Hot & Dry | Farm Raiser | Substation Closed | AV Day | Missing Jim | Jackie Help | Mural Opening | Autonomous Rider | Where Reading | Yesterday's Catch | Under Milkweed | Yes 50 | Not Normal | Giants Lose | Rookie Colby | Robert Redford | Not Art | Early TV | Atomic Torture | Jew Nails | Eyelid Storms | Dying Thoughts | Lead Stories | Gaza Today | Free Speech | Kirk Widow | Firing Anyone | Don't Agree | Bomb Shelter | Different Country | Flu Season | Murder Weaponization | Prove Me
HOT AND DRY weather will briefly build through Tuesday with gusty north winds near shore. Cooler weather will then return later in the week with scattered showers for the southern half of the area possible by Thursday into Friday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Another clear 50F this Tuesday morning on the coast. The bulk of the fog is well south so we can expect mostly clear skies thru tomorrow. That tropical system off the coast of Baja Sur is forecast to visit us by later week bringing a small chance of a shower, small being the key word.
PUBLIC NOTICE - FORT BRAGG SUBSTATION LOBBY CLOSED TUESDAY 9/16/2025
Due to an unforeseen staffing shortage, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Fort Bragg Substation lobby will be closed to the public on Tuesday 9/16/2025. It is anticipated the Fort Bragg Substation lobby will be open for normal business hours on Wednesday 9/17/2025.
Members of the public who need assistance can call the Sheriff's Office Dispatch Center at 707-463-4086 (option 1).
Thank you for your understanding.
DAVID EYSTER: An Anderson Valley sort of day. Sheep dog finals in the morning. Only one dog got his/her three sheep through and into all of the obstacles. Walk-through of fair. Sandwiches from Lemon’s Market in Philo. Picnic at Navarro Winery. Soft serve at Jumbo’s. Cheese shopping at Pennyroyal Farm. Up and over the hill and back to Ukiah.
SUPERVISOR JOHN HASCHAK:
For those who know Laytonville, Jim Shields was behind most all community events. There wasn’t an economic incentive, he wasn’t angling for another job. Jim just wanted to make government work for the people. He was relentless in advocating for those who needed help, whether it was navigating bureaucracy or guidance on how to get something done.
Jim was the publisher of the Mendocino County Observer. His “Political Type” column was a must read. He always informed the reader of the critical issues of the day and often gave history lessons as background. His knowledge was endless. Jim and I love history. We were both history majors in college. He would often say something to the effect of “Well of course you studied history and remember the such and such act of 1842”. My response would be “Jim, could you just remind me a bit about that” and of course he would.
We also shared a love of basketball. We both played in our younger years. I fondly remember eating dinner and watching a Warriors game with Jim in the old Boomers. His mind was so incredibly sharp.
Jim and I were both union guys. Jim was proud of his involvement in the airlines’ union and had so may tales to tell. I am sure that he was an incredibly effective advocate for his union. He could tell a story of negotiations relating it to a current issue as if it happened yesterday. Jim’s recall was exceptional.
Jim cared deeply about local and County government. He called himself an advocate for good government. For many years, Jim had his Saturday afternoon radio show on KPFN. Once a month he would ask me to be on the show. He was a talking encyclopedia. I had to have my facts straight before going on with Jim. He was opinionated in a positive, constructive, solution-oriented way. Talking with Jim often gave me a new way of looking at an issue.
I talked to Jim the afternoon before his passing. We were working on how to solve a rash of anonymous code enforcement complaints in Laytonville. He had the paper to finish up yet he still had time to talk. It wasn’t self-interest that motivated Jim. He wanted to solve problems for the community. And when we hung up as often happens, we had a coordinated, agreed upon path forward. I will certainly miss his thoughts, opinions, and guidance on so many issues.
Jim was the emcee for the Supervisorial debates and redistricting town halls. He was the Chair of the LAMAC. He and his wife founded the North Polar Toy Express in Laytonville so ensure that kids at least got a present. I could go on and on about his contributions to the Laytonville community and to the County. Jim’s community-oriented activism will have to inspire us all to do more locally because his are big shoes to fill.
There will be a Talk with the Supervisor on Sept. 16 at 10:00 in Brickhouse Coffee. You can always contact me at email [email protected] or call 707-972-4214.
CETAN BLUESKY: I have several Steller Jays all at the same time in my feeders throughout the day. They see me every morning fill up the feeders and announce that breakfast is ready quite loudly. Then about six fly down and start grabbing eats before I am away more than a few feet. After a few minutes of snatch and grab with great noise they fly back from whence they came. Chickadees are next. About a dozen or so. Once the Chickadees are present the Finches and Meadow Larks and other lovelies present themselves. All the while the Steller Jay’s above are making a great racket. The Crows and Ravens have their feeder and zone. I pick up the gifts of colored glass and bits of tin foil they leave me every morning. One of the Ravens enjoys his Little Smokey sausages so much it leaves me pennies! They are all a fine blend of me flying cousins. I appreciate them all so very much.
LAUREN SINNOTT: Grand Opening! “From Finland to Fort Bragg” Join us to celebrate my mural about the rich heritage of Finnish immigrants and their families. At the mural this Friday September 19, 5-7pm!
CALIFORNIA’S WINE INDUSTRY IS STRUGGLING. THE STATE’S BUREAUCRACY IS MAKING THINGS WORSE
An outdated state regulation requires that there be a rider on board most self-driving tractors
by Tim Bucher & Michael Miller
Changing alcohol consumption habits, climate change and competition from foreign government-subsidized imports have all compounded to create the most challenging environment that wine grape growers in the Golden State have experienced in decades. Last year was the lightest wine harvest California has had in 20 years, down 23% from the year prior.
The industry is in danger. Thousands of jobs are at risk. And turning its fortunes around won’t be easy. Some factors, such as foreign governments subsidizing exports to flood the U.S. market with artificially cheap wine, are out of California’s control.
But one factor entirely within the state’s purview is making a turnaround harder than it should be: California’s outdated bureaucracy.
The most egregious regulation governing the wine industry dates back to the 1970s. Title 8, Section 3441 of the California Code of Regulations requires a rider on board most self-driving autonomous tractors.
While everyone agrees that safety must be paramount when it comes to self-driving technology, California’s rule is based on tractor designs and technology that are outdated and have little bearing on the way modern equipment actually works.
For example, under this workplace safety standard, when a tractor is operated remotely in a workplace, a rider is required to sit atop it even though that rider has no operational control. That rider needs to be there only as a backstop in case the machine stalls or otherwise operates incorrectly. This rule holds even when the autonomous equipment has no steering wheel, brake pedal or place for a rider to sit. Yet a rider still must waste their working hours on top of it.
A report from the UC Davis Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering recently found that no other state or country requires a rider to be on board autonomously and remotely operated agricultural equipment. This is because autonomous tractors, many of which are manufactured here in California, have long been used safely around the world without a rider on board. For example, those designed by California companies like Agtonomy are widely used without a rider in Washington and Oregon.
Even more absurd, California’s rider requirement applies only to an agricultural workplace. Consequently, autonomous tractors can be operated in California without a rider along our roadways, in parks and athletic fields, along airport runways and in any other non-agricultural situation.
Broadly accepted international standards for these machines include technology designed to safely stop if it detects a human, dog, raccoon, fox, skunk or any other obstacle in its path. The equipment (robotics, especially) can also identify invasive plant diseases and pests more quickly through real-time, vision-based data analytics of the crop itself, and reduce chemicals used via precise application using computer vision.
There is almost universal agreement that outdated laws need to be updated in the global discussion of artificial intelligence and autonomy. Leaving things unchanged would be a head-in-the-sand abysmal failure.
Fortunately, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board is looking at updating this antiquated standard. The best way to update this law is to allow its interim use under clear safety parameters, gather data and then use that data to inform a future rulemaking.
That said, the wine industry isn’t holding our breath — as this change has been pursued for several years, and things have moved along incredibly slowly.
Conversely and interestingly, unlike California’s bureaucratic slog, international standards for autonomous tractors are updated every five years to keep up with technology.
Obviously, the primary concern with implementing any new technology in the workplace is the potential for job losses. But the agricultural workforce has been shrinking for decades. Since the 1950s, the percentage of ag workers, as a share of total U.S. employment, has fallen from 13% to just 1.6%.
It’s hard enough to find workers willing and qualified to do difficult agricultural labor. It makes no sense to squander their time and expertise doing nothing atop an autonomous tractor. Nor can the industry afford to eat this needless expense.
