Mendocino County Today: Friday 8/29/2025

Tow Boat | Seasonal Temps | Coast Trail | Drunken Business | Kathleen Marie McMain | Sewage Q&A | Xfinity Hell | Near Eel | Laser Printer | Artist McVicker | Local Events | AV Farmstands | Ray’s Resort | Wine Competition | Charlie Buck | Yesterday's Catch | Star Party | Forever Real | Creative Destruction | Price Gouging | The Grimace | Musical Ecstasy | Crab Violators | Giants Win | 10 Days | Socialist Commissioner | Dust Handful | Garcia Case | Schlockmeister | Narrative Model | Lee Marvin | Aggressive Trans | Lead Stories | Bacon Self-Portrait | Mass Killers | Tortilla Flat | Western Civ | Tea Time | Fly Buzz | Hup Whoot

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TEMPERATURES remain around seasonal norms into early next week. Dry conditions will persist with no precipitation expected. High pressure will build in next week to increase inland temperatures. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): After a beautiful sunny day yesterday I have 48F under clear skies this Friday morning on the coast. However, our forecast is calling for mostly cloudy today & tomorrow, then maybe some sunny skies after that? We'll see.

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MENDOCINO COUNTY BUTCHER SAYS FORT BRAGG POLICE RETALIATED AGAINST HIM FOR REFUSING TO SHARE PHONE VIDEO

by Elise Cox

Four people were arrested outside Fort Bragg’s Welcome Inn early Saturday morning on August 23, 2025

Zander Kain Garay, a 24-year-old butcher at Harvest Market, says his constitutional rights were violated after he was arrested at the Welcome Inn bar early Saturday morning on August 23, 2025 when he refused to share video footage from his phone with Fort Bragg police officers who had responded to a call.

Garay was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct and booked into the Mendocino County Jail on Saturday morning. He was released that evening on a promise to appear in court. Garay has since filed a claim against the city of Fort Bragg. The District Attorney has not yet filed formal charges.

Garay acknowledges that he had been drinking and admits he may have slurred his words when speaking with officers, but he says he was not “hindering the public” by blocking the right of way nor was he “inebriated to the point that I couldn’t take care of myself.”

He also said he was under no obligation to hand over footage from his phone just because police requested it. He said he wants people to know “it’s OK to say no to the police without fear of being arrested.”

Fort Bragg Police Capt. Thomas O’Neal confirmed the city received Garay’s complaint and that the department had opened an internal investigation.

Here’s what happened from Garay’s perspective, partly corroborated by surveillance footage reviewed by Mendo Local.

Garay went to the Welcome Inn with friends on Friday night. At 1:21 a.m. he exited the bar to join friends gathered on the sidewalk. The video shows five people talking. At one point, a man in a red shirt pats a man in a black shirt on the back as if to console him. They walk out of frame, then return. A woman is shown trying to draw the man in the black shirt down the street.

Garay can be seen standing to one side holding a glass. He hands the glass to a man in a red-checkered shirt, who takes a sip and hands it back. The woman faces the man in the black shirt, her hands on his arms. There is no sound in the three-minute video, and nothing suggests the group was doing anything other than saying their goodbyes at the end of the night.

The next video begins at 1:27 a.m. Sgt. Jarod Frank and Officer Antoinette Moore have arrived and talk to people standing outside. At 1:28 a.m., they cuff the man in the red-checkered shirt. He complies, and Moore leads him away. Frank continues speaking with others. Garay is not shown in this footage; he says he had returned inside the bar.

The third video starts at 1:33 a.m. A man in a white shirt and a man in a black vest are shown smoking. A woman with long blond hair appears in the frame, her hands cuffed behind her. Moore catches up and escorts her down the street and out of frame toward a police vehicle. Garay is not in this video either.

Garay said he was not present for any of the arrests but came outside after hearing a commotion. He walked to the end of the block, past the Golden West Saloon, and took out his phone.

At that point, Moore approached and asked him to send her the footage. He refused. She then asked him to sit on the curb, and he complied.

While he was seated, Frank approached. The two officers discussed the fact that Garay had been filming and was refusing to share the footage. Frank told Moore she could arrest him for public intoxication.

“I believe my First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated,” Garay said in an interview with Mendo Local. He described the scene in front of the bar as “drunken business.”

A friend, Arion Donn Eagle Kelsey, 29, was tased during a physical altercation with Frank. Kelsey was booked on charges of conspiracy to commit a crime (felony), resisting or deterring an officer (felony), battery against a peace officer (misdemeanor), and disorderly conduct (misdemeanor). Another friend, Shanna Ray Bayless, 28, was arrested on charges of accessory after the fact (felony), resisting or deterring an officer (felony), conspiracy to commit a crime (felony), and disorderly conduct (misdemeanor). Jason Lee Fullbright was also arrested on conspiracy to commit a crime (felony), resisting or deterring an officer (felony), and disorderly conduct (misdemeanor).

Garay said the First Amendment protects his right to record police performing their official duties. California Penal Code Section 148(g) clarifies that recording an officer in a public place does not, by itself, constitute resisting arrest or provide reasonable suspicion for detention.

He also cited the Fort Bragg Police Department’s policy manual, which states in Section 428.2: “The Fort Bragg Police Department recognizes the right of persons to lawfully record members of this department who are performing their official duties. Members of this department will not prohibit or intentionally interfere with such lawful recordings. Any recordings that are deemed to be evidence of a crime or relevant to an investigation will only be collected or seized lawfully.”

Garay said he is speaking out because, from his perspective, the conduct of the Fort Bragg Police Department at the Welcome Inn on Friday night deserves public discussion. He said he did not film the arrests — if he had, the police would have had the right to seize the phone. But he also admits that he did not tell the police that there was no evidence on the phone, he simply refused to cooperate — as was his right.

([email protected]. If you enjoyed this post, you can tell Mendo Local that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won’t be charged unless they enable payments.)

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KATHLEEN MARIE MCMAIN

Kathleen Marie McMain (Kathy) of Potter Valley, CA born November 18, 1942 in Imlay City, Michigan. Passed on August 19, 2025 at her home. She is preceded in death by her husband (Walt) Walter McMain, her daughter Kimberly Marie McMain, and grandson James Allen Dailey. She is survived by her sons Preston Dailey and wife Julie, Troy Dailey and wife Anne, step-children Doug McMain and wife Anna Marie, Caroyline Casey and husband Clint, (5) grandchildren Preston Dailey II and wife Morgan, Cade Dailey and wife Whitney, Scott Dailey and wife Cassie, Garrett Dailey and Ellia Casie. (3) great-grandchildren Preston Dailey III, Walter Dailey, and Dawson Dailey. She was known as “Mayor of Potter Valley” and had many friends in which she enjoyed making memories with. Her family would like to thank all those who has cared for her, called and showed support, they are greatly appreciated. In lieu of flowers donate to Hospice of Ukiah. Special thanks to St. Helena Hospital for the wonderful care they gave her. There will be a private family burial at a later date.

