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HOT conditions will peak Friday and Saturday with gusty winds along the coast by Sunday afternoon. Generally warm and dry conditions will continue through the start of June.
Key Messages:
- Hot conditions with triple digit temperatures across the interior. Moderate Heat Risk today and Saturday.
- Strong gusty winds along the coast Sunday and Monday afternoon.
- Low (10%) chance of isolated dry thunderstorms over high terrain on Sunday.
(NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Amidst some pockets of dense fog I have 47F with clear skies this Friday morning on the coast. Patchy fog is with us for a while going forward with "patchy" being the key word. Today will be the warmest day then cooling a lot by Sunday, & a bit breezy this weekend. We are in for a roller coaster of temperature swings next week.
FUTURE HOME OF THE MENDOCINO COUNTY COURTHOUSE
Looking east from the Clay St. entrance of the future Mendocino County Courthouse. A Liebherr 23 piling and drilling rig poised and ready to create piers for the foundation.
The drilling rig is quite impressive: https://www.liebherr.com/en-us/p/lrb23-4424791 (every piece of heavy equipment deserves its own web page).
— Martin Bradley
GOOD-BYE RITE AID, FORT BRAGG
Gisela (Coast Chatline):
I was shopping at Rite Aid today and was told the store is closing on June 23. They will be having a close out sale starting 10 days before closing. I’m sorry to see them go. They had good sales sometimes.
James Kachik:
I also confirmed today that RiteAid’s last day will be June 23. The store will close. The RiteAid Pharmacy has sold their prescription records to Safeway. If you’re fine working with Safeway you need do nothing more. If you/we want your prescription records to go to another pharmacy you/we need to advise that pharmacy to contact RiteAid and ask for the transfer. I also am sorry to see them go I’ve had my issues with others and will have to think a bit about what to do /where togo next. Nothing constant but change, eh?
Frank Hartzell:
I wrote a story about this. My prescriptions at Safeway would have missed a full month if I had not work actively.. The story has the best pharmacy to go to for prices.
David Day:
Seemed to all go south when they let the corporate office take over local sales decisions, like getting rid of their most awesome fishing tackle section. At least that is my understanding of what happened regarding inventory there.
COUNTY TO INCREASE OUTSIDE LAW FIRM COST from $200k to $400k for Cubbison civil case defense attorney fees — on the consent calendar. Extends outside lawyer contract date to June 30 of 2027.
Consent Item 3ab on Tuesday’s Supervisors consent calendar:
“Approval of Second Amendment to BOS Agreement No. 24-009 with Liebert Cassidy Whitmore [San Francisco law firm] in the Amount of $200,000 for a New Agreement Total of $400,000 and Extending Termination Date from June 30, 2025, to June 30, 2027, to Provide Legal Services.”
Agreement No. 24-009 is the contract for Cubbison case legal services originally signed in December of 2023 at a rate of $415 per hour for Managing Partner Morin Jacob.
(Mark Scaramella)
SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS TALKS BUDGET CUTS, LOCAL NEEDS IN MENDOCINO COUNTY
by Mary Benjamin
On Thursday, May 22nd, Fifth District Mendocino County Supervisor Ted Williams spoke to local Mendocino residents at a town hall hosted by Mendocino Rotary in Preston Hall. About 45 people attended the event, which took place in the middle of the workday.
Williams, first elected in 2019, spoke about various county issues frequently reported in local news media and then addressed audience questions. He remained beyond the closing time of the town hall to talk individually with constituents who were looking for more information or assistance.
Williams’ topics included his theory about the cause of the county’s financial insecurities, the drawbacks facing unincorporated communities, the need for economic development, and the inadequate county support given to the coastal districts.
Supervisor Williams began with the assertion that good people worked for the county, and board members “look out for their constituents and have their best interests in mind.” He stressed that the core problem in county government “is not the supervisors or the staff.”
In regard to the upcoming, necessary 10% across-the-board budget cut to present a balanced budget to the state, Williams stated that the root of the budgetary shortfall is due to the outcomes of Proposition 13 and his observation that “rural counties in California do not have a sustainability plan.”
Proposition 13, passed by public vote in 1978, limited property taxes to no more than a 2% increase per year until the property is sold. The residence would then be reassessed for the new owners. Both legislative houses could change the tax rate only by a two-thirds majority vote.
The purpose was to protect elderly property owners on fixed incomes who would benefit by remaining in the same home. Over the years, a long-time homeowner would be paying property tax based on a value set in 1976. Although one effect of the proposition was increased stability as owners remained in older homes, over time, home sales led to unequal tax liability between two similar homes whenever one was sold and then resold.
According to Supervisor Williams, a loophole in the proposition allows commercial properties to avoid the reassessment requirement when a commercial building is involved. Although attempts to close the loophole have been proposed, none have passed both houses of the legislature.
Williams described the scenario of how major corporations holding big box buildings benefit by remaining in the same building or using the loophole that residential sales cannot use. “We’ve protected seniors,” he said, “but crippled society.”
As a result, over the past 50 years of increased mandated services and inflation on construction costs and materials, the value of a county’s tax dollars has dropped dramatically to become what Williams called “the cliff.” Williams explained, “In rural counties, two-thirds of the tax base is taxed at 2% per year.”
He continued, “Due to inflation for the materials and labor, the county needs at least 5% or 6%. You have a Board of Supervisors that has to cut 4%, maybe every year. That’s what’s been happening since about 1978.” Williams noted that the result is unfunded pensions, deferred maintenance, unrepaired roads, and a lack of service for microwave communication systems.
Williams said, “It all comes back to a structural finance model that sets up for failure. The trend lines show we’re going to have less and less services until we get to the point where we can’t meet mandates.”
As an example, he said that paving one mile of road costs $700,000 to $800,000. “We have 1,017 miles of road in the county and 137 bridges. We are trying to maintain roads on a revenue cap that is below the rate of inflation.”
Williams took a positive stance about working for a better future by stressing that the public and the county need to fix the problem by not continuing to “bicker on side issues.” He noted that Assembly member Chris Rodgers “is a good conduit to the state right now.”
He also spoke of an invitation to work with Board Chair John Haschak to address the budget issue. Williams said he has been reviewing budget records back to the 1960s and hopes to present findings to the public and the state.
Williams sees targeted economic development as one piece of a plan to increase revenue. He said, “We’re like an island nation,” Williams said. “Everything we buy is imported, and we export very little.”
He insisted that tourism can’t be the bulk source of the county’s revenue by pointing out that tourism jobs can’t provide employees with healthcare benefits and pensions. Aside from those low-paying job opportunities, Williams noted that 48% of the county is already on public assistance.
He noted, “A healthy economy means more people are self-supporting, and we don’t have that. “He added, “This takes people with good ideas and a community in support of change. We can’t be against everything. We need some amount of clean industry if we want to have a tax base that can sustain services.”
One popular idea to draw businesses would ease county permit restrictions and inspections that prospective business owners claim drag on them unreasonably. Also, some state-level restrictions do not always serve the interests or needs of a rural county.
Williams did mention rural counties suffering from the inequity of state dollars compared to urban counties. “Dense population areas set policy for the state,” he noted. However, he believes that the county and the village of Mendocino should never rely only on state dollars.
“We need a local tax base and local assessments to provide base-level services,” he said. Williams added that Mendocino County is one of the few counties in California that doesn’t have a tax specifically for roads, as cities do. Tax for roads means the opportunity to receive matching state funds.
Williams stressed that getting the attention of the County Board of Supervisors means tuning in to what happens at the public meetings. Even better, he advised, come and make your point. With the caveat that he would probably “be in trouble,” Williams added his own thoughts about the coast’s role in county government.
“I would argue that if you’re living over here on the coast, you’re paying for the county, and they’re spending it over there, and they’re pretty happy doing that.” He continued, “They have three votes to spend money in the general fund.”
He said, “A lot of the general fund comes from your tax dollars from the visitors who come to your town and put wear and tear on your roads. That money does not go to repairing those potholes.” Other costs the town bears are visitors’ car accidents and fire department rescues.
All of these realities bear down on the county, receiving about 60 cents on the dollar from the state to run service programs mandated by the state. Williams said, “We need more state tax dollars to cover services that everyone deserves.”
Williams was asked a question about the Cubbison case and why the county was not working out a settlement. Williams replied that the county board has no control over the elected County District Attorney. He also insisted that some media sources have been misrepresenting the facts.