With this in mind, California universities and colleges are training students in the use of AI and autonomous equipment, and many of those students are developing this technology. This is because California’s higher education institutions realize that the future of farming, especially in precision viticulture, can only survive through innovation and the use of new technologies.
California leads the world in technology and agriculture. Yet, in a state where the most innovative minds in the fields of technology and wine are located only a few miles away from each other, the regulation of their collaboration is decades behind.
To survive, the wine industry needs laws that reflect the modern agricultural workplace — one in which our farm workers are able to incorporate the best technology and practices available into their labor.
(Tim Bucher is CEO at Agtonomy and is president and founder of Trattore Farms and Winery in Geyserville. Michael Miiller is director of government relations at the California Association of Winegrape Growers. Both serve on the Autonomous Tractor Advisory Committee at the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board.)
SHARON DOUBIAGO: I’m reading from my new book, Naked to the Earth, Nov 10, 2017 at Gallery Bookstore, Mendocino, 6:30 pm.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, September 15, 2025
WALTER BALL JR., 61, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse.
JESUS BANDA-MARIN, 33, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
KENNETH BLOYD, 59, Comptche. Domestic battery.
JESUS CASAS JR., 43, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, paraphernalia.
SCOTT FABER, 46, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.
CHADLEY GOTTSIMMONS, 41, Redwood Valley. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
TEVIN HOAGLEN, 28, Covelo. Stolen property, probation revocation.
LABAN MENTON, 49, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
AARON MUDRICH, 42, Ukiah. Under influence, battery on peace officer, resisting.
GERALD SIMSON, 55, Willits. Parole violation.
AARON STILL, 44, Ukiah. Burglary, probation revocation.
MARTEL UGALDE, 18, Ukiah. Battery on school grounds.
HOLD YOUR NOSE AND SUPPORT PROP. 50
Editor:
We should hold our noses and vote yes on Proposition 50, but it should never have come to this. Texas and the GOP continue to play unethical games, fully aware of how crucial the 2026 elections will be in determining control of the House. They have politicized what redistricting is meant to be: the fair redrawing of voting districts to reflect population changes and ensure balanced representation. Instead, partisan maneuvering has undermined public trust. We all know how pivotal the 2026 election will be in restoring balance to the House and Senate and in repairing the damage done to our country. That’s why it is vital to vote — both on Prop. 50 and in the 2026 midterm election.
Yvonne Martin
Santa Rosa
FIRE WITH FIRE
Editor
There seems to be a righteous uproar about California’s Proposition 50 redistricting proposal.
I’m a sixth-generation Californian who despises gerrymandering, but I also recognize that we are not living in normal times. It is not normal to send tanks and National Guard troops into our cities. It is not normal to disappear immigrants off the streets and deny them due process. It is not normal for a president to seek retribution against political enemies, former staff members and regular citizens on a daily basis. It is not normal to disregard court orders and use the Department of Justice as a personal weapon.
At this point, it is not a matter of being “fair” or “cheating.” We are trying to save the union of the United States of America and our representative democracy.
Proposition 50, of course, was triggered by the president of the United States asking the governor of Texas to find him five more U.S. House seats in Texas. President Trump’s move echoed his mob boss tactic in January 2021, when he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn his loss in the state’s lawful election.
When we are faced with a frontal assault on the Constitution by the most powerful man on the planet, it is not the time to pull back the front lines and settle into an illusion that gerrymandering is a thing of the past in California. It is time to organize a counterassault. And that’s exactly what Proposition 50 is all about.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to redraw California’s congressional maps in response to Texas’ gerrymandering is simply leveling the playing field in a dangerous time. I’m all for it, despite being a victim of gerrymandering in my county.
It’s time to fight fire with fire.
Debra Lucero
Chico, Calif.
GIANTS FALTER IN BRYCE ELDRIDGE’S DEBUT, lose 8-1 to Diamondbacks
by Shayna Rubin
PHOENIX — Bryce Eldridge’s anticipated debut finished with another ugly San Francisco Giants loss.
This third straight loss, this time 8-1 to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday, followed a similar roadmap of their previous pair of losses against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Bats, previously scorching, went cold with Casey Schmitt accounting for both of the hits they’d get against starter Zac Gallen, and the bullpen collapsed in one bad inning.
Eldridge got a steady dose of changeups in his first big league at-bat, but managed the pitch well. The 20-year-old top prospect came to the big leagues with concerns over his 31.1% strikeout rate in Triple-A, but showed command of the zone, worked a 3-2 count before hitting a fastball for a groundout to first base. Gallen introduced his curveball to Eldridge in his second at-bat, getting him swinging at one for strike three, but he was encouraged by how he handled the first at-bat.
“It was fun. I think that’s a good start, facing a guy like him. I had fun,” Eldridge said. “He had a good plan against me and it was fun to get to face him and I felt like I belonged. Felt like I competed…We have a good idea of what these guys are trying to do. Just being able to spit on those gave me some confidence, not going down and trying to reach down low for those. That was good.”
Eldridge looked more comfortable his next time at the plate against Taylor Rashi, crushing the third 89 mph four-seam fastball he saw 407 feet to center field. Outfielder Jorge Barrosa tracked it down, but Statcast determined that the fly ball would have been a home run in 23 other ballparks, including Oracle Park.
A homer would have helped. For the Giants, the fatal inning happened with the game tied 1-1 in the sixth. A bullpen trio of Matt Gage, Joel Peguero and Joey Lucchesi couldn’t hold on, allowing, as a group, six runs on five hits with two walks. Lucchesi took the brunt of it with Arizona tacking on a two-run home run, a double and triple against him.
“Arguably, Peguero and Lucchesi might be our most trusted arms down there, plus (Ryan) Walker,” manager Bob Melvin said. “So we’re just trying to get through that inning and (end up) giving up a six spot.”
This bullpen hasn’t been together long. It’s a group somewhat patched together in light of a complete personnel change within that unit. They’ve lost nearly all their high-leverage relievers that gave the bullpen its identity early on; Tyler Rogers and Camilo Doval were traded at the deadline and All-Star Randy Rodriguez will undergo Tommy John surgery and Erik Miller is working himself back from a long injury.
This new group held its own during the Giants' latest surge. From Aug. 23 — their first win vs. Milwaukee — to Friday the bullpen kept a 2.82 ERA over 70 ⅓ innings, third best in baseball. Over this three-game losing streak they’ve allowed 19 runs over 15 innings.
On Monday, Kai-Wei Teng overcame a rocky first inning in which he allowed an unearned run but otherwise handled the first four innings. Tristan Beck will start Tuesday’s game, but the bullpen will be needed as the third NL wild card slips further out of reach. The Giants are now two games back, as well as behind the Diamondbacks and tied with the Cincinnati Reds.
It helped during the winning stretch that the offense was pouring in runs early. That hasn’t been the case lately against familiar division foes. Gallen threw a steady diet of four-seam fastballs when he faced the Giants last week in San Francisco and switched up his approach Monday, offering up far more changeups.
As for Eldridge, he had at least 20 friends and family travel to Phoenix to watch his debut, and all will stay for the whole series. His gear though, still hasn’t even made it back to Sacramento. The truck carrying it (and all his teammates' gear) had an issue, as far as he knows.
There aren’t immediate plans to have Eldridge play first base, but his glove is also on the truck. For drills, or just in case he gets in at first, he’s using a clubbie’s glove and a brand new one that hasn’t been broken in. That new one has the name “Wayne” embroidered on its thumb, a nickname friends had given him a while back. The original nickname is “Bruce,” because text messages tend to autocorrect “Bryce” to “Bruce,” which then turned into “Bruce Wayne,” also known as Batman, and then just “Wayne.”
Eldridge wasn’t a superhero in his debut, but he signaled promise.
(sfchronicle.com)
ROBERT REDFORD DEAD AT 89
by Germania Rodriguez Poleo and Jane Herz
Screen legend Robert Redford has died at the age of 89.
The Oscar-winner died in his sleep on Tuesday at his home in Utah, outside of Provo, The New York Times reported.
The announcement of his death was made by Cindi Berger, the chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK.
Redford was one of the top Hollywood leading men for decades, appearing in blockbusters such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men.
His first big break came in 1963, when he starred on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, which he would later reprise.
He often starred alongside many of Hollywood's leading ladies at the time, like Barbara Streisand in The Way We Were in 1973, and Jane Fonda in the 1967 film, Barefoot in the Park.
The actor began directing later in life and won an Oscar for Ordinary People in 1980.
He founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute in 1981, which became a staple in the arts world for years to come.
In 1984, he transformed a struggling film festival into what's now known as The Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah.
