Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 7/22/2025

Looking east toward Sanhedrin Wilderness from Eel River Bridge in Hearst (Martin Bradley)

An upper level system is expected to linger near the area through the week. This will bring near near normal temperatures in the inland areas and generally light winds. Thunderstorms are possible in the interior through Saturday with the highest potential in Trinity county Thursday and Friday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 53F this Tuesday morning on the coast. Drizzle & fog dominate the forecast thru the week. A sunny day is forecast for Sunday, but we've heard that before.

TWO UNSEEN ISSUES LOOM OVER REDWOOD VALLEY’S SUMMER

by Monica Huettl

A siren that could save lives and a water deal that could secure the valley’s future—two major issues are simmering in Redwood Valley this July, even as the local advisory council takes a break.

Redwood Valley County Water District – Potential Annexation by Russian River Flood Control

Annexation of the Redwood Valley County Water District (RVCWD) by the Mendocino County Russian River Flood Control & Water Conservation Improvement District (RRFC) has been under discussion for years. Portions of Redwood Valley are already within RRFC’s boundaries, but RVCWD has never had access to RRFC water throughout its entire service area. The proposed annexation would place all of Redwood Valley under RRFC’s jurisdiction.

Historically, Redwood Valley has purchased “surplus water” from RRFC—water not needed by other customers. During the extreme drought of 2021–2022, however, no surplus water was available. As a result, RVCWD customers went without agricultural water and faced strict domestic water use restrictions.

If approved, annexation would allow RVCWD to access RRFC water for all agricultural and municipal customers, creating a more reliable water supply. RVCWD would remain a separate entity from RRFC. The potential annexation is unrelated to RVCWD’s recent consolidation with the Ukiah Valley Water Authority or to the City of Ukiah’s possible annexation of county land.

The public comment period for the proposed Negative Declaration is open until July 29. The RRFC Board will discuss the matter further on August 4 and vote on whether to approve the annexation during its September 8 meeting. Information on the proposal, including a press release and comment submission details, is available through the Russian River Flood Control & Water Conservation Improvement District.

Emergency Alert Sirens – Redwood Valley-Calpella Fire District

MAC Chair Dolly Riley shared updates from the July 10 Redwood Valley-Calpella Fire District Board meeting, where emergency alert sirens were a key topic.

Reports from Texas communities—where the absence of sirens contributed to deaths during recent flash floods—have reignited local interest in reinstating Redwood Valley’s siren. According to an Associated Press report, the town of Comfort, Texas, successfully evacuated residents thanks to sirens. In neighboring Kerr County, where officials had deemed sirens too costly, dozens of residents and summer campers died.

“Chief Dan Grebil presented a draft memorandum in which he proposed that the siren at the station be used in the case of wildfire, winds over 58 mph, and disasters,” Riley said. She noted that funding, staff training, and public education are still needed. Grebil’s proposal calls for sirens to be one of several emergency alert methods, alongside hi-low loudspeakers on first responder vehicles and official online notifications.

The memo outlines two tones: a “situational awareness” siren—a 60-second tone, followed by 60 seconds of silence, repeated five times—and an “evacuation” tone—a hi-low alert sound for 30 seconds, followed by 30 seconds of silence. Sirens could also be automatically activated by National Weather Service or National Defense alerts. Testing would occur twice a year.

“The truth is we possibly will not have a Redwood Valley fire warning siren unless the public makes their voice known,” Riley said. “The next Board meeting is August 14 at 6 p.m. at the firehouse, and unless people indicate they really want to use the already purchased siren, there is a chance it will not be used due to the multiple decisions still needed by the Redwood Valley-Calpella Fire District Board.”

A copy of the draft memo is available here.

(mendofever.com)

REPORT FROM A SMALL FARM IN BOONVILLE

Whew, it’s starting already…the harvests are coming in and they’re whoppers! Last week we harvested more than 100 pounds of figs, 3 kinds of plums totaling several 100lbs, lots of onions, 2 kinds of blackberries, nearly 100lbs of white peaches, and capers, squash, eggplant, 3-4 kinds of peppers, and scallions. This is just the beginning and the kitchen is jumping. There were 5 of us in it the other day doing various jobs to help…sorting fruit, cutting peaches, grinding seed from blackberries, picking plum pits from puree, and canning plums and peaches. This is the beginning of the chaotic months that start to taper off in November. It is also when we most appreciate the skill and dedication of our community of workers.

The picture of the bowl of meatballs with corn, squash blossoms, zucchini and what may be potatoes, was taken by a private chef in SF who created the dish using the hamburger and ground pork she bought from Cam at the Clement St. Farmers’ market last week. It looks delicious. Her name is Brenda Landa and you can check her out on her instagram account.

The pictures below show a bit of what’s going on in the kitchen. The baker’s rack holds canned peaches, beets, and strawberries. On the table are small jars of peaches just taken from the canner, and in front of them in the last picture are the cleaned cambros from which the fruit was taken. The fresh fruit in boxes are white peaches, tomatoes, figs, wild plums, and on the floor, onions.

Needless to say, we’re already a bit tired. But the thrill of having sown, planted, grown for years the finally mature trees and this year are harvesting such a bounty from them, keeps us going. We love conversing with and selling to our random visitors to the farm. And right up there for pleasure is eating the food. There’s also creativity in figuring out what to do with such abundance…where to sell it fresh? how to can it? what to call it? what to charge? and how to deliver it to a buyer? and this part is more like work (;>)) Hang in…

Nikki Auschnitt and Steve Krieg

TWO VIOLENT COVELO DEFENDANTS ADMIT HOMICIDAL CULPABILITY

Two Covelo men -- both charged with participating in and causing the death in October 2023 of Hermengildo Valencia Escalera, a 43-year-old cannabis worker in Round Valley -- were convicted Monday afternoon by plea in the Mendocino County Superior Court.

Defendant Iran Lee Hoaglen III, age 43, changed his plea from not guilty to guilty of murder in the first degree.

To resolve his case, defendant Hoaglen agreed to a state prison sentence to be imposed on September 4th of 25 years to life in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).

A co-defendant, Lawrence Allen Joaquin, age 37, changed his not guilty plea to guilty of voluntary manslaughter, admitted as true having suffered a prior Strike conviction, and admitted a second 5-year sentencing enhancement.

To resolve his case, defendant Joaquin agreed to a state prison sentence also to be imposed on September 4th of 17 years in the CDCR.

The jury trial for these two defendants – court proceedings estimated to have taken two weeks to complete – had been scheduled to begin the jury selection phase on August 18, 2025.

The law enforcement agencies that investigated and gathered the overwhelming evidence that allowed this case to resolve short of the scheduled trial date are the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, the California Department of Justice Bureau of Forensic Services, and the DA’s own elite Bureau of Investigations.

The attorney who has been handling all aspects of this two-defendant prosecution since November 5, 2023 is District Attorney David Eyster.

The bench officer who accepted on Monday afternoon each defendant’s guilty plea and admissions was Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Keith Faulder.

Judge Faulder will also impose the stipulated sentences when the case is called again on September 4th at 9 o’clock in Department A of the Ukiah courthouse.

Original Incident report: https://kymkemp.com/2023/11/08/two-charged-with-murder-after-body-found-in-burning-vehicle

THIS WEEK AT BLUE MEADOW FARM (Philo)

Summer’s finally here!

First Heirloom and Cherry Tomatoes

Bell, Gypsy & Corno di Toro Peppers

Jalapeno, Padron & Anaheim Chilis

Italian & Asian Eggplant, Zucchini

Walla Walla Onions, Lisbon Lemons

Basil, Santa Rosa Plums

Sunflowers & Zinnias

(Early Girl tomatoes will be out in a few days.)

Blue Meadow Farm
3301 Holmes Ranch Rd, Philo
(707) 895-2071

NO ANNEXATION UPDATE

Statement from No Ukiah Annexation on the City of Ukiah Taking Down the Annexation Map

No Ukiah Annexation acknowledges the City of Ukiah’s recent removal of the proposed annexation map from its website. Yet the City of Ukiah staff seems to view annexation as inevitable even after clear rejection from those the City proposes to annex.

Indeed, at a recent City Council meeting, Council-member Mari Rodin openly stated that city representatives intend to “soon bring back a new, proposed map,” as if the map is the only concern with annexation. This signals a clear contradiction between the city’s stated intentions and its actual plans which seems to be divide and conquer.

We view the removal of the map not as a meaningful shift in direction, but as a temporary tactic meant to quiet public opposition while continuing annexation efforts behind closed doors.

No Ukiah Annexation demands that the City Council take real, substantive action. We urge the Council to immediately direct staff to withdraw all annexation proposals and to suspend any further work until a genuine and inclusive citizen engagement process is conducted.

The public deserves clarity, honesty, and a truly inclusive process, not half-measures, strategic delays or divide and conquer attempts. Anything less undermines public trust and disregards the voices of the very community the City claims to serve.

No Ukiah Annexation is a community-driven organization made up of residents, local businesses, and public officials committed to ensuring that any annexation is approached thoughtfully, sustainably, and through a phased public process.