He advised the public to view the board meetings for accurate information. He said he didn’t want to be “put in the opposition of answering questions about something that is not real.” He declined to elaborate.
Constituents can reach Supervisor Ted Williams by phone or email at 707-937-3500 and williamst@mendocinocounty.gov.
(Ukiah Daily Journal)
A FEW BAD APPLES
A Boonville Reader Writes:
I wanted to share some thoughts on our school. Instead of focusing only on the negatives, let's highlight the positives and celebrate our amazing students' achievements. While there are challenges, pouring negativity into our school won't bring change. Real progress comes from supporting both students and the school.
For example, our seniors have earned numerous scholarships through their hard work and dedication throughout their high school years. These are students who consistently put in effort every day.
Another example is the FFA, which organizes community events and activities for children and students, fostering a sense of help and love. Additionally, the leadership class has been working tirelessly all year to revive school spirit by hosting fundraisers, events, and spirit weeks. Let's not forget about the sports teams, where students not only play but also maintain good grades and demonstrate positive behavior to participate. There are so many more things these kids do that deserve recognition and support. Where is the community support when it comes to encouraging and uplifting our children in these endeavors?
some issues stem from home, and while schools help shape behavior, there's only so much they can do. It's also important to recognize that the good things our school fosters that often don't get much attention. Instead of just criticizing, let's work together to make a positive change.
Yes, the school does need to learn how to manage students with behavioral issues effectively. However, it’s important not to let a few students with a history of behavior problems overshadow the entire school. What about the kids who are involved, get good grades, show effort, and give their all? Not the whole school is bad, and we should recognize that as well.
BOOMING JET
Julie Rumble (Coast Chatline):
I happened to be in a totally unlucky spot for Thursday’s flyover. Was in Little River-less than a mile from Hwy 1. The ground cracked and trembled as did I for several moments-my friend crouched and winced-what is that? a black military jet broke-banking out of the gathered and strewn clouds then headed west. Seemed like a “stunt”-flight. Brought to mind all those around the world subjected to the fury and terror of …
ED NOTE: Dumb question for Jim Armstrong: Why can't the diverted water simply bypass the abandoned power apparatus?
NO KINGS DAY — Saturday, June 14, 11am — is a national day of action and mass mobilization in response to increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption from Trump and his allies. We’ve watched as they’ve cracked down on free speech, detained people for their political views, threatened to deport American citizens, and defied the courts. They’ve done this all while continuing to serve and enrich their billionaire allies.
Join us at the Noyo Bridge on Flag Day: NO Thrones, NO Crowns, NO Kings!
A READER WRITES:
I don know if this is the People I need to tell them about this. I saw the Plaque about the Men that were Killed In Nam, I said they forgot one. His Name was Babe Pinoli. U.S.M.C. he lived in Manchester. I went to school with his Brother & Sister. They are gone. I'm sure he has some Family that has the Full Story. I know he was a Hero. His Story would be Interesting.
DJ KEN STEELY
You wouldn't tell us or me on this site. We/I have absolutely nothing to do with that plague.
I only shared the photo I have of it.
I have no information about it.
As I always say…
If you have additional information to add, contact the original entity that made the original post. Contact the Mendocino County Museum in Willits, where this plaque is displayed.
GALINA TREFIL
Letter To The Person(s) With The Fake Account
That someone would create an account using my name and photos isn't particularly surprising, given the situation regarding my father. It is very disheartening to find out that the person who did it isn't a stranger, but someone I've actually known for a long time.
There are very personal things that this imposter is writing to people. I've only said those things to my two best friends and my husband. My best friends would never make a fake site with my name. They'd never hurt me like that.
My husband has admitted that several people obtained downloaded copies of three months' worth of private correspondence between us. This contained highly private medical information about my disability, details of rape and child abuse, and a lot of other things that I never anticipated being public knowledge.
The damage is done and can't be fixed. It's bad enough that these people took the information in the first place, worse yet that they are actually using it in this fashion.
I'm putting this out here now because discrediting me seems to be one of this person's motives. All that I can say is that I am not responsible for whatever the person or people using this account are doing or saying in my name. I have to declare this publicly now because they have so much private data about me that they have managed to even convince some of people that know me that they are me. I'm being blamed for things they are writing.
I hope that the perpetrator just considers the legal consequences of this. I hope that they consider California Penal Code 528.5, in which it discusses impersonating someone online for malicious intent being a prosecutable crime. California Penal Code 646.9 (stalking) and 530.5 (knowingly receiving stolen medical information) are also things that they should consult a lawyer about.
I suspect that this page was created for the manufacture of evidence (for the divorce.) Manufacturing evidence can carry a sentence of six months in jail. And fines.
Make no mistake, if I can see this prosecuted to the full extent of the law, I absolutely will. Hopefully, the imposter will just stop. Now. Before they make things worse for themselves, as well as everyone else.
Cybercrimes aren't prosecuted very much because it's hard to prove who did it. In this instance, it is either my two best friends or the tiny handful of people (whose names I do know) that obtained the information. I imagine that it wouldn't be too difficult for the cops to figure out who did it.
So, to the perpetrator of this criminal nonsense, I say this: STOP. Leave me alone. Stop impersonating me. Stop pretending to be me. Just STOP. NOW.
Or continue risking jail time.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61576698380959
‘HOW WE REMEMBER’
by Anne Cooper
While enjoying a barbecue with friends, it might be of interest to consider that a place as remote from the battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania as is the Mendocino Coast has ties to the Civil War. The holiday we observe as Memorial Day has its origins in the sadness and losses resulting from the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865. Initially known as “Decoration Day,” it was widely observed on Saturday, May 30, 1868, to commemorate the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers by tending to their graves. It did not become an officially recognized federal holiday until 1971, when the last Monday in May was designated as Memorial Day.
Those ties derive from the people who settled here; many of whom were veterans of that war. The timing of the advent of the mills and the growth of coastal towns was such that the generations involved were either of an age to be swept up by the Gold Rush or swept into the struggle which became the Civil War. One of those was John Nelson Dennen, who in 1877 built this home in Little River; but prior to those peaceful times, he took part in historic moments. At the age of about 17, this lad born in Augusta joined Maine’s 31st infantry. The journal he kept during his service is part of the Dennen Collection at the Kelley House Museum.
The journal measures 4 ½” by 7 ¼” and appears to have been designed for keeping accounts. Portions of it were written in pencil and then at some later date written over with brown ink by the same hand. Reading through this handwritten record, some of which is still bound together by the original string, is a thrilling experience for a historian. These pages were at the siege of Petersburg!
Dennen’s service began when he “enlisted for three years” on February 22nd, 1864. On April 16th, he was mustered into service, and two days later he started for Washington. Dennen kept a record of his expenses as he traveled south through Fall River, Massachusetts, to Philadelphia, Washington, then on to Alexandria, arriving at camp on the 23rd of April. On May 5th, the young soldier recorded that he “got within 3 miles of Wilderness.” The next day he wrote succinctly that he “got to Wilderness and had a fight with the rebs and made three charges. lost $10.” His survival was celebrated by an activity with which he became familiar: digging breastworks. The night of May 8th was spent in Chancellorsville, expecting an attack. The soldiers started for Spotsylvania the next day but stopped within three miles of the town. On the 11th, he “laid behind the brestworks [sic] and that night went back to the rear and got two rations of fresh beef.” John Dennen was wounded on May 18th at Spotsylvania and arrived in Fredericksburg the following day. He did not record the nature of the wound or how it was received.
The months which followed were filled with trips to hospitals in Philadelphia and New York. A furlough brought him home in August to fish and pick black berries. He returned to service making his way from Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor (today’s Liberty Island) to City Point, Virginia and then to Petersburg. There he endured the seemingly interminable days of that siege, marked only by battalion drills, picket duty, guard duty, laying in at camp, illness (he only specifically mentioned headaches), and the rare game of baseball. John Dennen spent Thanksgiving that year with the 16th Maine infantry. He wrote that it snowed on December 10th.
Six days into the new year of 1865, Dennen “went over to the Generals and saw 1 man hung for desertion.” On the day when federal troops finally entered Petersburg, the record becomes nearly illegible due to a smearing of the pencil on the pages and possibly water damage. On April 2, 1865, Dennen described action in which 800 prisoners were taken. The entry for April 4th states “We was on the march.” He spent the days just prior to and immediately after the surrender near Nottoway Court House, which is between Appomattox and Petersburg. There is no discernible mention of the surrender, or of Lincoln’s assassination. His company participated in the Army’s “Grand Review” in Washington on May 22, 1865. On leaving the army, he had earned the rank of Sergeant Major.
