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WINDS EASE slightly along the coastal areas today. Slightly above normal temperatures with Minor HeatRisk forecast through mid next week. Breezy winds return mid to late week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A brisk 42F with some passing high clouds this Father's Day morning on the coast. With the fog down off the So Cal coast I think we can go with mostly clear skies for a while. "Think" being the key word. Nothing of significance is in the forecast right now.
JOE WAGGONER
Joe Wayne Waggoner made his way to heaven on June 5, 2025. He was on this Earth loving his family and friends for 67 years.
Born in Ukiah, California. He was a well liked, well known community member of Anderson Valley for over 40 years before moving to Ukiah California.
Joe was well known for his love of everything “Hollywood”. An avid movie buff. He enjoyed spending time with his Niece Lisa and his Great Nieces and Nephews Sierra, Bobby, Christian and Jazmyn and his beloved sister Judy before her passing, often at the Drive In theatre in Lake County or Ukiah theatre or just out for meals filled with laughs.
He was the historian of the family. Sharing stories of his family traveling from Norman Arkansas to Boonville California for a better life. He was one of 12 siblings and had endless stories of growing up in a large family close to the Summit family which were 1st cousins.
He had an unforgettable memory for events such as bdays, weddings, graduations of all his family.
He was a huge supporter of AV sports events. He attended every home football game for his Great nephews Bobby & Christian and his Great niece Jazmyn.
He greatly treasured his yearly visits at the Mendocino county Fair. He often talked of the many laughs shared with dear friends Junior Vargas and his wife Audrey, Julie Pardini-Vance, Barbara Valenti, Cindy Pardini and many others while sitting in front of the Rossi home where the family lived and made memories for over 30 years, while watching the Parade.
Joe loved spending holidays with his brothers Gene and Steve. Being able to watch his Nieces and Nephews grow to adults and raise their children.
Joe loved to brag about the accomplishments of his family. From his brother Gary’s skills in Softball to his brother Mick’s success in owning homes and businesses in Palm Springs. His Niece Daisy’s love for her children, his Great Nephew Christian’s career as a Jet Engineer for the US Navy and lovingly shared his mother Catherine’s skills driving a logging truck back in the 50’s.
Joe retired from the Anderson Valley School district where for 25 years he took great pride in keeping the Elementary school and District offices sparking and maintained. Always spreading laughs and funny jokes with the kids and teachers. He also spent over 20 years as an employee for Mendocino County. Before retiring. Many of the court house employees and Deputies described Joe as “A guy you just want to know, he never met a stranger”.
Joe was proceeded in his journey to Heaven by his parents, Ern & Catherine Waggoner. As well as his siblings, Timmy, Gary, Ruth, Pete, Judy, Rosalee and his Nephews Bobby Dean and Jake.
He leaves behind his siblings, Gayle, Gene, Ted, Mick and Steve. Nieces and Nephews, Yvonne, Guy, Lisa, Cardale, Daisy, Tyler, Tiffany and Jessica. Plus 23 Great Nieces and Nephews.
No amount of money ever bought a second of time.
Tony Stark, Avengers
Graveside service will be Friday, July 18th @ 11 am at Boonville Evergreen Cemetery.
Pastor Larry Mumma officiating.
NO KINGS BOONVILLE
No Kings Day In Boonville, Saturday, June 14. About 100 protesters Saturday in Boonville. No surprise that it felt like a party!
NO KINGS DAY IN UKIAH
https://youtu.be/fvaLYZHRlck?si=MrDzVN1wPLJ38lkC
(Photos & Video by Karen Rifkin)
NO KINGS DAY, FORT BRAGG
Chuck Dunbar:
We just got back from the No Kings Fort Bragg protest. Lots of folks present, surely a thousand or a bit more–old and middle and young folks, some kids even, learning their civic duties early. The protest extended across the Noyo Bridge on the east side, down to the motel to the south. Lots of great signs, lots of American flags, lots of friendly support of each other. Heavy weekend traffic passing both ways, lots and lots of folks honking and waving in support. Not much apparent opposition, though one guy drove past with middle finger extended. It felt good to be there, and it felt good to know that similar protests were happening across our country.
Louise Mariana:
My congratulations to the organizers of No Kings Day in Fort Bragg. Huge turnout, no negative incidents, creative and often very funny and clever signs. My favorite: Electile Dysfunction..I drove by the protest route at 2 p.m. and not one bit of trash. A wonderful unifying event. Thanks for getting it together.
Daney Dawson:
What a turn out! Makes me proud of coastal Mendocino.
Unofficial count: over 1,000
Drive by supporters (honks & thumbs up): 150-200 by my count
Drive by counter demonstrators (thumbs down, Trump flag, or middle fingers: 4.
Jennifer:
My spouse counted 1225 people on the east side of the street when more were still arriving.
George Dorner (Willits)
Just got home from Willits No Kings march. Schmoozed with a surprising number of fellow Vietvets, as well as members of Willits Indivisible. We marched at ten am from Babcock to Recreation Grove, Stars and Stripes leading. It was an all ages crowd at the park, with a heartening number of mobility impaired included. Clumps of marchers kept showing up at the Grove for over an hour, as the March stretched on.
Captain America appeared, clad in armor and equipped with shield, bugle, and bullhorn. A spectacular array of ingenious protest signs elicited horn honks, applause, and cheers from most passing motorists as the Grove crowd grew. I have no talent for estimating crowd size; I’ll just guess hundreds.
Counter-protesters? A lone goat roper in a pickup gave us the single finger salute.
NO KINGS, POINT ARENA & SOUTH COAST
Centennial Plaza, downtown point Arena. Approximately 180 people. Even bigger in Gualala I heard.
— Paul Andersen
NO KINGS DAY, SAN FRANCISCO
I happened to be in San Francisco for medical appointments and joined folks at Ocean Beach for No Kings Day. I always admired the drone shots from previous demonstrations that showed people spelling out words, and was looking forward to being part of a letter. It was very well organized; lines had been drawn in the sand to mark out letters and we were told to stand three abreast. I was part of the letter N. When all the letters were filled in, the rest of the people were guided to stand around the edges. Drones flew overhead as we raised our arms, waved flags and signs and sang.
Then we were asked to walk down to the water, and spread out in a line holding hands. It was a nice ending. On the way back, the bus was crowded with folks who were heading downtown, to join the thousands that had walked from Dolores Park. The bus had to detour because Fillmore Street was closed for several blocks for a Juneteenth celebration which was just getting underway. Two stages, speakers, food, lots of stands with all kinds of stuff, and as I walked up the street a jazz band started to play. I stopped for awhile to listen, then headed to Jane's Bakery, on Geary, for a loaf of fig walnut bread. A very full San Francisco morning.
Dobie Dolphin, [email protected]
NO KINGS PROTESTS BAY AREA: Tens of thousands flooded S.F. Civic Center
Saturday’s demonstrations could be among the largest in the nation’s history
by Molly Burke Ko Lynn Cheang, J.D. Morris & Sarah Ravani
The No Kings demonstrations being held in more than 2,000 cities across the nation today could be among the largest in the nation’s history. The demonstrations coincided with President Trump’s 79th birthday and his military parade in Washington, D.C. and came after days of increasingly tense protests over immigration raids and Trump’s deployment of military troops to Los Angeles.
Thousands march in Minnesota despite cancellations after shootings of lawmakers
Thousands of people marched in Minnesota’s largest cities Saturday despite cancellations of the events and warnings to stay away after the shootings of two lawmakers, one fatally.
The suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, remained at large Saturday afternoon as authorities conducted a wide manhunt. Police believe Boelter, disguised as a police officer, fatally shot Melissa Hortman, a former Minnesota House speaker, and her spouse in their Brooklyn Park home Saturday morning, in addition to wounding a second state lawmaker, Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife in Champlin.
Gov. Tim Walz called the attacks “a politically motivated assassination” and urged protesters to avoid No Kings marches until the suspect is captured.