It was a home for budding filmmakers to make a statement, famously featuring directors like Quentin Tarantino, Ava DuVernay, James Wan, and Darren Aronofsky.
The festival also became a place to showcase documentaries that involved serious topics, about things like climate change and reproductive rights.
However, as the festival grew more and more popular over the years, Redford spoke out against the commercialization of the event.
'I want the ambush marketers — the vodka brands and the gift-bag people and the Paris Hiltons — to go away forever,' Redford told a reporter during the 2012 festival, according to The New York Times.
He also continued to act later in life, as he played Bill Bryson in A Walk In The Woods in 2015, and John Gage in 1993's Indecent Proposal.
Throughout his career, Redford won countless awards and accolades.
In 1981, he won an Oscar for Best Director for his part in Ordinary People.
His 1994 movie, Quiz Show, was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Director at the 1995 Oscar Awards.
Redford also won multiple Golden Globe Awards, including Best Director for Ordinary People in 1981.
In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Redford as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is America's highest civilian honor.
Typically, it is awarded to 'individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.'
Throughout his life, Redford was also a huge advocate for preserving the environment.
He moved to Utah in 1961, telling CNN, 'I discovered how important nature was in my life, and I wanted to be where nature was extreme and where I thought it could maybe be everlasting.'
Redford was married to historian Lola Van Wagenen from 1958 to 1985, and they shared four children together - sons James and Scott Anthony Redford, and daughters Amy and Shauna Redford.
In 2009, he married German artist Sibylle Szaggars.
In a 2024 interview with Orion Magazine, Redford shared his advice for young filmmakers who want to urge their viewers to care about something.
'Well, good ones. No seriously, it has to be a good story to be a good film. That comes first,' Redford told the magazine.
'And I think on the environmental issue right now, the stories need to be encouraging in some way so that people feel motivated or inspired to care or do something about it, so they can envision a better future, which is a big opportunity for screenwriters,' he continued.
'We have enough stories about how people and other species are suffering from what we have done to the land and the water and the climate. The result of that is a lot of people don’t believe that anything they do will matter because the problem has gotten too big,' he shared.
'But we do need more people to get involved. So, we need to show them why it matters, by telling stories about people who are solving problems, really complicated problems.'
He urged young filmmakers to 'get involved,' and to not take it 'lightly.'
'Stop long enough to have something sink in with you, so you feel connected to it,' Redford said.
'That will give you the energy to stick with it long enough to make change.'
(dailymail.co.uk)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
By the mid Sixties, sitcoms had deteriorated pretty badly. There were always too many Westerns in the first twenty years of TV. There was other dreck. But there was all that great stuff, too.
On YouTube you can find probably all of the “You Bet Your Life” episodes. You can find what seems as if it couldn’t have happened, an excerpt from a TV drama from 1954. It stars Ronald Reagan and James Dean. You can find video of Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill’s widow, performing some of Weill’s great songs from “The Threepenny Opera.” You can find Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic with guest artist, Glenn Gould, and so help me God, Igor Stravinsky.
I have a permanent furious grudge against CBS and NBC for not allowing what must be hundreds of hours of great live ( and thank God, kinescoped or videotaped ) performances onto the Internet. Maybe they have and I just don’t know it. I haven’t had a TV since 2014.
WHEN YOU STOP to examine the way our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth—how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It’s not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, its sticking together that’s difficult. Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state—that’s the unconscionable torture.
Unquestionably we worship nothing more divine than our smell. All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick, or Harry, year in year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but ‘us,’ the jerks of infinity. We’d burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us by our pride.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
FRED GARDNER: "Jew nails" — That's what Norm called them. I asked, "Why, 'cause they're clever?" He said "No, 'cause they're cheaters." He also described his work (carpentry) as "slammin' 16s," a reference to the nails used in construction. A good neighbor, he taught me what little I know.
THE EYELID HAS ITS STORMS
The eyelid has its storms. There is the opaque
fish-scale green of it after swimming in the sea and
then suddenly wrenching violence, strangled lashes,
and a barbed wire of sand falls to the shore.
Or, in the midst of sunset, the passive grey lips:
a virile suffusion of carmine! itching under a plague
of allergies and tears; memories of the first soothing
ointment press the cornea to desperate extremity, the
back of the head, like a pool pocket, never there when
you stare steadily and shoot.
A man walked into the drugstore and said “I’d
like one hazel eye and a jar of socket ointment, salted.
My mother has a lid that’s black from boredom and
though we’re poor-her tongue! profundity of shut-
ins! And oh yes, do you have a little cuticle scissors ?”
Purchase to dream, green eyeshadow, kohl,
gonorrhea, of the currents at the bottom of the Gulf of
Mexico.
— Frank O’Hara
“THEY LAID ME DOWN again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of my mouth. ‘The artery’s gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting—I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment’s carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me—wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.”
― George Orwell, ‘Homage to Catalonia’
LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT
Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, U.N. Inquiry Says
Israel Launches Ground Offensive in Gaza City
White House Plans Broad Crackdown on Liberal Groups
Appeals Court Says Lisa Cook Can Remain on Fed Board
U.S. Strikes a 2nd Venezuela Boat, Killing 3, Trump Says
Trump Signs Off on Sending the National Guard to Memphis
China’s Snub of U.S. Soybeans Is a Crisis for American Farmers
These Ants Found a Loophole for a Fundamental Rule of Life
HE HAD THE GUARANTEE
Editor,
I disagreed with most of what conservative activist Charlie Kirk stood for as a 72-year-old card-carrying liberal, MAGA-disdaining, woke American and longtime LGBTQI+ ally.
I would also vehemently defend Kirk’s constitutionally guaranteed right to espouse his truths, and I am horrified that he was killed in Utah for possibly doing just that.
That being said, can we slow the efforts to beatify and anoint Kirk, who our president called ”great and even legendary,” as a paragon of free speech until we bestow the same accolades upon those who would defend transgender Americans, dare to criticize Israel and are horrified that immigration agents have become the American gestapo?
You don’t actually believe in free speech if you afford the right solely to those who agree with you.
Barry Goldman-Hall
San Jose
ERIKA KIRK, CHARLIE KIRK’S WIDOW, GRIEVES PUBLICLY, Melding Personal and Political
by Emma Goldberg
A rosary thrust out the tinted window of a car. Hands resting on a casket.
The images of Erika Kirk in the days since her husband, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated have been wrenching. Though Ms. Kirk has now lurched into a new and harrowing spotlight as she grieves in public, for four years she has stood on convention stages alongside Mr. Kirk and built her own following of young conservative admirers, while helping her husband build his.
“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife,” Ms. Kirk said, standing in a white blazer at a lectern at Turning Point USA headquarters on Friday, in her first public speech since her husband, a right-wing force and key ally to President Trump, was killed at a college event in Utah. “The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/style/erika-kirk-charlie-kirk-marriage.html
CHARLIE KIRK: THIS TOO SHALL PASS, UNFORTUNATELY
by Thomas Knapp
If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on, it’s that no one should be murdered for speaking.
In the aftermath of Charlie “Prove Me Wrong” Kirk’s murder at a Utah campus event, it’s clear that no, we don’t all agree on that.
The bulk of responses to Kirk’s assassination consisted of:
1) Sober condemnations of murder in general, or murder over speech, from most people, and
2) Opportunistic condemnations of “political violence” from the most politically violent creatures on the planet, politicians.
But we also saw significant amounts of celebration among Kirk’s opponents, and baying for the blood of anyone not aligned with Kirk among Kirk’s supporters (some of whom on “the right,” it should be noted, were vehement critics right up until the instant the single shot rang out).
Not good. More and more Americans seem more and more willing lately to countenance the “political violence” that most Americans (including its politician practitioners) still condemn.
Despite this last week’s fevered comparisons of the killing to the killings of JFK, RFK, MLK, and 3,000-plus people on 9/11, Kirk’s life and death, and his killer’s, are likely destined, within a few short years, to become the material of minor footnotes in dry historical texts.
Kirk and his killer are this past week’s, maybe this year’s, Brian Thompson and Luigi Mangione.
Yes, their notoriety will persist for more than the usual short news cycle, with bumps during associated court cases, etc., but none of them were so wildly noteworthy before their tragic interactions that they’ll be universally remembered a decade, let alone a century, hence.
That thought might comfort you.
It shouldn’t.
Last year, about 17,000 Americans were murdered.
How many of their names do you remember?
Do you consider “political violence” a differentiating factor worthy of closer attention than you’d give the victims of street robberies or domestic violence?
If so, ask yourself whether you’ve even heard names given to the 11 people politically murdered by the US government on a boat in the Caribbean on September 2.