John Dennen’s family home still stands on present day Highway 1 and is currently an inn.
— reprint from The Mendocino Beacon, May 24, 2018
(KelleyHouseMuseum.org)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, May 29, 2025
RICARDO ARENAS, 29, Potter Valley. Domestic battery.
SERGIO CERVANTES-RODRIGUEZ, 34, Ukiah. Shoplifting, controlled substance, concealed dirk-dagger, resisting.
JONATHON DELBELLO, 34, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, possession of deadly weapon while in custody.
AUDRA HRUSKA, 53, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors.
MELVIN KING, 39, Gualala. Paraphernalia, failure to appear.
STACY OAKLEY, 58, Albion. Domestic battery.
KRISTO OUSEY, 41, Ukiah. Controlled substance. (Frequent flyer.)
ERNEST STEPHENS, 53, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear.
P-D REJECTION
by Fred Gardner
Darius Anderson and other owners of the Press-Democrat have been major investors in Cannacraft, a very successful and very corrupt cannabiz based in Santa Rosa. Darius's brother Kirk was Cannacraft's chief operating officer, 2016-2018. In 2019 Darius and a group of rich cronies bought Cannacraft's in-house testing operation, Sonoma Lab Works, to create a legal firewall between the two wings of the business.
It's hard to acknowledge that the Press-Democrat can sink even lower than it's been under Anderson and Bosco.
After moving to Kenwood last year, I sent them a piece praising the local nursery/feed store. As a free-lancer I’d had plenty of rejections over the years, but this was the least offensive, most positive, pro-business thing I’d ever written. I confidently emailed it to the PD's managing editor a few weeks before Christmas. Didn't hear back.
One day when I was in Santa Rosa, I hand-carried a copy to their office. Fittingly, the sign for "Sonoma Media Investments" was more prominent than the name of the newspaper. The front door was locked. Through the plate glass I could see some female clerical workers behind a counter. I rang the bell. A young woman looked at an older woman for guidance. She got a nod (I pass for straight) and came to the door, which she opened just enough so we could talk. I asked if this was the editorial office. She said yes, the editors were upstairs. I said I had brought an article to submit. She said "You can't go upstairs," and reached out to take my offering.
Never heard back.
Highway 12 Revisited
If you've ever driven Highway 12 between Santa Rosa and Sonoma, especially if there was a kid in the car, you’ve almost certainly noticed the metallic animals in front of – and peering over the fence from – Swede's Feeds in Kenwood.
Recently I was at Swede's getting scratch for Rosie's chickens and found myself wondering about the provenance of a small sculpted pig… and all the other remarkable creatures on display.
General manager Katie Aimo filled me in. Dinosaurs and roosters are the most popular. The big pieces - the 12-foot Tyranasaurus Rex, the 10-foot elephant, the 15-foot Woolly Mammoth, the 16-foot giraffe – all come from Mexico. They are delivered every few months by Cesar Anaya, who makes regular trips from here to Guadalajara in "a big Dodge truck with a 20-foot trailer.
“He brings 3-foot sculptures, too,” she adds, “Crows, deer, armadillos, warthogs… “
The smaller pieces, such as the foot-long pig I coveted, "might come from artisans in the Philippines, Guam, India, Haiti, Kenya, Zimbabwe… These countries don't have recycling programs. Everything goes into landfills. People pull out car parts, they use oil drums – whatever they can weld – and they make all kinds of beautiful creations.
“We source lots of fair trade pieces whenever possible. This ensures that the artisans receive fair wages, health care and educational opportunities.”
I wondered if someday the beautiful creations might be collectibles showing up on Antiques Road Show. "The quality varies," Aimo said, "from flimsyish to amazing. Recently we've been getting some very well-made sculptures from Vietnam with an Alice in Wonderland theme." She pointed to a 3-foot-high dragon. "Look at the welding of all these scales! And the way it's brushed! This piece could be in an art gallery!”
Swedes’s busy season is Spring, when Kenwood’s feed store/nursery sells plants and tons of soil (literally) to gardeners from Glen Ellen to Santa Rosa. The busy season(s) for metal animals is before Christmas and Mothers Day.
Aspen Mayers and Michael Scheffer have owned Swede’s for 27 years. They encourage planting to encourage pollinators. “Now more than ever,” says Aimo, “planting with purpose is so important to protect our insects and conserve our precious water.”
Swede’s is a certified Monarch butterfly way station. “Planting natives is good for pollinators, so we carry native milkweed and nectar sources,” says Aimo. “We need to increase biodiversity all over the world, so why not start here?"
I asked if pigs sold well. "Pigs not so much," said Aimo. "It takes a special person. I'll look at a pig and I just wonder 'who's gonna take that pig home?'"
FRONTLINE COMMUNITIES, SHAREHOLDERS BLAST CHEVRON'S TOXIC RECORD ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND CLIMATE
by Dan Bacher
As Chevron continues to spend record amounts of money to defeat climate legislation in California, a coalition of shareholders, frontline communities, and activists around the world increased the pressure on the oil giant’s virtual Annual General Meeting this morning for its egregious record on human rights, climate, and corporate accountability.
“In a clear sign of growing investor dissent, 25% of shareholders voted in favor of lowering the threshold to call a special meeting to 10% (representing approximately 436 million shares, valued at around $60 billion),” according to a press release from Amazon Watch. “This is substantially higher than the threshold of 5% to 10% support usually garnered by shareholder resolutions not supported by management, a move aimed at bolstering oversight amid escalating reputational risk.”…
GETTING TREES AT COSTCO IN RENO, FROM A FRIEND (via George Hollister)
GROWING VEGGIES ON THE EDGE
by Marshall Newman
Anderson Valley locals have it good when it comes to gardening. The valley’s climate is neigh perfect for growing a variety of fruits, flowers and vegetables. The soil may not be perfect, but with the right amendment – be it compost, manure and/or fertilizer – it works fine. Heck, Anderson Valley even grows world class Pinot Noir, arguably the most finicky wine grape out there.
By contrast, the Richmond and Sunset Districts, on the western edge of San Francisco, are anything but perfect when it comes to gardening. The proximity of the Pacific Ocean eliminates the threat of frost, but in every other way the Outside Lands (as these districts once were called) are a challenge when it comes to growing stuff. Temperatures rarely exceed the mid-60s. Fog frequently cuts the hours of sunshine, as do neighbors’ fences. The soil is sand, as the area was sand dunes before development arrived.
Hot weather vegetables like peppers, corn and okra are nonstarters in western San Francisco; there isn’t enough heat to produce crops. Even cold weather vegetables probably shiver now and again during the growing season. Starting vegetables from seeds in spring may be doable, but isn’t practical unless the home gardener has a greenhouse or germination boxes. Soil amendment – LOTS of soil amendment – is a must.
Nevertheless, every spring I work the soil and plant a few vegetables in the Sunset District. After more than a decade, I should know better. Let’s call it a triumph of hope over experience. Let’s also call it aspirational; an annual attempt to create a “green thumb” where clearly there isn’t one.
But experience counts, because we intrepid gardeners on the edge eventually learn what works. Like soil amendment. In the beginning I added compost. More recently, I have transitioned to chicken manure, which works better but must be worked into the soil well before planting to avoid burning the young plants or contaminating the crops with dangerous bacteria.
Experience also helps with deciding the vegetables to plant. Over the years, I have planted cauliflower, broccoli, beets, radicchio, several varieties of lettuce, and even more varieties of tomatoes. Cauliflower and broccoli were frustrating; the crops were small at best. Radicchio lost its appeal after a couple of years. Beets never got very big, but were delicious cooked or thinly sliced in salads.
Now I limit myself to planting tomatoes and lettuce. Tomatoes because a homegrown tomato has flavor no store-bought tomato can match. Lettuce because it likes the local climate and produces well.
As noted, I have grown lots of different varieties of each. These days I only grow a few.
In tomatoes, I am partial to cherry tomato varieties, both because they reliably ripen and because they yield decent crops. Sweet 100s, Sun Gold and Yellow Plum Cherry have dominated the past two years. The only regular-sized tomato I have planted recently has been Early Girl, which isn’t hugely productive, but ripens fully. I previously tried two varieties supposedly suited to the local climate: Potrero Hill and San Francisco Fog. Apparently Potrero Hill was forgettable, as I cannot remember if I even got a crop. San Francisco Fog was a dud; it ripened but had almost no flavor.