Boelter had No Kings flyers in his car and writings that identified the victims as well as other lawmakers and officials, according to investigators, who could not say whether he had any other specific targets.
Despite the warnings, thousands of protesters turned out in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Duluth and Rochester, the Star Tribune reported.
Alex Waddington, who works as a unionized stagehand in San Francisco, said he thinks Democrats have “never been enough” in response to Trump’s policies.
“The Democratic party is supposed to be the ratchet back on fascism in this country and they’ve failed on that,” he said, adding that he saw the problem as money in politics. “Until we stop doing the behest of these corporations we will see no peace.”
He liked AOC and Bernie Sanders, he said, but said they are unable to get as much done as they’d like, being a progressive minority within the minority party.
Several immigrants who arrived at the San Francisco ICE office on Tehama Street on Saturday morning said they are part of an agency program that allows them to live at home as their cases are processed. ICE says there were about 7.6 million immigrants in the program, known as Alternatives to Detention (ATD) and Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP), as of October.
“ATD-ISAP enables aliens to remain in their communities — contributing to their families and community organizations and, as appropriate, concluding their affairs in the U.S. — as they move through immigration proceedings or prepare for departure,” the agency says on its website.
According to news reports, ICE has been using text messages to alert participants in the program that they must come to an agency location. The practice has picked up in recent weeks as the administration has pushed to increase arrests and deportations. The actions have spread fear and apprehension among immigrant communities because those called to appear could face deportation if they don’t show, but also if they do.
A Richmond resident who came with her husband, son and daughter to the San Francisco building just after 8:30 Saturday morning said her family is part of the ADT program.
In major shift, Trump tells ICE not to raid hotels, restaurants and farms
Ahead of Saturday’s protests, the administration is instructing federal immigration officers to stop raiding restaurants, hotels, farms and meat packing plants — a massive shift in Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans that signals he received pushback from these industries.
The change, reported by the New York Times late Friday, came after Trump admitted that his own policies were hurting farmers “badly” as they lost “very good workers.” According to the Times, a Thursday email from a senior ICE official to regional leaders of the agency stated the following: “Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”
(SF Chronicle)
AV EVENTS (today)
The Anderson Valley Museum Open
Sun 06 / 15 / 2025 at 1:00 PM
Where: The Anderson Valley Museum , 12340 Highway 128, Boonville , CA
95415 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4728)
Anderson Valley Village Garden Party
Sun 06 / 15 / 2025 at 4:00 PM
Where: Philip & Evette's More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4694)
AVBC Father's Day at the Brewery
Sun 06 / 15 / 2025 at 5:00 PM
Where: Anderson Valley Brewery , 17700 Boonville Rd, Boonville, CA 95415
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4744)
COUNTY BUDGET SLEIGHT OF HAND; AI & UNEMPLOYMENT
by Jim Shields
Characterizing the County Supervisors recent tentatively approved 2025-26 budget as a “budget-balancing shell game,” Mark Scaramella, of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, posits that the facts just don’t cooperate with those who might disagree with his analysis.
OK, I’m on board.
Scaramella says, “Another dubious assumption in the County’s projected budget for 2025-2026 is that the “carryover” from this fiscal year (2024-2025, ending June 30, 2025) will be around $6 million and that this carryover, which just happens to be about the same amount as the dubious estimate of the amount to be saved by keeping positions vacant for the year, will be drawn on to cover whatever savings don’t materialize from not keeping funded positions vacant.
“Get it? First they assume there will be millions in carryover (unspent money) this year (a number which won’t be known until the books are closed sometime in the fall), and then they assume that it will be a whopping $6 million, and then they tell everybody that if they don’t meet their ridiculous vacancy target that they will use the mythical $6 million carryover to cover the mythical vacancy savings which nobody expects to save because they know that they will have to replace many of the vacant positions. Then they call all these rolling assumptions “one time funds,” and — presto! — they have a ‘balanced’ budget.
“The whole idea of a ‘balanced budget’ when there are always unknowns and variables and assumptions involved is a fishy pretense to begin with on top of a very fluid process. But when the budget builders put in ridiculous and precarious assumptions just to make the budget appear to be “balanced,” it makes a mockery of the process and makes their empty claims that ‘we don’t have the money’ for this or that hard to believe since they can cover millions of costs with assumptions that don’t stand up to scrutiny … When the budget is seen as a perfunctory requirement built on financial number manipulation, it gives the Board and the CEO an excuse for not dealing with actual budget gaps because they know that underneath it all the ‘budget’ is just a pile of false assumptions and self-serving estimates.”
I’m sure the Supervisors take exception with Scaramella’s characterization of the budget, but it doesn’t gainsay that once again the county is at a crossroads with numerous issues that must be addressed.
Several years ago, the CEO and the Supes implemented a so-called “Five-Year Strategic Planning Process” that was touted as a “help guide the work of county government through 2027.”
Do you have any idea of just where that much-ballyhooed plan is now in 2025?
I know I don’t have a clue and neither do the Supervisors.
Instead of talking about amorphous, indecipherable strategic plans, how about focusing on something called priorities or a fix-it list.
Here’s short inventory of what needs to be accomplished and/or overhauled and fixed.
- Fixing 5 decades of failed homeless policies and programs.
- Fixing 5 decades of failed mental health policies and programs.
- Fixing the ever-deteriorating road and bridge infrastructure.
- Fixing a monstrously failed marijuana ordinance that has devastated the economies of the county’s unincorporated areas.
- Fixing 30 years of a housing shortage brought on by short-sighted and nearly non-existent affordable housing planning.
There are many other items that could — and should — appear on this list, but let’s keep it to a manageable workload of just five priority items for the Supes to address, and hopefully make demonstrable and verifiable progress on.
Of course, permeating the entire local governing process is that both previous and current Boards of Supervisors have functioned basically as a rubber-stamp for virtually every proposal emanating from the County Executive Officer and staff.
That dynamic must change, and the Supervisors must reassert their control over the CEO and staff who are un-elected bureaucrats whose primary role is to support elected supervisors in their duties to articulate and represent the best interests of their constituents.
That reversal of roles is without a doubt the number one item on the Supervisors’ list of priorities.
AI To Cause Unemployment?
Was streaming CNN the other day and heard an interview that shivered the timbers of this former airline union president.
I’ve believed since I first became aware of Artificial Intelligence, that it should be closely monitored and probably regulated by government because we have no idea or understanding of where it’s going or its potential uses and consequences.
The chief executive of one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs is warning that the technology could cause a dramatic spike in unemployment in the very near future. He says policymakers and corporate leaders aren’t ready for it.
“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview. “AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.”
Amodei believes the AI tools that Anthropic and other companies are racing to build could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to as much as 20% in the next one to five years. That could mean the US unemployment rate growing fivefold in just a few years.
Still think AI is a good idea?
(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, [email protected], the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Justice is a sweet and mellow dog, eager to find a loving home. She’s an adult dog with a playful side and enjoys toys and attention from people. Justice walks well on-leash and would love to accompany you on your daily walks. Justice is a friendly and easy going girl who would suit almost any household. Justice can be a bit timid at first, but will warm up quickly with a gentle and patient guardian. If you're looking for a new companion, come meet Justice and give this sweet pup the loving home she deserves! Beautiful Justice is a German Shepherd Dog, 2 years old and 58 svelte pounds.
For information about all of our adoptable dogs and cats, and our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.
Join us the first Saturday of every month for the Meet The Dogs Adoption Event at the shelter. For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.
Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, June 14, 2025
SETH COSTA, 22, Ukiah. Vehicle tampering, concealed dirk-dagger.
SAVANNAH GOUGE, 30, Fort Bragg. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.
FRANCISCO ORTIZ-GUTIERREZ, 24, Selma/Ukiah. Domestic abuse, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, false imprisonment.
JESUS RIOS-ESCOBAR, 30, Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for DUI, child neglect.
SHAWN SPILLER, 36, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, probation revocation.
CHRISTINA TORRES, 37, Ukiah. Battery with serious bodily injury, disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.
