Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 5/13/2025

DRYING AND WARMING trend today through the remainder of the week. Breezy northwest winds is anticipated each afternoon. A slight chance of precipitation returns on Saturday, but mostly dry weather conditions most likely persist over the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A partly cloudy 47F this Tuesday morning on the coast. It sort of tried to rain yesterday yielding a meager .06" of grass growing fuel. I thought (hoped) I was was done mowing this spring. A mix of clouds, fog & sun is our forecast this week then a sunny weekend, we'll see?

MENDOCINO WATER LEADERS CLASH OVER FUTURE OF SCOTT DAM

by Monica Huettl

Water politics took center stage at the Ukiah Valley Water Authority’s May 1 meeting, as tensions surfaced over conflicting strategies for the future of the Potter Valley Project. Committee members grappled with competing priorities among local agencies, raising questions about alignment, accountability, and the direction of long-term regional water planning.…

https://mendofever.com/2025/05/13/mendocino-water-leaders-clash-over-future-of-scott-dam/

LANDLINE SERVICE UNDER THREAT (AGAIN)

The California Public Utilities Commission is reviewing longstanding rules that require certain telephone companies to serve all customers in their designated areas, a move that has sparked concern among rural residents who say landlines remain their only reliable link to the outside world.

The process, known as Rulemaking 24-06-012, was launched in June 2024 following the CPUC’s unanimous decision to reject AT&T’s request to withdraw from its obligations as a “Carrier of Last Resort” (COLR). These rules, in place since 1996, ensure that at least one company must offer basic phone service in every part of the state—even in remote and unprofitable areas.

The Carrier of Last Resort must provide basic service, but according to the CPUC, basic service doesn’t have to be provided via a traditional copper landline, it can use any type of technology.

While California, New York, and Illinois maintain strict COLR rules, twenty states have dropped landline service.

Michael Matthay, a Mendocino County resident who lives on the edge of the Jackson State Demonstration Forest on the Mendocino Coast, said he received a CPUC notice about the rule-making in March that appeared benign. But he immediately suspected what was at stake.

“AT&T is trying to drop the landlines, and that’s the only communication I have with the outside world—period,” said Matthey, who is in his 80s and shares his property with a legally blind tenant. “He’s been here 15 years, and it’s his only way too.”

In many parts of Mendocino cell service is non-existent. “There’s a whole dead zone between Caspar and Mendocino—there’s just no cell service, period,” Matthay said, citing one example. “So the landlines are really important for emergency vehicles and stuff—if I want to call 911.”

Landlines are also essential for everyday communication with friends and family.

The CPUC’s review aims to modernize the COLR framework, possibly redefining what qualifies as “basic service” and whether alternatives such as mobile phones or VoIP should qualify. The Commission has held across the state to gather public input, with the last hearing scheduled for May 13, 2025 at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. This hearing will be virtual.

Matthay is worried that not enough rural residents will make their voices heard. “People need to write letters to the CPUC or submit a comment online and explain how important it is to preserve access to landlines,” he urged.

Letters may be mailed to the CPUC Public Advisor at 505 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102, or submitted online via the CPUC website.

(Elise Cox/KZYX)

TED STEPHENS (Yorkville): Brown Act Done MCERA Board Style…

Mark Scaramella’s “Does Anyone Read the Board Agenda” made me reflect back to my time on our county retirement board and what I would call “Brown Act Done Mendocino County Employee Retirement Association (MCERA) Board Style.” We took a vote in closed session, on if an embarrassing and costly mistake should be reported out of the session or just swept under the rug. If not reported, the cost, although very material, would just be lost in the next year’s actuarial report Mumbo-Jumbo that nobody can ever understand and all mistakes always inure to the taxpayers to pick-up. These mistakes are amortized over several decades, with an artificially high return rate making the cost today very small, and are lost in the amount of extra contribution the County has to pay on their side of the pension contribution; the employees absorb none of the cost (it is why we, our county, have a quarter of Billion dollars, and growing, in unfunded pension debt as of June 2024). Of course the rest of the board voted to not disclose or report out any vote. (Heck, it was embarrassing!) It was in total violation of the Brown Act on several fronts, but what can one do against a super majority board of foxes (by charter), elected by fellow foxes, counting taxpayer guaranteed chickens. You could go full lawsuit on them, but other than that they can just shrug their shoulders knowing, by design, no one can really do anything about it or understand it anyway. I imagine when it looks like the chickens can’t really be guaranteed there will be a mad rush to rearrange the chairs on the Titanic and many more will be paying attention. The county will find that quarter Billion extra in the budget won’t they? If they can’t, the state will pick it up, won’t they? If the state can’t find the scratch, I am sure the feds will pay for these pensions, they can just borrow another quarter Billion from our friends in China…

A Boonville Cactus blooms for one day in May.

ED NOTES

LOOKING BACK: Some bright fellow was stealing copper from the old Point Arena radar station. He cut into a live high voltage wire and was found dead with his bolt cutters in hand. He`d been there over a week before he was found and I was told he was so full of maggots that they were making a sound that was audible. The stench was indescribable, I was told.

SIDE-BY-SIDE movie announcements in a recent Chron announce these two epics: ‘Manson Family’ and ‘Spring Breakers.’ Given that choice the ‘Manson Family’ doesn’t look bad. The media are full of spring break stories accompanied of course by the point of these stories — barely clad young flesh. The local hook: Many people are aware that the Manson Family briefly made its rural headquarters in the Anderson Valley in a then-ramshackle house on Gschwend Road near Navarro. That would have been about 1967 or ‘68 before Chuck led his gang into random murders in the LA area. The man himself was arrested near Ukiah in ‘68 and held briefly on suspicion of being a hippie and as possibly responsible for the seemingly senseless bludgeon murders of two women across the highway from today’s Remco between Ukiah and Hopland. Those murders, which occurred in 1968, were almost certainly the work of a CHP officer named Dulaney who, represented by Timothy O’Brien, later a Mendo judge of the superior court, was never arrested or charged. Dulaney was in debt to the old lady who ran an antique shop at the site and he was unhappily married to her granddaughter.

DOWNSTREAM DRAWS on the finite waters of the overdrawn Russian River are becoming ever more obvious in their finite-ness, and the need to meter those draws from Potter Valley to Healdsburg should become ever more urgent, not that they are. Yes, Cloverdale also taps its water table, but most of that growing burg’s water comes from the Russian River, and the Russian is dependent on the South Fork of the Eel, which is diverted through an essentially 19th century redwood-timbered tunnel at Potter Valley, and from there into Lake Mendocino just north of Ukiah. The water thus diverted and stored at Lake Mendocino is mostly owned by Sonoma County which, although Sonoma County is also pretty much tapped out because it hasn’t dipped into the plentiful waters of Lake Sonoma, sells a lot of diverted Eel River water to Marin County at premium prices. The entire water supply for several million people from Potter Valley to Sausalito is precarious in the extreme. The next big earthquake will probably turn everyone’s taps off for some time, especially those taps fed by an ancient tunnel in the hills of Mendocino County.

FOR ALL THE CELEBRATING of free enterprise we hear in this country and in this County from Chamber of Commerce groups and other soldiers of free enterprise, commercial rents in Mendocino County make it almost impossible for mom and pops to make a go of asmall business. There are Ukiah landlords, for instance, who can afford to sit on vacant storefronts for months, even years in one School Street case, thus assuring the deaths of downtowns in struggling communities like Ukiah, and everywhere else in the state. San Francisco rents are even more egregiously exploitive, which comes as no surprise, but even I was startled to learn that one of my favorite bookstores, Adobe Books in the Mission, now gone, paid an extortionate $4,500 a month. You’ve got to sell a lot of books to make that nut, and book buyers are a dying breed. But it’s businesses like Adobe that give the town the charm it markets to tourists. The City’s “progressive” board of supervisors is unlikely to enact or even discuss commercial rent control at a time when landlords are demanding a rollback of the dwindling number of rent-controlled apartments because, well, because the owning classes have always called the tune in SF, and they’ve never called it as loudly as they do these days. Ditto for Mendocino County.