My lettuce choices also have narrowed considerably. I have given up on the butter head, green leaf and red leaf lettuces. Unless the watering schedule is perfect, they fail regularly in the Sunset’s sandy soil. Romaine lettuce has become my garden lettuce of choice. My current favorite is Spotted Trout, which handles cool climate (and an occasional heat spike), local soil and my inconsistent watering with ease. It produces well, adds crispness and color to salads, and is slow to bolt.
The pleasure of vegetable gardening on the western edge of San Francisco is mostly in the doing. In my experience, the value of vegetables harvested rarely covers the cost of plants, soil amendment, support stakes, etc. Nevertheless, lots of folks in the Sunset and Richmond Districts – like me - put in vegetables every spring. We are buoyed by the sight of our plants growing and setting crops. We are thrilled to harvest those crops. There is a feeling of accomplishment in the fresh flavors of those vegetables, made sweeter by knowing those flavors are hard won. For me, and for many like me in this cool, foggy corner of the world, it is enough.
WE TASTE-TESTED HIGH NOON. DOES AMERICA’S MOST POPULAR SPIRIT LIVE UP TO THE HYPE?
by Esther Mobley
In case you haven’t noticed, High Noon is everywhere.
Gallo’s canned vodka seltzer is the top-selling spirit by volume in the U.S. — meaning more of this stuff is sold than Tito’s or Jack Daniel’s. When my colleague Jess Lander and I learned that extraordinary fact, we knew we had to write about it. What we discovered in our reporting was a whole subculture devoted to Nooners, as the drink is known to some of its dearest fans, spanning golf clubs, Barstool Sports and basically every bar in the Marina District.
Nearly every source we interviewed for the story said that they believe High Noon is a superior product to competitors like White Claw and Truly. The vodka-based drink is also more expensive than its malt-based competitors, due to the fact that spirits are taxed more highly. I outed myself long ago, in the hard seltzer infancy period of 2019, as a White Claw detester. When Jess and I set out to write this story, I had never actually tasted High Noon, but I was eager to see if I could in good conscience jump on the bandwagon.
So we conducted a tasting at the Chronicle newsroom. I bought a couple cases of High Noon and enlisted colleagues from various newsroom departments — including several representatives of Gen Z — to sample eight flavors with me. (According to its website, High Noon comes in 26 different flavors.)
The good news is that the session was nowhere near as punishing as the blind hard seltzer tasting I organized back in 2019, when I subjected my colleagues Janelle Bitker, Soleil Ho and Paolo Lucchesi to 38 hard seltzers that were uniformly terrible.
The bad news is that I found the High Noons mostly undrinkable, and my colleagues, even the Zoomers, largely agreed.
“This tastes like if you dropped two cherry Starbursts in a Perrier and left it overnight,” said Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub of High Noon black cherry. Copy chief and native Minnesotan Linda Houser observed, “This one will sell in the Midwest.”
“Bubblicious cotton candy flavor” is how investigative reporter Susie Neilson (a Pulitzer finalist!) characterized the raspberry iced tea.
These drinks shouldn’t taste that sweet, based on their nutrition facts (2.6 grams of sugar per can for the non-iced tea variations we tried), but they all smelled like candy, and several of them tasted like candy too. The pineapple variation reminded us of a gummy bear; the watermelon was like a Jolly Rancher that had melted in the sun.
The High Noon iced teas tasted downright cloying, despite the fact that they have zero grams of sugar. We had to assume — though could not verify, since ingredient labeling is not required for alcohol — they had been jacked up with an artificial sweetener like Stevia. Some colleagues liked the lemon iced tea, which graphics reporter Harsha Devulapalli likened to a spiked Arizona, in a good way.
By far the best of the flavors we tried, in my opinion, was grapefruit, which restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan accurately described as a ringer for pamplemousse La Croix. It had a not-too-artificial grapefruit smell, was pleasantly tart and wasn’t too sweet.
I’d drink it. But if given the choice, I’d rather mix vodka with soda water and squeeze a juicy slice of grapefruit into it.
What I'm Reading
The company Ocean Fathoms got in trouble for aging wine underwater off the coast of Santa Barbara without the proper permits. As a result, it’s relocated to Oregon, which appears to be thrilled to have its bottles aging underneath its shores, reports Libby Dowsett of KGW, a Portland television station. There are some great lines in here: The Santa Barbara district attorney “questions why customers would pay hundreds of dollars for a bottle of regular wine that disrupts sea life.”
With the retirement of several vintners who were pioneers in Arizona winegrowing, the state’s industry faces an uncertain future, writes Georgann Yara in an engaging, comprehensive piece for the Phoenix New Times.
The New York Times’ Eric Asimov reports on the state of Virginia wine, which he sees as finally coming into its own. While there, he also paid a visit to Trump Winery, whose wines were “inconsistent.”
(SF Chronicle)
A READER RECOMMENDS:
Watch the trailer for this fun film ‘Rebel with a Clause’ a documentary by Brandt Johnson about Ellen Jovin, the grammar maven I wrote you about some time ago. Our Bay Area paper listed it today in documenatries playing around the Bay Area.
www.rebelwithaclause.com
INVESTIGATING THE WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS
by Scott Ostler
Muckraking is hard work, one would assume, but Irvin Muchnick doesn’t seem worn out by almost four decades of such dirty duty.
We have met for coffee a couple of times, and the Berkeley author and investigative reporter, now 70, looked peppy and sounded upbeat. All that digging into the slimy, dark corners of sport certainly hasn’t made Muchnick wealthy — he still hasn’t replaced his old Honda Civic that was stolen four years ago — but it hasn’t broken him down or dimmed his spirit.
“For whatever reason, this role suits me,” Muchnick said. “The payoffs are few and far between, but they’re there. I love my work, fortunately.”
His work? Since the late ’80s, Muchnick has written a trillion words, give or take, exposing various creeps, pedophiles, enablers, profiteers and other vermin in the world of sport.
That makes Muchnick a hero to me. Some of us keyboard pounders write the write. Others try to right the wrong, and those folks have my admiration. The least I can do is occasionally buy them a cup of coffee.
Most of Muchnick’s work has dealt with abuses and crimes in football, professional wrestling and swimming. He has written six books, tons of magazine and newspaper articles, and reported extensively and relentlessly on his website.
His most recent book is “Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe.” Muchnick takes pains to point out that most youth swim coaches are honorable and honest, but “if it’s Tuesday, a coach somewhere is preying on a young athlete, because that’s just the way it is.”
He learned that dirty little secret about swimming by accident, the same way he stumbled into his odd calling in the first place. The beginning: Muchnick grew up in St. Louis, where his uncle, Sam Muchnick, was a wrestling promoter, kind of the godfather of pro wrestling in America. This was before the arrival of cable TV, global advertising and Vince McMahon.
Little Irv got to hang out with the wrestlers. He came to know them as people, not human cartoon characters, and when wrestling blew up into a major culture phenomenon in the mid-’80s, Muchnick did some of the very first inside-wrestling journalism, peeking behind the theatrical curtain. In 2007 he published his first book, “Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal.”
He dug hard and found stuff. Like the story behind Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’s girlfriend’s “accidental” death. When the newspaper for whom Muchnick was freelancing got cold feet, he posted the true-crime account on his own blog.
There was no turning back. Muchnick hadn’t found his calling; it had found him.
He wrote about Hulk Hogan’s steroid issues. He wrote “Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.” In that book’s third printing, in 2020, Muchnick’s new introduction explains how the wrestling phenomenon pushed the rise of Donald Trump, a Vince McMahon crony.
The prevalence of concussions in wrestling led him to dig into the same issue in football, and he wrote, “Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads: The American Way of Death in Football Conditioning.” Muchnick is not a big football fan, calling it “a system socially imposed on young men” and “a blood sport.”
After Cal football player Ted Agu dropped dead while on a training run in 2014, local mainstream media (raises hand) pretty much dropped the ball on the story of Cal’s shameful coverup. Muchnick dug in and wrote/reported extensively. He sued Cal under the state Public Records Act and won, uncovering a lot of coverup. Cal ultimately admitted liability for Agu’s death and settled with the family.
