Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 8/13/2025

YESTERDAY'S HIGHS: Covelo 104°, Ukiah 100°, Laytonville 99°, Yorkville 95°, Boonville 87°, Fort Bragg 64°, Point Arena 60°

HOT AND DRY weather will continue to slowly ease through midweek with shallow marine air along the shore. Gusty northwest wind will accompany building marine influence late in the week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Another foggy 54F this Wednesday morning on the coast. Lots of fog still out there but will we have mostly clear skies by the weekend? Maybe.

AFTER WEEKS OF SITE PREPARATION (and after years of overall project planning and financing), the specially designed and built temporary bridge for the Lambert Lane Bridge replacement project arrived in Boonville Tuesday.

Installation of the custom one-lane temporary bridge is a project in itself since it has to span an awkward curve in Robinson Creek, not just the width of the creek, with no intermediate supports. The replacement bridge also has to be installed in very close quarters since the contractor was denied access to neighboring property and a couple of other possible temporary crossing points.

In preparation for installation, the bridge project contractor built a runway with a special launching platform where the bridge will be slowly scooted across the S-curve in Robinson Creek over a period of days, supported by a crane, a large counterbalance, and upside-down rollers until it reaches another specially built platform on the other side.

The temporary bridge was built and is being installed by a Central Valley engineering subcontractor (Arco?) to fit this specific span. The plan is for the temporary bridge to be in place until the fall while the new two-lane replacement bridge is built and installed where the old Bailey Bridge is now. Then the temporary bridge will have to be removed (another project by itself considering the tight space) and presumably returned to the County for, perhaps, another project/bridge washout.

So far we’ve been impressed by the contractor and subcontractor crews as they navigate the limited space available while taking a challenging number of external factors into account.

(Mark Scaramella)

NEW UKIAH CITY STAFFER LEADING TRASH, GRAFFITI CLEANUPS

by Justine Frederiksen

The city of Ukiah’s recently hired Volunteer Coordinator Ed Donovan is hitting the ground running, not only organizing multiple events in recent weeks to help rid the city of both trash and graffiti, but rolling up his sleeves to do much of the cleanup work himself.

During the most recent of several weekend cleanups, Donovan was picking up trash Saturday underneath the North Orchard Avenue Bridge.

“From my perspective, it’s an important part of community morale to see the city, and the people who live in it, caring and trying to make things better, and that’s why I wanted to be a part of it,” said Donovan, who was hired to fill a part-time, temporary position approved earlier this year by the Ukiah City Council.

In July, Donovan and volunteers cleaned up along the Rail Trail, and previously “we (cleaned up) Oak Manor Park, then in and along Gibson Creek up to Orchard Avenue, and the stretch of creek along the sports complex. (Also), we covered graffiti and picked up trash from Gobbi Street to Talmage Road along the Rail Trail.”

Before the position was approved, Community Services Director Neil Davis described

the proposed Volunteer Coordinator to the City Council as someone who would ideally work with “the recreation team to kind of encourage volunteerism.” In terms of what kinds of cleanups people will undertake, Davis said people should always “work within their limits,” and part of the coordinator’s job will be determining those limits and helping people stay within them, anticipating that much of the work undertaken will not involve “heavy equipment, or even equipment at all, but primarily involving garbage removal, creek cleanups and graffiti abatement.”

“And just to be clear, the Volunteer Coordinator is not just (focused) on parks,” noted City Manager Sage Sangiacomo. “It is about putting a concerted effort forward to deal with cleanup and abatement activities throughout the entire city, including public right of ways, creeks and other areas.”

When asked how much money is available in the Solid Waste Abatement Fund that staff suggested using to pay for the new position, Davis said “the short answer for me is that we know that we bring in a little over $5,000 a month, and that it is scheduled to increase a little bit each year. So the budget that we have identified for the Volunteer Coordinator position, and the work that is done by that group, is less than $5,000 a month.”

In his staff report prepared for the City Council, Davis wrote that “litter, graffiti, and other forms of vandalism are negatively affecting our creeks, waterways, parks and public facilities.

These issues harm the environment, diminish public spaces, and call for a coordinated effort to keep our communities clean and safe.”

And since “City Parks and Streets crews spend a considerable amount of time cleaning encampments, refuse, and graffiti from our parks, creeks, and public spaces (while occasionally getting assisted by) unorganized groups of volunteers,” Davis explains that the “Community Services team hopes to find a way to tap into the unorganized and relatively dormant volunteerism in our community, (proposing) to tap into this resource by using Solid Waste Abatement funds to hire a part-time, temporary Volunteer Coordinator to organize volunteers to improve the quality and cleanliness of our parks and public spaces.”

To join the cleanups or get more information, contact Donovan at [email protected]

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

COAST HOSPITAL UPGRADE

The Mendocino Coast Health Care District (MCHCD) has zeroed in on a more cost-conscious option for expanding and upgrading its Emergency Department, while also laying the groundwork for much-needed surgical and sterilization upgrades, according to an Aug. 7 workshop press release.

The board reviewed four major capital improvement scenarios focused on the Emergency Department (ED), Surgical Department, and seismic safety for the Fort Bragg hospital campus. Two ED options were on the table, both adding 18 exam rooms. The pricier, larger-scale plan (Option 1) came in at an estimated $55.8 million. But the board favored Option 2, which would cost roughly $53.5 million, take up slightly less space, and allow for phased construction without shutting down the ED. The freed-up space could later house services like labs, imaging, or infusion therapy.

Plans for the Surgical Department call for about 15,000 square feet of combined new construction and renovations, adding two operating rooms, 15 pre-op and recovery bays, and endoscopy rooms. That work carries a $61.8 million price tag. Alongside it, the district wants to fast-track a replacement for its outdated sterilization unit (Central Sterile Services), possibly by building a new one next to the surgical area and reusing the old space for offices and lockers.

A more ambitious idea — building a new 27,300-square-foot standalone facility to house both the ED and surgical services — was dismissed as financially unrealistic, with a $108 million cost estimate.

The district is working with an estimated $60–70 million in available and potential funding, including up to $50 million in possible bond financing. Seismic upgrades, estimated at $18 million in 2024, remain a legal requirement under California’s SB 1953 and will be integrated into modernization work where possible.

Next steps include producing a high-level cost plan for the sterilization and surgical upgrades in the coming weeks, with the board set to refine the financial strategy at its Aug. 28 meeting.

I HOPE WE CHOOSE WISELY

Editor,

When we first interviewed Neil Cervenka for Chief of Police, I’ll be honest — I was the only one in the room who didn’t want to hire him. My instinct told me we needed a “hammer” — someone who could come in hard, quickly impose discipline, and reshape the department in a matter of months.

Then Interim Chief Naulty pulled me aside. He said, “I know what you’re saying, and you’re correct — the other candidate would be the hammer you’re looking for. He’d take six months to reshape the department. But then what? Those other programs you want to build — homeless services, treatment, mental health help — he won’t touch them. Neil will take longer — maybe a year — to change the department. But those programs? He’ll run with them.”

That conversation changed my mind. I gave Neil my full support — and I was right to do so. He ran with those programs, and in doing so, gained local, state, and even national attention for Fort Bragg’s efforts.

A few months after Neil was hired, we had a shooting in the south end of town. Not long after, I happened to drive by the scene and saw the Chief in the field with several officers, personally training them on crime scene work. It was a reminder that leadership isn’t just about policy — it’s about showing up.

Were there problems in the Police Department? Absolutely. There always are. There were long before Neil got here, and there will be after he’s gone. Most of the challenges he faced in his first two years were holdovers from a previous chief who never truly settled into Fort Bragg. For me, the question was always: how did the Chief handle the issues when they landed on his desk?

Every time there was a problem, I’d get briefed, listen, and end with the same thing: “I’m sorry this happened and that you have to deal with it — but I’m also glad it’s your problem and you’re the one dealing with it.”

Did we always agree? No. Who does? What mattered was how the disagreements were handled — with mutual respect and a lot of listening. Neil’s tenure proved something important: public safety isn’t just about cracking down — it’s about building up. It’s about working across agencies, tackling root causes, and having a Chief who can take the long road to create lasting change.

The top spot always gets the criticism — rightly so, I guess. That’s just the way things work. Neil will take his like a pro. But now, Fort Bragg is set to get a new chief. Outside of an immediate promotion from within, a realistic process will take at least six months to find someone, and perhaps a couple more to get a contract done.

You know the old adage: careful what you wish for? Some are about to find out. My hope is the city will find an amazing chief who will continue to build on the department, retain good officers, keep morale high, and see value in the programs already in place. But the truth is, the opposite could very well happen and it could happen in the Police Department.

For the sake of Fort Bragg, I hope we choose wisely.

— Bernie Norvell, 4th District Supervisor

LIZ HAAPANEN:

Today a 92-year old woman ran into my car. Had I not sped up when I realized she didn’t see me, she would have hit me directly on the driver’s side door. I got out and said to her, “You HIT me!” She said, “You hit me.” Before we were done, we were almost friends, but I do think this suggests she won’t be driving much longer. She couldn’t even hear my horn blaring. Then at the blue autobody shop, a not-so-pleasant woman took a ridiculous amount of photos of all angles of my car, the interior as well, before she even bothered to get a couple of shots of the damage. What a weird day 8/11/25 has been.

AV BREWING: THE LAST FISH ROCK ROAD RACE

Fish Rock Race Weekend Music, Food, and Beer at Anderson Valley Brewing!

This weekend is the last ever Fish Rock Road Race with two days of live music, incredible food, and plenty of cold AVBC beer. You don’t have to be riding to join the fun. The party’s open to everyone!

Come raise a glass with us to the bicycle racers, this crazy road you could only find in Boonville, and the end of an era. No cover, all ages welcome.

www.avbc.com

A PERFECT BIRTHDAY

by Terry Sites

August 9th is famous for a number of reasons, including the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the beginning of construction on the Leaning Tower of Pisa (it took 200 years to finish!) and it is National Rice Pudding Day. In addition to these three things in 1950 it was my birthday. With inland Mendocino County sweltering in temperatures ranging from the 90s to the 100s, a Mendocino Coast celebration seemed like the logical way to go.

Happily the owners of Luna Trattoria at 955 Ukiah Street in the town of Mendocino had extended an invitation to sample their northern Italian cuisine. We took them up on it. Having interviewed Massimo Melani and Marissa Ray for Word-Of-Mouth Magazine for the summer 2025 issue #37, I knew quite a bit about their restaurant in advance.

The restaurant has a whimsical feel with many decorator touches both Italian and California casual.

All of the signage is fun to read, including “good vibes only,” “stay positive”, and “we’re all quite mad here – you’ll fit right in.” This restaurant is popular so best to make a reservation. Check out their website for details. Entering the restaurant is a bit like falling down a rabbit hole. The building is not visible from the street, but an Italian flag and archway with a sign meet the sidewalk. You follow a gravel and wooden path passing by the kitchen before you hit the front door. We knew we were in for a happy evening when we heard someone singing in the kitchen.

Who doesn’t like Italian? I was really looking forward to actually eating their food. Massimo’s exhortation to “Come to the Trattoria for the Italian experience without the passport” turned out to be apt. Although neither of them were on hand at our early reservation time (5:30) our server was quite enthusiastic with his Italian accent and expressive hand gestures. Massimo has an Italian movie star quality, and his server well mirrored his boss’s charm. The manager was equally on point as she greeted us warmly and encouraged us to relax and enjoy a special birthday meal. They presented us with menus, but we preferred to ask the kitchen to serve us what they thought we might like. In short order two appetizers appeared. The stuffed crimini mushrooms were savory and succulent. A plate of small bars with golden breadcrumbs and oozing with cheese satisfied our initial hunger. We were sipping Italian Pinot Grigio which offset the richness of both dishes.

For our entrée, my husband was served Spaghetti Carbonara, apparently a customer favorite. The pork bits were smoky and caramelized. I had little green pillows of ravioli, packed with a smooth and delicious paste. The sauce on the ravioli tasted like freshly smashed sweet summer tomatoes fresh from the garden. The very fresh tomatoes balanced out the richness of the ravioli. For dessert they had us choose and we picked “Italian style” crème brûlée. Fresh fruits surrounded the pudding with its traditional crunchy caramel topping. One beautiful strawberry in the middle held a lit birthday candle – what more could I have asked for?

A glass of Ramazzotti zinfandel with a very velvety mouth feel complemented the brûlée. The entire meal was a winner.

Adding to our enjoyment was a soundtrack that featured favorites like the Girl From Ipanema, romantic and soft. We ate inside with a good view to the garden outside. The twinkling lights, striped umbrellas and bright blooming zinnias were pretty magical. I know Marissa takes special delight in her garden and the mood it sets for her diners. For those considering a visit to Luna I counted 15 different varieties of pasta with some special “homemade from Romagna,” Massimo’s home. Steak and chicken dishes for meat lovers, and salads for veggie lovers are also on offer.

This restaurant is popular so it’s best to make a reservation. Prices are in the mid range, especially considering the ambiance and quality. Check out their website for details. If you have a special occasion coming up this just might be that special someplace that you’ve been looking for.

Lunatrattoria.com

(707) 962-3093

DA DAVID EYSTER:

Fun picture sent to DA Eyster today. Picture is circa 1975 of one of Mendo DA’s distant cousins in Ohio. He was elected and later became a judge.

BREATH WORK

Lately, I wonder, what became of my family after 29 years. I want to touch and touch again each of us.

In the morning while making her coffee, my wife listens to podcasts about “trauma-bonded toxic marriages”. (We are both survivors of childhood sex abuse. At 15, she had sex with her horse trainer. At 12, I was raped as a Boy Scout.)

She listens to these dumb podcasts and at night she locks her bedroom door.

A month ago, I got uninvited to my son’s wedding. (He didn’t do the uninviting. It’s what the bride wanted and a bride should get what she wants on her wedding day. Just the same, I won’t be with my son on the happiest day of his life.)

And now, my urologist tells me my MRI showed nodules on my prostate, whatever that means. (another biopsy?)

Everything turned to shit.

It was if one day I was breathing normally, and the next day I breathed the expelled last breath of everything that was alive in me. I can’t stand it.

Things are that bad.

Yesterday, I bought a book: “Secret Breath Control Method to Enter Meditation Instantly”, by the Indian and American Hindu yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda.

We’ll see where things go.

I want to breathe through this period in my life. Breathe. I want to trap inside of me what seems to be in everyone else -- marriage, family, home.

I want to enter me what I breathe in.

Earlier in this nightmare, my wife told me to pray for peace. She told me to “be peace”.

So I’ll start by breathing in peace. Peace. It seems like such a simple thing.

I’ll start tonight. Tonight, I’ll breathe in the light of the August moon in the park where I talk with crows.

— John Sakowicz

GALINA TREFIL:

Mom: Definitely a publicity picture of my mother from either 1968 or 1969.

I’m not sure if this picture was published in the SF Chronicle, but I’m pretty sure it was. I’m not sure if the last photograph was also for a newspaper or not. At the time, she’d already married and divorced John [Trefil]

She’d remarried William “Monk” Montgomery, and her stage name was Kandeda Brandewine-Montgomery.

SHERIFF KENDALL:

My mother used to say, “I once cried because I had no shoes then I met a person who had no feet.”

We live in a world of comparisons. We compare our success to those around us and it creates jealousy and complaining. Many of us are extremely lucky. My father and I were driving on a short hunting trip up to the forest outside of Covelo. He was talking about his youth in Point Arena and I was shocked how many kids he knew who had died of something I had never really seen in my lifetime including polio and the flu.

My father also spoke about how lucky he was to have two jobs when many folks only had one. He was always swinging a hammer on the side or dealing with a few head of cattle, constantly doing something with his time which benefitted our family.

I wish we could all experience life one generation back. Maybe we would be a little more grateful for the life we currently have. We should consider ourselves lucky to have the first world problems we seem to complain about.

ANOTHER E-BAY POSTCARD OF SEMI-LOCAL INTEREST (via Marshall Newman)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, August 12, 2025

RICKY BEAL, 53, Ukiah. DUI.

WYATT HAYDON, 29, Ukiah. Possession of over 600 obscene images of minor in sexual act.

ELI HERRERA, 26, Stockton/Ukaih. Loaded firearm, evasion.

CHERYL MATTSON, 53, Willits. Burglary.

CARLOS MAY-CASTILLO, 41, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

VIOLET MCALISTER, 63, Ukiah. Disobeying court order, failure to appear.

CHRISTINA PERTHEL, 34, Hopland. Failure to appear.

WILLIAM POWELL II, 50, Ukiah. Probation violation.

NEVE RANGEL, 26, Willits. Domestic battery.

PETER SAARI, 62, Ukiah. Parole violation.

SETH SMART, 29, Ukiah. Disobeying court order, county parole violation.

KNOX SOWERS, 47, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

KIMBERLEE THOMPSON, 40, Fort Bragg. Shoplifting, probation violation, resisting.

SHANNON TOBIN, 47, Willits. Battery, vandalism.

FRANK VANVRANKEN JR., 56, Ukiah. DUI.

KYMBERLY WILLIAMS, 23, Ukiah. Criminal threats, domestic violence court order violation.

JASON WINEGAR, 48, Mendocino. “Divided highway,” resisting.

“People are angriest at happy people. This has always been true, and this has always puzzled me. That lovely quote you gave me from Tennessee, about Eli [Wallach], which I was so happy to pass on to him. Tennessee was right: Eli had learned the secret of pissing people off. He was and is happy.

“I don’t know that we can aim for happiness. Happiness comes, like luck or love, according to the lives we lead, the people we are. To begrudge anyone their happiness or their luck guarantees that neither will visit you. Ever. If anyone in my life—known to me or not—is happy, then I’m happy.

“No one ever has or ever will dip into your share or stock of happiness. Only you can deplete it. Don’t do that.”

— Marian Seldes, 2008

“HE HAD KNOWN SEVERAL MEN who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.”

— Larry McMurtry, ‘Lonesome Dove’

WHY LELO JUAREZ CHOSE SELF-DEPORTATION

How the current conditions of immigrant detention and Trump Administration policies impelled a farmworker organizer to return to Mexico.

by David Bacon

When I spoke with Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, known as “Lelo,” while he was imprisoned in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, he had to be very careful about what he said. Calls to detainees are monitored. “My freedom of speech here is very limited,” he warned me. Lelo had been held there since his detention in March, and I interviewed him in July.

*Lelo Juarez in 2025 after accepting voluntary departure. Courtesy of Lelo Juarez*

Two weeks after our conversation Lelo agreed to "voluntary departure" - the term used by immigration authorities for self-deportation. In early August, by telephone from Santa Cruz Yucucani, his hometown in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, he was able to describe the conditions in this enormous immigrant detention center, which today holds more than 1,500 people awaiting deportation.

"It's a really terrible place," Lelo told me. He said bad food was probably the worst problem: The Geo Group, a private corporation that runs the detention center, is supposed to provide three meals a day, but often the last meal would come at one or two in the morning. "The rice was hard, like it never touched hot water, and the beans were never cooked all the way," Lelo said. "That was the main food they gave us. Chicken was so undercooked that sometimes it dripped blood, and people got sick during the night. One time everybody turned in their trays and we wouldn't take the food."

The second week he was there, Lelo started having vision problems because the lights were always on at night, making it hard to sleep. He signed up for the "sick call" list to get eye drops. "I waited a long time to see a doctor," he recalled, "and finally an officer told us to go back to our unit. They only had one doctor, and we weren't going to be seen. After that I didn't sign up again, but other folks in my unit would wait hours and hours and still not get seen. I'd share an apple or something sweet for people who were diabetic. But day after day it was the same thing. Sign up and maybe tomorrow somebody will see you."

The Tacoma immigrant detention center is run by the Geo Group, founded as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation, with ties to U.S. intelligence agencies going back to the Cold War. Since discovering in the 1980s the huge profits to be made in federal contracts, the company has become one of the two largest corporations running immigrant detention centers in the United States. Much of those profits are earned by keeping operating costs at a minimum; as a result Geo has been repeatedly charged with short staffing at the prisons it runs. "Geo does this on purpose to make it hard for folks, while maximizing their profit by not having more employees," Lelo said. Bad conditions serve to coerce people detained at the Northwest Detention Center into self-deportation.…

https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2025/08/why-lelo-juarez-chose-self-deportation.html

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR:

The entire Colombo series is now available on Prime. I watched the second pilot episode last night, starring the wonderful Lee Grant, as a brilliant “lady” trial lawyer, who plots an ingenious way to murder her dull and decrepit husband and then trades barbs and witticisms with Peter Falk for an hour or so until finally being entrapped by the bumbling detective. What I didn’t know about Grant, and endears her even more deeply to me, is that she effectively lost 12 years of her acting (and directing) career for refusing to testify to HUAC, after the snitch Edward Dymtryk named Grant’s husband, the screenwriter Arnold Manoff, as a member of the CP. Grant, who’d been nominated for an Academy Award for her first film role (Detective Story), refused to testify and was blacklisted for more than a decade in the prime of her career. She was probably one of the most talented people of her generation having danced in the American Ballet Theater under Balanchine & studied method acting with Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg. Grant later said that the constant hounding she experienced during the McCarthy Era so traumatized her that she would go into “a trance” any time she was asked about it. Grant became an accomplished director; her documentary on homelessness, Down and Out in America, won an Oscar for best documentary feature in 1986.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

It’s National Vinyl Record Day. Take a spin! I miss the album covers. Roger Dean, Hipgnosis, Storm Thorgerson… Fabulous art that added much to the magic of the music.

HOLD PG&E ACCOUNTABLE

Editor,

Regarding “Why is my bill so high? And other frequently asked questions about PG&E bills” (Personal Finance, SFChronicle.com, Aug. 3): While it is stated that rate increases over the past six years have contributed to the high cost of energy in California, the story doesn’t go any deeper into the reasons.

The primary reason is the lack of any accountability in the rate-making process from the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the investor-owned utilities, like PG&E.

The state’s utilities have done everything they can to increase their profits by building capital-intensive, and in many cases, unnecessary transmission and distribution infrastructure.

At the same time, the utilities have used their political muscle to suppress the use of grid-enhancing technologies, methods to expand the capacity of the grid with much less capital-intensive strategies.

Because utilities get a guaranteed rate of return on capital deployed, they have no incentive to use less expensive methods, so ratepayers end up taking it on the chin.

And despite what the story said, we can do something about it by supporting consumer advocacy groups like The Utility Reform Network and the Solar Rights Alliance.

Rick Brown

Petaluma

NORM CLOW:

The Marianas Trench in the Western Pacific Ocean, is the deepest point of Earth, reaching down nearly 7 miles below sea level. We lived for several years literally atop it on Guam. It’s commonly referred to as the “Ring of Fire”, due to the tectonic plates configurations that result in huge earthquakes. The seismic center at one of the northern Navy installations on the island recorded activity every day, some of them felt with no more than a quick jolt, but others of much greater magnitude. In August 1993, shortly after we moved to Guam in the Marianas from Pohnpei in the Caroline islands to the south, the island endured an 8.2 magnitude earthquake that lasted over a minute. Now, that was an interesting evening with friends at Kentucky Fried Chicken, in the middle of a thunderstorm, no less. It sounded like being under a freight train. At least we got a couple of days worth of free food to take home with us, so there was that. A major quake is considered to be in the 6-7 Richter range, and a quake lasting more than about 20 seconds is a long one. An 8.2 measures hundreds of points higher than an 8.0. So, that’s why when I hear reports of a 5 or 6, I say, “let me know when one hits an 8”. Later, we bought a set of plates from the Royal Palm Hotel, that had just opened on Tumon Bay and had to be demolished. They sold everything sellable, but we passed on the freight elevator. Lots of lawsuits over that one. When we moved back to California several years later, damage was still being repaired around the island, including the docks and service areas at both Big Navy and the commercial port on the west coast. (The “I Survived…” t-shirt is from a huge quilt Ruth made of many of our souvenir shirts from The Mariana and the Caroline Islands for my birthday in 2009, hanging over the French doors to her sewing room in our front entry.)

SERIOUS SPORT has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

— George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’

GIANTS’ FUTILITY FORMULA: 4 runs in 4 days fashion a 4-game skid

by Shayna Rubin

Robbie Ray (38) reacts after giving up a two-run homerun in the second inning as the San Francisco Giants played the San Diego Padres at Oracle Park in San Francisco, on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025. (Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle)

Patrick Bailey drew a two-out walk against left-handed starter Nestor Cortes in the second inning Tuesday, turning the San Francisco Giants’ lineup to leadoff hitter Heliot Ramos. The San Diego Padres had just taken a two-run lead, and Ramos had a chance to fight back — something the Giants haven’t been able to do of late.

Ramos took a first pitch ball, fouled off a slider then took a hack at a changeup, falling into a 1-2 count. Then he chased Cortes’ changeup down and out of the zone and Ramos grimaced as he turned back to the dugout, lifted his bat and broke it over his knee.

It wasn’t the most glaring failed scoring opportunity the Giants ran into during a 5-1 loss to the Padres, but a rare instance in which the team’s exasperation over a numbing losing stretch surfaced.

“It’s just not happening. It’s frustrating,” Ramos said “I don’t know what to tell you, honestly. It’s just not happening. That’s it. Have to get it done.”

Not only are the Giants losers of four straight — scoring four runs over that span — the skid has dumped them two games below .500 for the first time this year and 5½ games back of a wild-card spot. They’re losers of 12 of their past 13 games on home turf.

When the Giants sold at the trade deadline, it signaled something of a waving white flag from president of baseball operations Buster Posey, but a run at a wild-card spot with the core remained in reach. Home and away series against the Padres presented a perfect opportunity to close ground and make their second half interesting. Tuesday’s loss instead guaranteed a series loss and made those distant hopes even more remote.

The Padres have played very much like a team ready to challenge the Los Angeles Dodgers for a division title — they came away Tuesday tied for first in the National League West — while the Giants appear deflated, burdened by their own disappointment. Whatever good vibes the team brought home from a winning road trip through New York and Pittsburgh haven’t carried over.

“It’s tough, obviously,” starter Robbie Ray said. “That’s the team we’re kind of chasing right now. These are big games. Back-to-back losing against the team we’re chasing isn’t ideal.”

The Giants had their chances.

Casey Schmitt moved up to the second spot in the lineup against a lefty and it paid off. He had a four-hit night and scored the Giants’ lone run in the first inning on Wilmer Flores’ swinging bunt that stayed inches fair down the third-base line.

Schimtt followed Bailey’s infield single in the fifth with another hit to keep the line moving, but an overturned out at second base on Rafael Devers’ grounder preceded Willy Adames striking out to strand runners on the corners.

Their best opportunity came in the sixth when pinch-hitter Dom Smith hit a single to load the bases with one out. But Bailey fouled back Jason Adam’s best offering, a 96 mph fastball and popped out on the next pitch. Ramos then popped out on the first pitch he saw, perhaps a more appropriate moment to break a bat.

“Very frustrated,” manager Bob Melvin said. “We have the one inning with the bases loaded and one out and we have a chance and can’t get anybody home. Similar theme. It’s a lot of frustration.”

Ray did all he could. The Padres lengthened at-bats and got Ray to 113 pitches — the most he’s thrown since returning from Tommy John last season and five more than in his complete game against Arizona. Ray, at 93 pitches after five, told Melvin he had more in the tank for a sixth.

“For him to want to go out there and pitch that deep into a game, it just shows you who he is,” Melvin said. “Gave up a couple runs early and ends up going six innings and pitched better as the game went along. The velocity, even at 110 pitches, was as good as it was all game. Just a competitor.”

Ray allowed four runs, including a Jose Iglesias two-run home run in the second inning that bounced off the top of the left field wall and into the stands.

“Definitely didn’t think that was a home run,” Ray said. “Got him out front. Wasn’t mad about it.”

(sfchronicle.com)

WHY HAS THE GIANTS’ SEASON TANKED SO DRAMATICALLY? ‘I HONESTLY HAVE NO CLUE’

by Susan Slusser

Even without one of the league’s better lineups, the San Francisco Giants generated enough offense the first 2½ months of the season to be tied for first place on June 13, when Logan Webb outdueled Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Los Angeles.

Two days later, the Giants added the biggest bat available all summer, Rafael Devers. Bingo, just what a light-hitting team needed, a major slugger in the middle of the order. It was a brilliant move, and, even smarter, six weeks ahead of the trade deadline.

From that point on, San Francisco’s season wobbled and no one can put their finger on exactly why.

“There are a lot of things that are tough to explain,” manager Bob Melvin said before Monday’s 4-1 loss to the Padres. “The way we played the first 2½ months — the way we played recently is completely the opposite of the way things went and what we thought our identity was. So we have to try to get back to that. We’ve done it before. It looks completely different right now, and the effort is about trying to turn that back around again.”

“I couldn’t tell you the answer,” said Webb, Monday’s starter. “I honestly have no clue.”

Were those first 10 weeks the true measure of the team? Or have the past two months been a more accurate representation? Was the chemistry disrupted somehow? Was the scrappy, win-late persona based around having too few power hitters, a subconscious “we’ll show you!” type thing?

“We saw what we can do when we’re clicking,” DH Wilmer Flores said. “After that, we just didn’t play well. It’s hard to pinpoint why.”

“I don’t really have an answer for you,” shortstop Willy Adames said. “We started the season really well. The talent is here.”

The one thing we can say without a doubt is that since mid-June, the Giants have struggled immensely with runners in scoring position, batting a major-league low .212, 14 points worse than any other club, and their .632 OPS is the worst by 10 points. Before June 15, they were in the middle of the pack, batting .251 with runners in scoring position and carrying a healthy .772 OPS.

“That’s one thing that’s kind of hard to put your finger on,” general manager Zack Minasian said.

Part of this might be: Less Flores. He was the Giants’ RBI king through the first two months, hitting 10 homers and driving in 46 runs. Through June 15, he had 22 hits in 64 at-bats with men in scoring position. Since then he’s 8 for 27. He’s still getting the job done, he’s just not playing as much since Devers arrived — Flores started in 66 of the first 72 games, 23 of the past 47 — and he missed more than a week with hamstring tightness. Dom Smith, too, is hot, having extended his hitting streak to 14 games. Flores is the right-handed hitter of the three DH-first basemen, so he’ll sit against right-handers.

You could say maybe the opportunities have been fewer, but the Giants have had roughly the same number of baserunners per game: 11.19 in March-April, 11.07 in May, 11.03 in June, 11.08 in July and 11.30 in August. It’s the driving-in-runners portion that isn’t as robust.

“For the last two months, the big hit just is not there,” Adames said. “But we’re not doing anything different. We were doing the same thing in the beginning of the year, those hits were just falling.”

“I think it’s more we’re just trying too hard,” Melvin said. “When we’ve had that kind of success, and all of a sudden it goes away, maybe you try to do a little bit too much, swing a little bit too early in the count, expand the zone, which we are doing right now.”

Though the timing coincided with Devers’ arrival, none of this is in any way a slight on him. Devers, who homered again Monday, is a massive plus.

“We were all so excited about getting him,” Melvin said. “This is a premier bat. You’re seeing that now you’re seeing what he can do. We felt really good about adding him, and at the time, we were in a pretty good position. Now we’re having to play catch up. We’ve been stagnant and we haven’t been consistent across the board. The length of our lineup should be a strength, and that hasn’t been a strength for us. We haven’t been able to get in sync, especially the last month.”

The Giants seem to have lost a little sense of themselves and what they’re all about, with both Melvin and Adames mentioning they’re searching for something.

“This is an organization that’s trying to find its identity,” Adames said. “We’re trying to figure out who we are as a team. We haven’t found a way to get hot at the same time or execute at the right time.”

In recent weeks, another oddity emerged: The Giants have stopped playing well in their own ballpark, losing 11 of 12, and since June 17, 18 of 25. Oracle Park is a wonderful spot for pitchers, less so for hitters — could it be getting in some players’ heads? Adames is still getting used to it and Devers arrived even more recently.

“We’ve been hitting the ball hard — 105 mph, 103 mph,” Adames said. “I feel so bad, we just need some small things to go our way. But now, when we’re not doing well, everything gets magnified.”

“Nobody’s happy with the performance we’ve had here at home recently, because at one point in time, this was a real home-field advantage for us,” Melvin said. “Recently, that script has flipped.”

President of baseball operations Buster Posey has backed the coaching staff and picked up Melvin’s option for next year; it’s safe to assume any changes to the group would not come until the offseason. The front office has no issue with the pregame work or the attitude.

“I think the preparation, the effort, the motivation, that’s all there,” Minasian said, adding that the lack of success is weighing on the players “more than anybody — they all care. I’m a big believer in the character in there.”

Every team has injuries, including those atop every division. The Giants, with their knack for inopportune timing this year, seemed to place anyone who’d recently gone on a roll on the IL. Among those to get hurt just as they’d started to take off: Matt Chapman in June, Casey Schmitt and then Christian Koss later that month, Jerar Encarnacion after hitting homers in back-to-back games, including a monster shot, last week.

The pitching remains solid, even after trading Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks, then Tyler Rogers and Camilo Doval, and with Landen Roupp and Erik Miller on the IL. But the Giants have been prone to mistakes in the field and on the bases, a killer for a club that has little margin for error.

Perhaps, then, it was those first 10 weeks that were the anomaly? Then again, the Giants have some players picking up the pace: Devers, Heliot Ramos, Smith, Jung Hoo Lee and Patrick Bailey are among those seeing an uptick this month. If Adames (.227) and Chapman (.231) join in, the team is only 4½ games out of the final wild-card spot and could still make a run.

They’re not playing terribly well, and even so, they’re not out of it.

“There is a lot of positive stuff going on,” Adames said. “Yeah, we haven’t clicked together but we are long, long overdue to get hot all at once.”

AN ALLEGED KILLER IS LIVING NEAR GOLDEN GATE PARK IN A FACILITY WHERE PATIENTS GO MISSING

Chris Moyer never felt quite at ease growing up in the flatlands of Oklahoma City. Slender, with straight brown hair and a subtle, wan smile, she read books with near obsession, immersing herself in stories of elsewhere.

Like many before her, she was drawn to the idea of San Francisco and moved west in the early 1980s to chase a Summer of Love that had ended more than a decade prior. Over the next 30 years, she made a life for herself, settling into the Rose Hotel in SoMa where she had a community of friends and proudly expressed her fierce loyalty to her adopted home.

That life came to an abrupt end in a back alley on Christmas Eve in 2018. Michael Jacobs — four days out from a state-run mental hospital — allegedly snuck up behind the 64-year-old Moyer as she was smoking, stabbed her in the back, and slashed and sawed at her throat with a butcher knife, nearly decapitating her.

Before approaching Moyer, Jacobs, who was 27 at the time, removed his shoes and tossed his hood over his head, according to video footage. After she fell into his arms, then flopped to the ground, he wiped the blade on his pants and walked away, leaving a trail of bloody footprints, court records allege. He then calmly put his shoes back on and left the scene.

She bled out within seconds, according to her brother Robert Moyer.

“It was a very brutal attack,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to encounter this guy or have him encounter you and decide you are some kind of target. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Just six hours after allegedly killing Moyer, Jacobs struck again outside Third Street’s California Pizza Kitchen, allegedly lacerating Maritza Mercado’s throat while she sat at a table, according to court documents. She barely survived.

Jacobs was arrested Dec. 25, 2018, a few blocks away. His boots, face, and clothes were covered in blood. A knife was stashed in his jacket. Authorities moved quickly, charging him in January 2019 with murder and attempted murder. Jacobs pleaded not guilty despite the strong evidence police had collected, including video of the killer matching Jacobs’ description, a witness identifying him in the second attack, and DNA on the knife and his sock matching that of both victims.

But six years later, the case remains in limbo as Jacobs is unable to stand trial because courts have ruled that he lacks mental competency. By law, he can’t be kept in jail for a crime of which he has not been convicted. But he also can’t be sent to the overcrowded Napa State Hospital, whose doctors tried but failed to improve his condition so that he could stand trial.

Instead, despite serious warnings from doctors and prosecutors, Jacobs has been stashed in the only place the law allows: the privately run Crestwood treatment center on the fifth floor of UCSF Health St. Mary’s hospital. Located next to Golden Gate Park, near the bustling corner of Haight and Stanyon streets, Crestwood has a long history of patients going missing. In the past three years, in fact, at least 20 patients were reported missing by staff, according to 911 dispatch records.

Jacobs’ story is an extreme example of how California’s byzantine and overstrained mental health system intersects with a criminal justice process that doesn’t always kick in until it’s too late. Having cycled in and out of mental institutions for years, Jacobs personifies the state’s complex conservatorship process, illustrating the limits of what can be done legally to protect the public from someone who remains dangerously sick.

“This defendant is homicidal,” Assistant District Attorney Sean Connolly wrote this spring in a filing requesting a more thorough review of the threat Jacobs poses to society before his transfer to Crestwood. “The last time he was released, he murdered one person and tried to murder another.”

Revolving door

It’s impossible to know what drove Jacobs to allegedly kill Moyer. Much of his mental health history is locked away in confidential files. However, some of his life since 2018 can be tracked through public documents. What they show is a fragmented mental health system that cycles patients in and out of crowded and overtaxed institutions and passes responsibility from one authority to another.

Jacobs’ recent spell of institutionalization began in spring 2018, after he was arrested and charged with burglary in Merced County. A judge ruled him mentally incompetent, and Jacobs was sent to Napa State Hospital, one of six facilities in California that handles cases of mentally ill people facing criminal charges. A few months later, after being deemed competent to stand trial by the hospital’s doctors, he was returned to Merced County.

He pleaded no contest to burglary charges and was sentenced to time served. A week later, he was sent to another county jail, this time in San Mateo County, on a warrant for failing to appear in court for a petty theft case. He pleaded guilty, was again sentenced to time served, and was released Dec. 20.

Less than five days later, he was in San Francisco, allegedly killing Moyers and attempting to kill a second person.

With Jacobs behind bars on the murder charge, the pattern began anew. For the next six years, he cycled in and out of San Francisco County Jail and state mental hospitals, with little improvement and continued debate on whether he could be in front of a jury. In one instance, the state hospital declared him fit to stand trial in March 2023, only to have a judge express doubts about his competency three months later.

“He has been in this revolving door,” Moyer said. “They will get him back on his feet, where he at least can be released from the facility, presumably to stand trial. He goes back to the county jail, where he deteriorates psychologically, and then he ends up back in the hospital.”

One of the sole resources for people like Jacobs, who face grave criminal charges yet cannot care for themselves because of mental health issues, is involuntary conservatorship, wherein they are placed in privately run mental health facilities like Crestwood.

Since the dismantling of the state mental health system in the late 1960s under then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, California counties have taken charge of most mentally ill people in crisis.

“He can’t stand trial, and you can’t lock him up forever for a crime he has not been convicted of,” said former San Francisco public defender Kara Ka Wah Chien, who specialized in such cases but did not represent Jacobs.

By early 2025, authorities decided to put Jacobs in an involuntary one-year conservatorship, which allows the county, through the Public Conservator, to have legal power over where he would live and the kind of treatment he would receive. The aim was to bring him back to a competent level to face trial, or remain in some kind of care indefinitely.

Such conservatorships don’t have a great track record of success. More than half of all conserved people fall back into the criminal justice system because of mental health crises, according to a 2020 state audit.

In response to the audit, San Francisco public health officials admitted that the city is “struggling with the severity of needs of our residents who have mental illness, particularly when this is impacted by the effects of psychoactive substances, complex trauma, homelessness [and] racial oppression.”

Officials laid the blame, in part, on a lack of beds in state mental hospitals to deal with the most severe and violent cases. The shortage has had a direct negative impact on San Francisco, where, as of April, there were 700 people under conservatorship, among the highest number per capita of the 12 large California counties reviewed in a 2022 report.

In 2022, former prosecutor Michael Menesini and others warned that the city attorney’s office should not handle conservatorship cases due to its focus on civil rather than criminal cases. Those concerns were overridden.

“It’s only a matter of time before the dam breaks,” Santa Clara Deputy District Attorney Brandon Cabrera said of the rise in conservatorships in his county. “Capacity, bed space, and appropriate facilities and supervision to manage this population have become challenging for all.”

A secure healing center

Few would disagree that Jacobs should be in a secure facility where he can get treatment without risking harm to himself or others. At first blush, Crestwood seems to fit the bill.

In court for a hearing on Jacobs’ transfer, Deputy City Attorney Kimiko Burton described 54-bed Crestwood as “a private, secure facility. This is a locked facility.”

But despite these assurances, the center has a spotty history of keeping patients inside its walls. In the past three years, at least 20 have gone missing, according to 911 call records. In 2022, a 35-year-old man “ran away.” The next year, a “client awol’d,” and in 2024, a patient went missing after an outing in Golden Gate Park. In one of the five reports made this year, a patient went AWOL while a staffer escorted them to the Social Security office. Crestwood reported its most recent missing person in April.

UCSF Health referred questions to Crestwood, whose representatives did not respond to requests for comment. The city attorney’s office said in a statement that Crestwood is secure, but the office could not speak on the details of Jacobs’ case other than that it followed the law.

The state’s licensing agency, the Department of Healthcare Services, said in a statement that the facility was issued citations in its most recent review but would not provide those citations or comment on whether it was aware of patients missing from Crestwood.

A social worker who had several clients escape from Crestwood over the past six years said the facility is neither secure nor a place where many people recover. When her clients did depart the facility without authorization, she was not made aware by Crestwood.

“I think that someone like [Jacobs] … needs to be in an actually well-staffed, locked facility, and Crestwood is just not competent,” said the social worker, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional reprisals. “If these facilities actually were what they purport to be, which is a secure psychological facility, it would be another story.”

When a reporter from The Standard visited the hospital April 4, he easily made it to the fifth floor by following a nurse who used a secure key-card to access the facility via an elevator. The reporter wasn’t asked for security credentials nor stopped when he entered a day room with a view of Golden Gate Park. In an adjacent room, a man who appeared to be a staffer sat chatting with a woman. On a far wall, a hand-written poster congratulated the staff for an “AMAZING state survey!!!” After milling around for a few minutes without being questioned, the reporter departed.

“It’s not secure,” said Kelly Kruger, a recently retired SFPD police officer who has experience working with the facility. “If someone was halfway plotful, they are gonna be able to leave.”

‘Currently dangerous’

The fight over Jacobs’ future has pitted city officials against one another as they litigate in mental health courts the public threat he may pose.

There are two kinds of involuntary conservatorships related to severe mental health issues: Lanterman-Petris-Short, or LPS, and Murphy. LPS conservatorship is for people who can’t care for themselves but are not a danger to others, while Murphy is for the small group who may be seriously violent. While both can result in involuntary locked housing, any change to housing or treatment in a Murphy conservatorship must be approved by a judge, adding an additional safeguard.

Jacobs was initially put in the less-restrictive LPS conservatorship because a doctor deemed he did not pose a safety risk. But the DA’s office asked the judge to seek another assessment, arguing that Jacobs remains dangerous and should be transferred to a facility with the highest level of security. Prosecutors cited recent reports of Jacobs’ behavior in the county jail, where he wasn’t cooperating with mental health services and often refused his medication, leading staff to sneak the drugs into his food.

An Oct. 20, 2024, evaluation noted that he “continues to present as a danger if his symptoms are left untreated” and “would pose a risk to the community” if released, according to court documents. On Nov. 1, a doctor wrote that Jacobs needs a locked treatment facility because of his “severe symptoms” and “assaultive behavior.”

The city attorney, who represented Jacobs via the Public Conservator, countered that a consulting doctor found him not dangerous and that he’d be sent to Crestwood regardless. A judge ruled in favor of the city attorney’s office and against a second medical opinion.

Jacobs’ criminal defense attorney, Peter Fitzpatrick, contends that his client needs treatment and that he will never be allowed back on the street. “There’s no issue about what’s going to happen to this guy. This guy’s going to be in a locked facility no matter what.”

Despite such reassurances, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that the system is less than perfect. “It’s obvious that the system doesn’t accommodate people with serious mental health issues,” he said.

In a year, when Jacobs has his annual conservatorship reassessed, the Public Conservator responsible for his care has the power to change his medication or move him to a less secure facility without going before a judge.

For Chris Moyer’s brother, the potential of Jacobs escaping or being released to a less secure facility is harrowing.

“She does not have a voice other than this. She was brutally murdered,” he said. “Everybody should be concerned about this guy falling through the cracks.”

(SFstandard.com)

THE NEXT ‘BIG ONE’ ON THE SAN ANDREAS FAULT MIGHT NOT BE THE EARTHQUAKE WE EXPECT, RESEARCHERS SAY

A new report studied a massive earthquake that ruptured in the southeast Asian country of Myanmar on March 28 — on a fault known for being eerily similar to the San Andreas.

by Rong-Gong Lin II

What could the next mega-earthquake on California’s notorious San Andreas fault look like?

Would it be a repeat of 1857, when an earthquake estimated at magnitude 7.7 to 7.9 ruptured the fault from Monterey County all the way through Los Angeles County? Would it be more akin to the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which began just offshore of the city and ruptured in two directions, toward Humboldt County and Santa Cruz County?

Don’t bet on an identical sequel.

That’s the implication of a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The report, coauthored by scientists at Caltech in Pasadena, studied a massive earthquake that ruptured in the southeast Asian country of Myanmar on March 28 — on a fault known for being eerily similar to the San Andreas.

The earthquake ended up rupturing a much longer section of the fault than scientists expected, given the seismology of the region.

The implications of this study are that “earthquakes never come back exactly the same way,” Solene L. Antoine, a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and the study’s lead author, said in an interview.

“It came as a surprise that you could get such a long rupture,” said Jean-Philippe Avouac, a coauthor of the study and a professor of geology and mechanical and civil engineering at Caltech.

March’s Mandalay earthquake devastated Myanmar, killing at least 3,791 people and an additional 63 people in Thailand. High-rise buildings were damaged as far away as Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and homes were damaged in the Ruili area of China. Damage was estimated at $1.9 billion, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

It was the most powerful earthquake in Myanmar in at least 79 years.

The magnitude 7.7 earthquake ruptured an astonishing 317 miles of the Sagaing fault, a finding based on Antoine’s analysis of satellite data showing earth movement after the quake. That’s the longest seismic rupture ever documented on a continent.

By comparison, California’s 1906 earthquake ruptured 296 miles of the San Andreas fault; and the 1857 earthquake, 225 miles. Longer seismic ruptures have been found only on subduction megathrusts deep underneath the ocean.

What’s clear from the study is that while California’s next “Big One” may share some characteristics of previously documented devastating quakes, it’s unlikely to be an exact replay. As the recent experience in Myanmar shows, even well-documented faults can behave in surprising ways.

The next step is to develop a model simulating earthquakes over many millennia for the San Andreas fault, which the authors plan to do in the future. But the San Andreas fault “is far more complex,” Avouac said. “It’s not going to come soon, because it’s quite a heavy calculation.”

Still, such simulations would provide a model of “all possible scenarios so that we have a better view of the range of possible ruptures that could happen.”

For instance, maybe the San Andreas fault will rupture in smaller, separate earthquakes, Avouac said.

Or it could be a much larger earthquake — rupturing the fault not just from Monterey to Los Angeles counties, but perhaps all the way into San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties, which would possibly exceed magnitude 8. Such a quake would be the largest simultaneous disaster in modern California history, with huge swaths of the state wracked by powerful seismic shaking all at once.

By comparison, the 1994 Northridge earthquake’s footprint was relatively constrained, severely affecting only a portion of Los Angeles County, especially the San Fernando Valley — related to its relatively smaller magnitude of 6.7.

But while modeling previous activity on the San Andreas fault will provide a glimpse into the wide range of possible outcomes, it will not pinpoint precisely when the next great quake will strike.

“We can’t just expect the exact same thing to happen,” Antoine said. “It is a matter of just showing what scenarios are possible, the diversity of scenarios and seeing what are the consequences of each of those scenarios.”

Sometimes, Avouac said, “it’s quiet for a long time, nothing happens … stress is building up, the fault is locked for a long time, nothing happens, and then, boom, you have a large earthquake.”

“And then you have other periods during which you have a lot of [seismic] activity, but these earthquakes are all smaller,” Avouac said.

But “smaller” earthquakes, in the minds of researchers, are still big to the layperson. In the study’s simulations, there are periods where earthquakes around magnitude 7.7 are common. In other periods, earthquakes max out at magnitude 7.5 or so, but are more frequent.

The entire length of the Sagaing fault — including areas that didn’t rupture in the March earthquake — is 750 miles, north to south, from the Himalayas to the Andaman Sea, and helps accommodate the northward push of the Indian tectonic plate.

The fact that 317 miles of the Sagaing fault ruptured in March was surprising to scientists. Only about 170 miles had been quiet seismically for more than a century, having last ruptured in 1839.

Scientists call these “seismic gaps” — particular areas of a fault that haven’t recently ruptured.

Generally, scientists would’ve expected only this long-dormant 170-mile piece of the Sagaing fault to rupture, Avouac said, but not more recently ruptured sections. That includes a 100-mile stretch that ruptured in large earthquakes in 1929 and 1930, and a 50-mile stretch that went off in a pair of quakes in 1946 and 1956.

Instead, even those fault segments ruptured in the big March earthquake.

So what gives?

A possible explanation is the Sagaing fault’s extraordinary smoothness. “And people have observed that when the fault is very smooth, the rupture … tends to propagate at a velocity” so fast that it results in an “extremely elongated rupture,” Avouac said.

The study also published the results of a computer model simulation looking at how earthquakes might rupture along sections of the entire 750-mile long Sagaing fault. The code, developed by study coauthor Kyungjae Im of Caltech, suggests that over a hypothetical 1,400-year period, there would be no repeatable patterns.

In other words, earthquakes didn’t seem to re-occur like clockwork, rupturing the same stretch of fault in a repeatable, predictable pattern.

“There is complexity here. And this is because each time you have an earthquake, it redistributes the stress on the fault, which is going to influence the next earthquake,” Avouac said. “There’s a self-induced complexity in the process, and that leads to a bit of randomness.”

There is one certainty, which is bound to disappoint anyone who shares the hope that a “Big One” simply won’t ever strike California again.

“There will be an earthquake at some point,” Antoine said. “If there is stress building up on the fault, the fault won’t hold forever.”

Further research and observations are essential to refine models of future possible earthquakes, including from the Sentinel satellites, which are operated by the European Space Agency, the authors said.

The other coauthors of the study are Rajani Shrestha and Chris Milliner of Caltech; Chris Rollins of Earth Sciences New Zealand; Kang Wang of the Washington-based EarthScope Consortium; and Kejie Chen of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China.

(LA Times)

ANTHONY AGUILAR, AMERICAN

by Eva Chrysanthe

Two weeks ago, a former Green Beret, Anthony Aguilar, who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan for two decades stepped forward with an explosive story about what he observed working for the so-called “Global Humanitarian Foundation” food program in Gaza, which is suffering Stage 5 famine conditions.

In the GHF program, started in late May, over 1,400 starving Palestinians have been killed while attempting to collect food, a period of less than 80 days. That number excludes killings by the IDF elsewhere in Gaza during the same time period, and by settlers in the West Bank.

Aguilar stepped forward in a whistleblower capacity to report the brutal manner in which the GHF operated. Very much like the testimony provided by Donald Duncan (below) in 1967 about his tasks as a Green Beret in Vietnam, it’s an explosive story related by a thoroughly credible former participant.

Three main takeaways from the interview Senator Van Hollen did with Aguilar:

Starving Palestinians who pose no threat are being shot by Israeli forces and US contractors as they depart from the GHF food stations with inadequate food parcels and no water;
Very little food is actually being distributed by the GHF system, which assumed the place of the far more effective UNWRA food distribution network;
U.S. contractors are being given orders for the GHF that come from the IDF, which technically is not supposed to be overseeing the program.

I listened to multiple interviews Aguilar gave — including interviews on BBC, MSNBC, and Democracy Now. (I even suffered through the interview Aguilar dutifully completed with Tucker Carlson.)

It was expected that Aguilar would have been invited on all of the Sunday morning news shows by this point. But his very important story has been thoroughly ignored by the major networks and apparently even by The New York Times.

If you haven’t heard any of the Aguilar interviews already, you should. Perhaps the strongest and most intimate interview he did was with Senator Van Hollen, and I provide the link here.

The New York Times and Aguilar:

I want to provide some context for The New York Times willfully ignoring Aguilar’s testimony, which is inarguably one of the most important stories of the year:

Yesterday, The New York Times released a lengthy, softball interview with ADL Director Jonathan Greenblatt by their former Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Lulu Garcia Navarro.

Navarro is herself complicit in Israel’s genocide, having failed to report on any of the over 240 assassinations of Palestinian journalists since October 7, 2023. Today, five additional Palestinian reporters were assassinated by Israel in the provisional tent out of which they were forced to work. One of the five was the wonderful, young Anas al-Sharif.

The absence of Navarro’s reporting on this is particularly stark given that she has benefited by claiming that her own life was at risk while reporting in various countries in West Asia. But the reality of “risk” is this: Navarro is alive, well-compensated, and well-kept; meanwhile, over 240 Palestinian journalists have been “strategically” assassinated by Israel, most of them functioning on little food, broken equipment, sparse electricity.

Only ten hours prior to his assassination, Anas al-Sharif had reported on the plight of Gaza’s children amid Israel’s ongoing airstrikes.

Legally, Navarro is one of many higher-profile media apologists for Israel who could be charged at the International Court of Justice for complicity in genocide. This is of course unlikely to happen given that Netanyahu, charged in the same court for the same genocide, has been permitted to evade any court appearances, while a smear campaign has been launched against the judge who issued his arrest warrants.

(MarinCountyConfidential)

HOW MANY?

How many lies can one man make?

How many laws can one man break?

How many lives can one man take?

How many people can one man hate?

How many people will stand and fight?

How many morons will see the light?

How many judges will do what’s right?

How many flights in the dark of night?

How many voters approve of this shit?

How many people are sick of it?

— Elvin Woods

LEAD STORIES, WEDNESDAY'S NYT

Trump’s Show of Force Begins to Take Shape as Guard Troops Deploy in D.C.

White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions

Trump Told Park Workers to Report Displays That ‘Disparage’ Americans. Here’s What They Flagged

Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System

The Song Was a Hit 20 Years Ago. It Just Got a Video

STOPPING THE GAZA HOLOCAUST Is The First Step Toward A Healthy World

by Caitlin Johnstone

Palestine is the moral question of our time because the abuse of the Palestinians is the most glaring, in-your-face symptom of the imperial disease. You can see the effects of so many of the empire’s abusive dynamics in how this thing is playing out, from racism to colonialism to militarism to war profiteering to mass media propaganda to empire-building to government corruption to suppression of free speech to ecocide to the heartless, mindless, soul-eating nature of the capitalist system under which we all live.

But there’s more to it than that. The primary reason to place Palestine front and center as the moral issue of our time is because if we can’t sort out the morality of an active genocide backed by our own western governments, we’re not going to be able to sort out anything else. Stopping the Gaza holocaust and bringing justice to the Palestinians is the very first step toward a healthy civilization.…

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/08/13/stopping-the-gaza-holocaust-is-the-first-step-toward-a-healthy-world/

NON-SPORTS TALKING POINTS ABOUT TRUMP TAKING OVER MY CITY, D.C.

by Dave Zirin

Just so we have our points down after the most racist press conference of Trump’s Presidency where the “stalking horse” for fascism, which has been doing a lot of stalking, is out of the barn in DC.

1) A cornerstone of fascism is “the big lie.” This is no exception. Crime in DC is down dramatically over the last 12-18 months: a “30 year low.” The stats that prove this are still (for now) on Trump’s Justice Department website. Nobody is asking for a military occupation of the city other than the Trump staffers who jump at every shadow and cement an authoritarian agenda that can travel to other cities. The cruel are always the biggest cowards.

2) This was racism Central Park 5 style. Trump described DC as “crime ridden”, “dirty” and “disgusting”. He painted mendacious pictures of “caravans of youth rampaging through city streets at all times of the day”. (Note the use of “caravan”, the far right’s racist buzzword for undocumented immigrants coming into the country “First they came for…etc.)

3) He said he would be “getting rid of the slums” where Black and brown people live and raise their families. He also attacked unhoused people with language both violent and deranged. If so many of his followers weren’t such fucking cowards, I’d be more worried than I am about stochastic violence. His people know that the armed with of the state will do their dirty for them. Of course, it only takes one fascist loon to bring another mass death.

4) His head is still in the 1980s where the criminalization of Black youth will solve every problem and when he was allowed to sexually traffic children without scrutiny. I’m surprised he didn’t brag/lie about almost sleeping with Adrienne Barbeau.

5) This is of course on one level terrifying: a stalking horse of fascism. It also, like the tank and pony military raids into Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park playground, is designed as both violence and psychological violence. DC is already the most OVERPOLICED city in the country per capita.

6) That the justification for this, Trump explicitly stated, was because Musk’s human blood bag, “Big Balls”, took a break from ending cancer research and allegedy got beat up by a 14 year old so now we get fascism. (To paraphrase Jesse Freeston below, it shows how desperate they are for a pretext, that “Big Balls” getting allegedly hit by a child has become the city’s Gulf of Tonkin)

7) This is a pretext to send the military into Democratic run cities. In his presser he mentioned blue cities in blue states like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. No mention of red states with significantly higher murder and violent crime rates.

8) This is especially aimed at a Mamdani-run New York. If a billionaire is even looked at cross-eyed or an IDF soldier on an all-expenses paid NYC vacation gets their feelings hurt, he’s sending in the National Guard.

9) He also attacked in this presser on DC “crime” - for reasons only his addled, reptile brain can understand - transgender athletes. It was a spewing, projectile vomiting of hate, surrounded by his all-white cabinet of very cruel, very stupid Christian Zionists.

10) This is horrible. It’s frightening. It’s scary. And it’s a concrete step towards Trump’s dreams of total authoritarianism. But it is also absolutely yet another shiny object to distract his own base from reckoning with the fact that their moral God-King of End Times Christianity raped a lot of kids. Trump is a living embodiment of a criminal justice system, to paraphrase Eugene Debs, that is a magical net that catches minnows while the whales swim free. Any politician who supports this is pure garbage. But being lectured about “safe streets” from someone who shouldn’t be allowed within 500 feet of a school, is more than anyone’s stomach should be able to handle.

“Socrates said, ‘The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.’ He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

JUST AS THE CALENDAR BEGAN TO SAY SUMMER
 
I went out of the schoolhouse fast
and through the gardens and to the woods
and spent all summer forgetting what I’d been taught—
 
two times two, and diligence, and so forth,
how to be modest and useful, and how to succeed and so forth,
machines and oil and plastic and money and so forth.
 
By fall I had healed somewhat, but was summoned back
to the chalky rooms and the desks, to sit and remember
 
the way the river kept rolling its pebbles,
the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn’t a penny in the bank,
the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.
 
— Mary Oliver, Long Life

Distant Drums *Floribunda* (Elaine Kalantarian)

MY WILD RIDE

How job loss, the pandemic and a cancer scare led me to rediscover my love affair with America

by Stephen Grant

The worst-kept secret in corporate America is that marketing works. I had been a successful, highly paid strategist for some of the biggest companies in the world, helping the glass-tower crowd understand how regular people make the wheels on the bus go round and round. But marketing is notorious for being the canary in the coal mine of corporate spending. And now, my latest gig was abruptly ended due to the onset of COVID-19.

I was a husband and a father of two teenage girls, and everybody in our house up on Brush Mountain in Blacksburg, Virginia, was counting on me to keep them in the upper middle class. Getting a new marketing job was going to be a near impossibility for the foreseeable future. It was certainly not going to happen before my health insurance ran out in a couple of weeks.

Which was a problem. Because I had cancer.

I had only known about the cancer for a couple of months. My father had survived prostate cancer, as had his brother, my uncle Rich. So I wasn’t too worried, honestly. At least that was the story I was telling myself. My urologist told me the malignancy was contained inside the prostate. The tissues uncovered in the biopsy were submillimetric, thus too small for the MRI to detect. My cancer was as benign as cancer gets. But what had seemed manageable — treatable — now loomed as an existential issue. I was about to become one of the undoctored in America while I knowingly carried a disease that could kill me.

I needed money, so I took a job carrying the mail in Blacksburg, the town — and the surrounding county — where I had grown up, departed from for the bright lights, and returned to a few years earlier. And I fell back in love with America during that year. I feared for her and prayed for her, even though before I started carrying the mail, I did not spend much time in prayer. But here in midlife in my hometown, I found myself working a different kind of job, and I became a different kind of person.

I was the guy with the goods, and I carried the candy and the respirators and the dog food and the lube and the heirloom tomato seeds, the hot rod magazines, the handwritten pleas from incarcerated uncles, the scientific journals, tabloid-size book reviews, model train sets, illustrated children’s Bibles, the hand-painted postcards from artistic cousins and estranged girlfriends…

The story I told myself was this: I had joined a brotherhood that stretches back to Benjamin Franklin, to men on horseback and in biplanes. I had become a flag-wearing, sworn federal officer in a position of trust, the duly appointed agent of the United States government in a time of national crisis, the dedicated and beloved civil servant of the people.

I was the mailman.

I’m hauling ass up the hollow, down the dry dirt road past the sign that reads ‘END STATE MAINTENANCE,’ driving a 2001 Ford Explorer from the right-hand seat. My left leg is stretched across space where the center console had been torn out to allow easy access to the pedals, left arm stretched across to the steering wheel with its sloppy linkage, the leaking power-steering fluid an industrial aromatherapy. Here, on the northern side of the draw, is a land of permanent shade. All the trees are scrub pine, the road narrow enough that I can reach out and feel my fingertips being whipped by the needles as I drive by.

This isn’t some purpose-built vehicle. I’m driving a plain Jane, bone-stock, factory-basic, left-hand-drive car. But for slinging mail on back roads, it is hard to beat the Explorer. “Ford Tough,” this rusty beast has survived long beyond the planned obsolescence built into it by the engineers in Detroit because this thing has got a soul, man — Made-in-America magic that is still pulsing through it 19 hard years after it rolled off the assembly line in Louisville, Kentucky.

I’m driving as fast as the old crate will go, but I am behind schedule and this route is almost 60 miles long. This is where Google Girl says I need to be, headed toward the destination of the next parcel. But I’m lost. Not spatially lost. Geographically, I know exactly where I am. I’m where I grew up, in the hardwood, sedimentary Blue Ridge Mountains, the heart of the Appalachians. What I’m feeling is a spiritual disorientation, lost in the sense that I don’t know what I’m doing, lost in confronting the reality of being back in my hometown at 50 years of age, delivering the mail.

When you’re delivering the mail as a functionary of the U.S. government during a pandemic, the countryside and the nation itself become something alien and distant.

Down here at the level of individual mailboxes, time works differently. What time is it? What day is it? It’s parcel time, the only kind of time that matters anymore, and I’ve got a delivery to make, one that I’ve been waiting on since I left the post office that morning.

In the back is a cardboard box, over three feet long and about six inches deep. The return address reads “musashi katana, little rock, ar.”

I didn’t watch Kurosawa films over and over when I was a kid to not know what those words mean. There is a goddamned sword in that box. And the weird sisters of the United States Postal Service have sent me here to deliver it.

In a clearing at the end of the dirt driveway is a single-wide trailer with a small deck out front. I exit the Explorer and carry the box toward the trailer with both hands, supporting it from beneath, like the guy with a sword on a pillow processing up to the queen in Westminster Abbey.

Through the sliding-glass front door of the trailer, I see into the living room, a space dominated by a TV. The man who lives here pulls open the sliding-glass door and jogs out. He is lean, in a baggy blue tee, shorts, and flip-flops, with long, crow-black hair. A Buck folding knife in a leather snap sheath on his belt. Another guy like me who never feels quite dressed in the morning without a belt and a knife.

When he sees the box I am carrying, he stops. “Oh, goddamn.”

Sometimes you get the feeling that you have been brought somewhere to do a thing by powers larger than yourself.

“Hey, man, I think this is your sword,” I say. I can feel myself smiling. Now he starts to smile.

“Oh, goddamn!”

“What did you get? A katana? A nodachi?” I ask.

That gets me an appreciating look. His tone becomes serious.

“No, man, nothing Japanese. European. Two-handed sword. I got that second pandemic check and I knew I was finally going to get the thing. You want to see it?”

“Hell yes, I want to see it!” Because I can feel it now too.

He takes the box from my arms and lays it in the grass, as gently as if it were a sleeping child.

Have you ever been there when someone has gotten exactly what they want? Something that they have wanted for as long as they could remember? Something maybe useless and yet charged with mythic power, an idea that had been carried around for years and was now landing in reality as three long feet of tempered steel?

He has his pocketknife out in a flash and cuts through the packing tape. Pulls back the thin layer of interior foam. Resting in a cardboard cradle is a two-handed sword in a black leather scabbard. He takes the sword’s grip in his right hand, the scabbard in his left, and in a single smooth stroke looses the blade, which, as if someone has dubbed in a sound effect, rings like singing silver in the afternoon sun.

“Whoo! Yeah! This is Anduril, Flame of the West!”

“Reforged from the shards of Narsil by the elves of Rivendell,” I respond, instantly pulling the Lord of the Rings reference from thin air. We looked at each other.

“Yeah, man. The blade that smote Sauron.”

It is one of the most intimate moments I’ve ever had with a stranger. We aren’t up a hollow deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lost in the radio hole at the center of one of the longest rural routes in the Blacksburg, Virginia, post office. We are in the middle of a myth, a molten dream of a place where great deeds, brave words, and the right sword in the right hand can make a broken world whole again.

I was alive in a place where the possibilities of a job taken in desperation played out against a wild, mutating, horrific, chaotic, insulting, stultifying, dangerous, edifying, and sometimes transcendent experience of dealing with my fellow Americans during a national emergency.

I got to be there and to put a sword in this man’s hand at this particular moment in time. In the crabgrass and broken-glass front lawn of this single-wide aluminum-sided trailer, a perfect stranger and I reenacted the Tolkien-writ moment where Elrond calls on Aragon to stop dicking around, put aside the Ranger, and become the man he was meant to be.

I get it. We all want a sense of purpose. I could probably tell myself I was there out of a sense of civic duty, that I was doing the Lord’s work, placed here by the hand of providence, by Whitman-ian democratic impulse, by the manifest will of the American people, by the authority of the postmaster general. And I can say with a straight face that all those things were true.

And I would be lying if I didn’t confess that I perversely enjoyed the endurance-sport aspect of it, even the endangering of my physical and mental health. A lot of the time it was just fun. It was like being back in the Scouts again. Doing a good turn daily.

Yes, I had to pepper spray a pair of vicious mutts bent on making me one of the rare mail carriers who get mauled to death by dogs. I was nearly felled by hypothermia, and by a horde of angry wasps unhappy I had disturbed their mailbox nest. But I also bonded with an Afghanistan vet staying with his parents, who was pleased to show off to a fellow admirer his new M1A 6.5mm Creedmoor battle rifle. I reconnected — now as their mailman — with several men and women I grew up with, all of us recognizable, but also very different.

In short, being a mailman expanded my soul.

(Excerpted from ‘Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home’ by Stephen Starring Grant. Grant is a brand strategist and has worked as an adjunct college professor in Blacksburg, Virginia.)

15 Comments

George Hollister August 13, 2025

At Luna Trattoria try their Cioppino for $38. You might get some on your shirt, but it’s the best restaurant dish in the county, maybe the best dish North of San Francisco. Also the eggplant appetizer is unbeatable. As Terry says, it’s best to get a reservation.

- Norm Thurston August 13, 2025
  
  Thanks, George.
  
- Madeline Cline August 13, 2025
  
  I took a group of friends from out of town to Luna over the weekend. Between dinner at Luna and deli sandwiches from Lemons the previous day, they were singing the praises of Mendocino County bites!
  
Chuck Dunbar August 13, 2025

“I Hope We Choose Wisely”

Reading Bernie Norvell’s piece on choosing a new Ft. Bragg Chief of Police, and how the previous excellent one was chosen, gives me even more hope for him as a still fairly new County Supervisor. He knows how to think about leadership, is thoughtful, reasonable, smart, has some humane wisdom.

Kudos to him, to retiring Chief Cervenka, and to former
Interim Chief John Naulty, for their stellar work in our little coastal city.

Marshall Newman August 13, 2025

Lee Grant – a great actress and a great human being – is now in her late 90s.

Jurgen Stoll August 13, 2025

Irregardless of what you think of him as a governor, Newsum has found his calling in trolling Trump. From Heather Cox Richardson’s “A letter from an American”. Newsom posted on his social media account:

“DONALD TRUMP, THE LOWEST POLLING PRESIDENT IN RECENT HISTORY, THIS IS YOUR SECOND-TO-LAST WARNING!!! (THE NEXT ONE IS THE LAST ONE!). STAND DOWN NOW OR CALIFORNIA WILL COUNTER-STRIKE (LEGALLY!) TO DESTROY YOUR ILLEGAL CROOKED MAPS IN RED STATES. PRESS CONFERENCE COMING—HOSTED BY AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR, GAVIN NEWSOM. FINAL WARNING NEXT. YOU WON’T LIKE IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

Then the account posted: “FINAL WARNING DONALD TRUMP—MAYBE THE MOST IMPORTANT WARNING IN HISTORY! STOP CHEATING OR CALIFORNIA WILL REDRAW THE MAPS. AND GUESS WHO WILL ANNOUNCE IT THIS WEEK? GAVIN NEWSOM (MANY SAY THE MOST LOVED & HANDSOME GOVERNOR) AND A VERY POWERFUL TEAM. DON’T MAKE US DO IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

A follow-up post tonight read: “DONALD ‘TACO’ TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, ‘MISSED’ THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS,’ THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!). BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM—YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR—THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR ‘MAGA.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GN”

- Norm Thurston August 13, 2025
  
  Go get him, Gav!
  
- Call It As I See It August 13, 2025
  
  Gavin has already gerrymandered California, as has every other blue state. His statements are empty threats.
  Shocking that this man has ruined the most beautiful state and you treat him like a hero. No it’s not shocking, you hate America.
  
  - Chuck Dunbar August 13, 2025
    
    Sir, We are going to fine you for your overuse of the “Hate America” theme. It is false and slanderous, as well as argumentative, repetitive, tedious, and uncalled for. Fines will be administered accordingly. Consider ceasing such language. Thank you.
    
    - Yukon August 14, 2025
      
      HA HA. This one gets a gold star.
      
  - Jurgen Stoll August 14, 2025
    
    Your only response to getting called out for this MAGA trainwreck is tell me I hate America? I’m for Democracy, so if your party can convince enough of the people to vote for them then you get to rule. But your party wants to game the system because your policies aren’t popular enough to win the majority. You want to be ruled by an authoritarian conman and his band of fox news suck ups, so go for it! But do it fairly and legally. You’re the true Hater of America. Read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and try to live by them. I’m done with your idiocy. GFY
    
Mazie Malone August 13, 2025

Good Morning AVAers, ☀️🌷

This mornings edition a strategic placement of perspective. Its quite ironic, praise for LE implementing programs without a hammer 🔨
along with the warning the next person may remove those nails. The idea that adopting an attitude of gratitude is what the world needs to quit complaining, then the tragedy of a person afflicted with Serious Mental Illness not receiving appropriate intervention & treatment, in limbo.

mm 💕

Eric Sunswheat August 13, 2025

I wish we could all experience life one generation back. Maybe we would be a little more grateful for the life we currently have. We should consider ourselves lucky to have the first world problems we seem to complain about. —. SHERIFF KENDALL
RE: “Socrats said, ‘The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.’ He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do…” – Ursula K. Le Guin

—> July 22, 2025 Newsweek
A study published this month in the journal Scientific Reports estimated that just three beverage companies—Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé—produced about 8 million metric tons of plastic in a year, and as much as half of that ended up as plastic pollution on land or in rivers and oceans.
Still, with the world facing a plastic-waste crisis in which marine scientists warn that a garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the oceans each minute, every new source of plastic waste matters, especially one that is growing as fast as the cannabis business…
https://www.newsweek.com/pot-has-plastic-waste-problem-here-are-some-budding-solutions-2102590

—> June 10, 2025. The Times
As our use of plastics has increased, so have incidences of conditions such as heart disease and inflammatory bowel disease.
However, poor lifestyle habits, such as increased intake of ultra-processed food and declining levels of activity, also play a role in these diseases and while lab studies have shown that microplastic accumulation causes inflammation in human and animal cells, there is as yet no direct link with disease…
“A strong microbiome may bind or break down microplastics, so include probiotic-rich foods like kefir, sauerkraut or yoghurt in your diet,” Donnai says. “A high-fibre diet with oats, flaxseed, legumes and greens will help to bind and remove particles via the gut.”
https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/article/microplastics-orlando-bloom-truth-blood-gzccxsrvh

- Matt Kendall August 13, 2025
  
  To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do…”
  Thank goodness I am neither.
  
  - Matt Kendall August 13, 2025
    
    “ Socrats said” I think it was Socrates who was quoted there. Not certain who Socrats was, maybe a relative?
    Fairly certain Socrates wouldn’t want Socrats stealing his work.

15 Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply