, but a smart analysis,” Tucker Carlson said on his show in 2021.

“I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Blake Masters, running for Senate in 2022, said in response to an interviewer’s request to name an underrated “subversive” thinker who would “influence people in a good direction,” but “how about Theodore Kaczynski?”

It has been hard not to notice, in the years since Kaczynski’s 2023 death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina, the taboo’s weakening, the caveats’ growing fewer and further between. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology, not long ago largely the province of the left, have spread on the heels of the pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.

When Kaczynski died, Joe Allen, a contributor to the website of Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, argued that “it’s worth reflecting on Ted’s dark vision.” Even Elon Musk, a man whose company Neuralink has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to implant computers in people’s brains, has dabbled. Considering the first sentence of “Industrial Society and Its Future” — “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race” — Musk wrote on X, “He might not be wrong.”

Carlson, Masters and Musk all inhabit the ever-blurrier borderlands between the right wing of the Republican Party and more extreme or at least esoteric political territories, whose residents delight in theories about racial and societal determinism, in romanticizing past life ways and interrogating the value of our soft, entertainment-addled society. It’s not so surprising that Kaczynski has found a home there.

But Kaczynski has also become a kind of crossover figure — and a remarkably post-partisan one, capable of drawing nods from everyone from vaccine-skeptical Republicans to Musk-skeptical Democrats to internet-native teenagers. How many other domestic terrorists have been name-checked in conservatives’ complaints about the erosive effects of social media and also in TikTokers’ videos from a bucolic weekend at the lake? His manifesto, dismissed in the 1990s as impenetrable, is now the subject of YouTube videos drawing millions of views apiece.

It’s not so hard to understand why. Kaczynski mailed off his manifesto two months before Netscape’s I.P.O., in what were, for many Americans, the last days of the pre-internet era. Thirty years later, we occupy a disorienting moment when the visions of techno-optimists and techno-pessimists alike seem on the verge of realization, when a miraculous future and a dystopian one seem at once within our reach and beyond our control.

‘A Bit of the Unabomber in Most of Us’

“Industrial Society and Its Future” was published by The Times and The Post 30 years ago in September, at the urging of F.B.I. investigators, who wagered that giving in to the bomber’s demand to distribute his manifesto would be worth it if one reader in a million recognized the writing. One did: David Kaczynski, whose tip led federal agents to his brother’s small cabin in the woods outside Lincoln, Mont.

Ted Kaczynski was arrested on April 3, 1996, almost a year after the far-right anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Conservatives had chafed at Democrats’ attempts to link McVeigh’s views to the rhetoric of right-wing talk radio, and as the details of Kaczynski’s life and crimes emerged — Harvard education; a late-1960s teaching stint at the University of California, Berkeley; bombing targets borrowed from an Earth First! publication — they were quick to brand him as the liberals’ McVeigh. Rush Limbaugh proclaimed him “a left-wing nut.” Where were liberals’ “cries against radical extremism,” the conservative columnist Cal Thomas wanted to know, “now that one of their own has been implicated in the horrid deed of bombs by mail?”

But Kaczynski was not one of their own. His manifesto spent nearly as many words denouncing “leftism” as it did attacking technology. Although environmental degradation infuriated him, it was a distant secondary concern to the loss of personal liberty, which he defined in terms a libertarian would recognize.

Still, Thomas’s whataboutism was not totally misplaced. Kaczynski did undeniably stir something among the segment of the liberal intelligentsia that looked ambivalently upon the social and environmental consequences of the ascendant neoliberalism and globalization of the 1990s. “One thing I’ve noticed among the intellectual elite at this place,” Doug Horngrad, a liberal criminal-defense lawyer in San Francisco, told a reporter, “is that this guy is actually kind of admired privately.”

Some read Kaczynski’s writings, sympathetically, as a sort of culture-critic indictment of a country amusing itself to death at the end of history, where yuppies dozed off alone in McMansion rec rooms as the Waco standoff and the O.J. Simpson car chase unfolded live across their home-theater screens. “There’s a bit of the Unabomber in most of us,” the journalist Robert Wright wrote in Time in 1995, after the first excerpts from the manifesto were released. “VCRs and microwave ovens have their virtues, but in the everyday course of our highly efficient lives, there are times when something seems deeply amiss.”

But when it was published in full, the manifesto offered little support for this interpretation either. Kaczynski didn’t believe modern society had gone wrong. He believed it was wrong.