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve heard Lavoy Finicum’s name mentioned in the nine-year period starting about a month after his political murder by FBI agents in 2016, or Garrett Foster’s name mentioned in the last year, starting shortly after his political murderer was pardoned by Texas governor Greg Abbott.
Charlie Kirk’s name will fade from memory precisely because “political violence” is the not-so-new normal.
Personally, I’d prefer to live in a society where murder is so rare that we can remember every victim’s name whether the motive for the killing was “political” or not — and a society where the victim’s speech is never used as moral justification.
(Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida. CounterPunch.org.)
DRESSED TO KILL
“You currently have one side willing to talk and extend a microphone to anyone, and one side that shoots to kill when they do.” —Aimee Terese on X
by James Kunstler
When Brian De Palma’s movie, Dressed to Kill, came out in 1980, this was a different country. Like Hitchcock’s Psycho before it (1960), both films depicted men seeking to become women who are murderously deranged by their wishful fantasies. Now, our country has become murderously deranged by the same fantasy writ large.
These derangements are acted out now by a segment of the population that calls itself “the trans community.” This is just another manipulation of language, of course, by the same organized agencies working to turn our national life upside-down and inside-out. You call them “Globalists” or “Marxists” or “gnostic anarchists,” but who-or-whatever actually directs this action remains an abiding mystery of our time. (The runner-up abiding mystery is how the news media was hijacked to go along with all that.)
You have learned the past ten years how fragile reality can become in a society under stress. But then there is the reality of things as they actually exist, and the group’s perception of reality, which is not the same. The group’s perception of reality requires a consensus, an agreement, that certain things of this world are so. If the agreement is sturdy, and comports with how things actually exist, then you have a high-functioning society. If the agreement is flimsy and doesn’t comport with how things actually are, you get Clusterfuck Nation, a society tortured by various compounded derangements.
It is hard to account for exactly how this happened to us, but the most visible manifestations of it these days come out of the political Left, the party that once defended the interests of the working-class, the laborers in their tough, uncomfortable lives seeking fair treatment from the comfortable class that employed and managed them. At least, that’s how things resolved for a while in our industrial society, the classes coexisting in a fruitful, balanced tension. That all peaked in the early 1960s.
Political relations between business and labor grew increasingly irrelevant after that as industry got moved out of our country, so the party of the working-class had to find something else to give its attention to. By the early 1960s, the Democratic Party had already rebranded itself as the party of the civil rights (having been previously the party of Jim Crow and the KKK). It was not an altogether cynical or insincere transformation. It was driven by a dynamic imperative: to prove that America, the self-styled Leader of the Free World after two great and ruinous world wars, was a fair and righteous country, deserving its post-war leadership role. And that imperative rode the tailwind of Franklin Roosevelt’s “progressive” legacy.
Increasingly, though, after the 1960s, the civil rights crusade lost its mojo. It disappointed the zealous. Try as it might, the effort did not lead to a nirvana of racial harmony. In fact, the miserable black underclass seemed to only grow larger and more dysfunctional, the cities they lived in (increasingly run by them) more broken.
The band-aid for that failure was multiculturalism. By the 1980s, the consensus about reality was fracturing, especially about standards of behavior. Too many “people of color” were “justice involved” — they committed crimes. It was an embarrassment to “progressives” (liberal Democrats). Multiculturalism’s premise was that a society could have different standards of behavior and different values for different groups. Henceforth, there was no need for a broad agreement about what sort of behavior was okay and what was not okay — no need for a common culture that applied to everyone.
From there, the Democratic party had to assiduously recruit and sort out all the various multi-cultures in America, and pretend to manage and justify their special needs in order to continue functioning as a national political party. In the 1970s, it was all about feminism, the entry of women into the managerial class, the board rooms, the law firms, the professoriate. Then it was all about gay rights, Stonewall and all that followed. That movement was badly derailed in the 1980s by AIDS, which killed many of its activists and made the group’s sexual activities look less than entirely wholesome.
After about 1985, the liberals had to write off Black men. Too many were crackheads and no accounts. All they had left was the likes of Al Sharpton (of Tawana Brawley infamy) and a few hundred millionaire sports stars. So, the Dems rallied over the plight of Black women… who were soon joined by the indigenous people (formerly “Indians”)… the Pacific Islanders… By the early 21st century, the Democrats had run out of oppressed ethnicities to recruit under the multicultural umbrella. All that remained were the “homeless” (formerly “bums,” “junkies,” and “the mentally ill”).
Actually, the mentally ill had gotten a multicultural jump-start in the 1970s when patients in hospitals for the insane were re-branded as an “oppressed minority.” Thus, the hospitals were all emptied out and closed down and the patients released to “freedom” on the streets with vague promises of “community-based treatment” to follow — it never did, of course. After several major Middle East wars starting with Desert Storm in the 90s, more and more damaged military vets joined the ranks of the homeless. It has apparently never occurred to anyone that re-establishing hospitals for the insane might be necessary.
And so it has gone, from one “marginalized” and “oppressed minority” after another until all that liberalism (and their official org, the Democratic Party) had left in the 2020s was the tiniest subculture in the country: people who fantasized about becoming the opposite sex. That group was much encouraged by the medical establishment so narcissistically enchanted by their surgical skills and manipulations of hormonal chemistry (and the money it generated) that they recruited ever more subjects for their experiments.
The doctors and their therapist partners, in turn, egged-on the teachers, professors, and school administrators to recruit “patients” for “treatment” of the new condition called “gender dysphoria.” The cheerleaders of the political Left coalesced behind all of that, promoted the hell out of it, went as far as inviting “drag queens” (men portraying women as monsters) into the third-grade classrooms. And that is how deranged humans like the characters in Dressed to Kill and Psycho became the role models for the Democratic Party.
(kunstler.com)
ISRAEL, CHARLIE KIRK, AND THE WEAPONIZATION OF MURDER (w/ Max Blumenthal)
Max Blumenthal details the tension between Charlie Kirk and Israel in his final months, and what to expect from a new era of right-wing repression in response to his killing
by Chris Hedges
Charlie Kirk’s assassination will likely serve as the crux of a new era of political violence and repression in the United States. In the days since Kirk was shot at a speaking event at Utah Valley University, right-wing groups and figures have demanded mass censorship of all critical online speech directed at Kirk. President Donald Trump has effectively attributed the attack to the “radical left” and vowed to go after those he deems responsible. Mass doxing campaigns targeting people who contextualized Kirk’s politics or celebrated his killing has led to firings across the country.
Amid the online chaos, narratives surrounding Kirk’s assassin, stemming from incomplete reporting from mainstream outlets and a lack of clear analysis by the FBI, have further fueled confusion and outrage across the political spectrum.
Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to analyze the implications of the assassination. He also details his latest article, which reveals exclusive background information on Kirk’s flailing relationship with Israel and tensions within the Trump administration.
Kirk’s refusal to accept Zionist financial contributions as well as his deepening disconnection from Israel “left him feeling cold and anxious and even in the words of the friend, frightened,” Blumenthal tells Hedges.
Chris Hedges:
The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. Political violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — seems certain to expand. So does state repression of individuals and groups, accused by the far right and the Trump administration of fomenting the hate that led to Kirk’s assassination.
Trump blames the “radical left” for Kirk’s murder, claiming it is “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” He vows to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
If Trump means what he says, and I suspect he does, we will see the full force of the federal government used to target Trump’s opponents and organizations, including the Democratic Party, the media, universities and advocacy groups – which are already under heavy assault. More ominously, it will give a green light to far right vigilante groups to carry out violent attacks against those blamed for polluting America including Muslims, the LGBTQ community, groups such as antifa, feminists, liberals and the Left, the undocumented, the poor and people of color.
Joining me to discuss Kirk’s assassination, what it means for the United States and the future of our disintegrating democracy, is Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, whose most recent article is “Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals” which adds another fascinating twist to the unfolding saga.
So Max, before we get into the ramifications of this assassination in terms of civil liberties and repression, let’s talk a little bit about the article that you just published about Kirk’s alienation or distance from the Zionist lobby. I know you’ve been writing about Kirk for some time.
Max Blumenthal:
Yeah, I’ve been writing about him since 2015, three years after he started TPUSA [Turning Point USA], which became the largest, most influential conservative youth organization in history. And at that time he was at the forefront of a massive infusion of Israel lobby cash into his group through the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which was basically making him the property of Israel in exchange for this sort of Faustian bargain.
He was going to be at the top of the conservative youth grassroots or astroturf grassroots. So he could talk about race, immigration, all the social issues and take the most extreme lines possible, say whatever he wanted, as long as he pushed this so-called Judeo-Christian relationship and constantly talked about the Judeo-Christian roots of the country and supported Israel and attacked BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions], the BDS movement which was growing on campus, whenever he could.