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CSD BOARD CHAIR VALERIE HANELT RESPONDS TO ‘GINA’

Hello Gina, this was your question during the CSD meeting Aug 20 when we were discussing the Sewer project:

Gina: “As of now the problem seems to be too many people living on one property with a septic system for a single family home. I do not see this solving the problem. There will still be more people on the system / hook up than estimated per hook up.”

Valerie Hanelt:

Here is my response:

The problem that the sewer system is addressing is the potential threat to public health due to untreated or partially treated wastewater contaminating neighboring wells or surfacing in the community.

The wastewater collection, treatment and disposal system is being planned conservatively to be able to serve the entire service area. The service rates can be developed to account for the specific production of wastewater from each connection.

The current documented contamination of groundwater is likely from most, if not all septic systems in the densely developed portions of the study area – not just those with “too many people living on one property.” The septic systems are not sufficiently separated from private wells.

Thanks,

Val Hanelt

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JUDY VALADAO (Fort Bragg)

Vent For The Day:

So, I canceled my xfinity cable TV because I don’t watch TV. I’m supposed to return the equipment within 14 days BUT every time I sign into my account to print a prepaid label it says “sample” then I try again, and it says “sample” and has a different address on it. I’ve tried 4 times and got 4 samples with 4 different addresses to return it. So, I try calling Ukiah to see if I can send it to them. No human to be found and the fake human asks for my phone number and then tells me it doesn’t exist.

OK, so I decide screw the prepaid I’ll just pay for the return myself. Oh no!! There is no address listed any place to return the damn equipment. I finally got hold of a human employee and even she can find no address to send the equipment too. WTF?

Do I want to drive to Ukiah to return this shit? Hell no, but guess that’s where I’ll be headed. Unless of course, some wonderful person reading this happens to know the address to put on a shipping label to return xfinity equipment.

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JIM ARMSTRONG (Potter Valley):

These hot August days make me think about what Potter Valley will be like if the Eel River diversion system is destroyed. Three or four years from now, the pastures would be brown, the trees dying and our wells dry. Humboldt County, PG&E and Jared Huffman have made it their priority to leave a portion of California in permanent drought. Residents of Potter Valley have used the lucky coincidence of the nearness of the Eel for thousands of years. We need to get totally committed to saving that relationship by all means necessary right now.

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PAUL MODIC ASKS:

Hey, got a minute to recommend a laser printer, b and w, for home use?

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ABOUT THE ARTIST, Jim McVicker, of yesterday's Navarro Beach watercolor:

I made my first on location, plein air, painting in 1973. My influences then were the French Impressionist, mostly Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. At the time I was working full time and attending art classes at Chaffey Community College in Southern California. I was born and raised in Ontario California, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. By the summer of 1975 I decided to become a full time painter. I quit my job, left school and moved to Santa Cruz in Northern Ca. I always loved the northern part of the state and wanted to get away from everything I knew up to that point and start a fresh life as a painter. I think I had about $5,000 dollars in my bank account. In my mind, enough money to make a start at really exploring and trying to learn how to paint. My work at the time was very rough but I had no doubt that I would grow and survive.

After a couple of years I move further north to Humboldt County and have remained here, with a couple of adventures elsewhere, since 1977. Humboldt is where my education as a painter really started. There were several painters in the area whom I met through a life drawing group. Three of them, Curtis Otto, James Moore and George Van Hook became close friends as well as the three painters I learned so much from for the next few years. We painted daily together and George and I shared a studio for a couple of years. Working so closely with artists beyond ones own level was such a great way to learn to see.

In 1984 I met my wife, Terry. She was working as a graphic artist at the time we met, but by the time we were married in 1988 she began painting as a fine artist full time. Terry has been another major infulence in my development as an artist. To have a partner and companion on a daily bases that sees in ways I don't, and paints her view of life, opened my work and continues to do so. We also both believe in painting from life, outdoors and in the studio. We both paint a lot of still life and figure painting when not working outdoors.

I paint small and large on location. I've painted as large as 54x84 outdoors, but normally work 9x12 to 30x40. I may work one to fifteen or twenty sittings outdoors. I have no set rules but work until I feel I've completed the painting. Sometimes years later I will re-work a painting in the studio when I feel it is not quite working. It is funny how time can often change how we perceive our work.

I always look at as much art as I can, historical and contemporary. I learn from all of it. I will always keep painting and trying to grow as a painter. I think that will never end.

I've posted one of my small plein air and one larger plein air below.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and look at my work.

Jim McVicker

(jimmcvickerpaints.com)

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LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)

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PIZZA POP-UP ON SATURDAY ONLY!

Velma’s Farm Stand at Filigreen Farm

Friday 2-5 pm

Open Saturday & Sunday 11-4pm

This week’s offerings include: sweet corn!, melons!, table grapes, french prune plums, Flavor King pluots, ‘Red Gravenstein’, ‘Gala’ and ‘Zestar’ apples, Hosui Asian pears, tomatoes (heirlooms, cherry, new girls), eggplant, sweet peppers, hot peppers, shishito peppers, new potatoes, carrots, sprouting broccoli, cauliflower, little gems, arugula, onions, summer squash, cucumbers, kale, celery, beets, cabbage, garlic, basil, olive oil, and dried fruit!

Follow us on Instagram for updates @filigreenfarm or email [email protected] with any questions. All produce is certified biodynamic and organic.

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THE APPLE FARM, PHILO

Now we are really rolling along—there are still plenty of Pink Pearls and Connell Reds. Bartletts are now getting ripe and ready to eat off the shelf. Gravensteins are starting to run out, so make your move soon. New arrivals are the fantastic Ashmead’s Kernal and Cox Orange Pippin (only one box of Cox). Coming by the weekend—the French Butter Pear and King of Tompkins and who knows what else. Still some veggies, but tomatoes are thinning out.

18501 Greenwood Rd

Philo CA 95466 707 621 0336

philoapplefarm.com

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THIS WEEK AT BLUE MEADOW FARM

Alberta Peaches & Comise Pears

Heirloom, Early Girl & Cherry tomatoes

Sweet Walla Walla Onions

Corno di Toro, Bell, Gypsy & Pimiento Peppers

Jalapeno, Padron, Anaheim & Poblano Chilis

Eggplant, Zucchini, Basil

Lisbon Lemons, local Olive Oil

Sunflowers & Zinnias

Blue Meadow Farm

3301 Holmes Ranch Road, Philo

(707) 895-2071

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BROCK FARMS NOW OPEN!