Digging up dirt, Muchnick found, was hard. From 1994 to 2000, as assistant director of the National Writers Union, he fought for writers’ rights. He was the lead respondent in the landmark 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case (Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick) for freelance writers’ economic rights. He successfully sued the Department of Homeland Security to obtain records of a swim coach he was investigating.
Stories kept finding Muchnick. In 2004 his 8-year-old daughter took up swimming, joining the Berkeley Bears club, coached by former Cal swimmer Jesse Stovall. Muchnick loved the scene, happily taking his daughter to predawn practices. He even took lessons himself.
In 2009, after Stovall had been pushed out of the club over financial improprieties and was coaching masters swimming on the Cal campus, the story came out that the year before, he had sex with an underage club swimmer while chaperoning her at a national meet. Muchnick contributed to an investigative story in the East Bay Express, which did not endear him to the local swim community.
“The biggest danger of the kind of work that I do is that it can be perceived as trolling,” Muchnick said. “I don’t think I’m a troll, I think I’m an investigative reporter. But I haven’t been perfect.”
After the swim story, Muchnick was ready to move on, but fate stepped in.
“The story came out, I thought, ‘I’m done, I’ve done my little rabble-rousing thing,’ which I’d done in other areas,” Muchnick said. “The next week (ABC News’) ‘20/20’ aired a report (on widespread sexual abuse in amateur swimming), and I realized that what I had found on my team was just a local piece of a national problem.”
That plunged Muchnick into years of investigating horrors in the world of competitive and recreational swimming, culminating in his 2024 book, “Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe.” Please read it if you believe your club swimmer child is protected by the U.S. Center for SafeSport.
Subtle book titles, then, are not Muchnick’s thing. He names names, he shines a bright light on cockroaches, but with a higher purpose.
“My real hope would be to actually change the youth sports system,” Muchnick said. “I don’t think I’m interested in getting all the bad guys, that’s not really possible. I’m really interested in our taking a look at the youth sports system we have in this country, which has turned adults into children and children into adults. It’s hard, because I’m a sports fan, too, we all love our sports, we just don’t want to deal with the sausage factory behind them.”
The swim book, Muchnick said, might have been his “last rodeo” in muckraking. He has veered off that trail. He’s finishing a biography of Rikidozan, a legendary, pioneering Japanese wrestler in the ’50s. Typically, he won’t make much money off this book. Monetizing his work has never been Muchnick’s specialty. He has already spent most of his small advance on translation of research material.
Muchnick, who has four kids, one of whom was adopted from China, said of the book, “It’s my love letter to Japanese and Korean culture.”
All of his writing has been love letters, really. Like wrestlers, it’s cleverly disguised.
(SF Chronicle)
CHUCK WEPNER:
"The night before the championship fight, I bought my wife Phyllis a blue negligee. I was confident, I was on a nine bout winning streak and I bought the negligee and I gave it to her in Cleveland the night before the fight. I said, 'tomorrow night I want you to wear this in bed because tomorrow night you're going to be sleeping with the heavyweight champion of the world'. She said, 'OK, no problem.'"
"After the fight I came back to the hotel, I lost the fight.. and walked into the hotel room. And there she is sitting on the end of the bed with the blue negligee, and she says to me, 'am I going to Ali's room or is he coming to mine?' She had real good sense of humor."
JAKE TAPPER'S BIDEN BOOK IS HILARIOUS AND INSANE
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's mass media apologia is leaps and bounds more demented than the book's subject, Joe Biden
by Matt Taibbi
I wasn’t going to do it, really. After stepping to the edge of nervous collapse of late, I promised, no more Conventional Wisdom Bestsellers. I saw ‘Abundance’ in an airport and turned away before registering cover art. I had the same plan for ‘Original Sin,’ the “controversial” book in which CNN’s Jake Tapper teams with Alex Thompson of Axios to get real about the media and Joe Biden’s health. One moment of late-night weakness later, I was reading from Chapter One, “He Totally Fucked Us”:
“No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error. But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden. Harris, loyal to Biden to a fault, might never say such a thing. But plenty of people around her would… ‘We got so screwed by Biden as a party,’ David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us.. Harris, he said, was a ‘great soldier,’ but the compressed 107-day race was ‘a fucking nightmare.’
‘And it’s all Biden,’ Plouffe said. Referring to Biden’s decision to run for reelection, then wait more than three weeks to bow out, Plouffe added: ‘He totally fucked us’.”
Holy catfish! I thought from online buzz that ‘Original Sin’ was a mea culpa. It would own press failures to cover Joe Biden’s infirmity in a super-belated version of Canadian comic Bruce McCullough’s “I’m sorry I caused all that cancer” routine. But ‘Original Sin’ isn’t that. It’s much crazier! Instead of a dreary and predictable book-length excuse for thousands of media professionals simultaneously whiffing on the most obvious story in history, it’s an ambitious book-length effort to absolve all concerned, pin an industry’s coverage mistake on its President Droolcup subject (a gambit many times ballsier than blaming one reporter, a la Judith Miller), all while additionally swirling a new storm system of bullshit storylines to delay more serious questions about things like who was just president for four years.
It’s the opposite of a mea culpa and the literary degree of difficulty is awesome, equivalent to a blind unicyclist trying to juggle six chainsaws. Do Jake and Alex pull it off? They don’t! But they sure leave a hell of a lot of blood on stage…
https://www.racket.news/p/jake-tappers-biden-book-is-hilarious
THE TRUE HERO OF MOUNTAIN MEADOWS
Juanita Leavitt Brooks spent nearly five decades researching the story of the Mountain Meadows massacre. She suffered the condemnation of her neighbors and of the Church authorities, but her 1950 book—The Mountain Meadows Massacre—restored that fatal moment in time to the historical record. Eastern publishing houses turned it down, but Stanford University Press finally published it. When a movie deal seemed eminent, Church authorities applied pressure to kill the deal. But the book had legs, remaining in print to this day. Despite her hesitancy to blame Brigham Young, and her too ready acceptance of the lies of Indian complicity, Brooks’ efforts to vindicate John D. Lee and expose the collective guilt for the tragedy became a classic. Interest in the tragedy was renewed, although many historians preferred to ignore such an unpleasant story. Among Mormon historians, the party line remained that “the Indians made us do it.” In 1961, Lee was restored to the Mormon Church, Brooks had won her battle, but a greater one remained.…
https://truewestmagazine.com/article/the-ghosts-of-mountain-meadows/
LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT
On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama
Tariff Rulings Inject New Uncertainty Into Trump Trade Strategy
Trump Officials Intensify Attacks on Judges as Court Losses Mount
White House Health Report Included Fake Citations
Top Officials Overseeing Deportations Leave Their Roles at ICE
Trump’s Deportations Haunt Workers in the Fields of Rural New York
Companies Pull Back From Pride Events as Trump Targets D.E.I.
Japan Welcomes a New Sumo Champ. Surprise: He’s Japanese
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I'll confess that one of the reasons I voted for Trump in 2024 (and donated to his campaign) was because of Kid Rock's awesome rap song at the RNC. Having Dana White there was great too. We need more fun in our lives and less seriousness. President Trump cracks me up and I wish he could serve in office forever. Keep up the great work, Mister President.
TRUMP’S LYING NOW PRODUCES DEADLY, COSTLY AND SOON CALAMITOUS CONSEQUENCES
by Ralph Nader
The chronic lies of Der Führer Trump, hour by hour, day after day, are having deadly and costly impacts on the American people, with many more casualties in the pipeline of wreckage he and his henchman Elon Musk have wrought since January 20.
Trump’s lies, threats, and fake promises come from what dozens of psychologists who in 2017 perceived Trump as possessing an “unstable, dangerous personality.” Trump, a serial megalomaniac, announced recently: “I RUN THE COUNTRY AND THE WORLD.”
Confident that he can violate any law, any constitutional restraint, any international treaty, Dangerous Donald says he is “having fun,” flipping out one illegal executive order after another with cruel and vicious hammer blows against:
Dedicated civil servants performing crucial tasks for Americans he has fired or replaced;
Recent immigrants, paying taxes and working essential jobs at low wages (harvesting our food, cleaning up after us, caring for our children and elderly, for example); and
Law enforcers and courts who worked to bring him to justice.
The list of Trump’s wreckage is endless.
The torrent of Trumpian falsehoods have their own mass media – his own social media – and the mainstream media which still reports them out, including repeating his CAPITAL LETTERS, without giving his victims any right of reply, even when they are named. True, the mass media now tells us when some of his wild and crazy concoctions are “false” like his shameless false claim that a picture of graves was purportedly of slain white South African farmers.
