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DRY WEATHER with seasonably average temperatures today, before a progressive trough bring a chance of showers and a slight chance of thunderstorms late Saturday night through Sunday morning. Drying and warming trend returns on Monday and continue through mid next week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 52F this Saturday morning on the coast. Morning clouds then clearing like usual is all I have today. It has been lovely weather lately in general.
RICHARD "RICK" ERNEST RUDDICK
Richard Ernest Ruddick, known to friends and family as "Rick," passed away peacefully after a battle with Pancreatic Cancer.
Rick was born in Ukiah, California, and attended Ukiah schools. He was an honor roll student through Jr. High. After graduation from High School, he attended Jr. College and then Cal-Poly, San Luis Obispo. His major was Ag Business. Rick served on a California Farm Bureau State Committee and served as a board member and Vice President of the Mendocino Co. Farm Bureau.
He was an advisor of the Chico State Stock Dog Assoc. He became an accomplished trainer of stock dogs and proud of his Awards. Rick farmed for 20 years and proved to be an excellent farmer. He then worked for the Pinoleville Pomo Nation Tribe for 20 years off and on. He had a deep respect and caring for the Pomo culture, the beliefs and the Tribe who became family to him.
Rick could take a piece of bare land and transform it into a beautiful garden. He inherited his farming traits from his ancestors. Rick had a quick sense of humor, he was a great story teller-adding embellishments that made the story even better, he was an avid reader, he was intelligent and he felt at peace with being outdoors. His favorite go to place for serenity was the Lost Coast. Rick had a kind heart. He was loved. He lived life on his terms. Rick joined his grandparents before him and his beloved sister, Erin. He is survived by his parents, Dick and Sharon; his children, Ryan and Melissa; his grandchildren, Evan, Dylan, Harper and Jack; his brother, Randy and sister-in-law Carol and his nieces, Samantha and Rachel. Services will be private.
PERCY KENNETH GOOD IRON JR.
Percy Kenneth Good Iron, Jr. entered the Spirit World on September 2, 2025. Percy was born on April 24, 1959 in Oakland, CA. He was preceded in dead by his parents, Percy Kenneth Good Iron, Sr. and Katherine Young Bear Good Iron. Throughout his life, Percy was grounded and guided by his traditional Lakota teachings. He was a champion Fancy dancer, hand-drum singer, grass dancer and Sun Dancer. He spent much of his life in the bay area, Standing Rock Reservation and Redwood Valley. Percy always called himself a “wandering star” because he was never in one place too long! He was a very social person enjoying time visiting friends and relatives. He loved spending time at the Coast, hiking and playing dominos. Percy was most at peace when he was outdoors in nature.
Percy was a brother, father, grandfather, uncle and friend. He is survived by his loving daughter, Leslie Rose Good Iron, grandchildren-Anthony Nevarez Jr. and Lilianna Torres, and great-grand-daughter, Ellianna Good Iron Sanchez. He was loved by many including his brothers, Trevor Good; Keith Good Iron; Carlos Good Iron, Sam White Temple, Loren White Temple and sisters, Kathleen Good Iron, Rosa White Temple, Mary Stead White Temple, Althea White Temple, Alicia Keoke and Melissa White Temple. He is survived by numerous nieces, nephews and cousins in Standing Rock. Also, Percy is survived by his adopted Apache family, Clancey Gibson and family. Those who knew Percy will remember his quick smile, generosity of spirit and loving ways. Percy will be forever missed as a beloved Dad, grandfather, brother, uncle and friend. We will hold you, Percy, close within our hearts, and there you shall remain, to walk with us throughout our lives, until we meet again. Rest in power, dear Percy.
DEFAULT NOTICE ISSUED AS STORMWATER CONTAMINATION BATTLE WITH FORT BRAGG ESCALATES
Fort Bragg's failure to respond to allegations by the mill site owners adds a new twist in $10–50 million lawsuit over allegedly toxic stormwater and dioxin contamination.
by Elise Cox
A court clerk on Tuesday entered a default notice in response to a request by the Sierra Northern Railway and Mendocino Railway in a case they filed against the city of Fort Bragg.
The railways sued the city in federal court in August 2024 over ongoing contamination of Mill Pond 8, located on the site of the former Georgia-Pacific lumber mill, by hazardous substances including dioxins and furans.
According to the railways, the city discharged untreated, hazardous stormwater onto their private property for years, effectively transforming the eight-acre pond into an unlicensed toxic waste dump.
The companies are seeking between $10 million and $50 million for investigation, remediation and cleanup.
The judgment comes amid a long pause in litigation between the city and the railways. The lawsuits date back more than four years, when the Mendocino Railway and Georgia-Pacific first agreed to “a friendly eminent domain” transaction that transferred 292 acres of the mill site owned by Georgia-Pacific to the railway. The lumber company had previously sold 77 acres to the railway. In addition to receiving $1.2 million from Mendocino Railway, Georgia-Pacific also received substantial tax benefits from the eminent domain transaction.
Before the transaction could be ratified in court, however, Fort Bragg filed a lawsuit. The city sought a ruling on a single question: could Mendocino Railway, which operates the Skunk Train, be considered a public utility? The city also asked a judge to require the railway to comply with municipal ordinances and regulations.
The California Coastal Commission joined the city’s case on Oct. 27, 2022. Mendocino Railway responded by suing the city and the commission in federal court, requesting an injunction to prevent interference in its operations. A federal judge dismissed that lawsuit, and a federal appeals court upheld the dismissal on Aug. 29, 2024. The decision is on appeal to the Supreme Court.
On Nov. 25, 2024, following the election of two new councilmembers — Scott Hockett and Marcia Rafanan — the city and the railway jointly asked for a 90-day stay in litigation to explore settlement terms. The stay has since been repeatedly extended while the two sides negotiate a master development agreement.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit over the allegedly toxic stormwater has continued. The railways filed their first complaint in August 2024, then filed amended complaints in November and December. Fort Bragg responded in February 2025, arguing that the railways had no cause of action under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. The city said the claim was not tied to actual remedial action and that the railways themselves were potentially responsible parties, further disqualifying their claim.
Because the railways had already amended their pleadings twice, the city argued that further amendments would be “futile.”
But the railways went ahead and filed a third amended complaint on Aug. 4, 2025. When the city did not respond, the railways filed a motion for default judgment, which was entered into the record on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, city officials joined the public and the Coastal Commission on a mill site tour offered by the railways to coincide with the commission’s September meeting, being held this week in Fort Bragg. A Mendo Local editor informed City Manager Isaac Whippy of the default during the tour. We will add the city’s statement when it is available.
Robert Pinoli, president and CEO of Mendocino Railway, acknowledged the ongoing cooperative efforts between the city and the railways in an interview with Mendo Local during the tour, but he says the railways believe the city should pay. “The fact of the matter is that there continues to be a discharge of stormwater into the very ponds and area that people want remediated,” he said. “It’s one thing to say, ‘OK, landowner, go remediate the property,’ but if the very next day more pollutants are coming out, then the remediation is for nothing.”
(mendolocal.news)
NORTH COAST WINE GRAPE GROWERS SEEK MORE BUYERS as weather pauses picking
by Jeff Quackenbush
The North Coast wine industry is navigating a season marked by unpredictable weather, shifting market dynamics and ongoing challenges in both grape and bulk-wine sales.
Christian Klier, North Coast grape broker for Novato-based Turrentine Brokerage, said this season’s march through harvest was slowed by cooler weather and drizzle the second week of September. Cool weather in June and July delayed the start of picking the first grapes until the arrival of hot August days. This has led to a reversal of typical ripening patterns, with white grapes coming into wineries before most red grapes and southern North Coast fruit coming in before northern areas of the appellation.
“I was just on the phone with a major winery, and they are shutting down (harvest) for the rest of the week. Pick back up next week,” Klier said Thursday.
Grapes in Lake and Mendocino counties have been ripening ahead of Napa and Sonoma for the second year in a row — a dynamic that has not favored Lake and Mendocino growers, he said.
“Any type of market activity has been really focused on Napa and Sonoma, because wineries have been very used to Napa and Sonoma (grapes) becoming ripe first, and then looking to Lake in Mendocino after that,” Klier said.
On top of that, a significant amount of fruit — and more than last season — remains without a purchase contract, especially in Lake and Mendocino. Earlier this season, Klier told the Journal that the firm estimated 6,000 to 8,000 tons of North Coast grapes weren’t harvested last year.
“Double the tons (are) uncontracted this year in Napa cabernet than I had at the same time last year,” Klier said.
For vineyards where the fruit doesn’t yet have a home, growers are taking the opportunity to remove underperforming vines — newly planted vines take at least three years to mature — as well as further putting off or foregoing significant farming work, a tactic called “mothballing.”
“We are recommending to growers who have been suffering … if you don’t have a contract for your grapes, it’s a pretty big gamble right now to spend all the money on the whole year of farming those grapes with no real prospects of selling that fruit. So older vineyards and vineyards that have been hard to ripen, even in up markets two or three years ago, we’re recommending to those growers that they pull their grapes out,” Klier said. “We’ve got to somehow find balance between demand and supply, and right now we’ve got more supply than we have demand.”
Glenn Proctor, a partner at San Rafael-based global wine and grape brokerage Ciatti Co., expects the size of the 2025 wine grape crop to be smaller than average in the North Coast and statewide, more based on market conditions that are leading to vine removals and mothballed vineyards.
Proctor said that while there is some activity in the bulk-wine market — where vintners sell excess wine made from grapes purchased under contract but not needed — bulk pricing per gallon is barely at break-even.
“It’s probably paying to get the grapes off the vine, and the small return past that,” Proctor said. “But the activity’s limited, meaning it’s one buyer, maybe two. But it’s not like there’s real activity.”
Demand for North Coast wine grape varieties in California’s North Coast have reversed this season, according to the brokers.
“Last year, when we could sell Chardonnay pretty much till the last berry was picked, we could not move any Cabernet. Last year, demand for Cabernet outside of Napa was non existent — no buyers. That is flip-flopped this year. So we’ve actually seen more sales in the North Coast on Cabernet than we have in Chardonnay,” Klier said. “This year they didn’t buy any Chardonnay, and now they’re trying to make up differences because they didn’t buy any Cabernet last year.”
It’s too early to tell, he said, whether this is a trend in which vintners are buying what they need for each variety every other year.
Proctor noted a sluggish market for white grapes.
“There’s still some Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc out there available, looking for a home. And we’re really not seeing, at least to this moment, a buyer that’s, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll come in and buy it all up for this price.’ It’s a little harder to just to find that white (grape) buyer that’ll clean up some of the fruit that’s still left out there, which is a little different than last year.”
These shifts, the brokers say, reflect a market where buyers are “only going to buy what they need,” as Proctor put it. Overall demand remains well below typical levels for the region.
This season so far has seen only one significant wildfire, which can lead to concerns about smoke damage to grapes on the vine at the time. The Pickett Fire erupted Aug. 21 and burned 6,819 acres of Napa County northeast of Calistoga. County officials received estimates of smoke damage totaling $65 million. That would be about 6% of the billion-dollar value of Napa County grapes crushed last year, according to the annual state crush report.
The 2020 season, with its multiple major North Coast wildfires, saw tonnage crushed at wineries plummet by about one-third in Sonoma County and nearly half in Napa County, with some growers and vintners opting not to pick fruit and some rejections of fruit.
This year, the brokers are hearing that some vintners that had rejected potentially damaged fruit aren’t going out to look for other supply.
What vintners are looking for in deciding how much fruit to buy this season, which will come to market in bottles for white wines in one to two years and for reds in three or more years for higher-end wines, is whether consumers have returned to buying wine.
“We thought 2025 is going to be tough, and we kind of don’t expect, really, any market improvements … until we got to 2026. I think we’re still hoping for that, but it is a little concerning,” Proctor said. I have talked to a couple of larger wineries that are saying, ‘Hey, we think we’re getting near the bottom.’ But we’ve heard that before. We do feel that the only lever that we can turn is supply.”