APPLE DRYER AT DAY RANCH, with notes from the AV Historical Society. (Vern Peterman)

FULL MOON TEACHER HOWL & BOOGIE

Full Moon Breath work & Sound Bath at The Shala

Everyone is invited to a special Full Moon and Guru Purnima (Full Moon of the Teachers) Circle happening.

Monday May 13 at 5:30 PM at The Shala Mendocino.

This sacred gathering will include: Sound Bath to soothe your soul. Breathwork to energize and align. Gentle Yoga to ground and center.

As we honor the Full Moon and Guru Purnima, this is a beautiful opportunity to connect with yourself, the community, and the divine energy of this auspicious time.

Please note: The Shala website is temporarily down, so kindly use the registration link above to secure your place.

Spaces are limited, so I encourage you to book soon. I can’t wait to share this transformative evening with you.

Warm regards, Dr. Justine Lemos, The Shala Mendocino

Contact Email: [email protected]

FIRE SAFETY TOWN HALL, UKIAH, MAY 19

Dear Editor,

As fire season approaches, our community must be prepared and informed. I invite residents of Mendocino County to attend our upcoming Fire Safety Town Hall, hosted at Mendocino College’s Little Theater on May 19, 2025 at 6pm.

This free public event will feature science-based strategies on home protection, updates on insurance regulations, and local insights from leading fire experts. Speakers include Yana Valachovic and Mike Jones from the UC Cooperative Extension, CAL FIRE Unit Chief Brandon Gunn, and Scott Cratty from the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council.

Our goal is to equip you with the tools to safeguard your home, support your neighborhoods, and foster a resilient, fire-ready community. I encourage folks interested to register and attend this critical conversation about our shared safety.

Sincerely,

Madeline Cline

1st District Supervisor, Mendocino County

FIRE SAFETY TOWN HALL COMING UP

An upcoming Fire Safety Town Hall will cover a range of relevant topics for Mendocino County residents, from the science of home-hardening and prescribed burns to regulatory changes. “This Town Hall is based on the most up-to-date information, post-LA fires,” according to First District Supervisor Madeline Cline, who will kick off the meeting and introduce the speakers. The goal, she says, “is to start on the home end. We’ll be discussing what each of us can do in our homes, and then moving out: what can we do at a neighborhood level, a community level, and then some of the things that are happening region-wide.”

Michael Jones, the UC Cooperative Forest Advisor for Mendocino, Lake and Sonoma counties, will offer a presentation about using prescribed burns as a stewardship tool. In addition to being a founding member of the Mendocino County Prescribed Burn Association, Jones has been conducting experiments with prescribed burns in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest, which is mostly a redwood landscape. Fire, he contends, is a vital part of California’s ecosystem, and it is well past time to reintroduce it as a management strategy.

Prescribed burn in Anderson Valley (courtesy AVFD)

Brandon Gunn, CAL FIRE’s Mendocino Unit Chief, will update attendees on his work in the county and unit plans as summer approaches. Scott Cratty, the Executive Director of the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, will share information about how neighborhoods can work together to promote fire resistance.

Another speaker will be Yana Valachovic, the forest advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties. She is also the administrator for the UC Cooperative Extension programs in both counties, where she works with the UC Fire Network on how to make people’s homes less flammable. She recently visited Los Angeles, where she was reminded that fire will burn in any type of vegetation, including carefully curated landscapes in urban areas. “So much of our orientation is around fire in forests, and that it’s forest fire that’s going to impact our communities,” she reflected. “The challenge is, how do we keep it out of our communities?”

Much of the answer is reducing opportunities for wind-driven embers to do damage. These embers, she says, “are a force to be reckoned with. They can find all the little weaknesses in our buildings. They come in through the cat and dog doors. They come in by the open skylight, the garage door that doesn’t seal very well. They penetrate our vents. They land in the debris that collects at the bases of our walls, and the woody vegetation and the wood mulch that we have within the first five feet of our houses.

Once you get ignition adjacent to your building, then you have direct flame contact. Then fire finds a way into that building, which is so perfectly cured and ready to burn,” giving off radiant heat. The radiant heat can then find its way into the neighbor’s houses or outbuildings. More embers are created by the burning buildings, which creates what Valachovic calls “a contagion effect.”

A wooden fence, too, can act as a fuse, leading directly to a structure. A metal gate or panel between the building and the fence can disconnect the flame’s pathway. Another major fire-resistant component of any home is a good roof, which is a high-dollar improvement. But ember-resistant vents, with eighth-inch or smaller mesh, can be a DIY project for any enterprising homeowner with a pair of good shears and a roll of mesh from the hardware store. “While the (standard) quarter-inch screen keeps out rodents and other critters,” Valachovic says, it leaves plenty of space for an ember to slip into a home and become a fire. “A pair of metal shears and a staple gun can do a tremendous amount of good,” she advises.

She’s not merciful about beloved flowering plants nestled up against the house. “We’ve experienced unprecedented fire exposure,” she points out. “Responding to this moment, in my mind, means you can’t do business as usual anymore. What we’ve been doing isn’t necessarily producing a different outcome…Fire adaptation takes adaptation,” which means getting serious about home-hardening and defensible space.

Even if a homeowner is fortunate enough to have fire insurance, the recovery from losing a home takes years. Many rural landowners in Mendocino County have lost insurance. Some have had their rates double or triple. In an initiative called Safer From Wildfires, California’s Department of Insurance has agreed to allow insurance companies to use catastrophic models to inform their evaluation of fire risk, rather than relying on historical conditions. This means that the companies can use the risk of climate change and its accompanying disasters to determine their rates.

In return, insurance companies must take property owners’ efforts towards improving fire resilience into account. Insurers are also being required to make their decisions more transparent. Valachovic is part of a group that is working to develop a public wildfire catastrophe model at Cal Poly Humboldt, and plans to speak about Safer from Wildfires at the Town Hall. At the moment, her advice to homeowners includes raising their deductibles and carefully documenting the efforts they have made towards improving fire resistance. As of 2019, AB 38, sponsored by former Assemblyman Jim Wood, requires that residential property sales in high or very high fire-hazard severity areas include disclosures about compliance with defensible space regulations.

“We’re in an awkward time,” she acknowledges. “But I think there’s a lot of reason for hope in this space,” as fire becomes more understandable and communities learn how to adapt.  The Fire Safety Town Hall will be from 6:00-8:00 pm on Monday, May 19 at the Little Theater in building 700, the Lowery Building, on the Ukiah campus of Mendocino College. It is sponsored by the UC Cooperative Extension, the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, and CAL FIRE. The event is free, but registration is requested. The link is available on the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council and the Hopland Municipal Advisory Council’s Facebook pages.

MENDOCINO COUNTY HISTORY (Chuck Ross): Downtown Ukiah, December 1965. I was home on leave from the Army and riding with a friend in his Hughes 269A helicopter. What landmarks can you pick out? I’ll start with Masonite, upper left.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, May 12, 2025

BENNY FRENCH, 47, Oroville/Ukiah. Suspended license for DUI, failure to appear.

OCTAVIO GASPAR-LOPEZ, 22, Ukiah. False ID, probation violation.

CHRISTOPHER KEYES, 41, Ukiah. Trespassing, resisting.

JOSE LEYVA-ZAZUETA, 20, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

DAVID RUSSELL JR., 34, Ukiah. Narcotics for sale, probation revocation.

JORDAN SKELLET, 22, Ukiah. Burglary, vandalism.

DON’T FORGET GAZA

Editor:

Many of us are focused, rightly, on the destruction that Donald Trump is wreaking on American institutions, laws and values. But I fervently ask you not to turn away from what continues to happen in Israel and Gaza.

In Gaza, airstrikes, drones and ground operations continue daily. No food, water or medicine has entered Gaza for two months. Already one of the most densely populated areas in the world, Gazans have now been herded into just 30% of Gaza’s land.

In the West Bank, air strikes and bulldozers have demolished infrastructure and housing for 20,000 residents in the major cities of Jenin and Nablus. Over 900 people have been killed since Oct 7. Settlers protected or aided by the Israeli army or police have ravaged small Palestinian villages.

B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, reports that beatings, torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners are occurring in Israeli prisons in amounts far greater than ever before.