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.noukiahannexation.com

ADD YOUR NAME TO THE ALBION-LITTLE RIVER FIRE DISTRICT RESIDENTS LIST

Dear Residents of the Albion Little River Fire District,

Your Albion Little River Firesafe council is putting together an email list, so that we can contact you re matters of concern, info, etc pertaining to our fire district.

If you can please: reply to this with your email address contact friends, neighbors who are not on the list serve (and, therefore, cannot see this!) to send us their email info.

This is only if you reside in this particular fire district,

Most gratefully,

Sydelle, Susan, Lea, Zo, Jeannette

Albion Little River Fire Safe, [email protected]

TWINNED TOWERS

by Old Mole

The Old Mole is just back from a trip west to visit brother Lee. Because of the 75 years on his odometer, Lee (like myself) has to spend a good part of the day in routines of self-preservation. Despite those years, Lee is active in historic preservation — currently, preservation of water towers in his home town of Mendocino, California.

The towers were built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the town was one of many along the coast where logs cut upriver were loaded onto ocean-going sailing ships for transshipment.

The town was so situated on a headland that wells could not be drilled too deep. If they were, the water drawn from them would be brackish. But shallower wells could draw fresh water percolating from the fog forests inland. Windmills pumped the well water up into tanks atop the towers, and gravity was enough to keep the taps running. Both tanks and towers were made of local redwood.

The windmills are mostly gone, but many of the water towers remain, and many still do service. Some of them have been repurposed. As dwellings, or —as in a case now in dispute— as exterior stairways.

A restaurant on Main Street lowered an adjacent tower’s tank to ground level. It now pumps its water from a polyethylene tank, which nests inside the redwood original. The tower remains as exterior access to the second-floor dining room.

Now, new owners want to demolish the tower. Destruction that over a century of storms, winds, fires, earthquakes, development and neglect have failed at.

Mendocino once had over a hundred water towers. The number today is variously estimated to be between 24 and 30. Of course, there are other things that make Mendocino the distinctive place it is.

Its water towers make Mendocino unusual but not unique. During my visit I remembered another place I know that bristles with wooden water towers.…

https://oldermole.substack.com/p/twined-towers

UKIAH WOMEN’S BUSINESS CENTER AND PARTNERS URGE ACTION TO ADVANCE WOMEN-LED BUSINESSES IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

Press Conference To Highlight Impact of WBC Programs and Calls for Continued Investment

The Mendocino Women’s Business Center (WBC) will be joined by women business owners, advocacy groups, and national leaders to spotlight the positive economic contributions of women-led businesses in rural Northern California and call for continued state and federal support. The press conference will showcase success stories from local entrepreneurs and outline policy and funding solutions needed to help these businesses grow, create jobs, and strengthen community resilience.

Thursday, July 24, 2025 | 12:00 PM (Noon PT)

WEST Business Development Center

185 E Church St, Ukiah, CA 95482

Christine Rodrigues, Executive Director, Mendocino Women’s Business Center

Corinne Goble, CEO, Association of Women’s Business Centers (AWBC)

Megan Peterson, Founder & Owner, Mendo LEAP (WBC success story)

Women business owners from sectors including childcare, retail, and professional services

Women-led businesses are vital to Northern California’s economy, driving job creation and strengthening rural communities. Yet, persistent barriers such as limited access to capital, technical support, and scaling opportunities hinder their full potential. The press conference will highlight these challenges and call on policymakers to provide targeted resources and policy solutions that fuel inclusive and resilient economic growth.

MAGDALENA HOMES (Anderson Valley) OPEN HOUSE

Friday, August 22, 5 PM

Anderson Valley Brewing Co

17700 Boonville Rd

Boonville, CA 95415

HOW ANDERSON VALLEY AMUSED ITSELF IN THE EARLY 50s

(From the “News From Boonville” Section of the Ukiah Daily Journal of Monday, May 21, 1951, by Marie Tarwater (namesake of “Tarwater Hill” in Boonville)

Welcome To Hollywood Night

The American Legion Auxiliary sponsored a Welcome to Hollywood party Saturday evening in the Boonville Apple hall, with close to 300 people attending. Bob Rawles was the announcer; the master of ceremonies was Otis Goodman of Cloverdale.

The first number was Milton Badego of Cloverdale, pantomining several songs.

Otis Goodman picked three people from the audience te put on a one-act: play: Mrs. Beatrice Lampert, Alice Hanes and Gene Courtney. It wag a very good melodrama,

Prizes were awarded as follows: Mrs, Lampert, a plastic tablecloth, Alice Hanes a sheet from the Boonville Motel, and Gene Courtney a carton of cigarettes from the Food Center Grocery.

Mr. Goodman Jooked for the eldest lady, who happened to be 78-year-old Mrs. Louie Clingenpeel of Branscomb, who was visiting her daughter, Mrs. Golda Hurst here.

Mrs. Myrtle Perry was presented a shampoo and hair set for the most embarrassing situation,

Chester Knivila, who signed his name Jo Peter, sald that he would like to take a trip away from Boonville, “because of the lack of women in Anderson valley,” received a jarge rubber thumb to get himself out of town and 10 gallons of gas from the Shell Service station.

Rena Galletti wrote the winning good neighbor letter about Mrs. Louise Brown. Mrs. Brown was not there, but she recejved a $5 order from the Style Shop [the late Charmian Blattner’s Philo clothing store] and Mrs. Galletti won the Tom Breneman Rose. Victoria Harper won the wishing ring for her wish to be a retired teacher. The bigeest disappointment was awarded to Joe Rawles, because he once had taken a permanent job while he was waiting for a temporary one, He won a crying handkerchief and a carton of cigarettes from MeKinney’s store at Philo.

The master of ceremonies then had the people count to seat No. 53. That was Miss Linda Louise Westfield. She was presented banana splits for the family. Norma Presley’s pet peeve was that everyone criticized her driving. She won a plastic cake plate from the Variety Store. Mary Babcock’s pet peeve was her husband. She won a box of candy from the B&D Fountain. Henry Cox’s peeve was that his wife was too young for him, He won a rear view mirror for his car.

The biggest fish story was won by Robbie Rowley, who sald he caught a 5-foot rainbow trout. He won a spori shirt from Presley’s General store.

For the birthday of the day, Emilie Sanderson, who was 16 years old, got two Sunday dinners at the Boonville Lodge, also a big angel food cake decorated with candles.

The couple who had been married the longest was Mr. and Mrs. Louie Clingenpeel of Branscomb. They were presented two dinners at Wiese’s Valley Inn.

The child that would get up and sing a song was Kathy Lampert. She won a game from the Variety store.

To the couple that were married the shortest time was two chicken dinners at Philo Cafe. This was Mr. ond Mrs. Maxie Rowlon. To the largest family was a $3 grocery order from Zittleman’s, won by Mrs. Hettie Rawles, also a fuscia plant,

Mr, and Mrs, Thurlow Lyg won a foot-long cigar and a $1.50 worth of laundry from the Boonville Laundry for having the youngest child present.

The youngest grandmdther was Alice Hanes. She won a cardtable cloth. The boy who had the most junk in his pockets was Raymond Brunton. He won a toy lawn mower,

‘Mr. Nestor Taskinen was voted the most careful driver. He won 10 gallons of gas from Clark’s Service Station.

The baldest man was Homer Charles, Sr. He won a hair cut and shave at the Philo Barber Shop.

Jed Rawles won the door prize, a beautiful sandwich grill from Rossi’s Hardware.

Young Toby Huff drew the door prize ticket. He was presented with two show tickets and $2 in cash from Del’s Motel. The oldest car was a 1922 Chevrolet truck owned by Bill Maddux. He won an oil change and lubrication job at the Live Oak Garage.

The lady with the most articles in her purse, Mrs. Myrtle Perry, won a $5 check from Bud Miller of Cloverdale. Mrs. Perry had 189 things in her purse.

Grandmother of the day was Mrs. Golda Hurst who won a car wash at the Associated Service Station.

A hair cut and shave was awarded to Glen McAbee for being the quietest man there.

(Submitted by Valerie Hanelt of Yorkville)

POSTCARD OF LOCAL INTEREST (via Marshall Newman)

Wendling (now Navarro) postmark, June 29, 1909

That wide, rocky sandbar looks like the Navarro River. Any idea what they are cooking?

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, July 21, 2025

LUKE ABLEY, 30, Elk Grove. DUI.

JUSTINO FAENZIGLASS, 43, Santa Rosa/Leggett. DUI-any drug causing bodily injury, vehicular manslaughter in commission of unlawful act with gross negligence while intoxicated, cruelty to child-infliction of injury.

DANIEL HOAGLEN-LOCKHART, 29, Hopland. Loaded firearm-not registered owner.

JOHN IMUS JR., 63, Ukiah. Parole violation.

ADAM LEE, 54, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.

MARK MESA, 65, Fort Bragg. Elder abuse with great bodily harm or death, domestic battery, domestic violence court order violation with priors, offenses while on bail.

ARTURO NAVARRO-SANDOVAL, 44, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

FRANCISCO NAVARRO-SANDOVAL, 35, Hopland. Under influence.

ADDISON ROSE, 33, Fort Bragg. Trespassing, public nuisance.

PENG YANG, 46, Rancho Cordova/Laytonville. DUI, taking vehicle without owner’s consent, controlled substance suspended license for reckless driving, attempt to acquire stolen property, paraphernalia.

