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WARM WEATHER will continue to rapidly decline as gusty northwest winds help pull in cooler marine air Thursday and Friday. Cool weather will continue this weekend with midlevel clouds and possibly even wetting rain for the northern half of the area. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 53F under foggy skies this Thursday morning on the coast. Our forecast is for mostly sunny today but you know how that goes. A 20% chance of rain on Saturday?, right....
LAS VEGAS WOMAN COMMITS SUICIDE ON COAST HEADLANDS
On Tuesday, August 12, 2025 at approximately 6:43 P.M., Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Deputies were dispatched to the area of Portuguese Beach (Mendocino Headlands State Park), regarding a deceased person being located on the beach below a cliff.
California State Parks Law Enforcement Rangers and Mendocino Volunteer Fire Department personnel had initially responded and located a deceased subject later identified as a 66-year-old female from Las Vegas, NV.
Deputies arrived and initiated a coroner’s investigation. Deputies located evidence that the female traveled alone from out of the area to intentionally end her life. The decedent had injuries consistent with a great fall and criminal conduct is not suspected at this stage of the investigation. The official cause and manner of death will be determined after an autopsy is performed.
The identity of the decedent is being withheld, pending the identification and notification of the decedent’s legal next of kin. Additional information related to this investigation will be released as it becomes available. Anyone with information regarding this ongoing coroner’s investigation is requested to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office at 707-463-4086 (option 1). Information can also be provided anonymously by contacting the non-emergency tip-line at 707-234-2100.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24-hours a day, 7-days a week, across the United States. 988 is available via call or text, and online chat through their website: https://www.988california.org/ (https://www.988california.org/ )
ON LINE COMMENTS:
Actually, I find that to be one of the most powerful and moving aspects of her story.
She chose her place to leave this world, by the sea, and was not going to go out in the Nevada desert. She did not mind the drive. It shows her determination to take this journey. She had a lot of time to think things over. And change her mind and turn around. And she did not.
Where I am from, in Hawai’i, the people believed (and still believe) that there are “jumping off places” in the world, where souls jump off of this world into the next. Sometimes, the physical body will take this route as well, by “accident” or as in this case, deliberately.
Polihale, on Kaua’i, is one such place, as is Ka’ena Point on O’ahu. I am sure they exist in many, many parts of the world, and appear in folk tales and legends.
I think it is possible that the cliffs of the Mendocino coast may be amongst those sacred places.
Life is hard but it could be improved with this - “When you reach 100 years old in Barbados, you get a stamp in your honor."
AVOID NOYO BEACH! Keep the dogs away!
by Frank Hartzell
A large, visibly ill sea lion emerged from the water and collapsed on the sand about 4:30 pm on Wednesday. We were trying to keep children and dogs at a safe distance while contacting the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito to report the incident.
We were told that people should treat this as if it were for sure a case leptospirosis – a serious bacterial infection that affects the kidneys and stay away. There is an epidemic of the disease happening in sea lions right now. No proof this one has it but beaching Is a sign of it and the sea lion appeared sick. Other markers for the disease were absent. We will follow up.
https://mendocinocoast.news/breaking-news-avoid-noyo-beach-keep-the-dogs-away/
WILLITS CONFAB ON EEL RESTORATION
A workshop is being held Friday in Willits for people interested in supporting, or learning more about, the planned removal of Potter Valley Project dams that divert the Eel River.
The workshop is being hosted by the Sierra Club Mendocino Group and Friends of the Eel River, who stated in their press release that attendees are invited “to learn about the dam removal process and voice your support for timely removal of these antiquated barriers.”
The workshop is being held from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Willits Environmental Center, located at 630 S. Main St.
Last month, Pacific Gas and Electric Company officially filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to decommission its hydroelectric plant in Mendocino County, which is known as the Potter Valley Project.
In a press release, PG&E officials reported that the company “filed its Final Surrender Application and Final Non-Project Use of Project Lands Application for the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project with FERC” on Friday, July 25, and that the submittal package contains two applications:
PG&E’s Final Surrender Application and decommissioning plan for its Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project that includes the removal of Project facilities and features, including, but not limited to, Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam, and the removal of the Project from FERC jurisdiction.
An application for NPUPL that seeks FERC’s authorization for PG&E to allow the Eel-Russian Project Authority (ERPA) (a joint powers authority formed by a joint exercise of powers agreement between the County of Sonoma, Sonoma Water, and the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission) to construct the proposed New Eel-Russian Facility (NERF) for the purpose of future water diversion from the Eel River through the Project’s existing water diversion system to the Russian River Watershed.
PG&E officials note that an electronic version of this filing is available on the FERC website at https://www.ferc.gov/docs-filing/elibrary.asp
FEDERAL FUNDING CUTS? LIKE EVERY OTHER PROBLEM, MENDO HOLDS A MEETING
Mendocino County Launches Health Summit Series To Address Upcoming Changes To Programs And Services
Mendocino County CEO Darcie Antle is launching a three-part Health Summit series to bring together local health care providers, public agencies, and community stakeholders to discuss the potential impacts from the proposed financial changes to health-related programs and services.
The initial meeting of the series will explore how the first round of changes may affect various sectors of health care in Mendocino County, including hospitals, clinics, and County-provided programs. The goal is to foster open dialogue, share information, and develop collaborative strategies to respond to anticipated challenges.
The first meeting will take place on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM in the Board of Supervisors Chambers at the County Administration Building in Ukiah. Meetings two and three will follow in Fall 2025 and Spring 2026.
GROCERY OUTLET cuts expansion – Including termination of 28 unopened store leases – Will Fort Bragg’s store survive the shakeup?
by Frank Hartzell
Grocery Outlet, once expanding rapidly – has now pulled back – terminating 28 store leases and scaling down new builds as part of its’s late 2024 restructuring. For Fort Bragg where construction has just begun after years of legal battles, the question remains: will this long awaited store survive the shakeup?…
DOMESTIC ABUSE DEFENDANT CONVICTED AT TRIAL
A Mendocino County Superior Court jury returned from its deliberations Wednesday morning to announce it had found the trial defendant guilty as charged.
Defendant Sean Bradley Hammon, age 55, generally of the greater Ukiah area, was found guilty of Inflicting Traumatic Injury on a Cohabitant, a felony; False Imprisonment, a felony; and Providing False Identification to a Peace Officer, a misdemeanor.
After the jurors were thanked for their service and excused, a future evidentiary hearing was calendared to allow the prosecution to present any additional evidence it may want in a bench trial setting regarding circumstances in aggravation relating to either or both the facts of the crimes and the criminal background/history of the defendant.
As one example, certified documents will be offered into evidence at that hearing to prove defendant Hammon was convicted, among other thing, of a prior Strike offense – felony Criminal Threats -- in February 2017 in the local courts..
Once circumstances in aggravation and the Strike allegation have been proven, the defendant’s case will be referred to the Mendocino County Adult Probation Department for a background study and sentencing recommendation.
Defendant Hammon remains in the custody of the Sheriff at the Low Gap jail facility pending the final sentencing outcome.
The law enforcement agency that located the witnesses and developed the other evidence put to good use at this week’s trial was the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.
The attorney who presented the People’s evidence to the jury was Senior Deputy District Attorney Luke Oakley.
Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Keith Faulder presided over the three-day trial and will continue to preside over future proceedings involving this defendant through judgment and sentencing.
Background: Mendo’s Slap On The Wrist For A Dangerous Man
MARCO MCCLEAN:
Robert Spies wrote: “Marco, Perhaps your ongoing complaints about the cost of paying a general manager could be supplemented by your idea of a livable salary in a competitive market and even some suggestions of well qualified persons that would work full time for little or nothing. Don’t forget about medical insurance and workman’s comp and other fringe benefits. A little research will reveal that $60K is an extraordinarily low annual salary for an experienced executive. And as a programmer (Co-host of the Ecology Hour) I am happy to volunteer some of my time and do not feel I am taken advantage of.”
Marco here. Robert, I’m not complaining that management at KZYX is paid. You and so many others have the same wrong argument cued up and ready every time. You’re deliberately not seeing that the manager/CEO of KZYX has had, all along, a bookkeeper to keep the books, an operations manager to manage the operations, a program director to direct the programs, an underwriting coordinator to coordinate the underwriting, and an engineer to engineer, and six figures of tax-derived money to pay them all to do those things. What’s left for the manager to manage besides faking up a financial report once a year for the board?
Bob Young really manages all of KNYO, and he volunteers to do it so there’ll be a radio station for him to do his show, and for us. Others volunteer and help because he does. Marshall Brown teaches at Mendo High and manages KAKX. He does all those things listed above because /he/ also is in it for radio, and not for the money, and kids and grownups volunteer and help and do their shows. I volunteer to do my show. Just like you, Robert, I don’t feel like I’m being taken advantage of, but unlike you, I really am not. The first job of a manager of any business, profit or nonprofit, is to pay the workers before he pays himself. If your manager is pocketing the money your work brings in, and not paying you, you are not only being taken advantage of, however you feel about it, but you are hurting all workers everywhere. Just because you’re independently wealthy and don’t need money or you simply don’t know any better, doesn’t excuse you from facing this.
Speaking of which, there is no excuse for KZYX burning through almost three quarters of a million dollars every year. KZYX has always cost vastly more than it ever really had to. That is so not top talent; that’s crappy or criminal managing, or both.
For five years in the early-middle 1990s I published a county-wide newspaper. I built the light table and the computers, answered the phone and answering machine. I sold and designed the ads. I did the art, typeset and laid out the paper, made the print run to Willits Printing, did the delivery run all over the county, mailed out papers to the subscription list, and always exactly paid for it by the advertising. I did all that in four or five days’ work per issue, at first an issue every two weeks, then every three, then once a month, for 76 big, complicated issues, total, and kept myself alive with day jobs in between paper weeks. I printed everything anyone wrote and sent in, and everything anyone said into the answering machine, and everyone who wrote regularly got a regular column. Many people volunteered to help with this or that part of the paper: typing, driving a delivery run, poetry. (I gave Bill Kovanda an IBM XT computer with one floppy drive and a stack of disks that each had a word processor program on it and enough space for the poetry pages he collected. Two full newspaper pages of poetry every issue.) I advertised for cast-off computers, fixed them and gave them away to regular writers. Sean Harris and Jill Taylor often came in to enter handwritten or typed material. The woman who wrote the Dear Aunt Phoebe column did several partial delivery runs. A girl named Julie typed sometimes, and drew cartoons. Jennifer Benorden. I can’t think of all their names now. Everyone involved in that paper was top talent, Robert, speaking of top talent. And before /Memo/ there was the /Mendocino Commentary/. Harry Blythe managed that. He paid Judy Brown to do art and layout. He paid Carol Root to edit and typeset it on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter. When Carol left and I typeset the /Commentary/ for its last two years, he paid me. He came around for a day or two each issue, to catch up with advertisers. Those were the days. Also for almost 15 years Bob Woelfel paid me for my radio show, by the hour for the first two hours of each show and by a cut of the advertising/underwriting money my show brought in. Every month, he paid all of us at KMFB before he cashed his own check, in a depressed radio market, on a commercial radio station that didn’t get a single penny in government grants.
Compared to that… heck, compared to a clerk in a shoe store or a teenage shift manager at McDonald’s, managing KZYX is nothing. I have built and run whole real working radio stations from circuit diagrams and parts pulled from discarded household electronics at the dump. I can make a case that I put more time and energy and heart into doing my KMFB and then KNYO and KMEC and KAKX radio show than anyone at KZYX, including Andre or any of the former so-called managers, nor you too, ever put into radio there… In 2016 I offered to manage KZYX and pay the airpeople, and my application was ignored and tossed. KZYX has always been swimming in plenty of money to do it, and the manager has never even considered paying the airpeople, while never failing to cash his or her $5,000 a month check for doing little more than sitting in a chair and watching the tax-derived and rich donor money roll in.
Robert, there might be many reasons why you don’t feel taken advantage of. No matter what they are, they are no case for the manager not paying you, even if all you do there is turn on a mic, ID the station, and talk on the phone with your friends, or play your record collection, or start a playlist running. If your work is valuable, you should be paid. If you don’t need the money, tear up the check. If your work is not valuable, then you should get out of the way and let someone in whose work is, and advocate for their being paid.
LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)
KELLY WILKINSON (facebook):
Boonville Rental // 1 Bed, 1 Bath // Available Now
Standalone cottage for quiet, responsible tenant with references.
One bedroom cottage with gas fireplace, galley kitchen, bedroom, bath with shower and small private deck
Laundry on-site
Set in a (neglected) side yard, so plenty of room for for any gardeners
Sorry, no dogs
Parking for one car
On a property with one other cabin close by
$1450 which includes (outrageous) PGE, wifi, water, garbage, laundry. Tenant pays only for gas for little stove. Please use the facebook form to apply and thank you.
GALINA TREFIL: I don’t know who put Joshua Lee McCollister’s case on this website. Every morning, I light his candle though. It really keeps me grounded. It’s my way of saying hello. So, to whoever did it, I’m really grateful.
MENDOCINO MAGIC PRESENTS: The Perseids Meteor Shower Campout
August 15-17, 2025 | Laytonville
Nestled in the breathtaking wilderness of Mendocino County, Mendocino Magic Campground is thrilled to invite you to one of the summer’s most magical experiences — The Perseids Meteor Shower Campout. From August 15 to 17, guests can enjoy front-row seats to nature’s dazzling light show, set against the backdrop of California’s largest privately owned swimming lake and hundreds of acres of pristine forest.
“This is more than just a stargazing event,” says Mackenzie, owner of Mendocino Magic. “It’s a chance to connect with nature, create unforgettable memories, and share magical moments with your community under this area’s spectacular sky.”
The event will feature:
A panel Friday night on Dark Skies & Rural Economies, and Representation in Astronomy with Casey O’Neill, Edith Diaz, Michaël Uyttersprot, & Mackenzie O’Donnell
Saturday Meteor Shower Viewing at Methuselah’s Observatory
- Guided night sky tours with astronomy experts and constellation conversations with astrologists
- Galactic midnight soup station at the night market and teahouse
- Weekend camping packages for the full experience and interactive art on site for all ages
- Enjoy the lake for daytime swimming and boating
Mendocino Magic is the Perfect Place for the Perseids
Mendocino Magic is known for its remote beauty and warm hospitality, offering an escape from the rush of daily life. The property’s elevated location, minimal light pollution, and panoramic views make it an ideal setting for viewing the Perseid meteor shower — known for its bright, fast-moving meteors that can appear at a rate of up to 100 per hour.
Event Details:
Dates: August 15-17, 2025
Location: Mendocino Magic, Laytonville, CA
Tickets & Info:** [Visit MendocinoMagic.com/perseids]
(https://www.mendocinomagic.com/perseids)
Spaces are limited to ensure the best guest experience. Early booking is encouraged. Come with friends, bring a blanket, and get ready to make a wish upon a star.
About Mendocino Magic
Mendocino Magic is a premier outdoor recreation and camping destination in Northern California. With 600 acres of redwoods, meadows, and private waterfront, the property offers unique experiences ranging from weddings and music festivals to wilderness camping and stargazing events.
AV WINEGROWERS ASSOCIATION:
As harvest approaches, our farmers are gearing up for long days, early mornings, and the kind of hands-on work that makes Anderson Valley wine so special.
Today, we’re highlighting one of the valley’s most respected growers: Norman Kobler.
The son of Hans and Theresia Kobler, Swiss immigrants who founded Lazy Creek Vineyards in the early 1970s, Norman was raised among the vines. Today, he and his wife Colleen oversee vineyard operations across several sites in Anderson Valley, including the renowned Ferrington Vineyard.
With decades of experience and a year spent farming in Malans, Switzerland, Norman brings precision, intuition, and deep respect for the land to everything he does. He’s also a commercial fisherman.
This harvest, we raise a glass to Norman and the many growers like him who help define our region with quiet dedication and generational care. Good luck with the upcoming harvest!
CONFESSIONS OF A FAILED COMPUTER PROFESSOR
by Mark Scaramella
Actually, I was not a computer professor but a junior college part-time computer instructor in the late 1980s at Evergreen Valley Community College in San Jose.
I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1979 when they first came out and taught myself to program in BASIC while waiting to find a technical job in the San Jose area. After a few months, I found work at an engineering firm; My job title was “logistics systems engineer.”
It was the early days of the coming techno-paradise — selfies and on-line porn were still in the future. Personal computers were bursting onto the scene. I quickly realized that knowing how to use them and the early text-versions of various applications not only gave me an edge at work, but also freed me from dependency on those odd computer people in the back room who wore white coats and talked about Unix, but never really understood what the computers were supposed to do for ordinary people or non-computer specialists like me. They also had a bad habit of blowing your budget no matter how much money you allowed for programming, then charging you more time and money to “fix” what they produced — “fix” generally meaning correct problems of their creation or add features that had been requested from the beginning.
Living and working in the Silicon Valley area gave me ample opportunity to get involved in user groups for specific brands of computers and various computer applications. I dove in and mastered them all — word processing, spreadsheets, database management, and later, desktop publishing and graphic design.
I had multitudes of opportunities at work to use my newfound computer skills because no one else had much. For the first time in my life, I was ahead of the curve! In fact, I was the curve!
Mr. Computer Tutorial was soon giving classes to fellow workers and, after work, more classes for several computer stores and their customers in the South Bay; these classes were free to new buyers, but I got paid, and paid well.
After a series of very bad management decisions (a story for another day) the engineering company I had been working for filed for bankruptcy and I became a freelance technical writer, computer instructor, database application developer, and inventory management consultant through user group contacts and people I had known at work before the bankruptcy.
Somewhere around 1985 I got word through a user-group associate that a computer instructor at Evergreen Valley had quit and they needed someone to fill in right away. I submitted my application, was instantly interviewed by the senior computer instructor who just as instantly gave me the job since the classes were going to start in a little over one week.
But there was a problem: I had absolutely zero edu-credentials. Our section chief, Mr. Morris, the guy who wanted to hire me, figured out a way to substitute work experience for a credential and gave me some papers to fill out that had to be processed through several layers of the junior college’s bureaucratic edu-drones. It seemed quite foreign to the college’s office staffers that someone without any teaching credentials was about to be hired as a part-time instructor. (Ernest Hemingway couldn’t have gotten on with Evergreen’s English Department.)
Everywhere I wandered in the halls of academe I was met with skeptical looks and foot-dragging. I shuffled from office-to-office with an ever-larger stack of paperwork, occasionally being told to come back the next day for a simple sign off.
But with the constant pushing of my academic padrone, the desperate Mr. Morris, I was grudgingly awarded an interim-emergency credential and immediately began preparing for my first class.
Since Mr. Morris was the only person in the entire academic enterprise who even knew how to turn on a computer in those days, I prepared my own curriculum, handouts and test questions and considered myself thoroughly prepared for my first class.
Then Mr. Morris handed me a book — not a textbook, but a commercial computer book, having to do with one of the applications I was supposed to be teaching. It included chapters that I felt were unnecessary for the class as the class had been described to me. I was instructed in no uncertain terms to “just teach the book.”
Onward.
Most of the classes consisted of recent high school graduates and adults in equal numbers. All of them were hoping to be prepared for work in the emerging computer field. Many of my students were immigrants, some were hoping to switch careers into the computer field.
Presumably, my students had met basic prerequisites for my class. They were supposed to have completed a basic introduction to computers and operating systems, computer terminology and so forth. I quickly realized that although they had passed these classes and even more magically “met” these prerequisites, they hadn’t really learned what they needed to know about the computer basics.
So here I was with classes of about 20-30 ill-prepared students, some of whom were ill-acquainted with the language of instruction — English — teaching to a book that included material that I didn’t think was necessary or particularly relevant.
In the first few minutes of the first class it was obvious that having the students sitting at computers was a bad idea. They couldn’t resist the temptation to peck away at their keyboards while I was at the whiteboard explaining one thing or another, sometimes on class material, sometimes for no reason at all. The computers were an enormous distraction.
So I came up with a little ritual that I started all classes with: I theatrically strolled over to the master power switch on the wall and, with a flourish, turned off all the room’s student computers. “I want you to pay attention to me, not your computer. You’ll have plenty of time on the computer during your lab sessions.”
Over the next four years or so I taught about 25 classes on Database Management using dBase II, Page Layout and Graphic Design using Ventura Publisher, PageMaker, CorelDraw, Freelance, and several spreadsheet classes using Lotus 123, SuperCalc and a very early version of Excel.
Since most of the classes were based on commercial computer books, I had to develop my own tests. At first I tried short open book essay questions, explaining that I didn’t care if students used the book as long as they didn’t copy out of it verbatim. Nevertheless, their lack of understanding of computer terminology, their rudimentary language skills of even the native-born speakers of English, and a general inability to read, resulted in what might be called Orphic answers. Often their test answers were in the computer knowledge ballpark, but not pertinent to the need for the precise terminology required for computer usage. There were also a number of answers which were incorrect as written, but my experience with the students in the lab told me they knew the answer because they could operate the computer properly, although what they had written was incorrect.
I became as Orphic as my class and soon surrendered and switched to multiple-choice questions.
I always used the first few minutes of each class to go over the last test to make sure people understood the material from the previous class. When I went over the test results, inevitably there would be complaints that some questions were trick questions which allowed for more than one correct answer, and accusations that I was trying to mislead some students into incorrect answers. Arguing about these complaints was a waste of class time, so whenever a student made a reasonable case that an individual question was unfair or misleading, instead of arguing I just removed that question from scoring.
We never got through an entire book in all of the 25 or so classes I taught because the first few classes were spent going over stuff they should have mastered but hadn’t. I was always faced with what grade to give students who had not really completed the material they were supposed to complete. Mostly I gave students a C with an occasional B. (Anybody who attended all the classes deserved a C, even if their actual achievements were under par.) I think I gave out a total of one or two As.
Of all the students who finished the classes there was only one who I might have considered hiring as a trainee for an actual computer job. The rest would have required too much help, too much oversight, much more than an employer would be willing to provide.
Unprepared students are the rule in America. The entire system simply shoves the unprepared along until everyone gathers for a great big smiley-faced ceremony, and diplomas fall like confetti. Meanwhile, in the real world of work, well…
My main takeaway from those instructional days dealing with people who had, on paper, completed the prequisites, demonstrated that they were simply handed off to the next grade, unprepared to handle the instructional material presented to them. The system is geared toward pushing people through the classes, not on actually educating them. Each time students are pushed into the next grade level without having absorbed most of the material from the one they just finished, the problem snowballs and people fall further and further behind. Most teachers know this in their gut. Test results prove it. But nothing changes because the people directly involved in the dumbification system can’t face the fact that their efforts are fundamentally fraudulent. The result is a lot of “graduates” in name only, ill prepared for the serious business of adult life, easily duped, ready to buy a lot of crap both material and mental, just the way the money people like them.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, August 13, 2025
ELIZABETH ARNOLD, 39, Lucerne/Ukiah. Unspecified offense.
MICHAEL GIAQUINTO, 30, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
JORGE MARTINEZ, 29, Ukiah. Post-Release Community Supervision violation.
MATEO PACHECO IV, 21, Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, suspended license for DUI, criminal threats, probation revocation, resisting.
BRIAN PLYMPTON, 33, Samoa/Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia.
JANETTA VANPELT, 75, Fortuna/Ukiah. DUI-any drug.
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
The best part of Dems is their screaming about Fascists and Authoritarians. Their complete lack of vision and intelligence is truly astounding. I actually have to raise my glass to them. The sheer level of absolute unawareness is something to behold.
SPEAK UP FOR STARVING CHILDREN IN GAZA
Editor:
Day after day, week after week, news articles from around the world document the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Children are dying of starvation. Medical facilities have run out of supplies, and people are dying for lack of necessary care. Trucks are loaded with food and medical supplies across the border, but most have not been allowed in. How do we help stop this horror?
I am the daughter of Holocaust survivors. My parents endured that horror and raised me to do what I could to stand up for fairness for all — to recognize our common humanity and speak out against injustice toward any of us. We must not look away from the preventable starvation of the children of Gaza.
I just read a book by Omar El Akkad titled “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” documenting our failure to stop this. A line from that book that stirs me is this: “It may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.” These are our children. May we join together to speak up for them and for a world where all children may thrive.
Madelyn Hodges
Tomales
WHAT CAN ISRAELI CONTROL OF WATER SYSTEMS IN CYPRUS TELL US ABOUT THE 2014 (WATER TECHNOLOGY-HEAVY) CALIFORNIA-ISRAEL TRADE AGREEMENT?
by Eva Chrysanthe
We have heard for some months that Israelis are fleeing to, among other places, the island of Cyprus, rumored birthplace of the mythical Aphrodite. But this migration is a heightening of a longer trend over the past decade. Since 2019, the Israeli population on Cyprus has expanded from 6,500 to at least 15,000, in part by exploiting a loophole to purchase property on an island where land has long been contested for thousands of years, most recently between Greece and Turkey.
(If you want a somewhat dated but excellent primer on the critical 1974 partition of Cyprus, here’s the late Christopher Hitchens’ BBC documentary, “Cyrpus: Stranded in Time” which is viewable in its entirety for free here. It’s Hitchens at his finest, before he went reactionary.
Alarmingly, the Adelson-funded Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom is now promoting the lie that there is a “security threat” to Israel posed by Cyprus. This is absurd, as the island itself has been welcoming to Israelis and has been used as a staging ground for Israel’s assaults on Gaza, much to the consternation of many Cypriots.
But Cyprus had originally been envisioned as a Jewish homeland by Theodor Herzl, “the father of Zionism”. Herzl first presented this idea in 1902 in a pamphlet he distributed to the Parliamentary Committee on Alien Immigration, convened in London. Herzl’s pamphlet was titled: The Problem of Jewish Immigration to England and the United States Solved by Furthering the Jewish Colonization of Cyprus.
To many Cypriots, Israelis now look like they’re occupying Cyprus after destroying Gaza. The recent influx of new Israeli property owners is fomenting a backlash on Cyprus, as Israelis are driving up prices and driving out Cypriot shop owners, and because Israelis are beginning to set up walled settlements for “security”.
That type of walled settlement is not favored on Cyprus, where many Turks and Greeks consider themselves Cypriots first, against the wishes of both the Greek and Turkish governments. (Recent protests by Turkish Cypriots took the Turkish government to task for challenging the secular nature of their educational system.)
But the unease isn’t just about Israeli acquisition of land. Israel’s state water company Mekorot has launched a desal plant on Cyprus which at the time let Mekorot partake in the supply of about 40% of Cyprus’ water consumption. 12 years later, Israeli companies are now reported to control the majority of Cyprus’ water, which is eerily familiar to Israel’s control of Jordanian water supplies.
You may not have noticed it because it has been vastly underreported in California media, but as a result of the 2014 California-Israel trade agreement, Israeli companies have been enmeshing themselves in California’s water and agricultural technology. Some of these applications have been useful; others have been environmentally destructive. But with each one of these Israeli projects, California risks losing control of its share of the world’s most precious resource: water.
One last note: there has been ICE activity in Marin County ongoing for months now, and while residents have understandably been reluctant to discuss it, it has not been mentioned in local media. Isabeau Doucet wrote a recent article about the impact of ICE raids in Salinas Valley that gives an idea of the stress many workingclass immigrants in Marin are feeling right now.
Thanks as always to patient readers for support, insights, and inspiration. And if you’re still prevented from contributing by the Stripe block on this account, please feel free to reach out to me directly at marincountyconfidential (at) gmail.
(MarinCountyConfidential)
GIANTS’ NIGHTMARE AT ORACLE PARK CONTINUES WITH 11-1 DEFEAT TO PADRES IN HISTORICALLY BAD STRETCH
by Shayna Rubin
A strong home series against the San Diego Padres could have resuscitated the San Francisco Giants’ fading wild-card dreams. With an 11-1 loss on Wednesday afternoon, though, they were swept by their National League West rivals, and manager Bob Melvin hinted at a shifting goal for the rest of the 2025 season.
The Giants aren’t watching the standings anymore. The next six weeks might be better spent getting a look at young players in the minors to prepare for 2026. At the very least, they’ll use the rest of the season to try to play a better brand of baseball and bring some semblance of good vibes into a defeated clubhouse.
“You go out there and continue to try to play,” Melvin said. “You probably take a look at different complements, like we are at this point in time right now. We might be at a point where we give guys days off and look at some other guys. I still hate to admit we’re at that point. We talk about being a pitching and defense team and we’ve pitched well, but our defense hasn’t been good, really all year.”
This isn’t the first time the Giants waved a white flag. They dealt away key pieces of the bullpen, their most competitive feature, at the July 31 trade deadline, but clung to hope that the core could lead a second-half surge. A bad homestand sobered the high of a winning road trip through New York and Pittsburgh.
Melvin hates to admit that the Giants are pivoting attention from the postseason because, technically, they’re still in the race. They’ve lost five straight games, five straight home series, 13 of their past 14 home games — a first for this franchise since they moved West — and dropped into a tie with the Arizona Diamondbacks for third in the division, but the Giants are six games back of a wild card and would have to pass three more teams.
That type of run would be far-fetched the way this team has played since mid-June. A come-from-behind spirit fueled a hot start early on in the year, but the way Wednesday’s loss played out was indicative of how drastically their fortunes have shifted.
“Coming into the series we know we had to be better, go out and compete against the Padres,” shortstop Willy Adames said. “Obviously we didn’t play the best baseball over the last three days, but the last two months it’s been the same story. For some reason, nothing positive is coming.”
A sizable crowd of 35,080 on Wednesday at Oracle Park didn’t have to sit around long to know the home team’s fate. The Giants lost control of the game in the second inning.
A bad-luck bounce on a ball that could have produced an inning-ending double play with the bases loaded deflated the dugout. Jake Cronenworth’s jam shot bounced off of second base and past Adames’ glove to score a pair of runs.
Then the inning spiraled into a mess: Left fielder Heliot Ramos fielded Manny Machado’s double and, when second baseman Christian Koss failed to get to second to cut off, Ramos panicked and spiked the baseball into the grass, allowing a sixth run to score.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Melvin said of Ramos. “It was more how we were positioned for the cutoff.”
The Padres fought in every at-bat and drew four walks off Kai-Wei Teng, who labored through 1⅔ innings and exited his second start of the year trailing 6-0 before Machado scored on a passed ball by Patrick Bailey for the seventh run charged to Teng.
“Jam shot hit the base, that’s a double-play ball,” Adames said of the bad inning. “Something negative is in the air and we haven’t figured out how to beat it and how to be better out there.
“Today has been the toughest day for me to try to stay positive out there. It’s hard to punch back when you’re down 7-0 in the second inning, especially the way we’ve been playing.”
Lopsided as this loss was — the Padres scored four more runs against the Giants’ bullpen — the offense has been the standout disadvantage at home. San Francisco scored a total five runs over this five-game losing streak.
The at-bats have often looked lifeless, sometimes uncompetitive — Bailey struck out looking three times in Monday’s loss. The team struck out 51 times and drew seven walks over the five defeats. Giants hitters walked once and struck out seven times on Wednesday. Before the game, Melvin noted the disparity has a lot to do with the offense’s futility against the fastball.
Monday, Yu Darvish — who relies primarily on his vast array of off-speed pitches — went four-seamer heavy to keep the Giants in unfavorable counts and frozen when Darvish would whip a fastball into the zone in a two-strike count. Nick Pivetta, Wednesday’s starter, has one of baseball’s best fastballs. He struck out five and walked one. The Giants scored their only run off him when Jung Hoo Lee tripled and Koss hit a sacrifice fly in the seventh inning, forcing Pivetta out two outs into the frame having thrown 101 pitches.
The Giants dugout, though, had already come to terms with the loss. That’s just the way baseball in San Francisco has been going lately.
“It’s just like every day something happens,” Adames said. “It feels like everybody feels the same way that it’s like, come on. In the dugout, we lose the energy right away and from that it’s hard to come back when you don’t have it in the dugout. It’s just tough. We have to be better. It’s the bottom line.”
(SF Chronicle)
SOMETHING ABOUT OUTSIDE LANDS DOESN’T FEEL VERY S.F. ANYMORE
Editor,
As a longtime fan of Outside Lands and a Richmond District resident, it’s been frustrating to watch the festival drift away from its original spirit.
What once felt like a celebration of local creativity now feels more like a corporate billboard.
The large craft tent — once a vibrant hub for small, local makers — is now dominated by alcohol brands like White Claw, Cayman Jack, Pacifico and Ketel One. Meanwhile, the Soberlands tent — a space offering group support — was tucked away.
The overwhelming focus on alcohol pushes out the community-driven heart that once defined the event.
Outside Lands also feels increasingly disconnected from San Francisco. While a few Bay Area artists were in the lineup, the presence of local acts felt more symbolic than substantial.
And three consecutive weekends of festivals are taking a visible toll on Golden Gate Park and the western neighborhoods.
I volunteer with Clean Vibes, which supports Outside Lands’ waste sorting effort, and I appreciate the festival’s sustainability work, especially compostable food packaging.
But San Francisco deserves better than a festival that profits off its name while ignoring its values.
Mathilda Silverstein
San Francisco
DEBUNKING THE MYTHS ABOUT MAMDANI’S NYC MAYORAL CANDIDACY
by Stewart Lawrence
Zohran Mamdani’s remarkable campaign for New York mayor has left the Democratic party deeply divided. Moderates and conservatives like James Carville and Chris Cuomo – brother of Mamdani’s reading rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo – have all but denounced the 33-year old stature senator as a far-left lunatic that will doom the party’s chances of rebounding from their crushing defeat by Donald Trump last November.
Moderates are well aware that Mamdani is popular, especially with young voters, but they fear his likely victory will stoke the political ambitions of other democratic socialists in jurisdictions where the electorate tilts more conservative. Sure he might eke out a win in Deep Blue New York City – in fact, polls show him leading all other candidates – but at what cost to Democrat chances in Red-friendly districts in Ohio or North Carolina, they argue. This kind of fear-mongering is built on a series of myths about how the electorate in New York – and indeed, elsewhere –is likely to view candidates like Mamdani. What are these myths?
- Most of the electorate will reject a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist”
Nonsense. Avowed socialist Bernie Sanders polled extremely well against Donald Trump in 2016, besting him by 10 points (compared to just 5 points for Hillary Clinton). In fact, polls conducted as far back as 2015 – on the eve of Barack Obama’s departure from office – showed that young voters were becoming quite attracted to the idea of socialism, which they tended to associate with social democratic policies pursued in Scandinavia – unlike older voters, who still thought of socialism in terms of the Soviet Union, China and communism. The polarization was sharp at the extremes of age, but not in the middle. In fact, a near majority of voters in the broad 18-49 year old demographic – about 49% – had a generally positive view of “socialism,” according to polling conducted that year by YouGov.
And that was a full ten years ago, before COVID and the massive economic disarray and job losses of 2020 began taking their toll. Consider the very latest polls from May 2025, including a new You Gov/Cato Institute poll. More than 6 in 10 young voters (62%) now say they embrace “socialism” – a record high – and as older voters have watched their Social Security and Medicare benefits come under attack – their antipathy toward socialism – has also declined. Overall, some 43% of all voters have a favorable view of socialism, up from just 25% back in 2015. This is not polling from New York or California – but from all US voters, including the hard-hit American heartland and the Republican-controlled South.
- Mamdani is an Anti-Semite who will turn off Jewish voters.
Mamdani’s opponents are clearly counting on the candidate’s steadfast criticism of Israel and his passionate support for the victims of the genocide in Gaza to drive away Jewish voters. But it’s simply not happening. While the New York city area is home to 1.3 million Jews – second only to Tel Aviv, Israel – many share Mamdani’s concern about Israel policies and the Trump administration’s support for them. The latest poll sponsored by Zenith Research and Public Progress Solutions shows Mamdani leading with 43% of New York’s Jewish voters, followed by 26% for Cuomo and just 15% for Eric Adams. Mamdani’s Jewish support jumps to 67% among Jewish voters in the 18-49 year old age bracket, where support for the Palestinian cause is overwhelming.
Why are younger Jews so supportive? Research conducted by Samuel J. Abrams at the conservative American Enterprise Institute among Jewish college students gives the answer. “My recent research on Jewish college students reveals that many progressive Jewish students are reinterpreting what it means to be Jewish; traditional practices, historical beliefs, and faith-based ideas and traditions are being hollowed out for a more general, humanistic world view. For young, progressive Jews, their identity is now defined less by faith and traditional Jewish practices or solidarity with the state of Israel, but more by universalist ethics, justice, and opposition to oppression—wherever it occurs.”
Abrams is no Mamdani supporter, but he’s warning conservatives that they are failing to comprehend a profound shift in the Jewish electorate. “I find Mamdani’s ideas to be un-American and he has regularly peddled anti-Semitic views making him unfit to be the mayor of New York,” Abrams insists. “Regardless of my views, however, I cannot write off the sentiments and the supporters he is representing.” This is refreshing realism from a conservative opponent that could bode well for Mamdani as he seeks to govern and appease his Jewish supporters and critics alike.
- Mamdani won’t attract African-American voters, who are critical to prevailing in national and local elections.
Cuomo did win a majority of the African-American vote during the primary – the one minority group that swung sharply his way. Cuomo won more than half of the votes in majority-Black precincts, while Mamdani received about 34 percent. In those areas with more than 70 percent Black residents, Cuomo did even better, in fact. Black voters constitute about a quarter of all New York City voters, according to a June 2025 New York Times survey. Winning a sizable share of the Black vote can make a big difference, and with more candidates in the general election race, Mamdani may have some work to do.
But the Black vote in New York, like elsewhere, is no monolith. Here again, age is likely to be a big factor. According to one primary exit poll, about 70% of Black voters under 50 voted for Mamdani citywide. Another poll places young Black support for Mamdani lower – but still above 50%. Young Black voters do not simply fall in line with the traditional Black political leadership, which is closely aligned with the Democratic party establishment. Black voters also include US-born children of Black immigrants from other parts of the world – the Caribbean and Africa – who are politically independent and looking for change. Some young Black voters are tilting toward Trump and the GOP further dividing the vote among the top candidates.
If Mamdani can continue to increase young Black voter turnout, he may not need the older ones. And his surge of support among other minority constituencies – including middle-class Asian Americans as well as Hispanics – could well prove more decisive at the ballot box.
- Mamdani is soft on crime and illegal immigration and hostile to law enforcement
Critics also believe that Mamdani’s past support for “defunding the police” in the wake of highly-publicized police brutality incidents like the George Floyd killing in 2020 could cost him politically. But will it, in fact? Mayor Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa – both big boosters of law enforcement – are hoping to stigmatize Mamdani as a “cop-hater” who will make it harder to keep the city streets safe from dangerous criminals, including some illegal immigrants. Adams and Sliwa do enjoy much stronger support from the city’s public safety establishment – the NYPD and NYFD – but the allegiance of New York’s nearly 50,000 uniformed police officers and firefighters and their families is still up for grabs.
General voters, meanwhile, appear to bear no grudge toward Mamdani for whatever past statements he might have made about law enforcement. In fact, crime does not appear to be a top issue in New York City. A recent poll by Emerson College asked voters to rank their top concerns. Housing affordability, Mamdani’s core issue, ranked first, followed by the economy, including jobs, inflation and taxes. Crime? It ranked a distant third.
Violent crime in NYC has gone down substantially in recent years, something Mayor Adams can take credit for, but which, paradoxically, also serves to take the issue off the table, benefitting Mamdani. At the same time, new revelations of high-level corruption within the NYPD in which Adams is now implicated, have tarnished the overall reputation of law enforcement, further reducing whatever advantage the mayor might try to claim on this issue.
As for immigration, it’s proven to be a potent issue in New York State, favoring the GOP, just as it does nationwide, but not in New York City, which is filled with immigrants from 150 different countries. A whopping 38% of all New Yorkers are foreign-born – about 3 million residents overall – and there is still broad support among residents for New York’s status as a “sanctuary city.” While there’s also growing support for enhanced immigration enforcement, especially in conservative boroughs like Staten Island, the fact that Trump’s ICE has moved so aggressively to deport immigrants, including those with legal status, jeopardizing basic civil rights, has produced enough of a political backlash to insulate Mamdani from any criticism for publicly criticizing ICE and defending lax enforcement.
It’s also critical to note that thanks to a proposed 2021 law, which now faces a legal challenge, even non-citizen immigrants – about 1.2 million total – are eligible to vote in New York city elections. The outcome of this court case could be another factor favoring Mandani in November. The very fact that such a law is under consideration is a clear indication of how supportive New Yorkers overall remain of the city’s burgeoning immigrant population.
Conclusion
Mamdani has an extraordinary opportunity to capture the Mayor’s office in November. Much of what critics are saying would seem to limit his political appeal with “mainstream” city voters, but the results of the primary election – general election polling ever since – strongly suggest otherwise. Mamdani enjoys several major advantages.
His two leading opponents are both heavily tarnished by scandal, reducing whatever advantage they might otherwise enjoy as tried-and-true leaders with demonstrated track records. Mamdani is a fresh face and a political neophyte – but that’s not hurting him, it’s helping, especially with so many voters of the same generation or younger that increasingly dominate the electorate. New Yorkers want change, and Mamdani is the candidate of change. This is a “change” election.
Mamdani is focusing his campaign on the kitchen table issue that matters most to New Yorkers – affordability. That includes the affordability of housing and food, the items vital to basic survival. His declared solutions – a rent “freeze” and the establishment of government-run grocery stores – are easy to attack but they demonstrate that he is willing to take forceful action to limit the damage caused by an unbridled free market. Will he be forced to compromise if he wins? Undoubtedly, but these issues play extremely well with voters during a campaign, especially when his opponents have offered no policies of their own to address the same concerns.
Mamdani’s command of social media tactics, including the use of short videos in multiple languages geared to distinct ethnic Asian and Muslim communities has provided an outreach and messaging advantage unmatched by Cuomo or Adams. GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa has recently marveled at Mamdani’s communications skills, noting that only an all-out grassroots effort by his rivals is likely to blunt his march toward victory. Sliwa, as the long-time head of the Guardian Angels, an informal police auxiliary force, enjoys street “cred” with some New Yorkers of various ethnicities, but, at 71, is probably too “old school” to compete with Mamdani in the absence of a more well-organized and better funded campaign apparatus.
It’s also worth noting that New York’s powerful economic and political elites are not unified in their opposition to Mamdani. Mamdani, rather brilliantly, has reached out proactively to business groups to hear and respond to their concerns, if only to deflect their ability to coalesce against him. Several major corporate leaders – like Jewish leaders – have spoken out publicly against Mamdani, but they are keenly aware that their chances of defeating him are declining rapidly. Early efforts to coalesce a major fundraising effort to back Cuomo or Adams have already foundered, in part because neither man is willing to bow out in favor of the other. Sliwa has name recognition but no elective experience, and is unlikely to emerge as a dark horse alternative.
The upshot? Far from threatening Democrats’ political chances in the future, Mamdani’s campaign should be viewed as a powerful catalyst for debate over how the party can adapt itself to local opportunities and get back in the game against Trump and the GOP. There are some unique elements to the New York race that offer unusually favorable terrain for a rogue democratic socialist – who literally emerged out of nowhere – to capture the political leadership of the world’s financial capital. It’s a diehard blue city in a decidedly Blue state; the established Democratic leadership is heavily tarnished; and young voters and politically aware immigrants have emerged as a cutting-edge demographic and electoral force. But some of these same elements are present in other jurisdictions, and Mamdani’s campaign success is pregnant with lessons for Democrats elsewhere. Above all, by focusing on bread-and-butter affordability issues – and downplaying if not ignoring culture war issues – both of which proved to be the Achilles Heel of the Biden/Harris campaign, Mamdani has demonstrated that Democrats can tap into deep discontent with the status quo and with the policies of both major parties. Technically a Democrat, Mamdani is downplaying his own party affiliation and presenting himself as a vibrant force for change who can meet voters where they are, and who can listen without lecturing.
Make no mistake, a Mamdani victory in November is no slam dunk. There are some troubling warning signs in recent polling that suggest that Mamdani is nowhere near capturing 50% of the NYC electorate. If he expects to prevail, in the face of a massive billionaire-funded propaganda offensive after Labor Day, he has his work cut out for him. And even if he does win, that will just be the beginning. Mamdani will need to avoid the crippling governing mistakes that other recent grassroots change candidates – like Brandon Johnson in Chicago – have committed once they assumed office. The goodwill and wait-and-see attitude that greets such candidates at the outset can quickly dissipate as the high expectations from supporters and opponents alike clash with the need for coalition building with diverse city stakeholders. Mamdani, post-victory, will need to “step up” to the next level and be willing to disappoint as well as inspire. His unusual willingness to listen and learn could prove to be his greatest leadership asset. It could demonstrate that progressives at the local level can actually do the hard work of governing where stodgy and corrupt establishment figures, for all their vaunted experience, have failed.
(Stewart Lawrence is a long-time Washington, DC-based policy consultant. He can be reached at [email protected]. CounterPunch.org)
ELON MUSK: IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT. MUCH WORSE.
by Patricia Campbell
Elon Musk may well have sealed our fate. As his “constellation” of now over 8,000 satellites begin falling from the sky and burning up in the atmosphere after their planned five-year lifespan is over, the resulting nano-particles of aluminum oxide from the burned up Starlinks will linger around for decades, slowly falling from the mesosphere into the upper stratosphere where the ozone layer resides. By inevitable chemical reaction, these aluminum oxide particles will destroy the ozone molecules that make up the delicate ozone layer, which protects Planet Earth from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. So we won’t be going to Mars anytime soon to “promote human consciousness” and become a “space-faring civilization,” as cultural icon Elon Musk constantly iterates to his cultists in a bold con game to feed his internet empire with more and more rocket launches and more and more “Starlink” satellites.
Survivors here on earth, if there are any, will probably have to wear space suits. Skin cancer, cataracts, dying plant species, the extinction of phytoplankton and the worsening of climate change - all this and more will be the result of satellites vaporizing and destroying the ozone layer’s UV protection.
Musk’s Space-X company began sending up “Starlink” satellites in 2019. At that time, they were relatively small, just under 600 pounds with the frames and infrastructure made primarily of aluminum. Nowadays, a full-scale V2 Starlink satellite weighs 2,760 pounds, again mostly aluminum.
They orbit the earth in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) at an altitude of about 342 miles. These Starlink satellites are designed to last for a period of only five years, at which time they are disposed of by “de-orbiting,” which means they are rocketed downwards to the point where the intense friction of air in the upper atmosphere causes them to break up and burn up, starting at about 47 miles altitude. When aluminum is vaporized by the high heat of re-entry, it transforms into minute nanoparticles called aluminum oxide. Contrary to what you might think, you don’t have to worry about breathing in this stuff. These extremely small nanoparticles are so light, they end up staying high in the mesosphere atmospheric layer for decades, before slowly drifting down into the Stratosphere where the ozone layer resides. The ozone layer is essential to protect all life from the Sun’s deadly ultraviolet (UV) rays. As they descend into the Stratosphere these tiny aluminum oxide nanoparticles react with ozone molecules to destroy them. This is scientific reality. Bye-bye ozone layer. Hello misery and death.
But it gets even worse. There is something called the “Kessler Syndrome” that predicts as large mega-constellations of satellites are implemented, the risk of a chain-reaction collision scenario becomes more and more inevitable. Space-X currently has well over 8,ooo sats in LEO, with thousands more planned. Emergency collision-avoidance maneuvers are now routine, including at the International Space Station, to dodge the already prevalent and persistent “space junk,” travelling at speeds of 17,500 mph just to maintain orbit. That’s about three times the speed of a rifle bullet. When any of these thousands of busted-up satellites and burned-out rocket second stages hit anything else, it’s over. Lots and lots more uncontrollable “space junk” is thus created, resulting in pieces of crash debris hitting more and more other satellites in the overcrowded LEO orbit zone, in a catastrophic chain reaction.
And while Musk is by far the biggest villain in the ultimate destruction of the commons of outer space, he’s not alone. Since the Ukraine has extensively used Starlink to conduct its warfare activities against Russia, China has now taken this as a military threat, and decided to implement its own mega-constellation of thousands of LEO satellites. Other companies and individuals are also in on the greed-game of developing “constellations” of LEO satellites, for the lucrative profits to be made by connecting millions of people to the internet. Entities like Jeff Bezos with his “Project Kuiper,” Eutel’s “OneWeb” internet services, and Apple’s Globalstar, used primarily for their iPhones, are all launching satellites. And there’s a laundry list of other companies also interested in the development of low-latency LEO satellites for profit in this exercise of greed, competition and collective stupidity.
When and if the inevitable happens, the collision of one, then several, then hundreds, then thousands of satellites breaking up into small pieces in a Kessler Syndrome nightmare, their destruction will, for thousands of years, render LEO orbit activities (satellites and space stations) or any space travel at all virtually impossible. Nothing will be able to make it through the unnavigable cloud of millions of fatal projectiles in a blanket of space junk And, as the larger pieces of satellites, second stage rockets, space stations, etc. fall to the earth and burn up in the sky, the “fire and brimstone” apocalyptic prophecies of demented fundamentalist preachers claiming God’s judgement will become a reality. But the fireworks won’t be by the hand of God. It will be at the hands of greedy, stupid and arrogant human beings and their enablers, who in blind ignorance caused their own demise.
So, we won’t be going to Mars and populating new solar systems anytime soon to “expand human consciousness” and “find the meaning of the universe” as the stuttering Musk earnestly promises. That was all just a con man ruse to keep his space-cult nerds under his spell, and stay super rich with millions of new subscribers to “Starlink.” Thanks primarily to Elon Musk, the human experiment could very well be near its end. The richest, greediest man on Earth has sown the seeds of our destruction, and is making lots of money doing it.
Links:
Space 4 Peace - https://tinyurl.com/y29tmkx5
Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89909-7
Human earthlings
have become a force
that must be reckoned with.
LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT
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PROTESTERS GREET JD VANCE as he arrives in Scotland for family holiday
by Martyn McLaughlin
US Vice-President JD Vance was greeted by dozens of pro-Palestine protesters, who accused him of supporting a “genocide” by Israel in Gaza, as he arrived in Scotland on a family holiday.
Donald Trump’s second-in-command landed at Prestwick Airport on Wednesday evening before travelling with a large motorcade to the luxury Carnell Estate near Kilmarnock in East Ayrshire.
He was greeted there by the pro-Palestine protesters. The demonstrators were kettled by police as they bashed pots and pans, waved Palestine flags and shouted pro-Palestine chants.…
BILL HATCH: You rush around and around and around trying to be useful until they retire you, But that’s OK because you have your books. You get them all arranged (only takes a couple of years) and then you’re finally ready to really finish your undergraduate education. The best thing to do at this point is to find a good Korean espionage series on TV.
THE RIGHTEOUS COMMUNITY
by Jackson Lears
Six weeks after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. “Not in our lifetime,” Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews. Cheney, and by implication “we,” had embarked on a war to outlast our lifetimes — an endless war. For a member of the “Vulcans,” Bush’s foreign policy circle, committed to expanding US hegemony through constant imperial adventure, what could be more exciting than perpetual war against an elusive, shapeshifting, often invisible enemy? Now: nearly a quarter of a century on, the wet dream of an aging militarist has become a fundamental force driving American foreign policy. This should come as no surprise, given Cheney’s central role in creating a permanent warfare state. The media cliché that 9/11 “changed everything” offered a convenient excuse for unprecedented violations of fundamental constitutional principles — the unchecked expansion of executive power, the utter disregard for habeas corpus and defendants’ rights in general, the warrantless mass surveillance of millions of citizens and the legitimation of torture as a military tactic. To warriors against terror, the Bill of Rights had become “quaint,” as Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, said of the Geneva Conventions.
The hysteria provoked by the attacks on the World Trade Center created an opportunity for Cheney and his ideological comrades to engineer what amounted to a coup d’etat. In collaboration with the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, they fashioned a Washington foreign policy consensus committed to armed intervention abroad, overt or covert, anywhere US intelligence agencies decided that American interests were somehow at stake. What had once been kept hidden was now paraded in public, as doctrines of regime change and preventive war received serious consideration in the New York Times and the Washington Post. “Everything has changed” was the perfect mantra for a national security establishment that aimed to change everything — by unleashing executive power from constitutional constraints and defining its range as limitless. The foundation for that agenda had been laid during the Cold War and built on in the 1990s, in that heady unipolar moment. Bush the younger’s Vulcan advisers, led by Cheney, had been plotting a more aggressive foreign policy ever since Bush the elder thwarted their hopes by stopping short of seizing Baghdad in 1991. Clinton Democrats, meanwhile, were itching for overseas involvement wherever they could find or invent a population threatened by tyranny. Once the US became the world’s only superpower, universalist fantasies proliferated. But after 9/11 they widened, intensified and solidified into a new consensus. Washington policymakers and their media stenographers came to view endless war as a normal condition, and the world as a battlefield where morally charged confrontations could be staged repeatedly, perhaps forever.
This terrifying vision originated among a small group of intellectuals whose belief system would have been deemed reckless even at the nadir of the Cold War — indeed, it was the worldview that consigned Barry Goldwater to crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But eventually it moved inside the charmed circle, becoming regarded as responsible opinion and engulfing the Democratic Party even more thoroughly than the Republicans. During the weeks, months and years after the towers fell, as fear and anger spread through the body politic, disturbing habits of mind became embedded in policy debate. The most corrosive was the recoil from debate itself, which came to be seen as a betrayal of national unity. According to the official view, independent thought was the pathetic pastime of a few outliers like Susan Sontag, who had the temerity to ask: “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilisation’ or “‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” Merely raising the question led to Sontag being denounced as an apologist for terrorism. “Terrorism”: the word acquired the magical power of stopping all discussion, indeed all thought, instantaneously. In the public imagination, terrorism was close to barbarism — a marriage sanctified by implicitly racist Islamophobia (the term is inadequate, since it focuses on fear to the exclusion of contempt and rage). The obsession with exterminating terrorists had calamitous consequences for US foreign policy. Diplomacy was out of the question when you were dealing with murderous savages —which is what terrorists were by definition — and any political interpretation of terrorist acts beyond “they hate our freedom” betrayed the interpreter’s complicity.
The Bush team did their best to elevate their motives above plain revenge by making use of the rhetoric of “global leadership.” In this exalted idiom, eliminating terrorists and overthrowing governments suspected of harboring them were the first steps in a grander project: the global spread of American-style democracy, which would ultimately mean the triumph of civilization over barbarism all over the world. “Democracy promotion” abroad became an avowed aim of US foreign policy.
This is the sensibility — a blend of visceral revulsion, righteous anger and sentimental moralism — that the war on terror bequeathed to American foreign policymakers on both sides of the aisle, shaping their perceptions ofevery enemy manufactured by the national security state since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The media have collaborated in this project by personalizing projected threats, demonizing foreign adversaries by turning them into comic strip villains. Behind these monstrous figures are subhuman hordes, whose menace can be conjured by the magic words “Russia” or “Hamas.” This cartoonish world picture has flourished in the decades since 9/11 — never more flagantly than in the current Amercan and Israeli attempt to justify Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The great unpunished war crime of our time is a product of the war on terror; Israeis who descend from survivors of one holocaust are now creating another.
(London Review of Books)
FERN HILL
by Dylan Thomas (1945)
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
MARCO MCCLEAN:
More than enough hot air to warm Mendocino County during the winter, perhaps the entire state…
Are you calling me a liar, Harvey? Because– what part of what I said doesn’t ring true to you? Let’s talk about this on the air and you can set me straight. I’ll set aside however much time you think you might need. We can do it live.
–Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Obviously a trumple lover and lover of an authoritarian state.
…. and reeking of hubris.
Some brief thoughts on the Las Vegas woman who traveled to the coast to end her life last Tuesday evening:
First, bless her heart, bless her soul— she had her deep reasons to act, and she clearly thought long and hard about where and how to leave this earth. If we knew her whole story, I imagine we’d shed tears for her, feel compassion for her, wish her peace.
I was struck by the short MCSO report, words usually dry and to the point, that called her apparently intentional fall, “a great fall.” The intended meaning, of course, was that it was a long fall, a fall of many feet. But “great” has other connotations, as in “of notable meaning” or of “remarkable consequence.” And, by accident, the writer got at the heart of it. Serendipity there.
Over the last several years, I’ve had two friends who made the same choice, after much thought, but by very different means. Both were dealing with bodies badly broken, pain and suffering, with no hope of changes for the better. I myself at times can imagine doing the same if my body loses its way down the road. On we all go, sobered by fellow humans who make the choice to leave. They are brave souls.
From Kathy:
The problem of how to take control of one’s finale is so complex. One sympathizes tremendously with the woman who has driven to the Coast to end her life. But before this starts sounding like a good idea to folks, Please think of the First Responders! This option inevitably involves a group of hard working people generally unknown to the suicide. But having to deal with the aftermath of this choice is traumatic. First Responders are already dealing with so much. Am dearly hoping not to involve them in my end point, assuming I have some sort of free will at the time. Refusing to eat and then refusing to drink seems like an option. Probably walking off into the deep wilderness is too hard on the family and also might inadvertently involve others. Ideas welcome!
It’s a valuable point, and part of the complexity of it all, as Kathy says, and worth considering if one is going that way.. One of my friends ended his life in a way that involved first responders in the aftermath. I thought of those folks, and felt for them, would have been a terrible scene to have to deal with.
I hope the Las Vegas woman got to see a sweet sunset as she left….
The sunsets have been unreal This summer.
“Ideas welcome!”
Dorothy Parker, dead and buried so long, would be thrilled to contribute. The best options seem to require waiting for just the right moment, like the case I heard of recently where a grandfather jumped in a torrent of floodwater to pull out his grandson. Then more recently another granddad died saving a family member from a falling tree branch. I covered a murder trial where an old guy jumped in front of a gun and took a fatal shot to save a young dude. Keeping alert to these kinds of exits seems to me the least troublesome and messy with the added benefit of chalking up a good deed on your way out the proverbial door…like Robert Jordan holding off the fascists in Spain so the partisan comrades could escape. Lots of opportunities in that line should present themselves soon enough.
…Brave man, that Robert Jordan–it was his “just the right moment” for sure. I will never forget those last lines, a perfect ending to a life and a book.
Well, she was standing by the highway
In her boots and silver spurs
Gonna hitchhike to the yellow moon
When a Cadillac stopped for her
And she said, “Hey, nice to meet you
Are you goin’ my way?”
Yeah, that’s when it happened
The world caught fire that day
And she went down swingin’
Yeah, she went down swingin’
Well, she was over twenty-one
In trouble with the law
And it didn’t faze her none
She called her mother-in-law
And said “I need a little money
I know I can count on you
After that night in Vegas
And the hell that we went through”
We went down swingin’
Like Benny Goodman
Yeah, we went down swingin’
Yes, we did
Moonlight on the interstate
She was ‘cross the Georgia line
Looked out the window feeling great
Yeah, it had to come in time
And she said, “I’m never going back”
She said, “At last, I’m free
I wish Ma could see me now
She’d be so proud of me”
She went down swingin’
Like Glenn Miller
Yeah, she went down swingin’
Like Tommy Dorsey
Yeah, she went down swingin’
Like Sammy Davis
She went down swingin’
Like Sonny Liston
Tom Petty
‘…the woman is believed to have a terminal illness. She allegedly moved forward with the assassination plans after her diagnosis and planned to “take Bibi with me to the grave”’
https://www.timesofisrael.com/anti-government-activist-in-her-70s-arrested-for-plotting-to-assassinate-netanyahu/