But dare you in this country voice any objection or peacefully demonstrate on campus against this injustice. You can lose your student visa or be doxxed by organizations alerting potential employers to your “antisemitism.” Interesting and paradoxically, many of the protesters are Jewish faculty and students standing up for the basic Jewish value of justice.

Joan Meisel

Cloverdale

GODDAM RIGHT YOU OWE ME!

Warmest spiritual greetings,

Sitting here on a public computer at the MLK Public Library in Washington, D.C. reading the Mendocino County news on the Boontling Greeley Sheet. Straight up, why is there consideration of a new Ukiah public park, when the Alex R. Thomas Plaza is presently serving the community in a perfect location on State Street, right in the middle of the city? Second, why is there all of the hullabaloo about the ascetic features of a new courthouse? Who the hell cares about the architectural plan for a courthouse anyway? Nobody in any city in the world could care less what the courthouse looks like! Third, there is no solution to “homelessness”. If you wish to help somebody else, please go ahead.

Fourth, where is my Social Security SSI money which needs to go into my Chase checking account this month, and where is my senior subsidized housing? I’ll take a flight back to Mendo and temporary housing for starters. As a 75 year young productive patriotic American citizen, goddam right you owe me, and the government is here to serve me. What else??? Thanks for being sane.

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Trump hasn’t done a damn thing about drug prices, nor does he have any power to do so. If he had, things like Ozempic and Paxlovid wouldn’t be $1500+ a month (or just a box) without insurance. Nor would insulin and other diabetes medicine cost more than a new car for a year’s supply. Drug manufacturers have essentially told him to F- off on the pricing. Also that whole “most favored nations” thing is a throw back to Clinton, when he claimed China as such when it comes to trade.

A BIG LUXURY “GIFT” FROM QATAR! (Coast Chatline)

Jean Arnold : Why shouldn’t the president fly around in a luxury 747 given to him/us(?) by Qatar? I can’t think of any reasons. What a great idea! Saving so many tax dollars.

Marco here.

After Harry Truman’s presidency, he and his wife drove home to Missouri in their own car, on their own dime. Later, when they flew or rode trains or buses they bought their own tickets. California Governor Jerry Brown drove state motor pool Plymouth cars while in office; for private use he owned a VW Rabbit, and after his governorship he and his wife had a Chrysler minivan. When they flew, they used commercial airlines and bought their own tickets.

Harry’s cars: https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/automotive-history-the-cars-of-president-harry-s-truman/

When Jimmy Carter was elected president he sold his family farm to not have a conflict of interest.

Now, speaking of Qatar’s luxury airplane gift, United Arab Emirates just invested two billion dollars in the Trump family’s private cryptocurrency business.

“Donald Trump launched a memecoin called $Trump. The coin’s value surged rapidly, reaching a market valuation of over $5 billion within hours. However, a forensic analysis revealed that 813,294 wallets lost $2 billion by trading the coin, resulting in the president’s company profiting over one hundred million dollars.”

“Trump International Golf Course and Trump Villas, situated within the expansive $5.5 billion Simaisma beachside resort district, is financed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The announcement precedes Donald Trump’s visit to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, to engage in discussions on economic and military cooperation.”

In addition to the Qatar project, the Trump Organization has announced several other developments in the Gulf region: an 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Dubai, a Trump Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a luxury resort in Oman.

Also worth mention, though on a smaller scale, are the fines and fees and hundreds of millions of dollars Trump has been court-ordered to pay back from just one of the many crimes of fraud he’s been convicted of.

He is a 34-times federal felon who, if he were anybody else, would be in prison now, costing taxpayers and the world just $40,000 a year, for prison food and guards and heat and maintenance, and a fair profit for investors in the prison, if it’s a private one. That’s a bargain. Even better if he were given useful work to do there. He could learn a skill. Read Chick tracts. Bulk up in the yard. Even play golf.

Or he could be sorry-not-sorry mistakenly deported to one of the new torture prisons in El Salvador, even cheaper. Tell DOGE. Another advantage of the prison option is, it limits his pleasure travel. Out of prison, every single one of his golf trips costs taxpayers millions of dollars. He was playing golf forty of the first hundred days of his current presidency.

Marco McClean

WARRIORS FLATTENED BY T’WOLVES in second half, on brink of elimination

by Sam Gordon

Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards (5) is double teamed by the Golden State Warriors during the third quarter in Game 4 of the NBA Playoffs Western Conference Semifinals at Chase Center in San Francisco, Monday, May 12, 2025. (Santiago Mejia/S.F. Chronicle)

The Golden State Warriors started Game 4 of the Western Conference semifinals Monday to the tune of ear-splitting “Warriors” chants that rocked Chase Center like it was Oracle Arena.

They finished it inside a half-empty building, one loss away from the end of their season.

As Stephen Curry watched in a red bomber jacket, sidelined again by his strained left hamstring, the Warriors succumbed to their talent gap without him in a 117-110 defeat to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Their third straight loss – for the first time in the playoffs since the 2016 NBA Finals -- positions them at a 3-1 best-of-seven series deficit with Game 5 looming Wednesday at Target Center.

NBA teams with 3-1 leads in best-of-seven series are 275-13.

Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards scored 16 of his 30 points in the third quarter, lost 39-17 by Golden State amid 7-of-19 shooting and six turnovers. Julius Randle had 31 points and five rebounds.

Jonathan Kuminga scored 23 points on 6-of-13 shooting to lead the Warriors, who got 14 points and nine field-goal attempts in 34 minutes from Jimmy Butler.

Curry is due Wednesday for a re-evaluation.

Minnesota center Rudy Gobert, four times the league’s Defensive Player of the Year, helped anchor a defense with Jaden McDaniels that held Golden State to 43.5% shooting. The Warriors shot 8 of 27 from 3-point range, committing 16 giveaways. The Timberwolves shot 49.4% and made 16 of 34 from 3-point range.

“They played a great game and obviously took it to us and we’ve got to bounce back,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said. “We’ve got a flight to Minneapolis tomorrow and a chance to extend the series and that’s the plan.”

So was tying the series Monday, but strained left hamstrings spoil plans and leave the Warriors disadvantaged against defending Western Conference finalists. Throughout the series, Kerr has emphasized their margin for error – or lack thereof – without Curry, around whom their offense has long been constructed.

Along with their organization in general.

Again, Monday night: “The series changed with Steph’s injury. So, everybody’s shots are going to be more difficult. Steph’s a guy who breaks the defense down for us and creates that offensive flow. I think the end result is that shots are more difficult for every single guy. … We did some good things. We just couldn’t sustain it.”

Among those good things: opening their offense by quickening their pace throughout the first half; attacking with Kuminga, who knifed into the lane for six baskets and 11 free throws; hammering the glass for a 25-15 first-half advantage with 10 second-chance points; using their zone defense to slow Minnesota.

Accordingly, they led 60-58 at halftime.

But Edwards beat the halftime buzzer with a step-back triple from 30 feet, foreshadowing the third quarter blowout the Warriors couldn’t overcome. Draymond Green said the 3-pointer “was huge” and that “every time we’re on a run, we’re letting (Edwards) break the run up. And somebody can break a run up, but it can’t be their best player.”

A 17-0 run from Minnesota broke a 68-68 third-quarter tie as Edwards made contested triples like Curry. Golden State committed six third-quarter turnovers, shooting 7 of 19 from the field.

Big man Kevon Looney said the Timberwolves “got their confidence and we were having a tough time scoring.” One of the league’s best all-around defenders, backed by Gobert, McDaniels blanketed Butler. Green said Butler wasn’t feeling well: “Been pretty crappy all day. I know that affects the energy. No excuses made here.”

Kerr said Butler didn’t have the requisite space to operate in lineups devoid of shooting threats. He’ll comb through game video to find them, he said. Golden State was down 21 when Kerr pulled its top group with 4:38 remaining, jumpstarting Game 5 preparation as Minnesota’s starters concluded play. Smatterings of spectators in were treated to a run by Warriors reserves that disguised the beatdown.

“Always important to close games well and I love what those guys did,” Kerr said. “They all played well. That matters to me looking at what’s next for Game 5.”

