Mendocino County Today: Sunday 3/30/2025

Stormy Weather | Dapple Cat | Wildcats Win | Burn Workshop | Pump Restorer | Dam Fault | Sea Radish | Concert Protest | Pet Tonya | AV Events | White Murder | Dem Club | Loggers Lodge | Yesterday's Catch | Pitsenbarger Book | Marco Radio | Many Bothans | VOA Appreciation | Tourism Economics | Double Rainbow | Giants Personality | Verlander Debut | Hacking Concern | Toxic Party | Giant Ponzi | Poor Person | NPR | Cultural Revolution | Passed Down | Workingmen Unite | Marx Wrong | Great Articles | Disgusting Administration | Lead Stories | Greenland Goodies | Force Vote | Poker Players | Shark Teeth | Orwellian | Death Waits

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STORMY WEATHER quickly returns today with strong, gusty south-southeast winds followed by persistent rain through the start of next week. Isolated thunderstorms, small hail and moderate-to-heavy downpours possible Monday through Tuesday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 09", 46F & scattered light rain this Sunday morning on the coast. Scattered light rain is our forecast is our forecast into Tuesday. I am not sure after that just yet?

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WILDCATS OVER GAUCHOS

Ukiah 3, Casa Grande 2

In a classic pitchers’ duel, Ukiah (7-3) scored the go-ahead run in the top of the fourth inning Saturday and held on as the Wildcats handed the Gauchos (6-1) their first loss of the season.

Ukiah’s Brayden Beebe and Beau David combined to allow just two earned runs on four hits and five strikeouts. The Gauchos’ Brady Laubscher and Drew Bugbee allowed five total hits, with two earned runs and five strikeouts.

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PILE BURNING PLANNED on Lower Tenmile Creek Near Laytonville March 30th

Community Burn Workshop will include Biochar Demonstration

Mendocino County, CA– The Eel River Recovery Project, in collaboration with Torchbearr, local landowners, and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), will host a prescribed burn workshop on Sunday, March 30th, 2025. The burn area is located near Hwy 101 approximately 5 miles north of Laytonville. Burning will begin as soon as favorable weather and humidity conditions allow for safe and effective operations. The workshop will treat approximately 13-acres of slash piles on Vassar Ranch, part of an ambitious multi-year watershed-wide forest health project in the Tenmile Creek watershed. During the burn, smoke may be visible in the area. The burn will be assisted by qualified Burn Boss Scot Steinbring of Torchbearr with permission from CAL FIRE.

Funding for the Tenmile Creek Watershed Forest Health Project is provided by CAL FIRE’s Forest Health Program as part of California Climate Investments (CCI), a state-wide program that puts billions of Cap-and-Trade dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, strengthening the economy, and improving public health and the environment – particularly disadvantaged communities. The cap-and-trade program also creates financial incentives for industries to invest in clean technologies and develop innovative ways to reduce pollution. CCI investment projects include affordable housing, renewable energy, public transportation, zero-emission vehicles, environmental restoration, more sustainable agriculture, recycling, and much more. At least 35% of these investments are located within and benefitting residents of disadvantaged communities, and low income households across California. For more information, visit the California Climate Investment website at: www.calclimateinvestments.ca.gov.

Contact: Alicia Bales abaleslittletree@gmail.com or Patrick Higgins phiggin@sonic.net

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PUMP RESTORER WANTED

Wondering if there is anyone in Nor-Cal who restores/renovates these old gas pumps, not to working order….just stripped, clearcoated and re-assembled? The big glass cylinder is a bit daunting to remove, and the frame is bent a bit. we are in Boonville, south Mendocino Co.

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POTTER VALLEY PROJECT/SCOTT DAM SEISMIC RISK DANGER

Editor,

The Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) is surrendering the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license for the Potter Valley Project (PVP). PG&E identifies this action as a business decision because of the project’s failure to produce revenues that offset its operating costs, even though PG&E customers pay higher rates for delivered energy than just about everywhere else in the Unted States.

In our opinion, PG&E has determined to rid itself of the PVP for a different kind of economic consideration, after determining that the Scott Dam represents an economic liability that the company cannot afford. A key factor in this determination is the increased understanding of the seismic hazards represented by the Bartlett Springs Fault Zone (BSFZ), which runs through Lake Pillsbury approximately 5,000 feet (about a mile) east of Scott Dam.

As part of the PVP relicensing process, FERC held an auction for potential alternative licensees for the PVP. No takers made offers to accept the ownership of and responsibility for this existing hydropower license, for the same reason that PG&E does not want the responsibility for these existing conditions: a recognition of the outstanding risk that the BSFZ represents for the PVP licensee.

The history of the PVP doesn’t need to be repeated here, but the scientific understanding of Earth sciences that has developed in the past century, which is critical in considering the best options for the future of the PVP, is less well-known. The geological framework represented by plate tectonics is particularly significant in understanding the circumstances presented for the PVP. The dynamics of plate tectonics were not understood in the early 1900s when the Cape Horn and Scott Dams were designed and constructed. Over this past century, the scientific understanding of plate tectonics (including the Bartlett Springs Fault Zone) has developed continuously, and most of our current understanding of how tectonic dynamics affect northwestern California has developed fully only in the most recent 30 years.

A short summary of western California’s geological history shows that until about 28 million years ago the western continental margin was a “subduction zone” with the Farallon Plate subducting beneath the western margin of the North American Plate. West of the Farallon Plate was another plate (the Pacific Plate), with a surface movement direction toward the northwest. When the margin between the Pacific Plate and the Farallon Plate reached the edge of the North American Plate, the relative dynamics of the plate boundary changed to become a “transform margin”, with the Pacific Plate moving northwest relative to the North American Plate. This margin is known today as the San Andreas Fault Zone (SAFZ).

The SAFZ is not just a line on a map, but a 50-mile-wide zone of fault activity on a number of collateral major faults in addition to the San Andreas Fault itself. The Bartlett Springs Fault Zone is the easternmost fault in the SAFZ. The BSFZ extends 50 miles from the Middle Fork of the Eel River southeast to Round Valley, past Lake Pillsbury and Bartlett Springs to just north of Cache Creek. Related faults in the same alignment system to the south include Wilson, Hunting Creek, and Green Valley faults.

Nobody we know can accurately predict when a seismic event might occur. However, based upon the length of the fault zone and other criteria geologists can estimate the potential magnitude of a major seismic event. Recent studies have identified the Bartlett Springs Fault as capable of producing an earthquake of Moment Magnitude between 6.7 and 7.2 (as documented by geological studies published by B.L. Melosh et al. 2024, V.E. Langenheim et al. 2023, and J.C. Lozos et al. 2015).

Earthquakes with magnitudes between 6.7 and 7.2 are major seismic events. Prior events within the memories of individuals living in northern California that fall within this magnitude range include the 1994 Northridge Earthquake (M6.7), the 1992 Cape Mendocino Triple Junction Earthquake (M7.2), the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake (M6.9), and the 1980 Eureka (Gorda Plate) Earthquake (M7.3).

