Mendocino County Today: Thursday 6/5/2025

GUSTY northerly winds will continue to diminish each day through the week, but remain robust with steep elevated seas over the coastal waters. Hot and dry weather will continue each day this week as a ridge remains parked offshore. Hotter weather in the interior is expected this weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 50F this Thursday morning on the coast. The fog is large & trying to take charge. Fog or patchy clouds is mentioned in most of the forecasts for the next few days. The usual afternoon clearing is expected of course, but never guaranteed.

ROBERT FULBRIGHT NEEDS SOME HELP

Robert is a life resident of Boonville, and a friend to many. He is suffering from a debilitating cancer. Please help him with expenses. Robert Fulbright, Box 63, Boonville 95415

ALBION COMMUNITY MEETING RE HEADLANDS-FOR-SALE Monday June 9th, 5:30pm at the Grange

Since the 84-acre south Albion Headlands property came up for sale recently, there’s lots of citizen interest in seeing that it ends up as coastal public access and not as part-time vacation homes for wealthy outsiders. Fortunately, the Mendocino Land Trust has put in offers to buy it (tho they would still have to raise $6+million), and its director wrote me “We would be happy to meet in Albion to give interested residents an update.”

The Whitesboro Grange on Navarro Ridge Road is the venue for a public meeting Monday, June 9th, 5:30-7pm, where citizens can ask questions of the realtor marketing the property, Justin Nadeau, and two Mendocino Land Trust staffers, Conrad Kramer and Emily Griffin, and then discuss if and how people might want to influence in whose hands this property ends up and how it will be used.

Here’s a link to the realtor’s 3-min drone video of the property: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uIYNhYyMGw

All are invited. If you’re interested, join us and spread the word about this meeting: Monday, June 9th, 5:30-7pm at the Whitesboro Grange.

Thank you.

Tom Wodetzki, Albion,

707-937-1113, [email protected]

LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)

NO ANNEXATION

Dear Neighbor,

I am writing as a concerned citizen urging you to oppose the City of Ukiah’s land grab. As someone who has lived in this community for over 50 years, I know investing in our community is vital for growth. But businesses hesitate to invest here due to local mismanagement on issues such as homelessness, affordability, and a shortage of police officers.

Annexation will mean another layer of micromanaging bureaucracy. A quick drive down Perkins Street will show the effects of the City Planning Commission and City Council’s handiwork: many businesses are out of business and vacant or burned down with no replacement. The City of Ukiah’s plan is to quickly annex around 9,000 acres and, as a local business owner, I am against this proposed annexation that would triple Ukiah’s city limits.

Despite the City’s higher sales tax rates and fees, the City struggles to manage its current size. We can’t expect it to serve such a dramatic expansion.

The City of Ukiah is focused on annexing land that they cannot handle and overlooking the issues that we face on a daily basis.

Annexation is not the solution. We urge you to join us in opposing this unnecessary and poorly planned annexation. The City is quietly looking to annex everything from Burke Hill Dr. to Calpella soon. The only way for us to stop annexation is to protest, if you live or own property in the area to be taken over. There is a narrow time window in which the protest must be filed and that time has not started yet. We will reach out when that time comes with the proper protest process. In the meantime, please talk to your neighbors and let them know what the City is up to when the Ukiah Planning Commission will vote on whether they will advance the annexation proposal to the City Council for final approval to submit the plan to LAFCO.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me directly at [email protected] and keep an eye out for more information at www.noukiahannexation.com

Sincerely,

Ross H. Liberty, President Factory Pipe, LLC

Ukiah

MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: Besides owning Factory Pipe in an area of Ukiah which would be absorbed by Ukiah’s huge annexation proposal, Ross Liberty is a founding member of the inland advocacy group MendoMatters which, we gather, is opposed to Ukiah’s annexation proposal as well, presumably for reasons similar to Liberty’s.

SURPRISE! Auditor-Controller/Treasurer Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison told the Supervisors a few weeks ago that tax delinquency and tax default property sales were still a long way off because of the bureaucrat hurdles involved. But on Wednesday a Ukiah reader informed us that a “Notice of Property Tax Delinquency and Impending Default” appeared in the legal notices section of the Ukiah Daily Journal on June 4, 2025. This should be good news for the County as it represents potential long-overdue tax revenue for something like 190 parcels in the County. It could also mean that there are more sales in the pipeline that could generate more revenue, if not immediately, at least in the next few years. Hopefully, Ms. Cubbison will update the Board on this recent development at an upcoming Board meeting with an estimate of the amount of revenue that it might generate, and when.

(Mark Scaramella)

BIG HONOR FOR UKIAH’S KATE SCHAT

Congratulations to Ukiah High Senior Kate Schat for being named the Press Democrat Female Athlete of the Year! We are so proud of you! Hometown pride, Kate!

Cardinal Newman senior guard Kate Schat drives between two St. Ignatius defenders in the North Coast Division I playoff game Tuesday, March 4, 2025 in Santa Rosa. (John Burgess / The Press Democrat)

FORT BRAGG BLUE ENVELOPE KICK-OFF

On June 3, 2025, the Fort Bragg Police Department, in partnership with the Redwood Coast Regional Center, Parents & Friends Inc., and Art Explorers, kicked off the Blue Envelope Program with lunch at Bainbridge Park.

The Blue Envelope Program is designed to enhance communication between law enforcement and individuals with developmental or mental health disorders. Participants carry Blue Envelope items, such as wristbands or seatbelt covers in their cars, that identify themselves as someone with a communication difficulty, alerting officers the person they are interacting with may require unique communication techniques. It is a nationwide initiative, implemented by dozens of law enforcement and non-profit agencies.

At the kick-off event, participants were invited to select Blue Envelope items including wristbands, stickers, keychains, and seatbelt covers. Attendees also participated in mock traffic stops with officers to decrease apprehension and better understand what happens.

The Fort Bragg Police Department wants to extend our gratitude to the Fort Bragg Rotary Club for fully funding the Blue Envelope program and purchasing all the associated items.

Residents may request Blue Envelope items by contacting Redwood Coast Regional Center, Parents & Friends Inc., Art Explorers, or by visiting the Fort Bragg Police Department.

This information is being released by Chief Neil Cervenka. All media inquiries should contact him at [email protected].

KMUD SHOW ON JEWS IN AMERICA AND ISRAEL

On Thursday, June 5, at 9 am, our guest is Rabbi Paige Lincenberg. We'll talk about recent attacks on Jews in the U.S. and other antisemitic hate crimes.

Rabbi Paige Lincenberg serves the Mendocino Coast Jewish Community in Caspar. She lives nearby, in the redwoods of Elk, indigenously Pomo land. She feels most connected to the Divine Source of Life when officiating sacred rituals - weddings, funerals, baby naming ceremonies, and more. Rabbi Paige follows in the legacy and teachings of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (z”l), having received rabbinical ordination (smicha) from ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, with a specialized certification in Earth-Based Judaism. For further connection, flow on over to rabbipaige.com

Our second guest is Richard Silverstein, publisher of "Tikun Olam: Breaking News on the Israeli National Security State". We'll talk about recent developments in Gaza and Irael's continuing genocide against the Palestinian people.

KMUD
Our show, "Heroes and Patriots Radio", airs live on KMUD, on the first and fifth Thursdays of every month, at 9 AM, Pacific Time.

We simulcast our programming on two full power FM stations: KMUE 88.1 in Eureka and KLAI 90.3 in Laytonville. It also maintains a translator at 99.5 FM in Shelter Cove, California.

We also stream live from the web at https://kmud.org/

Speak with guests live and on-the-air at: KMUD Studio (707) 923-3911. Please call in.

We post our shows to our own website and Youtube channels. Shows may be distributed in other media outlets.

Wherever you live, KMUD is your community radio station. We are a true community of informed and progressive people. Please join us by becoming a member or underwriter.

— John Sakowicz

Visit Our Website: www.heroespatriots.org Heroes and Patriots is a program about national security, intelligence operations and foreign policy

A PRESENTATION ON THE NATIVE AMERICANS OF ANDERSON VALLEY
This Sunday, June 8, 1pm, Little Red School House

STUNNING 20-ACRE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ESTATE WITH PRIVATE ISLAND LISTS FOR $7.5M

The real estate agent said properties like this ‘don’t come around very often’

by Matt LaFever

Just south of Elk, California, a small coastal town that has grown into one of Northern California’s most desirable destinations, Sea Arches is a 20-acre estate commanding a bluff at the southern edge of Elk Cove. Getting its name from the unique natural architecture that defines its coastline, the property offers expansive views and uncommon privacy, representing not just a luxury home but a front-row seat to one of California’s most spectacular coastlines.

Opportunities like Sea Arches are few and far between, said Kevin McDonald, Sotheby’s listing agent: “Twenty private acres right off Highway 1 with those sorts of views don’t come along very often.”

Set at the end of a cypress-lined driveway just off Highway 1, the four-bedroom, four-bath residence with roughly 4,500 square feet of living space was designed to embrace its oceanfront setting. Walls of glass create a seamless connection between the indoors and the dramatic coastal environment. A spiral staircase leads to a mezzanine and a distinctive upper-level catwalk that was built to offer “even bigger views” of the epic landscape, according to McDonald.