Underdogs before the series started with Curry, Golden State is undermanned without him – dependent on a defense (the league’s top rated in the regular season after Butler’s team debut) diced again by Edwards and Randle. Its offensive rating so far in the series (103.1 points per 100 possessions) would’ve been the league’s worst in the regular season.

“They’re a great defensive team, especially were in the halfcourt,” Looney said. “They’re long, athletic and they’re putting a lot of ball pressure on us. It makes it tough.”

Predictably without Curry.

Imagine if Edwards was out for Minnesota or if Nikola Jokic was injured for the Denver Nuggets in a best-of-seven Western Conference semifinal series.

The Warriors don’t have to.

“Next game is going to be about do or die, because we need that,” said Kuminga, averaging 23.7 points (59.5% shooting) the last three games. “If we get that one, everything is going to be settled down. It’s a big one. We’ve just got to go out there and figure out how to get it.”

(sfchronicle.com)

OFFENSE SPUTTERS as Giants’ skid hits four with loss to Diamondbacks

by Shayna Rubin

Arizona Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte (4) reaches to tag out San Francisco Giants' Christian Koss after Koss hit an RBI single during the fifth inning of a baseball game in San Francisco, Monday, May 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

With the San Francisco Giants down a run in the eighth inning and the tying run aboard, Heliot Ramos was the right guy for the moment.

Ramos had three hits up until that point, all infield singles, but had Arizona Diamondbacks reliever Jalen Beeks on the ropes, fouling off pitch after pitch to get to 10 pitches in the at-bat. Ramos scorched the 11th pitch, a changeup, 110 mph with a liner to left field as Mike Yastrzesmki bolted to try to score from first.

But Snakes left fielder Lourdes Gurriel Jr. made a leaping catch, nearly flipping over at the wall to deflate the rally and, ultimately, any idea that the Giants could overcome a 2-1 loss to Arizona in the National League West rivals’ first match-up of the season.

The loss was the Giants’ fourth straight, the longest losing streak of their otherwise successful start to the season. The way the Giants see it, this loss came down to that one swing from Ramos.

“They made a great play in left field tonight that could have flipped the script for us. This game can be difficult, physically and mentally,” starter Justin Verlander said. “These streaks like this, you need to realize we had a chance. We haven’t played our best baseball in these games, but we’ve kept ourselves in a situation where we can possibly win. When things start going our way, hopefully, we’ll reel off a bunch of wins and forget this ever happened.”

Ramos came into Monday’s game having hit .500 (10-for-20) over the Giants’ road trip, but he’s been the standout in an otherwise lackluster offense. The bats went so cold in Minnesota that manager Bob Melvin shook up the starting lineup more than he has all season. It didn’t do much good.

They were unable to get more than a run against Diamondbacks starter Merrill Kelly over his seven innings. They struck out 10 times, eight against Kelly, and got one hit, an RBI single by Christian Koss in the sixth inning, in six opportunities with runners in scoring position.

“Lot of stuff isn’t falling our way. When Ramos hits a ball 111 (mph) and a guy does a back-flip, it’s kind of hard. I think just a couple guys are trying too hard to get us out of this rut by themselves,” Koss said. “It’s nothing anyone is really worried about, we just have to get back to having consistent, quality at-bats and string them together. Pitching has been doing great. We’ve been in a lot of ball games, we just haven’t come through.”

The nature of this loss was familiar for Verlander, who has gone winless in his first nine starts for the Giants. For a fifth straight start, Verlander’s performance was worthy of his 263rd career win. He struck out five while allowing two earned runs through six innings. He has a 2.78 ERA with 23 strikeouts over his last five turns.

Corbin Carroll was his only nemesis, hitting two home runs off Verlander in back-to-back at-bats. The first came in the third inning, an opposite-field solo shot off a fastball. The Diamondbacks’ young star hit the other to dead center off a good-looking curveball. Verlander was pulled one batter into the seventh inning with Carroll up to bat, but he’d probably been able to stay in the game had Geraldo Perdomo not reached on a single to lead off.

“It’s about winning the game. When you keep pitching well – literally it was just two balls off Carroll’s bat – other than that, he pitched into the seventh inning. He’s given us quality starts over the last four times.”

Verlander gave up nine hits, but with big help from the defense he navigated traffic well to keep the game in reach. He had two on in the first inning – Josh Naylor’s ground-rule double kept him and Carroll in scoring position – and drew the ground out to strand the pair.

Arizona got a pair of runners on again in the fourth inning, but Alek Thomas hit a chopper to shortstop Willy Adames, who made the inning’s second out at home before Verlander induced the inning-ending ground ball.

A few more big defensive plays kept the game tight: In the sixth, Patrick Bailey nabbed Gabriel Moreno attempting to steal second base. In the eighth, Ramos – who hasn’t played a perfect left field this year – made a spectacular diving catch in front of him to rob Naylor of a hit.

Now, Verlander, Los Angeles Angels’ Yusei Kikuchi and Boston Red Sox's Tanner Houck are the only MLB rotation regulars with nine starts and no wins.

“It’s one of the tough things about being a starting pitcher,” he said. “You want to win baseball games, so you have the exact same outing and you win and you feel really good when you go home versus this one where you don’t feel nearly as good. It’s the interesting thing of being a starter.”

(sfchronicle.com)

NEWSOM TO ASK CITIES TO BAN HOMELESS ENCAMPMENTS, ESCALATING CRACKDOWN

“There are no more excuses,” the California governor said in pushing for municipalities to address one of the most visible byproducts of homelessness.

by Shawn Hubler

Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to escalate California’s push to eradicate homeless encampments on Monday, calling on hundreds of cities, towns and counties to effectively ban tent camps on sidewalks, bike paths, parklands and other types of public property.

Mr. Newsom’s administration has raised and spent tens of billions of dollars on programs to bring homeless people into housing and to emphasize treatment. But his move on Monday marks a tougher approach to one of the more visible aspects of the homelessness crisis. The governor has created a template for a local ordinance that municipalities can adopt to outlaw encampments and clear existing ones.

California is home to about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population, a visible byproduct of the temperate climate and the state’s brutal housing crisis. Last year, a record 187,000 people were homeless in the state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Two-thirds were living unsheltered in tents, cars or outdoors.

Mr. Newsom cannot force cities to pass his model ban, but its issuance coincides with the release of more than $3 billion in state-controlled housing funds that local officials can use to put his template in place. And though it’s not a mandate, the call to outlaw encampments statewide by one of the best-known Democrats in the country suggests a shift in the party’s approach to homelessness.

Once a combative champion of liberal policies and a vocal Trump administration critic, Mr. Newsom has been stress-testing his party’s positions, to the point of elevating the ideas of Trump supporters on his podcast. The liberal approach to encampments has traditionally emphasized government-funded housing and treatment, and frowned on what some call criminalizing homelessness.

The model ordinance Mr. Newsom wants local officials to adopt does not specify criminal penalties, but outlawing homeless encampments on public property makes them a crime by definition. Cities would decide on their own how tough the penalties should be, including arrests or citations to those who violate the ban. The template’s state-issued guidance says that no one “should face criminal punishment for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go.”

Frustration with the persistence of homelessness has been rising, both within the Newsom administration and among many Californians.

Although California’s homeless population — like its overall population — remains the nation’s largest, federal data released in January showed an increase in 2024 of 3 percent in the state’s homeless numbers, compared with a rise of more than 18 percent across the United States. And the number of homeless veterans and chronically homeless people declined.

But encampments, which proliferated during the coronavirus pandemic as social distancing emptied public spaces, have remained a widespread problem in Southern California, the Central Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Sacramento region. And an apparent disconnect has emerged between many of California’s elected officials and the state’s fed-up residents.

Nearly 40 percent of the state’s Democrat-dominated electorate said they were so weary of squalid settlements overtaking parks and blocking sidewalks that they supported the arrest of homeless campers if they refused shelter, according to a poll last month by Politico and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of California, Berkeley. At the same time, a companion survey in the Democrat-led state showed that nearly half of California’s policy leaders and elected officials opposed addressing encampments with law enforcement.

Previously, federal courts had ruled that punishing people for sleeping on public property was “cruel and unusual,” and therefore unconstitutional. That legal landscape changed last year after a Supreme Court decision empowered governments to penalize people for sleeping in parks, on sidewalks and in other public areas.

The Newsom administration seized on the Supreme Court ruling swiftly, ordering state agencies to begin humanely clearing encampments from state parks and freeway underpasses, and urging cities to do the same in local jurisdictions.

Some did, addressing encampments with varying degrees of compassion and aggression.

Long Beach began clearing camps within weeks, urging homeless people to accept shelter and treatment but also threatening to cite and arrest occupants of recurrent encampments. Fresno made it a misdemeanor to sit, lie, sleep or camp in public places. The San Jose City Council is weighing a proposal by its Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan, to arrest homeless people if they refuse shelter three times.

But many California politicians have balked. Some worry about further traumatizing homeless people with citations, arrests and jail time. Some fear that a wrong word in a local law will still invite advocates for homeless people to sue them.

Some say a hard line is unnecessary. The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has pointed out that her signature program to move people voluntarily out of tent camps and into motel rooms and interim shelters has helped log the first double-digit drop in street homelessness in the city in nearly a decade.

Still, other policymakers — in Los Angeles County, for instance — note both the shortage of safe shelter spaces and the complexity of ramping up new programs. They contend that the state needs to fund even more housing and treatment than Mr. Newsom has pushed for. Until that happens, they say, arresting, citing and rousting people in tent camps only torments vulnerable people and moves the problem around.

Despite public pressure to address camps from San Diego to Eureka — and billions of dollars in state funding to do so — only about a tenth of the state’s 500 or so cities and counties have enacted new camping restrictions, according to data from the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington. And many municipalities have resisted adding shelter space.

The state funding the governor has released along with his initiative amounts to $3.3 billion in state-controlled money to expand local housing and treatment for homeless people with serious mental and behavioral health problems. The money, from a $6.4 billion state bond, was approved by voters last year.

“There are no more excuses,” Governor Newsom said in a statement accompanying the ordinance. “Local leaders asked for resources — we delivered the largest state investment in history. They asked for legal clarity — the courts delivered. Now, we’re giving them a model they can put to work immediately, with urgency and humanity, to resolve encampments and connect people to shelter, housing and care.”

The governor’s municipal template is based on the state’s protocol for deterring homeless encampments on state land and roadways. It would explicitly make it illegal “to construct, place or maintain on public property any semi-permanent structure.”

It also would outlaw camping on public property for more than three consecutive days or nights within 200 feet of a single location. And it would make it illegal “to sit, sleep, lie or camp on any public street, road or bike path, or on any sidewalk in a manner that impedes passage.”

The model ordinance requires cities to “make every reasonable effort” to offer shelter or housing and give homeless people at least 48 hours’ notice before clearing an encampment and to properly store any belongings that are moved.

Administration officials have said the California Highway Patrol, which enforces the state’s encampment cleanups, has rarely had to arrest recalcitrant campers. When it has, they said, it has generally been for an assortment of misdemeanor charges such as trespassing or obstructing or delaying peace officers who are performing official duties. The ordinance specifies that officers may also enforce other city or state laws, including laws governing the use of controlled substances or weapons, fire codes and public nuisance laws.

The accompanying state-issued guidance calls the ordinance “a starting point that jurisdictions may build from” and points out that it draws from an approach the state has used since July 2021. That approach, state officials said, has cleared more than 16,000 encampments and over 311,873 cubic yards of debris from freeway underpasses and other state property.

(LA Times)

NEWSOM’S NEW CALIFORNIA HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT PLAN IS JUST CHEAP PR

by Emily Hoeven

If you skimmed the national headlines on Monday, you might come away thinking that Gov. Gavin Newsom had just unveiled a bold, aggressive new policy for dealing with the homeless encampments that have proliferated across California.

“Newsom asks cities to ban homeless encampments, escalating crackdown,” blared a New York Times headline. “Newsom calls on California cities to ban homeless encampments ‘without delay,’ “ The Guardian breathlessly announced. Newsom himself proudly retweeted a Bloomberg story that proclaimed he was “ratcheting up the state’s effort to tackle the crisis” by urging cities to “ban, remove homeless camps.”

Look closer, however, and Newsom’s announcement contained little news. It was mostly a regurgitation of guidance he’d given local governments about a year ago after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave cities broad power to clear homeless encampments and confiscate property from individuals living in them.

Newsom’s order encouraged local governments and directed state agencies to quickly remove encampments by following key guidelines — including giving homeless people 48 hours of notice before clearing most encampments, connecting them with service providers offering housing and behavioral health care, and collecting and storing their property for 60 days.

On Monday, Newsom encouraged local governments to adopt laws that would formalize those policies. To make their job easier, he published a Mad-Libs-esque template they could effectively copy and paste, with room for some local tweaks.

The template recommended making it illegal to construct any “semi-permanent structure” on public property, to camp on public property, to establish an encampment within 200 feet of any posted notice to vacate and to block any public street, road, bike path or sidewalk in a way that violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Yet it also left up in the air how exactly cities should respond to violations of the law.

“No person should face criminal punishment for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go,” the template stated.

Furthermore, the suggested law is just that — a suggestion, with no teeth to require local governments to adopt it.

It’s also unlikely to materially change conditions in the Bay Area, as my Chronicle colleagues noted.

San Francisco and Oakland have already begun more aggressive sweeps of homeless encampments. San Mateo County officials passed a law permitting homeless residents to be arrested for refusing an available shelter bed. Fremont made it illegal to camp on public property and briefly outlawed actions to “aid or abet” homeless people. And San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan proposed arresting homeless people who refused an offer of shelter three times, noting that roughly half the people who were offered placement in a new city shelter declined to accept.

So, what exactly was the point of Newsom’s news blitz?

First: To capture headlines and get his name circulating nationally. Second: To redirect the blame for California’s persistent homelessness crisis away from the state and toward county and city governments.

The state has done its part to address homelessness, Newsom seems to be saying. Now it’s time for local governments to do theirs.

“The time for inaction is over,” Newsom proclaimed. “There are no more excuses.”

This claim has some merit, but the reality is also far more complex than Newsom is making it out to be.

Yes, Newsom’s administration has funneled more than $27 billion to local governments for housing and homelessness — a point the governor never tires of making. (On Monday, his administration also released $3.3 billion in grants from Proposition 1, a $6.4-billion bond measure voters narrowly passed in March 2024 to construct an estimated 10,000 behavioral health and shelter beds across the state.)

But money alone doesn’t equal results. A 2024 state audit, for example, found that California “lacks current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs” and that the state’s homelessness action plan wasn’t aligned with its stated goals. Although California has taken steps to improve its data collection and analysis, there’s still a long way to go.

And, yes, some local governments are actively refusing to do their part to address the state’s homelessness crisis. In the Central Valley, the Turlock City Council recently refused to allocate $1 to the city’s only homeless shelter — a symbolic gesture of support from the Stanislaus County city that could have unlocked more than $267,000 in state funding. The shelter is now at risk of closing.

In his Monday news conference, Newsom slammed the Turlock City Council.

“They’ve simply turned their back in terms of accountability and responsibility,” he said.

Local governments need to step up to the plate. Yet the state could also be doing more when it comes to keeping people off the street.

As the Chronicle recently reported, the California Department of Transportation is blocking a proposal to build more than 200 affordable housing units on a patch of surplus land it owns in the ritzy community of Woodside — which infamously attempted to block duplexes and fourplexes by declaring itself a mountain lion sanctuary.

CalTrans’ rationale?

The project could disrupt an area that contains some rare wildflowers. But Chris Shaw, former mayor of Woodside, told my colleague J.K. Dineen that the wildflowers are abundant in the area and that CalTrans had itself razed them to build an eight-lane freeway.

“Is this really what we are going to get hung up on? I feel like the state is playing NIMBY with us,” Shaw said.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Newsom’s Monday pronouncement, however, is that it upholds a tired paradigm that pits the state, counties and cities against each other — which only ends up raising everyone’s political hackles and makes it even more difficult to comprehensively address deeply entrenched problems.

