Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 8/5/2025

Warming | Bark Paint | Reckless Evasion | Toiletry Bandits | Cervenka Retirement | Toohey Moved | Supes Vacation | Local Events | Eyster Petition | Snakes | Piaci Music | Ed Notes | Yesterday's Catch | Gun Club | Gifford Fire | Fulton Mansion | Craig Willing | Grateful Nitrous | Vet Option | Wild Flowers | Giants Lose | SF Billboards | Third Guy | Lab Rats | Grampa Baloney | Average American | Lead Stories | Monetary Policy | Top Story | NYT Censor | Excessive | Suspicious Minds | Cradle to Grave | Antisemitism Accusations | America’s Streets | Celestial Peek

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GENERAL WARMING trend is expected for the remainder of this week. HeatRisk will increase Friday through Monday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 48F under clear skies this Tuesday morning on the coast. Have you noticed even when there is no real fog out there we still get scattered low clouds at times during the day? Our forecast is getting a bit more cloudy while still clinging on to mostly sunny. Decipher that weather fans.

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VERY RECKLESS EVASION

On Saturday, August 2, 2025 at approximately 9:45 p.m. a Ukiah Police Department Officer was on routine patrol in the 1000 block of North State Street when he noticed a red Dodge Ram pickup truck traveling in the opposite direction at approximately 20 MPH over the posted speed limit. The officer immediately turned his patrol vehicle around, activated his vehicle’s emergency lights, and attempted to catch up to the speeding motorist.

As the officer and the suspect vehicle traveled southbound towards the 900 block of North State Street it became apparent that the driver of the suspect vehicle did not intend to yield to the traffic stop, and a vehicle pursuit began. The suspect vehicle turned eastbound onto Brush Street, and then southbound onto North Orchard Avenue. The suspect vehicle then turned eastbound onto E. Perkins Street and took E. Perkins Street to Watson Road and over the hill to Old River Road. UPD requested assistance from The California Highway Patrol and the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office, and later informed Sonoma County law enforcement that a pursuit was headed in their direction.

The pursuit continued at high rates of speed southbound on Old River Road, with the suspect vehicle swerving in and out of its lane of travel and proceeding in the wrong direction of traffic for long periods of time. As the suspect vehicle approached Hopland it abruptly made a 180 degree turn and the pursuit continued northbound back towards Ukiah.

Wanting to ensure that the suspect did not lead the pursuit into downtown Ukiah, The California Highway patrol set up spike strips (tire deflation devices) near the intersection of Old River Road and Talmage Road. The suspect ran over the spike strips and immediately lost tire pressure. The suspect pulled to the side of the road in the 2000 block of Sanford Ranch Road and fled on foot from the vehicle into a vineyard to the west.

Law enforcement was quickly able to establish a perimeter around the vineyard and deploy a drone that was equipped with a thermal imaging camera. The drone operated quickly, spotted the suspect in the vineyard, and was able to direct officers towards him. The suspect attempted to run but was eventually cornered and apprehended without incident.

The suspect was identified as 34-year-old Willits resident Kolton Lindecarnes. Lindecarnes appeared to be heavily intoxicated and did not provide any information as to why he had fled from law enforcement and caused extreme danger to the community. Lindecarnes was arrested and booked into the Mendocino County Jail for charges of DUI, driving without a license, and reckless evasion/driving opposite traffic.

As always, UPD’s mission is to make Ukiah as safe a place as possible, and we are grateful for the help that we received from the California Highway Patrol and the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. If you would like to know more about crime in your neighborhood, you can sign up for telephone, cellphone, and email notifications by clicking the Nixle button on our website; www.ukiahpolice.com.

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THESE ARE THE TOILETRIES that sparked a dangerous Mendocino County police chase

by Matt LaFever

The chase ended with spike strips, a highway takedown, and two people in custody. But what kicked it all off wasn’t cash, weapons, or high-value electronics — it was body lotion, allergy meds, and an impressive amount of Dove soap.

According to a press release from the Ukiah Police Department, officers recovered a trunkload of stolen merchandise after a high-speed pursuit on August 1. The haul: six bars of Dove soap, six bottles of Dove shampoo, nine bottles of Dove conditioner, ten bottles of body lotion, 13 bottles of Native shampoo, 16 bottles of CeraVe skin and hair products, three boxes of Tylenol, 16 boxes of Claritin, and nearly 30 boxes of Zyrtec.

It’s the first time the public is seeing via a photograph released by UPD offering a strange but vivid glimpse into the kind of merchandise targeted by what police say was an organized retail theft crew.

The incident began when the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office notified Ukiah police of a shoplifting case in Cloverdale earlier that day. The suspects, believed to be operating a white Mazda SUV, were reportedly heading north to hit additional stores. One of the suspects was identified as Dejon Wilkes of Oakland, who police say had multiple felony warrants across several counties.

While that information was still coming in, Ukiah police got a call about another theft—this time at the Walgreens on East Perkins Street. Officers responded, but the suspect had already fled in what witnesses said was a white Mazda SUV, matching the vehicle in the Cloverdale case.

Using the city’s FLOCK camera system, UPD confirmed the SUV had left the area and shared the vehicle’s info with surrounding agencies. Later that day, a Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputy spotted the SUV near Willits and tried to make a traffic stop. The vehicle fled, triggering a multi-agency pursuit that included CHP, MCSO, and Willits PD, according to the release.

The chase ended southbound on Highway 101 after officers deployed spike strips to disable the vehicle. Wilkes and the driver, identified as Birdean Gaines, were both taken into custody without further incident.

Inside the vehicle, police discovered the extensive stash of hygiene products and over-the-counter medications, including the items allegedly stolen from the Ukiah Walgreens.

In the press release, UPD described organized retail theft—also known as organized retail crime — as large-scale theft of merchandise for resale, often involving coordinated crews and fencing operations.

Both suspects were booked into Mendocino County Jail on charges related to the pursuit and suspected thefts. As always, it’s important to note that both individuals are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.

(mendofever.com)

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FORT BRAGG POLICE CHIEF NEIL CERVENKA ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT

After three years of dedicated service to the City of Fort Bragg, Police Chief Neil Cervenka has announced his retirement, with his final day of service set for September 30, 2025.

Chief Cervenka joined the Fort Bragg Police Department with a vision to modernize the agency, strengthen community trust, and support the professional growth of its officers. In just three years, he successfully led transformative changes that will leave a lasting impact on the department and the community.

Under his leadership, the department:

• Modernized its patrol fleet, gaining national recognition for its vehicles.
• Overhauled policies and procedures and expanded training programs beyond minimum standards.
• Enhanced the working environment by investing in employee wellness, recognition, and leadership development.
• Established a Social Services Unit that addresses homelessness, mental health, and substance use—quickly becoming a model for other agencies.
• Strengthened community engagement and improved the department’s brand and public image.

“From an agency ridiculed to an agency revered—that was all you,” Chief Cervenka told staff in his retirement announcement, crediting the department’s success to the dedication and professionalism of its team. “It’s better to leave while the department is rising—so you all know our success was because of you, not because of the person sitting in the Chief’s chair.”

Chief Cervenka’s 32-year career in uniform includes 25 years in law enforcement and prior service to his country in the United States Air Force. He plans to remain in Fort Bragg with his family following his retirement.

Mayor Jason Godeke also reflected on Cervenka’s retirement:

“Chief Cervenka is an extraordinary public servant. He has contributed to our town in so many ways - through Police Department initiatives, policies, community culture - as well as his own volunteerism out in the community. His efforts to strengthen the department and build trust with residents will have a lasting impact. On behalf of the City Council, I want to thank him for his service and wish him well in his retirement.”

City Manager Isaac Whippy expressed his gratitude for Chief Cervenka’s contributions:

“Chief Cervenka has provided steady leadership during an important period of change for the Fort Bragg Police Department. His focus on modernizing operations, transforming the department’s culture, and supporting staff has positioned the department for continued success. We appreciate his service and the foundation he leaves for the team moving forward.”

The City of Fort Bragg will announce the next steps regarding the Police Chief transition in the coming weeks.

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BIG LOSS FOR AV: JOHN TOOHEY LEAVES FOR LAKE COUNTY

We are so sad that John Toohey has moved to Lake County. It was a hard decision for him, but he told me he wants to work where he will be able to afford a home. (He has been commuting to school for some time now.) And also he has been wanting to get back to teaching History for work/life balance. (The Athletic Director position is all consuming, of course.) He said that he will continue to stay in contact and support the new PE teacher / Athletic Director, Joel Cassias, via phone as well as meeting up occasionally. He said that the school will always be in his heart and he will never truly leave. He plans to attend some games, events, etc… Needless to say, it is a huge loss.

With respect,

Kristin Larson Balliet, Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

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SUPES TAKE SIX WEEKS OFF. AGAIN.

by Mark Scaramella

Mendo’s hard-working supervisors are taking another big six-week summer vacation. Their last meeting was July 29 when they decided that they couldn’t take even modest pay cuts, but they could do a fiscal assessment of local volunteer ambulances services to see if the $200k per year they grudgingly allocate is being properly spent. For perspective, $200k is less than the CEO makes in a year and less than a fifth of what the Board itself makes in salary and generous perks. Their next meeting won’t be until September 9.

In 2024 the Board took a six-week summer vacation as well, there being so little to do. No multi-million dollar budget gaps to attend to, no issues like homeless camps, glamping regs, airbnb rules, no staffing problems at the nearly finished Psychiatric Health Facility or the new wing of the jail, no road work to finance, no lawsuits to settle, no union negotiations to conduct, no tax sharing agreements or annexation proposals to examine or review, no vacancy reports to review… You know, nothing much. So let’s take six weeks off! Anyone who thinks the Supervisors are working hard for their generous salaries and benefit packages while not going to Board meetings for six weeks can look back at the agenda for last year’s post-vacation board meeting and see that no supervisors used the time off to develop any priority agenda items that required preparation or extraordinary proposals. We will be watching to see if this latest month and a half off produces any results.

It’s been a while since we checked in on what the Supervisors give their department heads and themselves (via their cozy “me too” salary-setting provision) as “benefits.” The latest Department Head Memorandum of Understanding (which expiries this month and will be up for renegotiation while they claim to have a multi-million dollar budget deficit for this year and an even bigger deficit next year) provides for a range of perks that many corporate managers would envy.

Department heads (and supervisors) get longevity increases (automatic pay increases for holding the job for specified years), a deferred compensation plan (to game their taxes), a $1500 “education, training and health” annual stipend, a $3,000 a year “automobile allowance” (for out of county travel), a commuting to “work” stipend, a large health insurance contribution, life insurance, retirement, vacation, sick leave, bereavement leave, “management leave,” family and medical leave, “catastrophic leave,” on top of eleven paid holidays a year.

According to the latest salary data at Transparent California (for 2023) Supervisor Ted Williams got $109k per year in salary and $64k in benefits (plus the non-monetary benefits like leave, vacation, etc. mentioned above), Supervisor John Haschak got $114.5k in salary plus $56.5k in benefits, then-Supervisor Dan Gjerde got $120k in salary and $38k in benefits, Supervisor Maureen Mulheren got $102.5k in salary and $49k in benefits, and then-Supervisor Glenn McGourty got $105k in salary and no benefits (no explanation provided). CEO Darcie Antle got $220k annual salary plus $65k in monetary benefits. Having served three terms, former Supervisor Gjerde gets a “pension” of around $26k per year on top of his salary from his transportation planning position for Caltrans which he cleverly positioned himself for while attending two decades worth of MCOG transportation planning meetings as Fort Bragg City Council rep and Supervisor rep.

Most of the highest paid Mendo employees are law enforcement officials with the top nine recipients for 2023 getting annual salaries ranging from $170k to $206k per year plus benefits ranging from $150k to $190k per year. In 2023 Sheriff Matt Kendall got $199k in salary and $176k in benefits. DA David Eyster got $197k in salary and $95k in benefits.

Funny how the Board spends money conducting a “fiscal assessment” of the $200k per year they grudgingly give to the local volunteer ambulance services (about $66k per organization, which hasn’t gone up in eleven years) who never get to take any vacation, but nobody ever calls for a “fiscal assessment” of the $200k/year-plus inflation-adjusted annual pay and perks that the CEO and the Supervisors give themselves and their department heads every year.

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LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)

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THE COVID BILLBOARD & OTHER MYSTERIES

by Carole Brodsky

In the grand scheme of things, this is nothing. But every time I drive north on 101, past the Lake Mendo Drive exit, I notice an almost-completely faded, full-sized “Get Vaccinated” billboard. It was designed, and I assume paid for by the County of Mendocino, and their name figures prominently in the design, and has been up since the peak of Covid.

I’d like to think some community-minded billboard company donated that space in the spirit of the times, but I’m more inclined to believe the County has been paying for that thing for the past five years.

I signed the Eyster petition. A year after my kid was killed on Highway 128 — a year after the CHP told me that the County “never prosecutes accidents like this, in the 25 years I’ve been an officer, I’ve never seen it happen once” — my son-in-law got charged with Vehicular Manslaughter. He was not drunk or high. Just tired. They were delivering a refrigerator to a family in Albion at the request of the landlord because it was Mother’s Day weekend. My daughter — a mom of 5 could not live with the idea of a family not being able to celebrate Mother’s Day, so they made the trip after a long, long day, and he fell asleep for that one fateful second.

I wrote a letter to Eyster, signed by my daughter’s huge family, asking who exactly the victims were that the county felt needed justice for? I thought we were the victims. It was a low-ball move. There’s more that he’s done involving my family. Worse, actually. I doubt if they’ll get the sigs but at least it’s an attempt at democracy.

I’m glad you’re still with us. At the Truck and Tractor pulls at the Fair I ran into a nice young man who only reads the AVA. In the midst of the diesel fumes and ear-splitting noise we discussed John Locke, Federalism and Hamilton. My best day at the Fair!

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FRED GARDNER:

Gopher snake: I saw this one, which looked as if it had crawled through the snap-off top of a beer can. Next day I saw the one EK photographed, which looked like it was digesting a meal. Made me wish I had snagged “mine” and snipped off his collar.

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Mike Kalantarian responds: Hopefully you'll get another chance to free your snake. Incidentally, the other photo you refer to (taken by KB) appears to be a rather interesting species, the Aquatic Garter Snake (Thamnophis atratus).

From Lindsay Wildlife:

Although garter snakes are found across the United States, aquatic garter snakes are only found in the coastal regions of California north of Santa Barbara, and the southern Oregon coast.

They eat fish, salamanders, toads, and newts. Garter snakes do not have venom, nor do they constrict to subdue prey. Instead, they quickly grab prey by mouth and gulp it down whole! In shallow water, aquatic garter snakes will encircle prey with their body and then strike as they try to escape.

These snakes are ovoviviparous—the females incubate their shell-less eggs internally, and the babies hatch as she lays the eggs. Aquatic garter snakes have smaller litters (only 3 to 12 young) than other species, but often can have several litters a year.

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ED NOTES

SO, what's next? I'm predicting an American Reichstag. Before Trump's term is up the Magas will manufacture an emergency, or react to a real one, by declaring martial law, announcing that things are too precarious for them to give up power. “America needs a firm hand at the helm during this difficult time. For the good of the nation we'll be staying on.”

TRUMP'S giant son, Barron, although young, will be installed as front man and handed a daily script, a la Biden, unlike Dad who winged it every day for 8 years. Barron seems, so far, to lack the viciousness of other Trump spawn but may grow into it given his pedigree and social circle. Or they, the chief Magas, will find a charismatic, articulate tough guy with a special forces background — they probably already have their eye on likely prospects — and install him. But no way are they, the best friends our oligarchy has ever had, giving up their seats at the power levers.

IT WAS BRAZEN and spectacular, a very big event for Mendocino County when, on a hot July 1984 day a little after noon, six armed robbers held up a Brinks armored truck on Highway 20 just north of Ukiah, getting away with roughly $3.6 million cash, 8-plus mil in today's money.

THE BANDITS were a white supremacist group called “the order,” or “the Silent Brotherhood.” They deployed two pickup trucks to box in the Brink's truck as it slowed on the uphill side of Highway 20 at Redwood Valley as their leader, Robert ‘Bob’ Mathews, lept on the front fender of the truck to penetrate the truck's windshield with three high powered rifle rounds, convincing the two black crewmen to stop the truck and cooperate.

CONNOISSEURS of this event probably have read up on the etiology of the robbery, which I thought I knew until I downed ‘The Order: Inside America's racist underground’ by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, but this fascinating, and meticulously researched episode in Mendo's often lurid history quickly convinced me I was mostly ignorant.

I WILL spare you a review of the whole story because what intrigued me most was the unique psycho-journey of The Order's leader, Bob Mathews. If there's such a thing as a natural born extremist it was this guy.

AS AN 11-year-old, when his peers were gearing up for Little League and Cub Scouts, Mathews demanded that his mystified parents allow him to attend meetings of the Phoenix chapter of the John Birch Society (! ). The lad was duly ferried to meetings by elderly Bircher crackpots until he began high school. (Mathews' parents would remain bewildered by their wayward son until he died shooting it out with the FBI at age 31.)

AS a high school kid, and by then fanatically opposed to ZOG, the fascist delusion that America is a "Zionist Occupied Government," Mathews was a wholly committed gun guy spending weekends with co-religionists out in the desert drilling for the big push against ZOG. A natural leader, especially among basically crazy people, Mathews was fully committed to overthrowing the government until the government ended him at age 31.

IN THE RUN-UP to their big robbery on Highwayt 20, the boys spent time in Ukiah, often lounging around on the Courthouse lawn where they amused themselves playing “Name That Creature,” guessing at how many races passersby carried in their genes.

THERE are many nut groups in our seething country, but from what we know about contemporary nutballs in their organized states, the Mathews gang of the early 1980s was ahead of its time in commitment and discipline. ZOG seems to be keeping the lid clamped tight on them. Of course the more active fascists of the Mathews type have to be pleased with the Trump reign, and will provide a lot of the local muscle when the Maga coup jumps off.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, August 4, 2025

NATASHA BABATUNDE, 38, Ukiah. Parole violation.

JOSE BUENROSTRO, 58, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, probation violation.

MATTHEW FAUST, 50, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol & under influence, unlawful camping on private property. (Frequent flyer.)

NICHOLAS HOGAN, 42, Ukiah. Parole violation.

OTIS LOZINTO III, 55, Sacramento/Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

SARINA MCDOW, 42, Ukiah. Petty theft.

LUIS OLIVER, 38, Covelo. Controlled substance while armed with loaded firearm, felon-addict with firearm, ammo possession by prohibited person, resisting, unspecified offense.

RICKY RAMIREZ, 18, Willits. Domestic battery.

JAIME TINAJERO, 46, Ukiah. Petty theft with two or more priors, concealed dirk-dagger, probation revocation.

JARED TITUS, 43, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, probation violation.

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GIFFORD FIRE REACHES 72,000 ACRES, THREATENING HUNDREDS OF STRUCTURES

by Jerry Wu

The Gifford Fire burning in Los Padres National Forest torched over 72,000 acres and prompted evacuations as of Monday evening, officials said.

The fire was 3% contained as of 9 a.m., according to a morning update from the U.S. Forest Service. Around 1,000 firefighting personnel were battling the blaze roaring across Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

Three individuals who were injured in the blaze were treated for minor to moderate injuries, and 460 structures were threatened, officials said.

According to the Forest Service, one person had suffered minor burn injuries, and two contractors were hospitalized after their vehicle rolled over in the area.

Plumes of smoke soared as the fire reached high temperatures, fueled by the area’s dry vegetation and rugged terrain. Some of the smoke drifted across state lines Monday into the Las Vegas Valley, impacting air quality and leading to hazy skies, according to the National Weather Service.

The fire broke out near Highway 166, about 30 miles east of Santa Maria (Santa Barbara County) on Friday. Officials have since closed off a stretch of the highway between Highway 101 and Perkins Road in New Cuyama (Santa Barbara County). The cause of the fire was under investigation as of Monday.

Given the hot and dry climate in the region, the fire remains high risk, but wind conditions appear to be favorable for the firefight and should not lead to explosive fire growth in the next day or so, said Chronicle meteorologist Greg Porter.

“The weather conditions are pretty similar from Sunday to today to really into Tuesday,” Porter said. “It’s a typical wind cycle that is usually indicative of moderate humidity levels, so I wouldn’t expect the fire to grow substantially in size Monday or Tuesday.”

Later in the week, however, the fire could expand rapidly when the temperature is expected to rise with different wind directions, Porter said.

The Gifford Fire’s burn site was close to where the Madre Fire charred more than 80,000 acres in San Luis Obispo County last month. That fire was declared fully contained on July 26, officials said.

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BILL KIMBERLIN

"Part of the mythology surrounding the goings-on at 2400 Fulton comes from the fact that the late ’60s counterculture scene — which would later spawn countless books and movies and be remembered as one of the biggest societal shifts in American history — was almost totally missed by the San Francisco media outlets at the time.

The lack of press coverage at the time is evidenced in there now only being two or three photos publicly available of the mansion painted black and gold,"

I would add that the lack of coverage would include Joan Didion and several other of the "new journalism" group that totally missed and still don't understand, "the biggest societal shift in American history".

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CRAIG YEARNS FOR NORCAL

Message to Postmodern America

Warmest spiritual greetings, Please appreciate the fact that I am in Washington, D.C. for the sixteenth time in support of the Peace Vigil located in Lafayette Park (24/7 365 since June of 1981). Catholic Charities gave me a bed and locker last September so that I could be here successfully again. My SSI appears to have timed out, so I am living on $488 per month SSA. The EBT card from California is not working, in spite of receiving emails indicating that the monthly amount is being received. And the federal housing voucher timed out, although none of the housing navigators can offer a rational reason. I would appreciate assistance in getting all of my benefits back! Also, I am willing to return to northern California, and could use help in having a place to go to upon arrival. Thank you very much.

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

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SAN FRANCISCO POLICE SEIZE THE UNLIKELY DRUG OF CHOICE OF GRATEFUL DEAD FANS

Vendors selling nitrous oxide, or 'ice cold fatties,' were ubiquitous outside the Golden Gate Park concerts

by Dan Gentile

When you walk out the exits of a major concert at Golden Gate Park onto 30th Avenue, usually you hear a chorus of vendors hawking steaming-hot bacon-wrapped hot dogs. But this weekend after the Dead & Company shows, the calls were something entirely different: “ice cold fatties.”

In Grateful Dead parlance, this means oversized balloons full of nitrous oxide, offering concertgoers a quick high — one balloon for $20, two for $30. The deflated colorful balloons could be seen littering the ground surrounding the festival. Dealers were so pervasive that on Saturday night, the San Francisco Police Department spotted a trailer carrying 100 metal tanks, which were presumed to be filled with nitrous oxide, and arrested a Philadelphia man on suspicion of possessing and distributing the drug.

Additionally, SFPD told SFGATE it issued three citations and booked one person into San Francisco County Jail.

Nitrous oxide, also known as whippets, cuts off oxygen to the brain, resulting in a euphoric high that lasts a few minutes. It’s primarily used as a sedative by physicians and dentists. Nitrous oxide isn’t illegal to purchase since it does have practical applications, such as adding foamy texture to whipped cream, but distributing it for recreational use is illegal. Around Haight Street, a Reddit user spotted ads offering delivery of 20-pound tanks.

The drug has a long association with the Grateful Dead. An oxygen mask used by band members as a delivery system for the drug was auctioned off on Sotheby’s in 2021. The squeal of a gas can be heard in the experimental song “Barbed Wire Whipping Party,” an outtake from the album “Aoxomoxoa,” and a black-and-white video shows the band sucking on a tank while in the studio. Jerry Garcia himself said the drug was the secret to unlocking one of the more psychedelic tracks on the album, “What’s Become of the Baby.”

“If you want to make ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ work, I’ll tell you what to do: get a tank of nitrous oxide. All of a sudden it works! When we were doing our mixes on that we had a tank. We were all there with hoses. All kinds of weird s—t was happening. It was totally mad, total lunacy,” Garcia said in a 1978 interview with biographer Blair Jackson.

It was also a popular drug of choice among the Dead’s fellow San Francisco counterculture contemporaries, with Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand reportedly consuming a tank a week in the 1960s, according to the Nation. A 1975 article in Rolling Stone described a vivid scene of a Berkeley home known as the East Bay Chemical Philosophy Symposium, which embraced nitrous under the mantra “Down with the Serious Sixties. These are the Silly Seventies.” A 2010 Village Voice investigation into the use of nitrous surrounding music festivals equated the drug to “hippie crack,” noting that at the time, sellers from Boston and Philadelphia took in over $300,000 per festival, with each tank capable of filling 350 balloons.

It is also having a resurgence in San Francisco, with handheld canisters being sold in head shops and found littered around area high schools, according to an investigation by the San Francisco Standard.

Vendors outside concerts are often known to pick up used balloons off the ground, so experienced fans will often bring their own, with one vendor overheard during the weekend saying that “the same balloon could have been used by 20 people over 13 states.”

As for the Golden Gate park shows, balloon providers were in high supply, with purveyors seemingly every 5 yards yelping their signature call for “ice cold fatties!” By Sunday, however, the nitrous sellers had fallen into the shadows of the park. But at the end of Shakedown Street, the sound of a balloon filling with air could still be heard from the brush.

(SFGate.com)

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I WENT TO THE HOSPITAL a few months ago because I thought I broke my arm. First they told me that the x-ray wasn’t covered by my health insurance. Then they told me that even if it was, they didn’t have a radiologist on staff at the time. What kind of raggedy ass health insurance coverage doesn’t cover x-rays? And why doesn’t the hospital have a radiologist on dayshift reading x-rays? I’m not messing with it anymore. I’m not going to the doctor anymore. From now on if I get hurt, I’m going to the vet! Vets are better than doctors on so many levels. First, vets never refer you to another vet. Doctors are specialized. They have a limited scope of expertise. Doctors will say, ‘I do internal medicine,’ or ‘I fix bones,’ or ‘I only work ear-nose and throat.’ Vets don’t give a shit what species you are! Anything that comes in the door, they’ll take it. They don’t care if it’s a pitbull, or a kitten, or a goldfish – lay that shit on the table. I’ll fix it! I don’t care. You got a sick parakeet, I’m ready to go. I do birds. I don’t care. And vets always give you options. Vets say, ‘Look, this surgery is going to be very expensive and it’s very complicated. I’m not sure if it’s going to work. If you want, I could just kill you.’ That’s always on the table. ‘We got a van out back, I’ll put you to sleep and we’ll just truck you off to wherever you want to go. It’ll cost 100 bucks. No grief for the family. We’ll take care of this shit right now.’ I’m not saying vets are the best option. I’m just saying I like knowing the vet option is available.

— Alonzo Bodden

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GIANTS’ JUSTIN VERLANDER GETS A NO DECISION as Pirates score 2 in 9th

by Susan Slusser

PITTSBURGH — Justin Verlander rediscovered his youth Monday night at PNC Park, pitching like he was in the prime of his sure-fire Hall of Fame career.

In his best outing by far for the San Francisco Giants, Verlander allowed one run, and that unearned. He struck out three — including getting Joey Bart looking at, essentially, a 98 mph fastball to end the fifth. And still, Verlander did not get a W, such is his fate with the Giants.

He went six innings and was in line to win his second consecutive decision when the Giants did their ultimate deny-Verlander act, with new closer Randy Rodriguez walking one and hitting another batter in the ninth before Bart tied it up with a base hit against his former team. Isaiah Kiner-Falefa’s tapper to first ended it, a 5-4 walkoff win for the Pirates when the Giants were unable to get the safe call at home overturned.

Verlander has made 10 starts this season in which he’s worked at least five innings and allowed no more than two runs. San Francisco is 1-9 in those games.

“I’m not shying away from it — everybody knows where I’m at wins-wise,” said Verlander, who’s 37 away from 300 for his career. “I’d like to get some, you know, but at the same time, you just control what you can control. It’s a s----- run in a long career, and nothing I can do about it. You just try to pitch better consistently and keep us in ball games and give us a chance to win, give myself a chance to win, and do that more times than not and see where things end up.”

Verlander’s fastball has averaged 94.1 mph this season, and he hadn’t hit 98 mph this season before Monday, but he threw Bart one 98.3 mph fastball, his hardest pitch since Game 1 of the 2022 ALCS. The one he struck Bart out on was 97.9, a velocity he hadn’t recorded since his second start on April 9.

“I was just talking to IKF and I was like, ‘I really wouldn’t want to see that guy in his prime,’” Bart said. “He’s got a different fastball. He made some really good pitches against a lot of us, but especially against me. Facing a guy like that, you just hope you’re ready for one mistake, and if you don’t capitalize you probably won’t get another one.”

The oldest player in U.S. pro sports, at 42, Verlander appeared as if he felt a dozen years younger, too. In the sixth, he dove to his right for Spence Horwitz’s tapper. He missed, amusing the infield; third baseman Matt Chapman tipped his cap at the attempt before giggling in his glove with shortstop Willy Adames as Verlander smiled and assured them he was fine.

“That was fun, all those guys came out there, and I’m just like, ‘Hey, we don’t need to call an ambulance here, I’m OK,’” he said “Everybody’s just kind of like looking at me, like, wide eyed. I’m all right, not a little fragile egg, I can move around on the mound. I am a fielder, after all.”

Verlander’s velocity wasn’t the only strong aspect of his night; his curveball was the best it’s been, catcher Patrick Bailey said. Verlander entered the game using the pitch about 14% of the time and upped it to 23% Monday.

Helping things along are some mechanical changes he’s made lately, including moving his glove position up near his neck and shifting to the left on the rubber. The results: He’s allowed one earned run over his past three starts and 16 innings. “The past few are the best I’ve felt by far,” Verlander said.

Run support remains elusive for Verlander, with just 33 runs of backing in his 18 starts entering Monday, the fewest in the majors among pitchers with that many starts. Monday, his teammates pasted two runs on the board right away, with Dom Smith knocking an RBI single and Casey Schmitt drawing a bases-loaded walk from Johan Oviedo, making his first start since 2023 after recovering from elbow surgery. Still, the Giants left the bases loaded when Jung Hoo Lee and Bailey struck out to end the inning.

“You have to cash in on those opportunities,” manager Bob Melvin said. “There were chances to add on.”

The Giants took their walks Monday, drawing five, including two to open the fifth. With two outs, Lee tripled to right center to send in both. He was stranded at third when Bailey struck out.

Little-used Carson Seymour, pitching in only his fourth game since July 2, had a 1-2-3, 12-pitch sixth but walked Liover Peguero and gave up a homer by Jack Suwinski in the seventh.

Rodriguez came in in the eighth for a four-out save, and he was ahead of every batter in the ninth but he walked leadoff man Andrew McCutchen in the ninth and with one out, hit Suwinski before Bart hit a 1-2 slider to left center off his former Triple-A teammate.

“You know how the ninth inning is — it gets weird, especially when you walk the first guy — it seems like there’s a little magic building,” Bart said. “I think we just kind of carried that throughout the inning and just kept extending at-bats.

“Randy’s been really, really good. Obviously, it’s really cool to see him come into himself, and you know he doesn’t give up a whole lot of runs, so you’ve just got to fight and hope something falls. I knew he was going to bring his best stuff and I was just trying to compete.”

“He’d taken pretty good swings at several pitches, and finally found one that he could put in play,” Melvin said, adding that Rodriguez “just couldn’t finish him off. And that’s something Randy is as good as anybody doing normally.”

The final play was a close one, with Suwinski just getting in under the tag.

“Against guys that strike everybody out, you’ve just got to put the ball in play,” Bart said, “Those guys are in those positions in the ninth inning for a reason, because they slam the door, but if he puts the ball on the ground, he’s going to be out or safe or whatever it is — that’s all you can do against a guy with that kind of stuff.”

(sfchronicle.com)

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THE FIRST WRITING I ever did was sportswriting for the Daily Tar Heel. I had these tough, old, hard-bitten editors from the Atlanta Constitution giving me what-for. I had a teacher, Skipper Coffin. He’d tell us, ‘When I say, ‘Get the story,’ I mean who, what, where, when, why and how — in that order.’ After the war there were two guys for every journalism job — the one who had it before the war and the one who took it during the war. Then there was me. The third guy.

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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THE BEAUTIFUL ONES

by Jon Day

Around a year ago a rat died in my kitchen. The first thing I noticed was the cloud of bluebottles flying drunkenly against the window. Then there was the smell, which was fetid and slightly sweet. It took me a while to find the source, and when I eventually pulled up the floorboards there was nothing left of the rat but a shriveled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark. I donned washing-up gloves, picked it up by the tail and put it in the bin. I blocked all the holes I could see and hoped that would be the end of the matter.

But for months afterwards I was haunted by thoughts of rats. At night, I imagined I could hear the patter of their feet beneath the floor.

No one seems to know the origin of the claim that you're never more than six feet away from a rat. It persists because it feels true. (According to one estimate, the actual average figure in the UK is 164 feet.) One possible source is ‘The Rat Problem’ (1909) by W.R. Boelter, a book that is part natural history, part anti-rat screed. Boelter estimated that there were 40 million rats living in the UK — one for every acre of arable land, and roughly equal to the human population at the time. His great enemy was Rattus norvegicus, the Norwegian or brown rat, which was believed to have arrived in Britain on Scandinavian trading ships in the 18th century.

In fact, Rattus norvegicus probably came to Europe from northern China. Its ferocity and adaptability meant that it soon displaced its smaller and more timid cousin Rattus rattus, the black or house rat. (There has always been a degree of xenophobia in the naming of rats: in Wales, Boelter reports, the black rat is called “LLyodun Ffrancon,” the French mouse; the French, for their part, call it the “English rat.”)

For Boelter, rats were a scourge with no redeeming features. They spread disease, ate crops and caused electrical fires with their gnawing. He calculated that they cost farmers $2 million a day. Even if rats were eradicated from the country, he warned, their fecundity is “known to be so enormous that, unless such preventative measures are of permanent character, the progeny of rats imported on shipboard or having come over the border, would soon rise to such a number as to constitute a new plague.”

Rats are unnerving in part because of their elusiveness, which makes the rat in the head seem more real than the rat in the sewer. Those who keep them as pets know them to be clean, gregarious creatures with a highly developed social life, but for most of us rats inspire only revulsion. This might be one reason they have become such popular subjects for scientific experiments, it being easier to sacrifice animals to the pursuit of knowledge if you're not particularly fond of them in the first place.

The first true lab rats were an albino strain of Rattus norvegicus developed in 1915 at the Wistar Institute, a biomedical research center in Philadelphia. Rats had already been used for some time to teach dissection in European medical schools, and Henry Donaldson, a neurologist at the Wistar Institute who had been searching for an animal for his own experiments, thought Rattus norvegicus might be suitable. In 1909 Donaldson's colleague Helen King began to breed rats, selecting offspring for their docility and fertility. After six years, 28 generations and tens of thousands of rats, King had bred what she considered the “perfect specimen”: a stable strain that, due to intensive inbreeding, amounted to what Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden in ‘Rat City’ call “a race of incest clones.” With the development of the Wistar, the lab rat became a branded product. According to ‘The Rat: Reference Tables and Data for the Albino Rat and the Norway Rat (1915),’ a guide by Donaldson and King, the Wistar rat was “clean, gentle, easily kept and bred, and not expensive to maintain.” Its lifespan was about three years, and it reached sexual maturity in three months. It bred all year round, producing relatively large litters (between six and twelve pups). The Wistar rat's homogeneity, Donaldson hoped, would ensure that the results of experiments conducted in different laboratories at different times could be more objectively compared. It was the biological equivalent of standardized units in physics, like the kilogram prototype or the meter des archives.

Several million Wistar rats have died for science since Donaldson and King published their guide, and descendants of that first colony are still used in experiments today. (When I tried to buy one, from a lab which said that their longevity and “high rate of spontaneous tumors” made them “an ideal choice for aging studies,” I was told I would need a permit from the Home Office.)

More specialized strains have also been bred: the spontaneously hypertensive rat develops high blood pressure at six weeks old, while the Royal College of Surgeons rat suffers from congenital retinal degeneration. There are chronically obese rats, rats doomed to develop early onset Alzheimer's, even rats that are thought to display behavior associated with anxiety and depression.

Yet a study in 2007 found that testing drugs on rats produces reliable results — in terms of their efficacy for humans — no more than half the time. Other studies have shown that, at least when assessing the potential toxicity of new drugs in humans, rats may be worse than useless. One analysis found that “results from tests on animals (specifically rat, mouse and rabbit models) are highly inconsistent predictors of toxic responses … little better than what would result merely by chance — or tossing a coin.” Relying on rodent models to draw conclusions about human behavior seems even less sound. How might one recognize depression in a mouse? Who's to say how an autistic rat will behave?

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I DON'T THINK THE INTERNET has hit the “average American” yet, but when it does, I should think the 10-minute attention span will probably still obtain because back of it is the refusal of the American corporate ruling class to educate the people at large. How can you find out what you don’t know — nearly everything as far as history and foreign countries go — if you have no idea of what it is you don’t know?

— Gore Vidal

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LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

Public Schools Try to Sell Themselves as More Students Use Vouchers

Trump’s Demand to Trading Partners: Pledge Money or Get Higher Tariffs

Trump Administration Will Reinstall Confederate Statue in Washington

A Nuclear Reactor on the Moon? Come Again?

