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COOLER interior temperatures and a deeper marine layer are expected Thursday and Friday. Fire weather concerns today from gusty afternoon winds and a slight chance for thunderstorms. Temperatures will then trend warmer through the weekend and into early next week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A mostly clear 50F under some passing high clouds this Thursday morning on the coast. I'll go with more of the same leaning towards the sunny side. Of course coast folks are curious about fog cover for Saturday evenings fireworks show? I am thinking we have a good chance for good conditions, BUT, as always, we'll see.
AN UNKNOWN NUMBER OF WILD PIGS are digging up yards and property along Robinson Creek in Boonville all the way down to where Robinson Creek joins Anderson Creek and beyond. So far, nobody knows how many pigs are doing the damage. A older Boonville woman with a nice garden has already had hundreds of dollars of damage done to her front yard and she’s worried that the oinker(s) will soon get into her back garden and ruin it. She’s gone through all the hoops she’s been told to go through — Fish & Wildlife, the County Ag Department, a private trapper — and filled out the forms and complaints and provided photos of damage, but all she’s got so far is the run-around. And no predation permit — which requires “verification” by Fish & Wildlife. The County’s “Wildlife Incident Reporting process webpage says, “CDFW Authorized Investigators and support staff strive to review all WIRs [Wildlife Incident Reports] in a timely manner,” but, “The Department is currently experiencing a high volume of human-wildlife conflict (HWC) and related wildlife incident reports. We appreciate your patience.” The woman is now considering an all-night vigil with a rifle, but that’s not much of a solution either. We’ve experienced some minor pig damage in the AVA HQ yard area too, but nothing serious yet. Ever since the County cancelled the Wildlife Services (Federal Trapper) Contract, people in Mendocino have been left to not only navigate the bureaucracy on their own, but to try to deal with the problem with very little help or experience or equipment. The local woman, and anyone else who has suffered damage from these beasts would greatly appreciate any substantive advice before it gets much worse.
Obviously, trying to deal with feral hogs on one’s own is not simple: https://feralhogs.tamu.edu/trap-design/
(Mark Scaramella)
ALICE WACO, warrior for peace and justice in Sonoma County, dies at 94
A former nun, Alice Waco was a Santa Rosa teacher who spent decades in service to various local and global causes, co-founding of the county’s Peace and Justice Center.
by Kerry Benefield
Anti-war activist. Teacher. Agitator. Runner. Global philanthropist. Partner. Education advocate. Former nun.
Alice Waco of Santa Rosa was all of those things and more. But from her long list of achievements and activities, according to those who knew well and admired her life’s work, two callings rose above the rest for Waco: Thoughtful friend and fierce fighter for justice.
There was ample proof that in the constant stream of loved ones and friends, well-wishers and long time colleagues who filled her room at Providence Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital after she suffered a stroke late last week.
“Alice was a pillar of the community,” said friend and neighbor Jonathan Taylor. “If you were on the left and into community activism and supporting the rights for all people and a champion of the poor? That was Alice.”
A founder of the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County, a continuous supporter of Friends of Cantera which supported education in Nicaragua, and a tireless anti-war protester and advocate for all manner of human rights and nonviolence projects, Waco died Sunday morning at Memorial Hospital. She was 94.
For decades, she was a champion of liberal and leftist causes in Sonoma County — there among the crowd of arrested Santa Rosa protesters two decades ago denouncing the U.S. war with Iraq and there two decades earlier as leader of the Santa Rosa teacher’s union in its first-ever districtwide strike in 1980.
“She was a force to be reckoned with,” said Taylor.
“She had amazingly disparate groups that she hung out with,” he said. “Alice was a candle and the rest of us are moths.
Her upbringing in a large, poor Midwestern family deeply influenced Waco’s regard for people and their needs.
She was born June 17, 1931, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Alice and Stephen Waco. She was the sixth of nine children. A sister died before she was born.
The family moved west to Santa Monica when Waco was three. She attended elementary school in the Ocean Park neighborhood and eventually went to an all-girls Catholic High School in Los Angeles. The family struggled for money, according to Waco’s cousin Angela Gleason of Santa Cruz, so Waco took a job in order to afford the bus fare.
In high school, Waco shone as an athlete, said her brother David Waco of Sonoma.
“She competed in school, mostly pentathlon,” he said. “She was the best in school at that.”
After high school, Waco joined a Catholic convent and became a nun, teaching school, for nearly two decades.
She was serving as a nun at St. Benedict’s Deaf Center in San Francisco when she met the resident priest, Bill McGee. Both were growing away from the church.
She and other nuns asked to be allowed to rent a house rather than live at the convent. They were given permission on one condition: They meet daily with a priest.
“So we found Bill McGee,” Waco told a Press Democrat reporter in 2004.
McGee and Waco left the church and married in 1974, becoming the nearly inseparable “Bill and Alice.”
Waco continued teaching, first chemistry and later becoming a counselor, according to longtime friend and fellow science teacher Susan Martin of Salem, Oregon.
She was working at Santa Rosa High School when, in 1980, she was also president of the Santa Rosa Teachers Association during its acrimonious 5-week strike that mired the county’s largest school district in conflict.
Waco appeared almost daily in the pages of The Press Democrat, articulating SRTA demands and, in late December, celebrating what she and others deemed a victory for teachers. A picture of Waco removing her yellow “On Strike” button appeared on the front page.
She brought that fighting spirit to all of her endeavors.
In 2003, she was again on the PD’s front page, this time shown while being arrested with four dozens others by Santa Rosa police after blocking the intersection of College and Mendocino avenues in a protest against the Iraq War.
In 2004, Waco helped lead another large demonstration against a Sonoma County appearance by notorious conservative and anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly.
Waco, the former nun, was interviewed while dressed as God, draped in an American flag and performing a mock wedding of a barefoot and pregnant woman to a broom.
Susan Swartz, the longtime former Press Democrat reporter, wrote in 2004 that when she’d call to ask Waco for comment, McGee would answer and say his wife was unavailable.
“Alice is getting arrested today,” he’d say.
That feistiness was there into her last years, said her good friend and neighbor, Taylor.
“When I met her, she was in her early 80s,” Taylor said. “She didn’t talk about her health and she didn’t talk about the weather and she didn’t talk about her cat. She talked about getting out on the streets and what the f--k is wrong with our government and how do we get them engaged? She wanted to talk about what she wanted to do.”
(pressdemocrat.com)
LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)
NOYO CENTER FOR MARINE SCIENCE FRENCH TOAST BREAKFAST
Enjoy a scrumptious French Toast Breakfast on July 6, from 10-12 pm at the Noyo Center Marine Science Field Station, formerly Slack Tide Cafe. Sit inside or relax on the deck overlooking the river. $20 includes French Toast and choice of Meat or Fruit Side. Vegan option available. Coffee, tea, juice and extra side dishes available for purchase. The perfect way to unwind after all the July 4th holiday events: https://www.noyocenter.org/calendar
Cheers, Dobie Dolphin
P.S. Noyo Center is having lots of events in the next few months. Stay tuned.
LOBA POETRY SERIES
Monthly Poet Features & Open Mic
Join Ukiah Branch Library staff as we host poetry events in-person on the third Saturdays of each month at 3 p.m. This free event is open to both teens and adults. All are invited to share poems in any form or style or just listen to others. On July 19, we welcome Jessica Cohn.
A Michigan native, Cohn has made homes in Illinois, New York, and most recently, California. “Gratitude Diary,” the first poetry collection from this long-time nonfiction writer, follows an arc from regret to illumination — from broken islands to the medicine creek. Cohn marks the path forward with rocks, ribbons, and observations in verse. For additional background, please see jessicacohn.net.
Please contact the Ukiah Branch Library at 707-463-4490 or [email protected] for more information.
CALIFORNIA IS FULL OF HIDDEN RESERVOIRS. THESE MYSTICS FIND THEM.
A professor said the practice is ‘a religion of sorts’
by Matt LaFever
On a recent sunny Monday morning, 85-year-old Doug Brown pulled up to a breakfast joint in Willits in his white pickup. Bold white letters on the tinted camper shell window spelled out “Water Witcher,” with Brown’s phone number written just below. Inside the truck was a quiver of wire rods, each tipped with different metals or materials, to be used for Brown’s practice of an archaic tradition: water dowsing.
In an age defined by dry spells and dwindling resources, an unlikely group continues to quietly deploy their centuries-old practice in search of water. Called dowsers, water witchers or diviners, members of this eclectic guild claim they can locate the Earth’s hidden reservoirs using primitive technology and intuition, all for a price.
In “The Divining Rod: A History of Water Witching,” published in 1885, U.S. Geological Survey researcher Arthur Jackson Ellis traced dowsing’s origins to the ancient world, citing Biblical references in the books of Moses, Marco Polo’s accounts of divining rods in Asia, and Greek mythology, where gods like Minerva and Hermes carried staffs believed to hold magical powers.
As the USGS itself explained in a more recent fact sheet, water dowsers have used everything from forked sticks cut from willow, peach or witch hazel trees to metal coat hangers, pliers, pendulums and even homemade electrical devices, in their sensory search for water. Brown, like other practitioners, says these tools serve as conduits for a kind of intuitive sensing — a way to connect with what lies beneath the surface.
“It’s all in the rods,” Brown says.