But fact-checking doesn’t reach most of the people who receive Trump’s lies. For these people, his carve-outs of reality are unrebutted. Unfathomably, reporters do not demand that he, Donald Trump, provide the evidence and the legal basis for his prevarications every single time they impact policy. Rarely, when they do, as in the case of Trump alleging widespread fraud by Social Security recipients, he backed off.
Mostly, however, starting with his endless assertion that he won the 2020 election “in a landslide,” eye-rolling reporters and editors don’t seem to see any point in routinely saying to him: “Prove it or admit you are mistaken.” In the vernacular – “put up or shut up.”
It doesn’t matter that Know-it-all Trump never admits any wrongdoing, any mistake, any failure, or any broken promises to his believing MAGA supporters. What matters is after a while, more and more people begin to see that he’s a fake, a delusionary con man and turn against him and proclaim “YOU’RE FIRED!”
For now, ensconced in the White House, Trump’s lies are no longer just words; they have deadly and costly effects and can soon produce calamitous consequences.
Here are some samples.
Trump falsely dismisses with repeated disbelief the violent climate crises – notwithstanding record wildfires, floods, hurricanes, sea level rise and droughts. His response to these problems: push to abolish FEMA, already firing thousands of staff. He is also dismissing scientists who study, document and predict approaching climate disasters, from federal agencies, including the National Weather Service, and the EPA and cutting grants to scientific organizations and Universities.
He continues to scoff at expert predictions of emerging pandemics, as he did in early 2020, mocking and dillydallying, while COVID-19 spread, resulting in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. His response to these perils: strip-mine the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health expert staff and their grants to outside scientists.
He falsely asserts that over-regulation of widespread corporate crookery is harming the economy and costing jobs. His response to these falsehoods: close down agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, firing regulators illegally, taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat and, recently, just openly failing to enforce the law at all and dropping existing criminal cases against over 100 companies, including the Boeing crimes crashing two 737 Max aircraft.
He absurdly and cravenly asserts the super-rich and giant corporations are over-taxed. His response to this ridiculous allegation: push through Congress super-rich tax cuts, ballooning the deficit, forcing cuts in Medicaid and even Medicare, afflicting people with disabilities, and closing many rural hospitals (See, New York Times: What’s in Trump’s Tax Bill?) He grotesquely describes this legislation as a “big, beautiful bill” even though it will cut critical feeding programs for poor children, severely weaken “Meals on Wheels,” “Head Start,” and federal food inspection programs.
Millions of people would lose health insurance and other life-saving and life-sustaining social safety nets. Savagely, Trump is increasing the bloated, wasteful military budget far beyond what the Generals asked for and loading tens of billions of dollars onto the Department of Homeland Security to police a relatively quiet southern border and contract for more private prisons to hold immigrants or asylum seekers whom they round up.
If the Senate doesn’t throw out this House-passed bill (by one vote) and only tweaks it on its way to the enriching Trump and his bloody pen, consider this the beginning of the end for the Republican Party in the coming elections. For Trump is ruthlessly skewering both Red and Blue state voters and families, breaking contracts with small businesses, rescinding popular clean energy programs, reducing student loans, and roiling the stock markets holding the savings and pensions of tens of millions of conservative and liberal families. He is going berserk against the American people while shielding massive corporate crime and corporate welfare from law and order.
It would help this growing movement of street protests against Trump if, to take two institutions, banding together as labor unions and universities they stop cowering before the Tyrant and roar back with all their unused, formidable influence and members. Bully Donald has come a long way using intimidation to pick off his victims because they do not push back in an organized fashion.
Moreover, the feeble Democratic Party just doesn’t fire its corporate-conflicted consultants, and retire its serial losers controlling its leadership, which lost elections to the worst most vulnerable GOP in history. They should patriotically quit and welcome younger, progressive leaders, some already challenging corporate Democrats in the coming primaries, to take over and replace decay and despair with dynamism and dexterity. These challengers know they are in a race against time and have no time for the lumbering, bureaucratic, disarrayed entrenched Democratic apparatchiks to lose our Republic to a fascistic dictatorship wrecking our country at warp speed.
This younger generation should connect with older, seasoned progressive Democrats who for decades have been fighting for real reforms in our country and are eager to lend their experience and advice. They include former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who in 2001 penned an op-ed in the Washington Post declaring “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead.” Other stalwarts include Jim Hightower (Texas), Joel Rogers (Wisconsin), Robert Kuttner (Boston), Bishop William Barber (North Carolina), Joan Claybrook (DC), Mark Green, co-author with me of the book on Trump titled WRECKING AMERICA (2020) and many others.
These people and others (see winningamerica.net) do not have marbles in their mouths; they know how to communicate with people on forward directions supported by a megamajority of liberal and conservative voters. (See my 2014 book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance To Dismantle The Corporate State).
RICHEST IN CONGRESS: PUSHING TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH, SLASHING AID FOR MILLIONS
by Alexis Sterling
As President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” advances through Congress, a new report reveals that 35 of the wealthiest Republican lawmakers stand to profit while their own constituents face deep cuts to critical public services. According to the watchdog group Accountable.US, the top 10 richest Republican senators and the top 25 richest House Republicans — collectively worth more than $2.5 billion — are backing a legislative package that would extend lucrative tax breaks originally introduced by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. At the same time, the bill would slash funding for food assistance, healthcare, and higher education for tens of millions of Americans.
“While pushing for more tax cuts to line their own pockets,” the report notes, “many of the richest Republican members are pushing for draconian cuts to the very social programs that millions of their constituents rely on,” including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and federal student aid.
In total, the proposed cuts would threaten the well-being of more than 14 million constituents in the districts and states represented by these lawmakers. Among them are 6.3 million SNAP recipients, 9.2 million Medicaid enrollees, and over 3.9 million students who depend on federal education grants.
Florida Senator Rick Scott, the wealthiest member of the Senate Republican caucus, is worth an estimated $551.7 million. Before entering politics, Scott made his fortune in the for-profit healthcare industry. His state is home to nearly 3 million SNAP recipients, over 3.5 million people enrolled in Medicaid, and more than 1.15 million students who received federal financial aid. Yet Scott, who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, is among those advocating to reduce federal support for these same programs.
Nine of the ten richest GOP senators hold seats on key committees driving budget reconciliation — including Budget, Finance, Appropriations, Banking, and Energy and Natural Resources. Together, these ten senators are worth more than $1.1 billion. According to the report, they represent some of the highest-need constituencies in the country and are pursuing legislation that would harm the very voters who rely most on federal support.
The House side tells a similar story. The 25 wealthiest Republican representatives have a combined net worth of over $1.4 billion. Nineteen of them hold seats on five major committees that shape federal spending: the House Budget Committee, Ways and Means Committee, Appropriations Committee, Energy and Commerce Committee, and Financial Services Committee.
Florida Representative Vern Buchanan, worth $249.3 million, is the vice chair of the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax legislation. He praised the bill after its passage in the House, stating, “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the definition of promises made and promises kept. This is a commonsense, pro-growth, pro-family, America First bill. We will not stop fighting until we get this bill across the finish line and to the president’s desk.”
But critics point to glaring conflicts of interest and the devastating impact the bill could have on working-class families. According to the report, “6.3 million constituents represented by the top 10 richest senators and 2.1 million constituents represented by the top 25 richest representatives use SNAP and are at risk of losing their food security.” It adds, “9.2 million constituents represented by the top 10 richest senators and 4 million constituents represented by the top 25 richest representatives use Medicaid and are at risk of losing critically needed healthcare.”
The education cuts are equally severe. The report warns that “3 million and 930,000 federal student aid grants were given to constituents within these lawmakers’ states and districts, respectively, and proposed cuts threaten â˜to price students out of pursuing higher education.’”
Senator Bernie Sanders, who is currently traveling the country for his “Fighting Oligarchy Tour,” condemned the legislation on social media: “As Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill moves to the Senate, we must make it clear: There is nothing ‘beautiful’ about giving huge tax breaks to billionaires while cutting healthcare, nutrition, and education for working families. It is grossly immoral and, together, we must defeat it.”
Only two Republicans in the House — Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio — voted against the bill. Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, who chairs the House Freedom Caucus, voted “present.” All other Republicans supported the legislation, despite some previously warning leadership that their districts had high Medicaid usage and they could not support cuts to the program.