DUALISTICALLY SPEAKING

Nirvikalpa Samadhi Is Knowledge, Bliss, Absolute

Warmest spiritual greetings,

Just sitting here on a public computer at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in Washington, D.C. Having fulfilled my goal of being supportive of the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil for the sixteenth time, I would like to leave the homeless shelter (which Catholic Charities let me use). Henceforth, I have no further goal nor anything that I need to do or acquire on the planet earth. Resting comfortably in my own svarupa (heart chakra), knowing what I am, the Absolute works through this body-mind instrument.

You are invited to contact me. I am available. There is $1,017.59 in the Chase checking account. There is $103.64 in the wallet. Health is excellent at age 75; the intensity of the Adam’s Place homeless shelter literally killed the COPD. It is gone. I am ready (dualistically speaking) for whatever the Divine Absolute wills. Please contact me.

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

It’s not everywhere. Not one store including Walmart, locks up anything where I live, not even the otc medicines or makeup. We still have self checkout too, with no item limits. I live in a rural area, so I do shop pretty much at every one of our major stores over the course of a couple of months. I’m thankful the people who live here are honest and normal. I guess I’m naive, but it’s very surprising to me that people steal big things like laundry detergent. Evidently they do, it just didn’t occur to me that people could manage stealing something so big. In NYC pretty much every big store locks up 50% of the merchandise…. moisturizers, body wash, razors, deodorant etc… Target has started chaining up the ice cream freezer. I bought a tin of cookies with a resealable tab, opened it, and there were some missing. The cashier said it happens all the time. I live in a nice neighborhood too, but there is constant shoplifting everywhere. Same with tons of fare beaters in the subway. They literally do it in front of the police.

— Jerry Yulsman

Fields were shaved, and this treasure was left behind: Daucus carota (Falcon)

GIANTS DROP 6TH STRAIGHT as starter Hayden Birdsong fails to record an out

by Shayna Rubin

The San Francisco Giants skipped Hayden Birdsong’s start at the end of the first half to give him time to regroup and the team their best lineup of starters vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers. He struggled to find the strike zone in three previous starts, and usually fell apart in one bad inning.

Birdsong’s first start in 15 days, though, went worse than his previous three. He threw 25 pitches Monday, and six were strikes. He walked four batters, including the first three before giving up a bases-clearing double to Drake Baldwin. He lasted six batters before being pulled for reliever Matt Gage without recording a single out.

It was the first time since Zack Littell in 2021 that a Giants starter faced at least six batters without recording an out, and the first time a non-opener has done it since Gil Heredia on June 4, 1992. He is also the first Giants starter to walk four batters and not get an out since Bob Carpenter did the same on Aug. 3, 1941.

Not only did the historic outing set the tone for the Giants’ 9-5 loss to the Atlanta Braves — the team’s sixth straight defeat — it brought further into light a rotation conundrum.

At this juncture, the Giants may need to move Birdsong out of the rotation to give him space to get right. The only problem is that they don’t have an immediate next-man-up since Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks went to Boston in the deal for Rafael Devers. Tristan Beck has gone 4 ⅓ innings with the big league team, but hasn’t started a game since last year. Spencer Bivens can go multiples, going 3 ⅓ in June.

The Giants could recall Carson Seymour, though he had a rough go of it in his two big-league appearances earlier this month. Carson Whisenhunt, the franchise’s top pitching prospect, has a 4.42 ERA in Sacramento. Gaps in the rotation can be fixed with a trade before the deadline, too.

The Giants tried to claw back. After Matt Chapman’s RBI single in the first inning, Patrick Bailey’s sacrifice fly in the second made it 5-2. Willy Adames batted in the other two runs, first with an RBI double then with his third home run of the road trip. Devers, heating up to start the second half, went 2-for-4 with a walk.

Atlanta hustled out a few more runs to create a cushion. In the fourth inning, Ronald Acuna Jr. caught the Giants’ defense flat-footed and scored from first base on Baldwin’s groundball single up the middle as center fielder Jung Hoo Lee was in little rush to get the ball to cut-off man Adames.

The loss continues their longest losing streak of the season.

(SF Chronicle)

BEFORE ALLEGED BAY AREA POST OFFICE CRASH, BROTHER OF PAT TILLMAN DOCUMENTED OWN UNRAVELLING ONLINE

by Anna Bauman

Just days before Richard Tillman, brother of the former NFL star and fallen Army Ranger Pat Tillman, allegedly crashed his car into a San Jose post office, he said in a rambling 11-minute YouTube video that he was going to “take down the system,” including the U.S. government.

“What I need to do is absolutely prove who I am and I will do that,” said Tillman, referring to himself as Yeshua, the Hebrew name for Jesus, and the son of God. “As far as the next phase of the game, I know what needs to be done.”

The cryptic video was among dozens that Tillman, a 44-year-old San Jose resident, posted in recent months documenting his own apparent unraveling. The videos, other social media posts and public records reviewed by the Chronicle show a record of legal trouble, mental health issues and isolation from friends and family in recent years. Tillman was arrested early Sunday after allegedly crashing into the Almaden Valley post office, sparking a fire that caused significant damage.

His YouTube channel, which had 1,700 subscribers, was taken down after the incident. It was not immediately clear Tillman’s remarks in the video posted last week were directly connected to the alleged post office crash.

In the latest video, which has since been removed, Tillman recorded himself talking from inside a parked vehicle as traffic cruised past his window. He wore sunglasses and sported a long beard streaked with gray. He spoke about the “spiritual realm,” ascension and making the planet evolve, while referring to Richard Tillman in the third person and laughing between bizarre statements.

“I’m not going to harm anyone physically, so there’s nothing to worry about,” Tillman said. “You guys will find out what I’m laughing about one day.”

Richard Tillman is the younger brother of Pat Tillman, who left the Arizona Cardinals football team to serve in the U.S. Army after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire in 2004 during a chaotic firefight in his platoon while on duty in Afghanistan.

Richard Tillman has pursued careers in acting and stand-up comedy. He also wrote a children’s book series in 2015 meant to teach kindness and empathy.

In 2019, his wife filed for divorce, which turned into a protracted and contentious legal battle, according to Fresno County records. The couple had two children. At one point during the divorce, a hearing was delayed because Tillman was “in a mental health facility,” according to court records. A judge granted a temporary restraining order against Tillman to protect his ex-wife, records show.

The court gave the wife sole custody of their children in 2021 and granted weekly supervised visits for Tillman. The judge also ordered Tillman to attend counseling for a year after finding that it “would be in the child’s best interest,” records show.

Several Facebook posts suggest that Tillman became antagonistic toward friends and family members in recent months and years, even as they offered to assist Tillman in getting mental health treatment.

“I’m here to end you…And all your worthless friends,” Tillman apparently wrote in a message to a family member, according to a screenshot of the exchange he posted on Facebook earlier this year.

In the crash on Sunday, fifty personnel from the San Jose Fire Department responded to the post office on the 6500 block of Crown Boulevard shortly before 3 a.m. Sunday and extinguished the fire within two hours, according to the agency.

There were no injuries reported.

Tillman was arrested at the scene on suspicion of arson and booked into Santa Clara County Jail. He remained in custody as of Monday morning on $60,000 bail, according to county records.

It was not the first time Tillman had faced criminal charges.

Fresno County court records show that Tillman racked up a series of misdemeanor charges starting in 2023, including for allegedly driving under the influence of alcohol, trespassing and twice disobeying a domestic relations court order.

Judges issued warrants for his arrest in each case because he failed to appear in court, records show.

Before that, local court filings indicate, his record included only a traffic infraction in 2015.

(SF Chronicle)

FEAR COMES TO AMERICA

by Frank Kendall

Like the fog in Carl Sandburg’s poem, fear has come on little cat feet, seeping silently into various parts of American society. It sits, looking over not just harbor and city, but all of America. I have seen and been affected by this fear over the past several months. It has seeped into our military, our civil service, universities, law firms, C-suites and the leadership of nonprofit organizations.

It wasn’t always this way. During George W. Bush’s presidency, I worked with a number of organizations that opposed his administration’s torture program — euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation“ — that was employed by the C.I.A. against suspected terrorists after 9/11. After President Barack Obama signed an executive order ending the program, my colleagues and I held a small party to celebrate. At that party, I remarked that we should be grateful for the fact that we lived in a nation where we could publicly oppose the policies of our government without fear of what that government might do to us. We didn’t worry about being arbitrarily arrested or investigated, having any government funding for our organizations cut off, or being personally and viciously attacked on social media and in the press.

I cannot make that statement today. President Trump does not accept dissent and is using fear to try to suppress it.

Let’s start with our military and civil service, communities with which I have had a lifetime of experience and maintain close contact. The fear in the Pentagon today is palpable. The firings of general officers without cause have sent a chilling message to everyone in uniform. I served through several changes in political leadership as an Army officer and later as a Defense Department civilian. Both the targeted removals of senior military leaders and the mass firings of members of our federal civil service that are taking place are unprecedented and clearly designed to eliminate dissent, replace professionals with political loyalists and create a climate of fear.