Chemical Makers to Pay N.J. $875 Million to Settle ‘Forever Chemicals’ Claims

James Leprino, ‘Willy Wonka of Cheese’ Who Revolutionized Pizza, Dies at 87

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ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I don't think much changes as long as central banks like The Fed are allowed to exist. Its monetary policy is at the root of every single problem. Within a couple short years it managed to wipe out the dream of home ownership & financial security for younger generations while facilitating the greatest transfer of wealth in history. Half our nation has lost or is losing all hope of ever getting ahead because of inflation. When people have nothing to lose, they're gonna lose it as the veil is lifted on all these 'conspiracy theories' like RussiaGate that keep coming true. If govt won't do anything, some people will … hence the un-alived healthcare CEO last year, and the recent NYC murders that included a Blackstone exec who was in charge of their core/real estate division.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES DOES NOT FEAR TRUMP; But Bret Stephens Is Another Matter

by Ralph Nader

After the long-time skittish New York Times published a lengthy essay by the renowned genocide scholar, Prof. Omer Bartov of Brown University titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar, I Know It When I see It,” the Palestinian-hater, Times columnist Bret Stephens immediately jumped into the Netanyahu style rebuttal mode. His column was titled “No, Israel is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.” His cruel and specious assertion, contradicted by many genocide scholars, was that if the Israeli regime was truly genocidal, they would have committed “hundreds of thousands of deaths” in Gaza instead of the mere 60,000 deaths reported by the Hamas run Health Ministry.

Get real, Mr. Stephens, the Israeli military has destroyed the lives of at least one out of four Palestinians there, or about half a million at least, from the daily bombing since October 7, 2023, of civilians and their infrastructure. Saturation aerial and artillery bombardments of 2.3 million defenseless Palestinians, also under constant sniper fire, crammed into an area the geographic size of Philadelphia. (See The Lancet, “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential”, my column “The Vast Gaza Death Undercount – Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures” and my article in the August/September 2024 Capitol Hill Citizen). American doctors back from Gaza have repeatedly observed that almost all the survivors are sick, injured or dying.

Seizing on the Hamas regime’s self interest in a low death count, to not arouse further the ire of the residents of Gaza against their lack of bomb shelters and other protections, Stephens constructs the usual fictions, reflecting AIPAC and Netanyahu’s regime, that Israel does not “deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians.” [Former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban wrote of Israel under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel “is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.”] Look at the reports by Times journalists from the area, see the pictures of the mass murder, the slaughter of babies, children, mothers, and fathers that comprise Netanyahu’s Palestinian Holocaust.

Listen to the Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s October 9, 2023, enforced declaration that Israeli demolition of Gaza would include “…no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

And so indeed has the Israeli military targeted innocent families, journalists, and UNRWA relief staff. To quote Professor Bartov, “the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure—government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks…” Bartov grew up in Israel, served four years in the Israeli army, and knows the situation there in great detail.

Bret Stephens brings an unprecedented power over the editorial Board at the Times because he is seen as the voice of the Israeli government-can-do-no-wrong domestic lobby, inside the Times who is always ready to frivolously accuse anybody at the paper of antisemitism to shut them up or water down their content.

As Will Solomon reported July 25, 2025 in Counterpunch, Stephens is the “minder” of what is unacceptable criticism of the Israeli regime and has succeeded significantly in his censorship. If you wonder for example why it took the Times editorial board so long to condemn the Israeli regime’s starvation of Gazans, especially the most vulnerable infants and children ( See July 31st editorial and the New York Times July 27, 2025 opinion piece “The World Must See Gaza’s Starvation” by Mohammed Mansour), it is likely the climate of fear or weariness generated by Stephens.

Stephens is given remarkable latitude by the Times editors. His falsifications and antisemitic rage against Palestinian semites (see, “The Other Anti-Semitism” by Jim Zogby) escape his editors’ pen. He is given unusual space, including a recently concluded weekly column with Gail Collins, which replaced valuable editorial space, with repartees that had become shop-worn over the years. He also is given special writing projects.

Consider his background. A former hard-line editor of the Jerusalem Post, then for years a war-mongering, columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Especially vicious against Palestinians and their supporters, Stephens came to the Times for a singular reason. The Times wanted a right-winger who did not like the new president, Donald Trump. What the Times got was a cunning censor of their journalistic integrity and editorial respect for the regular devastating reports the Times was getting from their own journalists operating out of Jerusalem. They were not allowed into Gaza to report independently on what was being done with U.S. tax dollars and the unconditional support from President Joe Biden and now Trump.

Imagine, for example, the Times not writing an editorial following the Israeli booby-trapping of thousands of pagers in Lebanon. This was called a clear war crime by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

While the Times has published op-eds critical of Israeli aggressions, it has maintained a list of words and phrases that could not be used in its reporting, such as “genocide.” It has avoided doing features on the many Israeli human rights groups sharply taking Netanyahu to task, or groups in the U.S., such as the very active Veterans for Peace with 100 chapters around the U.S. By contrast the Times devoted extensive space to repeated false propaganda by the Israeli regime.

Even coverage of the omnipresent Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now requires dramatic non-violent civil disobedience, as with the October 24, 2023 sit-in at Grand Central Station, to get into the Times pages.

Throughout the months since October 7th, and the mysterious total collapse of the multi-tiered Israeli border security apparatus on the Gaza border, still denied an official investigation by its perpetrators, the defiant presence of Stephens persists, though it is being countered by the sickening pictures of skeletal, starving Palestinian infants. (A survey last year by a British civic association had 46% of Palestinian children wanting to die and 97% expecting to be killed.)

Credit Stephens with covering his self-designated, intimidating role of policing what should not be appearing by staff in the Times’ editorial pages. In his column with Collins, he used humor and praise of Times reports and book reviews not connected with the Israeli domination of the Middle East. Recognizing a no-win situation for herself, Gail Collins agreed not to raise the Israeli/Palestine issue in any of the hundreds of columns she wrote with Stephens, who is disliked by many at the Times.

Stephens is immovable. Over a year ago, he shockingly wrote that the Israeli military is not using enough force on the Palestinians. He refuses to disavow the most racist, vicious descriptions of Palestinians over the years by high Israeli government officials. He refuses to support opening Gaza to foreign journalists, including Israeli journalists. He even declines to support the airlifting of amputated and horribly burned Palestinian children to ready and able hospitals in the U.S.

The New York Times does not fear Donald Trump. But it does fear or is very wary of the smiling, internal censorious presence of this AIPAC clone and the attention he demands because of the forces he represents. The editorial board and Times management need to reject this affront to the freedom of its journalists and the paper’s institution’s integrity.

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SUSPICIOUS MINDS

by James Kunstler

"It was a coup, and I'm using that term literally … One egregious felony after another." — Stephen Miller

America is tired of being driven insane, of having absurdities crammed into our collective consciousness. Reality is an agreement about what is going on in the world. That act of faith requires such an agreement be based on what is demonstrably true. Without it, society dissolves into chaos and failure.

The RussiaGate psychodrama is about an agreement based on lies. It started with Hillary Clinton’s desperate ploy to save her foundering 2016 election campaign. Her emails somehow got sent to Wikileaks, a radical news org dedicated to revealing government secrets, implicating misconduct. It was easy to declare the Russians did it, by hacking — when it was much more likely, in fact, proven by a forensic audit, that a Clinton campaign insider downloaded the info on a thumb drive, perhaps one Seth Rich, found murdered on a DC sidewalk soon thereafter.

Every lie after that met the kind of skepticism among the public that generates heat, controversy, scandal, and fire. Hillary managed to enlist President Barack Obama and his executive agencies into her project, and the party apparatus with it, because the Clinton Victory Fund had paid the DNC’s debts and took over its management. Soon, the Russia collusion project grew into a gigantic scaffold of flaming lies. The big newspapers and the TV news networks bought the story, and came along for the ride. They were all sure Hillary would win the 2016 election. All the heat and fire would get flushed away. The polls all said so. The agencies and the parties would pick up and go on as before, run the show, make careers, get wealthy, be important!

They miscalculated. They lost. But they decided to keep building the scaffold of lies in order to protect themselves from the danger it represented — because they lived in that scaffold, it was the party’s house. And the scaffold of lies needed massive fortification. The house that the party lived in had to be protected at all costs, or they would all be cast out, homeless, a whole party on street, lost, broke, ruined, dying, like the pitiful tweakers bent over out on Kensington Avenue in Philly, in every Democrat-run city, really.

And so, they undermined the winner of the election at every turn, worked furiously to drive him from office, made a plague happen, subverted the 2020 election, and spent four years under a fake president jamming absurdities into the public arena, turning it into a freak show, one drag-queen story hour after another, from seas to shining sea. All to defeat the return of a public consensus about reality based on what is demonstrably true — starting with the fact that there are men and there are women, and that the primary interaction between them keeps society going by producing offspring.

This enormous, drawn-out insurrection, composed of serial felony crimes, amounts to the greatest insult against the republic — the res publica, in Latin, the public thing — in the nation’s history. And now it is coming apart as an overwhelming majority of citizens, including now many Democrats, can’t avoid discovering what has happened in the country. Because lies are weak and the truth is sturdy and eventually truth prevails, even after an arduous struggle.

The old news media complex, the networks and the papers, are not reporting the recent disclosures by the Directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intel. What will it take to get their attention? Arrests and perp-walks of formerly important officials? And then, do they acknowledge and atone for their disgraceful participation in the events? Or pretend they couldn’t figure any of it out for years and years? Poor us, we didn’t know! Suddenly, it looks like many of these “legacy” news outfits are going out-of-business. They’re throwing their performers over the side like sinking ships casting off so much useless ballast.

You knew this was coming, right? Now, here you are: the hour that consequence finally returns from its wanderings in a wilderness of institutional failure. There’s no evading it anymore. The scaffold of lies has collapsed, and trying to add additional lies will amount to throwing a few twigs on a heap of smoldering wreckage.

The institutions themselves are under new management, and they show every sign of returning to regular operation, doing what they were designed to do in the first place: deliver a truthful account of what has happened and determine a just consequence for the people who made it happen. It’s going to happen, and then we can rebuild a coherent public consensus about what is really real, who we really are, and where we go from here.

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ON LINE COMMENT

"You knew this was coming, right? Now, here you are: the hour that consequence finally returns from its wanderings in a wilderness of institutional failure. There’s no evading it anymore. The scaffold of lies has collapsed, and trying to add additional lies will amount to throwing a few twigs on a heap of smoldering wreckage."

With respect, I don't quite see this happening - at least as of yet. What I see is a news media that is by and large ignoring what is happening before their very eyes. When they do speak of it, it is to parrot what Comey, Brennan, Clapper have said - that they did nothing wrong and that Trump is engaging in "retribution" against his enemies vis-a-vis the DOJ. For all intents and purposes, that they are the victims of an out of control president who is busy settling scores. I've yet to see an honest, 'Road to Damascus' moment…not even the slightest flicker of one.

This suggests to me that the whole rotten melange of traitors and their media propagandists will go down fighting. One would hope that a spark of wisdom and common-sense would be firing off in the synapses of their collective brains, but they're far too invested in the "big lie" that has kept their garbage barge afloat all these years.

It seems that all we can do is watch as this horror show unfolds…one indictment at a time - one conviction at a time. At the end of the day we may even get to enjoy the sight of former heads of agencies, perhaps even a chief executive, in orange jumpsuits working alongside other inmates in the laundry shop at a medium security prison. I'm patient.

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ONE of the reasons Israel’s supporters love to hurl antisemitism accusations at its critics is because it’s a claim that can be made without any evidence whatsoever. It’s not an accusation based on facts, it’s an assertion about someone’s private thoughts and feelings, which are invisible. Support for Israel doesn’t lend itself to arguments based on facts, logic and morality, so they rely heavily on aggressive claims about what’s happening inside other people’s heads which cannot be proved or disproved.

It’s entirely unfalsifiable. I cannot prove that my opposition to an active genocide is not in fact due to an obsessive hatred of a small Abrahamic religion. I cannot unscrew the top of my head and show everyone that I actually just think it’s bad to rain military explosives on top of a giant concentration camp full of children, and am not in fact motivated by a strange medieval urge to persecute Jewish people. So an Israel supporter can freely hurl accusations about what’s going on in my head that I am powerless to disprove.

It’s been a fairly effective weapon over the years. Campus protests have been stomped out, freedom of expression has been crushed, entire political campaigns have been killed dead, all because it’s been normalized to make evidence-free claims about someone’s private thoughts and feelings toward Jews if they suggest that Palestinians deserve human rights.

— Caitlin Johnstone

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MEMO OF THE WEEK

Ending Crime And Disorder On America’s Streets

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe. The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded. The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both. Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes. An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions. The Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.

Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order. Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens. My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.

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