The report also notes that “six of those Republican lawmakers — Reps. Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania, Rob Wittman of Virginia, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Young Kim of California, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey — could directly benefit from the expansion of the ‘pass-through deduction’ in the package.”
Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk stated, “The richest Republicans in Congress are happy to raise costs for millions of their own constituents and jeopardize healthcare for millions more, while they get a tax cut for themselves. The Trump tax scam is a grift for the ultra rich, including those who are in charge of passing this legislation themselves, and a betrayal to hardworking Americans everywhere.”
The structure of the legislation and the alignment of personal financial interests with political power suggest a system increasingly governed by self-interest rather than public service. By consolidating tax advantages for the ultra rich while dismantling key pillars of the social safety net, the proposed law threatens to deepen economic inequality and institutionalize class-based disparities in access to healthcare, food, and education.
(NationOfChange)
UR-FASCISM
by Umberto Eco
In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.
I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.
In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly colored and smelled good.
One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the villa of a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. I met him in their garden where some ladies, surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative French. Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My first image of American liberators was thus—after so many palefaces in black shirts—that of a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying: “Oui, merci beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j’aime le champagne…” Unfortunately there was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.
In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.
In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.
In my country today there are those who are saying that the myth of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different colors. Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights—the windows closed, the blackout making the small space around the set a lone luminous halo—listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to the partisans. They were cryptic and poetic at the same time (The sun also rises, The roses will bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la Franchi.” Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader of the most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood. Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.
In my country today there are some who say that the War of Liberation was a tragic period of division, and that all we need is national reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed, refoulée, verdrängt. But Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, “OK, come back and do it again.” We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.
But who are They?
If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.
Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?
Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings. Thus it is worth asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World War was generally defined throughout the world as a struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with Fascists, even when he thinks of the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR, “The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory against fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”
During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists”—meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. … Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?
Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.
Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.
Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.
Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.
There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.
There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In Italy there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such titles as Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech or States of Mind Created by Fascism.) The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivated and reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the concept of art for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.
The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Russia would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the bard of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism—which were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de siècle decadence.
Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.
Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university students’ association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new fascist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot where new ideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.
During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.
All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).
The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.
So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:
1 2 3 4
abc bcd cde def
Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
- The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
- Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
- Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
- No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
- Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
- Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
- To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.
- The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
- For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
- Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.
- In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.
- Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
- Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples”—“maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
- Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties—among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.
Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.
The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,”—I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words.
We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.
Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:
Sulla spalletta del ponte
Le teste degli impiccati
Nell’acqua della fonte
La bava degli impiccati.
Sul lastrico del mercato
Le unghie dei fucilati
Sull’erba secca del prato
I denti dei fucilati.
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
La nostra carne non è più d’uomini
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.
Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti
E sulla terra faremo libertà
Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti
La giustizia che si farà.
(On the bridge’s parapet
The heads of the hanged
In the flowing rivulet
The spittle of the hanged.
On the cobbles in the market-places
The fingernails of those lined up and shot
On the dry grass in the open spaces
The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.
Biting the air, biting the stones
Our flesh is no longer human
Biting the air, biting the stones
Our hearts are no longer human.
But we have read into the eyes of the dead
And shall bring freedom on the earth
But clenched tight in the fists of the dead
Lies the justice to be served.)
—poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli
Ralph Nader, and Alexis Sterling are pretty upbeat in todays writing, sounds like they are coming around to the Donald, what could it hurt!! We need all the support we can get:)
Buddy Holly, way back in 1956, sang this retort to your comment: “That’ll Be The Day!”
Excellent response, Mr. Dunbar.
The tiny-handed vulgarian and illiterate Sudafed addict (UK formula) is doing a fine job… of destroying the empire and displaying the paper tiger for all to see. Kind of a shame about his trashing of The Constitution, but, hey, it wasn’t being followed anyway. The original conservative, John Adams, said “Our constitution was made only for a moral … people,” and the American electorate is a collection of the bloodthirsty and mentally obese, hardly moral in any sense. Heck, it was kind of a show 250 years ago on the morality front anyway.
“International airport
A quarter after nine
Paris Texas, Athens Georgia’s
Not what I had in mind
As I’m getting out I laugh to myself
‘Cause this is the only place
Where as you’re getting on the plane
You see Buddy Holly’s face
I hear they hate me now
Just like they hated you
Maybe when I’m dead and gone
I’m gonna get a statue too”
— The Dixie Chicks, Lubbock or Leave It
“Well I feel like Buddy Holly ‘cos it’s raining in my heart
All the sad songs take me back to you
Now that we are apart
Now I know how Paul McCartney felt when he got up to say
‘I wish it was yesterday'”
–Alvin Stardust
“Ska vi älska, så ska vi älska till Buddy Holly”
–Gyllene Tider
“With a shy grin upon his face
Funny how you always seem to notice
That one little curl out of place
Not many people really knew Buddy
Or understood how he felt
But just a song from his lips
Would make the coldest hearts melt”
— Tommy Dee
Thank you for these lyrics, kind sir. Buddy Holly–from way past and the hero of today’s AVA. “A long, long time ago…” goes Don McClean’s stellar song. Bless Buddy’s heart, he was a good one.
Buddy, Natalie Maines (of The Dixie Chicks), and I all went to the same high school, albeit in different eras. I remember more than one “American Pie” singalongs that ended with tears in people’s eyes.
“The sun is out
The sky is blue
There’s not a cloud
To spoil the view
But it’s raining
Raining In My Heart”
A fine coincidence of high school attendance. I take it you are the younger of the group. Thanks again for the very cool musical allusions.
Report out on Wednesday’s BHAB meeting in Mendocino. All the usual suspects were there and drenched us with smiles while patting each other on the back. Damn near the entire Schrader family so much is written. I find them trying to do good things. Should they not profit from their work and who holds the cap on it? I personally will not do the work, it is hard on the psyche. The director went over contracts and recent legislation while many drifted off into nether land. I know I did and was properly castigated for it afterwards. I have good friends. Not a single Soul from the public, not sure why we went. Only thing of substance done was a vote to once again change our Calander to meet public demand as we go to Covelo next month. I’m sure the tribes will bring their programs down to show us how it is done. My experience so far is the tribes are way ahead of the county in actual treatment and intervention despite their losses. The board will at least have a learning experience. Directly from a tribal leader, they want everyone to know, everything they have is open to all.
Apologies for the correction, BHAB will be in Covelo September 17th, we are in Ft. Bragg next month on the 18th of June.
The Counties of Lake and Mendocino County Behavioral Health Services departments work together to provide the limited inpatient care we have. As you say, it is not an easy job, and the systems of payment are administratively burdened with layers of contracts and compliance documentation. Patients themselves are almost beside the point — “units of service” — but I never cease to wonder how we came to the place where we no longer know how to build multi-unit housing like we did in World War II, when millions of board feet were sawn and stitched together in barracks for the mobilization of the world’s “most lethal” military in a “non-combatant” country.
Futility is the lid on the coffin of compassion. Years of stress, everyday survival, intermittent traumas and temporary psychic relief from whatever corner you can get it, untended wounds and nutrient starvation, stares of dismissal and paperwork chaos.
While the “government” bewails its burden and entangles private enterprise donors in economic conditions that stop anything productive from occurring.
Our behavioral health agencies collaborate to combine resources for maintaining the few small licensed “facilities” — and the Schraders are the primary source of programs here as well — but the hundreds of human beings in government-created substandard conditions are the perpetual losers without “shelter.” I promise you, being “homeless” will drive you nuts.
Bye-bye Rite-Aid…. Fort Bragg! Carpe Diem! Redeem your heritage and demand that a bowling alley be installed at the Rite-Aid building. Do it before it’s too late! Before somebody puts in a climbing wall, or a cafe for pets only, or a Chipotle. Fort Bragg FOREVER!
Happy Friday, everyone, 🌷🫶🏻💕
GT and the fake account two things one is she can report the account to Facebook and request it to be taken down. Secondly, in my opinion she probably made the account herself! However a fascinating tale she weaves, is it tall or true? I vote tall and have from the beginning. 💕
Enjoy your weekend…..🥰
mm 💕
Regarding Ted Williams “Town Hall”
#1 Williams replied that the county board has no control over the elected County District Attorney. #2 He also insisted that some media sources have been misrepresenting the facts.
#3 He advised the public to view the board meetings for accurate information. #4 He said he didn’t want to be “put in the opposition of answering questions about something that is not real.” He declined to elaborate.