The 1992 Mendocino Triple Junction event (M7.2) resulted in damage in Ferndale (in Humboldt County) very similar to the damage that occurred in Ferndale from the 1906 (M7.9) event in San Francisco. The 1980 Gorda Plate earthquake (M7.3) resulted in a collapsed Highway 101 overpass near Humboldt Bay. The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake (M6.9) was on an oblique fault very close to the San Andreas Fault in the Santa Cruz area, and may be more directly indicative of effects associated with the Bartlett Springs Fault at Lake Pillsbury. The event was memorialized on TV because it occurred at the start of a World Series game in San Francisco. Long sections of the I-580 freeway in Oakland collapsed during the quake, and a large part of the Marina District in San Francisco was damaged because of liquefaction in the poorly consolidated fill on which it was built.

An earthquake in this magnitude range on the Bartlett Springs Fault in the vicinity of Lake Pillsbury could result in an immediate failure of Scott Dam as a consequence of the seismic shaking per se. Moreover, the existing large landslide at the south end of the dam, on which the south abutment is based, would likely be mobilized (as occurred widely in northwestern California in 1992 with the Triple Junction event), leading to the destruction of the south end of the dam, and the rest of the structure would follow. This location was not then, and is not now, a safe location for a dam.

Dams do fail and while the specific dynamics are different, the St Francis Dam failure in Los Angeles County in 1928 is a relevant example. A common joke among geologists is that a sure way to find a new fault is to look for an older dam, an indication of how significant a risk geologists consider fault movement to be with respect to dam safety, particularly for older structures. Geological science clearly indicates that the BSFZ represents a significant risk of failure for Scott Dam.

While we have yet to see the internal studies conducted by PG&E for the Scott Dam, we suspect that those studies say the same. We strongly believe that discussions among members of the public and their elected decision-makers about the future of the Potter Valley Project should include a greater appreciation of these geological realities.

Bob Schneider, Bachelor of Science, Geology, UC Davis

Chad Roberts, Senior Ecologist, Ph.D., Ecology, UC Davis

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THE PROTEST at the Israel Philharmonic Concert

by Phillip Lenberg

We all walked down the sidewalk, shoulders tucked and hurriedly leaning forward to avoid being touched and spit on by the angry racists jeering at people on their way to the doors. Parading effigies and leaning into the faces of Jews passing by while shouting in favor of their guilt, punishment, and ultimate destruction, these voices echoed in unison the coward with the megaphone marching back and forth. He demanded repetition, amplified through hundreds of other like-minded rule-followers that have been convinced their convictions are right.

As the crowd yells genocide the concert-goers are forced to walk single file to avoid the menacing, coursing mobs. Jews are shoved, body checked, threatened and insulted as they try to reach the entrance of the concert hall, rushing in as if from a sudden torrential downpour. Teams of security and police officers were standing by, outside the fray and away from the mass of protesters.

Being body checked, yelled at and threatened was unpleasant and disturbing, as it was obviously meant to be, but seeing it done to the elderly man hunched over behind me who almost lost his footing, knocking into his elderly wife, that somehow changed the experience. This righteous bully with a loud speaker ramming into Jews on the sidewalk, his sentiments reverberating and emboldened through throngs of supporters, watching them vehemently back up his actions while pumping their fists in the air and using signs, flags, and effigies as weapons to intimidate Jews, that was something else.

I've worked as an orchestra conductor and music educator for the past 30 years. I was the first person in my family to be born in the U.S., the first to get a doctoral degree, and, I hope, the first person in my family to be shoved on the sidewalk for being a Jew, at least in America. I'm glad my refugee father isn't alive to know this, may his memory be a blessing.

I keep thinking about the two kind Japanese women sitting next to me in the concert hall who simply wanted to attend an excellent concert, as did most of us. The orchestra’s performance from beginning to end was thoughtful, emotional, and expertly done. The need for people to feel like they were doing something important by disrupting, no matter how misguided and misinformed, was a pock. How embarrassing to see these people, college-aged and, even more embarrassingly adults, writhing to the literal beating of their own drums, screaming like toddlers and just as informed on both terminology and definition of what constitutes a genocide.

I would much rather write a review of the concert, which was beautiful in many ways. The choice of repertoire was meaningful, the soloists, both of whom are principles in the orchestra, were astounding. The cellist and the flutist played exquisitely, their sounds were warm and present, their sensitivity and spatial and harmonic awareness in the music was moving and made both pieces feel personal, and the conductor gave the orchestra so much freedom to play as a group while beaming expressive and thoughtfully interpreted music. This was intellectual, emotional, challenging music. The Israel Philharmonic is made up of musicians of the highest caliber, experts in what they do, products of a lifelong pursuit of dedication to a craft at the highest level. The very ethos of an orchestra is about collaboration and communion to create a transcendent experience every single time they perform. It is live, it is intense, it is hard work, it is time travel, and it is sacred. It requires an enormous background of knowledge, skill, athleticism, aestheticism, discipline, talent, and grit to become a professional musician. Bravo to the orchestra et al.

During Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony a person rushed to the edge of one of the boxes overlooking the violins. They unfurled a long keffiyeh-patterned banner and started screaming bloody murder about the musicians murdering babies, “…their blood is on your hands!” etc. My respect to the security in the wings, or wherever they were, but this went on for too long. I watched, along with the rest of a full concert hall (over 2,700 people), the 1st violins trying to play a Tchaikovsky symphony while being screamed at by a lunatic stranger from 20 feet away, as two elderly men in the audience attempted to physically subdue this histrionic “protester,” all-the-while concert-goers across the hall yelling “Shut up!” and “Get out of here!” for what seemed like an eternity, but lasted about three minutes. My partner and I eventually got out of our seats halfway across the hall to go down and help those men, but were stopped by ushers with earpieces who informed us they were “on it, please go back to the hall”.

We all sat and watched two elderly men literally fight to protect others, both the audience and the orchestra, physically subduing a person intent on changing the world by screaming at classical musicians and sitting on strangers’ laps during a Tchaikovsky symphony. It was upsetting and seemed extreme in a way that doesn’t really effect change.

I couldn’t help but think about the moldy growth of sanctimonious extremists who buy gift shop keffiyehs made by Muslims in concentration camps in order to support bullhorn thugs smugly chanting casual genocidal slogans as if they hold power. They do not. They do not have my sympathy. They do not elicit much aside from a defensive posture and vitriolic disdain. If change is the clarion call, this performative activism was antithetical to creating that change.

What exactly were these protests supposed to achieve? What is the efficacy of child-minded bullies behaving badly? The strong sense of solidarity within the audience and the orchestra was reinvigorated, and anyone mildly sympathetic to whatever the message may have been was most assuredly turned off by the total and obnoxious ignorance on display, entering a sacred space and turning it into “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who are the morally superior of us all?”