Next, the lawyers, another community that I am part of. The Trump administration is attempting to coerce major law firms into refusing to represent clients whom it disfavors and to represent clients it favors. Among the many lawyers I know, this is widely seen as a direct assault on the foundation of our legal system. But for many of those lawyers, fear of losing work that requires access to government buildings, including courts, is a strong motivator. A few law firms have fought back, but some have been anxious enough about the threatened loss of business or access that they have cut “deals“ with the administration.

Recently, I spoke to a group of graduate students and professors at Harvard. All were concerned about the effect of the administration’s unmistakable attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus. While Harvard as an institution has the resources and will to fight back, the loss of funding for research and the fear of interrupted studies are very real for the faculty and students there and elsewhere.

The administration has threatened prosecutions against former government officials and private citizens. It has threatened companies with the loss of government contracts and threatened nonprofit organizations across the country with cuts to funding. This climate of menace and apprehension extends to companies’ willingness to employ or associate with those who criticize Mr. Trump or his administration. I am one of those people.

Since I left the government in January, I have been told by several organizations that they either couldn’t openly employ me, hold my security clearances or otherwise be associated with someone visibly criticizing the administration. In one instance, I was told that a nonprofit that had asked me to serve as a distinguished fellow withdrew that offer because its senior leadership felt I had become too partisan. One corporate chief executive told me I had become toxic for writing and speaking about the administration’s abuses of power. I expected some of these responses, but it’s disappointing to experience, nonetheless. I have lost count of how many of my fellow national security professionals have told me they are grateful that I have spoken out, but in the same breath say they are afraid to do the same.

Mr. Trump’s use of fear as a weapon has been most pronounced with undocumented immigrants and communities of immigrants more broadly. Certainly, Americans strongly support deporting undocumented immigrants who are violent criminals. But the Trump administration has terrorized immigrants from all walks of life, including those in the United States legally. A few years ago, I represented a woman seeking asylum because she had been persecuted by members of her government. When an immigration judge granted her the right to remain in the United States indefinitely, the assumption was that she was finally safe. Now she must live in fear once again.

All these institutions and communities are a source of American strength. Indeed, they make America great. But now they are all, to varying degrees, under attack and experiencing a new sense of trepidation. Fear is the universal tool of authoritarians, and it is a clear sign that our democracy is in danger that so many Americans now have reason to fear their government. Fear has come to our country, and unlike Sandburg’s fog, it isn’t moving on any time soon.

(Frank Kendall was the secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration.)

READER COMMENT:

Fear of being fired, not being hired because of union activity, being evicted from their residence, losing health insurance, killed in mass shootings, falling victim to natural disasters owing to poverty and on and on; these are common states of mind for countless millions in this country. Much of that fear is rooted in the politics of the Republican Party The genius of Trump was promising those oppressed millions he would unleash the same fear on the so-called elites who lived mostly free of fear owing to their jobs and education. The Democrats clearly underestimated their own security and are finding, surprise, surprise, that the Constitution and legal system actually protect nothing and nobody. Strongly worded dissents, eight hour speeches and gimmicky press conferences protect nothing and nobody. It’s time to stop pretending Trump will back down. No compromise is possible with the current Trump government or congressional republican leadership. The GOP is turning into a repressive criminal enterprise. What resistance to this looks like is unclear but current Democratic leaders appear to have no clue.

A SHOW OF FORCE

by Fintan O’Toole

Putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of re-orientation. Soldiers are being retrained on loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. In his Fort Bragg speech, Trump invited the troops to see protesters in Los Angeles as invaders: “We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy, and that’s what they are.” But what was happening in LA was, he claimed, even worse than an armed incursion:

“Not only are these service members defending the honest citizens of California, they’re also defending our republic itself, and they are heroes, they’re in there, they’re heroes. They’re fighting for us, they’re stopping an invasion just like you’d stop an invasion. The big difference is most of the time when you stop an invasion, they’re wearing a uniform. In many ways, it’s tougher when they’re not wearing a uniform because you don’t know exactly who they are.”

If the army doesn’t know exactly who “they” are, it has to be told. Trump reminded the troops that their purpose is to spread fear: “For our adversaries, there is no greater fear than the United States Army.” Its job now is to spread that fear to an ununiformed and thus unknowable mass of internal enemies. Just as Trump transforms actual rebellion into the vague but omnipresent “danger of a rebellion,” he makes the invading army invisible, amorphous, and fluid. Traditional military doctrine demands a clear understanding of the nature of the threat and the shape of the opposing forces. Contrariwise, in the Trump doctrine the threat must be as nebulous as possible, and the opposing forces must be formless. Thus only the commander-in-chief can say at any given time what they are. The enemy the army must learn to face is one that he, and he alone, can conjure. In this Trump is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience. New lieutenants and sergeants are (for now at least) issued a document called ‘The Army: A Primer to Our Profession of Arms.’ Its prohibition on any appearance of partisanship is emphatic:

“The Army as an institution must be nonpartisan and appear so too. Being nonpartisan means not favoring any specific political party or group. Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively. When representing the Army or wearing the uniform, you must behave in a nonpartisan way too.”

At Fort Bragg, Trump incited the uniformed soldiers arrayed behind him to boo the press and laugh at his political opponents, thus disobeying those prohibitions, while a pop-up shop on the base sold MAGA-branded clothing and jewelry and faux credit cards labeled “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD: TRUMPS EVERYTHING.” This organized insubordination had an obvious point: soldiers must transfer their obedience from the army and the Constitution to Trump himself.

The manual makes clear to soldiers that they should not obey illegal orders:

“When you believe you are being given an illegal order, you should take further action—do your homework, seek counsel, and approach your leaders for clarification. If this fails or you know that what you are being asked to do is unlawful, then it becomes your duty to disobey and to follow the law, no matter how resolute your superiors’ stance.”

In this light, it actually suits Trump’s purposes if his federalization of the National Guard is understood to be illegal. His deployment of troops in Los Angeles is intended to dissolve boundaries—between domestic disputes and foreign wars, between reality and performance, and above all between a law-bound democracy and arbitrary rule. Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy. As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America.

(New York Review of Books)

PAM BONDI HAS RELEASED THE EPSTEIN FILES

MERRY PRANKSTERS ON PARADE

by James Kunstler

“The forces behind this coup have done and will do anything to protect their grasp on illegal & illegitimate power.” — Stephen Miller

Let’s not pretend that RussiaGate was ever anything but a “treasonous conspiracy” and a “years’ long coup” as bluntly labeled by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on Friday. The election prank launched by Hillary Clinton’s campaign turned into an overt sedition op led by President Barack Obama to overthrow his elected successor, Donald Trump. DNI Tulsi Gabbard went even further and proffered criminal referrals on all this to the US Attorney General. If you think this is not extremely serious, you are not paying attention.

The New York Times was not paying attention in its Sunday edition. Not a word about this historic action on the paper’s website landing page. So now you know why the Harvard law professors, the Martha’s Vineyard chardonnay widows, and all the creative class hipsters of Brooklyn persist in their personal globes of political delusion. Instead, The Times dwelt on the Epstein business, still haplessly hoping to catch the Golden Golem in its golem trap. (Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize committee for rewarding the Time’s RussiaGate coverage is still pending, by the way.)

Meanwhile, DNI Gabbard went on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday confab and warned of more info releases coming this week. Sooner or later AG Pam Bondi will have to announce that a case based on that referral is under construction. My guess is that this is exactly what Kash Patel’s FBI has been preoccupied with for months with no leaking — you can imagine severe penalties against that. You might also note that there are no higher crimes under our law than treason, as explicitly spelled out in the DNI report. The DNI also stated flatly on Sunday, “There must be indictments.” If you think DNI Gabbard went forward without consulting some crack constitutional lawyers, you’ll be disappointed.

And also meanwhile, Deputy AG Todd Blanche has applied for release of the sealed grand jury transcripts on the 2019 Epstein case from the DOJ’s Manhattan outpost (SDNY). And consider: all that info was completely segregated from the Epstein files that former FBI Director Christopher Wray controlled for years and years, meaning it was not subject to editing and manipulation. You may finally get to see the difference between the “hoax” elements of the story and the actual evidence.

The Russian meddling and collusion story might have seemed like “a thing” to many in the early January days of 2017 before Mr. Trump’s first inauguration. But when they went after the newly appointed National Security Advisor, General Mike Flynn, for having a conversation with the Russian ambassador, you had had to know that something sketchy was afoot. As this blog asked at the time: why are ambassadors from foreign lands here, if not to speak with our government officials? The story was preposterous but, of course, the news media helped run Gen. Flynn out of office and then led the cheering for the DOJ’s malicious prosecution of him afterward in Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s DC district court.

You also have to wonder if anyone in the news media might be subject to indictment above and beyond the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press. Is there a line between that and acting as an accessory to treason? What did New York Times editor (at the time) Dean Baquet think he was doing, publishing all that patent garbage? Or the producers of CNN and other network news?