And so Charlie Kirk was actually at the forefront of many of the blacklisting operations that have targeted college professors as well as students. He was in the same circles as those who were behind Canary Mission, which is now being used to target green card holders and visa holders for deportation under Trump.
So I was covering it early on before anyone had heard about him. He was like a baby-faced activist then, but he was obviously very hardworking, talented, a huge asset for them. And flash forward to July of this year, Charlie Kirk is the most influential conservative activist period.
He is on his way to possibly becoming the next president. Almost certainly would have become senator even though he’s from Illinois. TPUSA is major, but there’s a crisis taking place. Charlie Kirk is under pressure from his own grassroots on the issue of Israel.
Israel’s exerting, under [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, so much control on Trump, amid a genocide, that the grassroots have turned against it. And if you look at recent polling, YouGov polling, Pew polling, all of them show about only 25% of Republicans under 35 support Israel over the Palestinians.
If you actually pay attention to what Nick Fuentes — who’s the most influential right-wing, America First streamer — says they’re not just upset over Jewish influence. They’re not just being anti-Jewish. They’re actually upset by the same things that upset us — the deliberate starvation of a civilian population unfolding in real time, and then watching their president just fold to a foreign apartheid state.
And so this pressure was building within Charlie Kirk’s camp, and Charlie Kirk himself was beginning to turn and it all exploded out in the open at the Student Action Summit, which I believe was in Tampa, Florida in July, 2025.
And that’s where Charlie Kirk brought Tucker Carlson, someone who had already turned on this issue on stage to not only talk about how Jeffrey Epstein was possibly a Mossad agent, but to call for those who had gone and fought for Israel, American Jews who had gone to fought for Israel’s military rather than the US military to be stripped of their citizenship.
And he called out Bill Ackman, one of the most influential Zionist billionaires in the U.S. who is a Netanyahu cutout who had been sort of manipulating and bullying Harvard into submission. His money got Claudine Gay as president out at Harvard. He mocked Bill Ackman as a financial con artist. He literally called him a scam artist and questioned where his money came from. And the crowd was cheering and delighting in this entire spectacle.
Megan Kelly from Fox was calling Jeffrey Epstein a Mossad agent. Then Charlie Kirk opened up the floor to a debate on the very issue of Zionism and brought on an anti-Zionist Jew, a comedian named Dave Smith, to debate a Zionist apparatchik at Newsweek named Joshua Hammer. And Dave Smith like mopped the floor with him. He’s very effective. He was also talking about human rights abuses and the crowd was clearly with him.
And after this summit, Charlie Kirk was bombarded with furious text messages phone calls There may have been meetings as well very tense meetings as well with his donors the people who built him up and they said we built you up, we can take all of this away from you if you don’t stop this and we are laying down the law.
And this offended him, alienated him. He was not used to being talked to like that, as though he were property, but when you join the firm, you don’t get to leave. And at the same time, I was told by a long-time friend of Charlie Kirk that he was frightened by the way he was being treated. Basically, a mafia was reading him the Riot Act.
And he wasn’t the only one who was frightened. I was told that the source is someone who knows people in the White House, Donald Trump’s frightened. Donald Trump is afraid to defy Netanyahu. He’s afraid about what can happen. And I was told that during one of Netanyahu’s, or several of Netanyahu’s recent visits to the U.S., I think he’s made four visits this year, which is unprecedented, listening devices were planted by Israeli agents on the Secret Service’s emergency response vehicles.
Maybe StingRay devices, some kind of listening device, electronic surveillance device. This was found by the Secret Service. It was told to the White House. Obviously, the White House kept it under wraps. And this has made people nervous inside the White House and the national security team. And this is not something unprecedented.
Politico in 2019 reported, citing three former US officials, that Israel had planted StingRay devices around the White House to spy on Trump’s cell phone communications. Boris Johnson, the former [United Kingdom] PM, wrote in his memoir that Netanyahu went to use his personal toilet and afterwards his personal security team found a listening device in his toilet, like immediately afterwards.
[Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom] Tony Blair told his own team, when you go to Israel, do not speak about anything sensitive in government buildings or cars. So I don’t think I’m being fed a bunch of conspiracy theories here.
And what I reported, based on background sourcing, matches up with the things that Charlie Kirk said in public, that he was being bombarded by what he called Jewish stakeholders, meaning his funders, and that he felt that he could not express his own views anymore as an American.
And he was starting to move in public. So consider the consequence of a figure like Charlie Kirk who’s on his way to basically inheriting the mantle of Trumpism at some point and who controls a large segment of that movement taking the base away from the Judeo-Christian relationship, taking it away from rock solid support for Israel as Israel is in a seven front war, carrying out genocide.
And Netanyahu believes that he has this short window of time to basically carry out regime change in Iran. It would have been catastrophic. And I also learned from multiple sources that Charlie Kirk actually took it upon himself personally to go to the White House and personally lobby Trump against bombing Iran back in June and that he was shut down. Trump angrily rebuked him because Trump is simply afraid.
He’s completely controlled at this point by Netanyahu. So am I saying that Israel killed Charlie Kirk? How would I know that? There’s no evidence for that. But how am I going to not report this fascinating background about where the conservative movement and the Republican Party itself are going on the question of Israel when I’m learning all of this after his death.
And there are so many unusual aspects to the investigation, so many mishaps by the FBI and such strange behavior by the Israeli government and Netanyahu himself since Charlie Kirk’s killing that it has fueled speculation by millions of people online that there may have been an Israeli role.
I mean, why wouldn’t they speculate when Israel seems to assassinate everyone that defies it in its own region and has even dispatched thousands of pagers to low level Hezbollah members and their families to assassinate them?
It’s something that we would expect in this atmosphere, but I am not making any claim, direct claim, that Israel assassinated him. What I’m saying is I think they would have taken him out. The Israel lobby would have taken him out for sure, but they would not need to do it physically.
They could just defund him and then castigate him as they’re doing with figures like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson, who have turned against them. But so this is just a fascinating, I think, a fascinating look and it won’t be my last one at Charlie Kirk’s final days and the political pressure he was under.
Chris Hedges:
How much money was he getting, number one. And number two, can you talk about Netanyahu’s reaction and his, because you write about it in your piece, his interactions with Kirk?
Max Blumenthal:
Well, this is something that was not known to the public. And I hope to be able to report this out in greater detail. But I was told that by a friend of Kirk, someone close to Kirk, who was speaking to them in his last days, that Netanyahu actually came in and personally offered to re-up Kirk’s TPUSA organization with a massive infusion of Zionist money.
And his budget at its height was something like $80 million. I mean, we’re talking about a lot of money. You can just watch the Student Action Summit that became so controversial. There’s nothing like it on the left or even within the Democratic Party’s associated organizations. It’s very flashy.
Look at Charlie Kirk’s final moments. It looked almost like he was running for president. It looked like a Trump rally. And look at the amount of, he had enormous amounts of former Navy SEALs and special forces guys around him, like executive security. You have to have a lot of money for that. So he already had the money, but he was at risk of losing much of it. And Netanyahu comes in and says, basically, come to the dark side. Stop talking about this and we will take care of you.
I will call my cutouts and they’ll have everything handled. And Charlie Kirk refused. And what I’m learning is that was not the first time he refused someone close to Netanyahu in recent months. And it left him feeling cold and anxious and even in the words of the friend, frightened.
I’ve had some conversations with other influential people in the right wing influencer world since my piece came out. And basically what they want me to know is that this is something they’re all facing. All of the major right-wing media organizations associated with Trump, that there is no space for them to criticize Israel.
One figure I could point to, I’ve actually been on his podcast, he’s one of the top right-wing podcasters. Like if you go to Rumble, which is sort of the YouTube alternative, because so many right-wing voices were being banned there, and even us, Chris, like more on the left, we get like demonetized left and right and suppressed on YouTube.
Chris Hedges:
Constantly, constantly.
Max Blumenthal:
So we’ve even turned to Rumble, but you go to Rumble, Tim Pool is one of the first, if he’s live streaming, that comes up right away. And so he gets enormous amounts of views. And you know, I went on his show right after October 7th and he gave me the floor and let me speak my mind.
Tim Pool was summoned to a meeting with Netanyahu during one of Netanyahu’s visits under Trump’s second term at the Blair House where Netanyahu was staying with just a few other right-wing GOP-affiliated influencers, like media influencers.