It could be that the decline in wine sales may be nearing a bottom, according to Jon Moramarco, principal of BW166 and editor of the Gomberg Fredrikson Report.
“It’s looking like we’ve hit, the data would say, bottom over the last six to nine months,” Moramarco said, pointing to federal data on taxes paid for domestic and imported wine. “I’m a little hesitant to say that definitively, because we’re still seeing declines in under $11 (a bottle) wine. So I don’t know if we could say definitively that this is bottom, but it’s looking like we’re getting closer to that.”
He noted that higher-priced wines are more stable but still not yet growing.
“Everybody wants me to just say we’ve turned a corner,” Moramarco said. “I can’t say that right now.”
(The Press Democrat)
FAIR PHOTOS
NEW MICROENTERPRISE TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAM
The County of Mendocino (County) is pleased to announce the launch of its Microenterprise Technical Assistance Program as part of the County’s continued effort to support local businesses, assist small businesses with staying competitive in the marketplace, and encourage locally led economic growth.
Eligible businesses will receive technical assistance to overcome key barriers to success—particularly those related to government regulations, permits, licensing, and other areas where small business operations intersect with government procedures. Through tailored one-on-one assistance, the County aims to streamline business interactions with local and state agencies, enabling entrepreneurs to focus on growth and innovation.
How to Enroll in the Technical Assistance Program
Implementation of the Microenterprise Technical Assistance Program begins on September 9th, 2025. Services are coordinated through the County’s Economic Development Division. Microenterprises and entrepreneurs interested in receiving technical assistance can contact the Economic Development Division at (707)463-4441 or email [email protected] to review eligibility and services requested.
About the CDBG Program
The Community Development Block Grant Program is a federally funded initiative administered through the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), designed to support community development activities that benefit low- and moderate-income residents.
Mendocino County continues to pursue opportunities to invest in economic development, please visit the Economic Development Division webpage to learn more.
HAPPY NATIONAL POLICE WOMAN DAY: from the Corrections Division of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, reaffirming Friday that women are an essential part of a cohesive corrections group at the Sheriff’s Office. “We have the same expectations as our male teammates, with an added unique set of duties because we run a women’s jail. It is a challenging career, and exciting.” (Sophia Andersen, Corrections Deputy, 9 years)
JAG FOREST MANAGEMENT PLAN WORKSHOP
September 22, 2025
Mendocino County, CA- The Jackson Demonstration State Forest Advisory Group (JAG) will be meeting:
Meeting Date: Location:
Monday September 22, 2025 Saturday Afternoon Clubhouse
Start Time: 1:00 am 107 S. Oak Street
End Time: 5:00 pm (estimated) Ukiah, CA 95482
This meeting will also be available to view online.
ZOOM Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_25uq9HwjQdCFJ68E4zU5hA
Item # Time Subject
1:00 pm Welcome and Overview of Day Together
Land Acknowledgement We would like to recognize that JDSF is the unceded traditional territory of the local Indigenous people past and present. Honoring of the land itself by stewardship has and continues to occur throughout the generations. This land acknowledgement compels us all to continue to learn how to be better stewards of the land.
1:15 pm Workshop Facilitated discussion of JAG members on the Pre-Draft Forest Management Plan.
4:30 pm Public Comment (3 minutes per person)
FROM EBAY, a photograph of local interest (via Marshall Newman): Anderson Valley High (or in this case, “Hi”) School, circa 1930.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, September 12, 2025
WILLIAM ANDES, 48, Petaluma/Ukiah. Failure to appear.
BENJAMIN BICKNELL, 36, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
MIGUEL ESQUIVEL JR., 29, Ukiah. Sexual penetration with force of victim under 14 years of age.
JULIUS GRUBER, 62, Willits. Petty theft with priors, controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia.
LUCAS IVERSON, 24, Willits. DUI.
NATHANIEL KUGLER, 22, Fort Bragg. Under influence, probation revocation.
ROBERT MCWILLIAMS, 53, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
FRANK ONETO JR., 51, Ukiah. Under influence, parole violation.
BENJAMIN RAU, 48, Potter Valley. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.15% with prior.
MILLIONS OF CALIFORNIANS AT RISK OF LOSING MEDI-CAL COVERAGE AS RULES TIGHTEN
by Catherine Ho
Impending changes to California’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, are expected to make it harder for adults — especially undocumented adults — to retain, enroll in and qualify for Medi-Cal coverage, and to afford coverage and care.
Most of the federal changes under HR 1, commonly referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” apply to adults on Medi-Cal, the joint federal-state health insurance plan for low-income Californians. They enact new work requirements, more frequent renewal rules, and new copayments.
Most of the state changes under the state budget apply to undocumented adults. They restrict new enrollment, eliminate dental benefits and impose new monthly premiums.
An estimated 3.4 million California are at risk of losing Medi-Cal coverage as a result of the federal changes alone.
Medi-Cal is the largest Medicaid program in the country, covering about 14 million Californians, or roughly one-third of the state’s residents.
Here is a rundown of the biggest changes coming in the next few years, when they start, who they affect, and what people can do to prepare for them.
Starting Jan. 1, 2026
Medi-Cal will pause new enrollment for undocumented adults 19 years and older. This will not affect people who were already enrolled before Jan. 1, 2026, who will be considered “grandfathered in.” This exempts pregnant people and children. This change is being enacted under state law.
Medi-Cal will reinstate the asset limit to qualify for Medi-Cal, changing it from $200,000 per person to $130,000 per person. This change is being enacted under state law.
Starting July 1, 2026
Medi-Cal will eliminate dental coverage for undocumented adults 19 years and older. Pregnant people and children are exempt. This change is being enacted under state law.
Undocumented adults will still have access to emergency dental benefits, which include treatment for intense pain, infections and extractions. But they will lose access to routine dental benefits.
Starting Jan. 1, 2027
Adults 19-64 years old who are on Medi-Cal will have to show they meet work requirements in order to keep their coverage. This can mean working at least 80 hours a month, earning at least $580 a month, being a seasonal worker who made an average of $580 a month over the last 6 months, being in a job training program or volunteering. This change is being enacted under federal law.
Many people are exempt: children; adults 65 and over; pregnant people, including parents for one year after the baby is born; parents with children under 14; people with disabilities; people with serious health conditions; people released from jail within the last 90 days; American Indians and Alaska Natives; and foster youths under age 26.
“These new work requirements will be hard for some adults to meet,” Tyler Sadwith, state Medicaid director at the Department of Health Care Services, said in a news briefing with journalists Thursday. “Especially individuals who have unstable work, season work, or who are caregivers for loved ones.”
Adults 19 to 64 years old must renew their Medi-Cal coverage twice a year, instead of once a year. This change is being enacted under federal law.
“We acknowledge that this increases paperwork, and it increases the risk of members losing coverage for administrative and paperwork reasons, even if someone still qualifies,” Sadwith said.
Starting July 1, 2027
Undocumented adults 19 to 59 years old will have to pay a $30 monthly premium for their Medi-Cal coverage. Pregnant people, children under 19, and people over 60 are exempt. This change is being enacted under state law.
If you miss a monthly payment, you get a 90-day grace period during which you will retain coverage. After that, your benefits will be downgraded from full-scope benefits to emergency benefits.
Starting October 2028
Some adults on Medi-Cal may need to start paying a fee or copay for some services, such as specialty care or certain medical tests. This change is being enacted under federal law.
Core services like emergency care, regular primary care checkups, prenatal care, pediatric care, mental health services and substance use treatment will remain free.
“Copayments, even if small, can be a barrier to low-income Californians who are already struggling,” Sadwith said.
What you can do
The most practical thing you can do is to make sure your contact information is up to date so you can receive notifications about Medi-Cal renewal and other changes that will require action on your part. Renewal packages in the mail and text messages typically come from your county of residence.
Keep your mailing address, email and phone number up to date with the county or on BenefitsCal.com or CoveredCA.com, depending on which one you used to apply for coverage, said Yingjia Huang, deputy director for health care benefits and eligibility at the Department of Health Care Services.
“That’s the most critical,” Huang said. “Making sure their information is the most up-to-date will help us as we are rolling out these changes.”
(SF Chronicle)
A RIDICULOUS SITUATION
Warmest spiritual greetings,
Many thanks to friends who forwarded to me the comments on the AVA online which debated my ridiculous social situation in postmodern America. For the hundredth time, the housing navigator (a member of the Lyons family, and friends with a certain AVA publisher) apologized for showing me the small room at The Canadian located far south of Ukiah. She said that it was much too far from the center of town to be useful, and said to me that she shouldn’t have shown it to me at all.
Hopefully, at least one of my critics may now relax on this point. I did NOT turn down offered housing in Mendocino County; I did have my name removed from consideration. Isn’t it time that we moved on from this? Second, my 76th birthday is September 28th and the California driver’s license expires. I am accepting 1. return airplane fare 2.a place to go to initially 3.subsidized senior housing long term, 4.my SSI reinstated plus all money owed to me which was improperly withheld due to a seriously flawed Social Security Administration, 5.my California EBT card working again, and 6.the Federal Housing Voucher made current (even though landlords who own Ukiah property and live in Sonoma County told my housing navigators that they did not want to be bothered with the paperwork, and did not want to wait up to six months to get the $2,000 incentive to rent to me. Thank you for being sane and appreciating me. It’s about time!
Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]
DRIVERS REALLY NEED TO PAY ATTENTION WHEN BUYING GAS
Editor,
Having owned a gas station for over 20 years from 1984 to 2005, I find it astounding to see retail gas pricing at the pumps.
Recently, I checked prices around Marin. That day, a gallon of regular unleaded gas at the Arco station in Mill Valley cost $4.05. But at the Chevron 250 yards away across the freeway, it was $4.79. Here in Terra Linda, one of the gas stations priced it at $4.89.
Historically, the cost of gas to the dealer from the supplier is never more than about 10 cents per gallon difference between suppliers. The retailer has every right to price gas as it chooses. Most gas stations today have a volume in excess of 100,000 gallons per month.
Considering all that, I urge everyone to do the math and pay cash when filling up. The savings add up to a bunch of money. Choose your retailer wisely. In my opinion, the difference between brands is insignificant, as the formula for California’s “clean air gas” is mandated by the state and has very tight parameters and restrictions, including additive packages.
Bob Leedy
Terra Linda
BIG THREE DEAL IS DEREGULATION THAT WILL COST CONSUMERS AND ENVIRONMENT
by Jamie Court
The Big Three — Governor Newsom, Senator Pro Tem McGuire and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas — celebrated their end of the session deal for “Landmark Clean Energy, Climate and Affordability Solutions” with a headline that declared, “California is delivering real and lasting energy savings for families, workers and businesses.”
It’s a load of horse poop. The truth is 90% of the “solutions” will drive up costs for gasoline and electricity.
The reauthorization of cap and trade without a ceiling on the price of carbon credits could add 60 cents to a gallon of gasoline.
The replenishing of the state’s wildfire fund to protect negligent utilities with $9 billion will come right out of ratepayers’ pockets.
The move to a Western regional grid will give regional power traders the power to increase electricity prices free of state control and anti-price gouging laws. Other regional markets, East Coast grid PJM and New England grid NISO, have experienced such huge increases in the price of electricity that a bi-partisan group of 9 governors are in open revolt.
Rather than delivering clean energy and climate solutions, the package will open Kern County up to indiscriminate oil drilling, divorced from any needs of pipelines there to feed crude oil into Northern California refineries. That hurts Kern County communities that had hoped for a future free from poisonous oil drilling, which is what Governor Newsom promised them less than a year ago.
The deal also requires the Governor to remove the summer-time gasoline blend that has kept smog down in Los Angeles if it is estimated that it will increase gas prices.
The package mandates a study of an insane idea to allow oil refiners to use the dirtiest gasoline if they pay a 25 cents per gallon tax. Don’t you think refiners will pass that on to consumers and Californians will pay more for dirty air with higher gas prices?