Sean Fleming, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham who is at work on a book about Kaczynski, describes Kaczynski’s writing as “Nietzsche-like” in its defiance of easy categorization — a quality that explains the attraction of the Unabomber to “radicals of all stripes.”

Most of the ideas in “Industrial Society and Its Future,” Fleming writes, were borrowed from a small handful of Cold War-era writers — most prominently Jacques Ellul, the French sociologist whose most influential work, “The Technological Society,” appeared in English translation in 1964, when Kaczynski was a graduate student. Ellul argued that modern civilization, in its pursuit of rational efficiency, had in effect acquired a mind of its own. The system “has become autonomous,” Ellul wrote.

Kaczynski, drawing from popular books on evolutionary psychology, argued that this technological system was an inevitable consequence of the Darwinian pursuit of advantage, in which the survival of individual and society alike required innovation to outcompete one’s neighbors. This meant that the system could not be reformed. “You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’ parts,” Kaczynski wrote. He concluded, “It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.”

The notion that humanity, in building the technological society, had built its own prison was hardly original in 1995. What distinguished Kaczynski, obviously enough, was his conviction that technological society needed to be demolished, as quickly as possible, with violence. This earned him a trickle of would-be acolytes during his long incarceration: radical environmentalists and anarcho-primitivists at first, and later eco-fascists, the faction of white nationalists who built on Hitler’s view that race war was necessary for survival in a world of finite resources. (Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi mass murderer, plagiarized Kaczynski in his manifesto.)

Beyond the far fringes, though, Kaczynski was more or less forgotten about in the post-Sept. 11 decade, as Americans obsessed over a very different kind of anti-modern radicalism. With the man himself locked away in a Colorado supermax prison, the world seemed happy to disengage from the ideological component of his crimes, the troubling way they directed a familiar uneasiness toward ghastly conclusions.

A Lorax for the Doomers

Besides the anarchists and neo-Nazis, practically the only people who took Kaczynski’s ideas seriously for years after his incarceration were his most direct ideological nemeses: technologists.

“I was surprised how much of Kaczynski’s manifesto I agreed with,” Ray Kurzweil, the computer scientist and futurist, wrote in his 1999 book, “The Age of Spiritual Machines.” When Kurzweil showed Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a passage from the manifesto on the future of artificial intelligence, Joy found himself troubled. He later wrote, “As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage.”

The techno-optimists shared Kaczynski’s view that technology was not a series of innovations but, as the futurist Kevin Kelly wrote in a chapter dedicated to the manifesto in his 2010 book, “What Technology Wants,” a “holistic, self-perpetuating machine.” They also agreed that the near future would be one in which human existence was ruled by a system that humans did not control. Where Kelly and Kurzweil differed from Kaczynski was in viewing this future as navigable, even profoundly exciting — and inevitable, no matter how many bombs you built.

It’s not surprising that broader interest in Kaczynski began to tick upward in the early 2010s, as the average person’s daily experience of technology shifted from discrete tools and entertainment devices to near-constant participation in powerful and inescapable networks — when the system that both Kaczynski and the futurists described went from abstract to concrete. Lamenting Facebook and Twitter and “the ease with which technology taps the ego and drains the soul,” the Fox News contributor Keith Ablow argued in 2013 that Kazcynski was “precisely correct in many of his ideas.”

Since then, fights over misinformation and hate speech have made those networks a polarized battleground, while evidence of their psychological and social harm becomes stark. And over the past several years of increasingly rapid A.I. advance, technologists have come to sound as much like Kaczynski as Kurzweil. Moguls like Sam Altman of OpenAI have brazenly redefined Silicon Valley’s higher purpose, from expanding human opportunity to forestalling an apocalypse that they insist only they, conveniently enough, are capable of avoiding.

Kaczynski’s vision of a species-wide rebellion against our own creations was far-fetched in 1995, but in 2025, even his personal retreat from technological society seems practically impossible. The robots will be everywhere soon enough, and only the people who build them can afford to buy land in Montana these days.

The sense that there is no escape from technology and its consequences has fostered the very loose, very online ethos known as Doomerism, an irony-mediated marriage of nihilism and utopianism in which apocalypse is inescapable but the possibilities on the other side of it are vast, unencumbered by the constraints and cramped imaginations of politics as we’ve known them. It is perhaps no surprise that Kaczynski is ubiquitous in this milieu, quoted and memed and venerated on social media and message boards as Uncle Ted.