According to McDonald, Sea Arches achieves a rare balance between high-end luxury and everyday comfort. He notes that the design “is kind of set up in a way which is comfortable for a family.” A separate guest suite sits past the third bedroom, featuring its own bedroom and bathroom, plus an upstairs lounge with stunning views that draw you in.

Some of the estate’s most distinctive features are entirely natural, and its unique positioning offers exceptional views of them all. Just offshore sits a rugged isle that McDonald said is “actually attached to this parcel.” He described it as “an island sea stack right out in front of the house,” a feature he noted is “not exactly something that you find all the time on the California coast.”

In addition to the dramatic sea arches that lend the property its name, the estate’s nearly 2 miles of private trails contribute to an ambiance more akin to a personal nature reserve than a typical estate. “You get the feeling like you’re in your own little park,” McDonald told SFGATE.

For those seeking true seclusion, the property also includes access to a private beach. While the descent is not a casual stroll, McDonald described “scaling down some pretty steep areas.” He recalls that at one point, the owners “had like a rope ladder that they could get down to the beach.”

Sea Arches stands out not only for its setting but also because constructing a similar property today would be nearly impossible. “It’s challenging to build in a location like that, let alone one so close to a public area such as that Elk Beach,” McDonald explained. Strict California Coastal Commission regulations mean creating anything comparable along this stretch of coast would encounter significant hurdles.

Despite its seclusion, Sea Arches is just a mile from the heart of Elk, recognized as one of the West Coast’s most surprising culinary destinations. In 2024, Travel + Leisure named the town one of “America’s Best Small Towns,” commending its rugged beauty, tight-knit community, and the unique allure of a place that, as the article put it, “may be small, but it’s mighty.” Harbor House Inn is at the town’s center, a two-Michelin-star restaurant perched on a cliff above the Pacific.

“You’ve got 20 acres on a bluff with incredible views, incredible property,” McDonald said, “but you’re like literally a mile away from a two-Michelin-star restaurant.”

(sfgate.com)

THE ASSAULT ON PUBLIC BROADCASTING

The White House submitted the expected rescission package to the House Rules Committee on Tuesday, June 3. It seeks to defund CPB, representing 25% of KZYX funding for the next two years. The House is expected to vote on the package next week, and the swift turnaround implies it is expected to pass. The Senate will then take it up at the end of the month or just after the July recess. Its version will then go back to the House for negotiation. The rescission vote is likely to be used as a negotiation pawn for the larger “Big Beautiful Budget” reconciliation negotiations, to sweeten the pot on other issues.

The rescission package seeks to cut the next two years of funding, and the “Big Beautiful Budget” reconciliation process cuts the two years after that. Whatever hope exists for public broadcasting lies with the Senate, and an advocacy strategy can be expected in the coming weeks that focuses on the Senate. In the meantime, please contact anyone you know in red districts in the country to make their voice heard in support of public media. Over a million people have done so through ProtectMyPublicMedia.

A final clarification: While the NPR lawsuit filed recently seeks to get a ruling on Trump’s earlier (and likely illegal) Executive Order to defund public media, the legislative process described above is a legal process, and the outcome of the NPR lawsuit will have no impact on that.

Please use this link to contact your representative about the threats to public broadcasting, and urge others to do so: https://protectmypublicmedia.org

KZYX Welcomes Andre de Channes as New General Manager/Director of Operations

The Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Board of Directors welcomes Andre de Channes to his new position as KZYX General Manager/Director of Operations. The board chose him for the position at its May Board meeting after a nationwide recruitment process in which it advertised the position on every major community radio industry website and received applications from nine solid radio professionals from around the country.

After interviewing the three top candidates, the Board’s Hiring Committee (board officers, two staff members, and the Community Advisory Board Chair) and the full Board determined that Andre is the right person for KZYX at this moment. He brings a wealth of radio experience and management background, including extensive experience working in Human Resources. These qualities, combined with his recent months of stellar work as KZYX Operations Director, made him a real stand-out among the candidates. Board members are very pleased that Andre applied for and has agreed to assume this leadership role.

For budgetary reasons, the Board had joined Operations and General Manager duties into one combined role, and it found that this combination is not unusual in community radio. “Several of the candidates who applied for the position were working at similar-sized stations where this combination has been implemented,” said outgoing Interim General Manager Dina Polkinghorne. “This discovery affirmed that we were on the right track with this structural change.”

De Channes (pronounced de shan), a Canadian transplant, has been involved in the North Bay music and radio scene for decades as a musician and radio professional. Before his arrival at KZYX, he served in Sonoma County as Music Director and Program Director for KRSH, and was Operations Director for the five stations at Wine Country Radio for over two decades. He got to know neighboring Mendocino County while producing live remotes from the Kate Wolf Festival, Earth Dance, and other Mendocino County events.

While until recently his professional experience was with commercial radio, Andre grew familiar with community radio as a listener. “NPR and community radio have both been fixtures in my home for years. I’ve enjoyed getting to know the behind-the-scenes of this side of the dial since joining the KZYX staff last Winter,” he said. “We have such a wide variety of locally produced news and music/public affairs programs. There really is something for everyone.”

Two of Andre’s key objectives are to grow the audience of KZYX listener/supporters and to move the station headquarters from Philo to its new home in Ukiah next year. “KZYX has a beloved place in this community built on a foundation of members, listeners, and programmers, some of whom have been with the station from the beginning,” he said. “To sustain this precious community asset, we need to honor the past while also pivoting toward the future. I am really excited to lead us in those efforts.”

Alex de Grassi, on guitar, and Paul Yarbrough, on viola

May Fundraiser Raises $75,000 for New Ukiah Studios

Fifty friends of KZYX formed a Giving Circle on a balmy mid-May evening to support the Building Project for the new KZYX Ukiah headquarters. After enjoying exquisite music, brief presentations, and fine food and drink, the group joined forces to contribute an incredible $75,000 in donations and pledges toward the new KZYX Ukiah headquarters—enough to fund its three new studios.

The success of this event shows what our community can do when it comes together around a compelling shared purpose. It is a powerful testament to how much KZYX listeners and community members value the unique voice and vital services the station provides.

The party was the inaugural event at Massoletti Barn, the stunning new event center on North State Street being developed by Mario Assadi, who had generously invited KZYX to use his venue. In welcoming remarks that set the tone for the evening, Assadi praised KZYX as “a voice for the people of our region” that “holds a mirror up to who we are — rural, creative, resilient, and deeply connected.” He described his efforts over the past twenty years to craft this historic (ca. 1900) winery into “something that can serve today’s community,” and added that “seeing it used for community events like this one, filled again with people, purpose, and a sense of belonging, makes it all worthwhile.

“So tonight, I want to thank KZYX not just for your incredible programming, but for bringing people together—for helping us listen, learn, and lean on each other. And I want to thank all of you here for showing up to support a station that gives so much to our community.”

Volunteer Jubran Kanaan, guest speaker Alice Woelfle, and Board Treasurer Mary Golden, Supervisor John Haschak and Alison de Grassi

The centerpiece of this evening was a concert by the internationally renowned and locally treasured musicians Alex de Grassi, on guitar, and Paul Yarbrough, on viola. They shared gorgeous duets by de Falla, Villa Lobos, andâ‹ Piazzola, prepared specially for their unique combination of instruments for the occasion.

Former KZYX Program Director Alice Woelfle had traveled from Los Angeles, where she is an editor for NPR’s “Morning Edition,” to express her support for KZYX and the new studio project. After noting the current threats to public broadcasting and how “public media is fighting back,” she focused in on the critical importance of community radio and of her beloved KZYX. ”What you can’t get anywhere else is the local programming on KZYX,” she stated. “I’ve worked at KZYX. I’ve worked at KALW, I’ve worked at KQED. And now I work for the Mothership—NPR itself. And in my current job, I work with a lot of member stations all over the country. From the national perspective that I have now, I can tell you with complete confidence, what you have at KZYX is really special.”

Turning to the fundraising purpose of the evening, she reminded the audience, “The amount of support KZYX gets has a very direct and measurable impact on what happens in your community every day. You can see it. Your resources go further when they are applied to local organizations.” And she concluded, “What we’re doing is important. And we are really good at it.”

Many volunteers helped make this KZYX building project fundraiser a success. It was the brainchild of Alex and Alison de Grassi, whose contributions began with suggesting the idea and extended through helping to plan the event, (for Alex) sharing beautiful music, and (for Alison) preparing a spread of delicious appetizers with caterer extraordinaire April Cunningham. Our thanks go as well to Mendocino Spirits and the Graziano Family of Wines for donating beverages; to Schat’s Bakery for cookies; to our host, Mario Assadi; and to the dozen other volunteers who played essential roles.

The KZYX board and Building Fund Task Force hope the overwhelming success of this special fundraising party will inspire other friends of KZYX to create their own house or garden parties or other events to benefit the KZYX Building Fund. If you have an idea you’d like to explore, please contact [email protected]

MENDOCINO DEMOCRATS at the California Democratic Convention in Anaheim

Delegates to the California Democratic convention from Mendocino County. Tekla Broz from Covelo is the Chair of the Mendocino Democratic Party, formerly known as the Mendocino Democratic Central Committee.