And he was not allowed to talk about what happened. I think one of his co-hosts or guests brought up the meeting on his podcast and you could see he was extremely nervous, extremely anxious. And it’s like, was he captured somehow by Netanyahu? I mean, the pressure that Netanyahu himself is personally bringing on the right-wing podcast world really shows his anxiety about the rebellion that’s taking place among the youth.
And after my article came out, which got over 100,000 views, just unique views on our website. And I did an interview with Tim Dillon, who’s a very popular comedian, about this, which has erupted. It’s like 600,000 views now, just exploding across social media as people were already talking about this issue. Netanyahu tweets, takes to Twitter/X for like the sixth or seventh time since Charlie Kirk’s killing to declare that Charlie Kirk was a true friend of Israel.
And this time it felt like Netanyahu was overcompensating and was afraid of the truth getting out, which is that as Charlie Kirk’s longtime friend told me, Charlie Kirk had grown to hate Netanyahu, as every U.S. leader has.
Remember the open mic with [French President Emmanuel] Macron and [Barack] Obama where they’re complaining, the hot mic, like in 2012 or something, and they’re complaining about Netanyahu and they’re like, you think you have trouble dealing with him. He calls me every day. That’s where Charlie Kirk was. He thought he was a disgusting bully and manipulator.
And so Netanyahu’s worried that Charlie Kirk’s base posthumously will start to take on that sentiment towards him. You can see they’re deploying Ben Shapiro everywhere they can. Ben Shapiro is like the leading media asset for Netanyahu in the United States.
He just feels astroturfed to me. He even jokes on Twitter about having six million followers but he seems so sort of unlikable and talentless and he’s pushing a kind of form of warmed over softened Trump ism that just doesn’t feel authentic.
He was on Fox News with the other major Zionist enforcer in the media who Netanyahu helped personally credit with convincing Trump to bomb Iran, Mark Levin, just days before Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And they were complaining about Charlie Kirk alluding to him allowing Tucker Carlson on stage this summer and saying, you can’t have a big tent, you can not allow these kooks in, and you can’t be at the front of the church allowing congregation of anti-Israel nutjobs into your realm.
Then Charlie Kirk goes to the front of the church four days later, a sniper’s bullet hits him in the neck, and Ben Shapiro comes out 24 hours later and says, we need to go on our own campus tours and pick up the bloody microphone where Charlie Kirk left it. The subtext is, we’re gonna go on those campus tours and we’re not going to allow this anti-Israel stuff to come into our “church” anymore.
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk a little bit about the ramifications of this. One of the things that we’ve seen over the last few months as the genocide just, as you said, across the political spectrum becomes so repugnant, is Netanyahu’s courting of kind of alternative media, almost never anymore even goes on mainstream media.
Max Blumenthal:
Yeah, great question. Netanyahu never goes on Israeli media. And you know that from your years in the region and having Israeli sources, is that anyone who isn’t Likud in Israel constantly complains that Netanyahu will never talk to Hebrew language media. He can’t take a challenge. He wants to dominate and get his message across.
And his message is best sent to Americans as long as he can hold like his tiny, narrow edge in his coalition together by keeping the genocide going and keeping the fascist messianic elements as his linchpin. The Israeli public doesn’t matter. The hostages can all die. What matters is keeping his direct line to Washington and to Trump. And the biggest challenge to that, once again, was Charlie Kirk.
It was the conservative youth who are in this open rebellion against Israel. And so on his last tour to the U.S., Netanyahu sat down with The Nelk Boys. I wasn’t that familiar with them because I have an IQ higher than a grapefruit and they cater to a very low IQ audience that likes pranks and frat boy kind of bawdy humor.
And they themselves admitted after the interview, which was like a softball interview where they asked Netanyahu, what do you like better, McDonald’s or Burger King? They admitted after the interview that one, the questions were fed to them by Netanyahu’s team. Number two, they didn’t know who Netanyahu was. And after learning about it from more educated members of their audience, they decided that he was the new Hitler.
And they felt bad about interviewing the new Hitler. Netanyahu has carried out several interviews with basically the most vacuous podcasters in the U.S. And why would you even agree to interview Netanyahu? I mean, of course, he’s a world leader, so you want the engagement. There must be some kind of financial incentive there.
And if the pro-Netanyahu elements in the U.S., fronted by Bari Weiss, paid for by David Ellison, the son of Oracle CIA contractor Larry Ellison, are going to buy CBS News and put Bari Weiss at the head of the editorial team. It’s pretty clear what’s going on. They’re not just in a seven front war. They’re in an eight front war. The United States is the eighth front and it’s a hybrid war, mainly focused on propaganda. But when that fails, they will escalate.
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk about that because since Kirk’s assassination we have seen, in particular, the Zionist lobby weaponize his murder to call for this “war against the radical left”. You had, is it Brian Mast has pushed a bill to authorize the Secretary of State to revoke passports to “kick out terrorist sympathizers out of the country.”
This of course follows Tom Cotton, November ‘23 after the genocide had started after October 7th, demanded a Justice Department National Security investigation of news outlets such as AP, CNN, New York Times, Reuters for publishing photographs, images of October 7th.
They’ve weaponized, you know, it was fascinating as you have it, once this breach between Kirk and the Zionists and the Israel lobby, yet at the same time, his assassination, his elevation to martyrdom is really being used by the Israel lobby to go after everybody who, not just criticizes Israel, but I think everyone on the left.
Max Blumenthal:
Yeah, I mean they see the left as the main base of BDS and elevating this issue to a national crisis. The left is their main target. Netanyahu sees a marriage of radical leftism and Islam, what David Horowitz called the Red-Green Alliance as the main threat in the U.S.
And so in his first Fox News appearance before the suspect’s identity, the main suspect being Tyler Robinson, was even known, Netanyahu blamed Muslims. He blamed radical Islam for doing this. The same way that he declared in comments to Maariv or reported in the Israeli paper Maariv in 2008 that 9/11 was good for Israel.
If Muslims could be found to be responsible, well that’s good for Israel. It’s also good for the GOP. The Utah governor [Spencer Cox] openly declared during a press conference that he was praying that the culprit would be a foreigner and not one of our own guys, meaning Tyler Robinson of Utah.
I mean, he just openly admitted it, standing right in front of Kash Patel, an immigrant from India [Kash Patel was born in Garden City, NY], the FBI director, who looked kind of uncomfortable in that position. The identity of the killer and the motive was determined before Charlie Kirk’s body went cold. And the agenda was already there the same way that the Patriot Act had already been assembled prior to 9-11-2001.
And it is an agenda of mass repression, crushing dissent, basically criminalizing what they consider anti-Israel activity. And we have seen this week with Brian Mast’s bill, which is basically Israel’s agenda to strip Americans of citizenship if they’re accused of providing material support, which can be anything, to Iran and Israel’s enemies or pro-Hamas.
Chris Hedges:
Sorry, just to interrupt Max, people who have provided legal advice to groups are accused of providing material support to terrorist groups.
Max Blumenthal:
Yes, okay. And there is no due process for them under this bill. Normally it would go to a court. In this case, it’s left up to the exclusive authority of the Secretary of State, someone created by the Israel lobby, basically an AIPAC plant, Marco Rubio. And where’s Marco Rubio right now?
Marco Rubio is kissing the wall. Right now he’s leaving the Kotel in the old city of Jerusalem where he had to carry out this humiliation ritual that every U.S. politician who wants to rise does where they have put on a kippah and Netanyahu takes them to the Western Wall and they have to basically kiss the wall.
It’s like up against the wall motherfucker, you want to be a politician? And he’s there with Mike Huckabee, the Christian Zionist who really believes in that stuff, who is basically managing, he’s the U.S. wing of genocide management in Gaza right now, overseeing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s starvation siege. This is, I mean, it’s just a shocking display to witness.
And then back home you have Stephen Miller, who himself is an arch Zionist who is running the entire agenda for Donald Trump right now. He’s sort of the brains, the Rovian brains behind this authoritarian crackdown that they want to implement, telling Sean Hannity that we will put you into exile and we will take away your freedoms. If you minimize Charlie Kirk’s death, we will put you into exile.
What does that mean? It means taking away your citizenship. This is what they want to do. It’s on the table. It’s playing out on social media in a vigilante fashion where it’s like a site charliesmurderers.com [this website has been taken down and replaced by charliekirkdata.org] is doxing thousands and thousands of Americans, not only for celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, which I personally found just deeply anti-social, to be a form of anti-social behavior that just shows a kind of lack of humanity, but also minimizing his death or calling him a racist or putting his views in context, and they’re losing their jobs.
It’s a dystopian scenario. The right wing is playing cancel culture to the extreme, but it’s playing to win, unlike the left, which was sort of just trying to enforce a very narrow moral code by getting people canceled or going after people in the media within their own media organizations and so on. The right is playing to win. They want to fully isolate dissent, left-wing dissent from society, and they’re exploiting this in a way that raises a lot of questions before… there’s been no full investigation of this shooting yet.
Tyler Robinson is not cooperating. I haven’t seen the confession. Apparently everyone close to him is cooperating. We don’t have the information, but they don’t care. They want to ram through this agenda, which totally dovetails with what they’ve been doing with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].
ICE isn’t just about immigration. It’s about normalizing secret police in our society that violate people’s fourth and sixth amendment rights and are able to essentially kidnap anyone who is a resident in the U.S. and take them to de facto concentration camps. And the budget, Trump’s big, beautiful bill, has put these secret police on hyperdrive. The kidnapping of Latinos who are suspected of being undocumented migrants is a pilot program for a larger agenda.
Chris Hedges:
Yeah, without question and of course the expansion of these detention centers are regionally going to have, in essence, de facto concentration camps dotted throughout the United States. What do you expect to see coming? Now they’ve gone after George Soros, I mean the insanity of it. But what are we going to see in terms of their game plan over the next few weeks and months?
Max Blumenthal:
Well, I mean hate George Soros and what he’s done across the world is malign. I mean, he’s a CIA-adjacent anti-communist billionaire.
Chris Hedges:
Well, let me just interrupt Max. I mean, George Soros did exactly what the [US]AID democracy initiatives did, which was crush any kind of popular resistance movements. I mean, that’s the kind of final irony, but yeah.
Max Blumenthal:
Exactly. And you know, this relates to a wider conversation, I think, about the left, the post-BLM [Black Lives Matter] left, is the role of foundation money in the left. I know Christian Parenti is working on a book about this, how this foundation money from the Ford Foundation, Open Societies, was basically used to suppress and sort of neutralize anti-war and class-based activism within the left and get people more focused on issues that didn’t threaten the Democratic Party, which was controlled by the rich, like anti-racism.
Not, you know, understanding the racialized roots of poverty, but just this vague concept of anti-racism and all of these other social issues. It’s a sort of separate conversation, but where I think things are going in this country is very dark and recalls the Years of Lead in Italy.
The Years of Lead were driven by or punctuated and accelerated by political terrorism and political assassination. It was a strategy of tension which was being orchestrated by the intelligence services, not just the Italian intelligence services that were affiliated with NATO, the CIA was involved and Israeli intelligence may have been involved as well in the killing of Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister.
So let’s consider the 1969 Milan cafe bombing, Piazza Fontana bombing. This was like what launched the Years of Lead. And it was a false flag operation that was carried out by stay-behind armies recruited by the CIA under Operation Gladio from far-right fascist groups, which would have collaborated with Hitler during his occupation of Italy, as well as like they were also recruiting within the mafia. And it was blamed on left-wing anarchists.
That’s not what I’m saying happened here! I’m just talking about, I’m trying to make a larger point. The reason that the security services did this was they feared, they actually did fear in some way far-right fascism, but their primary concern was communism and leftism in general and they felt like if the situation became destabilized and the public became afraid, they would adhere to the security state’s agenda which was in that case pro-NATO.
I also mentioned the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro. Aldo Moro was the last of a kind in Italian politics. In 1978 he was kidnapped by the Red Brigades and it began, it really accelerated the social unrest and fear that the middle class Italian public felt following like Gladio and everything.
And he was held for days by the Red Brigades. They put him on a mock trial. And then after killing his security team and kidnapping him with his motorcade, and they accused him of selling out the working class and making Italy an imperialist state.
But historians have looked back at what Moro was doing and seeing that he was actually privately allowing arms to pass through Italy to Palestinian resistance groups, that he was taking a not necessarily friendly stance toward Israel, that he was a friend of unions and working-class syndicates and that the Red Brigades had actually, I mean, this is confirmed, the Red Brigades had been infiltrated heavily by the intelligence services, many suspect the Israeli intelligence service.
And it crushed the national unity government and actually moved Italy further to the right to the point where now Giorgia Meloni, I mean, Giorgia Meloni sort of reflects this legacy as this right-wing leader. So the strategy of tension in the U.S. has been building since 2020.
And I can point to one incident then that I think is a perfect microcosm of what I’m talking about. Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting, which is poorly understood by people on the left who supported BLM. Kyle Rittenhouse was acting in a vigilante fashion to guard local business with his weapon out, along with other local men from looters and rioters who were destroying local businesses in a completely nihilistic fashion.
A group of pro-BLM marchers was marching around soon after looting. They were not smashing up businesses. They were just marching randomly. And their own crowd had been seeded with people who had never protested before, one of whom was a local mental patient, a young man who had just been let out, mysteriously, of a local mental hospital and dropped off at their demonstration by police.
The police directed the marchers directly to where Kyle Rittenhouse and his group of vigilantes were. And several of the marchers began physically attacking Kyle Rittenhouse. One pulled a pistol on him. Kyle Rittenhouse shot them. He also shot the young man who had been a mental patient. And this inflamed racial hatred across the United States as Kyle Rittenhouse was actually accused of going across state lines to hunt down Black people.
The police had no reason to push the crowd and direct them to where Kyle Rittenhouse was except to inflame that conflict. Do I know that there was some higher order there? No, but this was what I was seeing in my own just being out there in the country at the time. And it was also
at a time when COVID was beginning to grip the country and the unvaccinated were being pitted against the vaccinated.
We’re just constantly being pitted against each other by narratives that come from the top. And that is where Trump wants this to go because Trump has promised a new golden age for the 1%. It’s not for the rest of us. And the 1% has been terrified not just since… the Charlie Kirk shooting is primarily terrifying the podcaster class.
Since the shooting of, I think his name was Brian [Thompson], the United Healthcare CEO by Luigi Mangione, Steve Bannon, former Trump Chief of Staff, gave a talk to a group of financial elites and tech elites, I believe it was in Silicon Valley. Many of them were not Republicans. And he said, here is our promise to you.
This was like, I think at the beginning of the second Trump term. He said, this is why you should support MAGA [Make America Great Again], because this guy, Luigi Mangione, went out and shot one of you. This is going to happen more and more. We are entering a period of social unrest and social turmoil, and we will protect you.
So what we are going to see now is a policy crafted for the elite that is terrified of this environment, and at the same time, a policy to drive us, the rest of us, who have nothing, who are in debt, who don’t really see much of a financial future in the U.S., they’re gonna pit us all against each other through a strategy of tension and then repress us all and let us say whatever we want online.
We won’t be banned anymore. We can say whatever we want on Elon’s Twitter/X. We have freedom of speech. As he said, we have freedom of speech but not freedom of reach. And that freedom of speech will be used to surveil us further and ruin our lives if we are provoked into saying the wrong things.
Chris Hedges:
What kind of infrastructure do you foresee in terms of, I mean, we’ve already seen the capitulation of universities, even the capitulation of mainstream media organizations such as CNN. What’s the landscape gonna look like? How is it gonna be deformed?
Max Blumenthal:
It’s going to look a lot like the McCarthy era and it’s been a major inspiration to the right. We’ve seen right-wing organizations like what was it, CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference], I think, was giving out like young McCarthy awards back during the mid-2000s.
Stephen Miller, I think, sees McCarthy as sort of a hero. So what has the Trump administration done? They have gotten Berkeley, UC Berkeley to furnish a list of 160 anti-Israel, anti-Semitic professors with Professor Judith Butler at the top of it. That’s what we’re seeing along with the defunding of universities for allowing Students for Justice in Palestine to exist, for allowing protests on their campus.
It’s the biggest free speech crackdown possibly since the McCarthy era, certainly the most transparent one. And it’s being conducted in many cases on behalf of a foreign apartheid state. There’s now a lot of grassroots calls I see online for a Charlie Kirk Act. Remember, this is something the right always does, is they name an act after a martyr of their culture conf, their culture war.
They had the Laken Riley Act, a woman who was murdered by a Venezuelan migrant. And the Laken Riley Act was an attack on due process. And it allows us to report any migrant who we may suspect of a crime and requires law enforcement to jail them and sequester them from society without any due process, which is unconstitutional.
The Charlie Kirk Act that’s being pushed online is an attack on media independence and will do a lot of what the Biden administration was doing to online media, which is to censor and punish any media organization or individual who’s accused of mis- or disinformation.