Brock Farms is open Wed-Sun 10-6, closed Mon and Tues

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BILL KIMBERLIN:

“Ray’s Resort” probably late 1940’s. $60 a week for a cabin, almost a mile of river front for swimming, croquet, tennis court, rec. building with pool table and three meals a day from the gardens, the chicken house, the cows etc. But the best part was for the mother…No cooking. Just take the kids to the river for swimming after a delicious lunch. The father was fishing.

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THE 46th ANNUAL MENDOCINO COUNTY WINE COMPETITION ANNOUNCES ITS RESULTS

Mendocino Winegrowers, Inc. (MWI) announced the results of the 46th annual Mendocino County Fair Wine Competition at a special event at Ukiah’s California Welcome Center earlier this week.

For the first time ever, the competition – held on Saturday, August 16 at Brutocao Winery in downtown Hopland – comprised simultaneous People’s Choice and professionally judged competitions.

“There are very few other competitions anything like this,” says MWI Executive Director Diego Mendoza. “A chance for wine-loving consumers to taste and rate wines that have been double blinded, alongside professional judges, is as unique an experience as one can have in the wine world.”

This year, 124 wines across 49 different winery labels were entered into the competition, all within the Mendocino County AVA. Awards were given in 14 categories, or classes. As in years past, Gold+ wines will be poured at MWI’s booth at the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show in Boonville from September 12-14.

Three exceptional wines won Best in Class in both the People’s Choice and the professionally judged competitions: Girasole Vineyards 2023 Pinot Noir, Rustic Ridge 2023 Zinfandel, and Husch Vineyards 2024 Late Harvest Gewurztraminer in the Dessert Wines category. Event organizers noted that there was also a lot of crossover in wines earning Gold and Double Gold in both competitions. “It’s extremely gratifying, as a producer, to know that professionals and consumers all rated our wine so highly,” says Zac Robinson of Husch Vineyards, whose family has been making this particular wine in Anderson Valley since the 1970s. Their Late Harvest Gewurztraminer also won Best in Class in the 2024 competition.

“We will always evolve what we do to best serve our members and to promote Mendocino County,” says Archer of the unusual competition format. “What will never change is our commitment to supporting and promoting Mendocino County, not just our grapes and wines but the broader community as well.” Archer explained that wherever possible, the competition sourced from local businesses including The Thatcher Hotel, Ukiah Natural Foods Co-Op, Schat’s Bakery, Flora Quest Farm, Creative Workshop, Ukiah Paper Supply, and Lake Event Design.

There were nine industry judges who participated: Sarah Doyle, wine & beverage reporter at The Press Democrat, WSET Level 3; Chris Sawyer, Master Sommelier; Laura Ness, wine journalist with the San Jose Mercury News and Wine Industry Network; Diane Baccaro, certified sommelier and owner of Rendezvous Mendocino; Bernadette Byrne, former executive director of MWI; Charles Brock, wine buyer at Surf Market; Bekah Burnett, wine sales; Bob Blue, retired Mendocino County winemaker; and John Buechsenstein, enologist, adjunct wine faculty at The Culinary Institute of America, and recipient of the 2025 Rhone Rangers Lifetime Achievement Award. “We’re so grateful to these industry experts for sharing their time and considerable expertise with us, especially within our non-traditional format,” says MWI President Elizabeth Archer. “They were all very good sports!”

In addition to voting, attendees of the People’s Choice competition had the opportunity to provide comments on their favorite wines. The winner, George Swain, received two VIP tickets to the annual MWI Harvest Party on November 8 for his comment about Greenwood Ridge Vineyards 2023 Mendocino Zinfandel: “With more notes of baking spices than Grandma’s house on a Sunday, this wine is a crowd pleaser.”

For a full list of competition results, including links to all the winning wines, visit mendowine.com.

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Charlie Buck, representing the Caspar Lumber Company, won the log bucking contest at the 1938 July 4th celebration, cutting in 2 minutes and 11 seconds. The following year, he became our first Paul Bunyan.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, August 28, 2025

JARRETT ANELLO, 44, Ukiah. Domestic battery, unspecified offense.

ROBERT BELL, 42, Laytonville. Arson, recklessly causing a fire.

EMERSON CALDERON, 24, Fort Bragg. County parole violation, false ID.

SERGIO CERVANTES-RODRIGUEZ, 34, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, disobeying court order, failure to appear.

JEFFREY COLEMAN, 52, Covelo. Failure to appear.

JEFFREY EMERY, 34, Philo. DUI.

POLICARPIO GALAVIZ-RODRIGUEZ, 48, Ukiah. Vandalism, paraphernalia.

RICARDO GARCIA-LOPEZ, 33, Ukiah. Disobeying court order.

FABIAN ROSALES-REYES, 36, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, narcotics possession, parole violation.

IAN SMYTH, 35, Potter Valley. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

JOHN TEDESCHI, 22, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

KRYSTAL WILLIAMS, 35, Willits. Controlled substance with two or more priors, probation revocation.

DAVID WOLF, 68, Ukiah. Criminal threat.

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JIVO MUTHA IS THE ANSWER

The Full Realization of the Inherent Emptiness of All Phenomena

Warmest spiritual greetings, There are two views possible insofar as life on the planet earth is concerned. The one view is that the world is real, and everybody is playing a part in it. Identification is with the body and the mind. Spirit is a concept. Therefore, one is attached to the world and experiences everything in it. Death is certain. The second view is that the nameless formless Absolute is real, and the world is only an appearance within it. One is not attached to the world, identifying with that which is “prior to consciousness”, or the Absolute. Death is only an appearance. The second view is that of the Jivan Mukta, or liberated spirit or soul.

The nameless formless Absolute is forever real. The key here is to focus the mind on it, which is possible following sufficient deep meditation. Samadhi makes the Absolute known to the mind. After the mind realizes its source, the mind may then be directed to the Absolute and be absorbed in it, (non-dualistically). This practice is called “reminding the mind”. One’s ongoing living condition in time and space is called sahaja samadhi avastha. The world is then no longer a problem, because it ceases to be real in the way that it was previously perceived. One knows the inherent emptiness of all phenomena. There is only peace and freedom.

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

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XIII, SABBATHS 2008

by Wendell Berry

By its own logic, greed
Finally destroys itself,
As Lear’s wicked daughters
learned to their horror, as
we are learning to our own.
What greed builds is built
by destruction of the materials
And lives of which it is built.
Only mourners survive.
This is the ‘creative destruction’
of which learned economists
speak in praise. But what is made
by destruction comes down at last
to a stable floor, a bed
of straw, and for those with sight,
light in darkness.