In this context, Kaczynski’s manifesto is less the blueprint for resistance he hoped it would be than a theoretical framework for understanding the dystopia we now must figure out how to live in and how we got here. In the goofier corners of Tedpilled social media, he is invoked, tongue mostly but not entirely in cheek, as a kind of Lorax figure: a weird, feral creature to whom humanity should have listened when we had the chance. On X, his glowering image is superimposed over headlines about Japanese men marrying virtual-reality brides. On TikTok, his manifesto is quoted, “Live Laugh Love”-style, in posts about wilderness hiking vacations.

Scroll through enough of it, and the lines between jokey provocation and unironic aspiration become difficult to discern. You remember that these are often people too young to remember a time before the iPhone, for whom Kaczynski’s alarms come from a world not much less distant and unthinkable than Rousseau’s. And you notice the phrase that accompanies many of the posts, the way it sounds more like a rueful shrug than a call to arms: Uncle Ted was right.

(New York Times)

17 Comments

Harvey Reading March 23, 2025

FOUR COMMENTS ON PG&E’S PLANS FOR ENDING EEL DIVERSION

Whole lotta whinin’ goin’ on…poor self-entitled babies…

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Mazie Malone March 23, 2025

Good Morning,

Years ago, I had volunteered my time at the Ukiah animal shelter and also at the Humane Society in Redwood Valley. It is so sad how many animals go through those doors.🐶🐈 Regarding the story of the woman went into the shelter to hijack/steal her dog I I really don’t understand how they were able to get the dog out. The dogs are all locked up unless a volunteer is taking them out for a walk or to meet a potential adopter. It does not make sense to me unless they came in not identifying as owner of the dog, asked to adopt it so the staff took the dog out of kennel for them to “meet” and then when Bliss walked away they exited with the dog. Somethings amiss. 🤪 I will say I am happy for the dog breaking free, hopefully they treat the dog well. To walk in and steal your dog from animal control takes an enormous amount of cockiness and nerve. 😘🐶

mm 💕

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- Bruce Anderson March 23, 2025
  
  They were charges so they got in somehow.
  
  Reply
  - Mazie Malone March 23, 2025
    
    Hi Bruce
    Yes .. they did …interesting… 💕
    
    mm 💕
    
    Reply
Inside Job March 23, 2025

What it looks like to me, and I’m sure to the rest of the county, is that two people run the county: Eyster and Antle. What does our BOS think about this? The way I read the article, Eyster circumvented Sara Pierce to for approval of yet another fake training, which leads me to believe he either knew she would say no or he did ask and she said no, so he went straight to CEO Antle. If the BOS is aware of this, then they are just as culpable. If they didn’t know, then they should feel like this is a complete slap in their face, considering the ongoing civil case. If Antle lied on the stand, then what’s to stop her from lying to the BOS and the people? Everyone I have talked to within the County employment, as well as constituents, are losing faith in the BOS. They feel like the Board has no idea what is going on and believe they have turned the keys over to Antle. I’ve heard many say that firing Antle would be a good start and show that the BOS is taking control of the situation. If Antle and Eyster continue to bulldoze our BOS, then why even have a Board? As long as the BOS allow the status quo, the county will continue to lose the trust of the people and its employees. Many longtime employees are choosing to retire early or find other jobs rather than stick around and watch this disaster unfold. Why would they work for an employer who supports their CEO lying when the employees get written up, reprimanded, fired, or suspended without pay for much MUCH less? It is time for the BOS to do the right thing. Do the job we voted them to do, not just give the keys to a vindictive DA and a hapless CEO.

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- Paul Modic March 23, 2025
  
  From this AVA bubble (with10% of the county’s eyes on this issue: more? less?) it is clear that Antle should go but who would want to wade into the dysfunction to replace her for that job? Who has the understanding of what’s going on like probably no other? The answer is Major S, but fat and slim are the chances he will run the county, though I do want to ask him:
  What would you do? Give us five steps for a roadmap to a solution to this governmental problem/mess. Please be brief, so as not to waste your time, thanks…
  
  Reply
  - Mark Scaramella March 23, 2025
    
    Monthly reports from each department in chart form with one chart each for budget status, staffing, workload, projects, and cost drivers.
    Honor all voter-approved measures with monthly reports on progress.
    Quarterly review of all special funds.
    Monthly open meetings in chambers with constituents in the evening so public can attend. Urge other supervisors to do the same.
    Assemble a kitchen cabinet of volunteer advisors, incuding select retirees.
    Salary caps on management positions.
    Reduction of Supervisors’ pay, elimination of commuter stipend.
    Review of responses to Grand Jury reports having to do with County operations. Report on status of implementation of all recommendations.
    Return Clerk of Board to Supervisors.
    Review all management to line staff ratios to reduce number of managers.
    Publication of a list of all purchase orders monthly in descending order by dollar value.
    Develop a living wage ordinance for staff and county contractors.
    Require all regulatory proposals to include copies of neighboring county versions annotated for applicability. …
    I could go on. But since we know none of this basic stuff will ever happen, I won’t bother.
    
    Reply
    - Chuck Dunbar March 23, 2025
      
      Excellent list of mostly common sense, purposeful recommendations for an informed, effective, high-functioning organization. You would be a valuable advisor to this BOS, Mark, but sadly, I don’t think they are knocking at your door.
      
      Reply
    - Betsy Cawn March 24, 2025
      
      Annual report to the Board of Supervisors on the status of implementing the current General Plan (“required” by the former Office of Planning and Research, now called the Office of Land Use and Planning, General Plan Guidelines).
      
      We have a jillion “plans” with no associated “plan” for funding and tracking expenditures to accomplish those plan tasks. Lake County Board of Supervisors has never received such an annual report on our current GP (2008). Tomorrow, the BoS will receive the first-ever such Annual Report (18 pages) all full of the particularly clever vague terminology and praises.
      
      Among other major “gaps” in county administration is lack of oversight of departmental performance. “Starting from scratch” a few years ago, with the (no doubt expensive) guidance from the National Association of Counties and the California State Association of Counties, our department heads ever-so-slowly moved into a glossy reporting mode every January where the Board and the Public are “informed” about the department’s responsibilities, and the director’s “plan” to meet those unavoidable requirements (created by State and Federal mandates, regardless of what the BoS wants to do with its “discretionary spending” funds.
      
      More social media? Hiring lobbyists to blandly advocate in Congress and the State’s equivalent, and whipping up a bunch of “ad hoc” committees — at least Lake County’s Board has the appearance of caring.
      
      Reply
Whyte Owen March 23, 2025

Also in today’s NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/us/trump-newsom-california-coastal-commission.html

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- Bruce McEwen March 23, 2025
  
  Also in today’s NYT Book Review:
  
  “Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that if you live in the actual world you can’t have your own way; that if you get what you want, it turns out not to be the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that one or two generations from now you’ll be forgotten entirely as if you had never existed. Another is that to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else’s expense or do and undergo things it is not pleasant to face; like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of the innocents murdered in an aerial bombing … and not just bombings. It is also an unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets and knives… you have connived at murder and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely.”
  
  —Paul Fussell on George Orwell’s “power of facing unpleasant facts.”
  
  Caitlin Johnstone appears to possess this power as well.
  
  Reply
Richard Weinkle March 23, 2025

Maybe someone can clue Dan Walters into the Mendocino morass.

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Chuck Dunbar March 23, 2025

“Love Letter” for John Barth—

A wide-ranging honor nicely done, John S. Thank you for sharing it with us.

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- John Sakowicz March 24, 2025
  
  Thank you, Chuck Dunbar.
  
  Jack Barth was my faculty advisor at Hopkins. He was a brilliant postmodernist…defined the “metafiction” genre. On a personal basis, he was patient, generous and kind. It was a formative period of my life. Jack and his wife, Shelly, hosted great dinner parties.
  
  In early April, one year after Jack’s death, Hopkins will be holding a memorial service for Jack. I hope to be reading my tribute. My classmates include the novelist, Louise Erdrich, and poet, Tom Sleigh, and comic and Andy Kaufman-collaborator, Bob Zmuda.
  
  John
  
  Reply
  - Chuck Dunbar March 24, 2025
    
    John,
    Thanks for your response and added information. I can imagine your tribute, read in the coming memorial service, would be received with gratitude, even cheers. It is remarkable–just went back and read it again this morning. A letter of love indeed.
    
    Reply
Lazarus March 23, 2025

“GIRLS BASKETBALL PLAYER OF THE YEAR: Cardinal Newman’s Kate Schat from Ukiah”
From the PD

Congratulations to Ms. Kate Schat, (Perhaps a local Caitlin Clark in the making…?) and Cardinal Newman on a great season.
It’s refreshing to read an uplifting story with no agenda and no political spin, in the AVA.
Thank you,
Laz

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Jane Does March 24, 2025

John Sakowicz, wow!

George Foreman, iconic, nice man. r.i.p.

Professor Phil Zwerlig, Ph.D., would say: ‘never place an exclamation mark after the word awesome.’

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Mendocino County Today: Sunday 3/23/2025

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