After the concert we were met with whimsical, child-like rainbow-colored sidewalk chalk lining the block leading up to the front doors of San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall. They espoused things like “Israel=U.S.=genocide,” and “Zionists Die!”, etc. This is not the usual kind of feces-laden SF street to which I've become accustomed. It reeked of a different kind of human waste, stained with possibly good intentions but too easily influenced by bad actors.This was a foreshadowing, a new kind of filth on our streets, less 1969 “Down with the man!” and more 2025 “Zionist rapists you can’t hide!” I sincerely hope the next phase of this street trash does not see a resurgence of a swastika flag because “it was originally a Hindu symbol of…” or “Hms changed the wording of their charter, so…”

What can be done from this point forward? Do I hope something terrible befalls these protesters? Only to the man that was shoving Jews. To the others, I hope once they see their Jewish neighbors being dragged and stomped upon on the streets while others celebrate, they realize they were complicit. Claiming indigenous peoples who have been colonized over and over, ostracized, tortured and murdered again and again, who have attempted to regain their ancestral homeland and live side-by-side with its occupiers again and again, who are constantly hanged in the court of public opinion and violently, “by any means necessary” denied their right to self-determination without consequence, or simply to attend a symphony concert in 2025 in San Francisco, claiming that these peoples do not or should not be allowed these things and further deserve to be physically, verbally, and emotionally assaulted as they go to the symphony, which for me and many other Jews, is my job and my temple, that is a clarion call all its own.

(Phillip Lenberg is the conductor of the Ukiah Symphony, as well as a professor of music at Mendocino College.)

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UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Tonya is no couch potato—she’s very friendly with people and excited to meet everyone! Tonya needs a bit more basic training, as she has a tendency to pull on-leash. But she’s eager to learn, and, as she appears to be a Malinois or German Shepherd Dog, very smart, as well! Our gorgeous girl enjoys playing with toys and getting out in the world and sniffing about. We believe Tonya would enjoy a canine housemate. Tonya is one year old and weighs a stunning 65 pounds.

To learn more about Tonya, 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!

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ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE List of Events

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CLIMATE REFUGEES, and What you can do now

The Inland Mendocino Democratic Club invites you to our monthly meeting Thursday April 10 at 6:30 - 7:30 pm to hear guest speakers: Eileen Mitro - AD2 woman of the Year and chair of Climate Action Committee. Topic - Climate Refugees and Janet Rosen - organizer of Indivisible Ukiah. Topic - what can You do now?

Free pizza and other snacks

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MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, March 29, 2025

LINDA ALMOND, 66, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, probation violation.

WESLEY BOHANNON, 37, Ukiah. Vandalism.

IZIK CABRERA, 27, Ukiah. Domestic battery, false imprisonment with violence, damaging communications device, probation violation.

WENDY DUERNER, 48, Willits. Probation revocation.

JEREMY EUBANKS, 52, Willits. DUI.

JOHN IMUS JR., 63, Ukiah. Parole violation.

KATHRYN JONES, 31, Ukiah. Petty theft with priors, probation revocation.

JEROME MCMURPHY, 54, Ukiah. Parole violation.

TASHA ORNELAS, 38, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

PATRICK SCHUETZ, 53, Ukiah. County parole violation.

GERALD SIMPSON, 55, Willits. Parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)

MALISSA WARNER, 48, Ukiah. Petty theft, carelessly starting a fire, failure to appear, probation revocation.

BENJAMIN ZAHNISER, 38, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Petty theft with priors, paraphernalia, probation violation.

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MEMO OF THE AIR: For All The Marbles.

"Imagine being me," I don't say to the friend who has lost, over the past seven years, both parents, her only brother, a cousin, an uncle, a childhood crush, a newly discovered half sister and beloved family dog to a cruel array of accidents, crimes of passion, and unpronounceable afflictions too ghastly and protracted to fathom, "with all that ahead of me." -Suzanne Buffam

Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (2025-03-28) 8-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part, my 1,405th, during which, as usual, no animals were harmed, except to eat choice parts of them, and there was no mention of toilet paper or white slavery, nor was there kissing without at least one foot on the floor, nor glorified criminality or disrespect of authority or faith, though there was some swearing, miscegenation, and a Dachshund wearing split trousers, so PG: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0637

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:

"I hope you carry that through to the end of all soft pieces for the rest of your performing lives." https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wwtLofwwVys

A fun, scientifically proven game to result in an intuitive understanding of where the countries all are, so if you're ever in a beauty contest, or it's quiz night, or if sarcastic minions of a talk-show host ever stop you on the street and attempt to humiliate you, you can smile and shine. https://map.koljapluemer.com

Waiting For Guffman and The Science of Sleep, full deep rich movies free to watch. But I'd really like you to see /Never Let Me Go/. That was 2010 and I'm still not over it. The trailer is terrible, and everywhere on the web someone tells you about it they tell it wrong and ruin it. It's a quiet science-fiction story, the best kind, with no special effects necessary. https://kottke.org/25/03/free-warner-bros-movies-on-youtube

The horrors. The horrors. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lest-we-forget-the-horrors-an-unending-catalog-of-trumps-cruelties-collusions-corruptions-and-crimes

And how we get alphabet soup. This gives me the idea to use such a smashplate for ancient magical Hebrew runes, to market soup that when shaken aligns the runes, becomes animated, opens and cooks itself without stove or pan, rises up, walks across the counter and waits before you, soft-shoeing sleepily with its arms up and out to the sides, mitten-palms up, like an old man at an Old World wedding, for you to plop it into a bowl. You do so, stir it to break the word/number-spell, and it's liquid soup, ready. Then use video of that in a remake of the famous heartstrings-tugging early-1970s Campbell's soup commercial that ends with the little girl mumbling, "My mother used to make this kind of soup for me," and the woman, who up to then we assumed was her mother, waits for more, then says gently, "My mother used to make this kind of soup for me, too. Why don't I tell you a little about my mother, then you can tell me about yours." Fill the screen with the sepia image of a can of Golem Soup. https://theawesomer.com/how-alphabet-soup-noodles-are-made/766603/

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

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BILL KIMBERLIN:

Working on movies that half the world was waiting for, made things sometimes a little tense. To combat that we would compensate by making jokes about, Star Wars for instance. There was one line that I heard so many times from the editors running a scene back and forth for hours. It was, "Many Bothans died to bring us this information." So we would say to someone who couldn't go to lunch, "Many Bothans died to bring you back this hamburger." George Lucas got upset with me when I put that in my book, but we did much worse, but all in fun.

Here I am honoring the great Sergei Eisenstein. We inherited these huge photos from the original Zoetrope studio in San Francisco where Coppola helped me with my first movie.

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BRING BACK VOA

Editor:

In September 1980, I started a six-month position with Africare to set up clinics in refugee camps in Somalia. Upon arriving, I realized I was cut off from my family and the rest of the world. The only exception was when I was traveling with my young Somali counterpart, Abdulahi Potan.

Abdulahi would get up at 3 a.m. to listen to the Somali language news broadcast of Voice of America. Memorization skills were valued in Somalia. Abdulahi would repeat the broadcast to me the next morning — my lifeline to the world. This was how I learned about John Lennon’s assassination, Ronald Reagan’s election, the Iran hostage release and the Oakland Raiders’ Super Bowl win.

VOA has been providing this lifeline to billions since the early dark days of World War II. Autocrats all over the world have tried to silence it by confiscating radios, jamming frequencies and arresting listeners. Brave people all over the world chose to listen anyway.

Now, our American autocrat has silenced these broadcasts. Congress needs to listen to Van Morrison’s song “Wavelength”: “I hear the Voice of America calling on my wavelength, saying come back baby, come back.”

Please bring VOA back.

Rick Denniston

Santa Rosa

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MOST AMERICANS never travel abroad (only 3.5%, according to one analysis), which is why they have no idea that universal health care, public transport, pedestrian-friendly urban centers and French food and wines are actually good things. Many don’t leave their own states. Some never venture out of their own Zip Codes. To each their own. But tourism to the US is a $155 billion a year industry, which Trump is rapidly killing off. “Even before the most recent spate of detentions, forecast visits to the country this year had been revised downward from a projected 5% rise to a 9% decrease by Tourism Economics.”

— Jeffrey St. Clair

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SCOTT OSTLER ON THE GIANTS: The Giants will show some actual personality, like they’re having fun playing the game of baseball. I don’t know if that will contribute to the win total, but it can’t hurt. The Giants’ championship clubs all had personality, some color and style. The more the Giants feel like a baseball squad, the better. Time will tell if Posey will change the mood, but on Opening Day, when the TV camera zoomed in on Posey in the press box, I actually breathed a sigh of relief.

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JUSTIN VERLANDER HAS SOLID DEBUT TO 20TH SEASON BUT GIANTS FALL TO REDS 3-2

by Shayna Rubin

Before his start against the Cincinnati Reds, Justin Verlander walked across the clubhouse with headphones on and eyes focused up and away from any potential eye contact. It’s only been a few weeks, but his San Francisco Giants teammates know to stay clear of Verlander before he starts.

“I don’t go near him,” manager Bob Melvin said before the Giants’ 3-2 loss to the Reds on Saturday. “There’s certain guys you just don’t go near and he’s one of those guys. So he’ll do his thing and won’t hear from me.”

Melvin likens Verlander’s demeanor to that of Hall of Famer Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, both of whom he managed with the Arizona Diamondbacks. It takes a special kind of intensity to pitch at the level Verlander has — for as long as he has.

Entering his 20th season, Verlander took the mound at Great American Ball Park in his Giants debut the leader of an exclusive group. At age 42 (he celebrated his birthday 37 days ago), he’s the oldest player active in any of the four major American sports leagues. He’s older than NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers by 280 days and he has more than a year on the NHL’s Marc-Andre Fleury (40, 119 days) and the NBA’s LeBron James (40, 87 days).

Saturday, he didn’t look like the oldest player in sports. Adjusting his eyes to a particularly tight strike zone with home plate umpire Cory Blaser calling balls and strikes, Verlander fell into three-ball counts against two of the first three batters he faced and struck out both. First, he got TJ Friedl on a rapid succession of fastballs that ended with one foul tipped into catcher Patrick Bailey’s glove, then he froze Elly De La Cruz looking at his first curveball of the game.

Verlander made one costly mistake. With a two-run lead in the third inning, he hung a slider to Matt McClain that wound up parked in the left-field seats.

“I thought today was decent,” Verlander said. “The hanging slider to McClain, I’d like to have back. But other than that, I didn’t think it was too bad.”

McClain was a thorn all afternoon, doubling off Verlander in the fifth inning. With De La Cruz up next, Verlander kicked his fastball up to 96 mph (one in a handful of times). De La Cruz, this time, had an answer for the two-strike curveball and shot it into the hole in right field, scoring the game-tying run. Verlander departed at 83 pitches — his limit on this day was 90 — after five innings with the game tied. He struck out five and walked one while allowing six hits in his Giants debut.

“He looked good. Pitch count got up after the last inning, but he gave up two runs and leaves the game a tie game,” Melvin said. “So he did his job.”

The Giants gave Verlander an early 2-0 lead when Wilmer Flores hit his second home run in as many days and, later, Jung Hoo Lee notched his first RBI of the year, scoring Heliot Ramos from third. With Verlander out of the game, Walnut Creek native Christian Encarnacion-Strand smacked a sinker on the outer half of the zone the other way for game-winning home run against reliever Spencer Bivens.

Flores, Bailey and Ramos hit into rally-killing double plays in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings, respectively, to extinguish any comeback mimicking the season-opener win. At least the Giants significantly decreased their strikeout numbers from 17 on Thursday to one on Saturday.

“Put the ball in play today, we only struck out one time — was 17 last time — but the double-play balls hurt,” Melvin said.

The Giants came away with their first loss of the year, and the first of Buster Posey’s front-office era, with the club’s most decorated pitcher on the mound. Verlander, though, couldn’t help but skew optimistic. An injured neck in 2024 set him on track for the worst season of his long career. Offseason changes he made to his wind up and delivery have the three-time Cy Young winner feeling much like his old self.

“We didn’t win the game. My guys gave me a two-run lead and I’d like to be able to hold that,” Verlander said. “I usually take an objective view of my performance, good or bad, and this was OK. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t bad. But it’s definitely a step forward from last season. I can say that.”

(SF Chronicle)

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COALITION CALLS FOR INVESTIGATION AND POSTPONEMENT AFTER CYBERATTACK DISRUPTS DELTA TUNNEL HEARING

by Dan Bacher

The Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School, on behalf of the Delta Tribal Environmental Coalition (DTEC), sent a letter to the State Water Resources Control Board to demand a “full investigation and immediate postponement” of the Delta Conveyance Project proceedings following a disturbing cyberattack that targeted a public hearing on March 24, 2025.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/28/2313177/-Coalition-Calls-For-Investigation-And-Postponement-After-Cyberattack-Disrupts-Delta-Tunnel-Hearing

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DON'T TELL VAL OR LEE

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GAVIN NEWSOM’S GIANT PONZI SCHEME

by Leigh Woodhouse

California’s Con-Man-in-Chief Rips Off American Taxpayers while crushing small businesses to pay the state’s supersized population of scammers. A scheme too obscenely corrupt for his own party to stomach. Let them eat Gruel.

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Last November, the celebrity chef and restaurateur Andrew Gruel got a call from his wife, who manages parts of his business. There was an issue with their payroll taxes: They were $2,000 more than the couple had expected. Getting billed for thousands of dollars, without explanation, understandably alarmed the chef. So Gruel called their payroll company to find out what had happened. What he was told provoked him into posting a tweet that went viral the following day. ‘California has a budget shortfall,’ his tweet explained, ‘and the federal government wants money back that it lent California for UI that it ‘lost.’ They are making up for it by having business owners pay it.’ When Elon Musk commented with his signature one-word boost ‘Really?,’ Gruel replied, ‘Yup, state defaulted on their loan and the businesses were the co-signers (unknowingly).’

In other words: During a time when California’s small businesses had already been decimated by debt they’d incurred because of COVID lockdowns, they now discovered they were also on the hook for debt that the state had accrued through its gross mismanagement of federal relief funds.

‘UI’ is unemployment insurance. In California, for the better part of a decade, the UI system has been running a chronic deficit. The problem isn’t some intractable crisis that has been impossible for the state to avoid. Indeed, the state government aggravated the problem by handing out billions of dollars in COVID-relief money to criminals and fraudsters, including death row inmates. Then the state deliberately failed to repay the giant loan it took out from the federal government. Meanwhile, the politician most responsible for allowing California to be defrauded took a cabinet-level position in the Biden administration. From that office, she issued a directive that allowed the state to avoid paying back the estimated $32.6 billion it had lost on her watch to the US government. The people who are now paying the money back through a state surcharge on payroll taxes are businesses and workers. For small businesses, this hits especially hard. California’s legislators ‘default on loans and stick it to law-abiding citizens,’ former Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert told me.

When the pandemic started, Chef Gruel owned and operated eight restaurants in California. When the lockdowns came, he told me, ‘It was horrible. Restaurants are highly leveraged. We rely on cash-in-drawer every day. We have debt payments.’

When restaurants in the state were forbidden to offer indoor dining, Gruel was forced to lay off most of his staff. He still chose to feed first responders for free, and he began crowd-sourcing donations for unemployed restaurant-industry workers. He cut his own salary, took on more debt, and started experimenting with food delivery services. Yet even after a lot of hustling, when he was finally able to reopen his restaurants to the public, Gruel couldn’t afford to rehire his workers, because the government was paying them to stay home. Meanwhile, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom was caught dining (unmasked, of course) with healthcare lobbyists at Sonoma’s famous, Michelin three-star French Laundry, while regular Californians were being forced to eat takeout on the sidewalk. Gruel, and restaurateurs like himself, were incensed.

Then came the news that the state had squandered a significant portion of the $20 billion in COVID-relief money on scammers. Over 130 inmates on death row were paid more than $400,000 in unemployment relief. Rappers ShotOff and Nuke Bizzle proudly defrauded the state of over a million dollars, then bragged about it in a rap video with an original, aptly titled track: ‘EDD.’

‘They didn’t go through the back door,’ Schubert told me. ‘They went right through the front door.’

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Displays of flash money melded with scouring contempt for the fate of working people has been par for the course in California. Fast money is as foundational to California’s cultural heritage as show business or technology. Indeed, it built the state. In 1848, when John Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill, California’s non-native population was about 15,000. By the end of 1849, it was six times that. Gold-seeking immigrants arrived by the thousands, making treacherous journeys that often ended in death by cholera. Some nearly starved in the mountains. But few, upon arriving in California and panning its rivers for a few years, made much more than they had spent to get there.

The real money was in price gouging. Largely cut off from the manufacturing centers of the East, the miners were dependent for their provisions upon a comparatively small number of merchants who imported their goods from the East Coast by sea, via the long journey around Cape Horn. The merchants charged the miners, who paid in gold dust, whatever the market would bear — boots for $35, blankets for $12, boiled eggs for 75 cents apiece. It wasn’t just imports, either. One farmer in 1849 made $25,000 selling vegetables; a prostitute claimed to have brought in $50,000 by peddling her wares.

150 years later, the dot-com boom resurrected the gold rush mentality in a new form. In the late 1990s, money flooded into Silicon Valley start-ups, the placer mines of the emerging 21st century. Pets.com raised more than $80 million through its initial public offering, before shutting its doors ten months later. Start-up employees shuttled from one $50,000 corporate party to the next. Silicon Valley office rents rose to the fourth most expensive in the world, behind London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Then the bubble exploded.

Just a few years later another bubble burst, in the residential real-estate sector. This was part of a national collapse in the market, the fallout from which spread across the globe, but California was one of the worst-hit states in the country. It was also where the crisis arguably originated. Nine of the top ten subprime lenders were located in California. Close to 60% of all subprime loans written in America between 2005 and 2007 originated with California firms.

So when California became the nation’s capital of COVID unemployment scamming, it was just conforming to a long tradition in the state. Moreover, California’s political leaders had all but begged for the title. Under California’s former governor Jerry Brown, the state Employment Development Department (EDD) had let a contract with a fraud-detection service lapse when the federal government declined to continue paying for it. The decision ‘went up the chain — it wasn’t just some low-level person,’ Brooke Armour from the California Business Roundtable told me. With no effective way to rout out imposters during the pandemic, ‘the state just paid whatever anyone claimed,’ Armour said.

This lack of oversight was nothing new. California’s UI system was in a fiscal crisis before the pandemic even began. During the Great Recession, the state dug a $10 billion hole via unchecked unemployment insurance payouts, and had to loot the federal government’s unemployment trust fund to make good on all of the benefits it owed. A decade later, the state had still yet to pay off the debt.

When a state fails to pay its debt to the federal government over unemployment insurance, it triggers a surcharge on that state’s employers. Going into the pandemic, California employers were already paying a 15% penalty to pay back the principal on the state’s UI debt. Then the tidal wave of COVID fraud began, and the deficit doubled. (The state Legislative Analyst’s Office denies that fraud is the reason for the deficit, blaming it, rather, on structural dysfunctions.)

California had an opportunity to take the onus off its employers when the federal government offered states the chance to pay off their UI debts by tapping into funds held by the American Rescue Plan Act — that is to say, by using federal tax revenue to pay off their debt to the federal government. But California turned down the deal.

Armour believes this was because the state understood that if it kept those federal dollars, it would be private employers, not the state, who would be on the hook to pay them back. Politicians could reap the dividends of a hidden tax without having a vote on it, and spend the $20 billion they effectively gained on other political priorities.

On top of that, Armour suspects that Newsom expected President Biden to forgive the debt. That may have happened if California, a state that boasted a $100 billion surplus in 2022, had not held the lion’s share of the balance owed by all states in the Union. Writing California such a massive check in the middle of a national crisis would have looked like a politically motivated bailout of the Democrats’ most supportive state. The optics made it impossible.

However, the federal government did manage to let California off the hook for the estimated $32.6 billion in debt that it owed it due to COVID fraud. The mechanism by which it did so was novel. Julie Su, the California Labor Secretary who oversaw the EDD during COVID, was made Deputy Secretary of Labor and then Acting Secretary of Labor for the United States under the Biden administration. In that capacity, she issued a letter in 2023 forgiving the outstanding debts of states for ‘erroneously paid’ or ‘misapplied’ federal COVID-relief funds, which California took to include the money it paid to fraudsters.

Almost two-thirds of the total UI debt still owed to the federal government by all states combined was California’s, which under Su’s watch had lost by far the most COVID-relief money to fraud of any state in the country. In effect, Acting US Labor Secretary Julie Su forgave the colossal debt incurred through the remarkably scammer-friendly policies of California Labor Secretary Julie Su, passing the burden for the state’s fiscally irresponsible behavior on to the rest of the country’s taxpayers.

In 2023, the state borrowed from its disability insurance trust fund, which is funded out of workers’ paychecks, to cover interest payments to the federal government on its UI debt. Then, the EDD increased the percentage it deducts from workers’ wages for state disability from 0.9% to 1.1% to bolster its depleted reserves. So not only employers and customers but workers, too, are now paying for the debacle.

The problem will only get worse for employers. Every year, the surcharge increases by 0.3%, up to a maximum of 5.4%. Small retail businesses in California are already under strain from the state’s soaring crime rates and the fires in Los Angeles. California’s politicians are now knowingly and deliberately making their situation even worse.

‘In California we’ve become almost immune to these increases left and right,’ said Chef Gruel. ‘There’s no recourse. There’s no juice in the squeeze. What are you going to do? They’ll take the money and then they’ll write the law retroactively.’ He fully expects the cycle to repeat itself. ‘They’re going to default again,’ he said.

(County Highway)

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KIRN & TAIBBI ON NPR

Walter Kirn: … And now we have NPR, National Public Radio supported by all these foundations with this sort of do-gooding uplift mandate, I guess. I don’t really know what their mandate is. I’d like to see their one-page mission statement that they had to file back when. But you can’t win with these people. And the fact that they are all ideologically and I would say culturally monotonous, monolithic, it’s no surprise to anyone. And if there is any American cultural institution waiting to be tipped over the cliff it’s got to be this one.