Case in point: The League of California Cities issued a blistering statement Monday that argued “cities need funding, not model encampment ordinances, to address homelessness.” It also noted that eight in 10 cities have encampment policies and nearly 40% of cities have already updated their local laws to align with Newsom’s executive order.

The California State Association of Counties, meanwhile, said “the state has not done everything it can to address homelessness in California. Without clear responsibilities for every level of government and reliable funding for cities and counties, successful local efforts will wither on the vine.”

Sigh. Another day wasted on political posturing instead of substantive policy.

(SF Chronicle)

GREENLAND’S SAND

Editor,

Donald Trump’s “deep attachment to symbols of power and identity” (as described by James Meek in a recent London Review of Books article) is probably sufficient to explain his interest in Greenland As Meeks notes, two other common rationalizations — securing the Arctic frontier against Russia in a world with less or no northern sea ice, and the exploitation of rare earth elements — fall on the grounds that these things are impracticable and unnecessary. However, Greenland does stand in a unique position with regard to another increasingly valuable resource: sand.

The rapid urban expansion of the 20th century necessitated the mining of vast quantities of sand and gravel, the primary constituents of concrete. By a wide margin, sand and gravel are extracted in greater amounts than any other material (nearly thirty gigatons per year by 2010, presumably a vast underestimate considering the power of illegal sand-mining operations). Nonetheless, the global sand supply system is bracing for hard times. A global sand shortage is widely seen as inevitable, and may have arrived already. One issue is that not all sand works as aggregate for concrete. An individual grain in the Sahara has probably spent a million years experiencing mechanical abrasion, getting rounded and polished as it blows in the wind and slams into its neighbors, but for concrete the grains need to be rough and angular if they are to pack together effectvely. Riverbeds are full of suitable sand.

A documentary from 2022, ‘Eat Bitter,’ follows a sand supply chain in the Central African Republic, from the backbreaking work of an artisanal diver filling buckets by hand n the Ubangi River to a Chinese construction foreman building a bank in the capital, Bangui. Many of these localized reserves, near the construction projects they’re intended for, are already exhausted. Others have been mined to the point of destroying ecosystems and destabilizing riverbanks, threatening riparian communities.

Another ideal source of angular grains is from the bed of melting glaciers. As the Greenland ice sheet retreats, it grinds down the underlying bedrock and liberates fine-grained sediments. These are carried by river channels to the coast, forming deltas. Mining these deltas would probably involve the use of floating suction dredgers to pipe sand from the delta directly into larger tankers. This obviates the need for a skilled local labor force and carries less long-term risk than developing a mine; you can simply pull anchor and sail away.

Trump himself is more interested in turning “the world’s largest island” red, white and blue on the map than in any of these considerations. But that isn’t necessarily true of some of the people around him.

For example, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, was the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald when the firm acquired a $10 million stake in the Critical Metals Corporation, which is actively pursuing a rare-earth mine in southern Greenland. (He stepped down after he was confirmed by the Senate.) One wonders if the smart money might shift from the extraction of materials that would go into solar panels, turbines and EVs to the mining of materials to build gaudy skyscrapers and luxury condos. An enormous ship anchored far offshore, hauling away the island itself as it is ground to gravel under the melting ice sheet, all to build the Trump Hotel Rafah: it feels almost inevitable.

Greenland’s mineral deposits on the east coast were first discovered in 1964 by a British expedition of which I was a member. The mineralized veins occur in Tertiary basaltic rocks near the snout of the Kronborg glacier. Aircraft routinely patrolled the coast checking for other country’s submarines. Our expedition found grim evidence of this in the wreck and dead crew of one such aircraft that perhaps through navigational error was flying inland at night and crashed into the basalt cliffs on the north side of the glacier.

David Bell

Oxford, England

I BELIEVE IN ARISTOCRACY, though — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke.’

— E.M. Forster, ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’

LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

Trump Administration Live Updates: President Kicks Off Gulf Tour in Saudi Arabia

Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Venezuelan Deportations to Resume

Trump Installs Top Justice Dept. Official at Library of Congress, Prompting a Standoff

Farmers Sued Over Deleted Climate Data. So the Government Will Put It Back

Newsom Asks Cities to Ban Homeless Encampments, Escalating Crackdown

Flamingos Make Underwater Vortexes to Suck Up Prey

WHERE THINGS STAND

Drug prices: President Trump signed an executive order that asks pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily lower drug prices. But it was not clear what legal authority Mr. Trump would invoke, and he threatened to “use the power of the federal government” if companies do not comply. The order was something of a win for the industry, which had been bracing for a much more aggressive policy.

Qatari 747: Mr. Trump defended his plan to accept a luxury 747 that the Qatari royal family planned to donate to the United States as a temporary Air Force One. Mr. Trump said the plane, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, would not be for his personal use after its eventual transfer to his presidential library. He called it a “great gesture” from Qatar, and said he would be “stupid” to reject it.

Tariff pause: The United States and China agreed to temporarily reduce the punishing tariffs that they had imposed on each other. Representatives for the two countries met in Geneva over the weekend to address the trade war that flared after Mr. Trump imposed a minimum tariff of 145 percent on Chinese imports. The president said on Monday that he planned to speak to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, later this week. Read more ›

Maggie Haberman: Brushing aside a question about the ethical concerns related to the proposed donation of a free jetliner from Qatar, Trump says he could reject the plane or simply say thanks for the gift. He then invokes a golf analogy suggesting that following rules when one doesn’t have to is foolish.

Alan Rappeport: Trump said that if a deal with China is not reached within 90 days, he will not raise tariffs back to 145 percent. However, he said that they would still be “substantially higher” and added “At 145 you’re really decoupling because nobody’s going to buy.”

(NY Times)

UNDERSTANDING POPE FRANCIS

by James Butler

Pope Francis assumed the papacy in 2013 in the teeth of a crisis. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, the first pope in centuries to resign, was strongly associated with theological and ritual conservatism. His resignation was widely interpreted as an admission of defeat by proliferating sexual abuse scandals which had shattered the moral authority of the priesthood, even among many of the faithful. Catholicism in the eyes of the world was defined by abuse, pedophilia and cover-up.

In the background were two other problems: a steady decline in churchgoing and the legacy of the Second Vatican Council — a vast exercise in reform, which reshaped every aspect of Catholic practice, streamlining the Mass and permitting its celebration in languages other than Latin. John XXIII, the pope who initiated the Council in 1962, described it as an aggiornamento, a “bringing up to date,” an attempt to “throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through.”

Much church politics over the last few decades has been driven by attempts to close the windows again. Attitudes toward Vatican II are good predictors of other positions: liberals and progressives tend to approve of it, wishing its reforms had gone further in changing the church’s approach to social issues; conservatives tend to see it as a sad loss of self-confidence, degrading a rich and beautiful tradition and setting the church adrift.

Mixed positions, which combine progressive social views with affection for traditional forms (or vice versa), are much rarer than they are in the Church of England, say.

Francis at first offered hope for progressives, who had felt asphyxiated by his two predecessors. The name was a positive sign, taken from a saint — Francis of Assisi — who championed spiritual renewal through poverty, who sought Christ among the poor and infirm, and whose followers often troubled the institutional church. Pope Francis spoke of a church for the poor, active in the world, with priests as “shepherds who smell of the sheep.” His earliest apostolic exhortation wished for “a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets.” His first trip out of Rome was to celebrate a penitential Mass at Lampedusa among migrants to remember the hundreds who had recently drowned, on an altar made from an upturned boat. There, he castigated “globalizeed indifference” and a “culture of comfort” which “makes us insensitive to the cries of other people.”

It helped that he wasn’t his immediate predecessor. Benedict had earned his reputation as a conservative enforcer. But he was a shy, cerebral and abstruse man ill-suited to the modern papacy. Caricaturing Benedict and Francis as, respectively, the intellectual and the populist would be wrong: Francis’s earthy manner — he once accused scandal-mongering journalists of being coprophiles — concealed a powerful intellect with strong cultural tastes. He loved Furtwängler’s recordings of Wagner; his letter on the value of literature quotes Proust, Cocteau, Borges and Celan. His reflections on the Covid pandemic quote Hölderlin, in lines which also characterize his papal approach: “where the danger is, grows the saving power also.”