USS BONE SPURS
Editor:
Just when you think this administration can’t stoop any lower, they propose renaming the USNS Harvey Milk during Pride Month. If they go ahead with this insulting idea, I propose they rename the ship the USS Bone Spurs.
Brian Narelle
Rohnert Park
WILD HIPPIES? WHITETHORN VS THE REST OF SOUTHERN HUMBOLDT
by Paul Modic
(Healthy middle class college educated back-to-the-landers or naked drug-crazed hippies?)
Is it possible that the Whitethorn hippies were different from those in other communities in Southern Humboldt? For example, after parties if a cat and chick got together they sometimes had loud sex in an adjoining room while the rest of us who couldn’t make it home slept, rather listened, on the floor in the living room. (Thinking of Danny and Lee and Barry and Vickie here.) Was this de rigueur among other new settler communities or did the far west side have its own brand of wildness, maybe influenced by the ocean?
In the Whitethorn swimming holes everyone was naked, if you had shown up in a swim suit you’d have been laughed out of the county, or maybe not, we’ll never know because everyone was skinny-dipping. A few years ago I mentioned this to a long-time Garberville friend and he said he always wore cutoffs, really? At the Garberville swimming hole, where I went a few times a year, no one wore clothes. (We never walked down the hill to the Mighty Eel, just piled into someone’s old pickup and drove as close to the river as we could, right near where I’ve been living now for twenty-four years after escaping the woods.)
There was also a good amount of drug use on the coast side: weed and booze of course, a lot of coke in the eighties, and always some heroin users, though they were discreet about showing the needle, ie, I never saw one and never shot up anything.
Once my friend was working for D, a well-known community event organizer, and came upon him around the corner of his house with a belt around his arm and a needle in his arm. (A light-weight like me, he was shocked, and it negatively affected his dreams of artistic activism.)
J was probably a long-time junkie and there were rumors about R. Around the Drinking Stump one summer day Dave T once “joked” about what he would do with some Mexican Brown: “right into my arm!” he pantomimed. (Was he serious?)
Little Stevie overdosed in 1987, the story which instigated a community meeting and launched my ‘zine Gulch Mulch, and Bubba told me he used until 2015. David S might’ve also, choked on his vomit, with Ray B it was always assumed, and probably there were more quiet users. (Jan seemed like one of those hard-core hippies: IYKYK.)
So just a small percent got into smack, right? Was that similar to other nearby hippie areas? (I never came close to shooting up, though once my friend’s boyfriend was smoking crack, puffing on his pipe on the couch next to me in Berkeley, and offered it. It had a very seductive and sweet aroma but I turned it down and just said no. Powder was another story…)
Out in Thorn back in the day there were instances of young men in their early twenties with girlfriends in their mid to late teens as the dating pool was shallow. One twenty-seven-year-old fisherman had a fifteen-year-old girlfriend and nobody cared, including her mother. (Maybe if there had been a father in the picture it might have been different?)
When I was telling a longtime Briceland resident that story recently he said he never heard of that sort of relationship, implying that it wouldn’t have been tolerated. He insinuated that that was not the norm, and by association neither was Whitethorn, saying I was a wild hippie and not representative of the culture. (That made me wonder and instigated this essay.)
I disagreed. I was very innocent, dude, I told him, compared to my neighbors, those “real” California hippies, I was just a teenaged wannabe from Indiana. (Besides, what about that twenty-something Briceland woman who liked to pop the cherry of the teenage boys back in the seventies? Now the survivors are all in their seventies.)
Were we just more naked, drugged, and sexed out there, far from the other communities in our isolated coastal habitat, the only village which was “All Hippie,” ie, every other area, from Ettersburg to Harris and Piercy to Salmon Creek, still had some (soon outnumbered)locals, ranchers and rednecks, even after the hippies invaded and took over. (Did Mendocino have their own “Whitethorn?” Maybe more research is necessary to answer these questions, though the last witnesses are disappearing every year/month/day…)
MEMO OF THE AIR: Offer not good after curfew in sectors R or M.
Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (9pm PDT, 2025-06-13) 8-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0648
Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.
Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in rehearsal. They don't make 'em like that anymore. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/06/frank-zappa-in-his-private-rehearsal.html
Africa, performed by Fingus. (via Juanita) This reminds me of a thing I used to do called Mister Fingelwitz, where I'd make a fist, raise the middle finger knuckle to be the nose, balance reading glasses on it and talk for it in a sarcastic but tired elderly New York Jewish comic's voice. You make the mouth by lowering and raising your thumb underneath. That's Mister Fingelwitz! His landlady is Missus Gibitsch (say gih-beetch), who is just a regular fist holding a handkerchief around itself. Their building has a dog, too. You already now how to do the dog, and the duck, and Batman. https://www.tiktok.com/@tokiejoestar/video/7467019807888641310
Roxana Amed - Corazón Delator. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/06/music-for-sunday-morning.html
And how to play Little Wing on ukulele. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ALTKER_NkX0
Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
ANOTHER SCHMITT SLAM, but Kershaw and Dodgers overwhelm Giants 11-5
by Susan Slusser
LOS ANGELES — The elder statesman had it Saturday night at Dodger Stadium, and the kid did not.
Dodgers starter Clayton Kershaw, 37, showed flashes of his prime in L.A.’s 11-5 win over the San Francisco Giants, striking out five to get him within 12 of 3,000. Giants starter Landen Roupp, 26, gave up a leadoff homer to Shohei Ohtani, no shame there, but in the second, the Dodgers sent 10 men to the plate and scored seven times, chasing Roupp after 1⅔ innings.
By the eighth, backup catcher Logan Porter was on the mound for the Giants and in the ninth, a helmeted Kiké Hernández for L.A. — and Hernández gave up Casey Schmitt’s second grand slam in as many nights, albeit with something of an asterisk coming in a blowout and off a position player on a 2-0 eephus pitch. Still, Schmitt is the first Giants player ever to hit slams in back-to-back games. Travis Jackson hit slams in back-to-back days on Sept. 5-6, 1924, in the second game of doubleheaders each day.
“That’s cool,” Schmitt said. “I don’t know — we lost, so it’s not really as cool as I guess it would be.”
After the Giants scored another run on an error, a real pitcher, Anthony Banda, had to come in and finish up, getting Jung Hoo Lee to ground out.
Using a position player when leading is allowed if up by 10 runs or more, but it’s far more common to see teams that are trailing use one; if behind, it’s allowed when down by eight runs or more. It’s not necessarily frowned upon to use a position player when leading, but Saturday, it leant an air of absurdity to the proceedings.
Asked about the Dodgers using Hernández, Giants manager Bob Melvin said, “I don’t know. I don’t run that, they do what they do. I pitched a position player too, but I’ve never done it in an up game.”
At the end of that late-innings travesty, the Dodgers were back in first place alone, snapping the tie atop the NL West with San Francisco. The deciding game of the series is Sunday afternoon, with Kyle Harrison starting for the Giants and Dustin May for the Dodgers.
Roupp threw 45 pitches, only 21 of them strikes, and got just one swing and miss from the 13 batters he faced. Kershaw went seven innings, walked one and allowed three hits, and he was efficient, throwing 81 pitches, including 56 strikes, though barely touching 90 mph.
“I really just don’t think I had anything working for me,” Roupp said. “I just could not find the zone with really anything, and then when I did, I got hit hard. I take full responsibility for the game tonight. You can’t expect the offense to come out swinging after that kind of start; I’ve just got to regroup and come out better next time.”
“He just didn’t have much going on today,” Melvin said.
Roupp had a 1.27 ERA over his previous five outings, but Saturday, the walks tripped him up. He got squeezed once or twice early and was never quite right after that, walking five (one, Ohtani, intentionally). But there was no real answer for the division’s best lineup: The Dodgers pounced on most of what he did throw in the zone, too. Former Giants outfielder Michael Conforto drilled a key double in the second and Mookie Betts provided another, driving in two.