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CONSUMER WATCHDOG URGES GOVERNOR, ENERGY COMMISSION TO NOT BETRAY STATED VALUES ON PRICE GOUGING PENALTY

by Dan Bacher

Sacramento, CA – As Big Oil spends record millions to expand oil drilling and eviscerate environmental laws in California, Consumer Watchdog today wrote a letter to Governor Newsom and the Vice Chair of the California Energy Commission (CEC) Siva Gunda to remind them of their previous statements about the need for a public process to determine a gasoline price gouging penalty.

“The CEC is voting on Friday to table the penalty deliberations, and the Western States Petroleum Association wants the deliberations to be frozen for 10 years,” according to a press release from Consumer Watchdog.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/8/27/2340526/-Consumer-Watchdog-Urges-CA-Gov-CEC-To-Not-Betray-Stated-Values-On-Price-Gouging-Penalty

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WHY KID OURSELVES? People have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all. They try to unload their unhappiness on someone else when making love, they do their damnedest, but it doesn’t work, they keep it all, and then they start all over again, trying to find a place for it. “You’re pretty, Mademoiselle,” they say. And life takes hold of them again until the next time, and then they try the same little gimmick. “You’re very pretty, Mademoiselle…”

And in between they boast that they’ve succeeded in getting rid of their unhappiness, but everyone knows it’s not true and they’ve simply kept it all to themselves. Since at the little game you get uglier and more repulsive as you grow older, you can’t hope to hide your unhappiness, your bankruptcy, any longer. In the end your features are marked with that hideous grimace that takes twenty, thirty years or more to climb from your belly to your face. That’s all a man is good for, that and no more, a grimace that he takes a whole lifetime to compose. The grimace a man would need to express his true soul without losing any of it is so heavy and complicated that he doesn’t always succeed in completing it.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine, ‘Journey to the End of the Night’

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GAME COMMISSION REVOKES FORTUNA MAN’S COMMERCIAL FISHING LICENSE FOR CRAB TRAP VIOLATIONS

The California Fish and Game Commission has revoked the commercial fishing licenses and permits of two fishermen after extensive histories of violations in the lobster and Dungeness crab fisheries.

At its June 11-12, 2025, meeting, the Commission – acting on California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) recommendations – revoked the commercial fishing license and lobster operator permit of Christopher James Miller, 68, of Santa Barbara, and the commercial fishing license and Dungeness crab permit of Ronald Ghera, 45, of Fortuna.

Miller’s violations, spanning a decade, included abandoning 156 lobster traps around Santa Barbara and the Northern Channel Islands, leaving traps in the water after the season closure, failing to retrieve baited traps and filing inaccurate catch records.

Ghera’s record included abandoning 94 crab traps after the 2023 season and 74 after the 2024 season, failing to service traps within the required 96 hours, failing to submit mandatory reports, and fishing with untagged traps and improperly marked buoys.

“The majority of people who fish commercially are law-abiding and care about our fisheries,” said Nathaniel Arnold, Chief of the CDFW Law Enforcement Division. “There are a few individuals, however, who choose to partake in commercial poaching. These individuals will eventually be caught and will likely lose the privilege to commercially fish in this state through either criminal or administrative actions.”

CDFW emphasizes that compliance with commercial fishing regulations – particularly removing traps at the end of each season—is essential. Those who abandon traps not only endanger marine mammals and other wildlife that can become trapped or entangled in derelict gear, but they can also cause shortened fishing seasons for law-abiding fishers who depend on those opportunities for their livelihood.

Whether it’s hunting, recreational fishing, or commercial fishing, the privilege to harvest California’s fish and wildlife requires a high degree of mutual trust between the public and law enforcement. CDFW’s wildlife officers are entrusted with protecting the state’s marine fish and wildlife species by patrolling and enforcing the law along California’s 840-mile coastline, and together with the California Fish and Game Commission, will continue to review violations of commercial fishing cases and take decisive administrative action to prevent bad actors from further harming California’s ocean environment.

See something serious? Report it and help protect California’s fish and wildlife. You can:

• Call CalTIP at (888) 334-2258 – available 24/7
• Text “CALTIP” + your message to 847411 (tip411).
• Download the CalTIP app from Apple’s App Store or Google Play to send tips anonymously.

(wildlife.ca.gov)

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GIANTS SWEEP CUBS on Jung Hoo Lee’s walk-off, Willy Adames’ two homers

by Shayna Rubin

After a walk-off, everyone takes a different role in celebrating the hero. There are the jersey rippers, the playful punchers and at least one guy responsible for dumping the vat of ice water over the hero’s head.

After each of the San Francisco Giants’ nine other walk-offs, center fielder Jung Hoo Lee has played the role of a playful puncher, buried in the celebratory scrum. Familiar with the madness, Lee was already running far away from his teammates when Christian Koss scored the winning run on Lee’s walk-off single into right field, securing the Giants’ 4-3 win over the Chicago Cubs on Thursday afternoon.

“I was trying to run away from the boys,” Lee said with Justin Han interpreting. “One, because the water in the dugout is really cold. … Number two is I’m usually the one that beats up on guys when there’s a walk-off, so I felt like it was going to be a little bit of revenge over there.”

Lee barely evaded the ice water dump and somehow walked away with his jersey still intact, but shortstop Willy Adames was the first to chase him down, eager to submerge Lee in his first career walk-off celebration. It was also the Giants’ first walk-off win since Patrick Bailey’s three-run, inside-the-park home against the Phillies on July 8. Since that day they compiled a 15-26 record while plummeting almost entirely out of the postseason race. It was the type of game the Giants won early in the season.

“Feels like old times,” manager Bob Melvin said. “We were doing that a lot early on, and it felt like any time we got into that position we were going to win a game, especially here at home in a close game. It was our calling card.”

Nothing changes their reality. They’re still two games under .500 and 6½ games back of the National League’s third wild card spot with the Cincinnati Reds in front of them. The Cardinals and Diamondbacks are just a half-game behind them. But the Giants’ play of late signals that they aren’t too beat up to make a pivot. The walk-off was their fifth straight win and their first series sweep since early June. Fresh off a road trip in which they earned a series win against the NL-best Brewers, the Giants handed the Cubs their first series sweep of at least three games this year.

“That team hasn’t been swept all year,” Logan Webb said. “That’s a team that’s going to be playing in the playoffs. A really good team. We just went and beat the two best teams in the NL Central two series in a row so it feels good. Just have to keep it going.”

Perhaps the load is lighter without the pressure to keep up in the playoff race. Maybe, after a shakeup at the trade deadline, this particular group is finally settling in. Over the five wins, the Giants’ hitting stars have had big games and the infield defense has tightened up.