Both sides of the culture war profited from caricatures of Francis as Pope Woke. The reality was less clear-cut. He distrusted the liberal impulse to make the church a vague, hand-wringing Roman branch of the human rights campaign. His positions on war, free-market exploitation and climate change were all in the mainstream of Catholic Social Teaching, though articulated with unusual directness and clarity. His interviews often gave the impression that he thought the church’s hang-ups about sexuality were just that — symptoms of an un-Christlike clerical trend to flee from real humanity.

Probably the most famous words of his papacy were uttered in response to a journalist’s question about gay priests: “Who am I to judge?” Like most of Francis’s progressive moves on sex and gender — such as receiving trans Catholics at general audiences — it was symbolic and rhetorical rather than doctrinal. A declaration in 2023 to permit the blessing of couples in same-sex relationships prompted a global tantrum from conservatives; a few weeks later the Vatican issued a barely cogent attack on “gender theory.” Francis made no attempt to alter the catechesis that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered” and gay sex “grave depravity.”

The general pattern was of rhetorical progress undercut by doctrinal inertia: praise for women in the church and reaffirmation of male priesthood; a vision of a decentralized church promulgated by a dominating and combative papacy. Real changes to the reporting of abuse, and reckoning with the church’s catastrophic failings, were marred by erratic and temporizing decisions on individual cases.

His Jesuit background was underexplored. He was the first modern pope to have taken a vow of poverty along with the standard vows of obedience and chastity. His loathing of clericalism — the sycophantic and self-glorifying tendency to exalt the priesthood, which he called a “perversion of the church” — had its roots here. That his ultra-conservative opponents in the church loved lace, gold and watered silk seemed to underline the point. He was especially fond of the Gospel of Matthew and must often have thought of Christ’s disdain for the showy teachers of the law who made their tassels long, who “love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues,” but never sought to lighten others’ loads.

Unusually, Francis retained the Jesuit monogram and his episcopal motto in his papal arms. He had chosen the phrase “miserando atque eligendo” from Bede’s homily on the calling of Matthew. Christ saw Matthew, the tax collector, “through the of eyes mercy and chose him.” Francis’s continual emphasis on mercy — “the first attribute of God” — explains his papal choices more clearly than the progressive/conservative heuristic. It is the reason he wanted a church of the peripheries, and for everyone. It runs through his pronouncements on divorce and his spiritual writing on the Sacred Heart, Dilexit Nos (“he loved us”). It explains his off-the-cuff remark that he hoped Hell was empty, and the way he consoled a weeping boy worried that his non-believer father might not have gone to Heaven.

When I was young, the pope always seemed to be dying. John Paul II’s long, public suffering with Parkinson’s made him an emblem for Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. At the time, I thought it sad and cruel. But I came to understand something of that emblematic force as I watched the ailing Francis insist on visiting prisoners, gasping out greetings, being present for his Easter message, speaking against the madness of rearmament and war, squeezing every last opportunity to speak to the world as it continues to erect new prisons and walls, and new oligarchic idols. “Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers,” Francis wrote in his last meditations on Good Friday. “Theirs is the construction site of Hell.”

(London Review of Books)

MAHA HUGGER MUGGER

by James Kunstler

“Those who perpetrated the greatest ruse in American presidential history by staging the Biden presidency will never tell us what their ultimate agenda was” — Victor Davis Hanson

One baseline truth in current American life is that our bodily well-being gets worse as the so-called health care industry gets ever-larger — it is now 17.6-percent of the economy (GDP). This is clearly the basis of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign that attached itself to the Trump 2.0 program. You hear almost no arguments against MAHA itself, even from the Party of Hustles and Hoaxes, but plenty of calumny and objurgation against MAHA’s chief advocate, Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Mr. Trump’s initial nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat was pulled last week just before her scheduled Senate confirmation hearing. Her credentials looked a bit sketchy — med school on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Maarten (say, what. . . ?) and other irregularities — which she confabulated about anyway. Plus, she was a Covid vaccine cheerleader and an avid advocate of the censorship campaign to slam down debate over it.

Which leads directly to a glaring quandary in President Trump’s current order-of-business: he has avoided engagement with the whole Covid fiasco that unspooled in the last year of his first term. Now, it is the opinion of this blog that Mr. Trump was played on Covid by blob-marshaled “experts” Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, who led the White House Covid “team,” and then snookered the president into Operation Warp Speed, appealing to his vanity to play the superhero. You can also surmise that the Covid operation was hatched to run Mr. Trump out of office by enabling epic election fraud, making a chump of him.

Other aspects of the Covid hairball are now finally getting unraveled, such as the lab origin issue and Dr. Fauci’s nefarious and vast operations to fund bioweapons. But the awful subject of the Covid mRNA vaccines, and all the monkey business around their development and deployment, remains taboo, even as Trump 2.0 sets records in smashing bureaucratic idols and radically shifting all sorts of policy — for instance, today’s monumental move to lower drug costs by 30 to 80 percent, using the Most Favored Nation trade policy device, which ties U.S. drug prices to the lowest prices paid by other high-income countries (e.g., Canada, Japan, or European nations) for the same medications.

But the Covid vaccine shots loom over the land like an ominous miasma that no one wants to talk about. The evidence has mounted steadily that the shots were ineffective and deeply harmful to many of the people who took them, especially those who got multiple boosters. The result, apparently, is a shocking rise in rare and aggressive cancers, immune system dysfunction, damage to the heart and blood vessels, neurological disorders, and much more. The CDC under “Joe Biden” worked desperately to hide all that, but it came out, anyway, because it was too big to hide.

81-percent of the US population submitted to the Covid vaccine shots. So, you can suppose that all that would be an extremely touchy matter. To admit all that scary information to the public arena would likely set off a politically dangerous fury. You can see why Mr. Trump would avoid going near it in the early going of his second term. But eventually he must come to terms with it.

Likewise, sooner or later, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., will have to take some kind of stand on the Covid vaccines, namely stopping the shots altogether. Whatever you think of the childhood vaccine schedule — a red-hot issue these days — it seems quite insane that the Covid mRNA vaccine is still included on it. It is still officially recommended by the CDC. Among the “much more” effects of the shots is damage to human fertility. You must ask: by giving these shots to kids as young as six-months, are we setting up a nation that won’t be able to have children? Pretty spooky.

Casey Means, the new nominee for US Surgeon General

So, the new nominee for Surgeon General is one Casey Means of the brother / sister team, Calley and Casey Means, known primarily as food safety advocate sidekicks to Bobby Kennedy. The Meanses were already under some suspicion for rising to rapidly into prominence from out of nowhere since the summer of 2024 when Mr. Kennedy began to swing over to the Trump campaign. They were suspected and criticized as the shills for some sort of sinister alliance between Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, and the US intel blob. The Meanses have adroitly avoided taking a position on the Covid vaccines. Hmmmm. . . . That’s the chatter, anyway — whether there’s any truth to it, we will have to stand-by to discover.

You’d have to ask yourself whether Mr. Kennedy would ally himself with people of supposedly sketchy character. Is he being used or played? Or maybe, it’s just not so. The nomination of Casey Means sent out shock-waves through MAGA and MAHA. Her credentials seemed a little sketchy like Janette Nesheiwat’s before her. Ms. Means dropped out of her five-year medical residency in Oregon a few months before completing it, apparently due to disillusionment with conventional medicine. She does not have an active medical license, supposedly required to serve as Surgeon General.

Instead, she transitioned into what is loosely called functional medicine, which rejects the oppressive “standards of practice” dictated by insurance companies and reliance on pharma products to alleviate symptoms rather than treat the causes of disease. Ms. Means also became a medical entrepreneur, starting Levels, a glucose-monitoring tech company, and is an Instagram “wellness influencer” with 750,000 followers. Given the gross racketeering aspects of conventional medicine and its failure to deal with the shocking rise in chronic disease, you might argue that Ms. Means made the right career moves, weird as they might seem superficially.