Spencer Bivens finished out the second, getting Teoscar Hernández to line out, then he worked three scoreless innings after that. When he left, the Dodgers resumed their onslaught, this time against Tristan Beck, who was greeted with Ohtani’s second homer, then gave up a two-out, two-run shot by Hernández.
Porter, who’s never pitched in a pro game, came in lobbing in 34-37 mph loopers, and Miguel Rojas hit a solo homer off him in the fifth. Dominic Smith made a nice diving play to his right and flipped to Porter covering at first to retire Conforto and end the inning.
Melvin was asked about Kershaw’s pursuit of 3,000 Ks; there are only 19 in baseball history, including Giants starter Justin Verlander. The most recent pitcher to join the list was Max Scherzer, on Sept. 12, 2021.
“That’s an incredible number when he hits that,” Melvin said. “I don’t know the next time you’re going to see that again. It’s pretty impressive. A lot of longevity, obviously, and quality. I mean, this guy’s been a stud for a long, long time, and that’s going to be a big deal when he gets 3,000.”
Atlanta’s Chris Sale, 36, is next on the active strikeout list after Verlander, Scherzer and Kershaw, but well back, at 2,521.
Kershaw is now 27-16 against the Giants, the team he’s faced most in his career, and he has a 2.23 lifetime ERA against them.
“He’s a Hall of Famer, he’s got great stuff, and he’s one of the biggest competitors,” Schmitt said of Kershaw. “He knows how to pitch, he’s been doing it for so long. He knows weaknesses. He knows what he’s doing up there.”
Briefly: Schmitt is the second player to hit grand slams in back-to-back games at Dodger Stadium, following Mike Piazza on April 9-10, 1998.
(sfchronicle.com)
HONORING DAN BACHER: AN ACTIVIST'S LIFE & LEGACY
Living with integrity in pursuit of human justice is not just a personal choice but a communal commitment. It builds trust, drives sustainable change, and creates a legacy of fairness. By embodying these values, you invite others to join a collective journey toward a more equitable world, where every action—rooted in integrity—contributes to a larger tapestry of justice.
Sat. July 5th 2025 12 Noon To 3PM
Sacramento Peace Action Conf. Room 909 12th st Sacramento CA.
Join Us In Recognizing Dan’s Work. Sharing his songs, fish stories, community actions, incidents that you and Dan were involved in. Bring favorite Dan photos.
If you are interested in participating with us in recognizing Dan for living an activist life with courage, commitment, humanity, political satire, honesty, self-respect, sacrificing personal gain, collective good over self-interest, leading by example, demonstrating that justice is a journey, building trust, credibility, and personal fulfillment.
Bring Your Own Potluck to share with all. Water, juices, soft drinks (No Alcohol) Charcuterie Style , salads, and veggie plates are welcomed.
(Please RSVP) For More Information Call: Carolina Flores—(279) 234-0391 [email protected] Felix Jose Alvarez—(408)836-9339 [email protected]
Musician, songwriter, actor, Chicano Cultural Activist, former UFW organizer, El Teatro de los Pobres board member, fishery protector and water rights activist. He is an independent journalist focusing on fish, water and environmental justice and a member of the California Outdoor Hall of Fame, inducted in January 2015. He was the editor of the Fish Sniffer Magazine from 1985 to 2020 and has been a reporter for the magazine since 2020. He also was the outdoor columnist for the Stockton Record from 2017 to 2024. He has written for the Daily Kos, North American Fisherman, El Observador, Sacramento News and Review, Chico News & Review, Because PeopleMatter, alternet.org, truthout.org, indybay.org, East Bay Express, Anderson Valley Advertiser and other publications. He was also the editor for the Central America Connection, a publication of the Central American Action Committee, for over 10 years. He is a long time anti-war activist that is currently on the board of Sacramento Area Peace Action. He was also a member of the Creative Alternatives political street theatre group in the early 1990s. He has also served as a photo journalist to boot. He is a founding member of Restore the Delta and the California Inland Fisheries Foundation. He has served on the board of United Anglers of California, the Golden State Salmon Association and water4fish. He currently serves on the board of the California Water Impact Network. He has also been a member of the Winnemem Wintu Run4Salmon planning committee. and the Save the American River Association Advisory Council. He graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. in history from the University of Santa Clara in 1975.
Important Note: Since Dan is immuno-compromised, please don’t come if you have symptoms of a cold, flu or COVID.
TAIBBI & KIRN
Now, Saturday is going to be this… it’s turned into this thing. Now, I think we got to talk about the fact that there is a level of absurdity in this 250th Army celebration, which is doubling as Donald Trump’s birthday celebration. And Trump was asked about this. And the video, Trump says some shit sometimes that just makes you wonder, and this was one of them.
Speaker 9: The life of a soldier is not just a job, it’s a calling, and a sacred tradition passed down from father to son, brother to sister, and one generation to the next. At every hour of danger, our noblest citizens have answered that call. Time and again, our enemies have learned that if you dare to threaten the American people, American soldier will chase you down, crush you, and cast you into oblivion. The last sound you ever hear will be the chilling howl of Black Hawks, thunderous boom of artillery fire, with the ferocious roar of the US Army infantry brigade. For our adversaries, there’s no greater fear than the United States Army.
Now it’s your duty to shield the flame of freedom that was first lit 250 years ago by the heroes of Concord Bridge and Bunker Hill. Standing before you today, I am more confident than ever that in the days ahead and every generation to come, the US Army will heap glory upon glory. You will protect every inch of US soil and you will defend America to the ends of the earth.
Matt Taibbi: All right. And just quickly, can we hear the-
Walter Kirn: Now, that’s footage from his recent visit to Fort Bragg, I presume.
Matt Taibbi: I don’t know. Is that right?
Walter Kirn: He went to Fort Bragg just the other day. And I think the berets and so on, and the exercises suggest he’s obviously on a military base. I think that was his just concluded visit.
Matt Taibbi: Okay. And let’s just quickly here. He was asked at his desk about this celebration that’s going to happen this weekend, if we could hear that.
NEWSOM CHANGES HIS TUNE ON RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT
by Alexei Koseff
Get ready, America. After years of firm denials, Gov. Gavin Newsom is finally acknowledging his presidential ambitions.
Over the past month, the Democratic governor who once insisted that he had “sub-zero interest” in the White House has begun publicly inching toward the idea. In a profile published in the Wall Street Journal this week, Newsom said he would wait to see if the moment felt right.
“I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he said.
The shift in tone comes, perhaps fortuitously, as all eyes are on Newsom again.
With President Donald Trump sending military troops into Los Angeles in recent days to quell sometimes unruly protests against immigration enforcement raids, Newsom has seized the moment to reestablish himself as the leader of resistance. The governor sued to stop the deployments and is now doing nearly endless rounds in the media accusing Trump of slipping into authoritarianism. He has sent daily queries to his fundraising list referencing the situation in Los Angeles and the president advocating for his arrest.
On Tuesday evening, Newsom gave a short video address, carried live on CNN, that sought to elevate his fight to national significance, warning that “other states are next,” and to rally the public behind him to defend democracy.
“This is about all of us. This is about you,” Newsom said. “It’s time for all of us to stand up.”
Many people already assume that Newsom is in campaign mode. A poll released last month by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times found that more than half of California voters believe Newsom is more focused on boosting his presidential prospects than governing the state and solving its problems.
But the ability to expand his message beyond California could stir voters in the rest of the country to start seeing Newsom as a potential leader, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
He commended Newsom for channeling the growing fear and anger over Trump’s actions in his remarks, which Sabato believes may have changed the minds of some skeptics who regarded the governor as just “another pol with good hair gel.”
“He saw the danger to the American republic,” Sabato said. “It was a home run.”
Though speculation about a future presidential bid has followed Newsom throughout his career — his family even joked about it in a congratulatory message in his college yearbook — he never would have admitted that he had his eye on the White House even a few years ago.
After defeating a recall attempt in 2021, Newsom told NBC’s Chuck Todd in an interview that he had “never” considered running for president and had “no, no, no, no, no” interest in ever doing so because “who needs the damn stress?”