The DNI called these activities a “treasonous conspiracy” for a reason. A conspiracy charge that encompasses a skein of persons in a continuous series of crimes extends the statute of limitations to the latest criminal act for all involved. You might also wonder how wide a net the DOJ could cast. Will it include such obvious players as Senator Mark Warner, who schemed to play along on RussiaGate as Vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence? Or then-Congressman Adam Schiff on the House Intel Committee when, for years, he pretended to have “proof” of (i.e., lied about) Trump-Russia collusion? Or FBI Director Wray, who hid evidence, might have tampered with evidence, and apparently lied to Congress about many of these connected matters? Or Andrew Weissmann, who virtually ran the phony Mueller Investigation as a RussiaGate cover-up op because Robert Mueller was mentally infirm? Or Lawfare Ninjas Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, and Mary McCord who appear liable for 2020 election hackery and the Jan 6 “insurrection” op (including the House J6 Committee fakery afterward) along with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Or former AG William Barr, who sat on the Hunter Biden laptop during Trump Impeachment No. 1, when the device was stuffed with exculpatory evidence withheld from Mr. Trump’s lawyers? Or CIA agent Eric Ciaramella, Lt. Col Alex Vindman, and Intel Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who conspired with Rep. Adam Schiff on the “Ukraine phone call” operation that was the basis of impeachment No. 1? Or DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who botched his investigation (on purpose?) of FISA court criminal irregularities, or Judge James Boasberg who presided over those criminal irregularities and issued many of them? Or Special Counsel John Durham who took years to overlook the salient elements of the RussiaGate coup? Or many other figures involved one way or another. . . McCabe, Stzrok, Page, Pientka, Thibault, Baker, Rice, Yates, Rummler, Halper, Pompeo, Haines, Bruce and Nellie Ohr. . . .

Are they all rounded-up and sent to court together, like a Nuremberg proceding? Or do they get their own separate cases? Or will the DOJ only go after the top dogs: Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey?

Finally, consider this: demonizing Vladimir Putin set the stage for the Ukraine War — which was initially kicked off in 2014 under President Obama and his State Department / CIA group led by Victoria Nuland orchestrating the Maidan revolt. The official disclosures now by the DNI should make it clear that Mr. Putin did not deserve the treatment he got for years on end, and that the overall effect of it has been catastrophic for world peace. Half the people in the USA still believing all the manufactured bullshit about Mr. Putin has made it extremely difficult for President Trump to end the war in Ukraine that has killed millions.

RussiaGate had the gravest consequences, and now there can be consequences for the merry pranksters who started it and kept it going, one way or another, for a decade.

“So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

EXPLAINING RUSSIAGATE: Why the December 9th, 2016 Meeting Mattered

It’s not just what the Intelligence Community planned to say about Russian interference, it’s who would have seen the text

by Matt Taibbi

Partisan wrangling over Russiagate continued over the weekend, with Democrats continuing harsh critiques of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her release of documents about Russian interference from Barack Obama’s last presidential days. Connecticut congressman Jim Himes went on Face the Nation to say “when you start throwing around language like sedition and treason, somebody is going to get hurt,” adding, “The mouth-breathers on MAGA online are just going out of their minds based on a lie.”

Donald Trump responded last night with a Truth Social post that cast Russiagate as a V for Vendetta trailer, promising an upcoming political blockbuster. This president is a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them.

In between all this, an important detail is being lost. Democrats are hammering an “apples and oranges” argument, saying documents showing intelligence officials planned a Presidential Daily Briefing on December 9th, 2016 that would say “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome” and “We have no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results” were meaningless.

As Himes put it, the fact that “Russians could not use cyber tools to mess with the voting infrastructure, the machines that tally our votes” was “true then, and it is true now.” Two things about this statement, disingenuous in multiple ways:

One is a crucial fact left out of Saturday’s Racket article on the DNI releases. Had the intelligence community gone forward with a Presidential Daily Briefing that said Russia had not attacked infrastructure in a way “intended to alter results,” it would have been seen by a key audience: Donald Trump. Presidents-elect are entitled to read Presidential Daily Briefings. During the transition, Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was already being read in, and would have seen the planned December 9th text downplaying Russian interference.

“I would have seen it,” Flynn says now. “I was reading the PDBs at that point.” Asked yesterday if he thought that might have been a reason for holding the planned draft, Flynn said, “Very likely.”

Second, the notion that Russia interfered with actual vote tallies was no fringe conspiracy theory then. It was widely believed by Democratic voters. This was almost certainly a consequence of a two stage process that began with the flood of news stories based on leaks from intelligence sources beginning on December 9th, 2016. These not only alleged Russia interfered to help Donald Trump in an abrupt about-face from pre-election stories, but focused heavily on Russian hacking.

Within a week — by December 16th, 2016 — Hillary Clinton was publicly calling the election “unfair, not free, illegitimate,” adding, “Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me.”

An Economist/YouGov survey taken immediately after these remarks, on December 17th-20th, 2016, showed that a majority of voters believed Russia “tampered with vote tallies.”

Notwithstanding either the Himes comments (“This is Epstein all over again”) or Trump’s apocalyptic Guy Fawkes-themed Truth Social post, the meeting on December 9th that switched out a tepid PDB for a dramatic narrative about Russian interference to help Trump was hugely meaningful. It positioned Steele Dossier conclusions as mainstream news, set up Trump to be investigated by his own incoming FBI Director, and made sure the incoming administration did not see dissenting intelligence about Russian meddling. More to come.

“The book ain’t just about the fall, the beatings, the TV morons calling me a drunk. It’s about the light - - the spotlight, yeah, but also the little flicker that keeps burning even when the world wants to blow it. Remember that night in 1958, after On The Road madness, when I sat at Neal’s busted couch in San Jose and he just looked at me, grinning like a looney, and said, “Jack, you did it, you crazy bastard, you wrote the Bible of the open road”? And then we got so drunk we couldn’t stand, but for a second, Sterling, one second, I felt like I’d climbed Everest in bare feet. That’s the thread — the moments between punches, the quiet when the camera shuts off. A man can be famous and lonelier than a hobo. And another thing — tell the publishers (if they’re not too busy counting all their dimes) that this ain’t some Beatnik confessional. It’s the last leg of the Duluoz ride, the part where the hero stumbles into the spotlight and finds out it’s just another kind of shadow. The critics want a circus of monkeys? Fine. But I’m writing the aftermath, the sawdust and the elephant shit.”

— Portion of a letter Jack Kerouac wrote to his agent, Sterling Lord on September 28 1968

LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

Trump Releases Thousands of Martin Luther King Jr. Files

Johnson Retreats on Demand for Epstein Disclosures, Saying Trump Needs ‘Space’

Judge Sentences Ex-Officer in Breonna Taylor Raid to Nearly 3 Years in Prison

Marines Will Begin Withdrawing From Los Angeles

Conviction Reversed in Etan Patz Case That Put Focus on Missing Children

Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Theo Huxtable on ‘The Cosby Show,’ Dies at 54

PITY THE NATION…

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2007)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

Video captured the moment an Israeli strike hit a residential building in Gaza City’s Nassr neighbourhood after warning thousands who had taken shelter there to evacuate, displacing them once again.

TO RESIST INJUSTICE IN GAZA AND THE WIDER WORLD

by Charles Glass

Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an American citizen. Covering the War on Terror in Afghanistan and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay exposed him to the “deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing they called “the free world.” Yet he believed the cracks could be repaired — “Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The slaughter was Israel’s razing of Gaza following Hamas’s rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli assault escalated to include massive bombardment, enforced hunger, destruction of hospitals and schools, bulldozing of dwellings deprivation of medical care, torture and the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. The onslaught caused Akkad to despair for Gaza’s Palestinians and for his adopted country, whose financing and weapons enabled it. He channelled that despair into the rage that inspired this excellent and troubling book.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is neither polemic nor memoir, although it contains elements of both.

Akkad’s prose is an appeal to readers not to wait for “one day” in the distant future to resist injustice not only in Gaza, but in the wider world: “In the coming years there will be much written about what took place in Gaza, the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians as they happened and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the western world.” When the killing ceases, as with genocides of native Americans, Tasmanians, Namibia’s Hereros and Namas, Armenians, Jews and Tutsis, it will be too late.

Akkad’s condemnation of U.S. policy in the formerly-colonized world sits uneasily beside his choice to live and raise his children in the land that torments people who, like him, are brown or Muslim or doomed to live under American-supported Arab dictators or Israeli occupation. His rationale is as simple as it is understandable: “I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”

He is unafraid to speak against the Biden administration’s veto of United Nations resolutions calling for ceasefires in Gaza (“untroubled when they say a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of an entire people”) and its termination of funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that was the primary supplier of food, medical care and education to Palestinian refugees. Yet speaking out seems futile. As the author of the award-winning novel American War and sometime columnist, he does not spare himself and other writers for political impotence: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?”

He quotes Egyptian-American poet Marwa Helal:

“this is where the

poets will say: show, don’t tell

but that

assumes most people

can see.”

Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary. Akkad quotes an Israeli newspaper post’s headline from seven months prior to October 7: “When Genocide is Permissible.” Palestinians are killed every day in Gaza, “but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.”

This book is not devoid of hope, which he finds in resistance that can be positive (“showing up to protests and speaking out”) and negative (“refusing to participate”). He praises students “risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers” and Jewish protestors “being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace.” Their efforts, however ineffective, absolve them of the culpability of waiting for everyone else to be “against this.”

(Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past 50 years. He was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in Lebanon, Syria, Eritrea, Rhodesia, Somalia, Iraq, East Timor and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His many books have dealt with the First and Second World Wars as well as contemporary Middle East history.)

ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE IS BIG BUSINESS – and the face of the future

US corporations and military planners welcome the ‘legal maneuver space’ Israel has opened up for them to profit from warfare that slaughters and starves civilians

by Jonathan Cook

The Financial Times revealed this month that a cabal of Israeli investors, one of the world’s top business consulting groups and a think-tank headed by former British prime minister Tony Blair had been secretly working on plans to exploit the ruins of Gaza as prime real estate.

The secret consortium appears to have been seeking practical ways to realise US President Donlad Trump’s “vision” of Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”: transforming the small coastal enclave into a playground for the rich and an enticing investment opportunity, once it can be ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population.

Meanwhile, the UK government has declared Palestine Action a terrorist organisation – the first time in British history that a direct-action campaign group has been banned under Britain’s already draconian terrorism legislation.

Notably, the government of Keir Starmer took the decision to proscribe Palestine Action after lobbying from Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons maker whose factories in the UK have been targeted by Palestine Action for disruption. Elbit supplies Israel with killer drones and other weapons central to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

These revelations came to light as the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report – titled “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” – exposing Big Business’ extensive involvement in, and profits from, Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

In an interview with US journalist Chris Hedges, Albanese, an expert in international law, concluded: “The genocide in Gaza has not stopped, because it is lucrative. It’s profitable for far too many.”

Albanese lists dozens of major western companies that are deeply invested in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

This is not a new development, as she notes. These firms have exploited business opportunities associated with Israel’s violent occupation of the Palestinian people’s lands for years, and in some cases decades.

The switch from Israel’s occupation of Gaza to its current genocide hasn’t threatened profits; it has enhanced them. Or as Albanese puts it: “The profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”

The special rapporteur has been a growing thorn in the side of Israel and its western sponsors over the past 21 months of slaughter in Gaza.

That explains why Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, announced soon after her report was issued that he was imposing sanctions on Albanese for her efforts to shed light on the crimes of Israeli and US officials.

Revealingly, he called her statements – rooted in international law – “economic warfare against the United States and Israel”. Albanese and the UN system of universal human rights that stands behind her, it seems, represent a threat to western profiteering.

Window on the future

Israel effectively serves as the world’s largest business incubator – though, in its case, not just by nurturing start-up companies.

Rather, it offers global corporations the chance to test and refine new weapons, machinery, technologies, data collection and automation processes in the occupied territories. These developments are associated with mass oppression, control, surveillance, incarceration, ethnic cleansing – and now genocide.

In a world of shrinking resources and growing climate chaos, such innovative technologies of subjugation are likely to have domestic, in addition to overseas, applications. Gaza is the corporate world’s laboratory, and a window into our own future.

In her 60-page report, Albanese writes that her research “reveals how the forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech… while investors and private and public institutions profit freely”.

Her point was underscored by the Israeli arms firm Rafael, which issued a promotional video of its Spike FireFly drone that showed it locating, chasing and killing a Palestinian in what it called “urban warfare” in Gaza.

As the UN special rapporteur points out, quite aside from the issue of genocide in Gaza, western companies have been under a legal and moral obligation to sever ties with Israel’s system of occupation since last summer.

That was when the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled Israel’s decades-old occupation was a criminal enterprise based on apartheid and forcible transfer – or what Albanese refers to as policies of “displacement and replacement”.

Instead, the corporate sector – and western governments – continue to deepen their involvement in Israel’s crimes.

It is not just arms manufacturers profiting from the genocidal levelling of Gaza and the occupations of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Big Tech, construction and materials firms, agribusiness, the tourism industry, the goods and services sector, and supply chains have also got in on the act.

And enabling it all is a finance sector – which includes banks, pension funds, universities, insurers and charities – keen to continue investing in this architecture of oppression.

Albanese describes the mosaic of companies partnering with Israel as “an eco-system sustaining this illegality”.

Escaping scrutiny

For these corporations and their enablers, international law – the legal system Albanese and her fellow UN rapporteurs are there to uphold – serves as an impediment to the pursuit of profit.

Albanese notes that the business sector can escape scrutiny by shielding behind other actors.

Israel and its senior officials are on notice for committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

When she wrote to 48 companies to warn them that they were colluding in this criminality, they either responded that this was Israel’s responsibility, not theirs, or that it was for states, not international law, to regulate their business activities.

Corporations, Albanese points out, can secure their biggest profits in the “grey areas of the law” – laws they have helped to shape.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jets, whose “beast mode” has been shop-windowed by Israel as it has destroyed Gaza, depend on some 1,600 other specialist firms operating in eight separate states, including Britain.

Late last month the UK high court, while admitting British-made components used in the F-35 were likely to contribute to war crimes in Gaza, ruled that it was up to Starmer’s government to make “acutely sensitive and political” decisions about the export of these parts.

UK foreign secretary David Lammy, by contrast, told a parliamentary committee it was not for the government to assess whether Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, using British arms, it was “a decision for the court”.

Lockheed Martin has joined the buck-passing. A spokesperson said: “Foreign military sales are government-to-government transactions. Discussions about those sales are best addressed by the US government.”

Big Tech collusion

Albanese also points the finger at leading tech firms for rapidly and deeply embedding in Israel’s illegal occupation, including by acquiring Israeli start-ups that exploit expertise gained from the oppression of Palestinians.

The NSO Group has developed Pegasus phone spyware that is now being used to surveill politicians, journalists and human rights activists around the world.

Last year the Biden administration signed a contract with another Israeli spyware firm, Paragon. Will we learn one day that the US used exactly this kind of technology to spy on Albanese and other international law experts, on the pretext that they were waging so-called “economic warfare”?

IBM trains Israeli military and intelligence personnel, and is central to the collection and storage of biometric data on Palestinians. Hewlett Packard Enterprises supplies technology to Israel’s occupation regime, prison service and police.

Microsoft has developed its largest centre outside the US in Israel, from which it has fashioned systems for use by the Israeli military, while Google and Amazon have a $1.2 billion contract to provide it with tech infrastructure.

The prestigious research university MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has collaborated with Israel and companies like Elbit to develop automated weapons systems for drones and refine their swarm formations.

Palantir, which supplies the Israeli military with Artificial Intelligence platforms, announced a deeper strategic partnership in January 2024, early in Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, over what the Bloomberg news agency termed “Battle Tech”.

Over the past 21 months, Israel has been introducing new automated programs driven by AI – such as “Lavendar”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?” – to select huge numbers of targets in Gaza with little or no human oversight.

Albanese calls this “the dark side of the start-up nation that is so embedded, so intimately related to the military industry aims and gains.”

Not surprisingly, tech firms are falling back on all-too-familiar smears against the special rapporteur and the UN for pulling back the veil on their activities. The Washington Post reported that, in the wake of Albanese’s report, Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, called the UN “transparently antisemitic” in a chat on a staff forum.

Concentration camp

There are a long list of other household names in Albanese’s report: Caterpillar, Volvo and Hyundai are accused of supplying heavy machinery to destroy homes, mosques and infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank.

Leading banks such as BNP Paribas and Barclays have underwritten treasury bonds to boost market confidence in Israel through the genocide and maintain its favourable interest rates.

BP, Chevron and other energy firms are profiting from existing gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean and pipelines that pass through Palestinian maritime waters off Gaza. Israel issued exploration licences for Gaza’s own undeveloped gas field, off the coast, shortly after launching its genocidal slaughter.

Israel’s latest plan to create, in its own words, a “concentration” camp inside Gaza – where Palestinian civilians are to be tightly confined under armed guard – will doubtless rely on business partnerships similar to those behind the bogus “aid distribution hubs” Israel has already imposed on the enclave’s people.

Israeli soldiers have testified that they are being ordered to shoot into crowds of starving Palestinians queueing for food at these hubs – explaining why dozens of Palestinians have been killed daily for weeks on end.

Those hubs, run by the misleadingly named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, were in part the brainchild of the Boston Consulting Group, the same management consultants caught this month plotting to turn Gaza into Trump’s Palestinian-free “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Israel’s planned concentration camp built on the ruins of the city of Rafah – to be termed, again deceptively, a “humanitarian zone” – will require all those entering to be “security screened”, using biometric data, before their incarceration.

Doubtless other contractors, using largely automated systems, will control the camp’s interior until, in the Israeli government’s words, “an emigration plan” can be implemented to expel the population from Gaza.

Albanese points to the many precedents for private corporations driving some of the most horrifying crimes in history, from slavery to the Holocaust.

Albanese urges lawyers and civil society actors to pursue legal avenues against these firms in the countries in which they are registered. Where possible, consumers should exert what pressure they can by boycotting these corporations.

She concludes by recommending that states impose sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel.

Further, she calls on the besieged International Criminal Court – four of whose judges are, like her, under US sanctions – as well as national courts “to investigate and prosecute corporate executives and/or corporate entities for their part in the commission of international crimes and laundering of the proceeds from those crimes”.

Psychopathic culture

All of this is crucial to understanding why western capitals have continued to partner in Israel’s slaughter, even as Holocaust and genocide scholars – many of them Israeli – have reached a firm consensus that its actions amount to genocide.