On Thursday, Adames was doing the heavy lifting before Lee’s big hit. He hit a pair of home runs in last week’s loss to Milwaukee and followed suit with another two-homer game against Cubs left-hander Shota Imanaga, spitting at splitters to hunt for his fastball. Adames’ latest two-homer game puts him at 24 on the year and that much closer to the elusive 30-homers mark not reached by a Giant since Barry Bonds in 2004. (Rafael Devers has 27 on the season, with 12 hit after he was traded from Boston to San Francisco.)

This game wouldn’t have been close without strong infield defense. Adames followed his game-tying home run in the sixth with a tricky scoop and cross-body throw to first on Nico Hoerner’s groundball headed for the left-field gap. Devers made the pick for a close out, the scoop untying a string on his glove in the process.

“Maybe the best play he’s made all year in a big spot,” observed Melvin.

“Even Rafi is making huge strides, looking like he’s played first his whole life,” Webb said.

That play helped Webb get through seven innings on 94 pitches while keeping the Cubs at bay. Webb used his four-seam fastball more than usual to change eye levels against a Cubs lineup with a few good left-handed hitters.

“Just saw opportunities to do it, especially with the lefties they have,” Webb said. “They’re a pretty good two-seam hitting team so saw opportunities to throw the four-seam. Didn’t land many of them, to be honest with you, but it changes the eyesight. Faced these guys a ton, and they have some guys that played for the Dodgers before so it seemed like their approach was similar to what those guys have done against me. So it’s about adjusting.”

(sfchronicle.com)

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CALIFORNIA SOCIALIST PLEDGES TO ‘SAVE OUR PLANET FROM CAPITALISM.’ CAN HE WIN THIS STATEWIDE RACE?

by Emily Hoeven

“Abolish the insurance companies. Save our planet from capitalism.”

No, this isn’t a rant from a random Reddit account. Rather, it’s part of the campaign platform of Eduardo “Lalo” Vargas, a 29-year-old socialist and Los Angeles high school teacher who’s running to be California’s next insurance commissioner.

When Vargas’ 2026 campaign announcement landed in my inbox this summer, I first thought its breathless assertions were meant to be ironic. After all, how can one regulate an industry while simultaneously seeking to eradicate it — à la U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon working to dismantle her own department? And how, as a lone statewide official, can one “save” the Earth from capitalism?

Vargas stands little chance of being elected. A political novice who unsuccessfully ran for Los Angeles City Council in 2024, he doesn’t have name recognition or a big campaign war chest. It doesn’t help that he’s running as a Peace & Freedom Party candidate. Under California’s “jungle” primary system, in which everyone competes for two spots in the general election, it’s extremely difficult for third-party candidates to outperform Democrats or Republicans.

And yet it wouldn’t be fair to totally count Vargas out.

Indeed, the 2026 insurance commissioner’s race has yet to take shape.

Long viewed as an unglamorous but cushy launching pad for ambitious politicians, the insurance commissioner role is now unglamorous and undesirable in an age of climate-change-fueled mega-disasters and scarce, costly coverage. Although some current and former state lawmakers have opened campaign accounts, it’s unclear whether they’ll all run. (The wild card is state Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, who’s considering a bid but may instead run for a congressional seat that would be created if voters approve Proposition 50’s redistricting in November.)

It’s also impossible to ignore voters’ mounting frustration with the Democratic Party.

A recent national Gallup poll found the Democratic Party’s favorability rating at a record low 34%. Even in deep-blue California, 61% of likely voters have an unfavorable impression of the Dems — not much better than the Republican Party’s 70% unfavorability rating, a recent Public Policy Institute of California survey found.

Could this anti-establishment zeitgeist propel Vargas into the California insurance commissioner’s office the same way it drew huge crowds for a national tour by Democratic socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and helped Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani handily beat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in this year’s New York City mayoral primary?

Vargas is certainly hoping it will.

“The California Department of Insurance is really letting the insurance companies go unchallenged at the expense of ordinary working families,” Vargas, who has a youthful, earnest appearance, recently told me in an hour-long interview.

But talking about making insurance more accessible and affordable for working-class Californians is one thing. Actually doing it is another. How, exactly, would Vargas transform his utopian vision into reality?

To start, Vargas declared there should be “a moratorium on any rate hikes.” He added, “If I could wave a wand, I wouldn’t let a single rate hike go by until every single fire survivor in any fire in California has been fully compensated for the loss of their home.”

Vargas’ righteous outrage is understandable. He was inspired to enter the race after watching survivors of the Los Angeles County wildfires struggle to get their claims paid and reckon with the devastating fallout from their homes potentially being underinsured.

Underinsurance is a serious problem. A recent Chronicle investigation found that companies representing at least 40% of California’s home insurance market rely on a flawed software program to recommend policy limits to customers, which often underestimates the cost of rebuilding homes by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That’s unacceptable. Thankfully, California and four other Western states afflicted by megafires are working together on possible solutions. California’s current insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, also recently opened an investigation into State Farm General’s handling of claims from the L.A. fires (not long after approving the company’s emergency 17% rate hike).

But, as Vargas’ wand metaphor suggests, it’s magical thinking to believe that freezing rate hikes would solve California’s insurance crisis. Artificially low rates are, in fact, a key reason why we’re in this crisis in the first place.

Even as risks have mounted amid rising global temperatures, development in hazardous areas and poor forest management, California insurers were prevented from raising homeowner rates by the well-intentioned reforms of Proposition 103, which requires the insurance commissioner to review and approve any rate changes. It also discourages insurers from raising rates above 7%, a threshold that triggers a more extensive and often costly review process.

This further prompted insurers to shrink their footprint or pull out of California altogether — forcing more homeowners to buy costly, bare-bones coverage from the state’s insurer of last resort, the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan. But because private insurers are on the hook for any claims the FAIR Plan can’t pay based on their share of the California market, its exploding growth prompted insurers to limit their coverage to reduce liabilities.

The only way to defuse this ticking time bomb is to permit private insurers to set rates that accurately reflect risk — which Lara is doing.

He ushered in reforms that allow insurers to use forward-looking climate catastrophe models to help determine rates and pass along some costs of reinsurance — essentially insurance for insurance companies — in exchange for writing or maintaining policies in high-risk areas. He also permitted insurers in certain cases to pass along some costs to ratepayers when the FAIR Plan runs out of money — as happened with the Los Angeles wildfires.

Still, it will take time for the market to stabilize enough for customers to have viable options other than the FAIR Plan, which grew faster in the first half of 2025 than ever before. This month, Mercury Insurance became the first company to propose a rate hike under the new rules — though it still asked for 6.9% to avoid triggering further review under Prop 103. (In another long-shot initiative, an independent insurance agent filed paperwork this month for a proposed ballot measure to repeal Prop 103.)

When I asked Vargas how he’d approach the FAIR Plan, his answers sounded contradictory.

“The FAIR Plan is now being used by the insurance companies to extract … some of the highest premiums from homeowners,” he said.

Yet he also suggested the FAIR Plan should grow until it replaces the insurers themselves.

“We need to start to lay the groundwork for what could be a state-funded insurance plan, and an expansion of the FAIR Plan would be one way to start with that,” Vargas told me.

It’s not clear how you could keep the FAIR Plan while getting rid of the private insurers that back its shortfalls. But for Vargas, the answer is self-evident: The state should step in.

“California definitely has the resources to be able to provide state-run insurance for every single Californian,” Vargas told me.

No, it doesn’t. California is expected to face budget deficits of $10 billion to $20 billion through 2028-29, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated, and President Donald Trump’s budget cuts will only make the problem worse.

But facts are frequently subsumed to vibes in political campaigns. In New York City, Mamdani is pledging to freeze rents and make buses fast and free; in California, Vargas is pledging to freeze insurance rates.

Sure, that all sounds good. But it’s also hard to see how any of it is feasible unless, as Vargas proposes, capitalism is abolished from the globe and climate change is suddenly reversed.

I’m not holding my breath.

If this is the playbook Democrats and other left-leaning politicians have for countering Trump, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

(SF Chronicle)

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THE BRAVERY OF KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA VS. THE BARBARISM OF DONALD TRUMP

by Dave Zirin

On Monday at 6:30 AM, hundreds of people gathered outside the ICE field office in Baltimore to be there with Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his family as he entered the building to face almost-certain federal detention. The headlines say that Abrego Garcia will likely be “deported,” but that is not what this should be called. The Trump administration is attempting to abduct Abrego Garcia as part of a for-profit human-trafficking operation in which it pays countries with atrocious human-rights records to incarcerate people who had been US immigrants. It wants to send Abrego Garcia—born in El Salvador, living in Temple Hills, Maryland—to Uganda, where he could be jailed indefinitely, tortured, and God knows what else.

Abrego Garcia’s “crime,” we must recall, was no crime at all. The Trump Justice Department admitted in court that it had imprisoned him and sent him to an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison due to an “administrative error.” The judge was appalled, particularly that Abrego Garcia—a union worker legally in the United States—was sent to be brutalized in El Salvador without due process, and the judge insisted that he be brought back to his family. That was March, and Abrego Garcia has been in hell ever since. Abrego Garcia is not suffering because of anything he did. He is suffering because the Trump regime’s autocratic outlook is defined by the idea that it cannot make any mistakes. The great leader, and by extension his slavishly loyal hacks, must be infallible. Therefore, in Abrego Garcia’s case, the person fired by the Justice Department was not the one who made the “administrative error,” but the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who admitted it in court. Think about it: The Trump administration fired a Justice Department attorney for not subverting justice by lying to a judge.

Trump’s corrupt attorney general, Pam Bondi, the crusading law-and-order Christian who authorizes deals with child predators to protect her boss, simply rejects due process as an inviolate Constitutional right. After all if people still have due process, it gums up the administration’s mass human-trafficking plan. If Abrego Garcia were to go free, it would legitimize the concerns of the judge and Bondi/Trump’s own former immigration lawyer, Reuveni, that due process had been denied.

The regime’s case is a marriage between lazy incompetence and legalized barbarism. First it said Abrego Garcia was in the gang MS-13 because he was a Chicago Bulls fan. When that argument fell apart, it claimed Abrego Garcia was a human trafficker. (Accusing others of what it does has gotten so tired at this point.) Then Trump officials said he was an abuser of women—a charge his wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura rejects—and we were supposed to take seriously that an administration stacked with alleged rapists really cares about the safety of women, but that claim too fell apart. Then the charge was driving undocumented people across state lines. That’s what earns you Uganda. Normalizing cruelties—and nativist white nationalism—is the point. If they can normalize discourse like that of balding 31-year-old “Trump youth leader” Charlie Kirk, who called Black and brown people living in cities “cockroaches” in order to support a military occupation of Chicago, then the battle is mostly won. (Having Kirk as a special guest of the Chicago Cubs last week—like he’s just another celeb—also makes this rank nativist bigotry seem ordinary and endangers many of their own players. Clearly the Cubs owner, TomRicketts—a dark money GOP patrons—does not care.)

In the face of this army of cowards is Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Trump administration offered Abrego Garcia a deal where he could be deported to Costa Rica with the promise of serving no jail time. He said no and is risking everything—indefinite incarceration in Uganda!—to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. It is especially poignant because a judge released him only four days ago to await ICE sentencing. After months of being in an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison and a Tennessee detention center, Abrego Garcia has had four days with his wife and children before being taken away again. That judge had actually been holding him in the Tennessee jail to keep ICE from grabbing him. It was legal protective custody against our own unlawful government.

Before entering the courthouse, flanked by his family, his union, local politicians, and hundreds of community members, Abrego Garcia addressed the crowd:

“Thank you to my wife Jennifer, my family, my union, CASA, my home away from home, and all of you. You have filled me with gratitude, and you have filled me with hope. Happiness is just being with my family. When I was detained, I thought about going to the park with my family or on a trampoline with my children. Those moments give me hope in this fight. To all the families that have been separated or are being threatened with separation, this administration has given us heartache. But God is with us, will never leave us, and will bring justice. With our community by our side, love will triumph. Never lose hope. We are all family. Regardless of what happens at my ICE check in, please promise you will still pray, resist, fight, love and continue to demand freedom.”

Then Abrego Garcia entered the building flanked by his attorney and family. Meanwhile ICE agents looked down smugly from the top of the stairs at the throngs of people. It did not take long before word got out that the expected had taken place: An authoritarian, weak-minded administration petrified of looking weak had put Abrego Garcia in chains.

They want to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda for no reason other than that it endangers their nativist project to treat him like a human being and not “a cockroach.” Let the last word go to Abrego Garcia’s wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura who accompanied him into the facility. The sneering ICE brigade around her husband was clearly chosen for the cameras. They were all white, tatted up, and so bulky that their muscles had swallowed their necks. Vasquez Sura stared at these men twice her size and said, “Tonight when you look at your family or look at your kids, think about the fact that today you kidnapped my husband and took him away from us.”

These shameful pissants wouldn’t meet her eyes, showing no heart and spine to go with their lack of necks. Vasquez Sura showed us true courage. Now it’s our turn. We need to fight Trump’s human-trafficking scheme for her, for Abrego Garcia, and for all the people in our communities who could be forcibly put on a plane and sent to an undisclosed location.

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NOTE ON THE MINNESOTA SHOOTING

Media coverage of the latest tragedy hits another new low

by Matt Taibbi

From the New York Times, about the Catholic school shooting in Minnesota:

Ms. Westman, 23, lived in a three-story brick building in a complex in Richfield, a suburb just south of the church… As a 17-year-old, she filed a court document to change her first name, to Robin from Robert. It was also signed by her mother. The document noted that Ms. Westman “identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification.” On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill… The right-wing uproar over Ms. Westman’s gender identity echoed the politicized reaction to a 2023 mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, which was carried out by a former student whom the police said was transgender… In a news conference, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, a Democrat, urged the public to avoid scapegoating transgender people…

The Times in “The Minneapolis suspect knew her target, but the motive is a mystery” did what news organizations are supposed to do, settling a controversy by telling us a mass shooter “identified as female” in a court document. But the paper was so afraid of conclusions its audience might draw that it surrounded its report with layer after layer of messaging. They strained to put “her” in the headline, referred to those who paid attention to the gender issue as “right-wing” and “conservative activists,” and told you Jacob Frey, “a Democrat,” urged against scapegoating. All this, while insisting others “politicized” the shooting. It’s the most glaring example I can remember of a news organization apologizing for its own reporting.

Walter and I will be talking about it on America This Week, but the degree to which news outlets seemingly as a primary coverage goal are scolding readers into not paying attention to true details has been extraordinary. Apologies for the brief note, but having just come up for air after spending time on a different story, I wanted to express shock. Apparently not even the most awful violence derails the narrative model.

(racket.news)

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LEE MARVIN was never one for polite speeches. Accepting his Best Actor Oscar for Cat Ballou (1965), he told the audience:

“I think half of this belongs to some horse out in the Valley.”

The house roared with laughter. But Marvin was serious—the drunken horse in the film had been his best scene partner.

That was Lee Marvin: outrageous, unpredictable, and unforgettable. On set, he was a wild mix of mischief and genius. Dwayne Hickman recalled that Marvin often rehearsed sober, then snuck vodka before takes to capture Kid Shelleen’s legendary drunken swagger. “Tension, baby,” Marvin would grin.

His antics delighted most of the cast—except Jane Fonda, who took her role deadly serious and bristled at Marvin’s constant jokes. He didn’t help matters by insulting her visiting husband, Roger Vadim, with his famously blunt wit.

Marvin was larger-than-life on screen, but off it, he kept only four mementos from his career: that Oscar, a cowboy citation for ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’ a gold record for ‘Wand’rin’ Star,’ and the high-heeled shoe Vivien Leigh walloped him with in ‘Ship of Fools.’

And when asked where he learned to act? Marvin credited the Marines. He said he mastered acting by pretending not to be afraid while under fire at Saipan, where he was wounded and awarded a Purple Heart.

From battlefield to Hollywood, Lee Marvin lived by his own rules—a rascal, a rebel, and an Oscar winner, who never forgot the horse that helped him get there.

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The truth is there are plenty of trans folks trying to live their lives, but the disproportionate amount of violence in that community shouldn’t be ignored. Is it mental illness associated with the trans condition? Is it depression spawned from the unfortunate condition that leads them to be medicated with SSRIs and antipsychotics, which seem to cause violent tendencies in some people? A little from column A and a little from column B? Testosterone and other hormone supplementation? Hormones mixed with other meds? I’ve known some pretty aggressive trans people and it seems like more than a ‘chip on the shoulder’ situation. I’ve joked that a trans guy (woman? - the male that wants to be female) is like a woman with serious PMS, but man bones and muscles. Scary.

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LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT

Trump Targets Agencies Long Seen as Above Politics. Critics See Big Risks.

Trump Moves to Strip More Federal Workers of Union Protections

Trump Administration Plans Immigration Crackdown in Chicago

A Tariff Loophole on Cheap Imports Has Closed. How Will It Affect Shoppers?

Texas Lawmakers Back Citizen Lawsuits to Stop Mail-Order Abortion Pills

Buried by Princess Diana, Time Capsule Brings Back the ’90s Far Too Soon

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FROM GUERNICA TO GAZA: MASS KILLERS HAVE BEEN ABOVE IT ALL

by Norman Solomon

Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”

Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.

Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War Two began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers — terrorizing and killing civilians — was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.

Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”

Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones

As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, “It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel’s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. “Well,” Biden recalled him saying, “you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”

Apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.” Citing the U.S.-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?”

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Huckabee said: “You have got the Brits out there complaining about humanitarian aid and the fact that they don’t like the way Israel is prosecuting the war. I would remind the British to go back and look at their own history. At the end of World War II they weren’t dropping food into Germany, they were dropping massive bombs. Just remember Dresden — over 25,000 civilians were killed in that bombing alone.”

The United Nations has reported that women and children account for nearly 70% of the verified deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. The capacity to keep massacring civilians there mainly depends on the Israeli Air Force (well supplied with planes and weaponry by the United States), which proudly declares that “it is often due to the IAF’s aerial superiority and advancement that its squadrons are able to conduct a large portion” of the Israeli military’s “operational activities.”

The “Grace and Panache” of the “Indispensable Nation”

The benefactor making possible Israel’s military prowess, the U.S. government, has compiled a gruesome record of its own in this century. An ominous undertone, foreshadowing the unchecked slaughter to come, could be heard on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel resulted in close to 1,200 deaths. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations said outside the chambers of the Security Council, while the country’s ambassador to the United States told PBS viewers that “this is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

Loyal to the “war on terror” brand, the American media establishment gave remarkably short shrift to concerns about civilian deaths and suffering. The official pretense was that (of course!) the very latest weaponry meshed with high moral purpose. When the U.S. launched its “shock and awe” air assault on Baghdad to begin the Iraq War in March 2003, “it was a breathtaking display of firepower,” anchor Tom Brokaw told NBC viewers with unintended irony. Another network correspondent reported “a tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.”

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq took hold later that year, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins (who now covers military matters for The New Yorker) was laudatory on the newspaper’s front page as he reported on the Black Hawk and Apache helicopter gunships flying over Baghdad “with such grace and panache.” Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.

In a 2014 commencement speech at West Point, President Barack Obama proclaimed: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”

After launching two major invasions and occupations in this century, the United States was hardly on high moral ground when it condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and frequent bombing of that country’s major cities. Seven months after the invasion began, President Vladimir Putin tried to justify his reckless nuclear threats by alarmingly insisting that the atomic bombings of Japan had established a “precedent.”