(CalMatters.org)
IN TIJUANA THERE ARE NO MIGRANTS
by James Wagner
Tijuana had migrants sleeping in its parks, shelters packed with families, and claimed to be the busiest border crossing by land in the Western Hemisphere.
Now, the migrants trying to pass through Tijuana’s gateway to Southern California have all but disappeared from sight.
The street where people lined up, waiting for asylum appointments to try to enter the United States legally, lies deserted. At the border wall, which some migrants climbed in desperate attempts at illegal crossings, the only ruckus nearby is road construction. On Thursday morning, five people waited on the Mexico side of the border crossing where crowds had once gathered.
“People aren’t coming here,” said Lenis Mojica, 49, a Venezuelan migrant who has been living in a shelter here since January. “Everyone has left. No one else has arrived.”
Mexican cities along the border have reported similar drop-offs in migrant numbers in recent months, a fall that began before President Trump was inaugurated but that has grown more dramatic since he took office, promising a crackdown on immigration. In April, U.S. border agents apprehended 8,383 people along the U.S.-Mexico border, down from 129,000 apprehensions in April 2024, and far below the record of nearly 250,000 apprehensions in December 2023.
Officials in the Trump administration have hailed the decline as a victory, including the secretary for Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, who in April wrote on social media, “The world is hearing our message: do not come to this country illegally.”
But despite the fall in crossings, Mr. Trump and other aides have also maintained that there is an emergency at the border, and the president said this week that he deployed the National Guard to quell protests in California and “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.”
Residents and the few migrants who remain in Tijuana, a border city of over two million people, say that they don’t see evidence of anyone rushing the border — or of much activity at all.
“The reality is this: There are no migrants,” said José María García, 58, the founder of a shelter just a few blocks from the United States. “It’s very calm,” he added.
Unlawful border crossings began to drop under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as he imposed asylum restrictions and Mexico’s hardened its own crackdown on migrants. The decline grew much sharper after Mr. Trump shut down an app that allowed migrants to schedule asylum appointments to gain entry into the United States.
Ms. Mojica, the Venezuelan migrant, said her own appointment was canceled the same day Mr. Trump took office.
She had arrived in Tijuana only days before, after a long trip through the dangerous land route called the Darién Gap with her husband and mother. She had been living and working in Peru, she said, but sold everything with the dream of reaching the United States and reuniting with her children, who entered the country legally.
She has not given up hope as her shelter emptied out, with migrants returning to hometowns or trying to settle in Tijuana. But with economic and political instability in Venezuela, and her husband finding work as a security guard in Tijuana, Ms. Mojica has started to consider a longer-term stay.
“The only option I see is to stay here, rent a place, and see what happens,” she said.
Johanna Ayada, who helps run the Ambassadors of Jesus shelter, where Ms. Mojica is staying, described a stark decline in migration. For parts of 2022 to 2024, she said, her 2,500-person shelter was at capacity, with people sleeping on the floor of the church.
By January, she said, the number dropped to roughly 1,300 migrants. Now, she said, it was down to about 700, mostly Mexicans displaced by violence elsewhere in the country.
Mr. García said he was puzzled by Mr. Trump’s recent remarks.
“He’s been in power for five months and the border areas are semi empty,” he said. “There is no longer the same community for him to say that there’s an invasion in his country. Maybe he’s saying it because of what happened years ago or maybe it’s because of what he’s seeing in Los Angeles, a sanctuary city.”
In the same shelter, Blanca Isabel Romero García, 37, and her family of 10, including five children and three grandchildren, had packed up their belongings to move out.
They fled Mexico’s Morelos State last fall, she said. Cartel gunmen opened fire on her cafe, killing her son-in-law, she said, because she couldn’t afford to pay a monthly extortion fee.
Ms. Romero García said she had applied for asylum, hoping to join her mother and siblings in the United States, but didn’t get an appointment before Mr. Trump’s inauguration. After seven months in a shelter, her family found some work and a trailer home to rent.
“For the moment, yes, we’re staying,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Maybe in a few years, if things change in the United States, I’d rather go there.”
I CAN HEAR MUSIC
by Chris Larkin
Junction 15 of the M25 may not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of escapism, but for me as a child in the late 1980s, joining the M4 was crossing a watershed. We visited my grandparents in Wales every summer, and not only did leaving the London Orbital mean we were properly on our way, it was also the point at which I was allowed to ask for music to be played. I always asked for The Best of the Beach Boys. (No one objected: my father had loved the Beach Boys since the 1960s, even before his older brother moved to the US.) Their songs weren’t just the soundtrack to a car journey to Wales, but a gateway to an America of the mind.
Brian Wilson, who died this week at the age of 82, was the creative centre of the Beach Boys. The early surf hits – ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’, ‘I Get Around’ – radiated brightness, but it was Wilson’s harmonic ambition that lifted the songs above simple chart fodder. He was listening to Gershwin and Bacharach, arranging intricate vocal lines in his head, layering falsetto over baritone in brushstrokes of sound. Those early tracks tapped into – and helped to propagate – a postwar Southern Californian mythology: beaches, high school proms, convertibles.
But Wilson wasn’t content with churning out catchy ballads of young love, car racing and surf culture. The 1963 single ‘Be True to Your School’ was all high school pep and cheerleaders, but the B-side was something else entirely. With ‘In My Room’, Wilson was starting to explore a new side of his songwriting; the harmonies are still there, but they recede into something more intimate and introspective. There’s a sense of unease and a desire for refuge from the loud, bright, unpredictable world outside. It pointed in a new direction, leading three years later to Pet Sounds.
Often cited as one of the greatest albums of all time, Pet Sounds is quite a strange record in many ways. It still has the recognisable themes of earlier albums – wistful love songs, coming of age fears and adolescent adventure – but the unerring optimism has disappeared. The love songs question themselves, coming of age is filled with unease and adolescence feels fraught. The arrangements are more experimental – stacked vocals, odd chord progressions, improvised instruments such as bells and cola bottles, sudden shifts in key, tempo and mood. It was a relative commercial failure, but hugely influential. And ‘Good Vibrations’, released a few months after Pet Sounds, may still be the best pop song ever made, a song so intricate and multi-faceted it’s almost impossible to keep up with it while listening.
But Pet Sounds also marked a turning point in Wilson’s mental state. He became ever more reclusive, taking more drugs and relying on various psychiatrists and hangers-on to remain stable. He performed on and off throughout the next few decades, but was never the same on a physical, mental or creative level. The early 2000s saw him well enough to complete and tour the ‘lost’ album Smile, but there was always a sense he was being carried by the new band he’d gathered around him. The harmonies were there, they sounded like the Beach Boys, but they never really felt like them.
As a child strapped in the back of a Volvo somewhere near Leigh Delamere services, I knew almost nothing of California. But Brian Wilson made me believe in it. The harmonies he created conjured visions of sun-bleached houses, longing glances, soft melancholy and endless summers.
(London Review of Books)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
No nation and no people is so virtuous that they are incapable of temporary (one hopes) insanity. Israel is at bat now. Look, I have no love for Hamas; I understand that Israelis feel threatened and vulnerable, surrounded by Arabs who hate them. But the warfare state that Israel has devolved into has lost its mind, given in to its own dark side. There is no justifying its blood thirst in Gaza, its moral corruption. It's hard to know what to realistically hope for as things stand. For those who believe in miracles, let them pray that peace can settle in the hearts of those who dwell in that savage corner of the middle east.
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Like School Shootings, Political Violence Is Becoming Almost Routine
Manhunt for Minnesota Suspect Enters 2nd Day as State Mourns Victims
Minnesota Suspect Carried List of Potential Targets
Minnesota, Known for Political Civility, Reels After Shooting
Israel and Iran Trade Strikes in Increasingly Deadly Attacks
Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah
ECONOMY AND PLEASURE
by Wendell Berry (1988)
To those who still uphold the traditions of religious and political thought that influenced the shaping of our society and the founding of our government, it is astonishing, and of course discouraging, to see economics now elevated to the position of ultimate justifier and explainer of all the affairs of our daily life, and competition enshrined as the sovereign principle and ideal of economics.
As thousands of small farms and small local businesses of all kinds falter and fail under the effects of adverse economic policies or live under the threat of what we complacently call "scientific progress," the economist sits in the calm of professorial tenure and government subsidy, commenting and explaining for the illumination of the press and the general public. If those who fail happen to be fellow humans, neighbors, children of God, and citizens of the republic, all that is outside the purview of the economist. As the farmers go under, as communities lose their economic supports, as all of rural America sits as if condemned in the shadow of the "free market" and "revolutionary science," the economist announces pontifically to the press that "there will be some winners and some losers" - as if that might justify and clarify everything, or anything. The sciences, one gathers, mindlessly serve economics, and the humanities defer abjectly to the sciences. All assume, apparently, that we are in the grip of the determination of economic laws that are the laws of the universe. The newspapers quote the economists as the ultimate authorities. We read their pronouncements, knowing that the last word has been said.
"Science," President Reagan says, "tells us that the breakthroughs in superconductivity bring us to the threshold of a new age." He is speaking to "a federal conference on the commercial applications of the new technology," and we know that by "science" he means scientists in the pay of corporations. "It is our task at this conference," he says, "to herald in that new age with a rush." A part of his program to accomplish this task is a proposal to "relax" the antitrust laws. Thus even the national executive and our legal system itself must now defer to the demands of "the economy." Whatever "new age" is at hand at the moment must be heralded in "with a rush" because of the profits available to those who will rush it in.
It seems that we have been reduced almost to a state of absolute economics, in which people and all other creatures and things may be considered purely as economic "units," or integers of production, and in which a human being may be dealt with, as John Ruskin put it, "merely as a covetous machine." And the voices bitterest to hear are those saying that all this destructive work of mindless genius, money, and power is regrettable but cannot be helped.
Perhaps it cannot. Surely we would be fools if, having understood the logic of this terrible process, we assumed that it might not go on in its glutton's optimism until it achieves the catastrophe that is its logical end. Butletus suppose that a remedy is possible. If so, perhaps the best beginning would be in understanding the falseness and silliness of the economic ideal of competition, which is destructive both of nature and of human nature because it is untrue to both.
The ideal of competition always implies, arid in fact requires, that any community must be divided into a class of winners and a class of losers. This division is radically different from other social divisions; that of the more able and the less able, or that of the richer and the poorer, or even that of the rulers and the ruled. These latter divisions have existed throughout history and at times, at least, have been ameliorated by social and religious ideals that instructed the strong to help the weak. As a purely economic ideal, competition does not contain or imply any such instructions. In fact, the defenders of the ideal of competition have never known what to do with or for the losers. The losers simply accumulate in human dumps, like stores of industrial waste, until they gain enough misery and strength to overpower the winners. The idea that the displaced and dispossessed "should seek retraining and get into another line of work" is, of course, utterly cynical; it is only the hand-washing practiced by officials and experts. A loser, by definition, is somebody whom nobody knows what to do with. There is no limit to the damage and the suffering implicit in this willingness that losers should exist as a normal economic cost.
The danger of the ideal of competition is that it neither proposes nor implies any limits. It proposes simply to lower costs at any cost, and to raise profits at any cost. It does not hesitate at the destruction of the life of a family or the life of a community. It pits neighbor against neighbor as readily as it pits buyer against seller. Every transaction is meant to involve a winner and a loser. And for this reason the human economy is pitted without limit against nature. For in the unlimited competition of neighbor and neighbor, buyer and seller, all available means must be used; none may be spared.
I will be told that indeed there are limits to economic competitiveness as now practiced - that, for instance, one is not allowed to kill one's competitor. But, leaving aside the issue of whether or not murder would be acceptable as an economic means if the stakes were high enough, it is a fact that the destruction of life is a part of the daily business of economic competition as now practiced. If one person is willing to take another's property or to accept another's ruin as a normal result of economic enterprise, then he is willing to destroy that other person's life as it is and as it desires to be. That this person's biological existence has been spared seems merely incidental; it was spared because it was not worth anything. That this person is now "free" to "seek retraining and get into another line of work" signifies only that his life as it was has been destroyed.
But there is another implication in the limitlessness of the ideal of competition that is politically even more ominous: namely, that unlimited economic competitiveness proposes an unlimited concentration of economic power. Economic anarchy, like any other free-for-all, tends inevitably toward dominance by the strongest. If it is normal for economic activity to divide the community into a class of winners and a class of losers, then the inescapable implication is that the class of winners will become ever smaller, the class of losers ever larger. And that, obviously, is now happening: the usable property of our country, once divided somewhat democratically, is owned by fewer and fewer people every year. That the president of the republic can, without fear, propose the "relaxation" of antitrust laws in order to "rush" the advent of a commercial "new age" suggests not merely that we are "rushing" toward plutocracy, but that this is now a permissible goal for the would-be winning class for which Mr. Reagan speaks and acts, and a burden acceptable to nearly everybody else.
Nowhere, I believe, has this grossly oversimplified version of economics made itself more at home than in the land-grant universities. The colleges of agriculture, for example, having presided over the now nearly completed destruction of their constituency - the farm people and the farm communities - are now scrambling to ally themselves more firmly than ever, not with "the rural home and rural life" that were, and are, their trust, but with the technocratic aims and corporate interests that are destroying the rural home and rural life. This, of course, is only a new intensification of an old alliance. The revolution that began with machines and chemicals proposes now to continue with automation, computers, and biotechnology. That this has been and is a revolution is undeniable. It has not been merely a "scientific revolution," as its proponents sometimes like to call it, but also an economic one, involving great and profound changes in property ownership and the distribution of real wealth. It has done by insidious tendency what the communist revolutions have done by fiat: it has dispossessed the people and usurped the power and integrity of community life.
This work has been done, and is still being done, under the heading of altruism: its aims, as its proponents never tire of repeating, are to "serve agriculture" and to "feed the world." These aims, as stated, are irreproachable; as pursued, they raise a number of doubts. Agriculture, it turns out, is to be se~ed strictly according to the rules of competitive economics. The aim is "to make farmers more competitive" and "to make American agriculture more competitive." Against whom, we must ask, are our farmers and our agriculture to be made more competitive? And we must answer, because we know: Against other farmers, at home and abroad. Now, if the colleges of agriculture "serve agriculture" by helping farmers to compete against one another, what do they propose to do to help the farmers who have been out-competed? Well, those people are not farmers anymore, and therefore are of no concern to the academic servants of agriculture. Besides, they are the beneficiaries of the inestimable liberty to "seek retraining and get into another line of work."
And so the colleges of agriculture, entrusted though they are to serve the rural home and rural life, give themselves over to a hysterical rhetoric of "change," "the future," "the frontiers of modern science," "competition," "the competitive edge," "the cutting edge," "early adoption," and the like, as if there is nothing worth learning from the past and nothing worth preserving in the present. The idea of the teacher and scholar as one called upon to preserve and pass on a common cultural and namral birthright has been almost entirely replaced by the idea of the teacher and scholar as a developer of "human capital" and a bestower of economic advantage. The ambition is to make the university an "economic resource" in a competition for wealth and power that is local, national, and global. Of course, all this works directly against the rural home and rural life, because it works directly against community.
There is no denying that competitiveness is a part of the life both of an individual and of a community, or that, within limits, it is a useful and necessary part. But it is equally obvious that no individual can lead a good or a satisfying life under the rule of competition, and that no community can succeed except by limiting somehow the competitiveness of its members. One cannot maintain one's" competitive edge" if one helps other people. The advantage of "early adoption" would disappear - it would not be thought of - in a community that put a proper value on mutual help. Such advantages would not be thought of by people intent on loving their neighbors as themselves. And it is impossible to imagine that there can be any reconciliation between local and national competitiveness and global altruism. The ambition to "feed the world" or "feed the hungry," rising as it does out of the death struggle of farmer with farmer, proposes not the filling of stomachs, but the engorgement of "the bottom line." The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.
In agriculture, competitiveness has been based throughout the industrial era on constantly accelerating technological change - the very principle of agricultural competitiveness is ever-accelerating change - and this has encouraged an ever-accelerating dependency on purchased products, products purchased ever farther from home. Community, however, aspires toward stability. It strives to balance change with constancy. That is why community life places such high value on neighborly love, marital fidelity, local loyalty, the integrity and continuity of family life, respect for the old, and instruction of the young. And a vital community draws its life, so far as possible, from local sources. It prefers to solve its problems, for example, by nonmonetary exchanges of help, not by buying things. A community cannot survive under the rule of competition.
But the land-grant universities, in espousing the economic determinism of the industrialists, have caught themselves in a logical absurdity that they may finally discover to be dangerous to themselves. If competitiveness is the economic norm, and the "competitive edge" the only recognized social goal, then how can these institutions justify public support? Why, in other words, should the public be willing to permit a corporation to profit privately from research that has been subsidized publicly? Why should not the industries be required to afford their own research, and why should not the laws of competition and the free market - if indeed they perform as advertised - enable industries to do their own research a great deal more cheaply than the universities can do it?
The question that we finally come to is a practical one, though it is not one that is entirely answerable by empirical methods: Can a university, or a nation, afford this exclusive rule of competition, this purely economic economy? The great fault of this approach to things is that it is so drastically reductive; it does not permit us to live and work as human beings, as the best of our inheritance defines us. Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.
But what the ideal of competition most flagrantly and disastrously excludes is affection. The affections, John Ruskin said, are "an anomalous force, rendering every one of the ordinary political economist's calculations nugatory; while, even if he desired to introduce this new element into his estimates, he has no power of dealing with it; for the affections only become a true motive power when they ignore every other motive power and condition of political economy." Thus, if we are sane, we do not dismiss or abandon our infant children or our aged parents because they are too young or too old to work. For human beings, affection is the ultimate motive, because the force that powers us, as Ruskin also said, is not "steam, magnetism, or gravitation," but "a Soul."
I would like now to attempt to talk about economy from the standpoint of affection - or, as I am going to call it, pleasure, advancing just a little beyond Ruskin's term, for pleasure is, so to speak, affection in action. There are obvious risks in approaching an economic problem by a way that is frankly emotional - to talk, for example, about the pleasures of nature and the pleasures of work. But these risks seem to me worth taking, for what I am trying to deal with here is the grief that we increasingly suffer as a result of the loss of those pleasures.
It is necessary, at the outset, to make a distinction between pleasure that is true or legitimate and pleasure that is not. We know that a pleasure can be as heavily debited as an economy. Some people undoubtedly thought it pleasant, for example, to have the most onerous tasks of their economy performed by black slaves. But this proved to be a pleasure that was temporary and dangerous. It lived by an enormous indebtedness that was inescapably to be paid not in money, but in misery, waste, and death. The pleasures of fossil fuel combustion and nuclear "security" are, as we are beginning to see, similarly debited to the future. These pleasures are in every way analogous to the selfindulgent pleasures of individuals. They are pleasures that we are allowed to have merely to the extent that we can ignore or defer the logical consequences.
That there is pleasure in competition is not to be doubted. We know from childhood that winning is fun. But we probably begin to grow up when we begin to sympathize with the loser - that is, when we begin to understand that competition involves costs as well as benefits. Sometimes perhaps, as in the most innocent games, the benefits are all to the winner and the costs all to the loser. But when the competition is more serious, when the stakes are higher and greater power is used, then we know that the winner shares in the cost, sometimes disastrously. In war, for example, even the winner is a loser. And this is equally true of our present economy: in unlimited economic competition, the winners are losers; that they may appear to be winners is owing only to their temporary ability to charge their costs to other people or to nature.
But a victory over community or nature can be won only at everybody's cost. For example, we now have in the United States many landscapes that have been defeated - temporarily or permanently - by strip mining, by clear-cutting, by poisoning, by bad farming, or by various styles of "development" that have subjugated their sites entirely to human purposes. These landscapes have been defeated for the benefit of what are assumed to be victorious landscapes: the suburban housing developments and the places of amusement (the park systems, the recreational wildernesses) of the winners - so far - in the economy. But these victorious landscapes and their human inhabitants are already paying the costs of their defeat of other landscapes: in air and water pollution, overcrowding, inflated prices, and various diseases of body and mind. Eventually, the cost will be paid in scarcity or want of necessary goods.
Is it possible to look beyond this all-consuming "rush" of winning and losing to the possibility of countrysides, a nation of countrysides, in which use is not synonymous with defeat? It is. But in order to do so we must consider our pleasures. Since we all know, from our own and our nation's experience, of some pleasures that are canceled by their costs, and of some that result in unredeemable losses and miseries, it is natural to wonder if there may not be such phenomena as net pleasures, pleasures that are free or without a permanent cost. And we know that there are. These are the pleasures that we take in our own lives, our own wakefulness in this world, and in the company of other people and other creatures - pleasures innate in the Creation and in our own good work. It is in these pleasures that we possess the likeness to God that is spoken of in Genesis.
"This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used." Henry David Thoreau said that to his graduating class at Harvard in 1837. We may assume that to most of them it sounded odd, as to most of the Harvard graduating class of 1987 it undoubtedly still would. But perhaps we will be encouraged to take him seriously, if we recognize that this idea is not something that Thoreau made up out of thin air. When he uttered it, he may very well have been remembering Revelation 4:11: "Thou art worthy, 0 Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." That God created "all things" is in itself an uncomfortable thought, for in our workaday world we can hardly avoid preferring some things above others, and this makes it hard to imagine not doing so. That God created all things for His pleasure, and that they continue to exist because they please Him, is formidable doctrine indeed, as far as possible both from the "anthropocentric" utilitarianism that some environmentalist critics claim to find in the Bible and from the grouchy spirituality of many Christians.
It would be foolish, probably, to suggest that God's pleasure in all things can be fully understood or appreciated by mere humans. The passage suggests, however, that our truest and profoundest religious experience may be the simple, unasking pleasure in the existence of other creatures that is possible to humans. It suggests that God's pleasure in all things must be respected by us in our use of things, and even in our displeasure in some things. It suggests too that we have an obligation to preserve God's pleasure in all things, and surely this means not only that we must not misuse or abuse anything, but also that there must be some things and some places that by common agreement we do not use at all, but leave wild. This bountiful and lovely thought that all creatures are pleasing to God - and potentially pleasing, therefore, to us - is unthinkable from the point of view of an economy divorced from pleasure, such as the one we have now, which completely discounts the capacity of people to be affectionate toward what they do and what they use and where they live and the other people and creatures with whom they live.
It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, that we support in fact a great variety of pleasure industries and that these are thriving as never before. But that would seem only to prove my point. That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless inability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places. Our workplaces are more and more exclusively given over to production, and our dwelling places to consumption. And this accounts for the accelerating division of our country into defeated landscapes and victorious (but threatened) landscapes.
More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons - why else should we be so eager to escape them? We recognize defeated landscapes by the absence of pleasure from them. We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them.
Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?
And in the right sort of economy, our pleasure would not be merely an addition or by-product or reward; it would be both an empowerment of our work and its indispensable measure. Pleasure, Ananda Coomaraswamy said, perfects work. In order to have leisure and pleasure, we have mechanized and automated and computerized our work. But what does this do but divide us ever more from our work and our products - and, in the process, from one another and the world? What have farmers done when they have mechanized and computerized their farms? They have removed themselves and their pleasure from their work.
I was fortunate, late in his life, to know Henry Besuden of Clark County, Kentucky, the premier Southdown sheep breeder and one of the great farmers of his time. He told me once that his first morning duty in the spring and early summer was to saddle his horse and ride across his pastures to see the condition of the grass when it was freshest from the moisture and coolness of the night. What he wanted to see in his pastures at that time of year, when his spring lambs would be fattening, was what he called "bloom" - by which he meant not flowers, but a certain visible delectability. He recognized it, of course, by his delight in it. He was one of the best of the traditional livestockmen - the husbander or husband of his animals. As such, he was not interested in "statistical indicators" of his flock's "productivity." He wanted his sheep to be pleased. If they were pleased with their pasture, they would eat eagerly, drink well, rest, and grow. He knew their pleasure by his own.
The nearly intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove "drudgery" from our lives. If I could pick any rule of industrial economics to receive a thorough re-examination by our people, it would be the one that says that all hard physical work is "drudgery" and notworth doing. There are of course many questions surrounding this issue: What is the work? In whose interest is it done? Where and in what circumstances is it done? How well and to what result is it done? In whose company is it done? How long does it last? And so forth. But this issue is personal and so needs to be re-examined by everybody. The argument, if it is that, can proceed only by personal testimony.
I can say, for example, that the tobacco harvest in my own home country involves the hardest work that I have done in any quantity. In most ofthe years of my life, from early boyhood until now, I have taken part in the tobacco cutting. This work usually occurs at some time between the last part of August and the first part of October. Usually the weather is hot; usually we are in a hurry. The work is extremely demanding, and often, because of the weather, it has the character of an emergency. Because all of the work still must be done by hand, this event has maintained much of its old character; it is very much the sort of thing the agriculture experts have had in mind when they have talked about freeing people from drudgery.
That the tobacco cutting can be drudgery is obvious. If there is too much of it, if it goes on too long, if one has no interest in it, if one cannot reconcile oneself to the misery involved in it, if one does not like or enjoy the company of one's fellow workers, then drudgery would be the proper name for it.
But for me, and I think for most of the men and women who have been my companions in this work, it has not been drudgery. None of us would say that we take pleasure in all of it all of the time, but we do take pleasure in it, and sometimes the pleasure can be intense and clear. Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.
The tobacco cutting is the most protracted social occasion of our year. Neighbors work together; they are together all day every day for weeks. The quiet of the work is not much interrupted by machine noises, and so there is much talk. There is the talk involved in the management of the work. There is incessant speculation about the weather. There is much laughter; because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished. And there are memories.
The crew to which I belong is the product of kinships and friendships going far back; my own earliest associations with it occurred nearly forty years ago. And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered. The tobacco cutting is a sort of ritual of remembrance. Old stories are re-told; the dead and the absent are remembered, Some of the best talk I have ever listened to I have heard during these times, and I am especially moved to think of the care that is sometimes taken to speak well - that is, to speak fittingly - of the dead and the absent. The conversation, one feels, is ancient. Such talk in barns and at row ends must go back without interruption to the first farmers. How long it may continue is now an uneasy question; not much longer perhaps, but we do not know. We only know that while it lasts it can carry us deeply into our shared life and the happiness of farming.
On many days we have had somebody's child or somebody's children with us, playing in the barn or around the patch while we worked, and these have been our best days. One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children. As industrial work excludes the dead by social mobility and technological change, it excludes children by haste and danger. The small scale and the handwork of our tobacco cutting permit margins both temporal and spatial that accommodate the play of children. The children play at the grownups' work, as well as at their own play. In their play the children learn to work; they learn to know their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.
(I am perforce aware of the problems and the controversies about tobacco. I have spoken of the tobacco harvest here simply because it is the only remaining farm job in my part of the country that still involves a traditional neighborliness.)
Ultimately, in the argument about work and how it should be done, one has only one's pleasure to offer. It is possible, as I have learned again and again, to be in one's place, in such company, wild or domestic, and with such pleasure, that one cannot think of another place that one would prefer to be - or of another place at all. One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simply all, and is enough. Such times give one the chief standard and the chief reason for one's work.
Last December, when my granddaughter, Katie, had just turned five, she stayed with me one day while the rest of the family was away from home. In the afternoon we hitched a team of horses to the wagon and hauled a load of dirt for the barn floor. It was a cold day, but the sun was shining; we hauled our load of dirt over the tree-lined gravel lane beside the creek - a way well known to her mother and to my mother when they were children. As we went along, Katie drove the team for the first time in her life. She did very well, and she was proud of herself. She said that her mother would be proud of her, and I said that I was proud of her.
We completed our trip to the barn, unloaded our load of dirt, smoothed it over the barn floor, and wetted it down. By the time we started back up the creek road the sun had gone over the hill and the air had turned bitter. Katie sat close to me in the wagon, and we did not say anything for a long time. I did not say anything because I was afraid that Katie was not saying anything because she was cold and tired and miserable and perhaps homesick; it was impossible to hurry much, and I was unsure how I would comfort her.
But then, after a while, she said, "Wendell, isn't it fun?"
NO KINGS DAY IN UKIAH
So many posters about CA history that are not even close to being true, so sad we do not teach history in our schools anymore, what a shame!!!
Remind us of whom is cutting funds from schools and the education department please. For a recent history lesson.
A true shame!
For the last twenty years America Hater’s(Democrats) have taken over education and are teaching DEI. No cuts needed, no reading, math or history. Teach wokeness and you end up with a bunch of unemployed protesters. Call half of America nazi’s and then send your assassins to kill and try to make heroes out of them. How will they spin Walz’s appointee now that he has murdered their own? Waiting on the edge of my seat.
He was appointed to a Board 6 years ago. How come no one complained until now?
Of course, America Hater. Now close your eyes, imagine if Trump appointed someone in his first term that assassinated people. If your answer would be the same, I’ve got some beach front property in Arizona to sell you. Oh, and I’ll throw the Golden Gate in for free!
Hold it right there, Call. Here you come hating on us only hours after Mendo’s and America’s greatest day of mass good vibes EVER! What’s wrong with you?
I have common sense, apparently this tempts you to ask a stupid question. Don’t need any DEI training, just lived it under your dementia ridden hero, Half Dead Joe, Harvey.
Apparently you confuse willful ignorance with “common sense”.
Close my eyes and imagine? That doesn’t work on everyone, you know. I’ll take a hard pass.
Move forward just a little bit more…by the way, what’s wrong with DEI? Sounds like you might profit intellectually from a class in it. Guess you’d rather be like your hero, Trump.
Back to name calling. Doing such thoroughly discredits any point the poster wants to make.
When was it that schools in CA, or the US as a whole, ever did teach real history? Certainly not in my tenure in them (’56-68). We were taught to be proud when California exceeded New York in terms of of human monkey population numbers, as though it was a good thing…
HONORING DAN BACHER: AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE & LEGACY
When I started reading this, I feared it was a memorial. Glad Dan’s still kicking.
6 9 1
8 5 3
2 4 7
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY’S NYT
WOW for the first time in many days TRUMP is not on the NYT headlines, a hallmark today!!
Re: Tijuana — You’d think with demand down, the price to cross would drop. But it’s $18k on foot, $25k by car. Cartels still cash in, preying on the desperate
ECONOMY AND PLEASURE
Farming life: Three percent of our population produces the food that feeds 330 million Americans. Try reading John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) to educate yourself about economics and economists. Originally, there were no economists and it was belived that bad ecomomies were due to sin.
Where else but in the AVA, on a Sunday morning in June, would one find a thoughtful Wendell Berry essay from decades ago? He speaks for some of the old ways, that of the common good, the looking to the human needs of communities. Mr. Berry has a good bit of wisdom, a quality sorely lacking in our world. It’s a model of putting things into perspective.
One could quote many of his clear, sensible thoughts—here’s one that caught my attention:
“Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.”
I think the record for DJT has been established. He alone is the greatest Uniter of any American President. United in firmly decided OPPOSITION! To him and his presidential mess ups!
Hiya, AVA’ ers,
I wanted to wish all the dads a Happy Father’s Day, enjoy, hope you are filled to the brim with love and laughter! 💕👴🤣
mm 💕