Governing parties in western countries like the US and Britain are largely dependent on Big Business, both for their electoral success and, after victory at the polling booth, in maintaining popularity through the promotion of “economic stability”.

Keir Starmer reached power in the UK after spurning the popular grassroots funding model of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and wooing instead the corporate sector with promises that the party would be in its pocket.

His reassurances were also key to making sure the billionaire-owned media – which had ferociously turned on Corbyn, constantly vilifying him as an “antisemite” for his democratic socialist and pro-Palestinian positions – smoothed Starmer’s path to Downing Street.

In the US, the billionaires even have one of their own in power, in Donald Trump. But even his campaign depended on funding from big donors like Miriam Adelson, the Israeli widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Adelson is among a number of top donors, funding both main parties, who make no bones about their number one political priority being Israel.

Once in power, parties are then effectively held to ransom by major corporations on large areas of domestic and foreign policy.

The financial sector had to be bailed out by taxpayers – and still is through so-called “austerity measures” – after its reckless excesses crashed the global ecomomy in the late 2000s. Western governments considered the banks “too big to fail”.

Similarly, Israel – the world’s biggest incubator for the arms and surveillance industries – is just too big to be allowed to fail as well. Even as it commits genocide.

Critics of the rise of globalised corporations over the past half century, such as famed linguist Noam Chomsky and law professor Joel Bakan, have long noted the inherently psychopathic traits of corporate culture.

Corporations are legally obligated to pursue profit and prioritise shareholder value over other considerations. Limitations on their freedoms to do so are near non-existent after waves of deregulation from suborned western governments.

Bakan observes that corporations are indifferent to the suffering or safety of others. They are incapable of maintaining enduring relationships. They lack any sense of guilt, or capacity for self-restraint. And they lie, cheat and deceive to maximise profits.

These psychopathic tendencies have been on show in scandal after scandal, whether from the tobacco and banking industries, or from pharmaceutical and energy companies.

Why would Big Business behave any better in pursuing profits tied up in the Gaza genocide?

Bakan addresses those who confuse his argument with a conspiracy theory. The psychopathic behaviours of corporations simply reflect the legal imperatives on them as institutions – what he calls their “logical dynamic” – to maximise profit and sideline rivals, whatever the consequences for the wider society, future generations or the planet.

Growing fat on genocide

The stakes in Gaza are high for western governments precisely because they are so high for the business world growing fat on Israel’s genocide.

Governments and corporations have an overwhelming shared interest in protecting Israel from scrutiny and criticism: it serves as their colonial attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East, and it acts as a cash-cow for the weapons, surveillance and incarceration industries.

Which explains why Trump and Starmer, on one side, and university administrations, on the other, have invested so much political and moral capital in crushing the spaces, especially in academia, where free speech and protest are supposed to be most prized.

The unversities are far from a disinterested party. Before their campus encampments were trashed by police, student demonstrators sought to highlight how heavily invested the universities are in the economy of occupation and genocide, both financially and through research partnerships with the Israeli military and Israeli universities.

The need to ringfence Israel from scrutiny also explains rapid moves in the West both to impute “antisemitism” to every effort to hold Israel, or its genocidal army, to account.

The desperate lengths to which governments will go was on display this month as UK officials and the establishment media kicked up a storm of outrage after a punk band at Glastonbury chanted “Death, death to the IDF!” – a reference to Israel’s genocidal army.

And as the power of the antisemitism accusation has weakened from misuse, western capitals are now rewriting their statutes to designate as “terrorism” any attempt to put a spoke in the wheels of the genocide economy, by for example sabotaging weapons factories.

Morality and international law are being scattered to the winds to keep the West’s most important colonial spin-off a money-maker.

Business as usual

Israel’s indispensability to the corporate sector and a captured western political class extends far beyond tiny Gaza. Israel is playing an outsize role as a war-industries incubator on a global battlefield in which the West seeks to ensure its continuing military and economic primacy over China.

Last month the global business elite – comprising tech billionaires and corporate titans, joined by political leaders, media editors, and military and intelligence officials – met once again at the publicity-shy Bilderberg summit, this year hosted in Stockholm.

Prominent were the CEOs of major “defence” suppliers and arms manufacturers such as Palantir, Thales, Helsing, Anduril and Saab.

Drone warfare – being used in innovative ways by key military clients like Israel and Ukraine – was high on the agenda. The greater integration of AI into drones appears to have been a mainstay of the discussions.

The subtext this year, as in recent years, was a supposed rising threat from China and an associated “authoritarian axis” comprising Russia, Iran and North Korea. This threat is seen chiefly in economic and technological terms.

In May, Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google and a Bilderberg board member, wrote with alarm in the New York Times: “China is at parity or pulling ahead of the United States in a variety of technologies, notably at the AI frontier.”

He added that the West was in a race against China over the imminent development of super-intelligent AI, which would give the winner “the keys to control the entire world”.

Schmidt, like other Bilderberg regulars, predicts that the power-draining needs of super AI will lead to ever-intensifying energy wars for the West to stay top dog.

Or as a Guardian report on the conference summed up the mood: “In this desperate winner-takes-all race for the keys to the world, in which the ‘geopolitics of energy’ becomes ever more important, power stations – along with the data centers they feed – are going to become the No 1 military targets.”

Israel’s slaughter in Gaza is seen as playing a critical role in opening up the “battlescape”.

The same corporations cashing in on the Gaza genocide stand to benefit from the more permissive environment – legally and militarily – created by Israel for future wars, ones where massacred civilians count only as “incidental deaths”.

An April article in the New Yorker magazine set out the challenge facing US military planners, who have considered themselves hobbled since the 1980s by the rise of a human rights community that developed an expertise in the laws of war independently from the Pentagon’s self-serving interpretations.

The result, say US generals regretfully, has been a “general aversion to collateral damage risk” – that is, killing civilians.

Pentagon military planners are keen to use the slaughter in Gaza as a precedent for their own genocidal violence in subduing future economic rivals like China and Russia who threaten the official US doctrine of “global full-spectrum dominance”.

The New Yorker sets out this thinking: “Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat US soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.”

According to the magazine, the genocidal violence being unleashed by Israel is opening up the “legal maneuver space” – the space needed to commit crimes against humanity in full view.

This is where much of the impulse comes from in western capitals to normalise the genocide – present it as business as usual – and demonise its opponents.

The arms makers and tech companies whose coffers have been swollen by Israel’s genocide in Gaza stand to make far greater riches from a similarly devastating war against China.

Whatever the script we are sold, there will be nothing moral or existential about this coming battle. As ever, it will be about rich people keen to get even richer.

(jonathancook.substack.com)

TEAR IT DOWN, THEY SAID. HE JUST KEPT BUILDING.

by Vivian Wang

The structure teeters over fields of knee-high grass, looking like a cross between a camping tent and a giant wedding cake. Eleven stories of dark red wooden rooms, diminishing in size as they ascend, balance atop one another, seemingly held together by only the thicket of cords that stretches from the peak to the ground.

Chen Tianming stands in front of his home, which has been called China’s strangest “nail house” – households that refuse to move in the face of development plans (AFP)

Inside feels no less precarious. The ceilings are propped up with repurposed utility poles. Power strips and wires dangle from low-hanging beams. Giant buckets of rainwater help support the weight of the structure. The homemade ladders that connect the floors perch at steep angles, often without handrails at the side.

Chen Tianming — the tower’s 43-year-old designer, builder and resident — does not need them anyway. He climbed lightly up the ladders, past the fifth-floor reading nook and the sixth-floor open-air tearoom.

From the ninth floor, he surveyed the sturdy, standardized apartment buildings in the distance where his neighbors live.

“They say the house is shabby, that it could be blown down by wind at any time,” he said — an observation that did not seem altogether far-fetched when I visited him last month.

“But the advantage is that it’s conspicuous, a bit eye-catching. People admire it,” he added. “Other people spend millions, and no one goes to look at their houses.”

Mr. Chen’s house is so unusual that it has lured gawkers and even tourists to his rural corner of Guizhou Province, in southwestern China. It evokes a Dr. Seuss drawing, or the Burrow in “Harry Potter.” Many people on Chinese social media have compared it to Howl’s Moving Castle.”

To the casual observer, the house may be a mere spectacle, a Frankensteinian oddity.

To Mr. Chen, it is a monument to his determination to live where — and how — he wants, in defiance of the local government, gossiping neighbors and seemingly even common sense.

He began modifying his family home in 2018, when the authorities in the city of Xingyi ordered his village demolished to make way for a resort they planned to build. Mr. Chen’s parents, farmers who had built the house in the 1980s, thought that the money that officials were offering as compensation for the move was too low and refused to leave.

When bulldozers began razing their pomegranate trees anyway, Mr. Chen rushed home from Hangzhou, the eastern city where he had been working as a package courier.

Along with his brother, Chen Tianliang, he started adding a third floor. At first, the motivation was in part practical: Compensation payment was determined by square footage, and if the house had more floors, they would be entitled to more money.

They visited a secondhand building materials market and bought old utility poles and red composite boards — cheaper than the black ones — and hammered, screwed and notched them together into floorboards, walls and supporting columns.

Then, Mr. Chen, who had long had an amateur interest in architecture, wondered what it would be like to add a fourth floor. His brother and parents thought there was no need, so Mr. Chen did it alone. Then, he wondered about a fifth. And a sixth.

“I just suddenly wanted to challenge myself,” he said. “And every time I completed my own small task or dream, it felt meaningful.”

He was also fueled by resentment toward the government, which kept serving him with demolition orders and sending officials to pressure his family. By that point, their house was virtually the only one left in the vicinity; his neighbors had all moved into the new apartment buildings about three miles away. (Local officials have maintained to Chinese media that the building is illegal.)

Mass expropriations of land, at times by force, have been a widespread phenomenon in China for decades amid the country’s modernization push. The homes of those who do manage to hold out are sometimes called “nail houses,” for how they protrude like nails after the area around them has been cleared.

Still, few stick out quite like Mr. Chen’s.

A former mathematics major who dropped out of university because he felt that higher education was pointless, Mr. Chen spent years bouncing between cities, working as a calligraphy salesman, insurance agent and courier. But he yearned for a more pastoral lifestyle, he said. When he returned to the village in 2018 to help his parents fend off the developers, he decided to stay.

“I don’t want my home to become a city. I feel like a guardian of the village,” he said, over noodles with homegrown vegetables that his mother had stir-fried on their traditional brick stove.

In recent years, the threat of demolition has become less immediate. Mr. Chen filed a lawsuit against the local government and the developers, which is still pending. In any case, the proposed resort project stalled after the local government ran out of money. (Guizhou, one of China’s poorest and most indebted provinces, is littered with extravagant, unfinished tourism projects.)

But Mr. Chen has continued building. The house is now a constantly evolving display of his interests and hobbies.

On the first floor, Mr. Chen hung calligraphy from artists he befriended in Hangzhou. On the fifth, he keeps a pile of faded books, mostly about history, philosophy and psychology. The sixth floor has potted plants and a plank of wood suspended from the ceiling with ropes, like a swing, to hold a mortar and pestle and a teakettle. On the eighth, a gift from an art student who once visited him: a lamp, with the shade made of tiny photographs of his house from different angles.

With each floor that he added, he moved his bedroom up, too: “That’s what makes it fun.” (His parents and brother sleep on the ground floor and rarely make the vertiginous ascent.)

Each morning, he inspects the house from top to bottom. To reinforce the fourth and fifth floors, he hauled wooden columns up through the windows with pulleys. He added the buckets of water throughout the house after a storm blew out a fifth-floor wall. Eventually, he tore down most of the walls on the lower floors, so that wind could pass straight through the structure.

“There’s a law of increasing entropy,” Mr. Chen said. “This house, if I didn’t care for it, would naturally collapse in two years at most.” He added, “But as long as I’m still standing, it will be too.”

Maintenance costs more time than money, he said. He estimated that he had spent a little more than $20,000 on building materials. He has also spent about $4,000 on lawyers.

His family has been, if not enthusiastic about, at least resigned to Mr. Chen’s whims. His parents are accustomed to curious visitors, at least a few every weekend. His brother came up with the idea of illuminating the house at night with lanterns. They have all united against their fellow villagers, who they say accuse them of being nuisances, or greedy.

“Now we just don’t go over there,” said Tianliang, Mr. Chen’s brother. “There’s no need to listen to what they say about us.”

In town, some residents said exactly what the Chens predicted they would: that the house would collapse any day; that they were troublemakers. (The local government erected a sign near the house warning of safety hazards.)

But others expressed admiration for Mr. Chen’s creativity.

Zhu Zhiyuan, an employee at a local supermarket, said he had been drawn in when passing by on his scooter and had ventured closer for a better look. Still, he had not dared get too close.

“There are people who say it’s illegal,” he said. Then he added, “But if they tore it down, that would be a bit of a shame.”

Chen Tianming and his rickety multi-storey house in Xingyi, China (Andrea Verdelli, the New York Times)

(nytimes.com)

ONE QUESTION

You are in a dungeon that has three doors. One leads to freedom, two lead to certain death. There are two guards next to you, one always tells the truth and the other always lies. You can ask only one guard one question. What question would determine which door leads to freedom?

28 Comments

Mazie Malone July 22, 2025

Happy Birthday Mr. Editor!!!💕

😘🎉🎂🥳🎈🎊🎁💕

I hope you have a fabulous and fun day!! Enjoy.. 💕

mm 💕

- Norm Thurston July 22, 2025
  
  +1 Happy Birthday Bruce!
  
  - Bruce Anderson July 22, 2025
    
    86, and sailing on the River Styx
    
    - Chuck Dunbar July 22, 2025
      
      Another Happy Birthday greeting, Mr. Bruce, and I’ll finish off those words for you—
      
      “86, and sailing on the River Styx”
      Please, don’t worry, though,
      Nothing the good docs can’t fix
      
      Hang in there, man
      We need the real news—
      Not time yet for your
      Last and final snooze
      
    - Bruce McEwen July 22, 2025
      
      Happy 86th Chief. Like that guy in the Kingston Trio song who couldn’t get off the MTA ‘cause he didn’t have the correct change for the fare, you gotta have two coins on your eves to pay the ferryman, Charon or he won’t take you across.
      
    - Chuck Wilcher July 22, 2025
      
      Ring us back when you hit 90.
      
    - Marshall Newman July 22, 2025
      
      May the river be very, very wide.
      
    - Rick Swanson July 22, 2025
      
      Happy Birthday Boss!
      
Beth Swehla July 22, 2025

The article “HOW ANDERSON VALLEY AMUSED ITSELF IN THE EARLY 50s” made me smile.

jim barstow July 22, 2025

Enough with all the hue and cry from Taibbi and Kunstler about “RussiaGate”. Kunstler seems to have missed National Review editor and right wing figure Andrew McCarthy’s excoriation of Gabbard’s letter charging Obama with treason. (It’s on Fox News, no less.) Taibbi is the annoying jerk who sits in the back waving his hand claiming that only he knows the truth.

Surely there are better sources of opinion who don’t reek of bias and delusion. I like to read the opposition but I skip them because I learned they are a waste of time.

- Chuck Dunbar July 22, 2025
  
  +1– Vastly more important issues to worry about than this crap.
  
- Steve Heilig July 22, 2025
  
  Why and how anybody would give Gabbard any serious thought is a mystery. And was so even before she cravenly went MAGA. My Hawaiian pals have long considered her a state embarrassment. What a clown show of a White House. Where’s Hunter S. Thompson when we need him?
  
  (But otherwise, lots of fascinating stuff in here today, and more important, good b-day, Editor! I’m bringing you some stray feral cats and dogs.)
  
- George Hollister July 22, 2025
  
  Go with the facts regardless of the messenger. From my experience Taibbi is a reliable source. (BTW, so is Brett Baier on Fox.) Kunstler isn’t because he doesn’t do his homework, or think for himself. It Is easy to conclude that only you know the truth when few in media sing anything other than what other people in media sing. Harmony in media is a bad thing.
  
Bruce McEwen July 22, 2025

If you delight in seeing true believers disillusioned (and I confess I do), then the coming week promises to be hugely amusing, as both the MAGAs and the Obama worshippers come to grips with the frailty of common human clay.

- George Hollister July 22, 2025
  
  Well said.
  
  - Lazarus July 22, 2025
    
    +1
    Laz
    
Bruce Anderson July 22, 2025

Thank you, well wishers. Negotiating some heavy medical probs but expect to emerge more or less whole.

- Lazarus July 22, 2025
  
  Best Wishes, Sir.
  Laz
  
- George Hollister July 22, 2025
  
  Hang in there old man.
  
- Mazie Malone July 22, 2025
  
  💕💕💕💕
  
  mm 💕
  
- Jim Armstrong July 22, 2025
  
  Two years and two days behind you. Happy birthday.
  
Dale Carey July 22, 2025

bruce is a leo.who knew…right?

- Mazie Malone July 23, 2025
  
  He is on the cusp like me, Cancer, Leo .. 💕🦀🦁
  
  The best people…. 🤣💕
  
  mm 💕
  
Peter Lit July 22, 2025

i don’t find an answer if only one question can be asked of only one guard? Other combos: one question to both guards or two questions to one guard–there is an answer

- Justine Frederiksen July 23, 2025
  
  Couldn’t you just ask the guard who always tells the truth, “Which door will lead me to freedom?”
  
  - Peter Lit July 23, 2025
    
    Which guard is that?
    
    - Bob Abeles July 23, 2025
      
      It’s a classic problem, but incorrectly transcribed. There should be only two doors, one leading out and the other leading to certain doom. Properly posed with two possible doors the solution is: Ask either of the guards, “Which door would your fellow guard recommend?” Then, choose the opposite door. If you asked the truthful guard, he’d truthfully give you the dishonest guard’s answer. If you asked the dishonest guard, he’d lie.
      
      What’s fascinating about this puzzle is that if you pose it verbatim to ChatGPT, it will lie to you. The LLM will recognize this classic puzzle while ignoring the three door error, giving an incorrect response that has a 50/50 chance of sending you to your doom.
      
Marco McClean July 22, 2025

Re: What are they cooking on those sticks? It looks like swollen human hands.

28 Comments

Leave a Reply to Bruce Anderson Cancel reply