And the deal includes study of a Western-wide gasoline blending standard to replace California’s clean burning fuel. That could work if the standard is as high as California’s or it could go to the lowest common denominator if it is a lower standard. In the hands of the California Energy Commission, I would bet on the lowest common denominator.
The Commission recently froze development of a gasoline price gouging penalty for five years despite the Governor calling a special legislative session in 2023 to have it enacted.
Bottom line, California’s Democratic leaders led by Governor Newsom have embraced deregulation that will lead to higher prices and environmental degradation.…
PATRICK BAILEY’S GRAND SLAM gives Giants 5-1 walk-off win over Dodgers
by Susan Slusser
Laying everything on the line Friday night at Oracle Park, the San Francisco Giants got some extraordinary defensive work and another big walkoff blast from Patrick Bailey.
Bailey, known primarily for his catching, has three walkoff hits this year, including his inside-the-park homer against the Phillies. Friday, he crushed a grand slam to left, his third homer in four games, and the Giants beat their arch rivals, the division-leading Dodgers, 5-1. They’re now just a half game behind the Mets for a wild-card spot.
“Electric,” said outfielder Grant McCray, who entered in the ninth and made the play of the game.
“That was a special game, one of the more fun games in a regular season I’ve been a part of,” said Giants starter Justin Verlander, and that’s significant — he hit 20 years in the big leagues Friday. “Obviously, you know, we know where we’re at, and playing the Dodgers here at home, it had a bit of a playoff atmosphere to it from the beginning.
“It was one of those games that you just never know who’s going to step up and make a great play or have a great at-bat.”
The Giants got contributions from every corner and played all-out all evening, but they might have lost slick-fielding first baseman Dominic Smith in the process. Smith and Matt Chapman combined one of the biggest plays of the night in the fourth, but Smith went down in the splits awkwardly, and rolled over in obvious pain after getting Andy Pages to end the inning. Manager Bob Melvin described the injury as in the upper hamstring area and said Smith will get an MRI on Saturday.
“We’re pretty much leaving it all out there, that’s all we can do,” said Chapman, who did not have to sit out Friday’s game after successfully appealing his one-game suspension for shoving Colorado’s Kyle Freeland 10 days earlier. “We could go back and play this shoulda, coulda, woulda game with how we played about a couple months ago, but we’re here now. We’ve put ourselves in a good spot to have a chance.”
The Mets are imploding, losing game after game, seven in all, and leaving the door wide open for the hopefuls behind them. The Reds are only 1½ games back.
San Francisco recorded only one hit in the first eight innings Friday, Willy Adames’ double in the first, which sent in Rafael Devers to score after a minor bobble by Pages that was ruled an error. In the ninth, Luis Matos reached on an error, Devers singled with one out, Blake Treinen intentionally walked Adames, and Wilmer Flores popped up to shallow center. Pinch runner McCray tagged and raced home and Pages threw him out at the plate. “They’ve got to make a perfect throw, and they did,” Melvin said. “The way that that game went, runs were tough to come by.”
McCray said at that point, he was determined to “just take one away. Just make a play.” Just into the game, and barely used since coming up Sept. 1, McCray turned around and uncorked one of the great throws of the year in the 10th, getting Ben Rortvedt trying to advance to third on Mookie Betts’ flyball to right. “He wasn’t even in the game,” Verlander marveled of McCray, “and that was one of the biggest plays of the game. … It’s pretty exciting to do that in a playoff chase.”
Joel Peguero then got Freddie Freeman to bounce into a double play, a three-pitch inning and he got the win when, with the placed runner already aboard, Tanner Scott walked Jung Hoo Lee and walked Casey Schmitt intentionally to bring up Bailey, batting .219 but with a knack for late innings heroics. “I was just looking to put a ball in play,” Bailey said. “He’s got elite stuff and I was just trying to stay short to the ball.”
He hit the second pitch, a high fastball, out on a line at 106 mph. Bailey’s the first player in big-league history with a walkoff grand slam and a walkoff inside-the-park homer in the same season, according to stats expert Sarah Langs.
“Both are definitely pretty cool,” Bailey said, adding with a smile, “I’m definitely not as tired this one as I was on the inside-the-parker.”
Scott has three blown saves and a loss over his past five outings. “Maybe I’m tipping,” he said. “I have no frigging clue right now. I’m having the worst year of my life. I have to be better.”
Verlander, 42, made yet another excellent start in what’s been a terrific stretch for him, holding the Dodgers to four hits and one run in seven innings, walking four and striking out four; he’s allowed three runs, total, over his past four starts and 24 innings.
The first time he got into trouble, the defense was right there to help. Freddie Freeman led off the fourth with L.A.’s first hit and Max Muncy walked, but Verlander got Teoscar Hernández to pop up, then Michael Conforto shattered his bat on a grounder to first. Smith ranged to his right and flipped sideways to Verlander covering as the runners moved up.
That brought Pages, who hit a bouncer to Chapman’s left. It wasn’t hit that hard, 76 mph, so Chapman had to hurry a rocket of a throw to Smith, who stretched for the ball but twisted slightly as he did the splits. He held his foot on the bag just long enough to complete the play, just a moment ahead of Pages’ arrival. The out call was upheld on replay as Smith got checked on the field. Flores hit for him the next inning.
“That was that was huge for us,” Verlander said. “One of the best plays I’ve had a third baseman make behind me.”
The Giants also got a super diving catch from Schmitt, launching himself at a 105 mph liner by Tommy Edman leading off the fifth.
Conforto, the former Giants outfielder, seems to relish playing his old team. His homer to center in the seventh was his second of the season against San Francisco and while he’s batting .193 overall, he’s hitting .300 against the Giants and a team-best .292 for his career.
The Dodgers also had a potential concern: The team just got Muncy back off the IL Monday and in the eighth, Joey Lucchesi hit him on the wrist with a pitch. He was replaced at third in the bottom of the inning. X-rays were negative.
(sfchronicle.com)
IN POINT REYES: MORE SECRETS AND LIES (As Always, About Water and Land)
An innovative project pairs investigative journalists with Freedom of Information Act attorneys. How has that played out at the Point Reyes National Seashore for investigative reporter Peter Byrne?
by Eva Chrysanthe (Marin County Confidential)
In Point Reyes, A New Legal Challenge:
Following a settlement agreement between ranchers and environmental groups in Point Reyes, the scion of one of Marin County’s oldest and most politically influential families is alleging there was a conspiracy on the part of the Federal government to close most of the remaining ranches in Point Reyes. Andrew Giacomini’s lawsuit is getting broad support from Republicans in Congress – and from rightwing media. What can a 2023 FOIA suit filed on behalf of the journalist whose reporting was cited in the 2022 environmentalists’ lawsuit tell us about how we got here?
The Giacomini name has always carried weight in Marin County. For those of us who were raised here in the 20th century, Giacomini still carries with it a sense of nostalgia for a supposedly simpler time in the County, when the descendants of West Marin’s ranching families settled even more comfortably into positions of power. With its echoes of the many earlier Italian (and Portuguese) families who started dairy and cattle ranches in Marin, and whose descendants also graduated from both Marin Catholic and solid Jesuit and Roman Catholic universities in the Bay Area (notably USF and St. Mary’s), the name provides a sense of continuity.
The Giacominis might be bastards, but they were the bastards we knew.
But now it is 2025 and attorney and rancher Andrew Giacomini of the reputable Hanson Bridgett Law Firm, son of the longtime Marin County Supervisor and rancher Gary Giacomini, is veering into “unknown bastard” territory. In an attempt to upend a settlement reached between ranchers and environmentalists, Giacomini is alleging a conspiracy between the Federal government and The Nature Conservancy to strip the Point Reyes National Seashore of nearly all of its remaining ranches. This, Giacomini claims, is displacing the hardworking dairy and ranch laborers, a long-abused and long-ignored demographic, whom Giacomini has only now decided to champion.
Per Giacomini, the secretive settlement mediated by The Nature Conservancy can only be undone by a large cache of money for the ranch workers to join a lawsuit led by Andrew Giacomini himself. This money was apparently negotiated by Giacomini from a secret donor. (In classic Marin County style, Giacomini, in his heroic quest against secrecy, is yet unwilling to identify the secret donor.)
To publicize his lawsuit, Andrew Giacomini, from the truest-blue county in all of California, recently sat for a nearly one-hour interview on a television show owned by the conservative Epoch Times media conglomerate, which normally trumpets far-right politicians in Europe and remains a strong supporter of President Trump. And shortly into the interview, the interviewer jarringly broke from the program to pitch the Falun Gong-associated Shen Yun dance troupe.
The Epoch Times is strongly linked to the “new religious movement” Falun Gong, which may or may not have been seeded by the CIA but which apparently has been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House, reference here.
But it’s not just The Epoch Times! Andrew Giacomini has also stated his willingness to work with the Trump administration to derail the settlement, which should not be surprising given that other Point Reyes agricultural businesses had reached out to the first Trump administration for support. And Giacomini’s bid for rightwing support appears to be working: the Republican-controlled Congress is now demanding investigation of the “secret” settlement, much to the consternation of Congressman Huffman and at least half of the ranchers who agreed to the settlement.
How did things deteriorate to this point? A successful FOIA lawsuit against the NPS filed in 2023 provides some context. But to understand it, we need to review some earlier Marin County craziness that surrounded the establishment of the Point Reyes National Seashore.
The Point Reyes National Seashore Was JFK’s Vision; And a Nightmare Vision for a Marin County Arms Trafficker
It was a lucky break, in a way, that the Point Reyes National Seashore was ever established. There had been housing developments and commercial attractions planned for the area. But in 1958, Kennedy, while still a U.S. Senator, wanted to establish a first-of-its-kind national seashore at Cape Cod. Per Paul Sadin, when JFK’s proposed legislation met with opposition, colleagues suggested that he expand the idea to include two additional national seashores on the Pacific and the Gulf Coasts, so that it wouldn’t appear he was favoring his own family’s preferred vacation site. Thus, the total initial package was Cape Cod, Point Reyes, and, in Texas, Padres Island.
The proposal for Point Reyes alarmed Marin County’s ranching families, who had more influence over the Marin County Board of Supervisors than they currently enjoy. In 1958, after a meeting with the ranchers, the Board of Supervisors held an ad hoc vote against the establishment of the proposed national seashore at Point Reyes.
The fight was soon joined by Marin County Chamber of Commerce President Adolph S. Oko, Jr. – a man who had previously trafficked 748 tons of armaments from Mexico to Tel Aviv for the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War. Oko’s opposition to the establishment of a national park was, he claimed, a general fear of government’s ability to perform a “blanket grab” of private property, which Oko believed “cast a cloud over the title of every man’s land.”
This short video clip about the ship Kefalos, which Oko used to ship both armaments and Holocaust refugees to Tel Aviv, includes some photos of the ship.
There is an irony in Oko’s obsession with land rights given that the 748 tons of armaments (including cannons, shells, bombs, Browning and Vickers machine guns, bullets, radar devices, and steel helmets) that he personally delivered to Tel Aviv a decade earlier were to be used by freshly-minted Israelis to maintain control over land seized from Palestinian families.
Neither did Oko seem concerned with the fact that Point Reyes ranchers themselves had acquired their properties through a “complicated” set of transactions: There had never been any remuneration to the Coast Miwok for the land in Marin County (first seized by the Spanish for the Mission San Rafael), which eventually came under the ownership of the ranchers.
The New Frontier
Unlike his plan to dismantle the CIA, Kennedy’s vision of a National Seashore succeeded – although in Point Reyes, it came with considerable compromise among the many parties. In September 1962, the House and Senate moved a bill to the Oval Office, where Kennedy signed into law the Point Reyes National Seashore. In Point Reyes, the ranches were grandfathered in, most with 25-year leases, under the hopeful, if unrealistic, expectation that they would actually leave at the end of the leases.
But as many people (and businesses) who become attached to the land tend to do, the ranchers preferred to stay at the end of the initial terms, and their leases were extended. This set up a fight between ranchers and conservationists that resulted in the settlement reached last January, which Giacomini’s lawsuit aims to upend.