Whoever Doesn’t Count Goes Uncounted

Journalist Anand Gopal, author of the brilliant book No Good Men Among the Living, spent years in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion of that country, often venturing into remote rural areas unvisited by Western reporters. While U.S. media outlets were transfixed with debating the wisdom of finally withdrawing troops from that country in August 2021 and the flaws in the execution of the departure, Gopal was rendering a verdict that few in power showed the slightest interest in hearing: the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan had involved the large-scale killing of civilians from the air, and civilian deaths had been “grossly undercounted.”

In Helmand Province (“really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades”), Gopal investigated what had happened to the family of a housewife named Shakira, who lived in the small village of Pan Killay. As he explained during a Democracy Now! interview, she had lost 16 members of her family. “What was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn’t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident,” he pointed out. “This was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years.” He added:

“So, people were living — reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn’t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary. And most of these deaths were never recorded. It’s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there’s not a lot of internet penetration, there’s not — there’s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don’t get recorded. And so, I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.”

Citing a U.N. study of casualties during the first half of 2019, the BBC summed up the findings this way: “Some 717 civilians were killed by Afghan and U.S. forces, compared to 531 by militants… Air strikes, mostly carried out by American warplanes, killed 363 people, including 89 children, in the first six months of the year.”

During my brief trip to Afghanistan 10 years earlier, I had visited the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 on the outskirts of Kabul, where I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma. She told me about what had happened one morning the previous year when she was sleeping at her home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5 a.m., the U.S. Air Force dropped bombs. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

As Guljumma spoke, several hundred people were living under makeshift tents in the refugee camp. Basics like food arrived only sporadically. Her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, told me that the sparse incoming donations were from Afghan businessmen, while little help came from the government of Afghanistan. And the United States was offering no help whatsoever. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the U.S. government was when its air force bombed them.

Normal and Lethal

When Shakira and Guljumma lost relatives to bombs that arrived courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, their loved ones were not even numbers to the Pentagon. Instead, meticulous estimates have come from the Costs of War project at Brown University, which puts “the number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere” at upwards of 905,000 — with 45% of them civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars — because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”

The increasing American reliance on air power rather than combat troops has shifted the concept of what it means to be “at war.” After three months of leading NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011, for instance, the U.S. government had already spent $1 billion on the effort, with far more to come. But the Obama administration insisted that congressional approval was unnecessary since the United States wasn’t actually engaged in military “hostilities” — because no Americans were dying in the process.

The State Department’s legal adviser, former Yale Law School dean Harold H. Koh, testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the nation’s actions targeting Libya involved “no U.S. ground presence or, to this point, U.S. casualties.” Nor was there “a threat of significant U.S. casualties.” The idea was that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. In support of Koh, a former colleague at the Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, claimed that the United States truly wasn’t engaged in “hostilities” in Libya because “there are no body bags” of American soldiers.

Ten years later, in a September 2021 speech at the United Nations soon after the last American troops had left Afghanistan, President Biden said: “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” In other words, American troops weren’t dying in noticeable numbers. Costs of War project co-director Catherine Lutz pointed out in the same month that U.S. engagement in military actions “continues in over 80 countries.”

Seeking to reassure Americans that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a matter of repositioning rather than a retreat from the use of military might, Biden touted an “over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.” During the four years since then, the Biden and Trump administrations have directly sent bombers and missiles over quite a few horizons, including in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Iran.

Less directly, but with horrific ongoing consequences, stepped-up U.S. military aid to Israel has enabled its air power to systematically kill Palestinian children, women, and men with the kind of industrial efficiency that fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s might have admired. The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica. But the scale of the carnage is much bigger and unrelenting in Gaza, where atrocities continue without letup, while the world looks on.

(Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area. This article first appeared at tomdispatch.com.)

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WESTERN CIV IS NOT WORTH SAVING

We don’t need to rescue western civilization from outside forces, we need to rescue ourselves from western civilization.

by Caitlin Johnstone

Western civilization is not worth saving. I think that’s been pretty well established by now.

That’s one of the silliest things about the way rightists are always babbling about how we need to protect our way of life from immigrants or Islam or “the trans agenda” or whatever. They’re beginning with the assumption that this train wreck of a society is worth saving at all.

I am not saying that westerners should die. I am not saying that all the ideals and values that westerners purport to hold are worthless. I am saying that this civilization, as it actually exists, is an indefensible disaster. Clearly.

Our way of living on this planet. The way we treat one another. The way we treat people on other continents. All the systems and social structures that give rise to the way things are. These things should not exist. We should not be the way that we are.

This civilization is genocidal. Ecocidal. Omnicidal. Imperialist. Racist. Dehumanizing. Degrading. Dystopian. Emotionally stunted. Culturally vapid. Spiritually impoverished. Intellectually enslaved. Why would any sane person want this to continue?

We don’t need to rescue western civilization from outside forces, we need to rescue ourselves from western civilization.

If we listen to our hearts we can understand that the call isn’t to save western civilization from corruption by foreign cultures or new ways of thinking, but to radically transform it from the murderous, tyrannical and oppressive nightmare that it has always been.

The western way of life doesn’t need to be preserved, it needs to end. We cannot keep doing this. We cannot go on this way. We cannot keep poisoning our planet, our minds, our hearts and our souls with the McGenocide ideology of the western empire. We are headed somewhere dark, somewhere none of us want to go, and we need to turn around.

Nothing about our old way of doing things has worked out for us. Everything we were doing before wound up bringing us to this terrible point. We don’t need to go backwards, and we don’t need to stay still. We need to evolve.

Gaza is a mirror. It’s showing us what we are. What we have always been.

It’s time to be real about what we are seeing.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

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Tea is the largest painting executed by Henri Matisse in the years just after World War I. It marks a notable departure from the artist's Fauve work, in which he sought to transform his feelings into pure color. This garden scene depicts Matisse's model Antoinette Arnoud, his daughter Marguerite, and his dog Lili relaxing at the artist's residence in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. Although Matisse's use of sunlight evokes the Impressionists' attraction to painting directly from nature, he focused more on communicating the cool lushness of the scene through adherence to local color. The masklike face of Marguerite, on the right, reflects the artist's long-standing interest in African art and contrasts sharply with the more conventionally rendered face of Antoinette. In this sense, Tea is a logical extension of Matisse's formative work Heads of Jeannette (1910-13), in which he progressively abstracted the female visage in a sequence of five bronze sculptures. In 1929 British art critic Roger Fry remarked that he found this painting to be "one of the most complete expressions of Matisse's highest powers." Tea was the last major Matisse painting acquired by Michael and Sarah Stein, brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein and notable collectors in their own right. (wikiart.org)

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I HEARD A FLY BUZZ

by Emily Dickenson (1862)

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -
Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -

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