Comment…
#1 No control over County District Attorney? Ok. But you sure think you had control over County ACTTC. How about the ability to vote no to trumped up charges? How about the ability to accept the ruling of the Judge and admit a wrong vote and reinstate duly owed back pay?
#2 Media sources wrong? Like who? Like what? Big claim. No evidence. Or is this reporting wrong too?
#3 We are watching. Doesn’t look good for you. How about we watch the rulings of the Judge?
#4 Not real. Haha. Ted is unreal.
Ted’s Talk or in reality Ted’s BS
I agree with Board Watcher. All of a sudden Ted claims they have no control over DA Dave. News flash, Ted you don’t have any control over elected officials and that includes Cubbison. By the way, you keep wasting money on outside counsel that has put you in the middle of civil suit that the County has no chance of winning. Most of the media’s sources have come from actual testimony in court. Mike Geniella did an amazing job covering this issue in spite of Ted and the cast No Commenter’s at the County.
Between Ted’s lies and Mo’s incredibly stupid Facebook posts, yea, you want a good laugh read some of that wisdom! Absolutely mind blowing.
Budgets are the least of their problems.
UR-FASCISM
In summary, it appears, via LOTS of words, that fascism is just another, rather amorphous, way of exerting control over others, which is an over-developed, distinctive trait of human monkeys. The earth will be a better place when the human monkey becomes extinct. Evolution plays some really dirty ticks on its subjects.
I would have appreciated a Cliff Notes version, but what I got out of it was that we are already a Ur-Fascist country led by a Ur-Fascist wannabe dictator wanting to go full on Mussolini. Wonder if Trump keeps this on his bedside table next to Mein Kampf?
Omigod! You mean the brainless mutant can read, too?
Yes, but look what a handy glossary it makes for use in cases where the president calls Nancy Pelosi “a whacked-out radical leftist” and nobody gets a whiff of the rank absurdity, the utter vacuity of sense in pinning such a head spinning label on former Speaker “This is my House” Pelosi, and nobody knows what to reply any better than slapping back with the equally absurdly hyperbolic label “fascist dictator Trump”— much easier than googling a more precise term… which the article in question very succinctly supplies for the curious cats out there in the readership.
“ED NOTE: Dumb question for Jim Armstrong: Why can’t the diverted water simply bypass the abandoned power apparatus?”
Holy smokes, Bruce (or Mark, depending on who is ED of the day), you’ve got to be kidding me.
The charitable thing would have been to pretend I didn’t notice this and ignore it.
However, after our years’ long conversation about Potter Valley water, charitable is not how I feel.
You both, in both print and in person, have called me names, refused to listen to my input and posted bullshit about the issues. Spike Huffman may have learned a lot from you.
It seems a little late to worry about the water diversion after having advocated its destruction by stealth in the AVA many times over many years.
If you had paid any attention to the plans now about to be acted on, you would know the answer to your question.
If you had ever learned about the workings and history of the project instead of just pontificating about it, you would know the answer to your question.
Instead of going about “free water” and “gentlemen of the soil,” there was a lot to try and understand about the costs what seems likely to take place.
The answer to your question, BTW, is easy and maybe I’ll answer it if you ask again.
It is the plan that it is part of that is dumb.
Noble sons of the soil, I believe was the characterization, for which I apologize, not having known I was dealing with Proustian sensibilities. Sensitivities and sensebilities aside, I am humbly asking again for you to ‘splain it to us all.
These are results for bypassing potter valley hydroelectric dam to divert water from eel
Search instead for bypassing potter valkey hydroelectric dam to divert water from eel
AI Overview
+4
The Potter Valley Project, including Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam, is being decommissioned by PG&E, and a new Eel-Russian Diversion Facility is planned to replace it. This new facility would allow for continued water diversions from the Eel River to the Russian River, but with a focus on environmental restoration and limited diversions during certain periods. The new facility would not directly bypass the dams in the same way that the existing Potter Valley Project does, but rather it would be a separate infrastructure project designed to divert water from the Eel River.
Here’s a more detailed look:
PG&E’s Decommissioning:
PG&E is removing Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam as part of a larger plan to restore the Eel River.
New Eel-Russian Diversion Facility:
A new facility, potentially a pump station, is planned to divert Eel River water to the Russian River after the dams are removed.
Limited Diversions:
The new facility is designed to be more environmentally friendly, potentially limiting diversions during certain seasons to protect the Eel River.
Focus on Restoration:
The new project also aims to improve fish passage and enhance the Eel River’s overall health.
Two-Basin Solution:
The plan is part of a broader effort to create a “Two-Basin Solution” that balances water supply needs with environmental concerns.
In essence, the new facility will not be a bypass of the old system in the same way the existing tunnels and diversions of the Potter Valley Project are. Instead, it will be a separate structure designed to divert water in a more sustainable and ecologically conscious way.
Should I Google Proust and free water?
I am tempted to wait and see if another Jamieson without a clue wants to weigh in.
Before I “‘splain it all,” is there an “instead” hidden in your dumb question?
The only Jamieson weighing in was with asking the question. The entity without a clue (according to you) is the Google AI, apparently utilizing 4 online references or documents to answer the question. AI responses potentially have included inaccuracies.
Notice the “AI Overview” header??
The AI Grok weighs in:
Following the removal of the Potter Valley Project dams (Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam), a new Eel-Russian Facility is planned to maintain limited water diversions from the Eel River to the Russian River. Here’s how the diversion is expected to work based on available information:New Eel-Russian Facility (NERF): A coalition including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, California Trout, Humboldt County, Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission, Round Valley Indian Tribes, Sonoma Water, and Trout Unlimited signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in February 2025 to advance a new diversion facility. This facility will replace the existing Van Arsdale Diversion at the Cape Horn Dam site, ensuring continued water flow to the Russian River while prioritizing Eel River fishery restoration. The design aims to allow a free-flowing Eel River, with diversions limited to the wet season (December to April) when excess flows are available, minimizing impacts on native fish like salmon and steelhead.Diversion Mechanism: The proposed facility may involve a pump station or a roughened channel with gravity supply to divert water through the existing mile-long tunnel to the East Branch Russian River. The exact engineering solution is still under study, with ongoing assessments to ensure fish passage and ecological compatibility. The diversion schedule will align with Eel River flow conditions to support fishery recovery, adhering to strict rules and performance metrics for adaptive management.Water Rights and Management: The water rights for diversions will be owned by the Round Valley Indian Tribes, reflecting their historical connection to the Eel River. The agreement includes an Eel River Restoration Fund, supported by financial charges on diverted water, to fund ecological recovery efforts. The initial term for the diversion agreement is 30 years, with a conditional 20-year renewal, and a long-term goal of phasing out diversions as the Russian River basin develops alternative water sources.Timeline and Implementation: The full diversion agreement is expected to be finalized by July 2025, with construction of the new facility timed to avoid delays in dam removal, potentially starting in 2028. The process involves coordination with regulatory agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and environmental permitting to ensure compliance and minimal disruption to both rivers’ ecosystems.This approach balances the need for Russian River water supply with the restoration of the Eel River’s ecological health, addressing concerns like seismic risks and sediment issues associated with the aging dams.
My Note: given how specific Grok is, relying on 25 resources, I don’t think we need Mr Armstrong to answer now???
OK, Mr. Jamieson, now try this:
“ED NOTE: Dumb question for Jim Armstrong: Why can’t the diverted water simply bypass the abandoned power apparatus?”
I asked (adding Eel River and Potter Valley Dam to that questions phrasing) and essentially received the above answer already posted.
Grok doesn’t call the questioner dumb, BTW. It (she? him?) just describes the possible diversion process.
What’s the holdup on a stern and staid old opinionated Gork? And wasn’t gork the verb used in Robert A. Heinlien’s sci-fi novel, Stranger in a Strange Land?
Has Gork finally achieved the elusive objectivity NPR was reaching for with their patented smarmy schmooze?! The high tone of a prudery beyond mere human pretensions? Wow! Awesome! It’s refreshing that Gork doesn’t identify as female or shemale, like those matriarchal old battle axes, Siri and Alexa, huh.
It’s great to see Grok confirming the naughty features of its Crestor-God, Elon.
So far, I think Grok conveys fewer errors than the Google AI or chatgpt.
Hopefully Grok adopts no pronouns. Michael Valentine Smith would like it that way (or Heinlein woud).