Mendocino County Today: Sunday 9/14/2025

By AVA News Service on September 14, 2025

A QUICK MOVING COLD FRONT brings a quick chance for rain and thunderstorms early this morning. Clearing skies and dry conditions expected for the rest of the day. A warming trend returns to the interior starting Monday through mid next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A clear (wait, WHAT?) yes clear skies & 52F this Sunday morning on the coast. The fog sure looks nearby but our forecast is calling for mostly sunny this week. Call me crazy but I'm not buying it, we'll see.

WALTER FREDERICK LINA

Loving husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, friend, and restaurateur, Walter Frederick Lina passed away at home on 06/25/2025. King of the Dad Joke, Walt had a pun or good-natured wisecrack for every situation, and a talent for lightening the mood with his wonderful sense of humor and warm disposition. Walt is survived by his devoted wife of 50 years, Yong Lina, their three daughters, Suzann, Jennifer, and Angela Lina, his grandchildren, Leila and Ellis, and his siblings, Rick and Nancy Martin.

An integral part of the Historic Downtown Fort Bragg community, for over 40 years, Walt, Yong, and their three daughters have welcomed locals and visitors alike at their Redwood Avenue Restaurants: Yankee Doodle Doggie from 1985-1989, the Redwood Cookhouse (1989-2002), and Lee’s Chinese (1999- to Present). Though he could be firm and protective of loved ones when the situation called for it, Walt led first and foremost with the principles of unconditional love and kindness that his mother Alice, raised him with. Walt and his wife, Yong, have lived by the saying: “When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence”, values carried on by their remarkable daughters and granddaughters. During their forty years on Redwood Avenue, Walt and his family have hosted countless holiday, birthday, and “just because” gatherings at their restaurants, where anyone who showed up was met with a warm welcome, a fabulous plate of food, and a sense of belonging.

Born on August 21, 1952, in Berkeley to Alton and Alice Lina, Walt attended Berkeley High in the 1960s, where he began his lifelong love affair with Rock and Roll Music. During his adolescence, Walt attended concerts by Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Rolling Stones, and the Monterey International Pop Festival. After high school, Walt enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he served 6 years of active duty, rising to the rank of Sergeant and later spent 23 years serving in the National Guard. In 1972 Walt was assigned to Camp Hialeah/Casey in Busan, South Korea, where he met his future wife Yong. The two were wed in 1974. They gave birth to their first daughter, Suzann, in 1976, followed by Jennifer in 1978, and Angela in 1980. As a military family, the Linas moved from base to base: Camp Hialeah, Busan, South Korea, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Fort Ord, Monterey, and later Sacramento, before finally putting down permanent roots in Fort Bragg in 1984.

Walt initially worked as a grader for Georgia Pacific Lumber, and in 1985 purchased his first of three restaurants, which he would own and operate with his wife and three daughters: Yankee Doodle Doggy on Redwood Ave. In 1989, the Linas bought The Redwood Cookhouse, a beloved home style buffet frequented by working Fort Bragg families, which operated until 2002. In 1999 the family bought Lee’s Chinese, at 154 E Redwood Ave, which they continue to operate as a family, holding Walt’s table which served as his base of daily operations, where he would order supplies and hold court with visitors, in tribute to their loving Patriarch. Walt is already dearly missed by all who were lucky enough to know him, and his legacy of warmth and kindness lives on through the many people he and his family have served with love throughout the years. A celebratory barbecue will be held in Walt’s honor by the Lina Family at a future date.

MARCH TO ROUND VALLEY HONORS SURVIVORS OF 1863 FORCED RELOCATION

by Matt LaFever

The 30th annual Nome Cult Walk, a weeklong remembrance of a tragic chapter in Northern California history, begins this weekend and continues through Sept. 20, the U.S. Forest Service announced in a press release. Participants will retrace a portion of the 1863 forced relocation of 461 Native Americans from Chico to Round Valley. Only 277 survived the 100-mile trek. Today, the walk brings together generations of descendants from multiple tribes, including the Concow Maidu, Round Valley Indian Tribes, Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians, Berry Creek Rancheria of Maidu Indians of California, Redding Rancheria, Grindstone Nomlaki, the Mechoopda Tribe, Pit River, Wintu, Nisenan and Greenville Maidu.

Forest officials are urging drivers traveling through Mendocino National Forest to be alert for walkers along M4 Road, County Road 55 and FH7 into Eel River Station and Covelo. Caution signs will be posted at forest entrances, and the walkers’ support team will display warnings on their vehicles.

The planned schedule begins Sept. 14 toward Orland, Sept. 15 toward Newville Cemetery, Sept. 16 to Black Bear Campground, Sept. 17 to Log Springs, Sept. 18 to Wells Cabin, Sept. 19 to Eel River Campground, and concludes Sept. 20 at the Round Valley Indian Reservation.

This year’s events also include a public gathering hosted by the Mechoopda Indian Tribe and Chico State University, scheduled for Sept. 13 at 2 p.m. in Colusa Hall on the Chico State campus. More information can be found on the Nome Cult Walk’s Facebook page.

(MendoFever.com)

GOING NOWHERE SLOWLY

by Mark Scaramella

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.” — Yogi Berra

Toward the end of Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Board Chair John Haschak off-handedly asked Supervisor Ted Williams to report on his (and Supervisor Madeline Cline’s) Budget ad hoc committee since Williams hadn’t mentioned it in his similarly off-hand “Supervisor’s Report.”

In his Supervisor’s report Williams had instead said that during the Board’s six week self-granted vacation he had studied County budgets going back to the 50s and brilliantly concluded that Mendo was spending a smaller percentage of property taxes on roads than in the past and that 1978’s Proposition 13 statewide property tax limitation measure had restricted County revenues almost overnight. Williams predicted that Mendo might have to convert some County roads to gravel rather than maintain them as asphalt. Williams also brilliantly noted that the County should be “more pro-active” with regard to business development. (It would be impossible for them to be less pro-active. In fact, it would be nice if they were even active.)

It took Williams six weeks of study to make these patently obvious and pointless observations. But when it came to addressing the County’s current budget problems all he could say was, “We haven’t got anywhere. We will have to make massive cuts and nobody will like them. We are like a deer in the headlights. I know the Board won’t support these cuts. It’s not good news.”

Haschak doubled down on the obvious, adding, “The longer we wait, the bigger the problem.”

“Cuts will have to be made,” added CEO Darcie Antle, “and it all will be opposed.”

Antle then inexplicably told the Board that her CEO report “does not include the things we’re looking at.” Why not?, one might wonder, but nobody did. “It might be new revenues. We are looking at a $16 million shortfall next year. I work every day with the Sheriff on what to cut. Travel, training… But most of it is required spending. And the Board has stated that we can’t touch public safety.”

The Board and the CEO have been making these kinds of self-evident doomsday observations for at least two years and yet, as Williams said, “We haven’t got anywhere.”

Williams then suddenly contradicted what he’s had been saying previously: “We have to cut public safety. If you cut other things, you cut off revenue. We need the Sheriff’s Office to right-size public safety. We can’t afford what we have.”

Before anyone could respond, Williams then interrupted himself saying that maybe they were drifting into an unagendized budget discussion.

Haschak concluded, “Sooner is better than waiting.” And later is worse than now. And more is more than less. And stop is slower than go. And never is later than someday.

Instead of doing the responsible thing, i.e., volunteering a substantive budget report or recommendations at the next Board meeting, Williams asked Haschak, “Do you want a date? Do you want hard proposals for cuts?” (Williams is in no position to magically know by himself what cuts to recommend, other than those that he presumes the board won’t support.)

Haschak thought that would be nice, “Bring back a proposal,” he replied, but imposed no date.

Williams and his oblivious colleagues have been sitting on their hands for years with this kind of empty budget rhetoric with nothing to show for it.

They never demand budget status reports or recommendations from their CEO, never invite the department heads for serious budget-xutting discussions, ignore their own assignments, and fail to take action at every turn, despite their vague acknowledgement that the longer they delay the worse the problem gets.

What about that “monthly vacancy report” that CEO Antle promised in June, the one that was supposed to track how many millions of dollars they claimed would be saved by leaving random vacant positions open for at least two years? It’s over three months and counting now and CEO Antle hasn’t provided any vacancy information, much less a monthly report, and none of the Supervisors have bothered to ask.

On Wednesday, after doing nothing and making no decisions on Tuesday, the Board held their big “workshop” concerning anticipated social services funding cuts heading this way from the Trump administration. The workshop was originally supposed to take all day, but the ended it before noon and went into closed session.

Deputy Social Services Director Rachel Ebel-Elliott summed the health and social services situation up nicely, although at bureaucratically long length, by telling the Board that 42,000 Mendolanders are on Medi-Cal and that she expects it will cost more to process their paperwork, require more staffing to handle more applications for less help and less money for the County as well as stricter eligibility requirements.

Mendo’s response was summarized by Board chair Haschak: “We will have to work together more and collaborate,” adding that “the CEO’s door is always open.”

As an afterthought, among the distressing observations made by the County’s Behavioral/Public Health Director Dr. Jenine Miller, was the fact that the soon to be opened Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) now under construction on Whitmore Lane south of Ukiah which was supposed to reduce the number of mental patients sent outside the County, will not accept anyone under the age of 25 because state law prohibits them being on the same site as adults. “It also depends on insurance,” added Dr. Miller. The insurance providers (Medi-Cal and private companies) have to agree to designate the County’s PHF as a mental health services “provider” before insurance will pay for whatever the PHF may provide. In other words, the PHF, paid for with around $10 million of 2017’s Measure B money and sold to the public as a way to assist or reduce the number of free-floating street nuts and drug addicts in the County, won’t make any noticeable improvement since the only people admitted to the PHF will be those whose costs are determined to “reimbursable,” at least half of whom will be paying customers from outside Mendocino County.

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Rudy is a soulful-eyed 6-year-old Brussels Griffon mix — a gentle little guy with a heart full of love. Rudy is incredibly people-oriented — he thrives on human companionship and will happily curl up in your lap for a snooze, or just to keep you company while you relax at home. He’s lived peacefully with other small dogs and could easily join a home with canine companions. Rudy has a calm and affectionate nature that makes him a wonderful fit for someone looking for a loyal, low-key friend. Whether you’re reading a book, watching TV, or working from home, Rudy will be happiest when he’s by your side. If you’re a fan of the little’uns and looking for a loving and devoted dog to complete your home, Rudy is ready to steal your heart. Rudy is 13 lovable pounds.

Our dog kennels are now open to the public Tuesday-Friday 1:30 to 4 pm, Saturday 10 am to 2:30 pm, closed for lunch Saturday from 1 to 1:30.

Join us the first Saturday of every month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event.

For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.

Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

UKIAH ROLLS FORTUNA

Ukiah 26, Fortuna 12: The Wildcats scored 20 unanswered points in the third quarter to rally from a halftime deficit in a win over the visiting Huskies on Saturday night.

Ukiah (2-1) trailed to Fortuna (0-2) 12-6 at the break but scored three touchdowns in a seven-minute span to pull away and avoid the upset.

Quarterback Beau David passed for two touchdowns and rushed for two more on the night. He had two short rushing scores in the third and completed touchdown passes of seven and 30 yards to Darion Dorsey and Zach Martinez, respectively. Dorsey also had an interception and a fumble recovery in the first half and Martinez’s 30-yard touchdown reception with four minutes left in the third put the Wildcats ahead 19-12.

Dante Giacomini added an interception in the fourth to help Ukiah close out the win.

Ukiah welcomes undefeated Chico (3-0) to town next Saturday.

DONNA BUSHNELL:

As I reflect this morning on the 9/11 tragedy…. searching through photos I felt appropriate to post…the one that caught my eye and literally made me tear up…was this picture of the old Covelo Hotel and the beautiful little flag hanging out front.

I remember everyone searching for flags, the local stores selling out, friends and neighbors in unity helping each other put them up.

Beautiful American flags were everywhere!! Let’s do this again today…let’s flood our town with patriotism and love for one another!!

Never Forget.

AV EVENTS (today)

Free Entry to Hendy Woods State Park for local residents
Sun 09 / 14 / 2025 at 8:00 AM
Where: Hendy Woods State Park More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4516)

No AV Grange Pancake And Egg Breakfast
Sun 09 / 14 / 2025 at 8:30 AM
Where: Anderson Valley Grange , 9800 CA-128, Philo, CA 95466 More
Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4634)

Mendocino County Fair & Apple Show
Sun 09 / 14 / 2025 at 10:00 AM
Where: Mendocino County Fairgrounds, Boonville, 14400 Highway 128,
Boonville, CA 95415 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4886)

The Anderson Valley Museum Open
Sun 09 / 14 / 2025 at 1:00 PM
Where: The Anderson Valley Museum , 12340 Highway 128, Boonville , CA
95415 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4868)

HEATHER KNIGHT: Just a heads up for parents with babies at the Boonville fair. This is the first year babies are required to have tickets to ride the carousel. Usually they let the parents ride with the babies and they wanted to make me buy him tickets 20 minutes before the fair closed when I had the wristband on. Been going to this fair for 33 years and never had this happen.

CLOVERDALE LEADERS TO PROVIDE FREE NARCAN TO LOCAL BUSINESSES TO CURB FATAL OPIOID OVERDOSES

More than 20% of Cloverdale’s businesses signed up to carry the life-saving medication within 24 hours of the program’s launch.

by Amie Windsor

Efforts are underway in Cloverdale to increase access to Narcan, a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses.

Over the past month, Mayor Todd Lands — who is running for Sonoma County Fourth District Supervisor — has partnered with the Cloverdale Chamber of Commerce, Micah’s Hugs and providers at Alexander Valley Healthcare to provide area businesses with four free doses of the medication, also known as Naloxone.

The medications being offered to Cloverdale businesses are nasal sprays and, when used soon enough after an overdose, can restore a person’s breathing within two to three minutes.

The coordinated push comes after a handful of fentanyl overdoses has pierced the Cloverdale community’s core.

“Our community, like many others, has seen its share of overdoses due to fentanyl,“ Lands wrote in a Aug. 15 letter to his fellow council members. “Fentanyl can be deadly to anyone that encounters it in any way, whether you mean to use the drug or not.”

In the past decade, more than 230,000 people under the age of 35 died from a drug overdose in the United States. Nearly 74,000 people died after ingesting fentanyl in the U.S. in 2022. That is approximately 200 people every day.

In 2024, fentanyl killed 49 people in Sonoma County, according to the Santa Rosa Police Department. Of those, 41 deaths involved a mixture of fentanyl with other narcotics or controlled substances.

While he recognizes that fighting the fentanyl and opioid crisis is “multipronged,” Lands also said that increasing access to Naloxone was a no-brainer.

“This is a product that can save the life of someone you love, or someone in distress, and you cannot be wrong for administering” it, Lands wrote in his letter.

The supplies come from Micah’s Hugs, a nonprofit dedicated to advocacy and education around the prevalence and dangers of fentanyl, including providing free Naloxone and fentanyl test strips. The organization has partnered with Alexander Valley Healthcare to distribute Naloxone to community members for free.

“At Alexander Valley Healthcare, we are deeply concerned about the rising number of fatal overdoses linked to fentanyl and other opioids,” Alexander Valley Healthcare wrote in a social media statement in February.

Lands said that 20% of the town’s 285 businesses reached out to him and Neena Hanchett, executive director of the Cloverdale Chamber of Commerce, within 24 hours of the announcement of the program.

“It’s nice to see our community coming together,” Lands said.

Businesses receive two boxes of two doses, plus a sticker they can place on their window that alerts passersby that Narcan is available inside.

Hanchett said they’re handing out the doses, “no questions asked. That’s not our place.”

What’s more important to both her and Lands is that increasing access to the medication has the ability to save lives.

“Even one person dying is too many,” she said.

The dramatically improved accessibility of Naloxone has been credited with a significant drop in overdose fatalities.

Last year, the number of overdose deaths in the U.S. among young adults, ages 20 to 29, was cut in half. At the same time, there were 40% fewer overdose deaths among teens.

Overall, there were 24% fewer fatal overdoses in the U.S. in 2024.

While Lands and Hanchett say that using the medication is simple, leaders at the Cloverdale Senior Multipurpose Center have planned an informational event set for Sept. 30 that will teach community members how to use the medication properly and provide details on what to expect after administering it.

“This is a subject that affects so many families and anything we can do to help others learn more and be prepared, the better it is for our community,” said Melanie Hall, program manager with the senior center.

The event will take place from 5 to 6 p.m. at 311 N Main St. It will feature retired firefighter Michael Velasquez and Blake Manning, a behavioral health counselor and substance use disorder lead with Alexander Valley Healthcare.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

Mark Scaramella notes: We asked Anderson Valley Fire Chief Andres Avila if there had been any narcan overdose saves in the Valley this year. Avila replied, “Good question. I believe we have had several doses administered with a few resulting positively. I’ll pass this along to [Ambulance Service Manager] Clay Eubank to see if he can add any figures to this.”

CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, September 13, 2025

JAMES DALEY, 67, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

LAKOTA HOAGLEN, 25, Covelo. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

DALE KLEINSORGE, 61, Willits. Failure to appear.

ELOY LOPEZ JR., Ukiah. DUI, controlled substance, suspended license for DUI.

SHIDEEWUM MARTINEZ, 27, Willits. Domestic battery, criminal threats, probation revocation.

ELI RIOS-WILLIAMS, 23, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

AARON STILL, 44, Ukiah. Probation revocation, resisting.

ROBERTO VARGAS-DEJESUS, 34, Ukiah. Narcotics for sale.

KARA WAGNER, 25, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

ROBERT YEOMANS, 68, Ukiah. DUI.

MEMO OF THE AIR: In flagrante delicto.

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s (9pm PDT, 2025-09-12) 8-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0661

Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I’ll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you’ll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

A gigantic question mark ten times bigger than the Earth, made of blazing plasma. That is the question. https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/gigantic-letter-s-spotted-on-the-sun-just-before-a-dark-eruption-hurls-a-fiery-shadow-at-earth

Katerina Valenti - Moto Perpetuo. (via b3ta) https://youtube.com/watch?v=DjcduD53HT8

Bohemian Rhapsody in isiZulu, the Bantu language. https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/09/bohemian-rhapsody-in-isizulu.html

Jeremy Siskind - Misty, and semi-ecstatic about it. /Play Misty For Me/ was one of the many adult-rated movies that I and my friends got to see by having the driving parent drop us off at Roseville Theater and we’d wait till he or she drove away and run up the street to the Tower Theater and get a grown-up couple in the line to say we’re with them so the ticket person wouldn’t turn us away for being too young. I grasped immediately that Jessica Walter was bad news, and so wasn’t at all surprised when she went all stabby at Clint Eastwood with a foot-long pair of scissors, sorry to spoil it for you. I love the song, and it and the movie are two things that go together perfectly or call each other into memory wherever they appear alone. Also the foot-long scissors at the ribbon-wire rack at work. And any extra-big revolver, punk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7es0gs6vnLY

And the A.I. Bible, a work in progress. https://www.pray.com/theaibibleofficial/videos

Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

*Mountain Juniper* (1933) by Maynard Dixon

SAUNA TIME

by Paul Modic

I told a friend about my calendar and he said it was odd and might be counterproductive that I keep daily records of all my habits and hobbies, including sleep, smoking weed, walks in the park, taking saunas and more.

“Don’t judge me, man!” I said. No, I didn’t say that, he might be right, and also the people who say, “Don’t judge me, woman!” are usually the ones who should be judged, right?

Yes, I keep records (then total them every week, month, and year) but there is a reason for this: I want to keep track of certain behaviors so I’ll know when an interval has elapsed and it’s time to maybe do it again, like cleaning the sheets every two weeks, right? Here is an example of what I’m talking about:

In my never-ending conflict with insomnia I decided to crunch the numbers to see if my early evening saunas, when I drank a lot of water, were affecting my sleep. I made a graph listing the dates of the fifteen saunas I’d taken over the last two months, overlaid it with my sleep numbers and my weed-smoking stats, and I found I had insomnia about a fourth of the days I took a sauna, but never on the evenings when I also smoked weed.

Since I was taking about two saunas a week and smoking about twice a week I decided to adjust my schedule and have sauna night also be my weed-smoking night. This worked for a week or so but then I started taking saunas more often but didn’t want to smoke more often so what to do? Since the insomnia link to saunas was having to get up in the night, after drinking all that water, I decided to take saunas only in the morning which seems to be working.

Over the years I’d been drinking water whenever I thought of it but then around April started religiously drinking a cup an hour throughout the day, suddenly felt the need to join most of my peers getting up to pee during many nights, and often couldn’t get back to sleep. (My doc later said the cup an hour thing is an internet myth.)

Then I realized I wasn’t taking into account the amount of water in food, started tracking that in May, and kept estimated records the next three months. With aid of the internet I estimated how much water was in various foods: an orange half a cup, chicken soup about 85% water, and most fruits and veggies over 90%. The hard things to estimate were a slice of bread, about 45% if I remember correctly. The amount of water in food turned out to be about 70% of the total intake and limiting it to about thirteen cups a day (the amount recommended for my size) I stopped having to get up in the night.

A few weeks ago I decided to let go of some of these obsessive tracking habits and stopped measuring my walks in the park on my watch, stopped mindlessly scrolling Facebook, tried to stop compulsively checking my one stock, and stopped writing down water intake.

Nine weeks ago in my latest attempt to get better sleep I took my doctor’s advice to cut down to one cup of coffee in the morning and I also decided to cut off news viewing. I checked the records of the previous nine weeks and found an average of 6.7 hours of sleep a night. Cutting down on coffee and news my average for the last nine weeks was 6.9 hours a night, which equals about one hour more sleep a week or about 8.5 minutes more a night. That doesn’t seem like much, is it worth it?

(When I posted this elsewhere, the only comment I got was, “Dude, you need to get laid.”)

NEW ENFORCEMENT TARGETS PEOPLE LIVING IN CARS, RVs on California streets

by Marisa Kendall

For months, cities around the state have ramped up enforcement against people sleeping in tents on the street. Now, some are focusing on a new target: People who live in vehicles.…

https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2025/09/homeless-enforcement-cars-rvs/

OUTSIDERS LOVE MOCKING MARIN COUNTY. NOW, IT’S LAUGHING AT ITSELF.

In February, the publication Marin Lately began satirizing the wealthy, idyllic swath of the Bay Area. The author has been a mystery, until now.

by Heather Knight

On the surface, Marin County has it all.

Rolling hills, redwood forests, golden beaches and panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay, set in a prime location just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

It has tremendous wealth and sublime weather. Residents can surf, mountain bike and paddle board all in the same weekend.

What Marin County did not have until recently was a public space to ridicule the flip side of all that supposed perfection: the progressives who try to outdo one another in righteousness, and the relative lack of ethnic, economic and political diversity.

Every king needs a court jester, and one has finally arrived here in the form of Marin Lately, a satirical online publication. It’s like The Onion, but filled with inside jokes that only Bay Area residents might appreciate. Or “Portlandia,” the television series about Portland, the Oregon city similar in spirit to Marin.…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/marin-lately-satire.html

IN TIBURON

by Van Morrison (2016)

Across the bay the fog is lifting
And I am here in Tiburon
That's what she said
When she was sitting looking out at the Golden Gate
In the morning dawn

Across the bay in San Francisco
Where City Lights and Ferlinghetti stay
North Beach alleyways and cafés
Kerouac and Ginsberg
Gregory Corso and Neal Cassady all held sway

Vince Guaraldi would play 'Cast Your Fate To The Wind' in the distance
Lenny Bruce got busted at 'The Hungry Eye'
The 'No-Name Bar' down in Sausalito
Across the street where Chet Baker used to play

My heart was beating on the hillside
Near Belvedere and Tiburon
I need to take you back, back down to 'Frisco
Now we need each other, need each other to lean on

Vince Guaraldi would play 'Cast Your Fate To The Wind'
And we'd listen
In the evening across the way
Chet Baker would play down at the trident
With his horn he blew everybody away

The Cliff House down at the Seal Rock Hotel
Foghorns blowing all night long 'til dawn
Geary Street culchies left their homeland a long while ago
Some have stayed, but others not for so long

My heart was beating on the hillside
Near Belvedere and Tiburon
Take you back down to San Francisco
Now we need each other more than ever to lean on
Now we need each other more than ever to lean on
Lean on me
Lean on
Now we need each other more than ever to lean on

Back to City Lights, North Beach and Broadway
We need each other
We need each other to lean on

Across the bay in Tiburon
Across the bay in Tiburon

GIANTS LIT UP BY DODGERS, miss chance to leap Mets for wild-card spot

by Susan Slusser

San Francisco Giants pitcher Logan Webb gives the ball to manager Bob Melvin after he was relieved during the fifth inning of a MLB baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers in San Francisco, Saturday, Sept. 13, 2025. (Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle)

Before Saturday’s game against the Dodgers, the San Francisco Giants moved into the third and final wild-card spot thanks to the Mets’ benevolence in losing yet again.

Then the Giants jumped out with four runs in the first, sending nine men to the plate against Clayton Kershaw, who long has dominated San Francisco. Good vibes abounded at Oracle Park, except among the large contingent of suddenly quiet Dodgers fans.

It’s tough to keep a team as good as Los Angeles down, though. The Dodgers chipped back two in the third — if you can call a 454-foot Shohei Ohtani homer chipping — then they busted loose for six runs in the fifth and added three more in the sixth, helping them sail away to a 13-7 win.

“The feeling was good, because Kershaw’s kind of had his way with us and we got him on the run early,” Giants manager Bob Melvin said. “You feel pretty good about your chances, especially with Logan Webb on the mound, but he just didn’t have his great stuff today. … So it went from a pretty good feeling to … you know, they just had 17 hits tonight.”

The Giants remain a half game behind the Mets, who have lost eight in a row but do have the advantage of holding the tie-breaker between the clubs. And San Francisco was well aware New York had lost before taking the field.

“Everybody knows, but we’re trying to stay pretty simple and just keep riding this momentum we have,” said Melvin, whose team has won 14 of their past 19 games overall and nine of the past 12 at Oracle Park.

“Obviously, it’s hard to hide from it,” Webb said of the wild-card standings. “Everyone knows what’s going in.”

For the second time this season, Webb allowed the Dodgers six runs, prompting him to tinker with his pitch mix, sometimes in unfortunate fashion. Kershaw, for the first time in his career, gave up four runs to the Giants in an inning. (Nevertheless, his lifetime ERA at Oracle Park is 1.84 in 31 appearances.)

Webb battled well through the first four, despite giving up three runs, helped along by a spiffy double play started by Rafael Devers at first. But a long break after home-plate umpire Roberto Ortiz was struck by a foul ball, damaging his mask, at the end of the fourth, meant that Webb, 84 pitches into his start, had to wait to get back to work. When he did, he issued his first walk, to Mookie Betts leading off the inning. Freddie Freeman followed with a single, Webb walked Max Muncy and Webb’s evening ended. José Buttó trotted in from the bullpen and faced the next five hitters; by the time he left, six runs were in.

Webb said that the delay as Ortiz’s mask got fixed didn’t affect him, but he was dissatisfied with his outing overall.

“I really let the team down today,” he said. “Balls were finding holes, especially early, and then I started giving up damage and started walking guys. It’s just unacceptable.

“The fifth inning came around and it seemed like I was trying to be cute with everything. I’m throwing six cutters to a guy, to a right-handed hitter (Betts). I don’t do that. I don’t why I need to do that. Overall, it’s just not good.”

Webb’s pitch usage was highly unusual, the game plan going in against a team that’s seen him a lot, he said. Usually, Webb throws more than 30% sinkers; Saturday, only eight of his 97 pitchers were sinkers, including the ball Ohtani crushed to center at 114.8 mph; it was the longest and hardest-hit homer at Oracle Park this season. Ohtani’s next time up, Webb fell behind 3-0 and came back and struck Ohtani out looking, using five changeups and then a four-seam fastball.

The Giants’ outfield wasn’t an optimum defensive alignment Saturday. With lefty Kershaw on the mound, it was all right-handed: Heliot Ramos, Luis Matos and Jerar Encarnacion, just off the IL. Ramos made a nice throw in the first to get Freeman trying to stretch a double, but in the third, with one on and two outs, he couldn’t haul in Teoscar Hernández’s drive to right, just missing it after a less than direct route, and Betts scored on the double.

In a key spot in the Dodgers’ big fifth, with Buttó just into the game, Hernández hit a sinking liner to right center that Jung Hoo Lee or Drew Gilbert, excellent defenders, probably would have had; Matos just missed it with a diving attempt.

San Francisco got three runs back in the fifth, with Chapman, Encarnacion and Patrick Bailey all smacking doubles, cutting it to two, but that was just a little blip of a rally because L.A. roared straight back. The sixth started in unfortunate fashion when lefty Matt Gage hit Muncy in the head with a pitch; Muncy took his base after getting checked out, but Gage looked rattled while Muncy was down and a walk, a single, wild pitch and two-run double by Miguel Rojas later, Los Angeles had a full dozen on the board.

For the second night in a row, Muncy ran for himself but came out of the game on defense after being hit by a pitch; Joey Lucchesi got him on the wrist the previous night.

Giants third baseman Matt Chapman made a marvelous play in that sixth inning, diving to his right for a bouncer by Hernández, rolling and firing a throw to second to get Muncy. He got up bleeding from the heels of both hands.

“It’s happened a few times this year,” Melvin said. “Once you get a scab on there, with the way he plays and how much he dives — probably as much as anyone in baseball — it’s just tough for it to go away. He’ll get patched up and be out there again tomorrow.”

After taking Friday night’s game, the Giants still have a shot to win their first series against Los Angeles since June 28-30, 2024.

(sfchronicle.com)

IN 1953, LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI and Peter D. Martin co-founded City Lights Pocket Bookshop in San Francisco’s North Beach.

City Lights, beacon for writers and dreamers.

It was the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, and it quickly became a gathering place for writers, artists, and activists.

Two years later, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the Pocket Poets Series—a project aimed at bringing accessible, “insurgent” poetry to a wider audience. The very first title was his own Pictures of the Gone World.

What began as a small paperback shop became the beating heart of the Beat Generation and one of the most enduring cultural landmarks in American letters.

WILD WEST OIL TOWN ERECTED AT CAPITOL AS LEGISLATORS CONSIDER OIL DRILLING EXPANSION BILL

by Dan Bacher

On September 11, members of climate justice groups, including the Oil & Gas Action Network and Third Act Sacramento, staged what they called a “Wild West Oil Town” on the west lawn of the State Capitol.

Arrayed in cowboy hats and clothing, they erected three wooden representations of oil derricks and pumpjacks — to show what happens when oil lobbyists call the shots in Sacramento like they are doing right now.

As the Western States Petroleum Association, Chevron and other oil corporations spend record money on lobbying in Sacramento, the Legislature is rushing through the biggest rollback of climate and safety protections in decades — what climate justice advocates call a “shady fossil fuel giveaway with zero transparency.”

The advocates talked to legislators and passersby, urging the Legislature to vote no on the oil drilling expansion bill, AB 237, a last-minute gut and amend that calls for expanded oil drilling in Kern County. The California legislature is slated to vote on this bill this morning.…

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/09/13/18879827.php

MURKY WEATHER FOR BURNING MAN 2025

by Katy Tahja

Mother Nature is tampering with the spirit of Burning Man campers. Really…the voice of experience here. The year 2023 was “Mudman” not Burning Man, but when one of the events goals is Radical Self Reliance you learn from experience. “Monsoon Man” will be the nickname for 2025.

The big city press is always looking for drama to pin a story on for Burning Man so while 69,900 are adapting and having a perfectly wonderful time the last 100 get all the press coverage. Yes, the wind blew 50mph in gusts and tore down anything not bolted down to Mother Earth, then about an inch of rain dumped on Burners and turned the Black Rock Playa into cement-like muck for a day, but all the regulars pitched in, cleaned up, and enjoyed lovely weather for the rest of the week while enjoying the best party on earth.

My home in Mobility Camp passed out crutches, knee scooters and wheelchairs to folks who disabled themselves in Black Rock City. We take people who cannot bicycle the distances to see art out on our accessible shaded trailer to see the sights. We ranged from ages 8 to 84, some three generational families, and were sure as heck had a good, but sometimes mucky, time. Being experienced Burners we built our camp well and had but a single shade structure collapse during inclement weather.

The monsoon interfered with getting to some events I wanted to attend, but I did get to attend the performance of the 60+ member Black Rock Philharmonic orchestra. Yes, classical music on the playa. An eclectic offering of everything from Beethoven to Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” with a Nirvana number and Star Wars theme music included. I missed “Booze & Bees” where you tasted honey whiskey while learning about native pollinators and “Fossils & Fire” which was a paleontologist’s talk on the rock under our feet on the playa. “Dessert on the Desert” was a trek I would have liked to make to sample hot Thai coconut pancakes with Thai ice tea.

Burning Man is one of the few places I can go and KNOW I’ll lose weight over the two weeks I’m there because I’m so busy I forget to eat. But ohh…the food offering…you can browse through Black Rock City and constantly be offered food. Check this out…start the day with coffee & croissants, naked bacon, avocado toast, blueberry pancakes, the Hash House’s “un-fork-ettable” hash brown potatoes, French crepes, and a Bloody Mary breakfast. Snacks? Cold Pickles, gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, Frito pies, Elote, and a camp serving 1,000 slices of lobster pizza.

European cuisine was prevalent with Syrnyky (Ukrainian Cheese Balls), Draniki Bela (Potato pancakes), Borshch (chef’s spelling for beet soup). There was a Ramen cart, someone offering potstickers, Spam musubi, tacos, a quesadilla saloon, and a camp offering indigenous foodstuffs. I could have gotten falling down drunk on Picon Punch, the official Nevada state drink, wine slushies, whiskey and sake tastings, kombucha, hot toddies, Margaritas, and homemade beer and mead.

After all that drinking I could have worked off some of the calories (if I wasn’t a little old lady) at a 13 mile marathon around the perimeter of Black Rock City, or the 31 mile ultra-marathon. These events start at 5 a.m. to beat the heat. Some people run nude. Want to see every variation of every part of the human body that can bounce? Check out a naked marathon. Need more exercise? Play field hockey or rugby. Then when you are all worn out there was a Finnish sauna, Polynesian massage and Bali sound healing.

You could dance the night away to techno-electronic music or join the Partners Dancing Camp for a tango lesson. There was a Lindy Hop party and sing- and dance-alongs to the Beatles, 1980s rock, drunk 1990s tunes, and a viewing of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Then, of course, were the “Only at Burning Man…” gatherings. The Dragon Camp Academy offered a workshop on making tinfoil armor bikinis, pinhole photography was demonstrated, there was a library of banned books to peruse, a class called “Whip-cracking 101” and a “Blinky Things Hospital” if you had an electronic item non-functioning. How about a “Alpine Yodeling” flash mob or a chance to learn some Swahili? Someone brought a life size animatronic dinosaur you could ride if, and only if, you rode it naked..

After a busy day I’d say bless the Canadian camp that was pouring maple syrup on shaved ice to make maple taffy and a family all dressed in orange that called themselves the “Tang Gang” and served tiny cold cups of the ice cold drink. But the very best event in our camp? A dinner Labor Day evening as we tore down camp. Twenty folks, some of whom have camped together more than a decade, sharing a meal and drinks and memories.

Along with the monsoon rains and winds Mother Nature gave us one more thing. I’ve been a Burner since 2012 and NEVER have I seen such spectacular sunsets. Beams of light came over the Granite range to the west and looked like they were 50 miles long, sandwiched in between purple cloud banks above and below. It is tradition on the playa to howl like wolves and coyotes as the last light vanishes over the mountains at sunset…you should have heard us those nights.

Crowded halls in high school between classes, Hermiston, OR (Photo by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration, September 1941)

JAMES TIPPETT

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.

THOUGHTS on Charlie Kirk:

I. Killing someone is morally wrong, no matter how much you might think they deserve it.

II. Killing a powerful right wing figure in the current political climate is monumentally stupid, given, as evidenced, that the right will use the killing as an excuse and opportunity to blame the left, even if the killer is farther to the right of the victim. (He was.)

III. Given that Kirk considered empathy as “a made-up, new-age term that [that] does a lot of damage,” there is a certain tasty irony to the demands for empathy for him, his friends, followers and family. (Not that empathy for the bereaved is not due.)

IV. A couple of quotes come to mind:

“…for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.” Galatians 6:7

“If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind.” Robert Hunter, “Franklin’s Tower”

*Carnival* (also known as Pierrette and Clown), 1925, by Max Beckmann

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Re Charlie Kirk: Most of these kids have never been challenged or possibly even heard a debate.

I’ll use myself as an example!

I started college at 17. Total little wannabe-hippie radical. Felt like I was supposed to be a radical.

The circumstances of the debate are a tad murky. I had to be in my first year of college and the encounter occurred in the coffeeshop in the basement of Cobb Hall (University of Chicago).

I don’t know how I got into the debate and I have no memory of the face of my opponent.

I just remember staring at the ground and the sense that he just demolished everything I lobbed (probably half-@$$3d macroeconomic content).

I have a memory of his shoes and my shoes and of getting my @$$ handed to me. It was an extraordinarily positive experience.

As such, I’d say that willingness to engage college students, even being a little provocative by simply showing up on a campus and offering to debate, is probably good. From what I can tell (and my direct experience is admittedly limited), Kirk never conducted himself maliciously or as a bully. Seemed like he was just trying to get kids to open their minds (college!), ask questions and consider alternative points of view.

ANOTHER ON-LINE COMMENT: ”Charlie’s murder has likely spurred a multi-digit alteration in the political landscape of America.” You’re way more optimistic than I am. I think his murder will harden existing tribal allegiances and lower the bar for future acts of political violence. We’re in a tailspin and I don’t see how to pull out of it. People compare this to the political violence of the early 1970s, but in that case there was a singular animating principle, the Vietnam War, and the domestic violence petered out after it ended. The modern culture war is just about hating the other guys, plain and simple.

LETTERS TO THE NY TIMES

To the Editor:

The news and commentary that so quickly followed the assassination of Charlie Kirk capture what makes this moment so troubling. The immediate calls for vengeance on the right, and even celebration by some voices on the left, show how fragile our civic fabric has become.

Political violence does more than claim lives. It corrodes the trust that allows democracy to function and chills the willingness of citizens to enter the public square. The viral spread of violent images deepens the trauma, planting fear far beyond the scene itself.

For me, this event felt like a turning point. While scholars debate whether diverse democracies can endure, what is clear is that tolerating violence — whether by action or by silence — will make our democracy unlivable.

We must reject political violence in all its forms if we are to preserve even the possibility of democratic life together.

Camerino I. Salazar

San Antonio

To the Editor:

The killing of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy, and it might never have happened if we had serious gun control in this country.

On the same day that Mr. Kirk was killed, two students were critically wounded at a Colorado high school; the suspect in the shooting then took his own life. A few days earlier another potential school shooting was prevented in Washington State when the police raided the home of a 13-year-old who had been making threats online and found 23 guns in the house. All this not long after a shooter opened fire at a morning Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, killing two children and wounding some 20 others.

In 2023, Mr. Kirk said, “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 to protect our other God-given rights.”

Sadly, Charlie Kirk paid that cost with his life.

Alix Wilber

Seattle

To the Editor:

In one of my classes, I showed the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Most of my students have seen such graphic violence only in movies and video games. It is still a horrific piece of film.

On Wednesday they all saw (on their preferred social media platforms) the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It was also horrific to watch.

We will hear the same rhetoric on both sides of the aisle in the wake of this murder. “It’s the guns,” liberals will cry. Conservatives will retort: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

And nothing will change, because we are asking the wrong questions in our echo chambers.

We can post our memes on social media about the number of gun deaths we have had in America this year, or wave our Second Amendment placards. Nothing will change until we look at the real beneficiaries of such violence. And they certainly won’t change if we — on both sides of the debate — remain entrenched in our ideological camps.

(Rev.) John Tamilio III

Beverly, Mass.

To the Editor:

I am a moderate Democrat who has voted for the D column in every election since I returned from the Vietnam War in 1969. Charlie Kirk’s political stance was not one I admired. His close affiliation with President Trump further alienated me from his politics.

But his assassination Wednesday made me sick to my stomach. Likewise, I abhor what this president and his Republican supporters in the House and the Senate are doing to my country.

But when the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump happened in Butler, Pa., last year, I was both aghast and infuriated. Political change in America should be the result of the ballot box, not the ammunition box.

In a country where there are more guns than people, I am numb as each day’s news cycle brings me more horrific stories of school shootings, political assassinations and crimes involving firearms. We cannot appear to find a middle ground on reducing gun violence, and we are more divided than ever. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

As we mark 24 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, we should remind ourselves of our country’s motto: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

Len DiSesa

Dresher, Pa.

To the Editor:

I am from Europe. My first thought after yet another shooting tragedy in the United States is: Why are you surprised, America? The sacrosanct right to bear arms in this country allows, even abets, this kind of abomination.

Exactly what kind of good comes out of it? The restrictions on buying alcohol seem stricter. The whole thing boggles the mind and kills way too many innocent people. It is a blemish on this otherwise extraordinary nation.

Catherine Luborsky

Far Hills, N.J.

*Landscape with Fence and Trees* (1916-19) by Edward Hopper

TAIBBI & KIRN

Matt Taibbi: Hi. Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: And it’s September 11th, and we’re recording on September 11th. You’ll be seeing this on September 12th. These are dark times in the United States. They have been for a while, but September 10th, Wednesday, we had another assassination. This time somebody you and I both know, Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. And a lot of people, semi-ironically, are describing this as a turning point in American history. There’s a marked change in tone in the reactions or radicalization, I would say, on both sides. We’ll get into all of it.

Walter, do you have any initial comments before we start rolling tape and things like this, or… All I can say is that I feel, as somebody… We’re both in the same business as him, and there’s a degree of coldness and viciousness and professionalism to this that is unnerving. But we’ll get into all of it. But I do feel like this is a difference making moment for a variety of reasons.

Walter Kirn: I do too. I just have a few things to say in preface before we get into it. Number one, this is a guy who I’ve met. He asked me to be on his show recently. I declined for various reasons, mostly having to do with my schedule. He is one degree of separation from me in all sorts of ways. I know a lot of people who know him, some people who are very close friends of his there, they’re absolutely shocked as was I. The fact that this occurred on a university campus, I think is underappreciated. It also was an attack on someone who, despite what is a pretty marked dehumanization campaign on the part of his political enemies, was a paragon of a sort of old-fashioned college Republican; let’s sit down and talk, I’ll persuade you, way of doing things.

Beside the fact that he was a podcaster and a journalist, it’s an attack on civil society, on the way we do things, on our expectation that there are spaces in which we can talk and debate and disagree. So the side of me that hopes for a civilized world and world in which there are guardrails around our political and cultural discussions is absolutely shattered and disappointed by this. He’s a father. I relate to that. Two young children, a 31-year-old man.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I was shocked to see that age. I didn’t realize he was that young.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, and I think that’s another dimension of this that is worthy of note. This was a young person, a young person speaking to young people on a place, a college campus, which is supposed to be for that very purpose. To see his posture on that stage, relaxed, sitting back in his chair, listening, engaged, suddenly disrupted by a shot to the throat is an image that too should stun and dishearten us all.

But finally, aside from all of these considerations, I think what bothers me the most is that almost instantly, and I guess we’re going to see this, this incident, was fed into a machine whose workings we’re quite familiar with now, whose operations have been used in all sorts of ways over the years, and especially the last few years. And the dehumanization of this person before he had even left the earth, truly, literally, was for me,, the most terrifying aspect of the whole thing.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So the first thing that came to my mind when I heard that it was Charlie who had been shot, is that his particular genre of being an influencer, being a reporter, being a commentator, is different from almost everybody else on the internet. He does a thing where he goes on campuses and he engages people, and he tries to prove you wrong or tries to pick a part your point of view. And what I thought was really interesting about it, now he comes from a background that I just couldn’t be more different from mine. He is a Christian. He’s sort of steadfastly a diehard Republican, always has been. A lot of his views are things that I probably politically wouldn’t have agreed with, especially years ago. Some of the things more recently, however I have agreed with.

But his whole shtick is to go and talk to people. And he’s not rude. He’s not abrasive or profane. Some of those conversations don’t go so well, but this is what we would hope for when we talk about free speech. We hope that people would talk to each other, confront one another, and that something would emerge out of those discussions. And so for him to be the person who is shot and killed is a message directed, not just at somebody who has a lot of political significance because Walter, as you point out, he’s really the Republican Party’s point man for engagement with youth. And they’ve had tremendous success in that area in the last few years. But more than that, to me, it’s a blow against the whole idea of speech and counter speech, that there has been a rising movement on campuses against the idea that something positive emerges from these discussions. And it started with people who were more openly provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos. Let’s just not have him on the campus, and that will be the better outcome. And-

Walter Kirn: And Colter, firebrands. I think you can look at a lot of cape of Charlie Kirk and realize he does one thing that a lot of these others don’t do quite so well, which is, listen. The guy is a good listener. Having been married three times, I’ve learned about the virtues of listening. And my wife will often come back from a party and she’ll say, “Oh, that guy was amusing, smart, and interesting, but he doesn’t listen.” I’ve cued into that and I see a guy whose wheels are turning, not just when he listens, not just because he wants to counter the person, but because he’s absorbing their point of view as fully as possible in order to argue it -

Matt Taibbi: Of course.

Walter Kirn: … but not merely to argue with it. In other words… And because he was 31, I would imagine that he had change ahead of him. He had evolution. How many of us are the same person politically, culturally, temperamentally we were at 31. And so there’s a reason why the death of a youth is classically much more tragic because the change, the growth, the evolution, the dynamism that we can expect as someone moves from youth into middle age is made to never be.

Matt Taibbi: Even that, the possibility that there were evolving views ahead of him, that has become a font of speculation online, and we’re going to get to that as well. But if we could, let’s just see an example of what Charlie was about. Because these videos that he put out and he put out a lot of them. They were copious and quantity and they were shared widely on, really, both sides. Let’s listen to what Charlie is like when he’s debating people on the other side.

Jean: Do you feel proud of yourself for debating college kids who are unprepared to speak in front of an audience like yourself? Hold on, hold on, hold on. You’re 30 years old. We can agree you’re 30 years old, right? Do you think that’s a little bit silly?

Charlie Kirk: Are you a voter?

Jean: I am a voter. I’m a registered voter.

Charlie Kirk: Oh, so I vote and you vote. So I’m talking to voters of this country that will determine the future of western civilization. That’s what I’m doing here today, yeah? Wait, hold on. How is it any different than a professor talking to you?

Jean: Than a professor talking to you? Who are you?

Charlie Kirk: Well, I’m important enough for you to come up to a microphone.

Jean: Actually, when I first saw this ad, I thought it was like an improv comedy thing. It looked so ridiculous that I didn’t even think it was real.

Charlie Kirk: Well, no. You can see, look how popular Trump is on your campus. How does that make you feel? That’s not comedy. That is a five alarm fire for Kamala Harris because she’s probably going to lose Pennsylvania.

Jean: Look-

Charlie Kirk: But no, I just want to be clear. Is there something wrong with talking to voters?

Jean: No. There’s nothing wrong with talking to voters.

Charlie Kirk: Well, that’s what we’re doing here today. It’s an open mic.

Jean: I think that you push a dangerous agenda.

Charlie Kirk: Such as?

Jean: Your stance on abortion rights, for example.

Speaker 1: Here we go.

Charlie Kirk: Okay, so-

Vivek Ramaswamy: So let me ask a question. What is your name?

Jean: Jean.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Jean. And what is your understanding of the current Republican Party’s stance on federal intervention and abortion?

Jean: Well, I know that they wanted to bring it back to the states, right?

Vivek Ramaswamy: So it sounds like you do know that the Republican Party’s current stance on abortion is they’re against a federal ban on abortion.

Jean: I do understand. Yes.

Vivek Ramaswamy: And we’re talking about a presidential election as the important election that we’re talking about here.

Jean: I understand that. Yes.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Great. So again, I think this open dialogue is great. I think it’s great you’re here challenging Charlie, and I think it’s great that he’s willing to travel campuses across this country to talk to the next generation. We need more conversation. Where’s the disagreement though, on content? You could criticize style or why you’re talking to people-

Jean: Listen my-

Vivek Ramaswamy: … or jumped on someone personally, but where do you actually disagree with the substance?

Jean: I agree with the way that you edit content and specifically frame it so that people look bad talking to you. The way that you edit your content-

Charlie Kirk: We post unedited content.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Let me just ask you one thing though, because personal insults can fly in all directions. Where is it area where you-?

Matt Taibbi: So there’s Vivek Ramaswamy, obviously sitting next to Charlie, and that’s a classic example of how these discussions tend to go. He was quick and it-

Walter Kirn: And it was sporting. He didn’t try-

Matt Taibbi: It’s always sporting.

Walter Kirn: He didn’t try to monologue over the person. He didn’t make cheap shots. He didn’t talk about how she’s dressed or how she’s speaking. There was no personal-

Matt Taibbi: Which she did, by the way. “Your ad is ridiculous. It looked like improv comedy.”

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: That’s one of the things that comes through in a lot of these encounters is how quickly his combatants devolve into ad hominem attacks and that sort of thing. But-

Walter Kirn: And I liked the spirit of the crowd. They were like, “Here goes” when abortion came up. Well, shouldn’t college students be like that? Spirited within boundaries, watching the ball go back and forth as at a tennis match. A little bit involved, but not to the point where the speaker is intimidated and not to the point where the speaker is insulting to them. That was a guy exposing himself to the come and go of American spirited political cultural debate in person on campuses at which I would probably imagine, if they’re not Christian or certain kinds of campuses are generally enemy territory.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Look, he was also extremely good at marketing his image, his personality, amplifying what he’s all about and doing the organizational development behind the scenes. I tried to do what he did. I tried to get people on college campuses to argue with me about censorship and free speech and could not get a single person to really argue…..

THIS TREND of inscribing messages on and/or of signing ammunition is one of the more macabre pathologies of post-9/11 America. How many politicians have signed US-made, Israeli-launched bombs that have killed Palestinian children? Nikki Haley signed her Israeli bomb: “Finish them.”

GUNGA DIN

by Rudyard Kipling (1943)

You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din,
He was ‘Din! Din! Din!
‘You limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din!
‘Hi! Slippy hitherao
‘Water, get it! Panee lao,
‘You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din.’

The uniform ’e wore
Was nothin’ much before,
An’ rather less than ’arf o’ that be’ind,
For a piece o’ twisty rag
An’ a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field-equipment ’e could find.
When the sweatin’ troop-train lay
In a sidin’ through the day,
Where the ’eat would make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl,
We shouted ‘Harry By!’
Till our throats were bricky-dry,
Then we wopped ’im ’cause ’e couldn’t serve us all.
It was ‘Din! Din! Din!
‘You ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been?
‘You put some juldee in it
‘Or I’ll marrow you this minute
‘If you don’t fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!’

’E would dot an’ carry one
Till the longest day was done;
An’ ’e didn’t seem to know the use o’ fear.
If we charged or broke or cut,
You could bet your bloomin’ nut,
’E’d be waitin’ fifty paces right flank rear.
With ’is mussick on ’is back,
’E would skip with our attack,
An’ watch us till the bugles made 'Retire,’
An’ for all ’is dirty ’ide
’E was white, clear white, inside
When ’e went to tend the wounded under fire!
It was ‘Din! Din! Din!’
With the bullets kickin’ dust-spots on the green.
When the cartridges ran out,
You could hear the front-ranks shout,
‘Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!’

I shan’t forgit the night
When I dropped be’ind the fight
With a bullet where my belt-plate should ’a’ been.
I was chokin’ mad with thirst,
An’ the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.
’E lifted up my ’ead,
An’ he plugged me where I bled,
An’ ’e guv me ’arf-a-pint o’ water green.
It was crawlin’ and it stunk,
But of all the drinks I’ve drunk,
I’m gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.
It was 'Din! Din! Din!
‘’Ere’s a beggar with a bullet through ’is spleen;
‘’E's chawin’ up the ground,
‘An’ ’e’s kickin’ all around:
‘For Gawd’s sake git the water, Gunga Din!’

’E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.
’E put me safe inside,
An’ just before ’e died,
'I ’ope you liked your drink,’ sez Gunga Din.
So I’ll meet ’im later on
At the place where ’e is gone—
Where it’s always double drill and no canteen.
’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to poor damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

IN SWEDEN, there is a fascinating statue of a woman named Danuta Danielsson who became a hero in 1985 when she used her purse to clobber a white Nazi supremacist while he marched in a right-wing rally.

What makes her statue unique among hero statues is that it captures her performing the heroic act of swinging her purse. It’s entirely an action-shot, a big departure from the universal practice of constructing hero statues intended to portray individuals as heroes. Danielsson’s statue isn’t about her as a person; it’s about her one specific act of courage that day. Her mother had survived a concentration camp during World War II. Danielsson knew the horrors of the Nazi menace and took action on that April day in Sweden.

NORMA BROWN: I often say, knowing full well that most black Americans were poor as dirt, they were families then, and no matter what life brought you, that family was there to support you and make sure you always had a home. The urban life destroyed the rural values and today, as for decades now, little black kids roam around the cities in the dead of night while mom is busy elsewhere and Pops not to be found. Clarence Thomas is an example of the good people that were turned out by a combination of needing to escape the poverty and a love of learning. There are still plenty of black stars in all fields, but the moral foundation has been replaced all too often by the schlock that the Dems sell as values.

LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission

After Charlie Kirk’s Killing, Suspect Joked That His ‘Doppelganger’ Did It

Grieving in Public, Erika Kirk Melds the Personal and Political

Kirk’s Killing Has Left Other Political Influencers Reeling

Wrestling Over Kirk’s Legacy and the Divide in America

Trump Escalates Attacks on Political Opponents After Kirk’s Killing

Russia Made Drone Production a Supreme Priority. Now It Swarms the Skies.

“HARD TIMES ARE COMING, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

THE AGILE AND THE AGED: PARIS COMES TO BERLIN MUSIKFEST

by David Yearsley

Midway through its near non-stop, culture-packed calendar running from August 30th to September 24th, the Berlin Musikfest last weekend brought two French symphony orchestras to the German capital’s famed concert hall, the Philharmonie. On Friday, the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées did Beethoven and Cherubini. On Saturday, a doubleheader from Les Siècles re-revolutionized Beethoven and Berlioz at 6pm, then re-modernized Boulez in a second concert later that same evening. This embarrassment of French riches came just a week after the Orchestre de Paris had made its appearance at the festival, thus bringing the total to three Parisian ensembles to match the three from Berlin also on the Musikfest roster. The ambitious program is filled out by orchestras from Korea, Sweden and Italy.

These bands are big. The Big Band of the German Opera Berlin, which plays tomorrow night, is smaller. The musicians and their repertoire are diverse; the interpretations vigorous and varied; the carbon footprint enormous.

I came to the Philharmonie as always on my bike—not much of an offset for enjoying the musical armies and their instrumental arsenals flown in from around the world. In Berlin, the land is flat, the few hills manmade, the moral high ground non-existent.

The back-to-back Beethoven-plus-epigone outings of the Orchestre de Champs-Elysées and Les Siècles made for a study in similarity and contrast.

Both groups are packed with virtuosos who subordinate their skills to the musical goals of the whole. Both use period instruments, either antiques made during or near the time when the composers wrote the music performed, or new ones modelled on the originals. Both ensembles explore the new creative avenues opened up when modern musicians wield old tools to confront the classics.

In Berlin, one of the orchestras was led by a young conductor with panache and precision. The other struggled to overcome the palsied trepidation of its flagging director.

Founded in 1991, the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées concentrates, as it did last Friday, on repertoire composed between 1750 until about 1900. Les Siècles has been around since the first years of this millennium, and, as the group’s name promises, it ranges across more centuries than its Parisian counterpart, from the 17th into the 21st.

Finicky forbear violins and willful winds had, on their first rediscovery, generally demanded specialization, but Les Siècles and its members are a leading a movement within a movement the Early Music movement intent on busting down barricades and opening up possibilities. Indeed, Les Siècles takes scholarly reconstruction and technical mastery to new levels of encompassing exactitude. For their program of Beethoven and Berlioz the wind players had to bring a quiver of flutes, oboes, and clarinets, shotgun cases of bassoons, oversized golf bags of oddities like the ophicleide and serpent. The concert program booklet not only listed all the musicians and but also all their instruments, as if to say that they, like American corporations, are people too.

At the top of the list was the flutes. The program informed us that the instrument used for the Beethoven was made by Rudolf Tutz after a Heinrich Grenser original from around 1810 with eight keys (seven more than a century earlier). Twenty-four years on and an unspecified number of added keys later, the Berlioz required one by Gautrot Aîné and another rom Jeanl-Louis Tuulou, both from 1845—apparently a good year for flutes. The orchestra’s pitch standard had to be re-calibrated during the intermission, inching inexorably upward from 430Hz to 438.

Last on the list of instruments came the mysterious serpent, which, along the course of its four oxbow bends that lead from mouthpiece to bell, expands from rattlesnake to python girth. The exemplar heard in Berlin last weekend was a modern reconstruction based on a 19th-century original by someone called Baudin—perhaps a hero to select devotees and practitioners of the instrument, but utterly meaningless to me and most others. Still, the reference might charm some kid in the audience into taking up the musical snake. In 1770, sixty years before the Symphonie fantastique was premiered in Paris, the Englishman Charles Burney stamped scornfully on the serpent while travelling through France, calling it “detestably out of tune, but exactly resembling in tone that of a great hungry Essex calf.”

Yet in his massive menagerie of winds Berlioz made sure to include the cantankerous beast. In the fifth and final movement, the slitherer intones the ponderous, portentous Gregorian melody of the “Dies irae” (Day of Wrath) along with a pair of ophicleides (like lanky tubas) as well as chimes whose ringing summons thoughts of churchly judgement and eternal doom. The program did not divulge the name of the serpentist, but when he held up his instrument during the ovation afterwards, there was a surge in the applause as if he were brandishing a real snake that might escape his grasp and wriggle out into the packed auditorium to liven up the après party.

For the Berlioz the Philharmonie stage was more crowded than the observation deck on Noah’s Ark at cocktail hour: four harps (deployed only in the second movement; Berlioz’s opium-sparked mania for orchestral color and scope had extinguished all regard for hand-luggage guidelines in the then-as-yet-imagined age of international orchestral tours; the stagehands who removed the harps before the third movement got a hilarious round of applause for their perilous efforts); gaggles of winds; throngs of strings; and a herd of percussion gathered around four timpanists.

The leader of this last contingent was percussion prodigy Camille Baslé. He was almost as fun to watch as he was to hear. His facial expressions oscillated between smiles of boyish wonder to madcap surprise to sublime reflection. Sometimes he swayed in his chair when not playing, gesturing and nodding at his compatriots alongside when they joined together, but also conversing through his movements as much as his mallets with the young Bavarian conductor, Ustina Dubitksy not far away, as the timpani was nestled close in behind the second violins rather than relegated to the back of the stage as is normally the case. Whereas Berlioz had been an infamously demonstrative conductor, Dubitsky is dynamic yet controlled, intent on drawing expression from her players rather than attention to herself. She practices an elegant accuracy, favoring efficient, meaningful gestures over maestro man-spreading, groping fingers and fist-pumping. She knows when to pick her spots to extend, enthuse and elevate.

On a different set of timpani, Baslé had been a heroic yet sensitive force in the Beethoven violin concerto, its demanding solo part conquered with a thrilling mix of majesty and intimacy by local heroine and international star, Isabelle Faust. She plays the Stradivarius “Sleeping Beauty” of 1704 on loan to her not by Disney but the German bank that owns it. The instrument’s bona fides weren’t printed in the book, but in her grasp the Strad galloped through the passagework, dashed off the martial double stops and saber-rattling octaves, and urgently whispered select high notes whose pianissimo could be heard in the last row of the hall with its miraculous acoustic. With a timeless and timely humanity, she proclaimed the work’s indomitable themes.

Beethoven’s cadenza for the first movement defies concerto codes by introducing a rustic duet between timpani and violin, a dialogue that resounds with space and possibility promised by the escape from convention. Who needs a symphony orchestra when Baslé and his Wunderlich timpani could evoke landscapes, deeds, qualities and characters, life and liberty, as vividly as dozens of other instruments capable of melody? Under Dubitksy and the likes of Baslé, Faust, and the rest of the Parisian centurions, the collision of Beethoven with Berlioz yielded a supernova. By taking seriously history’s materials, by gathering up past aesthetic innovations as fuel to fire the present, Les Siècles kindled rapture and revelation in this concert not just of the centuries but for the ages.

On Friday night, though, the Parisians of the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées saddled up Beethoven’s revolutionary warhorse with a weary warrior in the person of their conductor, Philippe Herreweghe.

The third symphony, nicknamed the Eroica, was originally dedicated to Napoleon when he was Europe’s republican poster boy but was supposedly torn off the manuscript by the composer when the diminutive dictator crowned himself Emperor in 1804.

Decried by some critics at the time as a fantasy rather than a symphony, the Eroica surges with revolutionary intent. Yet Friday’s conductor, the hunched and septuagenarian Belgian, Herreweghe, kept trying to tamp down the forces of musical change with his slight, nearly imperceptible motions. He tickled the air as if it was painful to his fingers, lowering his arms to plead for more quiet. Those under his dubious command occasionally rattled their sabers meekly but never charged the barricades.

Trained as a psychiatrist, Herreweghe barely bows and seems to abjure recognition. He’s reluctant to engage with his audience, or even, it often seems, his musicians, at least in performance. He must do his real interpretative work in rehearsal, but in concert, he conducts as if he is afraid. He enters the stage as if he were slinking into a confessional booth, not mounting a podium. Rather than stretching out on a shrink’s couch, he’d be more inclined to crawl under it to hide. Modesty is to be praised, especially among the ranks of the sex-power-fame hungry ranks of conductors, but timidity in this case resulted in lackluster, sometimes ragged results. This Beethovenian revolution was a tea party—and a tepid one at that.

Composed in 1816, the year after Napoleon’s final abdication, Cherubini’s Requiem, which made up the second half of Friday’s concert, was celebrated in its time, a multi-opus monument to revolution, war, monarchic restoration, and heroic remembrance. Such was the work’s fame and purchase that Beethoven wanted it to be played at his own funeral. The choir for the Cherubini was the Collegium Vocale Gent, which Herreweghe himself founded five-and-a-half decades ago. This group could not be quelled by their director’s shy fragility, as if thirty some human voices gathered together as one singing from the collective unconscious. Rays of hope and color shone from shadows.

But one still must wait for some other irreverent, but informed, authenticists like Les Siècles to take a power-washer to the mossy emotional architecture of the Cherubini crypt and reveal its majesty and emotion.

In the reddening haze of climate apocalypse, Beethoven seems to strive not so much to overcome the looming cataclysm as to search for an aestheticized acceptance of it. The music’s fire doesn’t burn the skin, but it is real, whether dampened by Herreweghe, or released in all its glorious, renewable power by Les Siècles.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)

*Portrait de Marguerite* (1906) by Henri Matisse

19 Comments

David Gurney September 14, 2025

re: Danuta Danielsson
“who became a hero in 1985 when she used her purse to clobber a white Nazi supremacist while he marched in a right-wing rally.”
At least she didn’t throw a Subway sandwich.
. . .

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Bruce Anderson September 14, 2025

I hadn’t heard of Charlie Kirk before he was murdered, but prior to looking up his opinions I was sad for him being so young and married with two little kids. After reading up on his opinions I’m much less sad for him but still sad for his wife. Any reasonably articulate radlib could unravel Kirk in a one-on-one. He’s lucky he stuck to debating college kids. Predictably, the orange demagogue has rolled out to blame Kirk’s assassination on “Marxist lunatics” and kindred maga punching bags like George Soros. One would expect the president, even the oaf like this one, to come out with a lot of insincere blather about how we’re all one civic student body etc. and should leave off with the violent rhetoric. Instead, our leader brings US even more gasoline to throw on the ever increasing civic violence. The pathetic Democratic resistance will continue to capitulate to the maga fascists and here we are. (We’d like to thank Reverend Anderson for this Sunday’s sermon.)

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- Mike Jamieson September 14, 2025
  
  You might be interested in seeing Gavin Newsom’s first podcast show, an interview with Kirk back in March:
  https://youtu.be/9XJ6rQDRKGA?si=b9vnlYx9o4xbWjd7
  
  Kirk was dramatized in this season’s first South Park episode also.
  
  Given the high degree of coverage and ensuing conflict among heavily plugged in partisans, I thought of a scene in the 2024 Civil War movie: as a press crew traveled through war-torn regions of America to get to a final showdown with the President’s forces and the “Western Alliances” in DC, they entered into a region where there was zero signs of conflict. Im fairly sure many Americans today haven’t gotten emotionally entangled in this current drama and are going about their business not obsessed with this story.
  
  There are “patriots” on x and elsewhere compiling lists of folks who say negative stuff about Kirk and attempting to get them fired from jobs. Some folks foolishly show their glee over his death. They’re of course idiots because theyre just solidifying his inflluence power post death.
  
  Reply
- Iggy September 14, 2025
  
  Paul Street regarding Kirk killing, “No cheers, no tears”.
  
  Reply
- George Hollister September 14, 2025
  
  Bruce, you are sounding like a left wing version of Charlie Kirk.
  
  Reply
Iggy September 14, 2025

Sprayed in orange day glow paint the 3foot high letters on the lakefront bike path read “MELT ICE, DEATH TO IDF, SHOOT KIRK”. Well 2 out of 3 isn’t too bad, however counterproductive the final part. Martyrdom plays well…

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Linda Bailey September 14, 2025

Don’t try to make “maple taffy” by pouring maple syrup on chipped ice. The sap has to be boiled beyond the syrup point and is then poured on fresh snow (I guess crushed ice would work) to make “jack wax” which is twirled on a fork.

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- Marco McClean September 14, 2025
  
  Frozen blueberries in a bag. Quarter-fill a coffee cup with them, pour in a little cream or half and half and stir it up. It becomes instant blueberry ice cream that’s just right, not too sweet.
  
  Reply
Kirk Vodopals September 14, 2025

Americas love affair with the warm gun and its security blanket second amendment has devolved over two centuries.
The older generations grew up in the rural areas idolizing the cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Some of these old timers now dress up as cowboys and head down to the shooting range for some wholesome fun.
But the modern generation did not grow up watching the Lone Ranger. They grew up with their eyes glued to video games like Call of Duty and Halo. They sit for hours pressing a button repeatedly to kill their opponents en masse. Seratonin spikes with each kill. They sit alone in dark rooms withdrawing from society gradually. They do not run outside and play Cowboys and Indians.
Our love affair with the gun is killing us. I’ll never understand or accept the justifications for maintaining the status quo.

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- George Hollister September 14, 2025
  
  The biggest group to commit gun violence is government, including ours. There are no close rivals.
  
  Reply
Mazie Malone September 14, 2025

Happy Sunday, 🕊️🍁

Re, Going nowhere slowly….

Regarding the budget one area that could be evaluated to make more revenue is the use of County Vehicles. Not LE, or street crews but why on earth does Public Health need 16 vehicles? The registration, the gas, the maintenance, all very expensive.

I was able to listen to part of the meeting on Wednesday morning, it is disturbing to say the least. The part I found fascinating is that Mrs. Miller stated Mendocino County spends approximately 4 mill a year on Conservatorships & 3 mill a year on hospitalizations and that we have about 64 people conserved on a yearly basis that the county is paying 62,500 per person! Since most people end up in jail multiple x before being hospitalized or conserved for these issues, as I have mentioned before the county is quadruple paying for shit that is not working and that includes the PHF as I have often said it is a band aid, a PHF is not going to fix the root of these conditions. For example the bill for my son having a psych stay back in 2020 for 5 days was 13,000!!!!!!!
Everything has doubled in price since then, let me reiterate that is a PHF!

Sheriff what is the reimbursement rate per inmate??

mm💕

Reply
Steve Heilig September 14, 2025

Outgrowing the Guns
By Steve Heilig, 2022
https://theava.com/archives/189029

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Steve Heilig September 14, 2025

Peter Coyote:
This is an interesting and important post about the way that algorhythms are actually creating separate, silo-ed realities among different groups. They literally do not know the whole story, and the partial view, like three blind men trying to describe an elephant–one touching the trunk, one the tail, and one a leg–produces a distorted and dangerous view of reality. Read this piece below about two completely different Charlie Kirks presented to two friends:
Shelly Hart-Remmel:
“One thing that has become really clear since yesterday is that we live in at least two different realities. Talking to a friend who only knew Charlie as a Christian motivational speaker because that’s all that ever came across her feed. Showed me videos I’ve never seen before of him saying perfectly reasonable and empowering things.
I showed her videos she’d never seen before of his racism, misogyny, homophobia, advocating for violence against specific groups of people. She was horrified by his remarks about Pelosi’s husband’s attacker being bailed out and celebrated for his violent act. She was horrified by a number of things that he said, but she had never seen or heard them before, the same as I had never seen or heard the generalized clips of him sounding like a perfectly nice loving man and father.
Neither of us had a whole picture of this man. I mentioned he was a known white supremacist and she thought I was joking. She talked about him giving a speech about finding your purpose and doing good in the world and I thought she was joking.
I saw why this friend was mourning the loss of a person she thought was a good person. My friend, bless her, saw why I feel the way I do about him. We understood each other better. In spite of a multi-billion dollar internet machine specifically focused on keeping us apart. Because we talked to each other with the desire to listen and to learn rather than the desire to change someone else’s mind or to be “right”.
None of those motivational things he said change my opinion about him because they don’t erase the negativity, the subtle calls for violence, the belittling and denigrating of other races religions genders etc. His negative and blaming comments about homeless people, the poor, and victims of domestic violence. His comments about rounding up people who didn’t think like him and putting them in camps where their behavior could be corrected. That time he said empathy was a made-up word he didn’t believe in. That other time he said the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. The time he said most people are afraid when they get on a plane and see that there’s a black pilot. His anti-vaccination rhetoric and his active campaigning against people being allowed to wear masks for their own health. His open support of fascism and white supremacy. To me, all of those are fully unchristian sentiments. Those are undeniable and just one of them would be a deal-breaker for me. All of them together are a picture of a man who was polarizing, enraged a lot of people and rightly so, but even with all of that I would never wish upon him or especially his children the end that he got.
Oh, and my friend had never heard, and God help me I don’t know how she escaped the news, but she had never heard of the Minnesota legislators who were shot in June. The husband and wife and dog who were killed, one after throwing themselves over their child to protect the child. The other couple who somehow survived. Politically motivated attacks specifically because they were democrats. She learned about those shootings that happened months ago because I showed her Charlie Kirk’s comments about them. The kidnapping plot against a female Midwestern Democratic governor. The assassination attempt against Pennsylvania’s democratic governor. All things Charlie had plenty to say about while supporting the Second Amendment and bashing the Democratic party. She didn’t know about any of it because we’re all living in two different worlds and none of us have the whole story.”

Ps: John Pavlovitz – “So, wait… the people who supposedly hate cancel culture are getting people fired for speaking negatively about Charlie Kirk? How do they not spontaneously combust from the hypocrisy?”

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James Tippett September 14, 2025

Continuing the conversation, philosopher Karl Popper wrote this during World War II and published it in 1945:

“Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

Something to think about…

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Jafo September 14, 2025

Regarding Mazzie’s question “… why on earth does Public Health need 16 vehicles? The registration, the gas, the maintenance, all very expensive.”

IME, with a motor pool of about half that number of vehicles for itinerant workers covering our large rural county, it was cheaper to have cars and cover all those other costs than pay workers the government determined mileage allowance for using their own cars. It sounds crazy, but that is what the study revealed.

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- Mazie Malone September 14, 2025
  
  Hiya Jafo, 🍁🍃
  
  Thank you, interesting, when was the study?
  
  mm💕
  
  Reply
  - Jafo September 14, 2025
    
    Mazzie – 2018 was the last version I saw
    
    Reply
    - Mazie Malone September 14, 2025
      
      Thank you, Jafo .. 💕
      
      Quite a while ago!
      
      mm💕
      
      Reply
Me September 15, 2025

PHF news, well duh! If anyone had been paying attention to Measure B meetings from the get go you would know it wasn’t going to help the local situation. And, how oh how will that staff be funded?

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Sunday 9/14/2025

19 Comments

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