It’s pretty much a miracle that RFK, Jr., managed to land safely as Secretary of HHS and that he was able to enlist “medical freedom” advocates Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes for Health and Marty Makary to run the Federal Drug Administration. This represents a stupendous turnaround in government policy. It’s also plausible that this new public health team has been preoccupied with personnel and administrative re-org in the first months of Trump 2.0. They’ve begun to nibble around the edges of the national health crisis, such as banning toxic food coloring.

They have yet to face the big, nasty legal questions such as revoking Pharma’s liability shield against lawsuits for its defective products, ending TV advertising of Pharma products — which is just an extortion racket for managing cable news content to protect Pharma — fully confronting the autism calamity and its connection to childhood vaccines, and, of course, pulling the Covid shots.

The is also chatter that RFK, Jr., is “managed” by hidden persons or forces. One not-so-hidden character in that psychodrama is Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA). Sen. Cassidy, a medical doctor, chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee that ran Mr. Kennedy over-the-coals in his confirmation hearing. Political pressure caused Sen. Cassidy to cave and vote “yes” for RFK,Jr., then. Louisiana has since changed its election rules so that Democrats can no longer vote in the GOP primary, and Cassidy is vulnerable. His base is restless. He voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January 2021 over the Capitol J-6 riot.

So, the chatter says that Mr. Kennedy made a deal with Sen. Cassidy to avoid taking certain actions — like, anything that might hurt Pharma and its profit-stream — or else Mr. Kennedy would be dragged back in front of the HELP Committee and raked over the coals again. If that were to happen, I suspect Mr. Kennedy would handle himself very capably in any public hearing. He has always been in command of the facts. As head of HHS, he has had access to a deep trove of information that he had no access to previously. He must know by now exactly what sort of mischief has been perpetrated in US public health over the decades and will not be shy about disclosing it publicly. You should also not be surprised if Mr. Kennedy begins issuing criminal referrals before much longer.

As for Casey Means — give her a chance to demonstrate that she is on the right side of MAHA and willing to fight in what has become a biomedical war on the American public.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR MIND Harder For The Propagandists To Manipulate

by Caitlin Johnstone

The worst mistake you can make when reading the news is to assume there’s a good reason why the mass media report on something in the way that they do. That there’s a good reason why Israel-Palestine gets framed as a complex and morally ambiguous issue with no clear path forward, even though it all looks pretty self-evident to you. That there must be a valid and legitimate reason why one story gets more coverage than a seemingly far more important story, like how the release of one Israeli-American hostage is currently getting far more news media coverage than the deliberate starvation of an entire enclave full of civilians.

In reality there is no valid and legitimate reason why such things are covered the way they are. The coverage happens in the way that it happens because it serves the information interests of Israel and the western empire, and for no other reason.

So much western ignorance is facilitated by the manipulative way the imperial media report on what’s going on in the world. People assume that because they’re not hearing about a given issue all the time or in a particularly urgent tone of reporting, it must not be an especially important matter that needs their attention. They assume that if one side of a conflict isn’t framed as being clearly in the wrong, then it must not be.

Westerners assume that if the world were experiencing another Holocaust, another Transatlantic Slave Trade, another Cuban Missile Crisis, they would hear about it in the news at an appropriate level of urgency. But that simply isn’t how it works. The only reason the western public is ever told about anything bad that happens at a high level of frequency and urgency is when it is convenient for the western empire, like when Russia invaded Ukraine. When that happened it was the main story in every western outlet for ages, and Russia was clearly framed as the evil aggressor, with all the NATO aggressions which provoked the invasion going completely unmentioned.

When people hear the word “propaganda” they tend to think it means the same thing as “lies”, but that’s not accurate. The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission.

Most of the worst things the US and its allies are doing in the world are reported accurately by the western press at certain times and in certain publications, but they simply are not given any emphasis and amplification after those brief mentions. If you look at the hyperlinks I cite in my articles to describe the criminality of the empire it’s usually either straight out of the mainstream press or some other independent author who’s citing mainstream news reporting. The difference is that I regularly spotlight those admissions, while the imperial media will mention them once halfway down an article somewhere and then let the daily news churn carry it away down the memory hole.

Western propaganda doesn’t consist so much of manipulating what gets reported but how it gets reported. How often something gets mentioned. How often the perpetrator of an abuse is explicitly named. The type of language used to describe a given offense. These adjustments might sound insignificant when they are described, but when put into practice across the board they are extremely effective at shaping public perception of world affairs.

The only way to get around this is to maintain an acute awareness of what’s being reported while ignoring distorting factors like frequency, emphasis and tone. You have to just focus on the raw data of what’s being reported about what the empire is up to from day to day without allowing your perception to be colored by the way in which that data is reported. If you come across a key piece of information about the empire’s criminality you’ve got to hold onto it and remember its significance for yourself, because the imperial press sure aren’t going to remind you. They’re going to be acting like it never happened by next week.

It’s bizarre once you start noticing how much of a disconnect there is between reality and the mass media’s reporting on world events. They’ll occasionally mention actual important things, but there’s no accurate sense of proportionality to any of it. It’s like if you were at a restaurant with a friend and a waiter’s uniform caught fire, and your friend just casually mentioned “Oh that guy’s on fire” before going back to talking about the meal for the rest of the conversation while the guy burned to death at the other end of the room. It is utterly surreal.

So one of the most important things you need to do to maintain a truth-based worldview is to take complete control over your own understanding of the importance of the pieces of information which come across your field of vision. You can’t rely on others to tell you how important they are, because all the most amplified and influential voices in our society are working to manipulate your understanding of their importance, and most ordinary people you’ll interact with are being manipulated by those voices to some extent. Public political discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by these distortions.

You’ve got to interpret the urgency and importance of information for yourself. By standing on your own two feet and looking at the raw data with fresh eyes before it gets jumbled around by the imperial spin machine, you make your mind much harder to bend to the will of the empire.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

11 Comments

Kathy May 13, 2025

Not only is ATT trying again to abandon landlines AGAIN – they are also hoping everyone will forget that they would be abandoning their facilities too – old telephone poles, lines, boxes —and leave it up to counties to deal with their environmental ‘junk’.
ALSO
How will abandoning landlines affect services such as cable tv access? Many of us rely on cable access for our broadband connections.

Jim Armstrong May 13, 2025

A quick note before I read the rest of the MCD:
One reason why I cringe every time Bruce tries to explain to us all the REAL Eel River story, note South Fork.
https://media.fishreports.com/fw_maps/n0MFMavRIWIsDZbaMbnm.jpg

Chuck Wilcher May 13, 2025

Kunstler: “I suspect Mr. Kennedy would handle himself very capably in any public hearing. He has always been in command of the facts.”

In today’s NYT:

“Rock Creek, which flows through much of Northwest Washington, is used to drain excess sewage and storm water during rainfall. The creek has widespread “fecal” contamination and high levels of bacteria, including E. coli, and the city has banned swimming in all of its waterways for more than 50 years because of the widespread contamination of Rock Creek and other nearby rivers.”

Moi-même May 13, 2025

Did y’all hear the one where Pope Leo XIV shows up in Gaza?

- Lazarus May 13, 2025
  
  Did you hear about Leo I? AKA as Leo the Great…
  Ask around,
  Laz
  
  - Moi-même May 13, 2025
    
    I just did, thanks.
    
    Pope Leo the I is known for meeting with Attila the Hun, and dissuading him from attacking Rome.
    
    Sound familiar?
    
    - Lazarus May 13, 2025
      
      You win the prize!
      Congratulations,
      Laz
      
      - Marco McClean May 13, 2025
        
        True story:
        https://aish.com/78624517/
        
Joanne May 13, 2025

It’s the main stem of the Eel at Potter Valley, not the south fork …

jim barstow May 14, 2025

In the past, the editor has not been anti-vax. Why print someone like kunstler who is spouting blatantly false garbage about vaccines? This is not “the other side of the story”, it is ignorance and fear mongering. The idea the mrna vaccines are inherently dangerous may stifle one of the most significant medical breakthroughs in decades. It has even shown promise in treating pancreatic cancer. Are we to stop research on a life saving medicine because of some ignorant morons who “do their own research” on facebook?

- Chuck Dunbar May 14, 2025
  
  Thank you, well-said. Kunstler is a damn fool.

11 Comments

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