Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 6/10/2025

Cooling | Fog | Lunchtime Shooting | Cosmos | Landline Abstainer | Safeway Streaker | Super Burrito | Boonville 18th | Pomo Presentation | Annexation Map | Proposed Reorganization | Hendy Programs | Puppy Love | Surfboards | Comptche BBQ | Planning Commission | Tanbark Interior | ALRFPD&FA BBQ | Inn Out | OneTaste Verdict | Offloading Tanbark | Yesterday's Catch | Diego Rivera | Authoritarian Rule | $7 Balance | Allegory Mural | The What | Manhattan Beach | Old Stoners | You Moron | Marines Added | Lead Stories | President Statement | Insurrection Act | Catching Zs | Sweet 16 | Pardoned | Undemocratic Constitution | Vaillancourt Fountain | Nuclear Winter | Dice Roll

---

ISOLATED thunderstorm threat for Trinity, Del Norte, and NE Mendocino County continues Tuesday afternoon into the evening. Warm temperatures continue Tuesday, however, a cooling trend will keep temperatures cooling steadily through the week into the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Yes! you guessed it weather fans, a foggy 50F this Tuesday morning on the coast. I'm going with foggy thru tomorrow with some afternoon clearing, then general clearing for later in the week. The satellite sure shows a lot of fog out there?

---

---

UKIAH TAQUERIA SHOOTING LEADS TO THREE ARRESTS

by Matt LaFever

A lunchtime shooting in the parking lot of a busy taqueria in south Ukiah ended with a restaurant employee airlifted to an out-of-county hospital and three suspects in custody after a dramatic SWAT raid, according to a press release from the Ukiah Police Department.

Shortly after 12:45 p.m. on Saturday, June 7, 2025, officers were dispatched to the parking lot of Taqueria Jalos, near South State Street and Talmage Road, after multiple 911 callers reported gunfire and a possible car crash. Officers arrived to find a 42-year-old man—later identified as a local resident and employee of the taqueria—bleeding heavily from the head and shoulder. The man was reportedly in shock and unable to tell officers what had happened before he was rushed to the hospital and eventually flown to a trauma center.

The scene painted a chaotic picture. Six spent .45 caliber shell casings were found near the victim, and the man’s bullet-riddled car was discovered abandoned across the street, stained with blood.

As investigators closed off the 1100 block of South State Street and declared it a crime scene, surveillance footage from the area began to tell the story. According to UPD, the video showed the victim being boxed in by two vehicles—a silver sedan and a silver Jeep—before the sedan rammed his car. A man identified as 38-year-old Raul Mandujano reportedly exited the sedan with a gun and fired multiple shots at close range before jumping back into the car and fleeing. Police say the Jeep was driven by Mandujano’s wife, 34-year-old Anna Escamilla, with a third family member, 49-year-old Ma Marin-Mandujano, also in the vehicle.

Both suspect vehicles were later located at a home on North Bush Street. With arrest warrants in hand and the lead suspect considered armed and dangerous, UPD called in the Mendo-Lake Regional SWAT team, which conducted an early-morning raid Friday. All three suspects were arrested without incident.

During the search of the home, police say they recovered the .45 caliber handgun believed to have been used in the shooting, as well as clothing matching what Mandujano was seen wearing in surveillance video.

Mandujano was booked into the Mendocino County Jail on suspicion of attempted murder, aggravated assault with a firearm, and personal use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. Escamilla and Ma Marin-Mandujano were both booked for allegedly aiding in the commission of a crime. As of this writing, the charges remain allegations and have not been proven in court.

Ukiah Police credited the swift resolution to coordination between multiple agencies and tips from the public. “We are grateful for the support we received during this investigation from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, the California Highway Patrol, and the witnesses and concerned citizens,” UPD wrote in its statement.

---

---

THE CHRIS ROGERS ABSTAINER. (He's in the tradition…)

Landline Service and Chris Rogers

Editor,

I called Assemblyman Chris Rogers' office to express our opposition to AB 470, and was told that he ABSTAINED from voting on this bill each time it's come up.

He ought to go ahead and sell out like everyone else, or get off the pot and represent us!

Please call his office and let him know how you feel about his nonexistent representation of the rural areas he represents: (916) 319-2002. Without a landline, many people will be isolated, and we all know that cell service is not reliable during area-wide emergencies like fires and quakes, where landline service is.

EOR (End Of Rant). Thanks!

Jean Arnold

---

ANN JOVICH:

Streaking is alive in Fort Bragg! Mike and I went to Breakfast very early this morning and then to Harvest Market to grocery shop. When we got done there we had to go to Safeway for a few items. As I was waiting in the car, a man came running through the parking lot buck naked and no shoes running at a good clip, his junk swinging everywhere, and headed towards Starbucks where he slowed down a bit, (probably thinking he needed a coffee) but instead continued running down the alley! It pays to be Early Birds! Well that’s my entertainment for the morning! Now what to do?

---

---

BOONVILLE MAKES ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST’S ’55 BEST SMALL TOWNS’ LIST. (Although their reasons leave a little to be desired.)

18: Boonville, California

“A rural community of less than 1,000 people, Boonville remains much as it has been for the past couple of centuries, with vineyards and farms spread across its land. Farm workers in the late 19th century developed their own jargon, Boontling, and many of the words reflect the rural lifestyle of the town.”

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/most-beautiful-small-towns-in-america

---

JEFF BURROUGHS

The presentation at the Anderson Valley Historical Museum, the Little Red Schoolhouse on Sunday was a day to remember. For the first time ever the Anderson Valley Pomo, the first people of the Anderson Valley, were honored. The extensive research by David Severn cataloging the journey of what happened to the Native Americans of A.V. was very interesting. But the highlight of the event was of course Elizabeth Knight, with her family lineage in Anderson Valley and Yorkville possibly going back as far as 3000 years. I couldn't think of a better representative than Elizabeth, her character is of the highest quality. Thank you to Lori Laiwa Thomas for her extensive knowledge of not only the pomo linguistics but her entertaining story telling that was truly a treat for all of us. And thank you to Sheri L Hansen who brought us all together for this special day.

---

---

CITY OF UKIAH TO HOST TOWN HALL ON PROPOSED UKIAH VALLEY REORGANIZATION, THURSDAY, JUNE 19TH

City of Ukiah Staff will host a town hall meeting on the proposed reorganization project—part of which is annexation. All interested community members are invited to attend.

The meeting will be held on Thursday, June 19th, beginning at 5:30 pm, at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center, 200 South School Street, Ukiah.

More on the Proposed Ukiah Valley Reorganization:

The proposed Ukiah Valley Reorganization builds on a long-standing City policy direction to strengthen regional planning, enhance service delivery, and protect agricultural and open space lands. In recent years, the City has completed an updated 2040 General Plan, secured a Master Tax Sharing Agreement with Mendocino County, implemented a Sphere of Influence Update, and consolidated emergency and water services through regional partnerships. The City has also passed a Right to Farm ordinance to protect agricultural land use within city boundaries.

If pursued, annexation could:

Enable more reliable and coordinated government services, including police, code enforcement, and infrastructure maintenance.

Secure a stronger, more focused tax base to fund quality services and community amenities.

Give residents in annexed areas a voice in City elections and representation on issues that affect their neighborhoods.

Provide a foundation for sustainable housing and commercial development while protecting agricultural land and open space.

For updates and more information, visit www.cityofukiah.com/annexation.

Shannon Riley, Ukiah Deputy City Manager

---

HOW DID UKIAH’S “annexation” proposal balloon to include an astounding 2600 unincorporated county parcels north and south of city limits when, during last year’s tax sharing agreement discussions, Ukiah gave County authorities the impression that Ukiah only wanted to annex a few parcels on the fringes of existing city limits? Of course, we’re not privy to the City’s real motivations, but some close observers believe it has to do with 1. The city accumulating a lot debt that can’t be covered by existing tax revenue forecasts which in turn jeopardizes the city’s credit rating and future borrowing capacity, and therefore they need more projected future revenue (i.e., taxable parcels) to continue borrowing, and 2. When they started looking at what parcels to annex, it became clear that cherry-picking a few here and there was impractical because behind the scenes special district boards in the Ukiah Valley (but outside city limits) representing overlapping water, fire, school, and sewer districts didn’t want to give up a few prime parcels in their districts piecemeal, jeopardizing their own (much smaller) taxable parcels while not reducing their costs and making those Board’s almost irrelevant.

So the annexation grab sort of snowballed into grabbing entire districts and tax rate areas just to get the few that Ukiah wanted at first. By the time they were done, however, the proposed annexation not only was unwieldly and impractical, but increasingly irrational because conflicts with the existing district boundaries didn’t really go away, they just got farther and farther from existing city limits.

There’s another third, more speculative factor that some Ukiah-ites mention: Ukiah City Manager ‘Seldom-Seen’ Sage Sangiacomo has megalomaniacal tendencies (by Ukiah standards, of course) and tends towards the grandiose gesture rather than practical smaller steps.

Add this to the bureaucratic hurdles involved, the negative impact on County finances, and the general unpopularity and disrespect that the public and the affected property owners have for Official Ukiah and the County and the suspicion that the annexation will only makes things worse, and you start to see why Ukiah’s over-sized annexation idea is facing ever-expanding opposition as the affected parcel owners realize that there’s nothing that will benefit them in the deal.

(Mark Scaramella)

---

---

A HOMELESS DOG?

Dear Editor Bruce,

Thank you, happy you are alive and kicking, wasn’t sure if you had been kidnapped and held hostage or were out for the count!?

Interesting your love for boxing. I believe my father was born the same year as you 1941. He also had a love of boxing! I never could understand why one could enjoy getting the shit beat out of them by another person, that never made sense to me. Maybe the money was good and I suppose men wanna prove how tough they are? Getting your teeth knocked out and brain damage, no thanks,

A few years back, my son brought a homeless man to our door after going for a walk. The reason he did so is he had a puppy that had gotten loose and ran away from home right up to a homeless person who decided he was going to keep and take care of the puppy, but he had no food to feed it. So my son, knowing that we have dog food since we have a dog, decided to bring him home and help him take care of the puppy by giving him some food. I of course, spoke with the man. We gave the dog some dinner. This individual was so excited to have this little dog but also very anxious about how he would care for it. Boy was he happy to have that dog.

Later that evening I was on Facebook and saw someone had lost their dog, a dog that looked like the same exact dog pup that had broken free from home. I did notify them that there was a homeless man who had a dog that looked exactly like theirs and where they might find him to get their dog back. Unfortunately I never found out if they did indeed get their puppy back.

The thing is, I do not know if the man had actually stolen the puppy or if it was as he said that the puppy ran up to him out of the blue and he just felt the love and wanted to protect and take care of the little guy. Who knows? But I did tell my son please not to bring homeless people to the door and he has not since done that.

Mazie Malone

Ukiah

---

---

COMPTCHE FATHER'S DAY CHICKEN BBQ

The Father’s Day BBQ Chicken Dinner benefitting the Comptche Volunteer Fire Department will be back in action Sunday June 15 from noon to 4 p.m. at Firehouse Park, right next to the fire station, a quarter mile south of the Comptche Store on Flynn Creek Road. A great meal is available for $27 for ages 13 and up, $12 for kids ages 7-12. Kids under six eat free.

The chicken will be hitting the BBQ grill served with salad, garlic bread, macaroni salad, beans and homemade pies and desserts. There will be liquid refreshments, a country store, a kids play zone and a raffle. Comptche quilters have hand made award winning quilts for decades and this year the quilt is the Grand Prize finishing the raffle.

Music will be provided by 2nd Hand Grass and New Nashville West.

The Comptche Volunteer Fire Department has been a valued part of the community for over 60 years. This event helps ensure the financial stability of the organization.

Please leave your pets at home.

---

I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT

Agenda & Staff Reports for Planning Commission Meeting 6-19-25

The Staff Report(s) and Agenda for the June 19, 2025 l Planning Commission meeting is now available on the department website at: https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/departments/planning-building-services/boards-and-commissions/public-hearing-bodies/public-hearing-bodies#!

Please contact staff if there are any questions,

Thank you

James Feenan

Commission Services Supervisor

[email protected]

---

---

ALBION-LITTLE RIVER FIRE BBQ JULY 12, 2025

The Albion-Little River Fire Protection District and Fire Auxiliary cordially invite you to celebrate the 62nd year of our annual fundraising BBQ on Saturday, July 12,2025, from Noon to 5PM at ALRFPD Station 812, 43100 Little River Airport Rd., Little River.

Support our firefighters while munching down on tasty BBQ'd chicken, tri tip, chili beans, corn-on-the-cob, garlic bread and desserts. We will have a wine auction as well as a silent auction for local items, live music, a dessert booth and bar for beer and wine, and this year we are adding a new margarita booth.

Tickets are available at the door and are $30 for adults, $15 for 7-12 year olds, and free for children under 7 accompanied by a paying adult.

Volunteers are needed to help the day before for preparation, to help at the event, and to provide desserts for our dessert booth. We also need volunteers to come in at the end of the event for cleanup. In addition, we are also soliciting donations for our auction. Please contact me at [email protected] regarding auction donations and desserts, Wendy Meyer at [email protected] if you are interested in volunteering, or Susy Kitahara at [email protected] for anything to do with the food, as soon as possible.

All Volunteers Will Get A Free Meal.

We're looking forward to seeing every one of you! Thanks for your support.

---

OPULENT HOTEL ON THE CALIFORNIA COAST ABRUPTLY AND MYSTERIOUSLY CLOSES

The Sacred Rock Inn debuted just as tourism in Elk, California, bloomed

by Silas Valentino

The other day, Melissa Boon said an odd occurrence kept repeating at the front desk in the hotel she co-owns in a remote hamlet on the North Coast. The Elk Cove Inn & Spa is one of three hotels in the tiny town of Elk, a recent darling for California travelers. Boon said a person frantically phoned the inn asking for an immediate reservation, adding that their room at the Sacred Rock Inn down the road was suddenly canceled.

“When we first heard about it, we thought it was strange,” Boon told SFGATE. “It happened once, then it happened twice. The phone was ringing off that day.”

News that the Sacred Rock Inn had abruptly closed caught many in town by surprise this week. “It was very sudden,” said Elk resident Judy Bonney. “Nobody was given any information and still has been given no information.”

Not only is the sudden closure unusual since the busy season is now underway, but the Sacred Rock Inn owners had only recently finished renovating and redeveloping the property. After purchasing parcels a decade ago, the Jackson Rancheria Band of Miwuk Indians reopened the hotel in June 2024. The timing seemed ideal for anyone in hospitality. Elk tourism is red hot. Last year, Travel + Leisure magazine crowned Elk “America’s Best Small Food and Wine Town.”

“Elk is being promoted. It’s such a hidden gem, like they used to call us,” said Rakesh Taneja, one of the other owners of the Elk Cove Inn. “It’s the beginning of the summer season — I’ve never heard of anyone closing business now. Usually they close at the end of season when it’s slow, like around Thanksgiving or Christmas. Now is the time to make money.”

Three-Hotel Town

Unlike the hurried way this chapter in the Sacred Rock Inn’s legacy concluded, the story of how Jackson Rancheria came to own it appears rather typical for this faraway enclave on the North Coast. Someone visits, falls in love with the craggy coastline and proceeds to look into property.

The Jackson Rancheria Band of Miwuk Indians are based in Jackson, a small city in the Sierra foothills that’s about 230 miles away from Elk. A construction manager of Jackson Rancheria Casino Resort explained to the Mendocino Beacon in 2018 that the tribe’s leader, Adam Dalton, was personally smitten with Elk during a vacation.

According to property records published by MendocinoCoast.News, Jackson Rancheria subsidiaries purchased seven parcels, including a hotel and restaurant, starting in 2014. The tribe went on to buy several historic properties along the bluff, including the Griffin House, Bridget Dolan’s Pub and the Greenwood Pier Inn.

An artist from Oakland named Kendrick Petty previously owned the Greenwood Pier Inn and since the 1970s, fashioned the property with red stone tiles on the floor, vaulted ceilings and tall windows, perfect for watching the waves crash against Wharf Rock offshore.

Jackson Rancheria threaded the properties together, rebranding them as the Sacred Rock Inn, featuring 19 luxury accommodations and a restaurant called the Elk House. There were more than a dozen rooms available, including cottages, bungalows, suites and a private house. Some of the employees lived on site since housing is often rare in rural areas.

Boon said the decade leading up the Sacred Rock Inn’s debut was a long process.

“It was delayed multiple times and I know they spent millions of dollars,” she said. “We got a tour and everything was gutted and redone, but beautifully redone. They didn’t spare a dime.”

Although the two hotels, along with the nearby Harbor House Inn, were competing for guests, Boon described them as complementary to one another. Boon and her husband Victor Passalacqua took over the Elk Cove Inn with Taneja in 2020. She said that their hotel, which has been in Elk since 1967, hearkens back to a vintage coastal experience.

“I describe our place as more charming — a home away from home,” Boon said. “It’s what people used to come to Mendocino for. Like coming to a friend’s house.”

She said Harbor House and its restaurant “put Elk on the map with its two Michelin stars” while the Sacred Rock Inn had a big marketing budget, benefiting all three hotels even if clientele differed.

At Sacred Rock Inn, Boon said “their cheapest room was about $600, which is what our suite, the most expensive room, goes for. It was different crowds.”

‘A Special Place With Special People’

As news of the hotel’s unexpected closure sent shock waves across the seaside town, some locals learned that even Sacred Rock Inn’s employees were unaware that they were losing their job. “It’s a small community and everyone talks,” Taneja said. “The staff at the inn had no idea what’s going on. I was told that they hired two people a week before they closed.”

Bonney added the abrupt closure particularly impacts the employees living on site. She said they were given three months to find new housing.

Doug Elmets, spokesman for the Jackson Rancheria Band of Miwuk Indians, wrote in an emailed statement that their decision to close was decided “after careful consideration of long-term plans for the site and the business. While Sacred Rock operated successfully, we felt this was the right time to conclude operations.”

He added that they have made no decisions for the future of the property and were not going to share additional details at this time.

The hotel restaurant, Elk House, was led by executive chef Ryan Seal. The menu was globally inspired — with dishes ranging from Korean fried chicken sandwiches to pork belly bao buns — while maintaining a homegrown charm. “Think ‘Uncle Ryan’s favorite food to eat,’” the restaurant wrote on Tripadvisor.

Seal said that despite the abrupt closure, the Sacred Rock Inn still managed to earn a positive reputation from guests, if only for a short period of time.

“The hundreds of 5 star reviews that we the team here earned and worked so hard for are not in vain. The time I spent here has been the most rewarding for me as a chef and to be able to lead a team of individuals that truly enjoyed coming into work and creating excellence in everything we do will be what I take away from here,” Seal wrote in a text message to SFGATE. “This was a special place with special people that was just getting started and we know the hard work that we put in mattered and made a positive ripple in our community and for the many guests we had the pleasure of serving.”

(SFGate.com)

---

LEADERS OF ‘ORGASMIC MEDITATION’ WOMEN'S WELLNESS COMPANY ONETASTE (FORMERLY OF PHILO) CONVICTED IN FORCED LABOR TRIAL

by Philip Marcelo

The leaders of a sex-focused women’s wellness company that promoted “orgasmic meditation” have been convicted of federal forced labor charges.

A Brooklyn jury on Monday found Nicole Daedone, founder of OneTaste Inc., and Rachel Cherwitz, the California-based company’s former sales director, guilty after deliberating for less than two days following a five-week trial. The two each face up to 20 years in prison when sentenced later.

Prosecutors had argued the two women ran a yearslong scheme that groomed adherents — many of them victims of sexual trauma — to do their bidding.

They said Daedone, 57, of New York, and Cherwitz, 44, of California, used economic, sexual and psychological abuse, intimidation and indoctrination to force OneTaste members into sexual acts they found uncomfortable or repulsive, such as having sex with prospective investors or clients.

The two told followers the questionable acts were necessary in order to obtain “freedom” and “enlightenment” and demonstrate their commitment to the organization’s principles.

Prosecutors said OneTaste leaders also didn’t pay promised earnings to the members-turned-workers and even forced some of them to take out new credit cards to continue taking the company’s courses.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nina Gupta, in her closing statement last week, said the defendants “built a business on the backs” of victims who “gave everything” to them, including “their money, their time, their bodies, their dignity, and ultimately their sanity.”

“The jury’s verdict has unmasked Daedone and Cherwitz for who they truly are: grifters who preyed on vulnerable victims by making empty promises of sexual empowerment and wellness only to manipulate them into performing labor and services for the defendants’ benefit,” said Joseph Nocella, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Daedone’s defense team cast her as a “ceiling-shattering feminist entrepreneur” who created a unique business around women’s sexuality and empowerment.

Cherwitz’s lawyer, Celia Cohen, argued that the witnesses who testified weren’t forced to do anything. When they didn’t like the organization anymore or wanted to try other things, she said, they simply left.

“No matter what you think about OneTaste and what they were doing, they chose it. They knew what it was about,” she said in her closing statement last week. “The fact they are regretting the actions that they took when they were younger is not evidence of a crime.”

Lawyers for the defendants said their clients maintain their innocence and intend to appeal.

“We are deeply disappointed in today’s verdict," the lawyers said in a statement Monday. "This case raised numerous novel and complex legal issues that will require review by the Second Circuit.”

Daedone co-founded OneTaste in San Francisco in 2004 as a sort of self-help commune that viewed female orgasms as key to sexual and psychological wellness and interpersonal connection.

A centerpiece was “orgasmic meditation,” or “OM,” which was carried out by men manually stimulating women in a group setting.

The company enjoyed glowing media coverage in the 2010s and quickly opened outposts from Los Angeles to London. Portrayed as a cutting-edge enterprise that prioritized women’s sexual pleasure, it generated revenue by providing courses, coaching, OM events, and other sexual practices for a fee.

Daedone sold her stake in the company in 2017 for $12 million — a year before OneTaste’s marketing and labor practices came under scrutiny.

The company’s current owners, who have rebranded it the Institute of OM Foundation, have said its work has been misconstrued and the charges against its former executives were unjustified.

They maintain sexual consent has always been a cornerstone of the organization. The company didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

---

VERN PETERMAN

This photo shows Monty Bloyd and Al Brusa unloading tanoak bark near the Christine area in the Anderson Valley. A tanoak extractor was put into operation in Anderson Valley before 1900. Tannin from the bark was reduced to liquid, shipped out to Greenwood in barrels and then to San Francisco. Tan oak harvest may have helped release coniferous forests in some areas of the watershed. Photo courtesy of the Anderson Valley Historical Society. (quoted from Krisweb - please feel free to correct, update or add information)

---

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, June 9, 2025

ROYCE FULTON, 41, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, controlled substance, trespassing, failure to appear.

WILLIAM GOFORTH, 57, Willits. Contempt of court.

KIRK JOHNSON, 64, Fort Bragg. DUI-any drug with prior, addict driving vehicle.

CHRISTOPHER LOPEZ, 35, Ukiah. Domestic abuse, probation violation.

JASON LUSK, 42, San Jose/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ORLANDO MUNOZ, 30, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

MATTHEW PATEREAU, 41, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

CARMELLA ROSEVEAR, 40, Philo. Failure to appear.

MARTIN SCOTT, 62, Laytonville. Failure to register.

MITCHELL THRONSON, 38, Ukiah. DUI, misdemeanor hit&run.

---

---

HOW MANY AUTOCRATS DOES IT TAKE TO RUIN A COUNTRY?

Editor,

Since ancient times, our civilization has relied on authoritarian rule. Violence and intimidation achieves obedience. Many ancient regimes have left artifacts to prove that tyranny yields results. Has anyone wondered what the peasants thought about their achievements? Do you believe that greats like Michaelangelo wanted to paint pictures depicting Biblical events? Have you ever wondered how many slaves, how many lives, were destroyed before an autocrat found one who could perform under pressure? A thousand? If a mathematician could quantify the results, do you think the study would dissuade the megalomaniacs? More likely than not, someone would want to wrest control of the government from its citizens. More likely than not, the autocrat would try to quash dissent. More likely than not, it would take violence to depose the autocrat. Democracy is a mode of political rule that reduces violence if the citizens are willing to participate.

Tom Fantulin

Fort Bragg

---

DEBT FREE

Postmodern America: You're Fired!

Warmest spiritual greetings, Adding to my woes in collapsing postmodern America, is the fact that the California EBT isn’t working at the Washington, D.C. H Street Whole Foods. Received the usual email informing me that the monthly sum was in my account, and yet the balance this morning was still around $7. This is on top of the fact that the Social Security Administration SSI disbursement disappeared last month. And of course Donald J. Trump is not remotely taking care of me as a 75 year old senior citizen, as I continue living in a homeless shelter and being part of the William R. Thomas Memorial Anti-Nuclear Vigil in front of the White House, in Lafayette Park. 50 years of frontline radical environmental and peace & justice activism, and writing about it all. The truth is that I don’t need postmodern America, and I don’t owe anybody anything.

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

---

---

WHAT?

by Steve Derwinski

The What and the Why and

…the When and the Where

The Where could be Here and the

…When could be Now

But the What and the Why

…Could furrow your brow

The What seems to imply

…Something concrete

But the Why might presume

…An Idea offbeat

In pondering what the Why could imply

…The reasons for thIngs could mystify

Given that we have minds that inquire

…Our wonder just might

……Sometimes backfire

Like a question that seems

…To rise out of thin air

Just what Is the purpose of pubic hair?

---

---

SENIORS' MARIJUANA USE REACHES NEW HIGH

by Maya Goldman

Older Americans are increasing their use of marijuana to a point where some geriatricians are warning about weed's health risks.

The big picture: U.S. marijuana use among those 65 and older surged nearly 46% from 2021 to 2023, according to new research in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Between the lines: The rapid adoption of state marijuana laws and commercialization of cannabis helped drive much of the increase.

But there also are changing social dynamics that make marijuana more acceptable for dealing with chronic pain, stress and other conditions — especially in the Bay Area, where seniors have been part of the push to allow cannabis dispensaries.

What they found: 7% of adults 65 and older said they'd used cannabis in the past month in 2023, per data from the federally administered National Survey on Drug Use and Health analyzed by researchers at University of California San Diego and NYU.

That's an increase from 4.8% in 2021, and 5.2% in 2022.

Geriatricians say more research and better patient and clinician education on marijuana use are needed to identify risks, like the way it can interfere with other drugs.

It can also impair the senses and cause accidents, an especially important consideration since U.S. cannabis has much more THC than it did decades ago.

(axios.com)

---

---

TRUMP SENDS MARINES TO LA ON FOURTH DAY OF IMMIGRATION PROTESTS

The military said 700 Marines were being added to the National Guard troops already mobilized in Los Angeles to quell opposition to immigration enforcement raids.

The Trump administration is deploying a battalion of 700 Marines to Los Angeles to protect federal property and personnel, the United States Northern Command said on Monday.

The Marines are to join about 2,000 National Guard troops in the city, the nation’s second-largest, potentially intensifying tensions after several days of clashes between law enforcement and demonstrators protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown. As of Monday afternoon, the day’s protests around Los Angeles largely remained orderly and peaceful.

---

LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

Trump Administration More Than Doubles Federal Deployments to Los Angeles

Trump Targets Workplaces as Immigration Crackdown Widens

Kennedy Removes All C.D.C. Vaccine Panel Experts

Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.

Sly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82

---

A MONDAY STATEMENT FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

---

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The current situation might be compared/contrasted with September 1957, when Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard (against the protests of segregationist Democrat Gov. Faubus) and mobilized the 101st Airborne to restore order in Little Rock after Faubus tried to use the National Guard to prevent integration in defiance of the Supreme Court. At the time a white mob was attacking the Black children who were trying to enter the local segregated high school, and Faubus was using the Guard not to disperse the mob but to keep the Blacks out of the school. Without Eisenhower’s action, which he justified in part on the Insurrection Act, the mob would have won and nothing would have changed. It is ironic that in 1957 we had a Republican President enforcing a liberal court decision against a mob of conservative Southern Democrats — things have definitely changed!

---

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

by James Kunstler

"Call me crazy, but I think Dem politicians in LA publicly encouraging riots helps explain why they’re also incapable of issuing building permits for the fires months ago." —Mark Hemingway

And pretty soon, expect action in a dozen other states, you can be sure, because just as it was in the scorpion’s nature to sting the frog crossing the river in the old parable, it is likewise in the Party of Chaos’s nature to sow chaos in an American summer.

The operation to cue riots over the removal of illegal immigrants has been well-planned in advance. Chief lawfare artists Norm Eisen and Mary McCord have engineered the legal strategy to oppose enforcement of US immigration law. They will clog the courts with lawsuits to prevent it and enlist their allied federal judges to issue injunction after injunction paralyzing the deportation process. They will work day and night to get their violent street cadres out of jail, just as they did in the 2020 George Floyd riots, so that these mutts can go back into the streets to loot and burn some more.

It is, of course, the most cynical operation imaginable. The Democratic Party hustled XX-millions of border-jumpers into the country under the authority of their phantom president, “Joe Biden” for one purpose: to flood the swing election precincts with enough new voters to keep the Party of Chaos in power permanently. Now that the illegals are here, the party will do anything it can to foil their removal. All the hand-wringing and crocodile tears over “fearful families and communities” is just stage-business to dress-up the CNN videos.

The ultimate goal of this operation is to goad President Trump into declaring some kind of national emergency to put down the violence, and the objective of that is to point at him and holler, “Behold the fascist tyrant!” That’s the game. The catch is, the Democrats are mistaken in thinking they can replay the George Floyd hustle.

This time around, more than 70-percent of the American public is not-insane. They are not fooled by the term “undocumented” — as if some mysterious clerical error was made by the federal bureaucracy in processing these millions. The actual error was allowing them to stroll freely across the border in the first place, with massive assistance from NGOs that provided smart phones loaded with helpful apps, plus free plane and bus tickets, plus freshly-minted debit cards for walking-around-money, plus posh hotel reservations.

You can blame former Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas — since “Joe Biden” was demonstrably non compos mentis during his term in office — for what was a patently treasonous act. How is it possible that Mr. Mayorkas remains unindicted? By the way, before he was sworn in as Secretary of Homeland Security, he was a board member of one of the most aggressive NGOs actively assisting the recent massive wave of illegal immigrants: the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). The org, founded in 1881 under very different circumstances, has been enlisted to serve the Democratic Party’s program for flooding the voter rolls — just as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been transformed into attack dogs against the Democratic Party’s political opponents.

So, you watch now as the streets of Los Angeles fill with violent mobs waving Mexican and Palestinian flags burn cars, fling missiles and fireworks at police, and interfere with the deportation process of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. They are coming close to presenting themselves as a foreign enemy army and, as such, would invite a response from the defending US military.

It has the odor, at least, of insurrection, while Democratic Party politicians pretend that this is all just “peaceful protest.” LA Mayor Karen Bass skates at the edge of sedition as she orders her city’s law officers to “not cooperate” with federal authorities who seek to find-and-deport illegal immigrants. In her youth as a leftist activist, Ms. Bass joined the Cuba-sponsored Venceremos Brigade. She traveled to Cuba eight times in the 1970s for training in regime change operations. (She claims it was only to do “humanitarian work.”) Ms. Bass is also alleged to have been affiliated in the 1980s with the Oakland-based Maoist organization Line of March, in the 1980s.

California Governor Gavin Newsom appears to be just recklessly grandstanding, looking for a kayfabe fight with Donald Trump as he primps for his party’s 2028 nomination. You have to wonder whether the citizens of California — that is, documented citizens with bona fide US birth certificates — have noticed how Governor Newsom managed to wreck the state during his terms-in-office (and before that, as Mayor of San Francisco). By now, even the steadfast, Woked-up Democratic voters of Pacific Palisades must be a little bit suspicious that Governor Newsom does not really have their best interests at heart as he blusters at the president.

There’s another angle on the current violence, you understand. As the old song goes, Summer’s here / and the time is right / for dancing in the streets. Or fighting in the streets, as the Rolling Stones famously updated the idea in December 1968 — after the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August that year. Street fighting is one of the capital amusements of the sore-beset Gen Z, stuck with unpayable college loans, faced with a daunting job market, reduced to living in Mom’s basement, addled with sexual bamboozlement, and jacked-up on prescription drugs and other mind-altering substances.

All of that feeds a lack of purpose and meaning, one of the more baleful plights of the human condition, in turn, feeding mass delusion, mob violence, and social upheaval. But it’s also party time, an opportunity to get outside in nice weather and consort with your peers, Z’s among fellow Z’s, illegal immigrants with fellow illegals. It affords opportunities for intrepid acts of daring-do — taunting the cops, flinging bricks, doing wheelies and “donuts” with motor vehicles — in order to impress potential sex partners. In other words, looking for fun and excitement, as youth will.

Alas, none of this works too well in an era of profound boundary problems — exploited very deliberately by the Democratic Party, which has erased the moral boundaries between decent behavior and crime, just as it tried to erase the boundary between the United States and Mexico. All of that needs to be fixed. Mr. Trump is aiming to fix it. It is liable to be a heck of a struggle, perhaps even as bad as a new civil war.

---

I DIDN’T FIND ‘RIOTS AND LOOTERS’ AT THE L.A. PROTESTS, BUT I DID STUMBLE UPON A QUINCEAÑERA

by Joe Mathews

On Saturday, I went to a riot and found myself at a quinceañera.

I wasn’t lost. I went to the Los Angeles County cities of Compton and Paramount to see the “riots and looters” that President Donald Trump and his administration were talking about on social media. I know those communities from years covering them for the Los Angeles Times.

But I couldn’t find any rioting.

Yes, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies were on Alondra Boulevard. The deputies had two lines, blocking off a stretch of Alondra that is home to Paramount’s Home Depot. That store, and an industrial park nearby, had been the site of a day-long conflict between federal immigration agents and local protestors who said they wanted to stop deportations

To the east, the sheriff department’s vehicles were confronting a few protestors, pushing them back into the middle of Paramount. To the west, the law enforcement lines had crossed the Los Angeles River and the 710 Freeway, which separates Paramount and Compton — and fired projectiles to push back a small group of protestors into east Compton.

In Compton, with its strong oral culture (it’s the hometown of Kendrick Lamar), some protestors were profane and provocative. A few were anarchists, dressed in black and wearing masks, and they threw things at the sheriff’s deputies.

On the Compton side of the law enforcement line, a burned-out car sat at the intersection of Alondra and Atlantic Avenue. But people weren’t rioting or destroying property. Maybe 400 people milled around. Some wrote “Fuera ICE,” or “Away ICE,” on signs and businesses, since the departure of these feds would certainly make everyone safer.

As I approached the law enforcement line, I swallowed droplets that tasted like tear gas and pepper spray. So I retreated, first to Alondra and Atlantic, where not much was happening.

So I walked around the neighborhood. Two hundred yards in any direction, it was just another Saturday night. Just up Atlantic, families were relaxing in the park where Venus and Serena Williams learned tennis.

I wandered west and then south, passing again near the law enforcement line. Less than 200 yards from there, I saw lights and heard banda music.

It was a quinceañera, a man said.

“Bro,” said a middle-aged gentleman wearing a Dodger hat, “you OK?”

“I’m good,” I said.

“Your eyes are kind of watery. Let me get you some water.”

I poured water from the cold bottle into my eyes. And he asked: “What’s the deal up there?”

I tried to explain.

“Trump is an idiot,” he said. “What else is new?”

Then the father of the girl celebrating her birthday invited me to the party.

He apologized that the party wasn’t grander —“I don’t have the money to rent a place”— but the event was quite spectacular.

It took up two side-by-side apartment building driveways that extended maybe 40 yards in from the street. The father and his family had put up a white tent, with chandeliers hung from the top, for 100 people. There was a dance floor, a stage and a terrific band played so loud that you couldn’t hear the helicopters overhead.

There was a woman making tacos. The father ordered me two al pastor.

Who knew civil war could be so tasty?

Technically, it turned out the party was a Sweet 16, not a quinceañera, for the father’s youngest daughter. This was his second marriage, and he wanted to go all out. He missed his older children, who had moved to Wyoming, where life is easier.

He saw no reason to stop the party. The police actions were just outside, but they didn’t feel or sound anything like what the White House was officially calling “a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

“The government does what the government does,” the father said. “Life goes on.”

Eventually, he excused himself and danced with his wife.

Some other guests invited me to dance. I agreed. If your national government is going to declare you in rebellion, you might as well have a good time.

(Zocalo Public Square)

---

---

OUR UNDEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION

by Nic Carter

There’s a very detailed book on this topic called The Framer’s Coup, by Harvard Law professor Michael Klarman, that casts the Constitutional Convention as a kind of reprisal of the elites against the incipient democracies that existed at the State level. Indeed, it’s quite clear that the U.S. Constitution was much less democratic than the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution established the Senate (at the time, Senators were chosen by the States, rather than being directly elected), the Electoral College, clearly intended to insert elite discretion into the presidential selection process, and firmly entrenched the Federal government as superior to the States.

So why did the Constitution include such apparently anti-democratic measures? Klarman argues that, post revolutionary war, these State-driven democracies had embraced populist policies imposing a kind of economic class warfare designed to disempower large landholders and benefit poorer farmers and the working class. He lays it out in a 2010 talk:

“The Framers’ constitution was mostly a conservative, aristocratic response to what they perceived as the excesses of democracy that were overrunning the states during the 1780s.

The Framers were trying to create a powerful national government that was as distant from popular control as possible: very long terms in office, large constituencies, indirect elections. They thought of democracy as rule by the mob. They didn’t think poor people could be trusted with the suffrage. They didn’t think women should vote.

“A lot of what the original Constitution was about was constraining the power of the states to pass laws beneficial to debtor farmers in a time of economic distress and expanding the power of the national government to that it could efficiently raise taxes in order to pay off government bond holders, who often were merely speculators in such debt rather than initial suppliers of credit.”

According to this reading of history, it may well have been the case that the Founding Fathers were motivated by a desire to reign in loose monetary policy that was benefiting debtors (by inflating away the real value of their debt) and harming the creditor class (which they, as a kind of American landed gentry, by and large consisted of).

This monetary theory of the Constitution is not often advanced, but one that seems to align with many of the Framers’ stated views on monetary policy. Jefferson for instance once claimed that “paper [debt] is poverty,” describing it as “the ghost of money, and not money itself.” He additionally sought to advance an amendment abolishing borrowing at the federal level. Washington was no fan of fiat either, writing in a letter: “paper money has had the effect in your state that it ever will have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.” James Madison was equally aggrieved, claiming that “paper money is unjust,” adding: “it is unconstitutional, for it affects the rights of property as much as taking away equal value in land.” (And if you read Madison’s Federalist 10, it seems he isn’t a huge fan of direct democracy either.) Virginia’s rampant currency printing and devaluation during the revolutionary war likely affected Madison, Jefferson, and Washington, as they were all Virginia landowners. They would all have likely dealt with losses stemming from the inflation, with Jefferson hit particularly hard.

(Medium.com)

---

---

IS NUCLEAR WINTER A CLIMATE ISSUE?

by Norman Solomon

Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age with the first explosion of an atomic bomb, I visited the expanse of desert known as the Nevada Test Site, an hour’s drive northwest of Las Vegas. A pair of officials from the Department of Energy took me on a tour. They explained that nuclear tests were absolutely necessary. “Nuclear weapons are like automobiles,” one told me. “Ford doesn’t put a new automobile out on the highway until they’ve gone through a lengthy test process, driving hundreds of thousands of miles.”

By then, in 1980, several hundred underground nuclear blasts had already occurred in Nevada, after the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty required that atomic testing take place below the earth’s surface. Previously, about 100 nuclear warheads had been set off above ground at that test site, sending mushroom clouds aloft and endangering with radiation exposure not just nearby soldiers but downwind civilians as well.

My guides from the Energy Department were upbeat. The only sober words came after one old hand at nuclear testing asked me to turn off my tape recorder. “No head of state in the world has ever seen a nuclear bomb explosion,” he said. “To me, that’s scary. I don’t think anyone who has ever seen a nuclear explosion has ever not asked the question: ‘My God, what have we done?’”

Otherwise, the on-the-record statements I got that day amounted to happy talk about the nuclear arms race. When officials showed me a quarter-mile-wide crater caused by a hydrogen bomb named Sedan, they expressed nothing but pride. “Across the windy desert floor of the Nevada Test Site, the government guides talk enthusiastically about their dominion,” I wrote then for The Nation magazine. “As the wind whips through Yucca Flats, it whispers that, left to their own ‘devices,’ the nuclear-weapons testers will destroy us all. To allow their rationales to dissuade us from opposition is to give them permission to incinerate the world.”

At the time, it never occurred to me that gradual heating, due mostly to carbon emissions sent into the atmosphere, could devastate the world, too. My visit to the Nevada site took place a year before Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives, convened the first-ever congressional hearing on global warming in 1981. Bill McKibben’s pathbreaking book on the subject, The End of Nature, appeared in 1989. Since then, the escalating catastrophe of human-caused climate change has become all too clear to those paying attention.

Two Existential Threats — Unrelated or Twins?

“Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid,” Inside Climate News reported as this year began. Seven years ago, an authoritative scientific study “showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.” It threatens, in short, to create what might be thought of as a climate-change heat wave on Planet Earth.

Meanwhile, the risks of a nuclear holocaust keep worsening.

A 2022 study estimated that “more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia.” Detonating just a small percentage of the world’s nuclear weapons (which are now in the possession of nine countries) would cause “nuclear winter.” Writing in Scientific American last month after nuclear-armed India and Pakistan almost went to war, Rutgers University environmental sciences professors Alan Robock and Lili Xia explained:

“A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas. That smoke would rise into the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above the troposphere where we live, which has no rain to wash out the smoke. Our research has found that the smoke would block out the sun, making it cold, dark and dry at Earth’s surface, choking agriculture for five years or more around the world. The result would be global famine.”

I asked Robock whether he knew of efforts by the climate movement and groups focused on nuclear weapons to work together. “I don’t know of any,” he said. Noting that “nuclear war would produce instant climate change,” Robock added: “Global warming is real and already happening, whereas it has been 80 years since the last nuclear war. And that one produced horrific direct impacts of blast, fire, and radiation, but not climate change. Radioactivity is still the predominant fear from nuclear war… but nuclear winter would affect those far removed from the blast, and there are no direct examples to show people, except for famines produced by other causes.”

Since early in this century, Ted Glick has devoted himself largely to climate activism, with a dedication that has included long fasts. Some groups concentrating on peace or climate have begun to engage in joint efforts, he told me, “but there’s very little specific interactions that I know of when it comes to nuclear weapons, as distinct from a broader peace and anti-war focus, and the climate crisis.”

About the possibility of nuclear winter, he added:

“It could be said that it’s the ultimate climate issue because if it happened, the world’s climate would be probably unlivable for most if not all human beings and most other life forms for a very long time. However, the fact that, despite nuclear weapons existing for 80 years, there has never been since Hiroshima and Nagasaki any use of them is certainly one big reason why others of us aren’t prioritizing it. What is very clear is the threat to the world’s ecosystems and societies of continued societal dominance by the fossil-fuel industry. That is a much more certain existential threat. There is no question that if the world doesn’t decisively shift within years, not decades, away from fossil fuels, break its power over governments, the risk of worldwide ecological and social devastation is, imho, a certainty.”

Depending on Context

When I asked John J. Berger, author of the recent book Solving the Climate Crisis, to what extent nuclear winter should be viewed as a climate issue, he replied: “It depends on how the issue is contextualized. But in general, I wouldn’t confuse anthropogenic climate change stemming from fossil-fuel use with nuclear winter stemming from nuclear war. They are two distinct issues, although both impact the climate.”

Yet current literature from the Council for a Livable World emphasizes connections:

“There are two serious threats to all life on earth: nuclear war and climate change. Both are existential, both are preventable, and both are inextricably linked through their reciprocal effects on each other. Climate change is generating conflict and instability in areas where the risk of nuclear proliferation is already high, and any use of nuclear weapons would have disastrous effects on an already fragile environment. By acknowledging the link between these two issues, we can advocate for more action on both.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility are among the few sizeable national groups that focus in a significant fashion on both climate change and nuclear weapons. Martin Fleck recently left PSR after working for the organization for 27 years, including as director of its Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program. “The strongest connection between climate and disarmament activism is this,” he said. “Climate science and abundant climate indicators show us that planetary human survival depends upon a rather dramatic paradigm shift from the current status quo and the way we are living as a species. The paradigm shift will necessarily include abandoning current, outrageous levels of military spending, military activity, and threats.”

He then added, “Nuclear winter is not a climate issue and I do not think it should be viewed as a climate issue… However, advances in climate science led to our current understanding of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, and the people who have led the way have been climate scientists. So I guess it is fair to say that nuclear winter and nuclear famine models reside in the realm of climate science.”

Working in a state beset with intensive nuclear industries ever since the Los Alamos laboratory opened secretly in 1943, Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, had a one-word answer when I asked about relationships, communication, or joint efforts between the climate movement and groups focused on nuclear weapons: “Nonexistent.”

Nuclear winter, he said, “hasn’t been viewed as a climate issue at all. It is, of course, the ultimate climate-changer, should nuclear war break out.”

Carbon and Fission

In California, the Tri-Valley CAREs organization has worked for more than 40 years scrutinizing and challenging the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which was founded in 1952, mainly to develop the hydrogen bomb. Scott Yundt, the group’s executive director, told me that “nuclear winter should absolutely be viewed as a climate issue. It represents one of the most severe and abrupt potential disruptions to global ecological systems. Yet in many mainstream climate narratives, it’s rarely discussed. Perhaps this is because nuclear winter is perceived as hypothetical or tied to geopolitical scenarios rather than immediate climate threats.”

He then added:

“Within coalitions made up of frontline communities, including those impacted by the oil and gas industry, toxic waste, and uranium mining, there is a strong and growing understanding of the deep systemic links between these issues and our work in Livermore. We see clear consensus around themes like environmental racism, government secrecy, the lack of meaningful community engagement, and the disproportionate burdens placed on low-income and Indigenous communities. In those spaces, nuclear weapons are not seen as separate from the climate struggle. They’re considered part of the same legacy of environmental violence and extractive industry. There’s solidarity and shared purpose among those of us directly impacted. However, we’ve also noticed that mainstream climate organizations and funders often treat nuclear issues as fringe or outside the scope of ‘climate’ work… This disconnect can be frustrating, especially when the communities we work with are living through the environmental fallout of nuclear activities and see those harms as deeply entangled with climate injustices.”

Basav Sen, director of the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that anti-nuclear and climate activists “both confront the same long-standing pattern of extractive environmental racism, which treats Indigenous, Black, Brown, and poor communities, and the land, water, and air they depend on, as disposable. In the southwestern U.S., the Pacific islands, and many other parts of the world, the very same communities who have been exposed to toxic radioactivity because of uranium mining and processing, nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear waste disposal, are also facing air and water pollution from fossil fuel extraction and burning, and from the consequences of fossil fuel burning such as droughts, wildfires, superstorms, and rising oceans.”

Yet, despite the convergence of those issues, Sen commented, “the degree of collaboration between these movements at the national and international level has not been significant. Locally and regionally, however, frontline communities impacted by climate change and by the nuclear weapons and nuclear energy supply chain have been consciously fighting these two systemic issues together.”

Since the mid-1980s, Jackie Cabasso has served as executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, one of the main groups tenaciously organizing against the Livermore lab. “Organizations such as my own have made serious efforts to reach out to climate activists since at least 2008,” she told me, adding that the outcomes have usually been disappointing. “From my perspective, the relationships, communications, and joint efforts have been mostly one-sided, with nuclear disarmament activists reaching out to climate activists and very little reciprocity.”

In addition, she has seen that “the climate movement generally seems to avoid addressing the climate impacts of wars and militarism. This is the case even though some individuals, and even some organizations, are involved in both sets of issues.”

A longtime leader of the Physicians for Social Responsibility chapter in the San Francisco area, Robert M. Gould, has devoted most of his national and regional work to climate change and related issues of environmental health. “While there has been an advance among organizations through the years on issues referable to environmental justice, there has been no significant uptake on issues of war/peace, nuclear weapons,” he wrote in an email. Gould added that, although nuclear winter “is a critical existential issue, there has been at most minimal uptake by the environmental movement, as with nuclear weapons and militarism in general.”

He also cited a major generational divide: “There are very few younger people involved in the anti-nuclear movement.”

Analyzing and Organizing

In the United States, the forces that have done so much to heat the planet and drive the nuclear arms race are today stronger than ever. The power of great wealth and huge corporations got us where we are now, with an escalating assault on nature and an unfathomable threat to humanity. Whatever connections (and differences) might exist between the ongoing war on the climate and the nonstop arrangements for possible nuclear annihilation, the superstructure making it all possible is right in front of us. Gauging its true dimensions is crucial for coming up with more strategic approaches.

These days, fatalism is an understandable feeling, but what’s truly needed is far greater support for activism. Organizers, whether for climate or against nuclear weapons, routinely face daunting obstacles. Funding is in short supply. The politics in Washington are, quite obviously, the worst in memory. And as activists struggle to make an impact, mainstream media outlets habitually skim the surface or, more likely, ignore the issues completely.

Media blind spots include the fact that military industries are big contributors to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the Pentagon uses more fossil fuel than any other institution on the globe. And the U.S. government’s destabilizing war policies in the Middle East — where flashpoints could set off a nuclear war — are directly tied in with Washington’s perennial quest for ever more profitable access to the massive oil reserves in the region. Even if unwilling to directly address the dangers of nuclear weapons, the climate movement could do more to challenge a foreign policy that boosts both carbon emissions and the risk that rampant militarism could end up triggering nuclear winter.

With adversaries in common, the climate movement and activists for nuclear disarmament have an unexplored potential to work together. In profound ways, they could become effective allies in helping to save the world from unimaginable disasters.

(This piece first appeared on TomDispatch. Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.)

---