I guess some conservatives or non-NPR types would like to maybe infiltrate it. And instead of Car Talk have Gun Talk and just switch it out. I am not sure that that’s the way either. But why would Jim Jordan feel that the United States taxpayers should be supporting what is essentially a partisan and now absolutely condescending semi-state news and culture network?

Matt Taibbi: So it’s a cultural scold and it’s front page. If we can just click on the NPR front page right now, it’s always basically indistinguishable from Democrats.org. And whatever. Which is similar to the commercial formula of stations like MSNBC or whatever it is.

Now, you mentioned the Pew Trust before. Pew does an annual survey of who follows what station by party identification. And this is something that Glenn has talked about, Greenwald has talked about a lot as well. The American media landscape has essentially become bifurcated, imperfect halves. And you see there that most, 93% of the people who watch Fox they lean Republican. And 95% of the people who watch MSNBC lean Democratic. It’s 91% for the New York Times and 87% for NPR. And I think the only reason that number isn’t higher is because NPR, like ABC, CBS and NBC, which are in the middle, is broadly broadcast.

Walter Kirn: And in places like Montana it’s the strongest signal…

Matt Taibbi: It’s the strongest signal.

Walter Kirn: … on the FM dial. And through the years, I’ve been grateful to them. Many times they have done me the favor of interviewing me over a book that no one on network TV would want to talk about or discussing an issue, a cultural issue that no one in network TV would be interested in. I don’t deny the usefulness of a high culture radio network that does things like play classical music, or play Appalachian music-

Matt Taibbi: Or jazz, or-

Walter Kirn: Or Jazz, Austin City Limits, or whatever it might be. But let’s have a history lesson here. American cultural governmental coordination began in the Depression when Franklin Roosevelt saw that there were artists and writers, painters, musicians all over the country who were broke and all these federal programs were developed. They wrote anthologies where writers from each of the 50 states summed up their state. They painted murals in post offices. Many of those murals had a social realist, almost Soviet feel to them, but they were Americanized. And they showed farmers and truck drivers and those muralists’ style of capturing everyday life.

But that seems to have just grown out of control. And it got to the point where I think it can be legitimately said that it is an ideological operation allied to the state, allied to a kind of permanent element within the state. And it can’t take for granted its status as the voice of the country in any meaningful way. As he said, I think Jim Jordan would have been satisfied if that 87, 0 number were 65, 22.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Right.

Walter Kirn: But it’s not.

Matt Taibbi: No. And it’s interesting that she said this really interesting thing. If we could look at the beginning of her statement? At the very beginning of her statement?

“Katherine Marr: Chairwoman Greene, Ranking Member Lynch and distinguished members of the subcommittee. My name is Katherine Maher and I’m the president and CEO of National Public Radio, and I welcome the opportunity to discuss the essential role of public media in delivering unbiased, nonpartisan, fact-based reporting to Americans. Americans listen to public radio as they commute, as they work and in the kitchen as they cook with family. Nearly 100% of Americans live within range of a public radio station. We cover what matters to local communities, crop prices, cook offs, and local sports teams, alongside news of the nation and the world, from the halls of Congress to coverage of our troops overseas. Today, Americans have more media choices than ever. The rise of podcasting has established a competitive free market for audio news and information, and every day I am honored to know that we have 43 million listeners from every state in the nation.”

Matt Taibbi: Okay, okay.

Walter Kirn: So let me run it.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, exactly. But it’s interesting that she’s talking about being in a competitive free market, which is something that public radio is not technically supposed to be part of, but they are… it’s interesting that she’s recognizing that they are competing for listeners. But they’re not competing in an interesting way. They’re doing it the way everybody else does it in media, and that’s why that Pew Center chat…

Walter Kirn: They’re competing for attention but they’re not competing for money, because all those other places, most of those other places have to fund themselves in the free market. You, however, get your money from the taxpayer and from these weird fund drives in which you rip us off for crappy tote bags in order to guilt us into listening, because every one of those fundraisers says, “You get this for free. You sit there on your butts and take, take, take from NPR. Why aren’t you going to give back? We’re not going to get back on the air until we’ve hit this goal.” But wait a second. Everybody already gave to NPR when they went to work at Jiffy Lube. But let’s talk about her comportment for a second here. I think it’s really important. She doesn’t dispute any of this. She just uses the language of competition. She’s a state-supported media exec. She doesn’t distinguish between herself and all the places that work in the open market, the free market. Number two, she came from Wikipedia. And what else was she once the board chairman of, strangely? Signal. The Signal Corporation.

Matt Taibbi: I was holding that to be a segue to the next thing, but yeah.

Walter Kirn: She is some sort of… I don’t know.

Matt Taibbi: She’s on the board.

Walter Kirn: She’s some sort of professional board member who shows up in all the info spaces and now has shown up in this one to profess ignorance of the way that her own company operates and of the way it’s perceived and of the way it’s staffed is sheer persiflage deception. And she does it really well. She’s very polished at it. She has almost an NPR-like way of just gliding over points without addressing them at all. And I would, if I were in control of her job, fire her?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I would And this is where I am, too. What she’s saying is, “We’re competing.” And the reason I showed that Pew Center chart is because, how do people compete in the media space now? They do the Audience Optimization Model, which is we throw what we know one demographic will like. We throw content at them. And NPR’s model is to completely court one demographic, one political demographic and not the other, and-

Walter Kirn: And to claim a halo around itself by virtue of being nonprofit, when in fact the biggest, baddest fortunes in American history are turned into, foundations are your benefactors. And when I saw you before, there’s Microsoft on your homepage, all over your homepage. Boy, talk about having your cake and eating it, too. If you want to be some kind of angelic, detached, out of the fray voice of non-profit reason, no Microsoft. Okay?

Matt Taibbi: Right, right. Yeah. No, it’s absurd. And let’s not—

Walter Kirn: And your product sucks now. As a listener I can tell you your product sucks. Because after that little clip we just aired about Meghan Markle, victim of racism, classism and racism, I assure you there was another segment that said the exact same thing about some other phenomena.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. Everything comes back to that. So why does the taxpayer… Even if I were a Democrat still, I think the logic of not having the taxpayer pay for that is pretty crystal clear at this point. In the same way we wouldn’t want to have a taxpayer-funded Fox News, and I would be very much against that.

Walter Kirn: Wouldn’t that be weird?

Matt Taibbi: And look, that could happen. I’m not saying that that… What’s going to happen to the Broadcasting Board of Governors? And there’s a serious issue here because all of those entities became heavily politicized and, especially in the last 15 years, almost identically aligned with American foreign policy. Even the fact checking sites and all that stuff. So yeah, it’s disturbing. And there’s one other detail that, we did a story on this in Racket a little while ago that’s worth pointing out. If we could show who was named the COO of NPR, Ryan Merkley. And that was just before the new year or just after the new year. And this was the guy who was the head of the Aspen Institute’s Committee on Information Disorder, which you and I talked about quite a lot.

Walter Kirn: Which also ran up against, probably, the misinformation portfolio of Prince Harry at the Aspen Institute. Remember?

Matt Taibbi: That was the one that he was the titular head of.

Walter Kirn: Oh, so now we see the exact revolving door that causes them to come to the defense of poor little Miss Princess. This dude was in the same NGO, on the same beat as Prince Harry, Meghan Markle’s husband.

Matt Taibbi: So if you open up the Committee on Information Disorder report and you scroll all the way down you will find Prince Harry’s picture, Katie Couric’s picture. And this guy, Ryan Merkley, was the head of that commission that was convened basically to investigate ways to better do censorship, content control, all that stuff. Remember, that was the one that Gary Kasparov resigned from because it reminded him too much of the Soviet Union. So that’s who is in charge of NPR. And yeah, do we want to pay for that? I don’t think the American taxpayer does. And I think it’s going to be a hard road for them….

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Walter Kirn: Okay, NPR in general. I come from the native home of NPR, which is the Minneapolis, St. Paul area of Minnesota where Minnesota Public Radio produces a lot of the greatest content and most notably, Prairie Home Companion from the past.

Matt Taibbi: Prairie Home Companion, yep.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I knew Garrison Keillor, was the first writer I ever met. He was sitting under a tree at a neighbor’s 4th of July celebration in my little town. I asked him, because I knew he was a writer, what it was like to be one and he tipped his hat down and wouldn’t talk to me. That was the early ‘70s before he became the big star. I can only imagine how insufferable he was then. And the rumors around Minnesota was that he was insufferable indeed.

Another show, From the Top, which is a kid’s music show, is produced by my mom’s next door neighbor. As was a cooking show that is syndicated. I’ve been around NPR really my whole life. And I always perceived it as a culturally open, fun, left in the sense that it was more likely to bring people from the slight counter culture and adapt them to greater acceptance by the mainstream. Garrison was also a writer for Time Magazine and so on. He had very liberal opinions but the show was a little different.

Anyway, when I lived on a farm then in Montana back in the ‘90s, listening to NPR, which was the only really audible station out where I was, was absolutely a daily ritual. And I got my news there and I got my entertainment shows like Car Talk, et cetera. Then somewhere-

Matt Taibbi: By the way, that’s where I come from, which is the other big hub of NPR is GDH in Boston.

Walter Kirn: Is Boston.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And so that’s how I saw NPR, as this mixture of slightly goofy but higher toned entertainment. And this very sober news that was done in a voice that was very distinctive. I don’t know if it was the sound of sophistication or the sound of ease, but it had a tone that nothing else did. It wasn’t quite as severe as the regular network broadcasts,

Matt Taibbi: So I always thought it had Polish without being tacky. It was an interesting sort of stylistic approach even for commercial media, which it isn’t, and which she kind of … Well, actually she said the opposite in her testimony. But I always thought that NPR from a style point of view did a lot of interesting things for public radio back in the day. But …

Walter Kirn: Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! It had a game show from a pier or something in Chicago. All of these other entertainment products that actually probably did pretty well commercially in some sense within the nonprofit world.

One thing that always caused me alert when I listened to NPR was the names of the sponsors. They were what we now call NGOs or the Pew Charitable Trust, the Ford Foundation. Now, we’ve come to see that those places were not the objective and politically neutral institutions that we may have thought at the time. They line up pretty squarely with what’s called now the establishment or the liberal establishment, or something maybe even to the left of that but never bothered me.

Then through some life change I didn’t listen to NPR for a few years. And then a few years ago, maybe in the mid-teens I turned it back on and it was unlistenable. Every single story had been stretched on the Procrustean rack to yield a point about American racism, jingoism, stupidity, or just general inferiority to what we might be or should have been. It was a guilt trip par excellence. And it was—

Matt Taibbi: Endless.

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BALANCING THE BOOKS ON OUR BACKS

“The wealthy have a million ways to wriggle out of their debts, and as a result, when government debt is transferred to the private sector, that debt always gets passed down to those least able to pay it: into middle-class mortgages, payday loans, and so on. The people running the government know this but they’ve learned if you just keep repeating, “We’re just trying to behave responsibly! Familes have to balance their books. Well, so do we,” people just assume that the government running a surplus will somehow make it easier for all of us to do so, too. But in fact, the reality is precisely the opposite: if the government manages to balance its books, that often means you can’t balance yours.”

– David Graeber

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LET THE RULING CLASSES TREMBLE at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!

— Karl Marx

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“WHERE MARX WENT WRONG was in assuming that the rich would become richer, and the poor poorer, until the dialectic tension of this 'contradiction' became so strong as to call forth the revolution. This is not at all what did happen. The industrial nations of the world, on the contrary, devised methods of regulation which softened the starkness of the economic struggle, by limiting freedom of action in the economic sphere and introducing social welfare schemes. When the revolution did come, it was not, as Marx had foretold, in the industrialized Western part of Europe, but in agrarian Russia. He did predict, with some accuracy, that a system of free competition would eventually lead to the formation of monopolies. However, this much is discernible from traditional economic theory.”

— Bertrand Russell

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An American sọldier in Vietnam in 1966. And to be clear, he got it for the articles.

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ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

This is what I find so disgusting about this administration. They treat people like they are thieves. What is the point of making life difficult for people on social security? Many with underlying health problems that make it hard to go to a social security office that is so poorly understaffed that they lose information and expect people to wait up to two hours to get help. Trump won on false promises and lies, and now he has a dufus ketamine addict ruining a system that's supposed to help our elderly and make their lives easier. Trump's lack of respect for humanity is one of the most deplorable traits about him.

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LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

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How Trump Weighed Waltz’s Fate After Signal Leak

Trump Says He Won’t Fire Officials Involved in Leaked Signal Chat

On Minnesota’s Iron Range, President Trump’s Tariffs Could Be Boom or Bust

Specter of Auto Tariffs Spurs Some Car Buyers to Rush Purchases

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BERNIE SANDERS TO FORCE VOTE ON BLOCKING BOMBS FOR ISRAEL’S DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

Grieving Palestinian Americans are demanding an arms embargo from their lawmakers as Israel escalates its genocide.

By Mike Ludwig

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced on Thursday that he would soon force a vote in the Senate on two joint resolutions to block the Trump administration from selling an additional $8.8 billion in certain bombs and weapons to Israel in the next week.

While the joint resolutions opposing the weapons transfer have little chance of passing the GOP-controlled Congress, a vote would force lawmakers to make their position public during yet another critical juncture in Israel’s genocide on the besieged Strip.

The announcement came the same day as Palestinian Americans who have lost family members in Gaza held a press conference to demand their congressional representatives support an arms embargo.

“I am here because Israel bombed a six-story building with three generations of my family,” said Rajaa Alrayyes, a Palestinian wife and mother living in Chicago, in a press conference on Thursday. “Some of my family members are still buried under the rubble and Israel won’t let us give them a decent burial.”

Sanders, who is Jewish, called the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “extremist.” Sanders also said that “Netanyahu has clearly violated U.S. and international law” over the course of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Israel has not allowed food, drinking water or medicine into Gaza for three and a half weeks, Sanders said, and the blocking of humanitarian aid is a “morally abhorrent and a clear violation of both the Geneva Convention and the Foreign Assistance Act.” He further noted that Israel has dropped U.S.-provided 2,000-pound bombs into crowded neighborhoods; the Trump administration has made more of those bombs available to Israel.

Hundreds of people have been killed since Israel broke a fragile ceasefirewith Hamas in Gaza last week as Netanyahu sought to appease far right politicians who support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to make way for Israeli settlers. Recent Israeli attacks forcibly displaced more than 142,000 Palestinians in Gaza who have already been uprooted multiple times, as Israel reignited its war on Gaza that has killed more than 61,000 people since October 2023.

“To survive Israel’s bombs, snipers and drones, my family has tried to split up, going to different shelters, hospitals and tents,” said William Asfour, a 28-year-old Palestinian American living in the Chicago area, during the press conference on Thursday. “If one group is bombed, the other might have a chance to survive.”

Asfour said he has lost dozens of family members in Gaza, including seven of his young cousins and their two parents who were killed during Israeli assaults over the past 10 days. He read their names aloud and held up a picture of the youngest victim, a 9-year-old girl. The girl’s father is a doctor and nutritionist at Nasser Hospital. Asfour said Israel destroyed his home, killing everyone inside.

“This is what is left of his wife, his mother and his children,” Asfour said, holding up photos of destruction. “By the way, they targeted his family again six hours ago.”

Earlier this week the Israeli military bombed Nasser Hospital, one of Gaza’s largest medical centers. The attack killed a Hamas official who was reportedly receiving medical care, the Israeli military said and Hamas confirmed. Feroze Sidhwa, a volunteer doctor at Nasser Hospital and a U.S. citizen, said a teenage boy who had been his patient was also killed in the strike.

“He would have gone home tomorrow,” Sidhwa said on social media this week. “If I had been changing his dressings, as I planned to this evening, I probably would have been killed too. Attacking hospitals is a war crime, and it needs to stop.”

Sidhwa is one of several U.S.-based doctors risking their lives in Gaza. In an interview this week with the news outlet Zeteo, Sidhwa said a woman from the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem called him after the bombing of Nasser Hospital to see if he was alive, and he urged diplomats to ask Israel not to bomb the hospital again.

“And I swear to God, she goes, ‘Actually, that’s not our role, sorry,’” Sidhwa said.

Like other international health care workers and human rights groups, Sidhwa said there is no evidence for Israel’s claims that Hamas militants are using medical facilities as cover for militant activity. Israel has consistently claimed its attacks on hospitals are justified, but striking civilian medical infrastructure is a war crime.

“Let us be clear this is not the first attack on hospitals in the Gaza Strip,” said Gulrana Syed, a Chicago-based emergency physician with Health Care Workers for Palestine, at the press conference, pointing out that this particular strike happened to put the lives of U.S. medical workers at risk. Syed said her friend and colleague, Tammy Abughnaim, is still treating patients at Nasser Hospital despite the deadly Israeli strike.

“We know the endangerment of American health care lives in Nasser Hospital is the direct consequence of U.S. lawmakers failing to sufficiently pressure Israel to cease attacks on life-sustaining institutions in Gaza, including hospital, water sanitation facilities and UN agencies,” Syed said.

Syed and other advocates are urging voters to demand their members of Congress to call for an immediate ceasefire and embargo on further U.S. arms transfers to Israel. Asfour said he has been trying to contact his representative in the House, Rep. Sean Casten, but has not heard back.

“Why haven’t you decided to meet with me?” Asfour said. “Why haven’t you asked me how my family is doing? I am your constituent.”

A spokesperson for Casten did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Advocates with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, also called Rep. Bill Foster, a Democrat from Central Illinois, to condemn attacks on civilians and call for a ceasefire. Foster did not respond to requests for comment though he has criticized Netanyahu’s handling of the war in the past.

Sanders’s push to force a vote in the Senate on joint resolutions disapproving of the Trump administration’s latest transfer of bombs to Israel is designed to force debate in Congress, which has largely abdicated its duties for managing overseas military interventions to the executive in recent decades.

In November, Sanders coordinated a similar vote to block the Biden administration from sending $1 billion in tank rounds, mortar rounds and joint direct attack munitions to Israel. The vote overwhelmingly failed, but was still momentous for being the first-ever congressional vote to block weapons to Israel.

Sanders said the U.S. must not continue to supply weapons to the Netanyahu government, which is facing sustained protests by Israelis who say the prime minister is dragging out the genocide on Gaza for personal political reasons instead of securing a deal for a ceasefire and hostage swap with Hamas.

“It is particularly unconscionable while President Trump and Israeli officials openly talk of forcibly displacing millions of people from Gaza to make way for what Trump calls a ‘Riviera,’” Sanders said. “There is a name for such a policy — ethnic cleansing — and it’s a war crime.”

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NOTES FROM THE EDGE OF THE NARRATIVE MATRIX

by Caitlin Johnstone

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The word “terrorist” is a meaningless tool of imperial narrative control.

Want to bomb some people? Designate them as terrorists.

Want to silence protesters and dissidents? Say they’re supporting terrorists.

Want sweeping surveillance powers? Say you need them to fight terrorism.

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The Democrats committed genocide. Now the Republicans are committing genocide. There you have it. Neither party is acceptable. Case closed. End of debate.

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The crimes of the Republican and Democratic parties are inseparably intertwined with each other. It’s not that they’re the same — there are some differences — it’s that they work in conjunction to advance the same evil agendas. Saying the Democrats are better than Republicans or vice versa is like saying the top teeth of the shark are nicer than the bottom teeth; they might look and function a bit differently, but they’re used toward the same deadly end.

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Trump supporters get so mad at me for listing facts about what a warmongering Israel cuck their president is. That big uncomfortable feeling you’re experiencing is called cognitive dissonance, fellas. It’s what being wrong feels like.

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Democrats pretended to support justice and oppose racism, then Biden exposed them all as frauds in Gaza. Republicans pretended to support free speech and oppose war, then Trump exposed them as frauds with his Israel policy. US politics is just empty noise draped over an empire.

That’s all it is. The pundits and politicians could all be speaking in baby talk gibberish and it wouldn’t matter. Presidential candidates could have their debates speaking Esperanto and it wouldn’t change anything. The only reason they bother using coherent English words at all is so people don’t get suspicious and start noticing that the politics of the United States are just empty noises fed to the public to let them feel like they’ve got some control while the tank treads of the empire roll onward.

It’s like this in all western “democracies”. The public is split into two equal factions who are then pitted against each other on issues that are guaranteed not to inconvenience the powerful in any way, and then the state just does what’s in the interests of the empire without regard for any of the noises being made in the political sphere. And the brainwashed masses just keep babbling on about their politics, completely unaffected by the fact that the things their government is doing run squarely counter to the values they purport to hold. There’s no real connection between the two.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

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WHAT WOULD ORWELL THINK?

Orwell died in 1950 at age 46, three weeks before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech declaring that he had a list of Communist sympathizers in the State Department, setting off the witch hunts of the 1950s.

Rodden points out that it was the first of many tumultuous events that scrambled political alliances and set off debates about who could claim Orwell’s moral authority. He was anti-Communist, but would he have actually condoned McCarthy?

Not being around to declare himself on the Cold War, Richard Nixon, the invasion of Iraq, the internet or the Trump years, Orwell was never pigeonholed in the modern era and instead morphed into his very own, very handy adjective. Really, what can’t be deemed Orwellian?

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DEATH WAITS FOR ME, I know it, around
    one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

— Mary Oliver