Contact information: Tekla Broz (707) 367-1990.

Val Muchowski

SHERIFF MATT KENDALL:

In 2023 the legislature decided to run a law through which aligned some elections with the presidential cycle. In essence Sheriff’s and District Attorneys who were elected in 2022 were subjected to the reshuffling of the election dates and instead of a 4 year term we were given a 6 year term which put us on presidential election cycle.

This means all of us sheriffs who lived through his terms will still be in office if he decides to run for president. That likely won’t serve him well as most sheriffs across the state have a long memory.

Anyone who is paying attention have seen the governor seems to be attempting to re-invent himself. This is likely because he is hoping most folks will forget about what has been done in our state. There will likely be 58 County Sheriffs who won’t forget. I know I won’t.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: FALSE ARREST

by Bruce Anderson (September 19, 2012)

Juan Orr, 26, probably of Chico, has libeled two Albion men every which way. Not only libeled them, but got them arrested, thrown in jail and, briefly, charged with major felonies.

It all started when Orr appeared at the Redwood Drive-In in Boonville a week ago Saturday, which would have been the afternoon of September 8th.

Orr said he’d been beaten and robbed by “two Americans.” The two gringos had snagged Orr, who is also a gringo, while he was innocently thumbing south on Highway 128. But instead of continuing to drive south, the “two Americans” had instead driven the hijacked hitchhiker up Mountain View Road, west of Boonville, where they beat him until he gave them $800 in cash, his backpack and his cellphone.

And there he was in the Redwood Drive-In, this weepy victim of a violent crime, sobbing and indeed looking kind of red and puffy in the face like someone really had smacked him a couple of times.

Cell phones were produced, 911 called.

The muggers, Orr said, were probably still headed west on Mountain View towards the Mendocino Coast. Maybe if you cops hurry you can catch them where the road comes out at Manchester.

Boonville people were outraged. They were walking around the Redwood Drive-In saying things like, “What the hell? I hope they get those bastards. Who would do such a thing?”

Orr played his audience like Barrymore, managing even to lob a little slander at locals with the claim that “No one would help me. I had to run all the way down the hill because no one would stop.”

Coast deputies were alerted to be on the lookout for two robbers headed their way, and very soon, Deputy Paoli had the alleged bad guys in custody. They were identified as Timothy Donald Gitchel and Thomas Joseph Valdez, both of Albion.

If Gitchel and Valdez seemed disbelieving that they had been taken into custody, there was no seemed about it. They were mystified because, as it turns out, they hadn’t done anything to get themselves arrested.

Meanwhile, back in Boonville, the Anderson Valley Ambulance had been called to the Redwood Drive-In, and Juan Orr, self-alleged victim of an assault and robbery, was hauled over the hill to the Ukiah Valley Medical Center where he was treated for no injuries and released.

Orr had put on such a convincing show about being a victim of a violent crime that the Boonville ambulance people, experienced at sorting out the real from the unreal, believed him.

But.

But Juan Orr hadn’t been hitchhiking.

Juan Orr hadn’t been beaten.

Juan Orr hadn’t been robbed.

Juan Orr, aka John Orr, had been hanging around Albion for a week or so, panhandling in front of Albion Store and pestering a young girl in the neighborhood to the point where she and her family characterized Orr’s unwanted attentions as “stalking.”

Orr had been reported to the Sheriff’s Office several times for basically making a major nuisance of himself at Albion, and Albion people wanted him gone.

That Saturday, Orr had shown up at the home of Betty and John Shandel of Albion. Shandel had encountered Orr panhandling out in front of the Albion Store. He’d been beguiled by Orr’s story that he needed some help. Shandel said he would trade help for stacking fire wood, and drove Orr and his “brother” up the hill to do some work for money.

The Shandels have been on the Mendocino Coast going way back. Mrs. Shandel is a registered nurse. She worked for years in the emergency room at Coast Hospital. RNs, especially RNs who work emergency rooms, can speed read people, and Mrs. Shandel read Mr. Orr’s book at a glance.

Mrs. Shandel says the two men her husband had dropped off to do a simple chore made her very, very apprehensive. And they didn’t seem eager to get to work, as Juan Orr went on and on and on about how he and his “brother” were orphans and how their mother had died from methamphetamine.

Emergency room nurses and doctors are always getting hustled by drug people trying to get the good dope, the pharmaceutical stuff. Emergency room people have heard every hype story there is.

Mrs. Shandel was not fooled by Juan Orr. She immediately pinned him as a nut, perhaps even a dangerous a nut.

So, when Tim Gitchel and his friend Thomas Valdez unexpectedly appeared at the Shandels as Juan Orr was rattling on, Mrs. Shandel made it clear that she’d be big time relieved if Gitchel and Valdez would drive her two visitors somewhere else, preferably somewhere far enough away to prevent them from coming back.

Gitchel and Valdez quickly informed Mrs. Shandel that Orr was a stalker of the neighborhood girl, and that Juan and his pal were not brothers, and that their mother had not died of a methamphetamine overdose, and that Juan Orr was not welcome anywhere in Albion.

Juan Orr was really a kind of free floating nutcase. And if the guy with him was voluntarily associated with Juan Orr he was undoubtedly also not the kind of guy you’d want sitting down at the dinner table with you.

Orr and his “brother” were told they had to leave. Gitchel said they could either walk or he and Valdez would give them a ride.

As it happened, since Orr and his “brother” were no longer welcome anywhere in Albion, and Gitchel was going to Boonville…

Orr and “his brother” were not forced or otherwise coerced into Gitchel’s vehicle. They asked for a lift and they got one. And to them, as transients, Boonville was as good a destination as any other.

A word about Tim Gitchel and Thomas Valdez. They are not thugs. Gitchel leads the marine rescue section of the Albion Fire Department and is a volunteer fireman. He’s a gifted athlete and a highly regarded member of the Albion community, who goes out of his way to mentor young people.

Thomas Valdez’s bona fides are similarly impressive. From all accounts he’s a good guy who works on a tuna fishing boat out of Fort Bragg.

Valdez and Gitchel are not driving around Mendocino County mugging hitchhikers.

And here they were two Saturdays ago under arrest and in the County Jail charged with a major crime.

Now it was Albion’s turn to be disbelieving.

The Gitchel-Valdez support networks kicked in.

Tim Gitchel was released on Tuesday, Thomas Valdez on Wednesday.

All charges were dropped.

No one knows where Juan Orr is.

ARMANDO STILETO

CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, June 4, 2025

DOMINIC FABER, 62, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, parole violation.

JENNA HATCHER, 39, Ukiah. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, controlled substance, probation revocation.

ROSENDO HERNANDEZ-VALDOVINO, 44, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

JAVIER MEDINA, 53, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

KURTIS SMITH, 39, Ukiah. Failure to register as transient, parole violation.

SOLOMON TAYLOR, 65, Nice/Ukiah. Vandalism.

FALSE INFO

After reading the article by Jonah Raskin dated today regarding Tommy Orange and Leonard Peltier. There is misinformation in the article.

"Leonard Peltier is still in prison for his role at Wounded Knee, and serving two life years."

First of all, Leonard has been released from Prison February 18, 2025. And the incident happened on Pine Ridge reservation in the city of Oglala, not wounded knee.

Love and CouRage,
Carol Gokee

GIANTS’ OFFENSE AWAKENS just in time to to rally past San Diego

by Shayna Rubin

San Francisco Giants’ Heliot Ramos celebrates his game-tying 2-run double in 7th inning against San Diego Padres during MLB game at Oracle Park in San Francisco on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. (Scott Strazzante/S.F. Chronicle)

The seventh inning scene painted a familiar picture: The San Francisco Giants, trailing the San Diego Padres by two, had the bases loaded with less than two outs. A prime opportunity the Giants have become adept at squandering as they stacked up 16 straight games without scoring more than four runs.

This time, though, Heliot Ramos could deliver the elusive big hit. He stroked a slider into left field for a two-run double that tied the game at five.

From second base, a pumped-up Ramos screamed words of encouragement — accompanied by a few expletives — at his teammates. A frustrating stretch for the offense finally had a breakthrough. Jung Hoo Lee’s sacrifice fly put the Giants ahead in a 6-5 win on a Wednesday night that looked destined to be another loss as they fell behind 5-0.

“You see him get to second base and he’s fired up and been so important for us this year,” Matt Chapman said of Ramos. “Love to see the fire and getting fired up. That’s the kind of energy we need, for sure.”

The win snapped a few ugly streaks: a seven-game losing streak against the Padres along with their streak of 16 games without scoring more than four runs. That kind of ripple effect was the Giants front office’s intended goal of an early morning roster shuffle that saw LaMonte Wade Jr. and Sam Huff designated for assignment and outfielder Daniel Johnson and infielder Dom Smith added.

“We just wanted to go out there and attack, that was the vibe overall,” starter Kyle Harrison said. “I think that’s just a sense of hunger. The guys that came in today, they were hungry and they played like it.”

It was Johnson, added to the roster Wednesday from Triple-A Sacramento, who collected his second hit of the game to help load the bases for Ramos.

Johnson, a Vallejo native whose family drove down to watch the game, was also on base when a heating-up Patrick Bailey launched an RBI double in the fifth inning for the Giants’ first run. His stellar outfield defense — part of the reason the Giants signed him to a minor league deal earlier this year — came into play in the ninth inning, nursing a one-run lead with a runner on, Johnson tracked down Luis Arraez’s line drive to the center-right gap.

What was going through his mind as he sprinted into the gap?

“I gotta go. I gotta run,” Johnson said. “I knew I had a pretty good chance. It wasn’t a guarantee, but I had to keep running to get that ball.”

Chapman, 9-for-his-last-20 with four extra-base hits heading into Wednesday’s game, hit a two-run home run off right-handed starter Nick Pivetta, who gave the Giants fits when he faced them in San Diego at the end of April. Swirling winds nearly knocked the ball into play, but it traveled 362 feet — just enough to be the shortest home run by a right-handed batter at Oracle Park this year.

“I thought it was gone,” Chapman said. “By the way the left fielder was camping under it I was getting nervous.”

The 16-game streak without scoring more than four runs hung like a dark shadow over the game’s first half. Things looked dire within the first minutes, when Fernando Tatis Jr.’s ground ball bounced off shortstop Willy Adames’ foot for a double, Manny Machado walked and Gavin Sheets blasted a triple off the top of the bricks to score them both.

More bad luck came Harrison’s way in the fifth. Tatis, again, started the rally off with an infield hit and Jackson Merrill provided an RBI double. But it was Sheets who came back with the pain, this time physical: His comebacker nailed Harrison in the elbow and ricocheted into right field, scoring two.

Harrison, already at 87 pitches, was removed from the game in favor of Sean Hjelle.

Hjelle, up for an injured Jordan Hicks, pitched 2 ⅔ scoreless innings.

Harrison underwent X-Rays, which came back negative. But there’s a good welt on the lefty’s arm that will be monitored before his next planned start — he’ll have an extra day to recover.

With closer Camilo Doval unavailable, Ryan Walker got the ninth inning and ran into trouble when Tatis hit a leadoff single. Adames strayed far into left field to get Machado’s fly ball, colliding with left fielder Ramos as the ball fell to put the go-ahead run aboard.

That brought in Randy Rodriguez, who got the next two outs for his first major league save.

(sfchronicle.com)

San Francisco Giants pitcher, Juan Marichal, pitching to Willie Davis of the Los Angeles Dodgers at Candlestick Park. San Francisco, California, August 22, 1965 (Neil Leifer)

IF A COUNTRY IS GOVERNED WISELY,
its inhabitants will be content.
They enjoy the labor of their hands
and don't waste time inventing
labor-saving machines.
Since they dearly love their homes,
they aren't interested in travel.
There may be a few wagons and boats,
but these don't go anywhere.
There may be an arsenal of weapons,
but nobody ever uses them.
People enjoy their food,
take pleasure in being with their families,
spend weekends working in their gardens,
delight in the doings of the neighborhood.
And even though the next country is so close
that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,
they are content to die of old age
without ever having gone to see it.

— Stephen Mitchell translation of Tao Te Ching, chapter 80

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The same president who ruined the former stately Oval Office with tacky golden chotchkes plastered all over the place? Weirdly enough, I just watched a documentary featuring recently murdered Russian whistleblower, Navalny, in which he does one of the things that got him killed -- exposing the massive palaces and other industries that Putin owns and built with money he took from the Russian Treasury. Navalny’s smuggled photos featured interiors in Putin’s over the top obscenely lavish palatial digs that had some of the exact same golden doodads on walls that Trump had stuck on the fireplace and walls in the Oval Office.

TEXAS MADE: Dr Pepper, created in 1885 by pharmacist Charles Alderton in Waco, is one of the oldest major soft drinks in America.

HAVING A COKE WITH YOU is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

— Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)

ZEN AND THE ART OF NEW YORK TIMES HEADLINE WRITING

by Caitlin Johnstone

The New York Times has just published one of the most insane headlines I have ever seen it publish, which is really saying something.

“Gaza’s Deadly Aid Deliveries,” the title blares.

If you were among the majority of people who only skim the headline without reading the rest of the article, you would have no idea that Israel has spent the last few days massacring starving civilians at aid sites and lying about it. You would also have no idea that it is Israel who’s been starving them in the first place.

The headline is written in such a passive, amorphous way that it sounds like the aid deliveries themselves are deadly. Like the bags of flour are picking up assault rifles and firing on desperate Palestinians queuing for food or something.

The sub-headline is no better: “Israel’s troops have repeatedly shot near food distribution sites.”

Oh? They’ve shot “near” food distribution sites, have they? Could their discharging their weapons in close proximity to the aid sites possibly have something to do with the aforementioned deadliness of the aid deliveries? Are we the readers supposed to connect these two pieces of information for ourselves, or are we meant to view them as two separate data points which may or may not have anything to with one another?

The article itself makes it clear that Israel has admitted that IDF troops fired their weapons “near” people waiting for aid after they failed to respond to “warning shots”, so you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. But in mainstream publications the headlines are written by editors, not by the journalists who write the articles, so they get to frame the story in whatever way suits their propaganda agenda for the majority who never read past the headline.

We saw another amazingly manipulative New York Times headline last month, “Israeli Soldiers Fire in Air to Disperse Western Diplomats in West Bank,” about the IDF firing “warning shots” at a delegation of foreign officials attempting to visit Jenin.

This was a story which provoked outcry and condemnation throughout the western world, but look at the lengths the New York Times editor went to in order to frame the IDF’s actions in the most innocent way possible. They were firing into the air. They were firing “to disperse western diplomats”—like that’s a thing. Like diplomats are crows on a cornfield or something. Oh yeah, ya know ya get too many diplomats flockin’ around and ya gotta fire a few rounds to disperse ’em. Just normal stuff.

It’s amazing how creative these freaks get when they need to publicly exonerate Israel and its western allies of their crimes. The IDF commits a war crime and suddenly these stuffy mass media editors who’ve never created any art in their lives transform into poets, bending and twisting the English language to come up with lines that read more like Zen koans than reporting on an important news event.

It’s impossible to have too much disdain for these people.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

*Jealous Lover* (1934) by Thomas Hart Benton

THE MEMORY-HOLING OF EVERYTHING, EVEN GEORGE ORWELL

From democracy to vaccines to election results to Orwell himself, the rewriting of the past to fit current attitudes has become an incurable mania

by Matt Taibbi

On Monday’s America This Week Walter Kirn read from a bizarre introduction to his 75th Anniversary edition paperback edition of 1984. Written by Harvard-educated author Dolen Perkins-Valdez, it came with a trigger warning.

“I had to go looking for the foreword by Perkins-Valdez, a black female writer whose Twitter page features a line from the “discussion questions” portion of her book Take My Hand: ‘History repeats what we don’t remember’.”

In Take My Hand Perkins-Valdez stressed the importance of remembering episodes like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the use of the Henrietta Lacks cell line. Her essay about 1984 argues at length that Orwell’s fictional dystopia is misremembered malinformation. She takes issue with this passage:

Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population…

“When I read this,” Perkins-Valdez wrote, “I can’t help but think of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and its publication in the United States just a year after 1984 was published in Britain. In Ellison’s novel, whites don’t see blacks, while in Orwell’s novel, there are no black characters at all. As a contemporary reader, I find myself self-pausing.”

Orwell was a great satirist, but he’d have had a tough time inventing something as clever as a reviewer of 1984, whose protagonist is a professional history-fixer, not seeing the irony in asking for more references to race or colonialism or misogyny to better fit modern political attitudes. I thought the trigger-warning-introduction was one of those outliers from beyond-wokeville that are good for a laugh but aren’t representative. Wrong! In preparation for the next America This Week I spent much of the week trying to count ideas, words, and people Americans have dropped in the memory-hole in the last 5-10 years. It’s an incredibly long list, beginning with Orwell himself.…

https://www.racket.news/p/the-memory-holing-of-everything-even

JUST IN: A sweeping travel ban targeting African and Middle Eastern countries takes effect Monday.

President Trump on Wednesday signed a travel ban on 12 countries, primarily in Africa and the Middle East, resurrecting an effort from his first term to prevent large numbers of immigrants and visitors from entering the United States.

The ban, which goes into effect on Monday, bars travel to the United States by citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT

‘We Don’t Want Them’: Trump Signs Travel Ban on Citizens From 12 Countries

Trump Orders Investigation of Biden and His Aides

U.S. Vetoes U.N. Resolution Demanding Immediate Gaza Cease-Fire

Israeli-Backed Aid Sites in Gaza Close Temporarily After Deadly Shootings

Should We Test Babies for Incurable Diseases?

Clever Cockatoos Have Figured Out How to Drink From Water Fountains

ISRAEL’S WAR ON GAZA

The Economist:

Israel fuels three emergencies as its furious allies bail out.

You might think it would be impossible for the inferno in Israel and Gaza to burn hotter. Yet Binyamin Netanyahu is fuelling three simultaneous emergencies: a humanitarian one in Gaza; a torching of support among European allies; and a constitutional crisis over who controls the security services, army and courts.

The pressure on Israel and its institutions is almost unbearable for the country. A culminating moment is probably imminent. Whether that comes in the form of a reinvasion of Gaza that finally ruptures Israel’s alliances and fractures its armed forces and society, or through a u-turn or ceasefire that triggers the prime minister’s political demise, remains dangerously unclear….

IS THIS FASCISM?

by Daniel Trilling

One way of thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy.

Where fascism took root, it grew rapidly beyond its base among the frustrated lower middle classes, attracting support from “the politically homeless … the socially uprooted, the destitute and the disillusioned,” as the German communist Clara Zetkin put it. Its supporters were organized into parties with uniformed paramilitary wings. They operated in what the historian Robert Paxton has called an “uneasy but effective collaboration” with traditional elites, which wanted to maintain order and crush the left. Fascism, from this perspective, was born of particular social conditions that are unlikely to recur in the same form.

The other way of thinking about fascism is as a constant presence. Some see it as the expression of a human tendency towards domination. “Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed,” Judith Butler wrote recently in relation to trans rights, “you’re operating within a fascist logic.”

Others see it as an inherent feature of unjust, oppressive societies. Fascism, Langston Hughes wrote in 1936, “is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America.”

Aimé Césaire argued that interwar fascism was the result of a “terrific boomerang effect”: all the brutality of European imperialism – which had dehumanized the colonizer as well as the colonized – was visited on the home continent.

Many historians and political theorists have described fascism’s appeal to the emotions. Paxton called them its “mobilizing passions”: a sense of overwhelming crisis and victimhood, a fear of the decline of one’s group, a lust for purity and authority, a glorification of violence. Fascism could return in “the most innocent of disguises,” according to Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, because we are all vulnerable to its emotional pull.

How useful is it to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism? We usually describe today’s right-wing nationalists as being on the “far right,” but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are fascist. The political scientist Cas Mudde divides the far right into two groups: the extreme right, which rejects democracy entirely, and the radical right, which is hostile to liberal democracy. Fascist movements in the historical sense belong to the extreme right. They still exist, if largely at the margins: the most successful so far this century has been Golden Dawn, which mounted a campaign of racist intimidation and murder after the 2008 financial crisis and briefly became Greece’s third-largest party. More prominent today, in liberal democracies at least, is the radical right, which is supplanting traditional conservative movements. Trump, Modi, Meloni, Orbán, Milei, Bolsonaro and Duterte, as well as the many far-right parties with significant representation in the parliaments of Europe, Israel and elsewhere, all belong to the radical right.

Twentieth-century fascism appears to have little in common with today’s leading far-right movements. These groups share a political style – populism – which purports to be more democratic than that of its opponents. Populists, whether on the right or the left, portray themselves as authentic representatives of “the people,” in contrast to corrupt governing elites. Far-right populists seek to redefine “the people” along narrow national, ethnic or religious lines. They like elections (as long as they win), but dislike the parts of the system – independent courts and media, intergovernmental bodies – that examine or restrain their power. Unlike interwar fascism, far-right populism does not seek to bring society under total state control.

Some far-right populists, such as Nigel Farage, even claim to be libertarians. For the most part, far-right populism doesn’t share the expansionist territorial aims of interwar fascism, Trump’s saber-rattling at Canada and Greenland notwithstanding; indeed, if anything links far-right populist programs, it’s the call for a retrenchment of borders, whether political, cultural or economic.

The second way of thinking about fascism may seem more useful. Some far-right populists haven’t been content merely to display hostility to liberal democratic institutions, but have set about dismantling them.

Under Viktor Orbán’s clientelist leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been neutered, while in his second term Donald Trump is trying to undermine the functions of the US state by wilfully flouting the law. Far-right populist movements are usually built around conspiracist demagogues who promise to remove rights from minority groups and whose supporters trade in jokey, memeified references to fascism (is that outstretched arm a Nazi salute, or is it reaching for the stars?).

Right-wing violence has become more prevalent, with the most extreme incidents carried out by “lone wolf” mass shooters, militia groups or mobs. Some far-right populists have sought to harness these impulses: Jair Bolsonaro and Trump both encouraged their supporters to try to overturn presidential election results when they lost, though both ultimately backed down. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP has links to a paramilitary street movement, the RSS.

But even if a political movement shares one or more features of fascism – its leader’s use of rhetoric and propaganda, say – it does not necessarily follow that the movement will be fascist.

Does anyone really believe that Farage intends to turn the UK into a dictatorship? The accusation can be a way of masking the failings of our political systems, from which far-right populism emerged.

Bill Clinton’s former secretary of state Madeleine Albright bemoaned the implications of a Trump presidency for American global leadership in ‘Fascism: A Warning’ (2018), one of a glut of such books that followed the populist election upsets of 2016, without considering the reason that Trump’s ostensibly anti-war message had appealed to so many Americans.

Invoking fascism can also blur our understanding of what’s really going on. Trump, for instance, wants to abolish birthright citizenship in the US. Margaret Thatcher did this in the UK forty years ago. Are both of these decisions fascist, or neither – or is there something qualitatively different about Trump’s actions? Does it even matter whether we have an answer to the question “Is this fascism?”

It does matter. As the historian Ian Kershaw says, trying to define fascism “is like trying to nail jelly to a wall,” yet for all its slipperiness, “fascism” describes a uniquely destructive force in politics, and one for which we don’t have a better word. Unlike other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship, if left unchecked it is not only murderous but suicidal. Interwar fascism involved millions of people in the effort to purify national communities, initiating a spiral of violence that led to war, genocide and self-immolation. Its devastating potential was rooted in the paradoxical promise of a revolution carried out in defense of hierarchy.

As Paxton noted, this led either to entropy, as the movement failed to deliver, or to increasing radicalism, as leaders raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.)

Fascism involves a form of collective behavior that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognize the danger it posed, seeing fascism merely as a tool of ruling-class oppression or as mass irrationality, rather than as a force with a logic and a life of its own. Today, “fascism” is useful as a political concept only in so far as it enables us to spot its destructive potential before it fully discloses itself. As Primo Levi wrote, “it happened, therefore it can happen again.”

Are we, as Richard Seymour suggests, “in the early days of a new fascism”? In ‘Disaster Nationalism,’ Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong places. Parties and policy platforms, or the personalities of “strongman” figureheads, can only take us so far. What matters more is the particular mood that pervades both the extremist fringes and the political mainstream. “The new far right is enthralled by images of disaster,” Seymour writes.

Far-right populists promise to defend their people from migrant “invasions” and “deep state” traitors. Conspiracy theorists chase cabals of Satanist pedophiles, while mass shooters believe they are resisting a Muslim takeover, or Jewish influence, or women who have emasculated them.

Large numbers of people contribute to moral panics about religious, ethnic and sexual minorities, or left-wing activism; a few even take matters into their own hands in outbreaks of pogromist violence.

These kinds of behavior, in Seymour’s view, are evidence of the mix of reactionary and rebellious emotions peculiar to fascism; a new version of the mobilizing passions identified by Paxton. They are shot through with “apocalyptic desire” – a fear of impending doom, combined with the contradictory impulse to throw oneself into the abyss – and reveal a “pervasive ambivalence about civilization … a submerged desire for it to fall apart.”

“Disaster nationalism” is Seymour’s term for the political expression of these feelings. It arises, he writes, from the “profound unhappiness accumulated in the era of peak liberalism” and offers the afflicted a range of enemies whose defeat will restore “the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood.” Significantly, it tends to ignore the real disaster staring us in the face, that of human-induced climate change: far-right populists are caught between outright denial of global heating and a perverse, gleeful wish to bring it on. Disaster nationalist figureheads don’t resemble traditional politicians so much as celebrities, borne aloft on a surge of violent emotion whose spread has been facilitated by the internet.

Interwar fascism required mass parties to establish a fatal dialectic between leader and mob; social media platforms now perform that function. Political entrepreneurs, from populist leaders to far-right influencers, engage in “permanent algorithmic campaigning,” directing their followers’ anger and sadism at their opponents. Bolsonaro had a Gabinete do Ódio (“office of hate”), a group of advisers who planned his social media strategy; Modi rewards his most virulent supporters on X by discreetly following them back; Trump is a “one-man troll farm.” And when rhetorical violence spills over into real life, it’s no longer career-ending.

This is a typical Seymour argument: ambitious, insightful and contentious. Over the past twenty years, the Northern Irish writer has built up a following on the anglophone left as an outsider intellectual. He emerged from the mid-2000s network of bloggers that also included Mark Fisher, Nina Power and Owen Hatherley. Their interests differed, but they shared a commitment to challenging what they saw as the stultifying political and cultural consensus of the neoliberal boom years – what Fisher called the era of “capitalist realism” – and to an idea of public writing that was engaged, disputatious and didn’t dumb down. Seymour was always the most straightforwardly political: first as a caustic opponent of the war on terror and its advocates (one of his early books was subtitled “The Trial of Christopher Hitchens”), then of the economic austerity that followed the 2008 crash. Like Hitchens, Seymour is a former Trotskyite; he left the Socialist Workers Party in 2013 when it imploded over allegations of sexual assault by a senior member. Unlike Hitchens, or indeed Power, whose work has taken a reactionary turn, Seymour has not moved to the right. Instead, he continues to examine the reasons that, despite the economic and environmental disruptions of our time, the right keeps winning.

This is what makes him a useful, if sometimes frustrating, guide to the present moment. Having abandoned the boosterism of the revolutionary left – “One more crisis, comrades, and it’s our time!” – he practices a radical pessimism. Capitalism, in his view, isn’t just an engine for human misery, but, through the burning of fossil fuels, a threat to human existence. Capitalist democracy, “an inherently contradictory and unstable formation” which asks people to forgo equality in return for the promise of rising living standards, is ill-equipped to avert it.

Seymour’s writing is erudite, drawing on Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural criticism and a wide range of social research, and sometimes has the breathless pace of the very online. He is a co-founder, with the novelist China Miéville and others, of the political journal ‘Salvage’ (“The catastrophe is already upon us,” one of its taglines runs, “and the decisive struggle is over what to do with the remains”), and his style has similarities with Miéville’s gothic-futurism. Seymour aims to provoke the reader – not least through the force of his rhetoric – into thinking about what might be round the corner. His efforts don’t always land, but when they do he can throw a murky picture into sharp relief: I have come across no better encapsulation of the nature of social media than “participatory disinfotainment.”

In ‘Disaster Nationalism,’ Seymour attempts to fuse the two ways of thinking about fascism – the historically specific and the continuous – to show that some version of it is emerging today. As in the 1920s and 1930s, the expansion of far-right politics clearly has some link to the capitalist cycle: voters in Europe, for instance, have tended to move rightwards in response to financial crises since at least 1870; the emergence of today’s far-right populism can be traced to the 2008 financial crash.

But Seymour follows the more supple Marxists, notably Gramsci, in stressing that culture and circumstance, as much as economic interests, shape our attitudes.

For Seymour, the determining factor is neoliberalism, whose ruins we continue to inhabit, as governing elites have struggled in the aftermath of the crash either to shore up the system or forge an alternative.

Neoliberalism, Seymour writes, drawing on the work of the economic historian Philip Mirowski, aimed to persuade the masses “to abandon tribal sentiments of solidarity and accept the law of universal competition.” The result, amid soaring wealth inequality, is a “paranoid system”: if everyone is a potential competitor, there can be no meaningful social sphere, public services will be corrupt and inefficient, and welfare recipients will be regarded as freeloaders. This is a recipe for “resentment, envy, spite, anxiety, depression and rage,” whose long-term effects – in the West, at least – are declining social trust, increased loneliness and a rise in political violence, even as other forms of violent crime have fallen.

The wager of neoliberalism, Seymour writes, was that if voters were treated as consumers “their rational choices would keep politics in the consensual middle ground,” and perhaps during the boom years they did. But many people have now come to feel that the system is rigged.

On the face of it, the balm offered by far-right populism seems mild in comparison with interwar fascism, which promised to transcend class divisions and bring nation, state and leader together in a single body – the “corporate state,” as Mussolini called it.

Far-right populism, by contrast, offers what Seymour calls “muscular national capitalism.” Although its tools are those of orthodox economic policy – privatization and welfare cuts for Modi; protectionism via tariffs for Trump; increased state direction for Orbán – they are being put to a very different end.

Muscular national capitalism treats the economy “as a moral space in which it is argued the wrong people have been losing.” (The problem with globalization, J.D. Vance said recently, wasn’t that it was unfair, but that it was causing rich countries such as America to lose their place at the top of the international pecking order.)

Yet, as it turns out, its real economic benefits can be relatively meager (average incomes in Brazil fell under Bolsonaro), since the true payoff is psychological. What far-right populists really have to offer is revenge: India’s frustrated Hindu middle classes will reap the benefits of growth if life is made intolerable for their Muslim neighbors; men in the Americas will become winners again when traditional gender roles are restored; cities in the Philippines will be regenerated if a war is waged on drug addicts; economically depressed regions of Europe will be revived by the mass deportation of refugees. The rhetorical tactics of far-right populism – the denigration of critics as traitors and Lügenpresse; the lurid claims about immigrants eating dogs; the obsession with “woke” forms of social etiquette – are all “programmatic,” as Seymour puts it. They aim to channel the multifarious resentments of a population into a “revolt against liberal civilization”’; in other words, into “barbarism.”

‘Disaster Nationalism’ is part of a tradition that locates the roots of interwar fascism in the human psyche. The idea that civilization makes us sick – that for all its benefits, it requires us to repress our aggressive and sexual urges, which reappear as various forms of unhappiness – originates with Freud.

But where Freud focused on the individual, his successors Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm tried to understand the social character of support for fascism. For Reich, it was a form of “mass psychology”: the use of symbolism, emotion and sexual imagery to mobilize the people’s repressed violent urges.

Fromm saw it in class terms, arguing that particular groups were drawn to fascism: authoritarians, certainly, but also defeated and dejected workers who had given up hope of social progress and put their faith in fascism’s promise of redemptive violence.

Some have applied similar thinking to today’s far right: Wendy Brown identified “apocalyptic populists” as a key component of Trump’s voter base in 2016, and her more recent work examines the mood of nihilism pervading contemporary political life.

For Seymour, the key emotion of our time is resentment, fuelled by the insecurities and paranoia of class society and neoliberalism. It is an emotion we cannot do without, he notes, since it is essential to our sense of justice. We feel resentment at things we perceive as unfair and can feel it on behalf of others.

But resentment can become an “emotional swamp,” leading in the most extreme cases to a “politically enabled passion for persecution.” Social media, which represents a shift in the way we communicate as significant as the rise of print newspapers was to the development of 19th-century nationalism, is an accelerant to this. Here, Seymour builds on his book ‘The Twittering Machine’ (2019), which argues that the compulsive qualities of social media – its hall-of-mirrors narcissism, the dopamine hit of likes, clicks and follows – are used to manipulate our “fantasies, desires and frailties” for profit. Participating in social media is to risk developing sadistic and self-harming forms of behavior, since anger and conflict are often the quickest routes to online engagement: it is all too easy for social media users to find themselves subject to or joining in pile-ons, flame wars, trolling and other forms of online bullying. The industry has also proved a remarkably efficient conduit for the apocalyptic fantasies that sustain the far-right worldview.

These tendencies are particularly concentrated in the lone-wolf terrorist, who takes revenge on the world for his personal and political grievances in a spectacular act of violence. According to the sociologist Ramon Spaaij, lone-wolf murders increased by 143% in the West between the 1970s and the 2000s – but social media has essentially turned these killings into a game.

The template was set by Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011. Breivik’s anger was nurtured and given shape by an extreme online subculture, in his case the Islamophobic “counter-jihad” of the 2000s. His murders, as Seymour puts it, were essentially a “marketing plan” for his online manifesto, an incoherent mixture of gamer talk, visions of the death of Western civilization and diatribes by mainstream right-wing commentators about multiculturalism and Muslims.

Since then, such behavior has become much more common: in 2019, a gunman in Halle, Germany, livestreamed his attack on a synagogue on the gaming platform Twitch; in 2016, the perpetrator of a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida checked Facebook midway through his assault; in 2019, an admirer of the man who murdered 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, expressed a desire to beat that “high score.”

Seymour’s title intentionally echoes “disaster capitalism,” Naomi Klein’s term for the exploitation by corporate interests of wars, natural disasters and other crises for financial gain. Disaster nationalism, correspondingly, involves far-right populists looking for political gain. But it also gestures to the way people behave when they feel threatened.

We like to think disasters bring us together – and sometimes they do – but that isn’t always the case. In the summer of 2020, for instance, the world’s largest anti-lockdown protests were driven by the Querdenken (“lateral thinkers”) movement in Germany. The movement grew out of concern over civil liberties and the economic impact of lockdowns, but quickly became conspiratorial, fed by a stream of “alternative news” on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Querdenken channels were dominated by followers of the QAnon cult, who believe in the existence of an elite, Satanic, cannibalistic child-sex-trafficking ring, and who see Trump as their savior. This rightwards drift culminated in a protest in Berlin in August 2020, when a faction led by QAnon followers attempted to storm the Reichstag.

The profound shock of the pandemic was clearly a trigger for these events, but in Seymour’s analysis there was nothing inevitable or natural about the way they unfolded. People are often drawn to conspiracy theories as a way of regaining a sense of control over a frightening and complex situation: for some, it is more comforting to have a shadowy elite to rail against than to accept there’s a virus spreading that nobody knows how to combat.

But if a conspiracy theory is to gain purchase, people must want to believe. They must have an existing distrust of power, of official or established information sources and authority figures; precisely those institutions, in other words, that become more remote from ordinary people the more unequal a society becomes. Conspiracy theories also fill an emotional need that isn’t being met elsewhere.

As Seymour notes of QAnon, whose followers decode “clues” posted anonymously online, people join in partly because they find it fun. There is a mix of horror and excitement, and a sense of community (one of their slogans is “Where we go one, we go all”).

As Seymour writes, the conspiracy has taken on a life of its own: QAnon is “a conversion-machine designed by no single hand, turning agnostic thrill-seekers into devotees of the apocalypse … and translating the attentional surges thereby generated into profit.” Before Facebook gave in to pressure to tighten its regulations in 2020, more than three million of its users were sharing QAnon material.

Not all conspiratorial thinking is as baroque as QAnon, but to Seymour its prevalence shows there is a latent desire for a “violent reset”: “There is evil in the world,” the logic goes, “but it has a face and a name and we can strike back against it.” For Seymour, taking his cue from Lacan, “the fantasy of a ‘world without them’ is destined to turn suicidal,” since the desire to annihilate the Other cannot be satiated and ultimately turns inwards.

Whether or not you follow him all the way here, it is certainly plausible that nationalism can be a beneficiary of unconscious aggression, since the nation is still, for all the disruptions of globalization, the primary form of our collective political life. Nationalism is always susceptible to violent confusion, since “the nation” means two things at once: a civic community defined by shared space and an ethnic community defined by blood.

Far-right nationalists put considerable effort into exciting fears that collective national life is under threat by focusing on its corporeal elements – think of their preoccupations with sex, birth and death – and naming the culprits. The Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin recently described Ukrainians as “collective transgenders”: Ukraine blurs the boundaries between Russia and the West, he says, thereby undermining the integrity of the Russian nation.

“Popular war against national enemies,” as Seymour puts it, may not yet be central to far-right populism in the way it was to interwar fascism, but it is lurking in the background.

When Rodrigo Duterte took office in the Philippines in 2016, he practiced what Seymour calls “death squad populism,” urging the murder of drug addicts as well as dealers in an effort to revive urban neighborhoods. It is estimated that as many as 30,000 people were killed, some by vigilante groups, in the space of six years.

In Israel, the far right’s eliminationist rhetoric has provided the drumbeat to the genocidal violence meted out to Gazans since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, as well as the increase in settler pogroms in the West Bank. India continues to be racked by outbursts of Hindu nationalist mob violence.

The correspondences between leader and mob may be looser elsewhere, but they are still significant: Trump’s pardoning of the January 6, 2021 rioters as soon as he began his second term, including members of militias and street gangs, makes clear his relationship to that part of his base. If his economic policies fail to deliver, and his ostentatious tormenting of migrants and trans people fails to make up for it, he may need them again.

In the UK, far-right politics appears to have moved away from violent extremism. Since the collapse in 2010 of the British National Party, a group founded by neo-Nazis that began to win support only when it adopted a more moderate public face, the momentum has been with the populists. Farage’s various projects – Ukip, the Brexit Party and now Reform UK – have been the defining right-wing influence on British politics in the past 15 years.

As elsewhere in Europe, the growth of far-right populism in the UK can be ascribed at least in part to various economic ills. Flatlining wages, stalled social mobility and a decrepit public realm have plagued British life since 2008 and are a breeding ground for the resentment that Seymour describes.

Until 2016, governments largely tried to manage that resentment by assuring voters that they were eager to punish the undeserving poor: the “shirkers” targeted by George Osborne’s cuts to the welfare state and the illegal immigrants Theresa May told to “go home.” But this did nothing to stave off far-right populism, which was buoyed by a combination of sympathetic coverage from the traditional right-wing press and the increasing prominence of far-right influencers in the mainstream media – only five people have appeared more often on the BBC’s Question Time than Farage – and online.

More recently, the right has secured its own TV channel, GB News. Since the EU referendum in 2016, which might not have happened without Farage, the principal effect of far-right populism has been to pull the mainstream further right: the Conservatives’ reward for this has been the erosion of its electoral base; they are now – at best – competing with Reform for second place at Westminster.

According to recent polling by the anti-fascist organization Hope not Hate, 40% of British people would prefer a “strong and decisive leader who has the authority to override or ignore Parliament” to a liberal democracy with regular elections and a multi-party system. The more pessimistic people are about their own lives, the poll found, the more likely they are to support Reform, to believe multiculturalism is failing and to oppose immigration.

If you believe Farage, his brand of politics is a bulwark against violent extremism, yet such violence has been on the rise too, and has often been cultivated online. The murder of Jo Cox in 2016 by a white supremacist was followed a year later by a foiled plot by members of a neo-Nazi youth network to murder a Labour MP. According to Hope not Hate, a growing number of young men are attracted to violence and are becoming “increasingly ideologically fluid” in the ways they justify their impulses.

In August 2021, a 22-year-old man in Plymouth shot and killed five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl. He had immersed himself in nihilistic and misogynistic online subcultures, and described himself shortly before the killings as “beaten down and defeated by life.” A 25-year-old man who raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend and murdered her mother and sister in Hertfordshire in July 2024 had been searching online for material by the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate shortly before he carried out the killings.

What’s more, as Seymour suggests, mainstream politics is now punctuated by the violence of the street. After 2016 there were frequent attempts by far-right Brexit supporters to intimidate MPs on their way in and out of Parliament, and canvassers for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party were assaulted during the 2019 election campaign. Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the anti-Muslim English Defence League, has more than a million followers on X, and has mobilized tens of thousands of supporters to take part in street demonstrations in London.

The populist posturing of some ministers in the successive Johnson, Truss and Sunak administrations did nothing to discourage far-right extremism.

In autumn 2020, while Johnson, the then home secretary, Priti Patel, and the Daily Mail mounted rhetorical attacks on “lefty”’ immigration lawyers, a Nazi sympathizer tried to kill the head of immigration law at a prominent firm of solicitors.

Patel’s eventual successor, Suella Braverman, was removed in a reshuffle in November 2023 after writing in the Times that police had applied a “double standard” in being tougher on “right-wing and nationalist protesters” than on “pro-Palestinian mobs.”

These various strands came together in the riots of the summer of 2024. To put it in Seymour’s terms, acute disaster – the Southport murders, carried out by a teenager who had cultivated his grievances online – led to a crisis in the chronic disaster of British politics, triggering riots and anti-immigration protests in 27 towns and cities. Committed far-right activists inflamed the response: as unfounded rumours spread online that the killer was Muslim or an asylum seeker, a veteran neo-Nazi from Merseyside called for a protest in Southport, promoting it via a Telegram group that swiftly attracted thousands of followers. Similar calls cropped up elsewhere online, but according to Hope not Hate most of the people involved in them, and in the riots themselves, had no formal political affiliation.

Although most of the disturbances took place in deprived areas, as rioting usually does, the stories of the people convicted for participating in or encouraging the violence suggest a perplexing range of motivations. Gavin Pinder, a 47-year-old with a highly-paid job at a nuclear power plant, was said to be laughing as he attempted to attack a mosque in Southport; so was Leanne Hodgson, a 43-year-old former flight attendant who charged a line of police with an industrial wheelie bin.

Peter Lynch, 61, joined a mob that tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham; he was carrying a placard condemning the “deep state,” the World Health Organization and Nasa. In Bristol, Ashley Harris, the 36-year-old owner of a scaffolding business, led a chant of “We want our country back” before punching a female counter-protester. “Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards,” posted Lucy Connolly, 41, a former childminder and the wife of a Tory councillor in Northampton. “If that makes me racist so be it.” Levi Fishlock, a 31-year-old from Barnsley who tried to set fire to the hotel in Rotherham, told arresting officers that it was for “a good cause.”

All of this illustrates the mix of apocalyptic fantasy, nationalist resentment and libidinal excess that Seymour describes. But it’s a long way from fascism as an organised political force. One problem with Seymour’s analysis is that he doesn’t explain how you get from one part of his picture to another – from a disordered outburst of racist violence, for instance, to a successful far-right electoral project. Another way of reading last summer’s riots is that they demonstrated the resilience of the UK’s political system: after a swift law and order crackdown instigated by the government, and large counter-protests endorsed even by the Daily Mail, the violence petered out.

Farage, whose political skill lies in carefully treading the boundary of mainstream respectability, was put on the back foot and had to disassociate himself from the violence. This year, Reform has been pushed into crisis twice by Farage’s attempts to maintain respectability: once, when Elon Musk called for Tommy Robinson to be admitted into the party, and again when Farage sacked his MP Rupert Lowe after a row caused – at least in part – by Lowe’s call for mass deportations.

This raises the question of whether, in focusing too heavily on the fascist potential of today’s far right, we miss what’s really going on. In the late 1970s, too, British capitalism was in crisis and the political system seemed stuck. One result of this was a rise in support for the National Front. But Stuart Hall, in his essay “The Great Moving Right Show” (1979), argued that the left was misreading the moment, either behaving as if interwar fascism were at the door again, or treating the Conservatives under Thatcher as run-of-the-mill Tories. The NF, while vicious and dangerous, was in Hall’s view marginal. Thatcher, however, represented something new and significant: a form of “authoritarian populism” that would win broad support through its attentiveness to forms of resentment at large in society and would reset British capitalism in favor of ruling elites, leaving the left adrift. That is more or less what happened. And it was achieved within the bounds of liberal democracy – though the Metropolitan Police were on hand just in case. When Farage describes Reform as a “brand new Conservative movement,” we should think a bit harder about what that means.

A related problem is that Seymour doesn’t quite explain the reason the trends he identifies are more prominent in some places than in others. His use of international examples is a welcome change from the usual anglophone solipsism – indeed their implication is that the cutting edge of nationalist revanchism in the 21st century might lie outside the sclerotic economies of the West – but this is not a properly global account.

How, for instance, does disaster nationalism relate to a more straightforwardly autocratic regime such as Russia under Putin, or to post-communist China, which has developed its own version of muscular national capitalism? Both are mentioned only in passing. This is a shame, because as Trump’s second term has already shown, the division of the world into rival, heavily militarised power blocs, each dominated by its own regional nationalist bully, seems to be a goal of far-right populists and dictatorships alike. A self-destructive spiral of violence is one potential consequence, but so too is a more stable form of authoritarianism: a ‘managed democracy’ under which people’s rights are curtailed and territories grabbed but the show rolls on.

The counter argument would be that nothing about this moment seems stable. We have not yet experienced the profound social shocks – of world war or hyperinflation – that helped give rise to interwar fascism, but that’s what awaits us, Seymour believes, if we fail to halt climate breakdown. It would be “Pollyanna-ish,” he says, to assume that our democratic systems are resilient enough to ride out the coming climate storms. The more forward-thinking far-right politicians are already trying to infuse their nationalism with an ecological flavour, turning away from the question of how to avert catastrophe and signalling instead that nations must look to their own. ‘Borders are the environment’s greatest ally,’ Rassemblement National’s Jordan Bardella said in 2019. “It is through them that we will save the planet.”

Seymour wants us to imagine the worst that could happen, and to do something to avert it. But it’s hard to square these aims. On the one hand, he stresses, correctly, that today’s far right can be defeated. It thrives on a diminished social sphere, on the timidity and paralysis of its opponents, and on the sense that hope, as Fisher once put it, is a “dangerous illusion.” Any meaningful reinvigoration of democracy will need to attend to emotional needs as much as to what Seymour calls the ‘bread and butter politics’ of jobs, wages and public services. Look, he says, at the way trade unions build solidarity among workers. People come together to improve their material circumstances, in the form of pay and conditions. But in doing so, other needs are awakened, “such as the need for other people in ‘communal activity and communal enjoyment’” – here he is quoting Marx – “and even the development of ‘radical needs’ such as ‘the need for universality’.”

On the other hand, Seymour’s foreboding vision leaves him with little room for manoeuvre. “We cannot disown apocalyptic desire,” he writes, suggesting that there is “a latent rebelliousness in even the bluntest expressions of hopelessness,” such as the banner unfurled at an Extinction Rebellion protest that read simply: “We’re Fucked.”

But that’s not nearly enough.

I first started reporting on the far right in the late 2000s, when it was regarded as an unpleasant, if lurid, sideshow. As I have watched it become one of the defining political currents of our time, one of the hardest things to grasp has been the way it thrives on failures in the existing system, yet offers remedies that would make everything much worse. It is difficult, but necessary, to give both parts of the equation due attention. Fascism, Paxton wrote, becomes a serious political force when it taps into “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions.” In order not to arrive at that point, we could start by looking at what we stand to lose, and thinking about how we might preserve it.

22 Comments

Justine Frederiksen June 5, 2025

63

- Matt Kendall June 5, 2025
  
  9×7=63
  That’s what’s I got as well
  
- Harvey Reading June 5, 2025
  
  A+B=16
  A-B=2
  
  Add the two equations: (A + B) + (A – B) and you get 2 x A=18, which makes A = 9, which in turn means B = 7, and A x B = 9 x 7 = 63. That is, unless I missed something …
  
  - Justine Frederiksen June 5, 2025
    
    I took a much less formal and complicated route to 63, but I believe we both arrived at the correct answer.
    
    - Matt Kendall June 6, 2025
      
      Me too
      I kind of guessed
      And copied off your answer
      
George Hollister June 5, 2025

Fascism, or Communism can not happen unless government has enough responsibility to make it happen. If Fascism or Communism are a really concern, then limit the responsibility of government.

- Chuck Dunbar June 5, 2025
  
  “Is This Fascism?” Daniel Trilling writes a fascinating, informed article, best one I’ve seen on this issue. The human, emotional, tribal and broad cultural issues around how fascism arises, evolves, and takes power on are greatly important. We see so much of it right here, right now in our nation. George, read this one again— think you missed the essence of it in your assertion about government power, it’s more complicated than that.
  The hope is, as Trilling argues, the following, and the struggling Democrats—or some new, vital party— need to heed it, or we are going to lose our nation, imperfect as it is and has been:
  “…Any meaningful reinvigoration of democracy will need to attend to emotional needs as much as to what Seymour calls the ‘bread and butter politics’ of jobs, wages and public services. Look, he says, at the way trade unions build solidarity among workers. People come together to improve their material circumstances, in the form of pay and conditions. But in doing so, other needs are awakened, “such as the need for other people in ‘communal activity and communal enjoyment’” – here he is quoting Marx – ‘and even the development of ‘radical needs’ such as ‘the need for universality’.”
  
  - Jurgen Stoll June 5, 2025
    
    This is available as a podcast on the London Review of Books (LRB) podcast.
    
  - George Hollister June 5, 2025
    
    My point is only a government with enough responsibility to control its citizens can enact a fascist state, or a communist one. The fundamental timeless fantasy humans have is that a power that is responsible for you, can’t control you. That control can be driven by many inherently human ideological forms. A good book to read on the subject is “Road To Serfdom” by Frederic Hayek.
    
Harvey Reading June 5, 2025

STUNNING 20-ACRE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ESTATE WITH PRIVATE ISLAND LISTS FOR $7.5M

Was this a paid ad? Or, was it just a cheer for destroying nature for the sake of the wealthy?

- Kirk Vodopals June 5, 2025
  
  Both!
  
Chuck Dunbar June 5, 2025

THE LITTLE BOYS ARE AT IT

“Trump and Musk Attack Each Other in Remarkable Break”

“President Trump said he was “disappointed in Elon” for publicly opposing his bill. Musk responded on X, saying, “Without me, Trump would have lost the election…”

POLITICO, today

Gosh, hard to believe, who could have predicted it? Still, they both deserved each other– both a grandiose, cruel, crude, nutcase. Sad that they’ve had a falling-out. Hope Trump does not deport Elon back to his great country of origin. Revenge must be on his mind. Watch them play this out before the whole world. Makes one proud of our leaders.

- Steve Heilig June 5, 2025
  
  Yep, nasty divorces between wealthy folks with giant egos tend to divulge lots of skeletons.
  Today Musk brings up Trump’s prominence in the Epstein files, saying that’s why they haven’t been released yet. Musk calls it “the really big bomb” and adds, “have a nice day, DJT!”
  (But tapes are already available, with Epstein calling Don the Con his very best friend, and worse….
  https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU08/20250227/117951/HHRG-119-JU08-20250227-SD006-U6.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawKu6QZleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFiZkMzbmJRaGFFYWFsRHVDAR7QbXZQagD1lSnIMMToEX2NhXgZIwTIt7H6L8wlgaI7YIDgHB8bj_jutwihuA_aem_gfQnxS-vjBef0-BTmxl15g
  
  This could get very ugly, but couldn’t happen to nicer guys…..
  ( funny irony too, the MAGA and QAnon cult folks have long fantasized it would be Clinton and others ensnared therein, not their certified sex-assaulting hero…)
  Stay tuned indeed.
  
  - Chuck Dunbar June 5, 2025
    
    Better than pulp fiction for sure… But God himself may be the author of this one. If not the author, He is watching it all, waiting for his chance to query each of his disciples at the end.
    
    - Eli Maddock June 5, 2025
      
      1324.5 days left
      May this god act more swiftly!
      
Craig Stehr June 5, 2025

Katha Upanishad 2.2.13
https://vivekavani.com/kau2c2v13/

Warmest spiritual greetings, This explanation from the ancient Indian upanishads explains how we may have solidarity. We may proceed in a unified fashion to perform eco-revolutionary direct action! I am ready to leave the homeless shelter in Washington, D.C., having been supportive of the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil (i.e. anti-nuclear war vigil) for the sixteenth time since June of 1991. I have roughly $2800 dollars, and California food stamps. The mental/physical health is good at 75. Holding fast to the constant, the Dao works through me (dualistically speaking) without interference. You are welcome to make contact at your earliest convenience.

Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone Messages: (202) 832-8317
Email: [email protected]
June 5, 2025 A.D.

Bob Abeles June 5, 2025

Robert Fulbright is our oldest friend in the valley. We met him a day or so after landing out near Bear Wallow. He and Dena were cutting wood, and the first thing he did was offer to share some with us. He’s always had a big, kind heart. I’m saddened to see him going through such hard times. Please join me in sending him what you can.

- Chuck Dunbar June 5, 2025
  
  Yes, thanks, Bob, for letting us all know.
  
Katherine Houston June 5, 2025

It would help to have the names of the Democratic committee members shown in the photo.

- Bruce Anderson June 5, 2025
  
  That would only add to our despair.
  
Mike Jamieson June 5, 2025

I wonder if there’s any popcorn left on the shelf. Probably not.

The cosmic script writers deserve a raise!

Julie Beardsley June 5, 2025

Musk just out-ed Trump by telling the world that the reason the Epstein files haven’t been made public is because Trump is in them.
It’s so fitting that a couple of catty bitches are having this falling out during Pride Month…..

22 Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply