Cooling | Lambert Bridge | Foodbank Funding | Trout Spotted | Out Gate | FB Report | Tennessee Kev | AV Appreciation | Gazania | Teacher Lawsuit | Night Sky | GRT Scam | Jawbone | Minimum Wage | Local Events | Produce Guide | Fair Dates | Library October | Fall Festival | Yesterday's Catch | Motor City | Private Schools | Outta DC | The Pearl | Marco Radio | Two People | Airliner Bunk | Headbanger | Jobu Wins | Going Home | Cat's Dream | Cliche Island | Gladwell Cowed | Sits & Stares | Stifling Speech | RFK Jr Wrong | Humpty Dumpty | Grifter's Lament | Apache Boy | Life Project | Lead Stories | Sound & Fury | Venezuela Target | Soir Bleu | Eleven Dead | Secretary War | War Poster | Censor Threats | Apache Women
THERE IS a slight chance of thunderstorms in Trinity County this afternoon. A cooling trend continues in the interior through the weekend and early next week. Wet weather and below normal temperatures are expected Monday and Tuesday with a gradual warming and drying trend possible later in the week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A very warm 58F with foggy skies this Saturday morning on the coast. Fog then clearing etc. thru the weekend. A good chance for showers is more likely now on Monday, with rain chances falling off Tuesday. A return to usual for the rest of the week.
THE BAILEY BRIDGE on Lambert Lane in Boonville that was installed over Robinson Creek back in 2017 after the heavy rains washed out the old 1930s bridge is gone. It took the bridge replacement contractor, West Coast Contractors (WCC) out of Coos Bay, Oregon, and their small crew less than three days to remove it.
The tricky assembly and installation of the large, rented temporary bridge which will be in place through the fall was completed and opened to traffic last week, in time for the County Fair. It took several weeks for the County crew to install the old WWII surplus Bailey Bridge back in 2017, but it only took the WCC crew about three days to disassemble, remove, and returned the Bailey Bridge to the County yard in Ukiah (in sections) by Thursday afternoon, ready to be re-used for the next bridge wash-out (assuming we ever get another big rain).
The contractor is now preparing to assemble and install the new, permanent bridge where the Bailey Bridge was which, weather permitting, is expected to be finished this fall.
(Mark Scaramella)
CITY OF FORT BRAGG DIRECTS $58,000 TO STRENGTHEN FOOD BANK SERVICES
At its July 14 meeting, the Fort Bragg City Council approved directing $58,000 from the FY 2024-25 General Fund surplus to the Fort Bragg Food Bank. This investment ensures surplus dollars are reinvested into the community to support food security for local residents.
The $58,000 contribution will directly support the Food Bank’s essential services, ensuring that Fort Bragg residents facing food insecurity continue to have access to healthy and reliable food resources.
Mayor Jason Godeke added, “I’m glad the City was able to support the Food Bank right now, as the funding landscape is so uncertain these days.
“The Fort Bragg Food Bank provides a vital service to so many of our town’s families and individuals. I’m grateful for all of the work Food Bank staff and volunteers dedicate to serving our community.”
(Ukiah Daily Journal)
FISH AHOY!
Trout spotted in Chadborne Creek are good signs for comeback of the Mendocino Coast’s three ocean going freshwater fishes.
by Frank Hartzell
In a flicker of color and a tiny splash no bigger than a raindrop, the young gamefish spun, darted, and—just for a moment—revealed herself in Chadbourne Creek
This fierce little shimmer of gold wasn’t fazed by the towering construction crane looming above her—part of the massive Myers Construction/Caltrans site. Instead, she slipped beneath one of its gigantic boulders, taking refuge from the photographer’s lens. She and her siblings, all likely under a year old, were living proof of resilience—a perfect picture of the Coast’s beloved oceangoing fish making their comeback, despite 150 years of human onslaught.…
GOING OUT THE GATE this morning. Got our salmon! (Olie Erickson)
FORT BRAGG CITY MANAGER AUGUST ROUND UP: link
SOCIETY NOTE: Long-time Philo resident, Kevin Burke, has quietly relocated to Tennessee. His neighbor/friend Kim Baxter said Wednesday that she had spoken to him on the phone recently and he laughingly said he couldn’t understand much of what people in Tennessee say. Apparently Kevin sold his house to his tenants who have since rented out the second structure they had been living in. Kevin’s wife Robin has been in Tennessee where she’s from for the last couple of years while Kevin arranged to move.
RON RICCI: I’m a bit of a poser being a part timer, but I’ll introduce myself. I grew up in Vermont and drove to the West Coast 27 years ago. Never looked back. The first moment I spent time in Anderson Valley it reminded me of home. Such a beautiful, bucolic place with great people. Fits like a glove. My wife and I have had our place for 15 years, full time for a couple of those years, and in the long run plan to be full time again. We’ve been lucky to share it with our kids (12 & 13), and now also share it with my in laws. Thank you for being the amazing community that you are.
HEARING MONDAY IN SEXUAL ASSAULT LAWSUIT AGAINST MENDOCINO COLLEGE PROFESSOR
by Sydney Fishman
UKIAH, CA., 09/05/25— At a hearing Monday in San Francisco Superior Court, lawyers will argue whether a lawsuit should proceed that alleges a Mendocino College professor sexually assaulted two underage students more than 20 years ago at San Francisco Waldorf High School, where he was employed as a substitute teacher and tutor.
Jason Davis and his attorney Eric Schattl filed a motion asking for a stay in proceedings in the civil lawsuit “until the conclusion of any related criminal investigation or until the threat of such an investigation has subsided.”
The lawsuit alleges that Davis, who worked for Waldorf and a tutoring service called One Smart Kid, sexually assaulted two minors identified in court documents as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 in the early 2000s.
The plaintiffs seek damages from Davis in connection with the alleged assaults and from Waldorf and One Smart Kid for what they allege was negligence in hiring and supervising Davis. The women seek punitive damages and the cost of the lawsuit, which was filed in May.
The Mendocino Voice reached out to Davis for comment, but he and his attorney declined to respond.
San Francisco Waldorf High School filed a response to the lawsuit denying all allegations against the school. One Smart Kid, which provides tutoring services for K-12 students in the Bay Area, also filed a response denying the allegations.
The Mendocino Voice requested a comment from San Francisco Waldorf High School, which responded that the school “is aware of the lawsuit and allegations against Jason Davis. We take any allegation involving the safety and well-being of our students very seriously. The safety of our students — past and present — has always been, and remains, our highest priority. We are committed to reviewing the circumstances surrounding the events from 2003-2004 with the utmost care and responsibility.”
The Mendocino Voice also requested a comment from One Smart Kid and did not receive a response.
Last week, Mark Boskovich, the plaintiffs’ attorney and a partner at San Jose-based firm Cerri, Boskovich & Allard, filed an opposition to the defendant’s motion to stay in the civil proceedings, saying “there is no basis for imposing a stay based on the mere possibility that criminal charges might be brought at some unknown point in the future.”
In response to that opposition, Davis and his attorney responded with another filing that said, “recent developments unequivocally confirm the existence of an active criminal investigation” into what it called “a separate but potentially related matter.”
The filing said, “Law enforcement is actively engaged in this matter, which includes interviewing individuals associated with Mr. Davis and has now extended to requesting a statement directly from Mr. Davis.”
The filing argued that “any civil discovery in this matter would severely impact his ability to defend himself in the ongoing criminal investigation, as any discovery in this civil matter could be used to incriminate him in the criminal investigation that is currently underway.”
Davis has lived in Mendocino County for most of his life and taught English and theater at Mendocino College’s Ukiah campus. He worked at the college for about 20 years, but was placed on administrative leave this summer, according to Mendocino College’s communications director.
Additionally, in a response to a request for comment on the lawsuit, the college’s communications director wrote in an email, “We can confirm that Jason Davis is employed as a faculty member at Mendocino College. However, it is our policy not to discuss personnel matters publicly. Please be assured that the safety of our students and employees is of utmost importance to us, and we address all complaints promptly and thoroughly.”
Before Davis began teaching at Mendocino College, the lawsuit alleges Davis was employed by One Smart Kid to tutor students attending the Waldorf school in San Francisco.
The filing alleges that Davis used his position of authority to groom two students for future sexual advances. The discovery process, where the parties in the lawsuit exchange evidence, is in its beginning stages.
According to the complaint, Davis was employed through One Smart Kid and eventually hired by the high school to be a substitute teacher and an assistant to the theater program in the early 2000s.
The lawsuit states that before Davis was hired as a substitute teacher, he worked as a tutor and taught Jane Doe 1 twice a week inside the Waldorf school’s art room. Davis was 31 years old at the time.
The lawsuit states that around January 2003, while Davis was still a tutor, he allegedly coerced Jane Doe 1 to stay behind at school while the rest of the students went on a field trip. The lawsuit alleges that Davis led Jane Doe 1 to a large room at the school with two big curtains where Davis undressed the student.
While Jane Doe 1 was partially undressed, the filing alleges, a Waldorf administrator entered the room and walked past the curtains. Davis allegedly moved Jane Doe 1 to another section of the room, but the administrator could see the student sitting on a chair with her shirt on inside out. Davis was standing above the student, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit then alleges, “After gaining Jane Doe 1’s trust, Davis went on to sexually assault her multiple times on school grounds from January 2003 through the end of her junior year.”
Davis allegedly transported Jane Doe 1 using his car or public transportation to his apartment to engage in sexual activities, according to the filing. The lawsuit alleges that on one such day, Davis took Jane Doe 1’s virginity.
The filing states that in the summer of 2003, the Waldorf school offered Davis a part-time teaching position to teach English and drama for the school year of 2003-2004.
The lawsuit also alleges that Davis had inappropriate relations with Jane Doe 2, who was a sophomore during the school year of 2003-2004, and that “Davis used his position of trust and authority as the SFWHS play director to openly groom her for his future sexual advances.”
According to the filing, Davis allegedly drove Jane Doe 2 home in his car after theater practices. Jane Doe 2 was 15 years old at the time. Davis allegedly began using these drives with Jane Doe 2 to engage in sexual activities, according to the lawsuit. According to the filing, in June 2004, Davis allegedly brought Jane Doe 2 to his apartment under the pretense that he was driving her home, and he took her virginity.
The next hearing in the lawsuit is scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday at the Civic Center Courthouse in San Francisco.
(mendovoice.com)
GREAT REDWOOD TRAIL VIRTUAL TOWN HALL MEETING
with State Senator Mike McGuire, August 12, 2025
by Monica Huettl
State Senator Mike McGuire, along with Great Redwood Trail Agency representatives, gave a progress update on the Great Redwood Trail. Senator McGuire represents District 2, ranging from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, encompassing the area through which the GRT runs.
The GRT map runs from San Francisco Bay to Humboldt Bay. The trail runs along the SMART Train tracks in Marin and Sonoma Counties, and along the abandoned North Coast Railroad tracks through Mendocino and Humboldt Counties. Once completed, the GTR will be the longest rail trail in the United States of America.…
MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: Everything — and we mean every single thing — that Senator McGuire and his Trail minions emit about the Great Redwood Trail is propaganda. It may be correct, narrowly speaking, but it’s very selective and incomplete. It’s well packaged slick political marketing. That’s because they know that public opinion ranges from Mulheren-style generic support of anything they label “trail,” to who cares?, to skeptical, and on into outright opposition to the ridiculously oversized, overpriced, mismanaged and dubious project. Therefore, they are making every effort to use taxpayer money to sell the project to the mostly disbelieving public as often as possible. The more they try to sell it to the public the more desperate they look. Just look at the North Coast Rail Authority from which the GRT sprang a few years ago at almost exactly the same time the NCRA funding was being cut by the state Transportation Commission. The Democrats have been milking this train/trail to nowhere scam in one form or another since the 1980s. Very little happens because a 300-plus mile trail isn’t practical except for dribs and drabs, just enough to keep the public thinking there’s some there there. The idea and the location for the 300-mile long GRT boondoggle only arose because the California Democratic Party happens to own the right of way and a large majority of the state legislature. McGuire & Co. have not championed any other trail projects and no other projects have received any attention (with the possible exception of Newsom’s anti-Trump redistricting measure), much less tens of millions in taxpayer planning and construction funds. McGuire makes no such effort to promote or publicize any other issue, as if the Great Redwood Trail is his only/top priority. (Last I checked, isn’t California running a big deficit?) Ask Sheriff Kendall if he agrees that the GRT should be the state’s or the senator’s top priority. When was the last time McGuire offered a “progress update” on law enforcement in California? Or on Health care? Or…?
Prediction: After he terms out next year, McGuire will end up in some cush tax-funded position somehow connected to the Great Redwood Trail. (Our guess: the State Coastal Conservancy.)
RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE
To the Editor:
What should be the Minimum Wage for Mendocino County?
“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country….by living wages I mean more that a bare subsistence level— I mean the wages of decent living.” — FDR
Franklin Roosevelt’s statement says it well! The working folks are the ones that make the businesses!
Some nations, like Luxembourg and France, have relatively high minimum wages, while others, like the United States, have lower federal minimums with states setting their own higher rates. Several European countries, including Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland, rely on collective bargaining agreements between labor unions and employers rather than government-mandated minimum wages.
The US federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, but many states have set higher minimum wages, according to the U.S. Department of Labor (.gov).
Factors Influencing Minimum Wage:
The political landscape and the balance of power between parties can significantly influence minimum wage decisions.
Economic growth, inflation, and the cost of living are important factors in setting minimum wage levels.
The strength of labor unions and the prevalence of collective bargaining agreements can affect minimum wage outcomes.
It’s time to reward the folks who are the means of production, so that they can participate in earning a living wage!!
What should a minimum wage be in Mendocino County? A decent living wage should start between $25 to $30 dollars per hour!
If businesses are not willing to pay a decent living wage to their employees, then a ballot measure is the next step!
Gino Zalunardo
Willits
LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO FREE, FRESH PRODUCE IN MENDOCINO COUNTY
by Sydney Fishman
MENDOCINO CO. 9/4/25 — At this time of summer, Mendocino County is filled with fresh fruits and vegetables ready to eat. Often, gardeners find themselves with more than they can handle and end up throwing away produce from their harvest.
“I feel like if you’re in need of food, you can find it in any corner of the county,” said Rachelle Sutherland, deputy director of the Mendo Food Network, a nonprofit that has helped distribute free and fresh food since 1979 and manages local distribution and drop-off sites. “I want to emphasize that it’s teamwork, and without all of the volunteers, it wouldn’t be available.”
For those under economic stress who can’t always afford farm-fresh food, there are locations across the county, organized mainly by volunteers, where community members can drop off extra fruits and vegetables for others to enjoy. The Mendocino Voice has compiled a list of those sites to help guide people to free and fresh produce. Did we miss a location? Email us at [email protected].
Albion
Albion pop-up: Provides free and fresh produce every Monday from 3-4 p.m. at 3512 Albion Ridge Rd. in Albion. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Anderson Valley
Anderson Valley Food Bank: Provides free and fresh produce every second and fourth Wednesday of the month from 2:30-5:30 p.m. at the Anderson Valley Grange, 9800 Highway 128 in Boonville. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Comptche
Comptche Food Pantry: Provides free and fresh produce every Monday from 2-4 p.m. at the Chapel of the Redwoods, 31201 Comptche Ukiah Rd. in Comptche. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Fort Bragg
Fort Bragg Food Bank: Provides free and fresh produce every Monday from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., every Wednesday from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and every Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 910 N. Franklin St. in Fort Bragg. Curbside distribution is open on Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to noon. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Gualala
Gualala Food Bank: Provides free and fresh produce every second Wednesday of the month from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Laytonville
Laytonville Food Bank: Provides free and fresh produce every third Friday of the month from 1-4 p.m. at Harwood Hall, 44400 Willis Ave. in Laytonville. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Laytonville pop-up: Provides free and fresh produce every fourth Thursday of the month from noon to 1 p.m. at 100 Cahto Dr. in Laytonville. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Leggett
Leggett Food Pantry: Provides free and fresh produce every third Saturday of the month from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at 65100 Drive-Thru Tree Rd. in Leggett. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Leggett pop-up: Provides free and fresh produce every first Tuesday of the month from noon to 1 p.m. at 65100 Drive-Thru Tree Road in Leggett. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Mendocino
Mendocino Community Pantry: Provides free and fresh produce every Tuesday from 2-3 p.m. at the Mendocino Presbyterian Church, 44831 Main St. in Mendocino. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Round Valley
Round Valley Food Pantry and the Covelo pop-up: The Covelo pop-up provides free and fresh produce every second Thursday of the month from noon to 1 p.m. The Round Valley Food Pantry also provides free fruits and veggies every third Friday of the month from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Both distributors operate at 24065 Riffe Rd. in Covelo. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Ukiah
Ukiah Branch Library: There will be a “Produce and Pantry Share” event on the last Saturday of September and October from 2-4 p.m. at the Ukiah Branch Library, 105 N. Main St. in Ukiah. There will be free homegrown produce and nonperishable items available. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Ukiah Food Bank: Provides free and fresh produce every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from noon to 4 p.m. at 888 N. State St. In Ukiah. Contact [email protected] for more information.
MCAVHN Care and Prevention Network: Has a “little free pantry” where the organization shares free and fresh produce from their garden at their main office at 148 Clara Ave. in Ukiah. This location has food available on a first-come, first-served basis. MCAVHN does not have a set schedule for people to pick up produce, but they are open Monday through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Willits
Nuestra Alianza de Willits: Nuestra Alianza provides free and fresh produce every Tuesday from 2-4:30 p.m. at their main office at 291 School St. #1 in Willits. People can pick up food on Wednesdays and Thursdays if they are not able to make it on Tuesdays. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Willits Daily Bread: Provides free and fresh produce Mondays through Thursdays from 4:30-5:30 p.m. at 66 E. Commercial St. in Willits. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Willits Food Bank: Provides free and fresh produce Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 344 Railroad Ave. in Willits. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Willits pop-up: Provides free and fresh produce every first Thursday of each month from 10-11:30 a.m. at 1250 Blosser Ln. in Willits. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Westport
Westport Choice Pantry: Provides free and fresh produce every third Wednesday of the month from 6-8 p.m. at 37551 N. Shoreline Highway in Westport. Contact [email protected] for more information
(MendocinoVoice)
IMPORTANT DATES for Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show (Sep. 12-14, 2025)
OCTOBER 2025 AT FORT BRAGG LIBRARY
Nailed It! Adult Craft with Amie
Bad at crafts? Love Pinterest? Think your sister’s not that talented? This is the place for you! Join Amie as she, along with you, attempts to make something crafty. All supplies provided. Space is limited. Reservations are required.
Saturday, October 4, 2025, 2-3:30 pm
Contact: [email protected]
707-964-2020
Creative Writing Workshop
A monthly workshop taught by published authors. Each month will feature a different genre/style/or theme.
Open and free to all adults. Bring your notebooks and pencils.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025, 2-3:30 pm
Contact: [email protected]
707-964-2020
Four Shillings Short
A Samhain/Halloween Concert: Music, Poetry & Folklore for the Celtic New Year
A free family concert.
Free
Friday, October 17, 2025 – 6-7:30 pm
Contact: [email protected]
707-964-2020
Spooktacular Fall Carnival & Drop-In Trick or Treat
Kids! Join us for the return of our annual Spooktacular Fall Carnival where we’ll have fun with ghoulish games, spooktacular prizes & sneaky snacks. Then, between 1 & 5 pm, wear your costume and get a trick or treat bag.
Free Event
Saturday, October 25, 2025, Storytime: 10:30-11; Carnival: 11 am – 12:00 pm; Drop-in Trick or Treat: 1-5 pm
Contact: [email protected]
707-964-2020
Ongoing Programs:
Open Mic Poetry—Come, read your own poetry, someone else’s or just come to listen. In person and via ZOOM. First Thursday of the month, 7 pm
Kids Story Time—Join our Youth Librarian, Kim for stories and sing-alongs. Most Fridays & Saturdays, 10:30 – 11 am. Rhyme Time Story Time is the first Friday and Saturday of the month (except those months where the two days are separate).
Adult Book Group—Contact the library to reserve a copy of the monthly selection then join us the last Thursday of the month @ 4 pm for a lively discussion. Contact: Dan Hess, [email protected] 707-964-2020
Kids Craft Time—Kids & families! Come and make a fun craft the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month, 11 am-12 pm. You bring the enthusiasm; we supply the rest!
Tech Help—Need help with library apps or some device help? By appointment only every Thursday, 1 pm – 2 pm
Teen D & D— Teens (12 to 18) will go on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign! No experience necessary, but space is limited. Snacks provided.
LEGO & Games— Kids! Create your own LEGO® design or play a game with your friends and/or family members. Most Tuesdays, 2-5 pm
Book Donations - Friends of the Fort Bragg Library— Second Saturday of every month, 12-3, in the alley to the west of the library. Contact: [email protected]
Poetry Writing Workshop for Adults—Find your inner poet! Workshops are free. Second Thursday of the month, 3-4:30 pm.
Always check the Calendar at fortbragglibrary.org for program updates, exceptions, and cancellations.
Hours of Operation:
T/W/T 10-7
Fri 10-6
Sat 10-5
Sun/Mon closed
THE GROVE MEETS GROOVE
Mendocino Grove is bringing back its Fall Festival on November 14–15, 2025. Set on California’s North Coast, the intimate weekend gathering (capped at just 225 guests) combines live regional music, hands-on workshops, seasonal food and drink, and modern camping under heated tents. Think late-nightjams, campfire cocktails, and a creative, close-knit vibe that’s a refreshing departure from larger-scale festivals.
https://mendocinogrove.com/fallfest
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, September 5, 2025
JAYME ALVA, 47, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.
SCOTT FABER, 46, Ukiah. False ID, probation revocation.
CARLOS GARCIA-ARENAS, 24, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.
BENJAMIN GAYSKI JR., 33, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery, probation revocation.
DANIEL GONZALEZ, 37, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, probation revocation.
RYAN LOOMIS, 46, Ukiah. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.04% with passenger for hire, leaving scene of accident with property damage, probation revocation.
SHANE MILLER JR., 32, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, domestic violence court order violation.
JONNIE MIZE, 50, Ukiah. Campfire without permit.
ILIJAH NELSON, 38, Ukiah. Parole violation.
JOEL ORDAZ-HERNANDEZ, 39, Ukiah. Failure to register after gaining a living residence, probation revocation.
GAVIN RUMBLE, 28, San Francisco/Ukiah. Failure to appear.
RANDY SAINE, 38, Willits. Failure to appear.
JASON SPLEISS, 45, Tracy/Ukiah. Disobeying court order.
JESSICA STEPHENS, 35, San Francisco/Ukiah. Disobeying court order.
MATREYUS TISCARENO-MEYER, 19, Fort Bragg. Possession of deadly weapons by person in custody.
TRAVIS WRIGHT, 48, Ukiah. DUI.
PRIVATE SCHOOLS HAVE UNFAIR ATHLETIC ADVANTAGES
To the Editor of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
As a local sports enthusiast, I commend Staff Writers Kienan O’Doherty and Gus Morris for their excellent coverage of prep sports. Their recent football preview revealed troubling inequities. Cardinal Newman hired a head coach earning six figures and imported two assistant coaches from Southern California. Assigned to Division 6, Newman will likely land in the Open Division playoffs — which is fair. But if they miss the Top 8 ranking, they could fall into Divisions 4, 5, 6 or 7 where true public schools at that level are left to face a program with resources they can’t match. That’s not equity.
St. Vincent’s tells a similar story. At least five transfers this year, more last year, yet they remain labeled Division 7. In reality, their roster rivals many D2 and D1 programs. Fifteen of 18 seniors have college scholarships. Still, unless ranked Top 8, the highest playoff placement they face is D5. Of course, they are going to win championships with that advantage. How is that fair and equitable? The fix is obvious: private schools need their own playoffs. They can schedule non-league games against public schools, but publics shouldn’t be forced into mismatches. The North Coast Section must stop pretending this system is fair.
Pablo Garcia
Petaluma
BRING CRAIG HOME TO UKIAH
Warmest spiritual greetings,
I have contacted all relevant politicians, major media, and everybody on my Gmail list to inform that I am accepting cooperation to 1. receive my SSI benefits (and all social security money which was either withheld or improperly discontinued), 2. the reinstatement of the California EBT benefits which simply disappeared, and 3. the federal housing voucher which timed out, since no landlords in Mendocino County were interested in doing the paperwork and waiting up to six months to get the $2,000 incentive to rent to me.
In addition, I thank the many friends who have contacted me in Washington, D.C. to recommend that I just get on an airplane and return to Mendocino County, assuring me that everything will work out. By the way, can I get complimentary airfare to Santa Rosa airport, a pick up, a place to go to initially, and long term senior subsidized housing? Whereas I am still in a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. being supportive of the Peace Vigil across the street from the White House for the sixteenth time since June of 1991, I am ready to move on. General health is excellent at age 75. I am thanking you in advance for your cooperation.
Craig Louis Stehr
Telephone Messages: (202) 832-8317
Email: [email protected]
MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio all night tonight on KNYO and KAKX!
Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight’s (Friday night’s) MOTA show is 5:30 or so. If that’s too soon, send it any time after that and I’ll read it next Friday. That’s fine. There’s no pressure.
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.
Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week’s MOTA show. By Saturday night I’ll put up the recording of tonight’s show. You’ll find plenty of other educational amusements there to educate and amuse yourself with until showtime, or any time, such as:
Jackson Brown - I’m Alive, live in his living room in 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P23J2_KZevg
The Hives live at KCRW. I think the singer looks like Chris Pine. https://theawesomer.com/the-hives-live-from-kcrw/781418/
And Swedish bluegrass band Steve ‘n’ Seagulls plays Don’t Fear the Reaper. https://theawesomer.com/stevenseagulls-dont-fear-the-reaper/781390/
Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
“WHEN you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila’s horses’ hooves have ever scoured.”
— Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Moveable Feast’
HEADBANGER
by Doug Holland
Once weekly, sometimes twice, I have breakfast at a cheap restaurant. Always it’s alone, always the same restaurant, and I’m poor so always I second guess the expense.
It’s splendid, though, starting a day with french toast, coffee with endless refills, and a few chapters of whatever book I’m reading. Long as Social Security keeps sending monthly checks, I’ll keep coming to the diner when I can.
Walking to breakfast a few days ago, a homeless man was sitting on the sidewalk in front of a laundromat, between me and the restaurant’s door. This is America, homeless people are everywhere, so his existence didn’t even register with me, at first. Might never have noticed him, if he hadn’t banged his head, hard, against the brick wall behind him.
Twenty steps from the restaurant’s door, the thud was loud and clear, and then he leaned a few inches forward, like cocking a pistol, and smashed the back of his head into the wall again. We had the same rhythm — for every four steps I took toward the restaurant, he bashed his head again against the wall. And these were firm thuds. Homeless guy was not half-assing it.
He was about my age, 60- or 70-something, a white man with gray, disheveled hair, tattered clothes, several days’ stubble, and a passion for repeatedly bashing his head against the wall.
As a rule sometimes broken, I give five bucks to any homeless person who asks, and some who don’t. I’m no saint — sometimes I forget, and sometimes I don’t forget but just don’t hand over the cash, cuz I’m a cheap bastard. My good Samaritan shtick is skipped for street people who seem dangerous, and cracking your skull against a laundromat’s wall, cracking it again and again, qualifies as dangerous, so there’d be no donation for that guy.
Thud. I walked past without eye contact, and into the restaurant. Thud again.
All the counter seats were taken, so I seated myself at one of the rickety booths. A waitress appeared, and asked if I wanted coffee. “Silly question,” I said with a smile, and she poured.
The restaurant doesn’t have air conditioning, so in summertime the door is propped open, and my seat was near enough to the front that as I took a sip of coffee, another thud came through. It was faint, but there was no not knowing what it was. Silver was tinkling and people were talking, the sounds of any restaurant, but again came the thud of the homeless man’s head hitting the wall.
This was moderately annoying. Here I was, trying to enjoy a civilized cup of coffee, but being interrupted by a mentally deranged homeless man’s self-hatred and headbanging. The nerve of some people.
That’s the thought that ran through my head, and then I was angry at myself for thinking it. The headbanger probably wasn’t intending to ruin my coffee. More likely he was banging his head because something’s wrong inside it.
With that, I decided to give him five damned dollars. Thud. He was certainly earning it, and it seemed likely he’d take the cash and hurry along to buy whiskey or whatever, and stop banging his head. Or at least, stop banging his head so near that I could hear it.
No fives were in my wallet, so I pulled out five ones. Took the wallet with me but left my backpack in the booth, and walked out the door. The man on the sidewalk banged his head hard against the wall again before I got to him.
“How you doing?” I said, a question which answered itself with another head-thud, and then he pulled his head forward, winding-up for the next full-force backward bang. If he sat there and banged his head for an hour, he would do genuine damage to himself.
Almost rudely, I pushed the five ones at his face, and there’s no mental illness that doesn’t remember and respect money, so of course he took my cash, which made it his. He didn’t say anything, but he stopped banging his head, and with effort and grunts he rose to his feet, and stuffed the bills in the pocket of his oily stained shirt.
He looked at me as he rubbed the back of his head, and when his hand came back, blood was on his fingers.
Then he walked away but not far, into the bodega that’s part of the same strip mall. Presumably he spent his five bucks there, on whatever makes life not worth cracking his skull.
Me, I went back in the diner, and finished that cup of coffee and several more, plus french toast and scrambled eggs. Read a few chapters of the book I’d brought, but also thought about the headbanger homeless guy.
If you can help someone, you should, right? I hope I helped that blood-headed man, and not hearing any more thuds at breakfast helped me, too. It was worth five bucks.
(itsdougholland.com)
AS GIANTS CRUSH OPPONENTS, lucky Jobu voodoo doll gets its own locker
by Susan Slusser
ST. LOUIS — One of the San Francisco Giants’ lockers at Busch Stadium, nestled between Rafael Devers’ and Willy Adames’, has a surprising resident: a Jobu doll, a replica of the voodoo doll that features in the 1989 movie “Major League.”
The doll even has its own nameplate, courtesy of clubhouse assistant Carter Pierce. And why not? Since the day the doll arrived for Adames, from a person or persons unknown, the Giants have won 11 of 12 games, and Friday, Devers and Adames hit back-to-back homers in the first inning to down the Cardinals 8-2. Every man in San Francisco’s lineup had at least one hit in the 18-hit attack, matching the season high achieved one week earlier.
Carson Seymour, making his 12th appearance and his second start, threw four-no-hit innings before allowing two hits and a run in the fifth, his final inning, and a career high — and he earned his first career major-league win.
For the non-superstitious, sure, the unusual gift is just a doll — but it appears it, at the least, can’t hurt. During Jobu’s tenancy with the Giants, the team has outscored opponents 94-49 and Devers (.391, six homers) and Adames (.302, five homers), in particular, have been on tears. Special mentions to Drew Gilbert (.379) and Jung Hoo Lee (.361), who had four hits, including a triple, Friday. Patrick Bailey had three hits, and the catcher is batting .314 with Jobu around.
Adames nearly tossed Jobu in the trash — he didn’t know what it was, he didn’t know who sent it. “I was scared!” he said, with a laugh, of the wild-looking figurine.
He’s never seen “Major League.” Told it’s the movie where his late friend Bob Uecker utters the famous line “Juuuuust a bit outside! ,” Adames nodded — he knows that one, for sure.
Equipment manager Brad Grems knows the movie but still nearly took a bat to the doll, not knowing its provenance. But: You don’t mess with Jobu. Earlier this year, the St. Louis Blues also adopted a Jobu doll and went on a club-record 12-game winning streak.
“It’s going to stay in there,” manager Bob Melvin said.
Seymour wasn’t expected to go more than three or four innings, but he’d only allowed one walk in the first four.
“Bob asked me after the fourth if I was good, and I knew I hadn’t given up a hit,” Seymour said. “I was like, ‘Yeah! I feel good.’ I was just trying to keep that alive, honestly, and keep it rolling, quick on defense and long innings for us when we’re hitting that’s the goal when I started.”
“You can tell he was pitching with a lot of confidence,” Melvin said. “To be able to get five was huge for us, and then only have to use three relievers on a day that we felt like we’re going to have to use a bunch was nice to do.”
Seymour left his sinker up too much before Friday, allowing four homers on the pitch in 24⅔ innings. Against the Cardinals, he was determined to keep the pitch at the bottom of the zone, and he did so consistently, stealing nine called strikes with it. “That was my big goal: keep the sinker low,” Seymour said.
The rookie got the customary dousing reserved for a first-time big-league feat. “Barbecue sauce, yogurt, something spicy — my lip was kind of on fire,” Seymour said. “It was the whole business for sure.”
Devers has homered in four of his past five games, and he now has 31 homers and 99 RBIs combined between Boston and San Francisco. Seven of his homers have come in the first inning, three of them on this road trip.
“Those are things that just happen in baseball,” he said, with Erwin Higueros interpreting. “I just take every turn the same way. I try to get the best of myself that I can.”
He now has a rambunctious fan in the dugout: Gilbert leads the cheers for Devers. Asked about the rookie, Devers smiled and said, “It’s another level of vibe with him. It just gets us really excited when he celebrates like that.”
There are few things starters like more than an early lead. The back-to-backs were just what Seymour ordered, and Patrick Bailey told him after the two runs “to be aggressive, let’s go after them,” Seymour said. “It’s super easy to pitch with the big two-run lead and then a bigger lead after that.”
Adames extended his RBI streak to eight games in a row, the longest of his career and the longest by a Giants hitter since Pablo Sandoval’s nine-game streak May 21-29, 2014. Lee has hit safely in 26 of the past 29 games, and his 11 triples are tied for third in the majors. Heliot Ramos has a six-game hitting streak, Bailey has scored in each of his past six games.
“It’s the entire team,” Devers said. “Everything is going good for us, so we just want to take advantage of this streak that we’re enjoying right now.”
The Giants remained four games behind the Mets in the race for the third wild-card spot; New York holds the tiebreaker, however, making it in essence a five-game lead. San Francisco gained a game on both the Dodgers and Padres in the NL West, though; the Giants are six games behind L.A. and four behind San Diego.
Since Jobu established residence in the Giants’ clubhouse, the Dodgers are 5-7, the Padres 3-9 and the Giants have picked up six games.
The Cardinals, two games behind the Giants in the wild-card hunt, are without some significant players this weekend, including first baseman Willson Contreras, serving a four-game suspension for bumping an umpire during a meltdown after a called strike three Aug. 25. Alec Burleson and Nolan Arenado are both on the IL.
(sfchronicle.com)
CAT’S DREAM
by Pablo Neruda (1959), translated by Alastair Reid
How neatly a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its posture,
sleeps with its wicked claws,
and with its unfeeling blood,
sleeps with all the rings--
a series of burnt circles--
which have formed the odd geology
of its sand-colored tail.
I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to no one,
stretch myself over the world,
over roofs and landscapes,
with a passionate desire
to hunt the rats in my dreams.
I have seen how the cat asleep
would undulate, how the night
flowed through it like dark water;
and at times, it was going to fall
or possibly plunge into
the bare deserted snowdrifts.
Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
like a tiger's great-grandfather,
and would leap in the darkness over
rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.
Sleep, sleep cat of the night,
with episcopal ceremony
and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams;
control the obscurity
of our slumbering prowess
with your relentless heart
and the great ruff of your tail.
LIBERAL DARLING MALCOLM GLADWELL FINALLY SAID THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD.
Trans Extremists And Their Gutless Enablers Ravaged America
by Maureen Callahan
A star leftist just went right.
Or at least, finally, made the right call.
Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author and darling of the liberal elite, admitted this week that he’d been cowed into silence on the trans issue.
Good for him, truly. Better late than never.
That said, listen to him describe his inner monologue as he moderated a panel discussion at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2022.
After a trans athlete on that panel went beyond insisting that biological males should play in female sports but that ‘you’ — everyone, but women especially — ‘have to let us win,’ Gladwell says he thought to himself: ‘This is nuts.’
But he didn’t have the guts to say it then.
Are we surprised? This is what woke progressivism has wrought — a culture in which a 62-year-old, who has cumulatively sold 25 million books, is afraid to say what he knows to be true.
What all sane people know to be common sense.
This is the real pandemic. This is the actual virus, and it’s in the collective bloodstream, and it’s killing off rational, logical thought and debate — the one and only threat to our democracy.
‘I’m ashamed of my performance at that panel,’ Gladwell told The Real Science of Sport podcaster Ross Tucker, who was also on that panel and had the courage to argue against trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.
‘I share your position 100 percent and I was cowed,’ Gladwell continued. ‘My suspicion is that 90 percent of the people in that audience were on your side, but five percent of the audience was willing to admit it.’
Of course.
Even today, those of us who refuse to countenance biological men in women’s sport and spaces, to use groupthink Orwellian nonsense words such as ‘chestfeeding’ and ‘pregnant people’ — terms that the Democratic party is now encouraging its adherents to abandon, in the hopes of reclaiming the White House in 2028 — risk being tarred as transphobes, bigots, or being cancelled.
Gladwell’s admission doesn’t so much signal a shift — his is too passive and late for that — as it reflects one.
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who presented as masculine but insisted he was female and was then allowed to fight biological females at the 2024 Olympics — and ‘won’ — has been banned from the World Boxing Championships.
Why? Because Imane Khelif is a man.
The Italian Olympic boxer Angela Carini, 25, ended her match against Khelif after 46 seconds, fearful that she would be maimed or worse.
Not that she said so explicitly or even felt as if she could say how utterly insane, unjust and potentially fatal it is to put biological females — who have trained their entire lives to reach Olympic gold — up against a man.
‘I am in pieces because I am a fighter,’ Carini said after withdrawing.
Even so, she had another burden: Not upsetting Khelif, who smirked at Carini as she tearfully exited the ring, or trans activists or the mainstream media, who still carry this water.
On Wednesday, Sky Sports reported the latest on Khelif’s rejected appeal to compete against women at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, calling Khelif ‘she’.
Even Big Tech is in on it.
Google ‘Iman Khelif, male,’ and AI replies with this: ‘No, Imane Khelif is a woman, and claims that she is male are false’.
Well, according to reports published last fall in France, Khelif has XY chromosomes.
In other words, he is a man.
Not that we needed chromosomal testing, because our eyes tell us as much: The height, the musculature, the broad facial features, the sheer physical force of the two punches Carini suffered at his hands.
‘I have never felt a punch like this,’ Carini said, adding that she feared he had broken her nose.
If Khelif had any decency, he would never have fought women. If Khelif had anything approaching scruples, he would never have accepted that gold medal in women’s boxing.
But as with so many of these trans athletes, they’d never make it against fellow biological males — like Lia Thomas, the undistinguished UPenn male swimmer who declared himself trans, began allegedly swinging his appendage around the girls’ locker room, and was suddenly breaking records all over the place.
Thomas actually came up during that MIT panel, with Gladwell saying ‘she’s an elite swimmer’ and musing whether Thomas could compete in the Olympics — as a female, of course, before minimizing any debate by saying that was the province of Fox News.
This is exactly why Democrats lost.
And it’s why the trans athlete on Gladwell’s panel felt emboldened enough to say that it wasn’t enough for men to compete in women’s sports.
Again: ‘You have to let us win.’
Gladwell — who still won’t name that athlete, which is part of the problem — claims that was his a-ha moment.
‘They’re not asking for a place at the table. They’re not asking to be treated with respect and dignity,’ Gladwell said. ‘What they’re asking for is for no one to question their considerable physiological advantage they bring to the sport. I heard that and I thought, This is nuts, and yet I didn’t say anything.’
Well, now he’s saying it — as is California’s ultra-progressive governor Gavin Newsom (doing so out of political expediency, not because he has a shred of integrity or true core beliefs), Dem congressman Seth Moulton and Dem senator Ruben Gallego.
‘Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,’ Moulton told The New York Times after the 2024 presidential election. ‘I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that’.
Who will be brave enough to follow, not that Moulton and Gladwell are dragging the NPR/MS-NOW crowd into the light?
(DailyMail.uk)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Our son was in a US medical school, more than half of the class was female. He spent 4 years being congratulated that he wasn’t “as bad as all the other white cisgender males” by self-identified victims of misogyny (in a majority female school). Our son, along with any other normal male (of all skin colors btw) just put their heads down for 4 years and worked. In other words, a percentage of a medical school class self-censored for 4 years at a time when we desperately need new ideas and thinking in medicine. That is the problem with even stifling free speech. We risk losing our greatest asset, human creativity. The public square used to be the place ideas went to be argued, and the best ideas won.
RFK JR.’S DANGEROUS DESIGNS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH
by Bernie Sanders
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. writes that “We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC” (WSJ op-ed, Sept. 3). That would be laughable if it weren’t dangerously wrong. In my view, Mr. Kennedy is waging a war against science and the well-being of the American people.
Let’s not forget. At the height of the Covid pandemic, we were losing 3,000 people every day, hospitals were overwhelmed, doctors and nurses were dying for lack of personal protective equipment, and workers were afraid to go to their jobs. President Trump’s initial poor leadership—free-wheeling behind the podium, recommending untested cures and sowing confusion—exacerbated this crisis.
Yet once the president recognized the severity of the situation, he did something extremely important. He initiated Operation Warp Speed, which in record time led to the development of lifesaving Covid vaccines. Oddly, Mr. Kennedy doesn’t have a good word to say about what his boss called “one of the greatest miracles in the history of modern-day medicine” that “saved tens of millions of lives worldwide.”
Did people make mistakes in responding to Covid? No question. But nobody, not least the secretary of health and human services, should ignore that these vaccines were an enormous and beneficial breakthrough.
We shouldn’t be surprised, however, by Mr. Kennedy’s refusal to acknowledge that success. While the medical community has understood that vaccines are safe, effective and have led to the elimination of polio, measles, smallpox and other diseases, Mr. Kennedy hasn’t. Throughout his career, and as the founder of the antivaccine Children’s Health Defense Organization, he has made millions sowing doubt about the efficacy of vaccines.
If the president wants to make America healthy again, great. But he shouldn’t expect to achieve that noble goal with a secretary who looks down on modern medicine and undermines our ability to respond to pandemics.
HUMPTY DUMPTY sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
THE GRIFTERS’ LAMENT
by James Kunstler
What a gruesome spectacle it was to see HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. take on a conclave of vicious grifters on the Senate Finance Committee straining to warp reality in defense of their mighty patron, the nation-wrecking pharmaceutical companies. Do you understand how deep, convoluted, and grave the political sickness is?
Over the years, the public health agencies and “big pharma” had evolved into a symbiotic vector driving the nation into chronic illness. They allowed the population to poison themselves on a diet of corn syrup, engineered snack foods, and chemical additives. Result: epidemic obesity, diabetes, and many other illnesses. To counter that, they dosed everybody to-the-max with sketchily-tested pharma products while the agency employees raked in royalties and pharma got a get-outa-jail-free card in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) — legal liability cancelled.
Then, they all badly mis-stepped, conniving in the Covid-19 operation, a still poorly-comprehended scheme to punk the American people and enable mail-in ballot fraud to steal the 2020 election. First, there was Dr. Fauci’s years’ long effort to hatch a novel corona virus, Covid-19, in labs here and overseas. Then, there was the opportune release of the virus in 2019. Then, the pharma response to the virus: a “miracle” mRNA vaccine that was likely already developed in secret, even before Operation Warp Speed was acted-out to pretend that pharma just came up with it. And, of course, there was President Trump 1.0 getting hosed by his Covid Response Team (Fauci, Birx, et al.) on all this.
Thus, you have that battery of US Senators all paid handsomely by Pharma to defend the industry with hysterical obfuscation against the lone figure, Mr. Kennedy, striving to correct all that fantastic corruption. He retorted to their malign nonsense honorably, revealing their conflicts of interest, their cupidity, the bales of dollars paid by pharma to the likes of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and the rest over the years, and their longstanding silence on the afore-mentioned poisoning and drugging of America.
Incidentally, to understand how this grift got so exorbitant, look to the unfortunate 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (558 U.S. 310). In a 5-4 ruling (by majority conservative justices, then including Alito, Thomas, and Scalia), SCOTUS decided that previous prohibitions on corporate money in election campaigns were unconstitutional because corporations enjoy legal status as persons, that is, as citizens, and giving money to election campaigns is a form of free speech under the first Amendment, which can’t be abridged by any law.
And so, the spigot opened on vast fortunes laid on politicians by corporations seeking to protect their interests. If anything went to warp speed, it was the Beltway lobbying industry. The Citizens United decision was a singular tragedy for our country. The legal reasoning behind it was specious because corporations, unlike real human citizens, do not have duties, obligations, and responsibilities to the nation, entailed in their citizenship. Rather, corporations have duties, obligations, and responsibilities solely (and explicitly in law) to their shareholders, whose interests are not necessarily consistent with the public interest. Why has no one noticed this?
Well, they haven’t and that is exactly where American politics went badly off-the-rails. The resulting accelerated corruption in the public health agencies of our government has been a disgusting side effect of all that, which RFK, Jr., has been called to clean up, a Herculean task. The most visible manifestation of that corruption is the chronic illness of the people — 76.4 percent of all of us, he told the committee, with eight out of ten young men physically unfit for military service. We’re the sickest nation in the world.
When the senators confabulate over “the science,” what they really mean is the armature of medical authority that has enabled the money-flow to their campaign committees (and eventually to their own bank accounts.) It’s that very scaffold of authority that has collapsed. Why? Because the medical authorities lied over and over about the Covid-19 episode, and especially about the vaccines, which were never properly tested, and were neither safe nor effective.
Your own doctors got paid extravagantly to push the vaccine. The so-called Pfizer Papers, collected, collated, and analyzed by Naomi Wolf’s organization (because nobody else would do it) showed the sloppiness of the whole process behind the vaccines’ development and release, and the pharma companies’ evasion of responsibility for the damage done. The medical journals lied about everything from the origin of the virus to the efficacy of the vaccine. The CDC campaigned against viable, inexpensive treatments for the virus. The CDC pushed the worthless, gamed PCR tests to jack up the case numbers. The CDC pushed the idiotic mask rules, school closings, business closures, and the vaccine mandates. The hospitals killed people with remdesivir and respirators, and got paid for it! The authority of all these parties is blown, especially the CDC’s — and these perfidious senators have the gall to hide behind this “science”?
What Mr. Kennedy is challenged with is sorting through all the official lies told by these agencies — the so-called “data” —to arrive at a comprehensible picture of what really happened. And then to inquire beyond Covid into many other pharma products that might be making Americans sick. Neither the politicians nor the people employed by the agencies when Covid went down want that to happen.
I HAD A PROJECT for my life which involved 10 years of wandering, then some years of medical studies and, if any time was left, the great adventure of physics.
— Che Guevara
LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT
Many Cities Say Yes to Federal Police Help, but No to ‘Occupation’
Grand Juries in D.C. Reject Wave of Charges Under Trump’s Crackdown
Chicago Braces for a Surge of Federal Agents
How Trump’s Blunt-Force Diplomacy Is Pushing His Rivals Together
Trump Says U.S. Military Has ‘Never Fought to Win’ Since World War II
Second Weak Jobs Report Undercuts Trump’s Claims of a Booming Economy
What to Know About a Rapid U.S. Military Buildup in the Caribbean
Will Trump Have to Run From the Economy?
Trump Will Host G20 Summit in 2026 at His Doral Resort in Florida
U.S. Is Increasingly Exposed to Chinese Election Threats, Lawmakers Say
ALL ELEMENTS IN PLACE FOR A US DECAPITATION STRIKE ON VENEZUELA
by Roger Harris & Joe Emersberger
President Donald Trump euphorically concluded his White House press conference on September 2 with breaking news: the US military had just blown up a small motor vessel in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. He alleged that the skiff came from Venezuela and was loaded with illicit drugs headed to the US.
On social media, he further embellished his story by saying that the crew were members of the Tren de Aragua cartel, which Trump claims is controlled by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump alleges that this cartel is “responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence across the US.”
Evidence Blown Out Of The Water
There was no attempt to stop and search the boat in international waters, before murdering the crew. This gruesome practice arrogates to the US state the extrajudicial power to kill anyone with whom it unilaterally declares itself to be at “war.”
The eleven victims are just a drop in the imperial blood bucket compared to the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza. But the homicidal “victory” was used by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to crow about the “full power of America, the full might of the United States.”
Maduro responded that no one believes Trump’s and Rubio’s lies: “they come for Venezuelan oil and gas, they want them for free.”
The day before the incident, Maduro presciently warned that the US could create a false positive to justify the US military deployment. Claims have circulated that the incident may have been faked by AI. If true, that’s not much of a relief. It simply means Trump’s military escalation against Venezuela has begun at a lower level than he claims.
Maduro alluded to the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident and the explosion of the Maine, which precipitated the 1964 Vietnam and 1898 Spanish-American wars respectively. Maduro also mentioned the WMD hoax that was used to justify the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
Maduro might also have noted that President Bill Clinton bombed Sudan, diverting attention from his Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Trump is now facing similar difficulties due to his close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein
A Decapitation Strike Attempt On Venezuela Foretold
All the elements, especially US impunity, are in place to eventually attempt a decapitation strike eliminating the South American nation’s leadership.
Trump ominously boasted at his press conference “there is more where that came from” for Venezuela. Just four days earlier, Washington’s “historic partner“ Israel had assassinated the Yemeni prime minister and his civilian cabinet. Arguably, the word “partner” understates the intimate level of integration between the two. The Israelis have been perpetrating a live-streamed genocide in Gaza for over 700 days while receiving daily airlifts of military supplies under both Biden and Trump.
Decapitation of an enemy’s leadership has become a tactic for the “partners.” Aside from Yemen, the Israelis launched a devastating decapitation strike on Hezbollah in Lebanon along with a similarly brazen one of top Iranian leaders during its twelve-day war with Tehran. In 2020, Trump murdered Iranian General Qassem Soleimani with a drone.
Trump signed an executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations the day he returned to the presidency. US military were deployed to the Caribbean near Venezuela under the ruse of drug interdiction. Shortly afterwards, The New York Times reported a leaked “secret order“ authorizing the use of the US military to intervene in other countries against drug cartels.
Also in August, the reward on the head of Maduro was doubled to $50 million with lesser rewards for other top officials. US sanctions now extend to the heads of the state oil and transportation companies, supreme court justices, electoral councilors, national assembly politicians, various military and security heads, and so forth; in short, a leadership hit list.
Trump Doesn’t Actually Care About The Us’s Illegal Drug Problem
The US is indeed flooded with drugs, but Trump’s concern is insincere. Otherwise he would have mobilized against trafficking within the US and close allies like Ecuador. Instead Trump diverts public attention by scapegoating Venezuela, a country that contributes to the problem negligibly.
Illicit drug sales in the US are estimated at $200–$750 billion, including new synthetics. Remarkably, the only other domestic commodity that comes close in volume is legal pharmaceuticals at $600 billion, followed by oil and gas at $400 billion. Indeed, the US is the largest consumer of illegal drugs and a major supplier of weapons and drug precursor chemicals for the cartels. As the world’s leading narcotics money launderer, prominent US banks implicated include HSBC Bank USA, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.
We constantly hear about Latin American drug kingpins, but who distributes the dope when it crosses the border is left unanswered. Research by Mexican journalist Jorge Esquivel demonstrates that no US administration has ever seriously investigated domestic drug trafficking networks. Venezuelan international analyst Sergio Gelfenstein asserts Washington has “no interest whatsoever in combating the drug trade”; it is just too big and profitable.
Besides, drug usage serves to pacify youth, African Americans, and other potentially dissident demographics. Journalist Gary Webb exposed how drug trafficking on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s helped fund the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua. And opium production was virtually eradicated in Afghanistan before the US invasion of 2001, only to explode again under direct US military occupation.
Fake Threat Of Venezuelan Drug Trafficking
“What the US really seeks is regime change and regional control, thinly veiled behind drug war rhetoric,” according to The Cradle.
The authoritative 2025 UN World Drug Report featured minimal mention of Venezuela, emphasizing that it plays a marginal role in global drug trafficking. The report confirms that Venezuela is a territory largely free of drug cultivation and processing, as well as any significant international cartel presence. Nor does the report mention the fictitious “Cartel of the Suns,” which the US claims Maduro heads.
Despite the Tren de Aragua’s designation by the US as a terrorist organization, the intelligence community itself refutes that it is controlled by Maduro or is even a highly functioning international narcotics cartel.
The Guard Rails Are Down For Imperialist Aggression
Democrats may carp about the optics of Trump’s actions, but they have been bipartisan partners in opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution’s attempt to build socialism in the 21st century ever since Hugo Chávez was first elected Venezuela’s president in 1998. Note, every US Senator voted to confirm Marco Rubio as Trump’s Secretary of State.
The so-called “international community” and its institutions such as the United Nations have been powerless to stop the US/zionist war on Palestine let alone one in Uncle Sam’s “backyard.” Welcome to the post-Gaza genocide world.
And let’s not forget the perfidy of big “human rights” NGOs like Amnesty International, which absurdly and hysterically alleges that the Venezuelan government’s “cruelty knows no bounds,” nicely timed to justify US imperialism.
The US aggression on Venezuela is clearly escalating from funding of opposition elements, lawfare, and sanctions, plus occasional coup attempts and sabotage. Now direct military confrontation is possible, which could involve an attempt to assassinate the entire Bolivarian leadership.
The reported 4,500 US troops recently deployed to the Caribbean could never take Venezuela even if they were multiplied manyfold. But recent history suggests that the US often avoids a full US troop-heavy occupation. In Haiti, Libya, and Syria, the US instead opted for chaos rather than permitting insubordinate states to survive.
Resistance by Venezuela has stiffened to meet the challenge. Civilian-military unity has remained strong. This video clip shows artisanal fishing boats accompanying one of the mobilized Venezuelan naval ships. Shortly before the US destroyed the alleged “drug boat,” President Maduro had declared a “republic in arms.” And millions of civilian reservists have enlisted in the Bolivarian National Militia, a branch of the Venezuelan armed forces, while regular troops had been dispatched to the Colombia border.
Many regional leaders along with the regional ALBA organization have condemned the US military buildup. Further afield, Russia, Iran, and China all stated their support of Venezuela. And international grassroots support for Venezuela’s sovereignty has been overwhelmingly positive, condemning Yankee warfare.
For humanity, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution represents hope; for the US imperial project, which seeks to crush any alternative to its order, it is a threat. To force regime change in Caracas, Washington may attempt to eliminate the current leadership or pursue another tactic. The method matters less than the goal – either installing a compliant vassal or, failing that, leaving the country in chaos. The pressure will therefore continue, and likely intensify.
(Roger D. Harris is a founding member of the Venezuela Solidarity Network and on the secretariat of the US Peace Council. Joe Emersberger is co-author of “Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela.”)
WHEN THE COURT SAYS TRUMP IS ABOVE THE LAW, WHO PROTECTS THE ELEVEN DEAD ON THAT BOAT?
by Thom Hartmann
When the Court says Trump is above the law, who speaks for the eleven dead on that boat? Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable.
Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the Court had given him immunity from any consequence and the leaders of his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed not just to his cruelty, but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license to kill.
For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Congress’s approval. Franklin Roosevelt went to Congress for Lend-Lease before escalating aid to Britain, and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned heavily on the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify everything from Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia to killing Bin Laden. The principle has always been that the United States does not simply kill people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched, it may be abused, but it has been invoked.
What Donald Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented. He gave the order to kill eleven human beings with no congressional approval, no international authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.
This was simply murder on the high seas. And the world knows it. He did it in the full knowledge that six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have granted him immunity for crimes committed while in office, even international crimes. That ruling opened the door to precisely this sort of extrajudicial killing and stripped away one of the last guardrails protecting both our law and our global standing.
The official claim is that the boat carried members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But eleven people on a small vessel that couldn’t possibly travel as far as America doesn’t sound like a cartel’s drug shipment (typically there’s only one or two people manning such a boar); it sounds like desperate migrants fleeing a collapsing country.
That possibility makes the strike even more chilling when paired with a story Miles Taylor has told about Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller. Taylor recounts traveling with Miller and a Coast Guard admiral after a drug war event in Key West.
On that trip Stephen Miller asked the admiral if it would be legal to use a Predator drone to obliterate a boat full of migrants in international waters. Miller’s reasoning was that migrants weren’t covered by the Constitution, so what was to stop us from blowing them out of the water?
The admiral reportedly shot back that it would violate international law, that “you cannot kill unarmed civilians just because you want to.” At the time it was an alarming glimpse into the sadistic mind of a man who saw immigrants as less than human.
Now it looks like Trump has taken Miller’s reported hypothetical and turned it into policy. What was once an outrageous musing has become a bloody precedent.
This has profound legal and moral implications.
By attacking a vessel flying the flag of a sovereign state, Trump risked triggering a direct military confrontation. Venezuela could have fired back at American forces in the region. A firefight at sea can escalate quickly into a regional war, and Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro would have every incentive to turn to Russia and China for protection.
Leaders of both of those nations are eager to deepen their presence in our hemisphere, and this gives them an opening. It’s not inconceivable that Moscow or Beijing could send ships or aircraft to Venezuela in response.
That would put foreign military forces hostile to us within thirteen hundred miles of Miami. If shots were fired between American forces and Russian or Chinese deployments in the Caribbean, the slide toward a larger war would be real, very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 (except then we had a statesman as a president, instead of a corrupt buffoon). World War I began with a simple assassination that pitted one nation against another and then the sinking of the civilian boat the Lusitania; this is how great power conflicts can begin. Trump’s reckless strike doesn’t just risk Venezuelan lives. It risks American troops, regional stability, and, in the most ominous scenario, world peace itself. Meanwhile, at home, the timing is impossible to ignore. Authoritarians throughout history have turned to foreign crises to distract from domestic scandals.
Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia as Watergate began to close in. Reagan invaded Grenada days after hundreds of Marines were killed in Beirut. Trump has lived for decades under the shadow of allegations of sexual predation, including reports that Jeffrey Epstein recorded him with underage girls during the years he owned and ran Miss Teen USA.
If new evidence of that were to surface, Trump would need a distraction on a scale large enough to blot out the outrage. Creating a crisis with Venezuela, complete with martial language and threats of escalation while renaming the Department of Defense to Department of War, serves that purpose. It’s the oldest play in the authoritarian book: wag the dog. Except this time the stakes are far higher. This time we’re dealing with a president who’s been told by six corrupted members of the highest court in the land that he’s above the law.
When Miles Taylor first revealed Miller’s macabre question about bombing migrant boats, some dismissed it as idle cruelty. It now looks like a glimpse into the inner workings of Trump’s policy mind. In this worldview, immigrants are vermin, human rights are optional, Democrats are “extremists,” and lethal force is just another tool of politics. Combine that with the Supreme Court’s gift of immunity and you have a recipe for lawless violence on a scale America has never contemplated. The entire edifice of international law is designed to prevent precisely this sort of conduct.
Extrajudicial killings, violations of sovereignty, the targeting of civilians: these are the acts that international courts prosecute when they can, and that history condemns when courts cannot stop them. And now we’re learning that Trump did something similar in 2019 when he was last president. He authorized a SEAL Team strike against North Korea, where they killed three civilians in a boat who were simply out fishing. If America embraces this new Putin-like assertion of America’s power to bomb anybody, anywhere, on the whim of the president, we’ll have abandoned any claim to moral leadership.
Worse, we will have normalized the authoritarian logic that anyone the president labels an enemy can be eliminated without trial, without evidence, without process. We’ll have handed Xi a rationale to attack Taiwan; all he has to do is claim that a non-governmental gang within that nation is importing drugs into China (or something similar). The international reaction has already been severe. America’s allies are horrified, our adversaries have been emboldened, and human rights groups are openly appalled.
But the real test is here at home. Do we still believe in the principle, famously cited by our second President John Adams, that America is a nation of laws and not of men? Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?
Keep in mind, the same Stephen Miller — who reportedly wanted to blow up boats of immigrants to kill more brown people — just in the past week claimed that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organization.”
The doctrine of immunity means there is no legal backstop. The only remaining check is political will. And Trump’s fascist toadies are all in on more extrajudicial killings.
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete “Kegger” Hegseth said: “We’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike.”
Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio echoed the sentiment, saying during a speech in Mexico City yesterday that similar strikes “will happen again.”
This is why Democrats, independents, and every American who values the rule of law must call this out for what it is: an atrocity against eleven people, an assault on international norms, and a direct threat to American democracy.
Trump has shown us exactly how far he’s willing to go. He’s willing to risk a war in our hemisphere. He’s willing to put our troops in danger. He’s willing to risk drawing Putin and Xi into a confrontation with us that could spiral out of control. He’s willing to destroy lives to protect himself. And he’s doing it because six Republicans on the Supreme Court told him he could.
If Congress doesn’t act now to confront and contain this lawless behavior, if we don’t restore accountability to the presidency, then we’ll have surrendered not just our moral authority but our future. The question is not whether Trump wants a distraction from his scandals; of course he does. The question is whether we’re willing to let Trump and his fascist toadies drag America and the world into catastrophe to get it.
This isn’t just about a boat off Venezuela. It’s about whether America will allow a president, blessed by the Court, to kill without evidence, without process, without even the pretense of law.
Eleven dead migrants are the proof of what immunity means in practice: impunity. If Trump can slaughter refugees today, what stops him from targeting dissidents, protesters, even political opponents tomorrow?
The answer, unless Congress and the people act, is nothing. And “nothing” is what those justices have left to protect us, our laws, and our humanity.
(hartmannreport.com/via Betsy Cawn)
SECRETARY OF WAR
by Caitlin Johnstone
He hung up a sign that said Secretary of War,
snapped a picture for the socials,
shut the door,
took a swig of Jameson straight from the bottle,
then sat down and fondled the revolver in his desk drawer
like a little boy playing with his penis.
Visions of cruise missiles danced through his head,
aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines
and tiny middle eastern bodies blown to bits by glorious inventory.
Mushroom clouds flashed in his eyes
as he caressed the trigger with an index finger.
“They call me the Secretary of War,” he said.
“They call me the Secretary of War.”
He did not feel the robins in his chest
or hear the red-winged blackbirds trilling in his hair.
The electricity of the flesh was a stranger to him.
Exuberance was a deadbeat dad who never called.
Outside the Pentagon walls a cicada roared unnoticed
and the grass sang ancient hymns to the sun god.
People bustled in and bustled out,
their minds buzzing with Palantir porn,
their lips casting spells of Raytheon and ruin.
Under the rubble of a far away building
a child reached out a hand in the darkness.
Her cries were silenced by gulps of whiskey
in the office of the Secretary of War.
WHAT IS THE BIGGER THREAT TO FREE SPEECH, EUROPE, OR DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA?
Thoughts after a challenging discussion with Freddie Sayers of Britain’s Unherd
by Matt Taibbi
On Tuesday morning, a day after Father Ted writer and comedian Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow airport for three tweets deemed transphobic, I spoke with Freddie Sayers of the U.K.-based Unherd, in an interview released yesterday. For the unfamiliar, Unherd has been a stalwart, often lonely defender of free expression in a post-Brexit era that saw significant shifts in British attitudes. Freddie’s site responded to the Linehan story in characteristic fashion: “The Shameful Arrest of Graham Linehan.”
In the last year, Unherd has become more pessimistic about unfettered free speech. There’s been backlash to criticism from America about British regulation, particularly as expressed by Elon Musk and his supporters on X/Twitter. Through voices like Richard Hanania and the always-interesting Malcolm Kyeyune, Unherd has devoted a lot of space to decrying Musk’s actions with DOGE, and what it sees as a too-unchecked flow of falsehoods on X.
I have my own documented issues with Musk and often roll eyes at his leap-before-you-look tweets, though many of the supposedly “terrible“ things he’s said just strike me as funny (e.g. a picture of Bill Gates under the tweet, “in case u need to lose a boner fast“). As noted in the friendly interview above, when asked to choose between a British government that arrests citizens for tweets and has an Online Safety Act that empowers the state with broad control over Internet content, I have to side with Musk.
He certainly has reasons to be upset with Britain and the EU, which are both threatening crippling penalties for refusing to obey content dictates. As Paul Thacker and I also reported last year, the Labour-aligned Center for Countering Digital Hate listed “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top organizational goal in leaked documents.
When Freddie referred to Musk’s Twitter as a “cesspit,” I had a flashback. It’s forgotten, but the digital censorship era began with two electoral results. First after Brexit in June 2016, then after Donald Trump’s election in November that same year, it became instant conventional wisdom that “disinformation” on social media was responsible. When Trump was elected, Twitter — not Elon Musk’s Twitter but Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, proto-BlueSky Twitter — was deemed a “cesspool for disinformation“ by the New York Times. Public panic reached such a pitch that within a year Twitter, Facebook, and Google were dragged to the Hill and forced under the threat of increased regulation to come up with plans to combat “discord” and disinformation, birthing public-private censorship.
Twitter and Facebook, previously praised as a lubricant for aiding Barack Obama’s victories (“The First Social Media President!” the Seattle Times gushed), were now regularly denounced as “cesspools“ of “fake news,” bigotry, and anti-Semitism. The pattern would repeat across multiple issues (Covid, J6, Ukraine, Gaza), inspiring more draconian responses, from Trump’s social media ban to suppression of content promoting “vaccine hesitancy.” In America heavy-handed digital measures helped re-elect Trump. In Europe, the specter of Brexit, Trump, Viktor Orban, and other movements led to full-service censorship laws like the Digital Services Act.
It’s a chicken-egg question. Did a dangerous xenophobic nationalism necessitate state intervention, or did an authoritarian political establishment inspire the nationalist revolt? The U.S. under Trump and J.D. Vance since last year’s election formally accused Europe and Britain of undermining democracy, while our ex-Atlantic partners accuse us of stirring up nationalist violence, with Musk becoming a villain of almost Hitlerian sweep in Britain. Who’s right? Freddie posed some of these worries in an earlier talk with Claire Lehman of Australia’s Quillette, but my American answer is that Europe started it:
I decided to speak at the “Rescue the Republic” MAHA event last fall, and center the address on the uniqueness of the American speech tradition and why it needed protecting, mainly because of material found in the Twitter Files.
If you’ve read Racket’s timeline on the subject, you know American firms like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter were first asked to aceept “voluntary“ content monitoring by European authorities in mid-2016, after terror attacks in Paris and Brussels. We saw in Twitter’s Files that the company was sufficiently concerned about these developments to hire “counterspeech” experts to lobby lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic on the idea that more and better speech, not censorship, was the right policy answer.
In Europe, they failed. The 2017 passage of Germany’s NetzDG and the 2018 addition of Europe’s Code of Practice on Disinformation in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal enmeshed American companies early on in a series of agreements that forced them to expend significant resources to prove compliance by broadening content moderation programs.
There have repeated efforts to pass American laws to match Europe’s, an example being the 2020 “COVID–19 Disinformation Research and Reporting Act of 2020.” New York Times reporter Cecelia Kang went on CBS to complain that our “thorniest” problem was “we have in our law… the First Amendment,” and “have to abide by really our constitutional limits,” while the “United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, Australia [and] India” could be more proactive about Covid “misinformation.” That law failed. The Biden administration’s 2022 effort to institute a “Disinformation Governance Board“ via the authority of the Department of Homeland Security also failed, following a backlash.
We saw in Twitter Files that during this time, frustrated American and European officials were discussing the possibility of the U.S. either independently adopting European-style speech concepts, or folding the U.S. into EU laws like the Digital Services Act. One EU parliamentary report written after Joe Biden’s election and discussed internally at Twitter was titled, “Harnessing the new momentum in transatlantic relations: Potential areas for common action during the Biden presidency.” It suggested the U.S. could seek “inspiration from the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation” and enforce speech rules through the authority of the Federal Trade Commission, bypassing Congress.
This dovetailed with other material, like an Aspen Institute proposal for funding a “capacity-building” bureaucracy for “misinformation countermeasures” through “FTC fines.” The Institute also pushed an international “cross-platform database” of speech offenders. A report by Twitter’s lobbying firm after January 6th even described how “exasperated” members of Congress on the Hill were, suggesting the U.S. needed to “follow in the footsteps of Europe.” Another summary by a Twitter political advisory firm described hearing officials and executives “bemoaning of the limitations placed on the government as a result of the First Amendment.”
Seeing John Kerry last fall talk to the WEF about the difficulty the First Amendment posed in “hammering [disinformation] out of existence” heightened worries. The one thing everyone in the “anti-disinformation” universe seemed to agree on is that the First Amendment was a unique pain in the ass of global enforcement.
There was nothing in Trump’s history to suggest he would be any kind of free speech champion, but by last summer the Democrats’ repeated efforts to institute European-style speech codes made future prospects under Kamala Harris look not so hot. During the Harris run Democrats aligned with a French government that arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, and accepted campaign assistance from the Labour Party of Starmer as the latter was promising to accelerate speech enforcement and even deploy “preventive action“ in the mold of Minority Report.
So long as First Amendment survived as a turd in the international censorship punchbowl, the worst possible outcome was two bad speech regimes, which would always be better than one big, globally integrated one. That was my thinking heading into last year’s “Rescue the Republic” event, anyway.
After the election there were a few positives (the dismantling of the Global Engagement Center, bringing victims of censorship like Jay Bhattacharya into senior positions, appearing to support Meta/X/Google etc in efforts to resist foreign speech codes) but also clear bad signs (Marco Rubio using AI to scan social media of legal visitors, having the head of X in a high quasi-state position, etc). When J.D. Vance gave a speech in Munich denouncing Europe’s move toward arrests for speech and even overturned elections, it was notable that U.S. media figures as well as Democratic Party officials went on air to declare themselves shocked, shocked by objections to European laws. In the interview below, Katie Couric — co-chair of the Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder that wrote a report suggesting reforms that would “align” with the DSA — interviewed former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, about the collapse of the Transatlantic Partnership.
What’s happened since has been predictable. The Trump administration’s most troubling speech decisions have been in service of a nationalist policy, while Britain and Europe have continued using speech laws to crack down on nationalism.
When Turkish Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was detained on March 25th, press and academia in America plunged into a panic. This was a doctoral student on a legal visa, whose only apparent offense was authorship of an editorial in Tufts Daily demanding the school “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.” A government that will detain a legal resident for a tepid editorial like Öztürk’s probably isn’t bothered by the the idea of arrests for speech in general, which is why the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) was right to sue and force the courts to decide if immigration law trumps the First Amendment.
Still, the American media response was remarkable. The surveillance footage showing Öztürk’s arrest went viral, leading to commentary that used words like “kidnap“ or “abduct“ or “snatched“ to describe her detention, and that of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. Meanwhile, the Times UK on April 4th came out with a story headlined, “Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages.” The paper of record in Britain wrote:
Custody data obtained by The Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988…
The paper showed the number of speech arrests more than doubled annually since 2017. American and British commentators have since downplayed the numbers.
My own former Rolling Stone in its story about Linehan worried more about the “backlash” to European speech laws than it did about Linehan, who was denounced as a reactionary. “Not the only middle-aged celebrity to pivot to transphobia,” quipped the mag. They also noted that “fewer than 10 percent” of England’s 30 daily arrests resulted in sentencing, and some of those sentenced, the erstwhile countercultural magazine pointed out, included “individuals who incited racial hatred on social media during the U.K.’s anti-immigrant riots last summer,” which was “violence that [Elon] Musk helped to fuel.”
The BBC similarly wondered what Musk’s “curious fixation” was with Britain, noting that one of the 30-odd daily arrests in England ended in “a three-month jail sentence for a person who posted a meme along with the caption ‘let’s [expletive] riot’” last year. British state media could equally have cited a case of 40-year-old David Wootton, convicted for going to a Halloween party dressed as suicide bomber Salman Abedi, or the Derbyshire student who called someone a “Polish twat,” or the Bedfordshire resident arrested for saying being “pansexual” was “not a thing,” or dozens of other preposterous cases. There haven’t been releases of scary surveillance video of “kidnapped” Halloween partiers, which makes one wonder why the American press is willing to embrace Khalil as a speech martyr but not Julian Assange or Linehan or the retired German army sergeant arrested for calling Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck a Schwachkopf, which apparently translates as “dunderhead” or “moron.” In the U.K., these dumb arrests are inevitable because the law under which Linehan was detained, for instance, is based on whether or not the complainant felt “alarm” or “abuse.” Like many American campus speech codes, it’s a harm standard where injury doesn’t have to be proven, just asserted. Instituting a criminal law in the U.S. using that concept would be a radical step for us, but less so in Europe, which has been moving in that direction for a while.
Given the pattern of tightening enforcement following each controversial election, a guess is Europe’s present is America’s ghost of Christmas future. That doesn’t mean allowing Trump to ride roughshod over the Constitution, but there’s reason to see conflict between the former allies as a positive. So long as they’re not uniting to sideline the “thorny” First Amendment, we’ll remain a step removed from the worst-case scenario, which looked pretty possible if not likely a year ago. Or are we overhyping the dystopian character of Europe’s new laws? Comments from Racket’s European readers are welcome. In the meantime, thanks to Freddie and Unherd, and let’s hope our two countries are not locked together in a downward spiral.
A few thoughts on the Great Redwood Trail: it’s a boondoggle, all tangled up in what seems to be a typical California public project, heavy on the administration, planning, permits and process and not getting much done for a lot of time and money wasted. It’s too much like the high speed rail project which would not be hard to build somewhere else other than California. The engineering and construction is not complicated, but it’s to the advantage of a certain group of politicians, planners and paper pushers to make it take as long a possible. Once it’s built you are out of a job.
However, I still think The Great Redwood Trail is a good idea. As a person who used to ride bicycles all over the place, wherever a safe route could be found, and enjoyed exploring the world without much baggage, the potential to navigate from Sausalito to Arcata on a bicycle is intriguing. Particularly the part from Dos Rios down the Eel River canyon.
In the southern state of Georgia, where a hundred years ago there were rail lines all over the place, to every little town, and then many of them abandoned as highways and corporate consolidation bankrupted the little short lines, some of these old rail routes are now bicycle paths. People who know about this come from all over the country to make these bicycle trips. Where I lived many years ago in Cedartown now has a paved bike lane on an old rail line all the way to Atlanta. It’s maybe sixty miles. These various old rail now bike lanes intersect and groups of people can travel much of the state on bicycles, stopping in the small towns, staying in the old hotels, eating in the little restaurants. It is a special kind of tourist industry. We could do this up here if the Great Redwood Trail project wasn’t so convoluted and seemingly corrupt, benefitting a bunch of people invested in making it take forever. It should be easy. If ever built, it would certainly be a great trail, maybe one of the best in the world.
Some of the opposition to the GRT would disappear if they agreed to leave the railroad tracks in place as far north as Willits.
Maybe, but I think any public project emphasis for this area should focus on restoring rail service to, as you say, Willits. And I agree with Mr. Chichester that a rails to trail project, in theory, would be a good thing. But as long as the GRT is led by the empty suit from Healdsburg and his fellow opportunists of the Democrat type — Republicans aren’t interested in any exercise beyond climbing in and out of their F-150’s — the GRT will continue as a massive scam.
THE BAILEY BRIDGE
Let us try to get the story straight here. The bridge did not exactly fail, “after the heavy rains washed out the old 1930s bridge”.
Caltrans insisted on running a culvert from the storm drain near the ice cream shop on Hwy 128 down Lambert Lane dumping near the foundation of the original bridge.
Bill Holcomb, who was in charge of our roads at that time, wrote an official letter to Caltrans that informed them that this error in official plumbing would eventually wash out the bridge. Bill’s official letter was ignored.
Happy weekend, everyone, ✌️🌷
Craig, I remember when you said you wanted to get the hell out of here and now you’re talking about coming back. That back-and-forth is part of the struggle, and I don’t say that to criticize you, but to point to how hard stability really is in these situations.
SSI is federal. They didn’t cut you off for moving states, but because they never got updated info on your address and living situation. You can fix this by going into a Social Security office in D.C. with ID and a letter from the shelter confirming you live there.
California EBT (CalFresh) doesn’t transfer. When you left, that case closed. In D.C. you’d apply there; if you return here, you’d reapply in California.
The housing voucher, once it expired, was gone. You’d need to get back on a waitlist, either there or here.
It feels like politics or punishment, but really it’s paperwork and consistency. Maybe with the right help, if you came back, I’d do what I could to support you in making it work this time.
mm💕
Good for you, Mazie, very practical, realistic feedback for Craig, who is clearly in kind of a jam now. And good of you to offer him some help if he comes back here.
Thanks Chuck,
I also offered him help when he was still here.
mm💕
Headbanger….🤘🤪💕
Doug, thank you for writing this. What you saw is the reality so many people face a man in crisis, hurting himself in public.
It has become so accepted and normal that nobody even knows what to do in these situations, or who to call.
Even if one knew what to do or who to call there is very real possibility that no one shows up. Or whoever does show up does not respond effectively or appropriately and the person is either left there or taken to jail.
mm💕
Thanks. So far as I know there’s no-one to call except 9-1-1, but as you allude, they’d most likely send a cop, and there’s nothing a policeman would do that wouldn’t make matters worse.
Doug, 🍁🍃😏
You are located in Seattle, right? this is what I found for your area so you do call 911 but they should send a Crisis team that would not involve police, however, they always make it sound great in print.
I lived in Seattle when very young my dad worked at Boeing. ✈️
https://www.seattle.gov/care/community-crisis-responders
mm💕
Community Crisis Responders is a good idea, and I don’t want to piss all over it, but at that page there’s this terrifying bit:
So, they send a couple of people to make things better, and another couple of people to make things worse.
Doug, 🍃🤘
Yes I read that. It is for protection of the mental health workers or so they claim. I would like to think that when you have a dual response like that, we have it here, supposedly, lol, keeps officers from reactionary measures unless absolutely necessitated.
mm💕
I would also like to think that. (:
Doug,
🙃✌️💕
mm💕
Craig,
Suggest you step over the line, go over to the White House, in person, and knock on the door.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Mustache.
Mustache who?
I mustache you a question!
RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE
How are low wage workers any different from slaves? They have TVs and phones is all. It’s an often quoted statistic about some high percentage of Americans not having $500 bucks for an unforseen emergency, so it’s evident that many people have no savings, just like slaves. A large percentage of these people are functionally illiterate like slaves. All these people end up with at the end of the month is to cover the costs of housing and eating, with a little left for TV and phone. Slave owners have to provide housing and food or their slaves will die too often. The slaves had religion too, so there’s that. But hey, MAGA!
Related story: A friend in his mid 70s has a reverse mortgage on the house he’s owned for 40 years. It’s looking like he’s going to lose it because he’s going to lose his insurance because of the fire danger rating of his area. Any coverage he could possibly get will be unaffordable for him.
“Drug boat”
Trump said specifically, “…on my orders” They say it was in international waters. A look at this map shows that there are no international waters inside 200 miles from the coast of Venezuela: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Map_of_the_Territorial_Waters_in_the_Caribbean.png
Nobody goes that far offshore in a boat like that. Boats of that size anywhere in the world do not normally fly the flag of their country of origin. Also, if you look at the part of the video that shows the boat from above, and count the 11 lumps that look most like people, you will be hard pressed to find another 11 lumps total which are probably the belongings of the people aboard. It is plainly not a drug boat. The entire story is a pack of lies.
The current development of the GRT between Norgard Rd and Plant St:
https://youtu.be/kP5n6bOTwK0?si=qoJfzjtmSPqkmRxb
A couple of nearby homeless camps (small scaled). One clearly evident in video, the other in trees adjacent to elevated freeway.
Damn Mike lol…🙃🧐😏😂 you outed the peeps.
mm 💕
I ran into 3 homeless guys filming there when there was a city event there at the river…..one of them gave an on film summary of the GRT! That area is Sheriff turf, the river spot looked at for a park city property where upd controls. There were alot of camp debris on the tracks (first scene in my film short) so im thinking there’s a “leave alone” Sheriff policy in that track/trail area. Whereas the stretch north of Norgard was periodically cleared of large encampments by UPD. (They cleared out several visible tents there before starting on GRT work there.)
Mike,
Thanks for not taking offense to my comment. I was just trying to have some fun… 🤣… amongst the realities of existence. And yes, I remember when you posted that I did watch the video.
mm💕
LOL I will chastise myself if they’re booted out. The one by the freeway was cleared out before when Gaska was manager of that area for the owner and he had a deputy with him when doing so. The clothes and LG appliance (propane heater??) on the tracks is an easy cleanup. Not sure what the camp situation is under the overpass….I assume that’s Cal Trans turf.
A few years back there was a large encampment by the river (beyond the end of Norgard) which got cleared out. Then they cut down trees. Etc to make it impossible to walk into the affected areas. The area is owned by the city but is south of city limits.
Mike,
Let me get this straight, the city cleaned up the encampment and then cut the trees down to keep homeless people from coming back & living there?
Here is an article in Sacramento Bee that is about a lawsuit not providing appropriate shelter when people are living outside.
https://amp.sacbee.com/news/local/homeless/article311609602.html
It’s a no win situation until it is understood and acted upon that we provide treatment, housing and support. That is the fact, and there is no way around it and until that is addressed. In the mean time we will continue to suffer.
mm💕
sorry, I fumbled my words a bit at the end. I was using voice to text…💕
mm💕
All along that stretch of river going south from the Norgard spot just beyond the end of the street there was heavy infrastructure work…like steps and cleared areas and many camps which city workers told me left batteries. Etc by the river. And at the nearby water plant there were high e coli readings in the river, one worker told me. (A couple were on carts a few years back when I was out for a walk…i dont know much now with heart attack shortening walks for last 4 years)
There seems to be a consistent effort in ukiah to prevent or chase away camping along the river to prevent contamination. From some postings in comments here it seems maybe camping is not confronted all that much at riverside park.
Mike, 🍃⭐️
Absolutely waterways need to be safe, but literally the only way to make that happen is to provide actual shelter. Every time they displace people they just move farther up or down the river, never solving any of the issues that create these conditions.
mm💕
mm💕
Google AI itemized strategies to get the stock of shelter needed to get us all “inside”:
“Key Strategies and Initiatives
Zoning and Permitting Reform:
Legalize More Housing Types: Cities are encouraged to legalize more apartment units, accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and multi-family housing.
Streamline Approvals: Expediting permitting processes and making them more predictable helps reduce costs and get homes built faster.
Reduce Parking Requirements: Easing or waiving parking minimums can lower construction costs for new developments.
Financial and Economic Tools:
Developer Incentives: Offering tax credits and other financial incentives encourages developers to build more affordable housing.
Reducing Fees: Waiving or subsidizing impact fees and other development-related taxes can significantly lower construction costs for affordable projects.
Federal Funding and Programs: Expanding federal investments in programs run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) helps provide resources for affordable housing development.
Housing Innovation Fund: Proposals include a dedicated fund to support innovative construction methods and developers.
Innovative Construction and Land Use:
Modular and Manufactured Housing: Utilizing modular construction can lower costs, while updates to the HUD Code aim to enable more cost-saving manufactured homes, including duplexes and quadplexes.
Land Banking: Public entities can use land-banking programs to acquire land for future affordable housing development.
Repurposing Federal Land: A proposal aims to make federal lands available for affordable housing projects.
Community-Based Solutions:
Community Land Trusts: These local trusts allow communities to own land to create long-term affordable housing.
Preservation and New Development: Efforts include preserving existing affordable housing and creating new housing for lower- and moderate-income households. “
GRT
I like the man from Healdsburg.
DO NOT PUT PEDESTRIANS, AND BICYCLES IN THE SAME LANE, for obvious reasons (am I the only one who can 👀 that?)❗