Sadly, JFK would not live long enough to visit the National Seashore he established in California. And Oko died of a heart attack just two months before JFK was gunned down in Dallas.
A Defunded National Park Service Dances With The Partners It Has To
In the decades since, we’ve seen a defunding of the National Park Service, which was always underfunded for what it has delivered to the public. (Park rangers are technically law enforcement, but their salaries are a fraction of what police and deputies earn, despite the fact that many park rangers have degrees in biological/ environmental sciences.)
As the power of the NPS has waned, it has had to rely on partnerships and volunteers to maintain the parks. The vision of public land has always had to dance, uneasily, with business interests, complicating its mandate for conservation.
That uneasy dance might explain how NPS officials at the Point Reyes National Seashore reacted to an in-depth and meticulously researched article about the impacts of ranching on the Point Reyes ecosystem – a reaction that prompted a successful FOIA lawsuit filed by Thomas Burke on behalf of investigative journalist Peter Byrne.
Why Peter Byrne’s FOIA Lawsuit Matters
The article in question, “Apocalypse Cow”, was written by investigative journalist Peter Byrne in late 2020 for the Pacific Sun, prior to Byrne’s late 2023 departure from that formerly anti-war publication. Byrne’s meticulous reporting exposed the NPS for allowing their tenant ranchers to pollute the land in water in ways that were not necessary to their operations; for harming the wildlife including tule elk and elephant seals; and for damaging important Coast Miwok archeological sites. The article was subsequently republished in Counterpunch.
“Apocalypse Cow” was only part of a series of articles Byrne wrote that expanded public understanding not only of the impacts of ranching in Point Reyes, but of the conflicts of interest between old ranching families, politicians at the local, state, and national levels. An article Byrne wrote about the lack of rights of Coast Miwok tribal members like Theresa Harlan to even participate in decision-making processes regarding Coast Miwok land at PRNS is a must-read.
And for those like myself who are concerned about the impact of the closure of most of the ranches on the mostly Latino farmworkers, many of whom are second or third generation ranch-hands, Byrne’s reporting raises an obvious question in retrospect: what if NPS, which administers the PRNS, had met its mandate and held the ranch owners to legal standards for everything from water quality to adequate housing?
Byrne’s article also exposed the 2019 Environmental Impact Survey contracted by NPS as seriously deficient. That EIS was mandated as a condition of a prior lawsuit filed by environmentalists. And it provided deeper context for the conflicts of interest at the state and federal level (including significant donations from agricultural interests to Representative Huffman and then-Senator Feinstein) that allowed such a flawed report to be approved.
Notably, Byrne’s article exposed the prior, serious corruption of the Louis Berger Group, which NPS contracted to conduct the EIS, including $69 million that LBG had to pay in fines for defrauding the US government when it was operating in post-2003 Aghanistan. (Given what we now know about what was actually happening during the US war on Afghanistan from Seth Harp’s new, best-selling The Fort Bragg Cartel, it raises even more questions about why the NPS found LBG suitable for the task of an EIS report.)
NPS Reaction
As much as Byrne’s article resonated with much of the public and environmentalists, it clearly upset NPS officials. Even the prospect of Byrne’s article was jarring to Congressman Jared Huffman, who angrily denounced Byrne in a telephone conversation after Byrne politely contacted Huffman for comment.
Those reactions are unfortunate. The article is brilliantly written, skillfully putting the reader right onto the ground in Point Reyes, something Byrne also managed to do in his reporting on MALT. But the reality of what Byrne exposes, especially for those who love the park, is painful to read. This was potentially the moment for NPS officials to address the issues Byrne exposed, potentially saving the trouble of the 2022 lawsuit, or at least mitigating the force of the lawsuit.
Instead, NPS officials denied the facts reported by Byrne, and began a public campaign of smearing Byrne, including maintaining a long list of denials of Byrne’s provable facts on their own website.
When Byrne and his then-editor, Will Carruthers, submitted a detailed rebuttal (later published in the Pacific Sun) to the NPS’ counterfactual attack on Byrne’s reporting, it was ignored. Seeking insight into why the NPS had chosen such a response, Byrne subsequently submitted another FOIA request to NPS. NPS repeatedly stalled this request, and then unlawfully redacted information under the bogus pretense of Section 5(b), a blanket excuse that is most commonly used by many federal agencies to suppress what should be public information.
Enter Thomas Burke
It was the unlawful NPS redactions that resulted in a successful lawsuit filed on Byrne’s behalf by the pre-eminent FOIA attorney Thomas Burke, of Davis Wright Tremaine, on a pro bono basis. It is the first of three cases Burke is handling for Byrne under an innovative program, started by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, that matches journalists with attorneys on FOIA cases. Byrne’s suit asked for no damages, only the unredacted material.
(The second case that Burke has taken on for Byrne regards Operation Tailwind documents that Byrne requested via FOIA of the National Security Agency. In the simplest terms possible, Tailwind was the 1970 operation in which it is claimed that US forces deployed sarin gas in Laos, which targeted US military personnel. That lawsuit is has been ongoing for five years and has yielded significant findings. Byrne’s existing article on Tailwind, published in Counterpunch, is available here. For most of 2025, Byrne has been engaged in researching and writing a ten-part series about the use of AI in military for Project Censored. The 6th article in the series was published last week, covering the interface of human soldiers and AI technology.
What’s In the Unredacted Material
Some takeaways from the unredacted emails obtained through the lawsuit:
- NPS officials were aware that the “corrections” they demanded to the article were counterfactual;
- NPS Spokesperson Melanie Gunn repeatedly and falsely claimed both to colleagues and the general public that Byrne had failed to seek NPS’ perspectives;
- Gunn deliberately refused to acknowledge either Byrne’s entreaties to meet to discuss the issues, or the rebuttal to NPS claims submitted by Byrne and his then-editor Will Carruthers.
The $57 Million Question
One noteworthy aspect of the now unredacted emails is the discussion amongst NPS officials about Byrne’s claim that the ranchers were paid $57 million for their properties under the original agreement.
Without checking, multiple NPS officials repeatedly insisted that Byrne’s claim of $57 million was incorrect, and they made it a feature of their online campaign against Byrne. But Byrne had originally found the amount in a lengthy history which was contracted by NPS itself.
Further, not fully satisfied that the $57 million figure was entirely accurate, Byrne patiently began checking property records at the Assessor’s office in Marin County to verify that the amount reported in the NPS history was accurate. That is exactly the kind of meticulousness that Byrne has demonstrated in his reporting for decades, and which has been entirely absent at the Marin Independent-Journal, and has been almost entirely absent at the Pacific Sun since Byrne’s departure.
An avid outdoorsman, Peter Byrne is no enemy of the National Park Service, or the Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS). He deeply values what the NPS has been able to protect, as well as the labor of hardworking park rangers, who are in a different league from NPS officials. Byrne’s article was a cri de couer for the NPS to meet its responsibilities to the environment, wildlife, and the public. (An eloquent followup article by Byrne about Coast Miwok tribal leaders’ concerns regarding the NPS use of Miwok land should be required reading for all who enjoy the area.)
What was genuinely disturbing both to Byrne and later his attorney Thomas Burke was the manner in which the NPS, instead of addressing the valid and reasonable evidence he brought forward, initiated a campaign to slander Byrne, falsely claiming his reporting was sloppy and irresponsible.
Opportunity Lost:
This isn’t just a matter of the NPS being unfair to a journalist. The documents Byrne’s attorney sued for indicate that the NPS spent an inordinate amount of time “team-building” a PR document smearing Byrne’s work. In taking this unethical approach, the NPS punished Byrne, but it also failed its own mandate to protect the environment and serve the public.
Reading through hundreds of pages of finally unredacted documents that were delivered thanks to Byrne’s attorney, I wondered about the human impacts of the NPS’ negligence, too. In addition to the concerns of the Coast Miwok descendants about their archeological sites and desires to have a voice in the decisions about their own land, there is the issue of the ranches’ many Latino workers, who would have been better served if the NPS had simply held the business owners to more reasonable standards.
Perhaps you disagree with Byrne’s position that there is no place for the cattle and dairy ranches in Point Reyes. That would be all the more reason to ask why government officials were so insistent on punishing the whistleblower. Enforcing standards – whether for better protecting the water or land from the pollution of ranching, or for providing safer housing for laboring families – would have been better for all parties than the near-total abdication of responsibility that the NPS took instead.
What We Are Left With As A Result of White Environmentalists’ ‘Blind Spot’
Andrew Giacomini’s suit on behalf of displaced Latino ranch workers points to a serious and long-standing flaw in the environmental movement. By failing to address the legitimate claims that the Coast Miwok have to their former lands which now make up the PRNS, and by refusing to consider the seriousness of displacing a “mere” population of Latino ranch workers, the environmentalists who sued the NPS, almost of them white and property owners, established a fundamental weakness in their case.
Their case and the settlement itself failed to account for the backlash that would inevitably accrue when a longstanding working-class Latino population with substantially fewer rights – a population that was essential to the larger functioning of the park and the small towns adjoining PRNS – was given less than two years to leave with zero restitution.
When I published an article about the backlash to the settlement last January, I received, tellingly, a series of outraged emails from a white home-owning environmentalist who scoffed at the idea that Latino families who have lived and worked in Point Reyes for generations have a right to stay. The irony: she has only lived in Point Reyes for a decade or two, having purchased her home after retirement. And the County services that are essential to her living in Point Reyes actually depend on a population count provided by hardworking Latino ranchworkers.
The failure to even consider the loss of the ranchworker families is now being exploited not only by Andrew Giacomini, but by Republican congressmen who now potentially have the power to derail the entire conservationist project of the PRNS.
The environmental groups that sued the NPS now have an interesting opportunity before them: to help find environmentally-friendly solutions that will allow the working-class Latino families to stay on the land they have now lived on, and toiled in, for generations.
(marincountyconfidential.substack.com)
CALIFORNIA LAWMAKERS PASS A FINAL FLURRY OF BILLS; SOME ARE NEWSOM’S POTENTIAL VETO TARGETS
by Sophia Bollag
Proposals to regulate AI, cap insulin costs and provide lawyers to children in immigration court are among the policies California lawmakers are debating this week as they conclude their work for the year.
But the Legislature isn’t the final hurdle: Once lawmakers wrap up their work on Saturday, the bills they pass will have to win approval from Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Newsom, a Democrat, will probably sign most of the bills the Democratically controlled Legislature sends him. But ones at particular risk for a veto include bills with high price tags, which Newsom frequently targets. During the same period last year, he vetoed about 18% of bills lawmakers sent him, often citing cost concerns.
That dynamic could be exacerbated this year as federal cuts and budget pressures intensify demand for limited state funding. Newsom and lawmakers reduced state spending in their June budget agreement to make up for a projected $12 billion deficit. That happened before federal lawmakers passed a massive spending bill with deep cuts to health care, food assistance and other safety net programs. President Donald Trump is also targeting California for other federal funding cuts, including to schools.
“The threat of the federal government is very real in terms of our budgetary concerns,” said Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, who chairs the Assembly Appropriations Committee. “I think at every turn the federal government is looking for opportunities to punish California.”
Some of the bills with significant price tags are in response to Trump’s policies. One, by Assembly Member Mia Bonta, D-Alameda, would require the state to provide lawyers for unaccompanied children in immigration court. The measure would cost between $17 million to $77 million, according to the Assembly Appropriations Committee, which analyzes bill costs. Lawmakers voted to send that bill to Newsom on Thursday.
Bonta, who introduced the bill in response to Trump’s mass deportation efforts, said she thinks the bill is worth the price and hopes the governor will sign it out of concern for immigrant children.
“What’s the price of doing what is morally the right thing?” Bonta asked. “I can’t think of anything more vulnerable than an infant or a 6-year-old or a 12-year old having to sit in a court of law unaccompanied without the right or even access to counsel, facing deportation.”
Assembly Member Tina McKinnor, D-Hawthorne, said she’s optimistic the governor will sign two of her bills aimed at advancing racial justice, even though they would cost the state money.