‘It’s voodoo’
The U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly map blending climate data and expert analysis to show current U.S. drought conditions, estimates that more than 22 million Californians currently live in areas affected by drought. Vast stretches of the Golden State are literally sinking as residents draw from deep aquifers, with surface water increasingly out of reach. With increasingly dry conditions across the state, wildfire season has become a year-round concern, leaving vast stretches of chaparral and brush primed to ignite with little warning.
In a climate like this, it’s no wonder the search for water can veer into the mythical.
For Brown, the practice is a family affair. He grew up watching his father, Bob, dowse, relying not on rods but on intuition. He “could feel it, you know. It just was a sixth sense into his body,” Brown says.
So, after a 34-year career with the United States Postal Service, Brown returned to the art he had watched his father practice throughout his childhood. He does use rods, even though his father never did, selecting whichever rod from his collection has the same material at its tip as the material he is searching for. He uses other techniques to enhance his searches, too, like holding a sample of the target material in the same hand as the rod. If you’re looking for money, he says, “you just take a $100 bill or so, hold it in your hand.”
After breakfast, Brown directed this reporter to meet him at a grassy field behind a church about a mile north of the diner. Upon arrival, Brown got to work. Gripping what looked like an old-school car antenna, he pointed toward a grove of trees to the southwest. The rod in his hand began to rotate in a small circular motion — a signal, he said, that water was somewhere in that area.
Brown said he’s worked with professional well-drilling companies that hire him specifically for his water-finding abilities. One company owner “doesn’t believe in witchery. Thinks it’s voodoo.”
One of Brown’s regular clients is Ryan Anker, a water driller with Superior Pump and Drilling, a drilling company based out of the Mendocino coastal hub of Fort Bragg.
Anker has worked with Brown for over five years and relies heavily on his water-finding skills. “I just stand by the data,” Anker says on a recent phone call with SFGATE. He adds that Brown’s findings lead to flowing water “at least 75%” of the time.
The way Anker describes it, it’s a matter of numbers. Percussion sounding, a scientifically backed method that involves sending sound waves into the earth to determine the depth of water below, costs around $3,500 and typically takes about two weeks to deliver results, Anker says. In contrast, Brown’s dowsing service costs about $700 and provides water location guidance the very same day. Anker further notes that Brown usually points to water sources in “generally the same location” as the percussion sounding experts.
Despite the skepticism around dowsing, Anker says the results speak for themselves. He recounts one job where a family hired percussion sounders to locate a well site. When Anker drilled where they directed, there was no water. The clients then called in Brown, who picked a new spot just 75 to 100 feet away. Anker found water. The family was “kind of baffled,” Anker says.
“If it was me, just by the data and drilling behind, I would use Doug first,” Anker says. He adds: “He’s the real deal.”
Brown insists dowsing is a skill only certain people have. He knows some people doubt his family practice. He’s seen people online label water witching as satanic. Brown defends himself, saying, “I’m out there helping people.”
Anker would agree.
“He knows what he’s doing,” Anker says. “He could find water.”
Scripture, not superstition
Among the skeptics, however, is the U.S. Geological Survey. In Ellis’ 1885 text, he calls dowsing “a favorite trick for appealing to uneducated persons.” While he conceded that some practitioners may be sincere, he warned that many so-called professionals were likely “deliberately defrauding the people.”
Today, the USGS offers a natural explanation for any “successful” water dowsing cases: In regions with adequate rainfall and favorable geology, groundwater is so abundant and close to the surface that drilling almost anywhere is likely to strike water.
Jack Coel is a water dowser cut from a different cloth than Brown. The 78-year-old didn’t learn the craft from family or folklore. He picked it up on a U.S. Army base in Germany during the late 1960s.
Coel told SFGATE in a recent phone call that while laying communication lines at the old Eckernförde airfield, he watched a German technician trace buried cables using nothing but a pair of bent rods. The man marked the cables’ path along the flight line, and Coel was ordered to dig. Each time, the cables were exactly where the man had indicated using his rods.
Coel was captivated. He asked the technician to show him how it worked and, from then on, abandoned traditional locating gear. “It made us very fast at what we were doing,” he says. He eventually taught dowsing to his entire team, using it to locate infrastructure on five continents.
Coel lives full-time in Arizona now, but he maintains an office in Williams, California, a small town an hour northwest of Sacramento. He’s been a full-time water dowser for over 40 years, traveling thousands of miles across California and the American West each year to help clients locate water, metals and even lost items. His preferred tools are two metal L-shaped rods, one held in each hand. He says the rods swivel to point out the direction of whatever he’s seeking.
His website features several newspaper articles about his work, including a profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, along with glowing testimonials. One customer reported that all three of the sites Coel identified were flowing with water. “I’m giving your name to everyone I know who is looking for water,” they wrote.
One particularly striking validation of Coel’s dowsing career came in 2006, when he was hired to survey a million-acre property, but limited to working only along existing roads. In just three eight-hour days, he marked 17 drill sites for the water drillers to try. The company chose the three most promising sites. One produced 8,000 gallons per minute during a pump test; the other two, drilled 6 miles away, came in at 6,000 gallons per minute each. The company had previously spent $300 million over 20 years to find drill sites, with far less success, Coel says.
For Coel, people like Brown, who came to dowsing later in life, are mere hobbyists who are not true dowsers. He also pushes back against dowsers who embrace a level of mysticism or refer to “water witching.”
“I’m not a witch,” Coel says. “I’m a Christian.”
He rejects the idea that dowsing is some rare or mystical gift. For him, it’s a practice rooted in Scripture. He cites the biblical phrase “seek, and ye shall find” as a call to action — proof, in his view, of humanity’s God-given ability to locate what’s hidden, whether it’s water, metal or some other lost object. He believes he could teach anyone the art of dowsing.
“Some think they’re special. Well, they’re not. It’s like anything else. You get good at what you do for your day job and you have to learn from that,” he says.
He adds: “The only reason it works is because you’re focused on what you’re looking for.” If someone simply wanders around waiting for the rod to move, “nothing ever happens. They’re just tools.”
A modern spin
Elizabeth Lamond, a 66-year-old Sonoma County resident, brings a modern spin to dowsing. Though she’s been seriously dowsing for only about a year and a half, she’s developed an approach that she feels sets her apart. Unlike traditional dowsers who roam fields with rods, Lamond works remote.
“I do all my dowsing from a map,” she told SFGATE on a phone call last month. She holds a weighted pendulum over a printed map and asks, “Show me the best place to drill.” The pendulum swings gently until it slows, then stops. The point at which it stops is where Lamond believes water lies.
“You give me an address, I print it from Google Maps, I can dowse it with my pendulum,” she explains.
She, like Coel, believes dowsing is less about special ability. But instead of Scripture, she finds the practice to be a reflection of self-trust. “Most people can do it. The people who cannot do it are usually the people who doubt themselves,” she says.
She primarily works with one water driller in Sonoma County: Fisch Bros. Drilling. She says she’s surveyed more than 100 locations for that company, and that her accuracy has improved over time.
“I met Elizabeth about a year and a half ago on a project we were subcontracted for in Calistoga,” Steve Unterseher, vice president of Fisch Bros. Drilling, wrote to SFGATE in a prepared statement sent via text message. Lamond selected the drill site using dowsing, which proved to be a “very successful well, plenty of water,” he wrote.
That outcome sparked an ongoing collaboration. “Elizabeth was very enthusiastic about finding water — and that marked the beginning of our professional relationship,” Unterseher wrote.
Since then, he’s sent her addresses for upcoming sites and shared the drilling results. “Elizabeth has been using Google Earth to print maps of these properties and then providing her estimates for the expected depth and water volume,” he said, echoing Lamond’s own description of her process.
She believes the talent runs in her blood. Her grandfather was a healer in France, and as a child, family often told Lamond she shared his special abilities. The family lore has combined with spirituality to play a quiet but constant role in her work.
“I work with guides in my head,” Lamond explains, which help her stay focused and “maintain myself.” She’s not sure exactly what — or who — may be guiding her, but, she says, “I have high respect for whoever is helping me.”
‘Practical uselessness’
Thomas Harter has spent the past 30 years as a professor at the University of California, Davis, specializing in groundwater hydrology. When asked about water dowsing, his answer is unambiguous: “I don’t look at dowsing as a scientific method.”
He’s reviewed the few studies that have tested dowsing against modern techniques. “They have shown there is no merit to dowsing,” he told SFGATE on a recent phone call. To Harter, belief in the practice has less to do with data than with conviction.
“It’s a religion of sorts,” he says. “… You believe it or you don’t.”
It’s the same perspective Ellis, the USGS researcher, shared in 1885. He said that closer inspection should allow “honest inquirers to appreciate the practical uselessness of ‘water witching.’”
Still, dowsing endures. Why?
“It’s cheap. It’s interesting,” Harter offers. In an era of relentless drought and rising costs, dowsers offer something both affordable and immediate.
“They’re looking for help,” he says of water drillers and others in search of lost items, “and dowsers offer themselves up for that help.”
Even so, after decades in the field, Harter concedes there are dowsing success stories. “I also know the thing works somehow,” he says — but maybe that’s because “it’s not that hard to find groundwater in many places.”
But even then, Harter is clear: “There’s no scientific evidence or explanation for why it would work.”