AB57 would dedicate 10% of state subsidies for first-time homeowners to the descendants of enslaved people. The bill would need money appropriated in a future budget year, and would likely cost tens of millions of dollars each year, according to an analysis by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
AB62, also by McKinnor, would compensate people who were not properly compensated when the government took their property because of their race. The bill’s cost would depend on how many people take advantage of the program, and could range from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“If I get one, I’m very happy, but you know, I always wish for two and hope that I get them both signed,” she said of the bills, which both passed Tuesday. “But I know what kind of budget constraints we’re in.”
While the budget outlook always affects what governors sign or veto, there are exceptions, like expensive bills signed during deficit years, said Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco.
“Governors look at the cost, but they also look at what they think about the bill,” said Wiener, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee. “So it’s always complicated.”
Newsom historically has also been sensitive to arguments by the tech industry that overregulation could hurt innovation and companies’ profits. That industry in particular is also a cornerstone of California’s economy and, by extension, the state budget. Last year, he vetoed a sweeping AI regulation bill authored by Wiener, while signing what he described as more “surgical” AI bills that placed more targeted guardrails on the rapidly advancing technology.
This year, Wiener has returned with a pared-back approach to regulating AI: SB53, which requires developers of the most powerful and expensive AI models to test and plan for potentially catastrophic risks that could kill more than 50 people or result in more than $1 billion in damage. Those could include using the technology to create a biological weapon or destroy critical infrastructure.
The bill is one of many aimed at the tech industry this year, including proposed regulations for AI companion chatbots and digital age verification requirements for companies.
Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda, has advanced multiple tech regulation bills this year, including ones to bar companies from making potentially harmful chatbots available to children, crack down on artificially generated pornography and require warning labels on social media websites. She said she’s hopeful that Newsom’s experience as the father of four children will influence him to sign regulations intended to protect children. And she noted that his own AI working group produced a report providing a framework for regulation, which she said she hopes he takes into consideration.
One of her tech regulation bills, AB1018 attempts to ensure automated decision-making algorithms don’t discriminate against people based on characteristics like gender or race. State agencies estimate the bill could cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. Bauer-Kahan said she’s still hopeful Newsom will sign it if it passes this week.
“I’m hopeful that that will guide him to be thoughtful in signing bills,” she said of the report. “He is very cost-conscious, as he should be … so we will see how that shapes up, because I think choices will have to be made about resources.”
Wiener also pointed to the AI report as a sign that his SB53 will fare better than his sweeping AI bill did last year.
“We based the bill on that report,” Wiener said. “He has not said that he is signing it, but I am cautiously optimistic.”
Wiener has multiple bills this year that Newsom vetoed previous versions of before, including SB40 to cap insulin copayments and deductible costs to $35 for a 30-day supply and SB41 to impose new restrictions on prescription drug middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers. Both bills passed earlier this week. Wiener said he’s optimistic about those measures, too.
Newsom has already committed to signing some bills. He announced Wednesday that he made deals with legislative leaders to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program, add funding to cover costs of catastrophic wildfires and increase oil production.
Those deals, which were secured Wednesday morning, are forcing lawmakers to extend their legislative session by a day. They had been scheduled to end their work for the year Friday, but now plan to convene Saturday morning to pass the environment bills agreed to Wednesday.
For most bills, however, we don’t know how Newsom will act. He faces an Oct. 12 deadline to sign or veto all bills lawmakers send him this week.
“He has tough choices to make,” Wicks said. “It’s a difficult budget year, but yet we have really important needs for our constituents.”
(SF Chronicle)
JOHN HORST:
I have been toying around with issuing an NFT called “the NFT” - “the Next Fuqqing Tulip”
But beyond that… If anything can be said in Trump’s defense it is that he traded on his brand long before becoming president, so it should not be a surprise that his family trades on his/their brand. The meme coin is just another branded luxury accessory for peacocking tech bros. I think the real scandal is in how this and so many other forms of luxury are bought with printed money - not real wealth.
Now, the Stablecoin? That’s where the story really lies: If you pay attention to the bond market you’ll see why. Normalization of Stablecoins is not about innovation, it is about propping up the bid for treasuries. If the bid goes away, the price drops and interest rates rise. Unless the Fed prints more money to buy them - a restart of QE.
So, normalize Stablecoins - the issuer has to bid for short term treasuries to back the issuance. This is just gasoline on the dumpster fire of the national debt. It will only hasten the market’s realization that the full faith and credit of the United States is a mirage. And once that realization sets in, there is nothing the Fed can do… the USD is toast, as is everything adjacent to - and valued in - it.
Crypto will be the first “asset” to be wiped out because it really isn’t, never has been, and originally was not designed or conceived to even be an asset. Bitcoin is not supposed to be just another asset you value in USD. It is supposed to be an alternative to the USD to return us to an immutable monetary unit of measure. If you value your crypto in USD, you do not understand crypto.
Lastly, Circle (USDC) and Tether (USDT) are already Shadow Central Banks and their Stablecoins are Shadow CDBCs. The efforts to ban CDBCs are laughable misdirections.
LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT
How Law Enforcement Got the Man Suspected of Killing Charlie Kirk
From Scholarship Winner to Wanted Man: The Life of the Kirk Shooting Suspect
Kirk Assassination Puts America’s Political Spotlight on Campuses Again
Vance Invokes Kirk in Midterms Push to G.O.P. Donors
After Kirk Assassination, a Republican Governor Tries to Stop the Blame Game
“WRITE HARD and clear about what hurts.”
― Ernest Hemingway
DENNIS O’BRIEN (Ukiah): There are some online who are saying that the Left has some sort of “assassination agenda”, that “the fight you demanded will be your regret.” It appears they are using the shooting of Charlie Kirk as the justification for a violent reaction against their political opponents. I am immediately reminded of how Hitler and the Nazis used the Reichstag fire of 1933 as their justification for doing the same. Yes, it’s that bad. I fear our nation is headed toward a very dark place. God help us all.
EVAN WROTAN:
To hell with the gaslighting corporate media & their talking heads.
To hell with the virtue signaling leftist influencers, late night talk show hosts, and politicians.
They’ll all be back to calling half the country deplorables, bigots, fascists, racists & Nazi’s by Sunday.
Word to the wise. Charlie Kirk was moderate. The potential for what fills the vacuum as a result of Mr. Kirk’s murder is a thousand times worse than the greatest fears & concerns they all had of him.
You don’t hate the media enough - you think you do, but you don’t.
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Being a boomer and having seen too many assassinations in the video age where we get to see them in slow motion with almost play by play commentary. One common theme seems to be that the assassin almost 100% of the time turns out to be a supposed insignificant person leading a troubled, insignificant life. Their heinous acts give them a notoriety they perhaps sought for mentally deranged reasons. While political rhetoric may demonize people unfairly and make them targets, every single assassin turns out to be someone with a lost life who has nothing to lose and disturbed enough to commit a desperate senseless act.
MANY OF THOSE righteously condemning the rise of “political violence” have supported two years of genocidal violence in Gaza and recently celebrated when the President of the US released a snuff film of a US Navy drone strike that killed 11 people in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela in violation of international and US law, as well as that most mysterious of all laws, the Law of the Sea. Our society, already among the most violent in the world, has been saturated in official violence done in our name since 9/11. In the last quarter-century of the forever wars, hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed. These daily slaughters, many if not most of them rationalized by politicians and the pundits, have done more to twist the psyche of Americans than ideologies, video games or serotonin uplifters. And the ubiquitous presence of high-powered, military weaponry has provided the means for these bomb-shattered minds to go off on full-auto in their own perverted missions of retribution and revenge.
— Jeffrey St. Clair
FROM SCHOLARSHIP WINNER TO WANTED MAN: THE PATH OF THE KIRK SHOOTING SUSPECT
Tyler Robinson, the man accused of shooting Charlie Kirk, was a stellar student in high school, raised in a Republican home in Southwest Utah and training to be an electrician.
by Jack Healy, Sabrina Tavernise, Nicholas Boget-Burroughs & Orlando Mayorquin
In the conservative southern Utah city where Tyler Robinson grew up, neighbors and classmates described him as a reserved, intelligent young man raised in a Republican family who was deeply interested in video games, comic books and current events.
On Friday afternoon, people who knew Mr. Robinson struggled to reconcile their memories of him and his seemingly ordinary suburban upbringing with his notorious new image: the latest face of political violence, accused of fatally shooting the conservative influencer Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus earlier this week in what the authorities have called a political assassination.
“It’s really sad that someone with his mind put it to that sort of use,” said Keaton Brooksby, 22, a former high school classmate of Mr. Robinson’s.
Mr. Robinson had recently spoken with a family member about the fact that Mr. Kirk was going to hold an event in Utah, according to a police affidavit, and he and his relative discussed “why they didn’t like him and the viewpoints he had.”
But as elements of the nation’s political left and right scrambled for motives, the image that has initially emerged of Mr. Robinson is not at all clear. Neither is his trajectory from a scholarship-winning high school student to an apprentice electrician to a suspect.
Mr. Brooksby said that Mr. Robinson was generally considered a quiet pupil when they were growing up in the conservative St. George area, but one day in high school, the topic of the 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, came up during lunch. Few there knew exactly what had happened, but Mr. Robinson was sure of himself.
“He gave us a whole spiel on what happened,” Mr. Brooksby said. “I just remember thinking, he’s got a lot of information on this for someone who’s 14.”
Mr. Robinson is registered to vote in Utah, but he is not affiliated with a political party and had never voted in an election, according to the Washington County Clerk. His parents are registered Republicans, both with active hunting licenses in a part of the country known for its outdoor life, near Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks.
Social media photos posted by his family over the years show Mr. Robinson and his two younger brothers shooting and posing with guns.
Mr. Robinson surrendered to the police near his hometown on Thursday night after an intense, 33-hour manhunt. A police officer wrote in an affidavit filed in court that one of Mr. Robinson’s family members had described him as growing “more political in recent years” and, during a recent dinner, had mentioned Mr. Kirk and his upcoming event at the Utah campus.
Officials said they found, left with the gun, unfired ammunition that had been engraved with jokes and slang from internet memes as well as the words, “hey fascist! CATCH!”
Adrian Rivera, 22, who had been in a high school woodworking class with him, said that Mr. Robinson would often hang around the area designated for the Junior R.O.T.C., or Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, with other students who were interested in the military program. It was unclear whether Mr. Robinson had actually been a member of the corps.
Mr. Rivera said that Mr. Robinson was a “massive Halo guy,” referring to the popular science fiction game, and that he also liked to play Call of Duty, and other shooter games.
Mr. Robinson appeared to excel academically as a teenager. His mother posted online a photo of him when he graduated from middle school with a perfect 4.0 grade point average. In a Facebook post from August 2020, celebrating the start of Mr. Robinson’s senior year at Pine View High School in St. George, his mother proudly reported that he had been taking four college-level classes as well as Advanced Placement calculus. He graduated from Pine View in 2021.
“My brain hurts for him, but he’s so excited!” she wrote in the post.
Jaida Funk, 22, who went to elementary and middle school with Mr. Robinson, said he was an excellent student — they were both in high honor roll together. In fact, she said, he had the personality of a teacher’s pet, always on time, respectful, hardworking, and smart.
“He’s the kind of kid that even if you are not friends, you’d ask him to be in your group project,” she said. “He’s someone you’d expect to get the award for perfect attendance.”
She said he was very into computers. He was not in the popular crowd but people liked him.
“The way he carries himself and speaks to others. I thought he’d be a C.E.O. or a businessman. He had good leadership qualities.”
In 2021, Mr. Robinson’s mother posted a video of her son reading a letter in which he said he had received a presidential scholarship to Utah State University worth $32,000. But a university spokeswoman said that Mr. Robinson only attended the university for one semester in 2021, as a pre-engineering major. The school is roughly two hours away from Utah Valley University, where the shooting took place.
At the time of the shooting, Mr. Robinson appears to have been living with at least one roommate in an apartment complex in St. George, about a 10-minute drive from his family’s home in the adjoining town of Washington, Utah. The police said that they had interviewed a roommate of Mr. Robinson’s, who showed them messages from after the shooting in which Mr. Robinson described leaving a rifle somewhere and changing his clothes.
Mr. Robinson had been a third-year student in an electrical apprentice program at Dixie Technical College in St. George, the school said in a statement.
Several of Mr. Robinson’s neighbors at the apartment complex where he had recently lived described him as withdrawn, saying that they rarely saw him, apart from when he was walking to and from a gray Dodge Challenger he kept in the parking lot.
“He’d never talk to anybody,” said Josh Kemp, 18, who lived across from Mr. Robinson’s apartment. “He’d always blast music with his roommate.”
Oliver Holt, an 11-year-old who lives a few doors down from Mr. Robinson’s apartment, said he was going door-to-door in the complex last week, asking neighbors whether he could do any odd jobs to help him save up for a new phone, when he encountered Mr. Robinson. Oliver said he was put off by Mr. Robinson’s behavior, and said he kept glancing back into his apartment.
“He was acting pretty strange,” Oliver said. “He was acting kind of nervous and scared.”
Mr. Brooksby, who knew Mr. Robinson in high school, said the last time he saw Mr. Robinson was when they bumped into each other at a Walmart. Mr. Robinson seemed to have grown even shyer, appearing to not want to catch up.
AN ARREST, CORRECTIONS, AND PURE HORROR
If "hate speech" can kill, how about the "hate error"?
by Matt Taibbi
From ABC News:
Tyler Robinson, the man suspected of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk during a campus event at a Utah university, had eluded authorities for more than a day. However, after his father recognized him from photographs distributed by authorities, it led a series of events that ultimately led to 22-year-old Robinson being taken into custody.
Robinson mentioned during a dinner conversation with a family member that Kirk would be visiting Utah Valley University, according to Cox. Robinson and the family members discussed why they didn’t like Kirk and his viewpoints, and the family member stated Kirk was “full of hate and spreading hate,” [Utah Governor Spencer] Cox said.
Photos of Robinson reveal a thin young male in a purple shirt, barely a man, a boy in pajamas just a tick of the clock ago. Innocence has no staying power in the Internet age. Every parent will soon be afraid to send their kids into the world unattended.
Meanwhile an editor’s note silently appeared at the bottom of a New York Times story, “Where Charlie Kirk Stood on Key Political Issues”:
A correction was made on Sept. 11, 2025: An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement.
Even the correction was grudging and uncharitable. The Times “described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made” isn’t the same as “We incorrectly ascribed antisemitism to Charlie Kirk.” I wrote this morning about the increasingly common trope of “alleging racist or antisemitic comments without elucidating them.” This is what the Times did, in its obituary in the story in question, and in others where the paper used rhetorical gimmicks like “Mr. Kirk’s own rhetoric was long cast as racist, xenophobic and extreme by groups that study hate speech.”
When you go looking for the statements the paper matches to these extreme words, they turn out to be things like advocating the use of the term “China virus” and using his platform to “decry racial equity programs.” The line that struck me said Kirk believed “Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants,” and “That ideology motivated the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.”
This is another common technique, ascribing hate speech to a person, then saying those beliefs motivated specific acts of violence. This openly invites readers to blame the subject for the violence. That’s not only nothing new, it’s been the underlying premise for a generation of “anti-dehumanization” proposals tying “hate speech” to episodes like the 2019 Christchurch shooting, the 2019 El Paso shooting, and the January 6th riots.
My problem with these laws, always, has been that what they call “disinformation” often turns out to be true, and “hate speech” often turns out to be something not nearly deserving of the term, or false altogether.
(racket.news)
EXORCISM NIGH
by James Kunstler
“The point I was trying to make is how peaceful the left was. . . right before he got shot.” —Hunter Kozak, Question-Asker at Charlie Kirk Utah Event, Sept 10
“It’s been obvious for some time that the Left has been hijacked by the modern equivalent of the Manson Family.” —Sasha Stone
It’s been a tough week for our demon-haunted nation. First, video surfaces of the young Ukrainian woman, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, slaughtered by a homeless psychopath, one Decarlos Brown, Jr., on the Charlotte, NC, light rail — weeks after the crime happened, because Charlotte police suppressed the CC video and the legacy news media barely reported the story. Suddenly, the country is shocked by what they see: wanton murder witnessed at the scene by a half-dozen other transit riders, who don’t even react to the woman spurting blood as she topples to the floor and bleeds out.
Already Stabbed, Minutes To Live
“Progressives” hasten to cover for the psycho. He was mentally unwell and did not get the treatment he needed. Uh-huh. . . . Yet anyone with functioning brain knew the score at once. Decarlos Brown, Jr., was “justice involved” (arrested and convicted of crimes) more than a dozen times in recent years, including a five-year stretch for armed robbery. He was on-the-loose because of how the Democratic Party manages public safety, which is not at all. It allows the criminally insane to run free, but especially if they can be sorted into the “marginalized” minority basket to be presented as sob stories (George Floyd).
The Democratic Party has this affinity for the criminally insane because the party as a whole is insane. It peddles insane policies and ideas, such as cashless bail and defunding the police. It can’t tell the truth about anything. For instance, that black people account for 37-percent of violent felonies committed in the USA, according the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, though they comprise about 13-percent of the population. And that only includes the “solved” cases, for which the “clearance rate” is a low 50- 60-percent of violent crimes — that is, more than half of violent crimes discovered go unsolved.
The Iryna Zarutska slaying set off a fury that ranged from intimations of race-war to declaring the Democratic Party a “domestic terrorist organization.” Of course, this was only days after disgruntled transgenderite Robert Westman — another product of Democratic Party ideology — shot up a catholic school in Minneapolis. Westman declared in his diaries that he’d learned to his disappointment that it is not really possible to change sexes and pretending was not good enough. That was perhaps the sole sane expression among his otherwise violently deranged writings. Westman was but one in a growing line of transgenders shooting up places, but his deed marked the end of the Democratic sex hustle, inflicting LGBTQ ideology on the schools and coercing the public to play along.
And then, Wednesday, a marksman as yet unidentified murdered Charlie Kirk, 31-year-old rising conservative media star, whose main activity was traveling to college campuses to discuss and debate the great public issues of our time with students. Charlie Kirk was an exemplary young man, on a mission to rescue our country from bad ideas and help young adults beset by the depraved Jacobin faculty discern the difference between good ideas and bad ideas. He’d barely got going in life. I won’t belabor the encomiums to Charlie’s excellence that you can read elsewhere all over the web. He was the real deal, a man in full. The Left has its martyr, the degenerate George Floyd, and now the right has its martyr, the righteous Charlie Kirk. Choose your hero.
The murder sickened at least half the nation to a degree we haven’t seen since the Kennedys and MLK were gunned down half a century ago, but the country is much more fragile now than it was then. Nobody knows what comes next, but you can sense it is going to be harsh. All that’s known about the shooter so far is that he might be the scraggly figure captured in a CC camera in a stairway on the Utah campus, that he might have used the Mauser 30.06 rifle found ditched in the woods nearby, that he was a darn good shot, and that the brass cartridges in the rifle’s chamber and magazine were engraved with “transgender and Antifa” slogans. Uh-oh. . . . (I wouldn’t want to be them on that dreadful day.)
The question on everybody’s minds — those not still paralyzed by grief and rage — is what will the political Right do now, especially those currently holding the levers of power, led by President Trump? What we have lived through is an astounding cavalcade of gross insults against our country, against our history, and against common decency. The ten-year-long seditious conspiracy against Mr. Trump was a kind of self-compounding criminal cover-up for even more long-running illegality carried on routinely in the so-called Deep State or DC blob, which has been laying trips on the people of this land for decades.
It’s all coming apart now in one climactic maelstrom of discovery and retribution. Of course, there are the anticipated indictments of many well-known Deep State figures, but the captured agencies and regions of the judiciary remain infested with either ideologues determined to wreck the country (CIA, DOJ, DOD, State) or grifters making fortunes (FSA, CDC, NIH, HUD) or the simply power-crazed who have long forgotten even why they seek to be in charge of anything. And that’s just the government, not higher ed, or medicine, or the news business, or banking and finance, or Big Business, or the lively arts. What the demon-haunted country needs is an exorcism.
Good thing America elected an exorcist in 2024. I don’t know if Mr. Trump ever thought of himself that way, but it’s come to that. I suppose he will start by dismantling altogether the skein of NGOs beyond the already-demolished USAID umbrella — and there are thousands more of them — that keep money flowing into the Democratic Party, a thoroughly corrupt and treasonous faction. Start with George and Alex Soros’s operation, please, Mr T.
The Democratic Party might not survive all that especially since it has turned itself into a mere infernal machine manufacturing hoaxes and hustles against the public interest. That’s all it does, all it stands for. Americans are about to re-learn that the reason we have laws is to state clearly what sort of human behavior is okay and what is not okay. It’s not okay to be a demon and do the Devil’s work — a metaphor, admittedly, but take it as you will.
(kunstler.com)
THE MUZZLING OF CHARLIE KIRK
At a crucial juncture in the 2020 presidential election, the Washington Post used a tried-and-true method to pressure Twitter to remove Kirk
by Matt Taibbi
The New York Times obituary of Charlie Kirk, “Charlie Kirk, Right-Wing Force and a Close Trump Ally, Dies at 31” will go down as an infamous entry in the genre for many reasons. It’s an obvious understatement/provocation to write “Dies at 31” in a headline about a man assassinated by rifle round to the neck. The Times also leaned on the worn trope of alleging racist or anti-Semitic comments without elucidating them (“He tweeted relentlessly with a brash right-wing spin, including inflammatory comments about Jewish, gay and Black people”), a tendency that’s been common in coverage today. Then there was this:
Mr. Kirk rose even further into the conservative stratosphere during the early days of the pandemic, when he was quick to attack the World Health Organization — which, in his typical fashion, he called the “Wuhan Health Organization” — accusing it of hiding the source of the Covid virus and claiming that it had emerged from a Chinese lab in the city of Wuhan. He later rallied opposition to school lockdowns and mask mandates.
He was so vocal in his willingness to spread unsupported claims and outright lies — he said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was “100 percent effective” in treating the virus, which it is not — that Twitter temporarily barred him in early March 2020. But that move only added to his notoriety and seemed to support his claim that he was being muzzled by a liberal elite.
The notion that Kirk was “so vocal” in his willingness to spread “unsupported claims and outright lies” that it led to his temporary banning on Twitter seemed a strange thing to emphasize in an obituary. The quote about hydroxychloroquine being “100 percent effective” notwithstanding, Kirk wasn’t wrong (or demonstrably wrong, anyway) to criticize the WHO, lockdowns, or mask mandates. The Times also likely should have been more circumspect about its own performance in contemporaneous stories like “For Charlie Kirk, Conservative Activist, the Virus is a Cudgel,” when the paper complained about his use of phrases like “China virus” and his tweeting of a list of pre-Covid diseases named after the location of the first cases (Zika, West Nile Virus, Ebola, etc). But was Kirk “muzzled by a liberal elite”?
According to Twitter Files documents, “muzzled” might be a strong word, but “targeted” would be accurate. One episode, in which an effort was made to remove Kirk and Benny Johnson just before the 2020 Presidential Election, stands out. Twitter understood this was a high-profile decision and copied the top executives in the firm, as well as Twitter’s “US GOV TEAM,” on its decision-making process. In the most damning sequence, Twitter went from having zero interest to actioning hundreds of accounts linked to Kirk within hours, after receiving a query from The Washington Post. Though the firm had a tough time linking Kirk himself to wrongdoing, he was recommended for removal, despite reservations by Trust and Safety executives. At the last minute, he was given a reprieve, only to be removed just before the election over a tweet about missing mail-in ballots.
In all, Twitter fielded at least three high-profile press queries about taking Kirk down just before the election, and one finally stuck. There’s no suggestion of an intelligence role, but it’s worth noting that a former CIA official was put in the “lead” of one of Kirk’s investigations…
https://www.racket.news/p/twitter-files-the-muzzling-of-charlie
THEY LOWERED THE MCDONALD’S FLAG HALF-MAST AT GUANTANAMO
by Caitlin Johnstone
The McDonald’s flag at Guantanamo Bay was lowered to half-mast in honor of the GOP swamp creature who was assassinated by a sniper the day before 9/11, which I think we can all agree is the most American thing that has ever happened.
They’re saying they caught the guy who did it. Some 22 year-old Utah kid with no priors. My social media feeds have been full of people debating whether he was right wing or left wing, or agreeing with each other that he was obviously one or the other depending on their own ideology and how insulated their echo chamber is.
I am not young enough or online enough to understand what the hell they’re talking about. It’s all about memes and groyper culture and video game references and furries. Reading the discourse makes me feel older than rocks.
I have no idea how much of what we’re being told about this case is true and how much we are being lied to. All I know is at the moment it all fits very nicely into the pre-existing plans of the powerful.
White House lackey Stephen Miller is saying that Charlie Kirk’s assassination means “radical left organizations” need to be targeted and dismantled in the United States, because it’s what Charlie would have wanted.
“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me before that assassin stole him from all of us. And we are gonna do that under President Trump’s leadership,” Miller told Fox News.
Yeah okay. The fascists want to roll out authoritarian measures and crush the left, something they definitely never planned on doing until this past Wednesday.
And meanwhile the nightmare in west Asia continues to blaze on with the backing of the empire Kirk spent his life supporting.
People in Gaza are still being starved to death and shot while seeking aid and bombed in their homes, with scores of innocents slain in the days since Kirk’s death in the genocide that he had actively facilitated. Former Israeli commander Herzi Halevi has publicly admitted that more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured since the onslaught began — a number which is surely a massive undercount.
Israel killed at least 30 journalists in an attack on a press office in Yemen on Wednesday, because the only thing the Israelis love more than bombing hospitals is assassinating news reporters, and the only thing they hate more than Palestinians is the truth.
On Thursday the IDF abducted over a thousand Palestinians at random in the West Bank following an explosion which wounded two Israeli soldiers, marching them through the streets in a public display of humiliation.
Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on a major West Bank settlement expansion on Thursday, proclaiming that “there will be no Palestinian state, this place belongs to us.” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich added that the West Bank will soon be annexed, a move the Trump administration has reportedly signed off on.
Anyway, yeah. Things are dark.
Sometimes when the world looks dark and scary I like to remind myself that the darkness was probably what pressed humanity to become the clever creature that it is.
According to British anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham, the most likely explanation for the explosion in human brain size in our evolutionary history was because our early ancestors started cooking their food with fire. This greatly reduced the amount of energy needed for chewing and digestion, which could then be redirected toward the brain, whose operation consumes a large amount of energy.
Why did our ancestors start using fire? What was the initial appeal? It probably wasn’t “I can roast this piece of animal flesh over the flames so my digestive system doesn’t have to work as hard and I can reallocate those calories for other purposes.” It was probably the warmth and the light — things which we wouldn’t have had access to in the night time.
Until our ancestors started making fire, the night would have been a terrifying time. Prehistoric predators would have been able to pick them off before they ever saw it coming; they’d have just huddled together surrounded by an infinite stretch of darkness full of sharp teeth and claws until sunrise. They probably started making fires because they were afraid of the dark.
If early humans had been a nocturnal animal, this probably wouldn’t have happened. If their eyes had been adapted for night vision, they may never have been incentivized to go through all the hard toil and trial and error that would have gone into learning how to start and maintain a fire.
They wouldn’t have been afraid of the dark, so they wouldn’t have started cooking, so their brains wouldn’t have begin to grow, and all the brilliance of our species would never have emerged. All the artistic, scientific and philosophical wonders we have birthed into this world would never have existed. We get to experience all these amazing things, ultimately, because our world used to be dark and scary.
Maybe the darkness of these times will press us to make the next adaptations necessary for a further leap forward as a species.
(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)
HOW BLUE CAN YOU GET
by Leonard & Jane Feather (1949)
I've been downhearted, baby
Ever since the day we met
I've been downhearted, baby
Ever since the day we met
Our love is nothing but the blues
Baby, how blue can you get?
My love is like a fire
Your love is like a cigarette
My love is like a fire
But baby, yours is like a cigarette
I watched you step down on it, baby
And crush it!
Tell me how, tell me how
How blue can you get?
You're evil when I'm with you
And you are jealous when we're apart
You're evil
You're so evil when I'm with you, baby
And you are jealous when we're apart
How blue can you get baby?
The answer is right here in my heart
I gave you a brand new Ford
And you said: "I want a Cadillac!"
I bought you a ten dollar dinner
And you said: "Thanks for the snack!"
I let you live in my penthouse
You said it was just a shack
I gave you seven children
And now you wanna to give 'em back
Yes, I've been downhearted, baby
Ever since the day we met
Our love is nothing but the blues, baby
Baby, how blue can you get?
SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH ABOUT ISRAEL AND GAZA
Editor:
Don’t say Palestine unless it’s to suggest that the people there are all terrorists, and Israel is only defending itself by sending all the Palestinians to kingdom come. That’s the real premise of Assembly Bill 715, now kicking its way around the Legislature, and being supported by our own state senator, Mike McGuire.
Masquerading as a way to protect K-12 Jewish students from antisemitism, the bill is actually an effort to suppress the truth about the Palestine/Israel conflict. And it falls right into line with the Trump administration’s Project Esther, which is, again, a plan to root out criticism of Israel by claiming it is antisemitic. In fact, the bill mentions Israel, Israelis and Zionism 10 times, more often than it mentions the Jewish students it claims to protect.
Frighteningly, going after Palestinians, and those of us who support them, is clearly the first step in Trump’s agenda to roll back all dissent and all freedom of speech. Palestine activists are a relatively easy target. And it is Democrats in our state Legislature who are promoting this gateway attack on all of our freedoms. What’s next, removing Greg Sarris’ “Watermelon Nights” and Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” from school library shelves?
Lois Pearlman
Guerneville
THE INHUMAN CRUELTY CONTINUES
by John Arteaga
I was really moved, the other day, by the words I heard from an impassioned speaker on some KZYX program where they were talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I didn’t catch the speaker’s name, but when he said something like, “we are, all of us, challenged by this outrage to our common humanity”. It’s true; we can all come up with whatever excuses or evasions we will, but like the fact that Israel has killed over 240 journalists (sometimes annihilating them and their entire families at their homes, or as they did yesterday, bombing one of the few barely functioning hospitals left in the Gaza Strip, where there just happened to be five Al Jazeera journalists in exactly the spot where the missile hit. Of course the IDF flack said that they were targeting a Hamas surveillance camera (as if that would justify bombing a hospital full of desperate wounded people, doctors, nurses and in this case five journalists trying to do their job!). Israel said that it regretted the ‘mishap’. Sheesh!
Unlike the good Germans of World War II Germany, many of whom could legitimately claim that they knew nothing about the Holocaust being perpetrated by their government, the media having been, by then, completely bent to the will of Der Fuhrer (much like what is happening here in the USofA under Trump), we have no such excuse; in the age of live streaming and instant communication, the intentional mass murder of perhaps a million of our fellow human beings is not something that, I hope, can be swept under the rug.
But hey! October 7th! Doesn’t that justify whatever barbarism the Zionist regime can come up with against the entire Palestinian people? That atrocity, which was accompanied by a Warren commission, 9/11 type of ‘investigation’ where the preconceived narrative was never challenged by troublesome facts, like the fact that the always, everywhere, IDF was suddenly absent from the scene for 6 hours while the carnage took place, and that when they finally stirred themselves to do something about it they followed their doctrine of annihilating both hostages and hostage takers rather than see any more hostages being taken. Truth be told, should it ever, I would bet you dollars to donuts that Mossad or other Israeli agents set the whole thing up, complete with supplying the flying hang gliders etc.
The absolutely inhuman cruelty of what Israel is doing to the millions of Palestinians who have thus far survived their endless predation, reminds me of what I once considered hyperbole; that the complete penetration and domination of US foreign policy exercised by Israel is such that, should the Zionist regime decide that the only solution to their ‘Palestinian problem’ is The Final Solution, that is, setting up Nazi-style gas ovens and poison gas killing rooms, that the US government would immediately step up to fund the construction of them. At this point, the miraculously surviving millions of starving, wounded Palestinians are being herded from one location to another so that Israeli bulldozers can freely go about the business of leveling their beautiful stone homes to deprive them of anywhere to go back to. Just today, the IDF, after forcing people to leave their high rise apartment buildings under pain of death, used robots to plant explosives in at least three of these high-rise apartment blocks, leveling them. At the same time they have been mass murdering those who show up to, hope beyond hope, receive some pathetic ration of food promised by some for-profit mercenary con job by the name of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or whatever Orwellian name they give to this bait-and-kill program. It seems to me that the gas ovens would be a more merciful fate for these starving people, abandoned by the rest of humanity because of their unwillingness to face the plain facts of what we, through our elected governments, are funding there in our name and with our tax money!
On the subject of senseless and completely unjustifiable mass murder, let’s look at this slaughter of 11 individuals somewhere near Venezuela in what sounds like a very expensive high speed motorboat that was blown out of the water by the U.S. Navy at the behest of a commander-in-chief, with the specious explanation that it was a drug smuggling boat. First of all, this kind of high speed multi-motor hot rod boat is certainly not the kind of vessel used to transport drugs. It would have nowhere near the range needed to even get to the United States. Secondly, a drug shipping boat would only have one or two people on board, just enough to pilot it. Why put any more people than that at risk?! 11 people would take up valuable space that could be used for drugs!
11 people! They were probably just friends of some well off individual down there going for a spin on his hot rod boat.
SORRY! Our idiot commander-in-chief just decided to sacrifice all your lives to distract attention from the fact that he is a lifelong child (and convicted adult) rapist who is desperately trying to do anything that he can to stop the release of Epstein files which would undoubtedly verify what many people in the know assume to be the case. God bless those victims who spoke to Congress on the steps of the capital the other day.
May they eventually have their day and see all these uber-powerful sick pervs get busted!
Of course the six Republicans who dominate our ‘supreme’ court have already decided that the president is a King, and is above the law, so I’m not holding my breath for justice to prevail.
Mass murder, child rape, hey, it all falls under the heading of the imperial president’s ‘official duties’ as far as these prostituted ‘justices’ are concerned, so it’s all good!
For this and other articles; https://inarationalworld2.blogspot.com/2025/09/usreal-genocide.html
(John Arteaga is a Ukiah resident.)
“assassinated by a sniper the day before 9/11, which I think we can all agree is the most American thing that has ever happened.”
That’s likely one of the sickest and most vile things I have ever heard. It’s obvious some folks have got a screw loose and this gal seems to have several missing.
California bans the death penalty for some seriously twisted and sick individuals convicted of terrible crimes. Meanwhile we have people celebrating the assassination of a father and husband who had a differing point of view. Leaves me wondering, what’s next?
There’s really something wrong with people and I hope it’s not contagious.
Never ask what’s next!!
I’d like to assume that Ms Johnstone was referring to the “lowering of the flag at the McDonalds at Guantanamo “ and not the assassination in that statement.
Either way, I hope no one is moved to start engraving bullets over her comments.
Assassination is a very American trait. Just ask Native Americans, the Buffalo, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Evers, Kennedy, Oswald, Lumumba, Malcolm, King, Kennedy, Hampton, Silkwood, Allende, Milk, Moscone, Lennon, Newton, Tupac [partial list].
“assassinated by a sniper the day before 9/11, which I think we can all agree is the most American thing that has ever happened.”
That’s not talking about the flags being flown at McDonalds. No one one should be engraving bullets for any reason.
Someone’s got a screw loose.
Israeli children writing messages on bombs that were dropped on Arab children –
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GAASCqnbYAAbBNH?format=jpg
Nikki Haley, former US ambassador to the UN, writing on bombs that were dropped on Arab children –
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gog_oA_P6rI/maxresdefault.jpg
President of Israel writing on bombs that were dropped on Arab children –
https://ynet-pic1.yit.co.il/picserver5/crop_images/2023/12/25/H1gi00TQDvp/H1gi00TQDvp_8_8_676_999_0_x-large.jpg
Orthodox Zionists Israelsi write on bombs that were dropped on Arab children –
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2E7RK6T/ultra-orthodox-jewish-men-write-on-artillery-shells-at-a-position-in-the-northern-village-of-fassuta-near-the-lebanese-border-july-24-2006-israels-offensive-in-lebanon-is-not-aimed-at-totally-dismantling-hizbollah-but-rather-at-preventing-the-guerrilla-group-returning-to-the-border-and-attacking-the-jewish-state-a-cabinet-minister-said-2E7RK6T.jpg
Bomb written on by US military, dropped on Iraq where the US killed 1-2 million people even though they had nothing to do with 9/11 –
https://live.staticflickr.com/7557/16336267045_d1c6a91e88.jpg
Oh, by the way, guess who paid for the bombs?
Oh, by the way, guess who voted for the people who signed the checks?
THE INHUMAN CRUELTY CONTINUES
Well stated…better lock and chain your doors and be always on the look-out. Trumpies operatives will be seeking you out!
That “night sky” is a beauty. Thanks, Elaine, you’ve got a good eye.
What’s the story on KZYX vet Rich Culbertson, KMUD’s new interim Station Manager, who will probably be the permanent one I’m told.
(Apparently his job will include cutting the stations expenses by 30%, starting with firing one unknown placeholder who just milks it. Hmm, wonder who that is…)
In times like these, more people will understandably yearn for refuge from the storm.
Google’s AI Overview adeptly provides good advice on that front:
For those seeking spiritual refuge during political turmoil, spiritual leaders and mental health experts recommend practices such as setting boundaries on news and social media, prioritizing intentional daily habits, and connecting with community to reduce stress and maintain perspective.
Set intentions and manage your media consumption
Intentionally limit how much you consume news and social media to find a balance between staying informed and avoiding overwhelming anxiety.
Establish boundaries: Schedule specific, brief times to check the news, like once in the morning and once in the evening. Avoid scrolling constantly or checking updates right before bed.
Be mindful of your triggers: Pay attention to how news and online discussions affect your emotional state. If a topic consistently makes you feel agitated, limit your engagement with it.
Curate your feeds: Mute or unfollow accounts that primarily post political content and create feelings of anxiety.
Ground yourself with daily practices
Spiritual practices that focus on presence and peace can serve as a refuge amid the “what-ifs” of political uncertainty.
Meditation and mindfulness: Use practices like deep breathing or guided meditation to stay grounded in the present moment. This can help prevent your thoughts from spiraling into worst-case scenarios.
Prayer or spiritual reflection: Start and end your day with prayer or quiet contemplation. This can help you focus on your core values and connect with a spiritual purpose beyond the current political climate.
Cultivate gratitude: Intentionally shift your focus toward what is good in your life. Journaling a few things you are grateful for each day can boost your mood and balance negative thoughts.
Take constructive action to regain control
Focusing your energy on things you can control, rather than fixating on broad political worries, can restore a sense of purpose.
Engage in your community: Research local organizations that support causes you care about and find out how you can get involved. This can be more empowering than focusing solely on national politics.
Act mindfully: Consider ways you can engage in activism that align with your spiritual values, such as volunteering or advocating respectfully for your beliefs.
Reframe your perspective: Recognize that you can cope with whatever outcomes occur. Taking a longer-term view reminds you that society and politics have always faced challenges.
Connect with your spiritual community
Faith communities can serve as a buffer against political polarization by creating shared values and a sense of belonging that transcends political divides.
Participate in service: Join interfaith coalitions or service groups to work alongside people with differing political views. Focusing on common goals can help bridge divides.
Seek solace with fellow members: Leaders and members of religious organizations can provide emotional and spiritual support during stressful times. Reach out to stay connected with your community.
Hold meaningful discussions: When engaging with others, try to find common ground and focus on shared values rather than heated arguments. Understand that others hold their views based on their own life experiences.
time to ban AI essays from the comments
AI is a failure of civilization
and a money grab
Yes. It’s not intelligence at all. It’s just theft of intellectual property on a massive scale. I fail to see it’s benefit to humanity.
What to do…
Dr. Richard Miller recommends…
Wilbur Hot Springs, a health sanctuary and nature resort in Northern California. He founded the sanctuary and serves as its owner and chief caretaker.
Who is Dr. Miller?
He is an American clinical psychologist and author, known for his work in psychology and his establishment of the Wilbur Hot Springs Health Sanctuary.
What is Wilbur Hot Springs?
It is a health sanctuary and nature resort located in Northern CA, near Clear Lake at 3375 Wilbur Springs Rd, Williams, CA 95987 offering a place to rejuvenate in nature and utilize the hot mineral springs.
Check out his new book.
Re: Elise Cox’s report on the Sierra Northern Railway & Mendocino Railway v. City of Fort Bragg lawsuit:
The Court Clerk filing the plaintiff’s Request to Enter Default only means that the City’s attorneys in this case, hired according to City Manager Isaac Whippy, by the City’s insurance carrier, missed a deadline.
On September 9, Federal District Court Judge Jon Tiger scheduled another case management conference for November 18, with a Joint Case Management Statement due by November 11.
As a side note, this case is almost a carbon copy of a lawsuit filed by Georgia-Pacific/Koch Industries in 2011 against prior owners Boise Cascade and Office Max, adding the City of Fort Bragg in 2013. That lawsuit abruptly settled under seal prior to the discovery phase, reportedly following Georgia Pacific’s realization that they had been hiding massive pollution of the ponds and site by fly ash from the power plant boiler.
And it’s not over yet.
Case filings and details may be found here: https://savenoyoheadlands.org/snr-v-fb/index.html
what are the odds, that the good sheriff couldnt even finish johnstones article?
80-20?
Dale, I read its entirety hoping somewhere it would get better. Theres a 100 /O chance that won’t be happening again.
In a free society we are allowed to do, and say stupid things as long other persons, and property are not hurt. None of us are exempt, and all of us do it. In politics saying and doing stupid things that are legal, is an American institution. Some writers in the AVA are good at this, and proud. The intellect in these cases is shallow, to say the least.
Yep there’s a lot of things going on that folks can say “it’s not wrong”. Brace yourself folks, a lot of it sure as hell isn’t right either.
I don’t speak poorly of the dead, count head stones or whistle in cemeteries. We all have our quirks for sure. Some seem a little tamer than others.
We are dealing with something relatively new in this country called “stochastic terrorism”. This is when someone with a platform and reach engages in hate speech targeting a specific group, whether it’s Jews, gays, Democratic office holders, or whoever. This hate speech is often laden with lies and allegations of supposed threats to the dominant group or culture. The speaker does not engage in anything illegal. By current standards, their speech is protected by the First Amendment. However, it is reasonable to believe that, given the accusatory and inflammatory nature of their speech, that more fanatical or psychologically unbalanced followers, ones looking to make a name for themselves in the speaker’s group or audience, will put that hate into action and attack representatives of the target group. Kirk’s alleged killer, Robinson was reportedly a follower of Nick Fuentes, leader of the Proud Boys, who flamed Kirk as being soft and not far enough right. Other attacks have followed similar patterns.
Stochastic terrorism creates serious difficulties for a society that seeks to remain peaceful. The speakers, in the current state of the law, cannot be held legally responsible for the independent acts of their followers. Unless they explicitly instruct their followers to attack, they are just “expressing an opinion”. And yet, it is reasonable to believe that, given sufficient inflammatory speech, someone will take the next step to action. This is how demagogues and authoritarians intimidate their opponents and develop their critical mass of followers who protect, project and act out their animosity on their target scapegoats and victims. It’s something this country is way behind on figuring out how to deal with. But it’s here.
Thanks for this post, James, it gets to a good part of what is happening.
True, and it is a two way street.
That part is often overlooked by the stridently righteous
what a day!!!! I finished 5 more beams on my deck, that was great, so see you tomorrow, enjoy:)
“Trump operatives will be seeking you out”
“Assassination is a very American trait”
Thank you for both of your inputs
well spoken
There are two books I would strongly suggest AVA people read; “Road To Serfdom” by Frederick Hayek, and “A Conflict Of Visions” by Thomas Sowell. Both are written by “conservative” writers, but both do a good job of offering insightful recognition for fundamental, and inherent differences of human social perspectives. I would start with Thomas Sowell.
I have yet to meet an “insightful” conservative. Most are totally full of their own supposed self-importance and “intellect”.
No group or person has a monopoly on closed minded bigotry.
Maybe, but it occurs much more often among conservatives, which is obvious to anyone with the brains to see it.
“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!”
Actually, it looks a bit like Ted Cruz. Is that just a synchronicity?
Evan Wroten – uhm, Charlie Kirk was an extremist. He was a Christian Nationalist, also known as a Dominionist. He wanted the US to be a Christian nation by law, which would undo one of the pillars of the founding of the country. Many of the key founders of the country were Deists, not Christians, including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen., George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison.
Kirk wanted public executions – with children mandated to view them. He wanted a complete stop to all non-white immigration, legal or otherwise. If you’re sitting there thinking “gosh, none of that sounds very extreme,” well, uhm, I have some news for you…. you’re an extremist.
He also advocated for genocide in Gaza. The ironic thing is that when he finally started moderating that view by platforming anti-Zionist Jews like Dave Smith as well as other new critics of Israel like Tucker Carlson… when he started saying that the Mossad was behind Epstein’s pedophile extortion network … when he started blaming “da Jews” for immigration … when he turned down direct funding from Israel… when he turned down an invitation by Netanyau to visit Israel … he was murdered within weeks.
Matt Walsh has called for the right to ‘stop the infighting.” Gosh, Matt, what was it you were infighting about again? Ben Shapiro has said he will “pick up Charlie’s bloody microphone.” Gosh, Ben, wasn’t it you who got into an argument with Charlie about the Mossad being behind Epstein just a few days ago?
Re: online comment of the day, “One common theme seems to be that the assassin almost 100% of the time turns out to be a supposed insignificant person leading a troubled, insignificant life.”
James Earl Ray didn’t do it. A civil jury found that the assassination of MLK Jr. was a conspiracy of “government agencies.”
Sirhan Sirhan didn’t do it. RFK’s two sons say so. So does one of RFK’s friends who was injured in the attack. Who benefits from pinning it on a Palestinian?
Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam didn’t do it. Malcolm X died because of a conspiracy involving the NYPD and the FBI – so said both the criminal court that exhonerated Aziz and Islam and a civil court which awarded them damages for the 20 years they lost in prison afer being falsely convicted.
Oswald probably didn’t do it. In 1979, The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.’
John Hinkley probably did do it, but few know that he is the son of one of GHW Bush’s best friends. Few know that today Hinkley is a 100% free man with no requirement to check in with a parole officer or a mental health specialist.
So when they tell you the assassin was just some weird loner… overcome your mind control and recognize history for what it is.
Re: Kunstler. I stopped reading at “Kunstler.” Zionists in 2025 belong in graves or in jail. Just like Nazis in 1940. Going around advocating for murder and genocide is a crime under our laws – both as incitement and as terrorism.
Re: Caitlin Johnstone. She remains one of the most erudite commentators of our time, just as the (invisible in the AVA) Whitney Webb is the best journalist alive today.
Some Charlie Kirk quotes. All real, all verifiable.
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.”
“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.”
Kirk was asked what he would want his daughter to do if she were 10 years old and pregnant following rape. He responded, “The answer is yes. The baby would be delivered.”
” [Black women] do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.”
“Democrat women want to die alone without children.”
“I’m not a fan of retirement. I don’t think retirement is biblical.”
“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act.”
“MLK [Jr] was awful.”
“The world is a better place because of the state of Israel.”
“I don’t think [Palestine] exists… It’s a non-existent place… I don’t think the place exists.”
And now Charlie Kirk doesn’t exist. Boo hoo hoo.