And yet, people keep picking up the rods.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS RE: THE ONE TASTE ORGASM CULT BASED IN PHILO
Is an ‘Orgasm Cult’ Tycoon Looking for a Trump Pardon?
All signs point to: Yesssssssss!!! YESSSSSSS!!!!!
by Will Sommer
THE FORMER HEADS of an alleged female “orgasm cult” are making inroads with pro-Trump media outlets—an alliance that could be crucial now that its leaders are facing the possibility of federal prison terms.
The story of once-booming female “orgasmic meditation” startup OneTaste appeared to come to an end earlier this month, when a jury in Brooklyn convicted founder Nicole Daedone and head of sales Rachel Cherwitz on a count each of forced labor conspiracy.
OneTaste, founded in 2004, purported to teach a sort of meditation through instructional demonstrations, which often featured a woman being brought to orgasm by another person’s fingers. But employees have claimed they were coerced into performing sex acts as part of the orgasm program, though the question of whether their fears of losing social status in the group if they didn’t perform acts genuinely qualified as “coercion” hung over the trial.
The allegations against OneTaste were chronicled in the 2020 BBC podcast series Orgasm Cult and the 2022 Netflix documentary Orgasm Inc.
As its leaders now face potential twenty-year prison sentences, OneTaste may have a second life as a MAGA cause célèbre. That’s because Daedone and her legal team have been pitching themselves as victims of exactly the kind of prosecutorial “weaponization” that the Trump administration has vowed to eradicate.
Seriously, the list of unsavory connections, apparent backchanneling, and MAGA media inroads is kinda shocking. Come along for the journey.…
CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, July 2, 2025
KEVIN BENDER, 52, Stockton/Piercy. DUI-any drug.
JASON FRYMAN, 40, Willits. Failure to appear.
CANDICE HAWKINS, 40, Covelo. Suspended license for refusing chemical dui test.
MARIA PEREIRA, 31, Fort Bragg. Petty theft false ID, failure to appear.
ANDREW PIERCE, 42, Ukiah. Dometic battery.
CASEY PRINCE, 45, Fairfax/Ukiah. DUI, suspended license.
CHRISTINA SIMMONS, 34, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.
STEPHEN SUTAK, 54, Ukiah. Grand theft-dogs, probation revocation.
DANIEL YEOMANS, 54, Fort Bragg. Disoderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, probation violation.
SMART RIDERSHIP IS UP, BUT AT WHAT COST?
Editor,
Ridership on the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit train is rising, but the numbers tell a more sobering story. For the first 11 months of fiscal-year 2025, average weekly ridership reached 3,546 — a record for SMART, yet still well below its original goal of 5,000 daily riders.
To attract riders, SMART is heavily subsidizing fares. In fiscal 2024, it recovered just 3.7% of its operating costs from ticket sales — far short of its original 36% target. It appears the ratio will fall even further in 2025.
By comparison, the San Francisco Peninsula’s Caltrain covers nearly 70% of its costs through fares. BART, which is experiencing a financial crisis, still recovers 16% — more than four times SMART’s level.
Some view SMART’s low fares as an attractive European-style public benefit. But the comparison doesn’t hold up. In Europe, farebox recovery ratios typically range from 35% to over 80%. SMART is nowhere close.
Meanwhile, through 0.25% sales tax funding, SMART pulls about $50 million annually from Marin and Sonoma counties — adding up to $1 billion over 20 years. That’s money that could be redirected to urgent local needs like schools, infrastructure, wildfire resilience or climate adaptation.
Instead, we’re subsidizing an inefficient, diesel-powered train system with low ridership, high costs and traffic disruptions — especially at the San Rafael crossing.
Given these facts, is SMART really the best use of our public dollars?
Gaetan Lion
Mill Valley
THE UPSTAIRS HALLWAY inside Eureka’s Carson Mansion
FDR WARNED OF PROBLEMS WITH ‘TRICKLE DOWN’ PLAN
Editor,
It has been pointed out that the current policy of low taxation for the very rich is not only unfair but is bad for our economy. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized this situation in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention of 1932.
“There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” Roosevelt said. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.”
We all know that this trickle-down approach did not work then and it will not work now. We think, in actuality, the Tories did not leave in 1776. They are still with us and they now call themselves Republicans.
Sharlene Hassler
San Rafael
EVEN THE SNIPER…
The Fourth of July…
Warmest spiritual greetings, Please accept my early 4th of July greeting. Am in Washington, D.C. where the fireworks are spectacular, particularly during this far right of the political center presidential administration. The White House was barricaded three days ago. Not certain why the current residents are concerned about the long time Peace Vigil across the street in Lafayette Park. After 44 years of continuously witnessing for peace 24/7, one would certainly think that our statement has been made, and whomever is in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could relax. Even the sniper on the roof came over one time and said hello to us.
Otherwise, as you know from previous messages, I identify with the Spiritual Absolute, which works through this body-mind complex. If you grok that, there ought not be any problem with anyone relating to me. After all, you are the Spiritual Absolute too.
I am seeking cooperation to leave the homeless shelter because I do not have any further reason to be there now. I’ve got $2000 in the bank and the health at 75 is terrific. In the midst of this postmodern American meltdown, why don’t we make creative statements? Let’s sit down and perform “automatic writing”, in which the Spiritual Absolute communicates through these body-mind instruments. And then we publish it! Let’s identify with Bliss Divine as opposed to the ridiculous mental hell detailed in the news and on television nowadays. Hey, no therapists are necessary when you are enlightened.
Please contact me at the following:
Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]
GIANTS SNAP LOSING STREAK, win in extras after blown ninth-inning lead
by Shayna Rubin
PHOENIX — A four-game losing streak rendered Camilo Doval’s services useless of late, but the San Francisco Giants finally had a lead for their closer to protect on Wednesday.
Trouble appeared to be brewing in the bottom of the ninth for Doval, who had a two-run lead, when his first pitch to Geraldo Perdomo landed way outside and he’d soon hit a leadoff single to bring up newly minted All-Star Ketel Marte. A 1-0 slider over the plate was food for Marte, who blasted a game-tying home run into right field, ultimately sending the game into extras.
But Doval’s evening wasn’t over. The Giants had used up nearly all their high-leverage arms to keep the tender lead intact, and coaches told Doval to stay ready.
“When he was told that if we score a run he goes back out there, he perked up,” manager Bob Melvin said.
Patrick Bailey’s go-ahead sacrifice fly in the 10th guaranteed Doval a shot at redemption. Sharper in the second go-around, Doval got a flyout and struck out the final two batters to strand the ghost runner and preserve a 6-5 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks, snapping the losing streak at four games and revitalizing a team that had been running low on good vibes. It was the first time Doval had pitched two innings since July 2022, he earned the win and a blown save.
“That’s more our style of game there,” Melvin said. “Comes down to the last pitch.”
Save for a few instances — Tuesday’s loss, for one — this team’s pitching hasn’t been its downfall during the latest stretch in which it lost 12 of its previous 16 games. Few heroes on offense have emerged to carry them.
Jung Hoo Lee was a central figure during the Giants’ hot start, but he fell into a deep slump the latter half of June that has coincided with the team’s plummet. Since June 15 heading into Wednesday, Lee was batting .075 (4-for-53), including two triples, with four strikeouts and seven walks.
“Yeah, June wasn’t great,” Lee said with Justin Han interpreting.
Two days into July, Lee broke through and helped carry the load. He came a home run shy of the cycle and powered early offense against Diamondbacks starter Merrill Kelly.
After Mike Yastrzemski’s leadoff home run, Lee, who got the day off Tuesday, tripled home Wilmer Flores from first soon after for his first hit of the trip. Lee would put up his first multi-hit game since June 4 and first three-hit game since the 11-inning run-scoring bonanza against the Chicago Cubs on May 6 with a double in his next at-bat and a single in the eighth.
That eighth-inning single led to the Giants’ fourth run — a scoring tally they hadn’t reached before on this trip. Having advanced into scoring position on Luis Matos’ walk, Lee was sent home by Patrick Bailey’s single up the middle and they added on with Brett Wisely’s single to right.
Lee said bad luck — hard hits that found gloves — stoked a mental struggle that manifested into a spiral, but he has been poring over video from earlier this season to mimic his mechanics.
“I’ll try to get that feel back (from) when I was really good,” Lee said. “I just wanted to give it back to the teammates. Today’s game, I hope July, August, September will be great months for me and I can help the team out a lot from now on.”
Added Melvin: “I think a game like this is going to do wonders for him. Pull the ball, hit it with authority, looked more comfortable out there. After the first time up, just looked like something clicked for him.”
Landen Roupp cruised through the first four innings, spinning a good-looking changeup to keep the Diamondbacks at bay. Similar to Hayden Birdsong a night prior, he lost the strike zone in the fifth inning.
Alek Thomas led off with a solo home run, then Roupp lost feel for his two-seamer and walked the next two hitters and was taken out for reliever Erik Miller after Marte’s single loaded the bases with no outs. Arizona scored on Josh Naylor’s sacrifice fly, otherwise Miller limited the damage by striking out pinch hitter Tim Tawa and Eugenio Suarez on sliders.
“My body felt good. Arm felt good. It’s one of those things where I’ve just got to continue to pound the zone,” Roupp said. “I lost my two-seam a little bit in the fifth and that kind of threw me off a little bit. But other than that, felt really good.”
Roupp allowed two runs over four innings with four walks and four strikeouts.
Roster move: The Giants optioned Carson Seymour, who gave up three home runs over three innings in his second big-league outing on Tuesday, and recalled Mason Black prior to Wednesday’s game. The move was to add a fresh arm in the bullpen midway through this stretch of 16 straight games without an off day.
(sfchronicle.com)
NEWSOM, DEMOCRATS AND MAGA REPUBLICANS UNITE TO PASS BILL GUTTING LANDMARK ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
by Dan Bacher
Sacramento — As expected, California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has cozied up to the likes of far right wing influencers like Charlie Kirk, Steven Bannon and Michael Savage in his podcasts, on Monday evening signed legislation that will eviscerate a landmark environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
Under intense pressure from Newsom, the California legislature passed two trailer bills, AB/SB 131, and 130, that will undermine the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and halt cost-saving energy code updates statewide, according to Sierra Club California.
On yesterday evening, Senate President pro Tempore Mike McGuire, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and other legislative leaders joined Newsom at the State Capitol as Newsom signed the legislation.
Governor Newsom claimed the legislation is “a landmark budget bill package that cuts red tape, fast-tracks housing and infrastructure, and improves affordability for all Californians.”
“This isn’t just a budget. This is a budget that builds. It proves what’s possible when we govern with urgency, with clarity, and with a belief in abundance over scarcity,” Newsom gushed.
“In addition to the legislature, I thank the many housing, labor, and environmental leaders who heeded my call and came together around a common goal — to build more housing, faster and create strong affordable pathways for every Californian. Today’s bill is a game changer, which will be felt for generations to come,” Newsom claimed.
Here’s what actually happened: the corporate Democratic Governor, the Democrats and MAGA Republicans united to lay waste to a law that is supposed to protect California rivers, bays, land and the entire state from devastation by rapacious development corporations and Big Ag and Big Oil billionaires.
The controversial budget bills exempt nine types of projects from CEQA environmental reviews, including child care centers, health clinics, food banks, farmworker housing, broadband, wildfire prevention and* water infrastructure. The key word here is “water infrastructure.”*
In other words, the bills will exempt environmentally destructive and salmon-killing projects like the Governor’s two pet water projects, the Delta Tunnel and Sites Reservoir, from environmental review under CEQA. In addition, the bill will exempt high tech manufacturing plants from CEQA review.
If built, the Delta Tunnel and Sites Reservoir would hasten the extinction of spring and winter-run Chinook salmon, Delta and longfin smelt, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon and other imperiled fish species, according to independent scientists and tunnel opponents. And this all takes place as Delta smelt are functionally extinct in the wild and the San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem is in its worst ever crisis, due to the export of Delta water to corporate agribusiness interests in the San Joaquin Valley and abysmal water management policies by the state and federal governments.
Representatives of environmental groups blasted the passage of the budget trailer bills.
“These half-baked bills written behind closed doors will have destructive consequences for environmental justice communities and endangered species across California,” said Jakob Evans, Sierra Club California Senior Policy Strategist, in a statement.
“AB/SB 131 and 130 will undermine vital CEQA regulations and halt crucial statewide energy code savings. It is extremely disappointing that California’s leadership is taking notes from the Federal Administration by ramming through this deregulation via the budget process. Sierra Club California and our allies will be working closely with the legislature to ensure these rollbacks that impact CEQA’s transparency are addressed,” Evans vowed.
It was a “loss for California’s wildlife and transparent decision making as the legislature passed and the Governor signed one of the worst rollbacks of the state’s environmental review law in decades,” according to the Alameda Creek Alliance.
“The claim that this is for housing and childcare centers is a diversion - it will allow developers and water diverters to hide damaging impacts from public scrutiny and limit challenges to projects that destroy wildlife habitat,” the group stated.
Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Executive Director of Restore the Delta, summed up what happened.
“On Monday June 30th, California lawmakers approved a budget trailer bill that significantly alters CEQA, exempting certain types of projects from environmental review—including water infrastructure,” she said in a statement to those who worked hard on trying to stop the legislation.
“Thank you to all of our members, partners and supporters who showed up to advocate for the Delta and against the Delta Tunnel. While the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) trailer bill did pass with the state budget, your calls and emails made a difference. Lawmakers have now committed to working on amendments that address the concerns we raised,” she stated.
“Your voices made a difference. This is proof that when we speak up together, our elected officials listen. Please continue to make your voices heard and ensure these amendments are made to explicitly exclude the Delta Conveyance Project from CEQA reform,” Barrigan-Parrilla added.
“We need and expect good governance in California and your voices of support will help ensure we have transparency, public participation, and accountability. Again, thank you to all who called, emailed and advocated against the Tunnel to protect our community. This is how you build a sustainable future, idea by idea, call by call!” she concluded.
Unlike most corporate and “alternative” media, I tell the truth, based on facts and data, on the Trump-like attacks by Newsom on fish, the Bay-Delta ecosystem, tribal rights, environmental justice communities and the people of California.
Rarely will you see in the mainstream media the real issue here: deep regulatory capture. In other words, follow the money.
Newsom’s push for the Delta Tunnel, Sites Reservoir and his “voluntary agreements” is undoubtedly driven by the unpopular fact that Beverly Hills Billionaires Linda and Stewart Resnick, owners of the Wonderful Company and the largest orchard fruit growers in the world, are among the largest contributors to Governor Newsom and hosted his 2022 anti-recall campaign in a fundraising letter.
The Resnicks have donated a total of $431,600 to Governor Gavin Newsom since 2018, including $250,000 to Stop The Republican Recall Of Governor Newsom and $64,800 to Newsom For California Governor 2022.
Newsom received a total of $755,198 in donations from agribusiness in the 2018 election cycle, based on the data from www.followthemoney.org. That figure includes a combined $116,800 from Stewart and Lynda Resnick and $58,400 from E.J. Gallo, combined with $579,998 in the agriculture donations category.
But the Resnicks are also huge contributors to the University of California system and other universities in the state. In 2019 they made a donation of $750 million to Caltech and in 2022 made a $50 million donation to UC Davis, in addition to contributing millions to UCLA, CSU Fresno and other universities over the years.
The Resnicks have pushed for increased water exports from the Delta for agribusiness and the construction of the Delta Tunnel for many years.
The Resnicks have donated many millions of dollars to both the Democratic and Republican parties and to candidates for both parties over the years. They were instrumental in the creation of the Monterey Amendment, a 1994 pact between Department of Water Resources and State Water Project contractors, that allowed them to obtain their 57 percent stake in the Kern Water Bank:
https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/monterey-amendment
FIVE YEARS LATER, PANDEMIC STILL WEAKENS TWO EMPLOYEE SAFETY NETS
by Dan Walters
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck California five years ago, it massively impacted California families not only medically but economically.
As the state forced many businesses to close their doors, 3 million Californians lost their jobs, shooting the state’s unemployment rate up to more than 16%. In turn, two state programs that are supposed to cushion employees from the effects of workplace disruption were hard-hit.
The most obvious impact is what happened to the state’s unemployment insurance program.
As workers were laid off, they filed claims for weekly benefits from the Unemployment Insurance Fund, which is financed by employers through payroll taxes.
However the fund, which had been struggling to pay claims prior to the pandemic, was soon exhausted, and the state borrowed about $20 billion from the federal government to keep benefits flowing.
The Employment Development Department also suffered a managerial implosion, leading to not only the blockage of payments to legitimate claimants, but billions of dollars in payments, mostly out of federal funds, going to fraudsters.
Five years later, not only has the state been unable to claw back the billions in fraudulent payments, but the state’s unemployment fund’s debt to the federal government has continued to grow. Interest charges are piling up, and there’s still a gap between income and outgo even though the state’s unemployment rate today of 5.3% is about a third of what it was in 2020.
The Employment Development Department estimates that the debt will rise to $23.7 billion by the end of 2026, even though federal officials have raised their payroll taxes in California to chip away at the debt. Underlying the issue is a decades-long political stalemate over unemployment insurance benefits and taxes.
The other safety net program affected by the pandemic is workers’ compensation, which provides medical treatment and support payments to employees suffering job-related illnesses and injuries.
Most employers purchase insurance either from private insurers or from the quasi-public State Compensation Insurance Fund to cover employee claims. Some big employers, including state and local governments, self-insure for “work comp,” as it’s dubbed.
An estimated 200,000 work comp claims were filed by COVID-19 victims, even though a connection between the disease and the workplace is tenuous at best.
Nevertheless, those claims and sharp increases in medical costs are being cited by the insurance industry’s Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau in seeking an 11.2% increase in employer-paid insurance premiums, tentatively approved by the state Department of Insurance to take effect on Sept. 1.
It’s the latest chapter in the long-running political friction over work comp costs and benefits, which collectively approach $20 billion a year.
Roughly once a decade, the major players in the work comp system — employers, insurers, unions, work comp attorneys and medical care providers — clash over the issue. The last time was in 2012, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown negotiated a compromise that raised benefits but imposed new rules on eligibility for benefits and medical care to save enough money to pay for the increases.
Although opposed by medical providers and attorneys, the deal had the desired impact, including a sharp reduction in insurance costs vis-à-vis payrolls. However, California’s insurance costs, 1.86% of payroll, remain among the highest in the nation, according to a biennial survey by the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services, widely considered the most authoritative source of work comp premium data.
The stage would seem to be set for another of the Capitol’s periodic work comp clashes. However, legislation that would have increased cash benefits to disabled workers never made it through the first committee this year, so the contending forces will face off sometime in the future.
THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by William Strunk Jr. and later expanded by E.B. White is a concise guidebook on English writing style, originally published in 1918 and widely respected for its emphasis on clarity, simplicity, and precision. It’s best known for its brief and direct rules that help writers tighten their prose and eliminate unnecessary words.
The book promotes principles like using the active voice, omitting needless words, and ensuring subject-verb agreement. It champions clarity over cleverness and teaches that writing should serve the reader, not the ego of the writer. For example, it prefers “He noticed a change in her manner” over “He was aware of a change in the way she was behaving.”
There are two main parts: the original rules by Strunk, which are short and rigid, and the additions by White, which include commentary, examples, and more flexibility. Their combined voices make it both strict and stylistically rich. It’s especially useful for students, journalists, and anyone aiming to improve the clarity of their written English.
Though some critics say its rules are too old-fashioned for modern writing, its influence is still strong in academic and professional circles. Even today, writers return to it for reminders to be concise, consistent, and clear.
‘I WENT SOUTHWEST’
The disappearance and afterlife of Lew Welch.
You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.
I don’t know what you’re going to do about it,
But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
A small part of it will die if I’m not around
feeding it anymore.
—Lew Welch, final lines of “Chicago Poem”
Goodbye
It would be a strange season, seemingly of two minds, weeks of relentless sun followed by a freak snowfall that would cause general havoc among mountain-loving flatlanders who found themselves inconvenienced or dead. And now, in late spring of 1971, the valleys, foothills, and mountains of California seemed unusually alive with death: Bodies were showing up in shallow graves in Sutter County, victims of a serial killer by the name of Juan Corona; Berkeley student Mary Hoefer would go missing in Yosemite Valley, never to be seen again; four climbers from the Sierra Club’s Loma Prieta chapter would die in an attempt on 13,149-foot Mount Ritter; and on May 23, the 44-year-old poet Lew Welch, a longtime friend of Gary Snyder’s who was camped among the oaks and ponderosa pines adjacent to Snyder’s hand-hewn home on the San Juan Ridge, retrieved his .22-caliber revolver from Snyder’s footlocker, composed a 90-word note, and walked off the face of the earth.
By the time the search for Welch was called off, a cold rain was falling on the foothills and snow from the north would be measured in feet on the Sierra Nevada crest. For five days, the rescue party had thrashed and crawled up and over and down the promontory south of Welch’s camp called Bald Mountain, but had found no sign of Welch. He’d last been seen wandering off with the pistol he’d used earlier that week in a feat of marksmanship, shooting the head off a fence lizard during a wildflower walk led by Snyder. Young children were about. This was Snyder’s new home; he was building a community here and had certain norms in mind, gunplay not being one of them. Not one to suffer fools, the five-foot-seven-inch Snyder confronted the rangy, red-haired poet in front of the others with the blunt force of his words.
“Lew, you’ll never change.”
It must have stung, that judgment, coming from someone Welch loved and respected a great deal, someone with whom he’d shared important history for over two decades, because the reasons Welch had come to the foothills had everything to do with change.
He’d come to build a cabin next to Snyder’s on land Allen Ginsberg was deeding to him, on the northwest side of Bald Mountain. He’d been talking about it for six months. To make a new life. Establish himself in a new community.
He’d already had many lives, many identities, and many homes. And now he needed a new one.
Full story with photos:
https://www.altaonline.com/books/a64673251/alta-folio-lew-welch-disappearance
[I Saw Myself]
by Lew Welch
I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it
.
and vowed,
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through
.
and then heard
“ring of bone” where
ring is what a
.
bell does
TRUMP KNEW WHAT THE (EXPLETIVE DELETED) HE WAS SAYING
by Jack Ohman
President Donald Trump is now a truly historic president.
He said “f—” on national television. Very deliberately.
Referring to Israel and Iran, the full quote was: “They don’t know what the f— they’re doing.”
Maybe. But he did.
I don’t wish to be overly prudish here. Most of us engage in the use of this particular word from time to time. A “common Anglo-Saxon rejoinder” is the way a philologist would define it, and it is common.
In fact, I had to call my editor to gently inquire as to the San Francisco Chronicle style regarding f—.
“F—” is the preferred style. Not “f***.”
Please make a f—ing note of it. Next.
Ever been on a golf course? Watched your team lose? Stub your toe? You’ve likely said it. Don’t lie. If you are, you’re f—ing with me.
Trump’s deployment of the F-bomb while simultaneously making a statement about bombing is rich, like Fordo enriched uranium rich.
Naturally, the use of profanity by national political leaders in private is well-known.
In 1962, in response to steel industry CEOs lying to him about not raising prices, President John F. Kennedy said, “My father told me that all businessmen were SOBs, but I never believed him until now.”
This casual remark resulted in a little firestorm among businessmen and anti-profanity Americans.
Later in 1962, Kennedy was said to remark during the Cuban missile crisis after getting dressed down by some congressional leaders, “They can have this f—ing job.”
“Perhaps apocryphal,” as they say, but likely true. Kennedy was in the Navy after all, where this sort of linguistic laxity was a common occurrence.
When Oval Office tapes of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal were released, the transcripts were rife with the phrase “expletive deleted.” This led to a lot of tut-tutting among the easily offended and really dinged up Nixon’s image.
Was anyone really surprised that Nixon used that kind of language in private? No. He was in the Navy, too.
The thing is, he never used that language in public, on camera and neither has any president, ever. Until now.
Trump has been flinging around “hell,” “damn,” “s—,” “bastards” and variations thereof for years. Joe Biden also has been known to say “hell” and “damn” in public speaking as well.
Biden’s most famous foray into the F-word was when he described Obamacare as a “big f—ing deal” on a hot mic at a White House ceremony in 2010.
Indeed, it was, but a hot mic moment is way different than Trump deliberately screaming it over the Marine One rotor noise.
As president in 2022, Biden was caught on another hot mic after an event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Biden told the mayor of Fort Myers Beach, Fla., that “no one f—s with a Biden.”
Again, it was a definite Scranton Joe moment, but it wasn’t said before a bank of microphones as a public policy pronouncement. Perhaps if Biden had said this during his catastrophic debate performance with Trump, it might have helped.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was photographed giving the finger to a group of hecklers who had been giving him the same digital riposte. Did you expect him to fuhgeddaboutit? He’s from New York. Gimme a f—ing break here, pal.
Astute political observers may have also noticed an uptick in public use of profanity in the past few years.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., said to the group MoveOn.org in 2019 that “we’re gonna impeach the motherf—er,” which drew a lot of critical commentary. Had she said it on the House floor, the parliamentarian would have “taken down” the remark and stricken it from the record, a capital/Capitol crime.
It’s now common to hear governors, senators and representatives say “hell” and “damn” on television.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who, shall we say, is charmingly tart in private, is also known to say “hell” and “damn” in public a lot, but he also strongly objected to former San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly’s New Year’s resolution to say “f—” at every board meeting in 2010.
In the House of Representatives, rules say that “the context of the debate itself must be considered in determining whether the words objected to constitute disorderly criticism or do in fact fall within the boundaries of appropriate parliamentary discourse. The present-day meaning of language, the tone and intent of the Member speaking, and the subject of the remarks, must all be taken into account by the Speaker.”
Depends on who the House Speaker is, I guess, but Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian, seems like that guy who says “heck” and “golly” a lot.
The thing about the use of the word “f—” is that the bar is lowered, yet again.
It isn’t just Trump, although not to be a stick in the mud, using the F-word in public is, at baseline, yet another thing we have to explain to our kids.
When President Bill Clinton was caught in flagrante delicto with not-Mrs. Clinton, one of my kids walked around the house saying, “Listen to me … I did not have etc. …”
That I had to explain anything like that to a child was, well, f—ed up.
Nixon was right. Presidents should delete at least one of those expletives going forward, people.
Unless they stub their toe.
LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT
House Moves Ahead With President’s Policy Bill Amid G.O.P. Resistance
Illegal Border Crossings Plunge to Lowest Level in Decades
Combs Acquitted of Sex Trafficking but Found Guilty on Lesser Charges
Lack of New U.S. Sanctions Allows Restricted Goods and Funds Into Russia
Lululemon Sues Costco Over Selling ‘Dupes’
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
For over a year, I have been saying that we are regressing to a pre-Gutenberg world. Very soon the only things you can even consider trusting will be your own recollections, physical clippings or other evidence, and perhaps a very few people to whom you are very close and can trust implicitly. Everything else will be unreliable. We are always being played—that is the only thing we really know to be true.
PARAMOUNT’S SURRENDER TO TRUMP
by Bernie Sanders
The decision by the Redstone family, the major owners of Paramount, to settle a bogus lawsuit with President Trump over a 60 Minutes report he did not like is an extremely dangerous precedent in terms of both the First Amendment and government extortion.
Paramount’s decision will only embolden Trump to continue attacking, suing and intimidating the media which he has labeled “the enemy of the people.” It is a dark day for independent journalism and freedom of the press — an essential part of our democracy. It is a victory for a president who is attempting to stifle dissent and undermine American democracy.
It’s pretty obvious why Paramount chose to surrender to Trump. The Redstone family is in line to receive $2.4 billion from the sale of Paramount to Skydance, but they can only receive this money if the Trump administration approves this deal. In other words, the Redstone family diminished the freedom of the press today in exchange for a $2.4 billion payday.
Make no mistake about it. Trump is undermining our democracy and rapidly moving us towards authoritarianism and the billionaires who care more about their stock portfolios than our democracy are helping him do it. That is beyond unacceptable.
THE WORK OF LOCAL CULTURE
by Wendell Berry (1988)
FOR MANY YEARS MY WALKS HAVE TAKEN ME down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.
The old bucket started out a far better one than you can buy now. I think it has been hanging on that post for something like fifty years. I think so because I remember hearing, when I was just a small boy, a story about a bucket that must have been this one. Several of my grandfather's black hired hands went out on an early spring day to burn a tobacco plantbed, and they took along some eggs to boil and eat with their dinner. When dinner came time and they look around for something to boil the eggs in, they could find only an old bucket that at one time had been filled with tar. The boiling water softened the residue of tar, and one of the eggs came out of the water black. The hands made much sport of seeing who would have to eat the black egg, welcoming their laughter in the midst of their days work. The man who had to eat the black egg was Floyd Scott, whom I remember well. Dry scales of tar still adhere to the inside of the bucket.
However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—which will be its culture. And these two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.
IN THE WOODS, THE BUCKET IS NO METAPHOR; it simply reveals what is always happening in the woods, if the woods is let alone. Of course, in most places in my part of the country, the human community did not leave the woods alone. It felled the trees, and replaced them with pastures and crops. But this did not revoke the law of the woods, which is that the ground must be protected by a cover of vegetation, and that the growth of the years must return—or be returned—to the ground to rot and build soil. A good local culture, in one of its most important functions, is a collection of the memories, ways, and skills necessary for the observance, within the bounds of domesticity, of this natural law. If the local culture cannot preserve and improve the local soil, then, as both reason and history inform us, the local community will decay and perish, and the work of soil-building will be resumed by nature.
A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this. Once we have acknowledged this principle, we can only be alarmed at the extent to which it has been ignored. For though our present society does generate a centripetal force of great power, this is not a local force, but one centered almost exclusively in our great commercial and industrial cities, which have drawn irresistibly into themselves both the products of the countryside and the people and talents of the country communities.
There is, as one assumes there must be, a countervailing or centrifugal force that also operates in our society, but this returns to the countryside, not the residue of the land's growth to refertilize the fields, not the learning and experience of the greater world ready to go to work locally, and not, or not often, even a just monetary compensation. What are returned, instead, are overpriced manufactured goods, pollution in various forms, and garbage. A landfill on the edge of my own rural county in Kentucky, for example, daily receives about eighty truckloads of garbage. About fifty of these loads come from cities in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Thus, the end result of the phenomenal modern productivity of the countryside is a debased countryside, which becomes daily less pleasant, and which will inevitably become less productive.
The cities, which have imposed this inversion of forces upon the countryside, have been unable to preserve themselves from it. The typical modern city is surrounded by a circle of affluent suburbs, eating its way outward, like ringworm, leaving the so-called "inner city" desolate, filthy, ugly, and dangerous.
MY WALKS IN THE HILLS AND HOLLOWS around my home have inevitably produced in my mind the awareness that I live in a diminished country. The country has been and is being reduced by the great centralizing process that is our national economy. As I walk, I am always reminded of the slow, patient building of soil in the woods. And I am reminded of the events and companions of my life—for my walks, after so long, are cultural events. But under the trees and in the fields I see also the gullies and scars, healed or healing or fresh, left by careless logging and bad farming. I see the crumbling stone walls, and the wire fences that have been rusting out ever since the 1930's. In the returning woods growth out of the hollows, I see the sagging and the fallen barns, the empty and ruining houses, the houseless chimneys and foundations. As I look at this evidence of human life poorly founded, played out, and gone, I try to recover some understanding, some vision, of what this country was at the beginning: the great oaks and beeches and hickories, walnuts and maples, lindens and ashes, tulip poplars, standing in beauty and dignity now unimaginable, lying deep at their feet—an incalculable birthright sold for money, most of which we do not receive. Most of the money made on the products of this place has gone to fill the pockets of people in distant cities who did not produce the products.
If my walks take me along the roads and streams, I see also the trash and the junk, carelessly manufactured and carelessly thrown away, the glass and the broken glass and the plastic and the aluminum that will lie here longer than the lifetime of the trees—longer than the lifetime of our species, perhaps. And I know that this also is what we have to show for our participation in the American economy, for most of the money made on these things too has been made elsewhere.
It would be somewhat more pleasant for country people if they could blame all this on city people. But the old opposition of country versus city—though still true, and truer than ever economically, for the country is more than ever the colony of the city—is far too simple to explain our problem. For country people more and more live like city people, and so connive in their own ruin. More and more country people, like city people, allow their economic and social standards to be set by television and salesmen and outside experts. Our garbage mingles with New Jersey garbage in our local landfill, and it would be hard to tell which is which.
As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized sales talk, entertainment, and education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper "prices of progress", or made the business of folklorists. Nevertheless, local culture has a value, and part of its value is economic. This can be demonstrated readily enough.
For example, when a community loses its memory, its members no longer know each other. How can they know each other if they have forgotten or have never learned each other's stories? If they do not know each other's stories, how can they know whether or not to trust each other? People who do not trust each other do not help each other, and moreover they fear each other. And this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lose one another's help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued.
We don't trust our "public servants" because we know that they don't respect us. They don't respect us, as we understand, because they don't know us; they don't know our stories. They expect us to sue them if they make mistakes, and so they must insure themselves, at great expense to them and to us. Doctors in a country community must send their patients to specialists in the city, not necessarily because they believe that they are wrong in their diagnoses, but because they know that they are not infallible, and they must protect themselves against lawsuits, at great expense to us.
The government of my home county, which has a population of about 10,000 people, pays an annual liability insurance premium of about $34,000. Add to this the liability premiums that are paid by every professional person who is "at risk" in the county, and you get some idea of the load we are carrying. Many decent family livelihoods are annually paid out of the county to insurance companies for a service that is only negative and provisional.
All of this money is lost to us by the failure of the community. A good community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. It depends upon itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside—unlike most modern populations that depend upon distant purchases for almost everything, and are thus shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influence of salesmen.
I WAS WALKING ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON several years ago with an older friend. We went by the ruining log house that had belonged to his grandparents and great-grandparents. The house stirred my friend's memory, and he told how the old time people used to visit each other in the evenings, especially in the long evenings of winter. There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as "sitting till bedtime." After supper, when they weren't too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they had all heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories, and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, "They had everything but money."
They were poor, as country people often have been, but they had each other, they had their local economy in which they helped each other, they had each other's comfort when they needed it, and they had their stories, their history together in that place. To have everything but money is to have much. And most people of the present can only marvel to think of neighbors entertaining themselves for a whole evening without a single imported pleasure and without listening to a single minute of sales talk.
Most of the descendants of those people have now moved away, partly because of the cultural and economic failures that I mentioned earlier, and most of them no longer sit in the evenings and talk to anyone. Most of them now sit until bedtime, watching TV, submitting every few minutes to a sales talk. The message of both the TV programs and the salestalks is that the watchers should spend whatever is necessary to be like everybody else.
By television and other public means, we are encouraged to imagine that we are far advanced beyond sitting till bedtime with the neighbors on a Kentucky ridgetop, and indeed beyond anything we ever were before. But if, for example, there should occur a forty-eight hour power failure, we would find ourselves in much more backward circumstances than our ancestors. What, for starters, would we do for entertainment? Tell each other stories? But most of us no longer talk with each other, much less tell each other stories. We tell our stories now mostly to doctors or lawyers or psychiatrists or insurance adjusters or the police, not to our neighbors for their (and our) entertainment. The stories that now entertain us are made up for us in New York or Los Angeles or other centers of such commerce.
But a forty-eight hour power failure would involve almost unimaginable deprivations. It would be difficult to travel, especially in cities. Most of the essential work could not be done. Our windowless modern schools and other such buildings that depend on air conditioning could not be used. Refrigeration would be impossible; food would spoil. It would be difficult or impossible to prepare meals. If it was winter, heating systems would fail. At the end of forty-eight hours many of us would be hungry.
Such a calamity—and it is a modest one among those that our time has made possible—would thus reveal how far most of us are now living from our cultural and economic sources, and how extensively we have destroyed the foundations of local life. It would show us how far we have strayed from the locally centered life of such neighborhoods as the one my friend described—a life based to considerable extent upon what we now call solar energy, which is decentralized, democratic, clean and free. If we note that much of the difference we are talking about can be accounted for as an increasing dependence upon energy sources that are centralized, undemocratic, filthy and expensive, we will have completed a sort of historical parable.
HOW HAS THIS HAPPENED? There are many reasons for it. One of the chief reasons is that everywhere in our country the local succession of the generations has been broken. We can trace this change through a series of stories that we may think of as cultural landmarks.
Throughout most of our literature the normal thing was for the generations to succeed one another in place. The memorable stories occurred when this succession became difficult or was threatened in one way or another. The norm is given in Psalm 128, in which succession is seen as one of the rewards of righteousness: "thou shalt see thy children's children, and peace upon Israel."
The longing for this result seems to have been universal. It presides also over The Odyssey, in which Odysseus' desire to return home is certainly regarded as normal. And this story is much concerned with the psychology of family succession. Telemachus, Odysseus' son, comes of age in preparing for the return of his long-absent father. And it seems almost that Odysseus is enabled to return home by his son's achievement of enough manhood to go in search of him. Long after the return of both father and son, Odysseus' life will complete itself, as we know from Teiresias' prophecy in Book XI, much in the spirit of Psalm 128:
a seaborn death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with sick old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you.
The Bible makes much of what it sees as the normal succession—in such stories as those of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David and Solomon—in which the son completes the work or the destiny of the father. The parable of the Prodigal Son is prepared for by such Old Testament stories as that of Jacob, who errs, wanders, returns, is forgiven, and takes his place in the family lineage.
Shakespeare was concerned throughout his working life with the theme of the separation and rejoining of parents and children. It is there at the beginning in The Comedy of Errors, and he is still thinking about it when he gets to King Lear and Pericles and The Tempest. When Lear walks onstage with Cordelia dead in his arms, the theme of return is fulfilled, only this time in the way of tragedy.
Wordsworth's poem, "Michael," written in 1800, is in the same line of descent. It is the story of a prodigal son, and return is still understood as the norm; before the boy's departure, he and his father make a "covenant" that he will return home and carry on his father's life as a shepherd on their ancestral pastures. But the ancient theme here has two significant differences; the son leaves home for an economic reason, and he does not return. Old Michael, the father, was long ago "bound/ In surety for his brother's son." This nephew has failed in his business, and Michael is "summoned to discharge the forfeiture." Rather than do this by selling a portion of their patrimony, the aged parents decide that they must send their son to work for another kinsman in the city in order to earn the necessary money. The country people all are poor; there is no money to be earned at home. When the son has cleared the debt from the land, he will return to it to "possess it, free as the wind/ That passes over it." But the son goes to the city, is corrupted by it, eventually commits a crime, and is forced "To seek a hiding place beyond the seas."
"Michael" is a sort of cultural watershed. It carries on the theme of return that goes back to the beginnings of Western culture, but that return now is only a desire and a memory; in the poem it fails to happen. Because of that failure, we see in "Michael," not just a local story of the Lake District in England, which it is, but the story of rural families in the industrial nations from Wordsworth's time until today. The children go to the cities, for reasons imposed by the external economy, and they do not return; eventually the parents die and the family land, like Michael's, is sold to a stranger. By now it has happened millions of times.
And by now the transformation of the ancient story is nearly complete. Our society, on the whole, has forgot or repudiated the theme of return. Young people still grow up in rural families, and go off to the cities, not to return. But now it is felt that this is what they should do. Now the norm is to leave and not return. And this applies as much to urban families as to rural ones. In the present urban economy the parent-child succession is possible only among the economically privileged. The children of industrial underlings are not likely to succeed their parents at work, and there is not reason for them to wish to do so. We are not going to have an industrial "Michael" in which it is perceived as tragic that a son fails to succeed his father on an assembly line.
According to the new norm, the child's destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession has given way to supersession. And this norm is institutionalized, not in great communal stories, but in the education system. The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance which it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to the future, of the child. The orientation is thus necessarily theoretical, speculative, and central. The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community. And parents with children in school are likely to find themselves immediately separated from their children, and made useless to them, by the intervention of new educational techniques, technologies, methods and languages. School systems innovate as compulsively and eagerly as factories. It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, "educators" tend to look upon the parents as a bad influence, and wish to take the children away from home as early as possible. And many parents, in truth, are now finding their children an encumbrance at home – where there is no useful work for them to do – and are glad enough to turn them over to the state for the use of the future. The extent to which this order of things is now dominant is suggested by a recent magazine article on the discovery of what purports to be a new idea:
The idea that a parent can be a teacher at home has caught the attention of educators… Parents don't have to be graduates of Harvard or Yale to help their kids learn and achieve…
Thus the home as a place where a child can learn has become an idea of the professional "educator," who retains control of the idea. The home, as the article makes clear, is not to be a place where children may learn on their own, but a place where they are taught by parents according to the instructions of professional "educators." In fact, "The Home and School Institute, Inc., of Washington, D.C." (known, of course, as "The HSI") has been "founded to show… how to involve families in their kids' educations."
In such ways as this, the nuclei of home and community have been invaded by the organizations, just as have the nuclei of cells and atoms. And we must be careful to see that the old cultural centers of home and community were made vulnerable to this invasion by their failure as economies. If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to each other. When people are no longer useful to each other, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people fall into dependence upon exterior economies and organizations. The hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself upon local failure. And from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods as a source of "raw material," human and natural. The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the government's economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom. Professionalism means more interest in salary and less interest in what used to be known as disciplines. And so we arrive at the idea, endlessly reiterated in the news media, that education can be improved by bigger salaries for teachers – which may be true, but not, as the proponents too often imply, by bigger salaries alone. There must also be love of learning and of the cultural tradition and of excellence. And this love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and community. Without this love, education is only the importation into a local community of centrally prescribed "career preparation" designed to facilitate the export of young careerists.
Our children are educated, then, to leave home, not to stay home, and the costs of this have been far too little acknowledged. One of the costs is psychological, and the other is at once cultural and ecological.
The natural or normal course of human growing-up must begin with some sort of rebellion against one's parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend, forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That is the old norm, of which the story of the Prodigal son is an example.
The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents. Of course, such a return and reconciliation cannot be achieved without the recognition of mutual practical need. However, in the present economy where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one another. Hence, the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological or emotional reconciliation.
And this interposition of rebellion and then of geographical and occupational distance between parents and children may account for the peculiar emotional intensity that our society attaches to innovation. We appear to hate whatever went before, very much as an adolescent hates parental rule, and to look upon its obsolescence as a kind of vengeance. Thus we may explain industry's obsessive emphasis upon "this year's model," or the preoccupation of the professional "educators" with theoretical and methodological innovation. And thus, in modern literature we have had for many years an emphasis upon "originality" and the "anxiety of influence" (an adolescent critical theory), as opposed, say, to Spenser's filial admiration for Chaucer, or Dante's for Virgil.
But if the norm interrupts the development of the relation between children and parents, that same interruption, ramifying through a community, destroys the continuity and so the integrity of local life. As the children depart, generation after generation, the place loses its memory of itself, which is its history and its culture. And the local history, if it survives at all, loses its place. It does no good for historians, folklorists, and anthropologists to collect the songs and the stories and the lore that comprise local culture and store them in books and archives. They cannot collect and store, because they cannot know, the pattern of reminding that can survive only in the living human community in its place. It is this pattern that is the life of the local culture, and that brings it usefully or pleasurably to mind. Apart from its local landmarks and occasions, the local culture may be the subject of curiosity or of study, but it is also dead.
THE LOSS OF LOCAL CULTURES IS, IN PART, A PRACTICAL LOSS and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and moreover the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly. The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.
Lacking an authentic local culture, a place is open to exploitation, and ultimately destruction, from the center. Recently, for example, I heard the dean of a prominent college of agriculture interviewed on the radio. What have we learned, he was asked, from last summer's drouth? And he replied that "we" need to breed more drouth resistance into plants, and that "we" need a government "safety net" for farmers. He might have said that farmers need to reexamine their farms and their circumstances in light of the drouth, and to think again on such subjects as diversification, scale, and the mutual helpfulness of neighbors. But he did not say that. To him, the drought was merely an opportunity for agribusiness corporations and the government, by which the farmers and rural communities could only become more dependent on the economy that is destroying them. This is as good an example as any of the centralized thinking of a centralized economy—to which the only effective answer that I know is a strong local economy and a strong local culture.
For a long time now, the prevailing assumption has been that if the nation is all right, then all the localities within it will be all right also. I see little reason to believe that this is true. At present, in fact, both the nation and the local economy are living at the expense of localities and local communities—as all small town and country people have reason to know. In rural America, which is in many ways a colony of what the government and the corporations think of as a nation, most of us have experienced the losses that I have been talking about; the departure of young people, of soil and other so-called natural resources, and of local memory. We feel ourselves crowded more and more into a dimensionless present, in which the past is forgotten, and the future, even in our most optimistic "projections," is forbidding and fearful. Who can desire a future that is determined entirely by the purposes of the most wealthy and the most powerful, and by the capacities of machines?
Two questions, then, remain: Is a change for the better possible? And who has the power to make such a change? I still believe that a change for the better is possible, but I confess that my belief is partly hope and partly faith. No one who hopes for improvement should fail to see and respect the signs that we may be approaching some sort of historical waterfall, past which we will not, by changing our minds, be able to change anything else. We know that at any time an ecological or a technological or a political event that we will have allowed may remove from us the power to make change and leave us with the mere necessity to submit to it. Beyond that, the two questions are one: the possibility of change depends upon the existence of people who have the power to change.
Does this power reside at present in the national government? That seems to me extremely doubtful. To anyone who has read the papers during the recent presidential campaign, it must be clear that at the highest level of government there is, properly speaking, no political discussion. Are the corporations likely to help us? We know, from long experience, that the corporations will assume no responsibility that is not forcibly imposed upon them by government. The record of the corporations is written too plainly in verifiable damage to permit us to expect much from them. May we look for help to the universities? Well, the universities are more and more the servants of government and the corporations.
Most urban people evidently assume that all is well. They live too far from the exploited and endangered sources of their economy to need to assume otherwise. Some urban people are becoming disturbed about the contamination of air, water, and food and that is promising, but there are not enough of them yet to make much difference. There is enough trouble in the "inner cities" to make them likely places of change, and evidently change is in them, but it is desperate and destructive change. As if to perfect their exploitation by other people, the people of the "inner cities" are destroying both themselves and their places.
My feeling is that, if improvement is going to begin anywhere, it will have to begin out in the country and in the country towns. This is not because of any intrinsic virtue that can be ascribed to country people, but because of their circumstances. Rural people are living, and have lived for a long time, at the site of the trouble. They see all around them, every day, the marks and scars of an exploitive national economy. They have much reason, by now, to know how little real help is to be expected from somewhere else. They still have, moreover, the remnants of local memory and local community. And in rural communities there are still farms and small businesses that can be changed according to the will and the desire of individual people.
In this difficult time of failed public expectations, when thoughtful people wonder where to look for hope, I keep returning in my own mind to the thought of the renewal of the rural communities. I know that one resurrected rural community would be more convincing and more encouraging than all the government and university programs of the last fifty years, and I think that it could be the beginning of the renewal of our country, for the renewal of rural communities ultimately implies the renewal of urban ones. But to be authentic, a true encouragement and a true beginning, this would have to be a resurrection accomplished mainly by the community itself. It would have to be done, not from the outside by the instruction of visiting experts, but from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home.
FIND AREA OF TOP SHAPE
The area of the top square is 16 (4×4). I worked it out algebraically. As is often the case with these puzzles, the drawing is not proportional.
I got the same answer. a.) Center rectangle width is 7 (42/6). b.) Bottom rectangle width is 7+5=12. Height is 60/12=5. c.) Top square height is 15-5-6=4, and width is 12-5-3=4.
Good morning Mendo, ☀️🌷
The article by Matt Lefever on water dowsing is really good. If you understand, energy and frequency, you know why the dowsing works. Basically water has a much higher vibration than the ground, which has a lower vibration so when the rod hits the water, it starts moving because the molecules of the water are moving rapidly, where the ground is much more stagnant. there has been a lot of scientific studies on molecules vibration & frequency, but it is considered more of the metaphysical sort, not mainstream science. The lady that uses the pendulum, it’s the same thing. The pendulum would start swinging where the water is because of its high vibration as opposed to the low vibration of the ground. I can’t get over the religious water dowser who’s mindset seems to be his dowsing is better because he’s Christian, but then again the Water Witcher name probably scares the bejesus out of him, 😂. 🔮
mm 💕
” so when the rod hits the water,” Please explain at what point the rod hits the water.
At about the same the angler does…
Hiya Bill,
Sorry, I was using voice to text so when rod locates water from above the ground, obviously, it doesn’t technically hit the water, it has located it through the vibration. The dowsers have to be very careful that they are not causing the rods to vibrate by their movements.
I think it’s interesting, never tried it but I would be game to see what happens.
mm 💕
“The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White for writing.
“The Art of War” by Sun Tzu for strategizing and organizing.
“The Art of Computer Programming” by Knuth for understanding the underlying math and algorithms.
“The Art of Electronics” by Horowitz and Hill for understanding circuits.
I keep all of these handy. They’ve served me well over the decades.
“Given these facts, is SMART really the best use of our public dollars?” Yes. Please tell us how much income the State of California receives from our State Highway System.
I rode the SMART train for the first time two weeks ago, a round trip from Larkspur to Petaluma. Nice mode of transit: clean cars, good views and – while not fast – certainly quick enough.
I was chuckling at the dowser article then hit the part where the person prints out a map from google and uses a pendulum and laughed out loud. People believe this? We’re doomed.
Haha,
We are doomed but not because people use pendulums and dowsing rods. I can help you with the pendulum if you want to experiment in the name of science? … 🤣💕
mm 💕
Re: Dowsing. I remember speaking with a woman who was hot on the subject of something called Energy Massage, where the practitioner would wave his hands above the client’s body, feel the vibrations of the Energy, as she put it, and through psychic means remove the obstruction in the flow and so cure any affliction. To her mind, it was valid because it even worked on television. She meant, she had been told that an expert could wave his hands over the televised image of someone miles away and get the same results. Proof enough to quit her job, pay thousands of dollars to learn from an expert and after a few short weeks be certified to go out and sell this service to others.
The so-called science of dowsing really relies on the fact that there is water nearly everywhere underground if you just dig deep enough, and a person who knows a little geology can recognize features in the landscape that indicate a better chance of water being closer to the surface in this place rather than that place. The fact that dowsers use the same mumbo jumbo about being in tune with the universe and feeling the Vibrations to explain how it works for water as they do to explain how it works to find a lost wedding ring or missing pet or box of money or the site of a murder, should be enough for anyone with a brain in his head to dismiss it. A stopped clock is right twice a day. Charlatans of clock magic count when the clock was right and not when it was wrong, and that’s the story they tell.
That said, I like a good story about magic. I loved the teevee series The Magicians. It’s a little like Harry Potter, but edgier, the kids are older, college age, and they do magic by finger tutting. Go to YouTube and look up finger tutting. It’s pretty cool. Also I recommend the book series His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman. And I’m thinking about a TV series called The Lost Room that a friend gave me to watch like 20 years ago, about small magical objects, that reminded me of when I was a very little boy playing that a pen could be a gun or could change the colors of things in the yard by pointing at them, or summon my imaginary friend, Goobadoo.
Hiya Marco,
Your woman friend was probably performing Reiki, it’s not massage, no manipulation or touch required. A lot of people call it Reiki massage because it’s easier to understand massage than woo woo metaphysical stuff. Reiki is a Japanese holistic healing method that uses energy/vibration to balance physical, spiritual and emotional aspects of people and animals. It’s been around over 100 years was a sacred practice until a woman named Hawayo Takata brought from Japan to Hawaii in the late 30’s created a school and made it more accessible. Over the years it has become more commercialized and mainstream.
We cannot see electricity except in a lightning flash but we know it powers our world. Cant see touch or feel it but somehow it works maybe that is magic too!!
mm 🔮💕
I hold a high opinion of the AVA community: intelligent, informed, empathetic, curious, LEFT, but today was astonished at the lack of critical thinking promoting nonsense like dousing and reiki! Please go to Science Based Medicine to explore these areas. A good start is this article by Dr. Mark Crislip on reiki and therapeutic touch s://sciencebasedmedicine.org/reiki-and-therapeutic-touch-compare-and-contrast/
Jayne, with all due respect, and praise for your statement…
I was impressed with Mazie’s ability to discuss the topic.
Dr. Mark Crislip’s Science-Based Medicine Comment Policy: ‘We encourage civil science-based discussion. The comment section is not a platform for misinformation/disinformation.’
(HA! HE DONE APPOINTED HIMSELF GOD: I’m a f—ing doctor, it’s my way or the highway.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.’
I thought the article was well written and much like the Corker Mazzie Malone, I tend to think there are things beyond our comprehension. Those things cause us to give our brains a little workout and think outside of the box.
We humans are a work in progress and a little humility in simply stating “we dont know what we don’t know” (yet) often makes us work harder for an answer. I think it’s one of the really cool things about our species.
Even if science says something shouldn’t work, but it does for the person experiencing it, well then it works for them.
And the interactions on thought provoking topics are always a good thing as well.
Just my 2 cents
Happy 4th to all who can enjoy it!
Thanks Sheriff,
It is fun and insightful to talk about things out of the norm of everyday existence. Especially with the downfall of humanity on the horizon, lol. 😂 Happy 4th and stay safe!
mm 💕
Jayne,
How can you dismiss the critical thinking here? The article sparked engagement people thought about it and they didn’t necessarily agree. That’s a win for critical thinking in my book.
You don’t have to believe in something for it to exist. Just because conventional science has not found a way to measure certain phenomena in a lab doesn’t make them any less real.
mm 💕
“Just because conventional science has not found…”
As Albert Einstein said, “In order to make extraordinary claims, you need extraordinary evidence.” Abraham Lincoln put it a different way, “‘How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? ‘ The answer: ‘Four, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”
Kimberlin,
Just to clarify, I didn’t make any claims. The article did. The people looking for water did and they paid for it, which seems like evidence to me.
I wasn’t calling a tail a leg, 🤣. That would be a lie. And if I believed a tail was a leg… well, that’s a whole different issue. 😉
mm 💕
Interesting AVA comment day–Just got back from a trip up north to get trees at Miller Farms Nursery, a good place, in Arcata. So, took all the comments in at one sitting. Not sure what to make of all this odd stuff today. I do draw one clear conclusion–Bob Abeles and Norm Thurston are much smarter than I, at least in the arcane subjects of geometry and algebra. Bravo, guys!
I stopped trying on those little quizzes when they out ran my modest education. …
I’m fairly certain when it comes to numbers… Norm would wipe the floor with me and could do it with half his brain tied behind his back.
I still tried and tried and didn’t come up with the same answer. so I am glad he shared his work with the rest of us!
Correction, Miller Farms is in McKinnleyville, not Arcata