And so the right is basically picking up where the Biden administration left off, just directing it against their enemies. I don’t think that will be the forum that such an act takes, but I expect some kind of Charlie Kirk Act to take place. I expect the investigation that the FBI’s carrying out to be incomplete, just as the investigation of the young man who shot Donald Trump, what was his name, [Thomas] Matthew [Crooks], the Butler shooting, the Butler, PA shooting, it feels like that was shut down.
Ryan Routh, the would-be shooter at Mar-a-Lago who was recruiting for the Ukrainian Foreign Legion in Kiev and who had had meetings on Capitol Hill, we don’t hear about that anymore. So I expect them to try to sort of bury any uncomfortable or inconvenient facts there.
And then finally, I think there will be a push to label Antifa as a terrorist organization the same way that the British state and British intelligence have labeled Palestine Action, an anti-war group that has never harmed a single person, which was carrying out direct action against Israeli defense facilities, has been proscribed as a terrorist organization in the U.K., which means that you are not allowed in the U.K. to declare your support on a t-shirt for Palestine Action without being jailed for supporting terrorism.
And the difference there though is that Palestine Action is a real organization. It was sort of an amorphous organization, but it had a brand. Antifa is not. We don’t even know what Antifa is. And Antifa is something that, as you wrote in a piece that I think really stands the test of time about Black Bloc, an aspect of Antifa back during Occupy Wall Street, is easily and constantly and comprehensively infiltrated by federal law enforcement.
They’re basically a chaos agent for federal law enforcement, but they’re not a real organization. You can’t determine who’s a member of it, except through, what? Bullet engravings or t-shirts? If Antifa is prescribed as a terrorist organization in the U.S., it pretty much allows anyone on the left who gets involved in direct action or protest activity to be labeled as a terrorist as well.
Chris Hedges:
I just want to throw in Ellen Schrecker, who did all the great work on McCarthyism, No Ivory Tower, her books, and et cetera. She says this period is worse than McCarthy because there you saw black lists and people being pushed out of schools and universities. The FBI actually used to show up at high schools with lists. But she said here they’re capturing institutions.
Max Blumenthal:
That’s right. I mean, it is a march through institutions, and they’re also just simply eliminating institutions that can’t be captured.
Chris Hedges:
Alright, thanks. That was Max Blumenthal, check out his great work on The Grayzone.
Oh, yeah. The problems in the wine/grape industry is that autonomous tractors require a human as a safety. I got to the end and thought, “This belongs in the Onion”.
+1
Tim Bucher & Michael Miller: How about a nice bit of cheese with your whine?
MULTI CROP YIELD TRANSITION OPERATOR
—>. March 25, 2025
Regulations in the US – where Amazon has been testing drones since 2022 – allow for multiple drones to be tracked by one human.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/22/amazons-self-flying-delivery-drones-need-pilots/
—> June 22, 2025
Almost 90 drones have attended up to 11,300 jobs including arson, major crash and search-and-rescue operations since they were first introduced into the WA Police Force in 2018… Senior Sergeant chief remote pilot officer Paddy Madaffari of Police Air Wing, described the drones as “one of the biggest changes in technology” and said they allowed police to better allocate their resources.
https://thewest.com.au/news/crime/wa-police-could-be-australias-first-law-enforcement-agency-to-fly-drones-beyond-visual-line-of-sight-c-18945494
—>. October 7, 2024
The group claims to be the first retailer in the UK to trial an “autonomous field” farming technique in an effort to reduce its carbon emissions and improve crop quality and quantity. In partnership with Huntapac, its long-term root vegetable supplier, M&S planted its first batch of parsnips at a farm in Yorkshire in March, using two robots for bed forming, planting and weeding and two different types of drone to monitor and maintain crop health…
This, it said, had contributed to an increase in quality and number of parsnips and reduced waste, with a 16 per cent higher yield of grade one vegetables compared with Huntapac’s other parsnip fields. The trial is being held at Huntapac’s parsnip field in Yorkshire but the supplier said it was “aiming to deliver multiple fields farmed this way for next season”. It supplies M&S with parsnips and carrots.
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/robots-and-drones-sow-a-better-m-and-s-parsnip-0lb85wzr7
Exactly. Oh, the misunderstood, unfortunate alcohol industry in general and the sad, put-upon, filthy-rich alcohol factory owners in particular. Imagine their constant worry and responsibility to maintain alcohol’s place on the list of death and widespread misery of addiction: violent crime, accidents, cancer, family breakdown, cost to society. Merely one-third more bad outcomes of alcohol use than from heroin, or crack cocaine. Only a few more millions humiliatingly crippled and killed every year from alcohol than from smoking meth and smoking cigarets and taking ketamine and barbiturates and roofies and ecstacy and nitrous oxide all put together. And when they buy a machine, for about the cost of a house, to do the work for them, Luddites in government require them to pay someone to /sit there and watch the machine work, too?/ Somebody should start a petition.
I’m with Jim Barstow.
“…and people of color….”
Chris Hedges uses the term ‘People of Color’. I don’t know what is more un-american.
More unAmerican than the Supreme Court just deciding that it’s perfectly legal for army-armed gangs of ICE officers unidentifiable in sunglasses, hats and facemasks to kidnap people away to prison camps in swamps and deserts for not being white? Because that’s what they just decided. Being brown and speaking Spanish constitutes probably cause. Your turn: suggest something that’s more unAmerican even than that.
Okay, listen up, Marco
STOP using the term ‘people of color’, and I promise you there will be peace in the land.
You know why? Because then those people will be on equal terms with the rest.
You know why? Because they’ll stop being ‘people of color’, and be allowed to move up the food chain.
You know why? Cause they’ll finally have EQUAL ACCESS to their own f* culture, without some moron telling them they’re slaves to the term ‘person of color’.
You know why? Because the largest group of AMERICANS would never use that term because they are ALL mixed.
You know why? Cause I’m an American. IF you don’t like it call your Island the United States of America. Don’t usurp the entire gd Continent.
Oh man, I wish it were so easy. Marco, what have you to say?
Well, I married a person of color in 1988. I wonder if she’d appreciate you calling her a slave, Lily. And Mexicans in Mexico are Americans, as are Indians in Canada (First Nations people). Every /U.S./ American Indian I ever spoke to about this issue preferred to be recognized as Indian, preferred the term Indian over Native American, and the name of their tribe over Indian. My mother has always been puffed-up proud of being Italian, as many Irish-Americans are proud of being Irish, and the same with Armenians and Hmong and Swedes and so on.
One time about ten years ago I was on the air from the KNYO storefront and a big squishy Hawaiian-Mexican-looking guy and a skinny white girl wandered in and sat down. I put a microphone in front of them. The skinny girl did most of the talking while the big guy played with his phone. There was the smell of weed, but it might have seeping in from in front of the bar next door. Skinny was a boy, I thought, by tone of voice and shape and manner and face and clothes, but then, unrelated to the conversation, she, or he, said she or he was transitioning. That’s interesting. I said, naturally, “From what to what?” Everybody looked at me like that was nuts to say, so that was the end of that line. They said something about persons of color, and that their father came from the Philippines, so it was implied that they were a person of color. I said, “You look like any white guy. I was just recently surprised to learn that Hispanic people aren’t considered white. I mean, George MacDonald Frazier’s character Harry Flashman, throughout the late 1800s, in all the books, seems to think everyone in the world who isn’t an Englishman (royalty or wealthy or at least a military officer) is a nigger, to hear him tell it calmly, matter of factly and without negative connotations (that he’s aware of); he’s friends with everyone, takes cowardly, scheming, criminal, haplessly counterproductive advantage of everyone equally, has touchingly romantic unprotected sex with all the many kinds of women everywhere he goes in the world despite his happy marriage to “dear brainless Elspeth” back home (Scottish, so almost white, close enough). That was then. What makes someone white or not now?” And the skinny, transitioning person said sharply, incredulously, glaring at me, “Do you think /you’re/ white?!” I thought about it and said, “My wife Juanita’s father was quite black, from Texas; her mother, a blueish-white redheaded Irish-Cherokee woman, was born in Kentucky. Juanita’s milk-coffee-colored with soft curly candy-floss hair; when I first saw her I thought she was a tiny Samoan girl, like a Samoan elf. My mother’s father’s parents came from Italy. Her mother’s parents were Polish and Lithuanian; my grandmother was kind of a witch, the good, funny kind, though she used to tie my mother to the bedpost and beat her with a wooden hairbrush for sassing back. My bio-father’s parents were German Jews who got out of Nazi Germany in the nick of time and both became lawyers in Brooklyn, New York, where they had a brownstone house, filled with an at least four-floor labyrinth of high-but-tiny dim rooms linked by cupboard doors and narrow staircases. I think if your mother’s mother was a Jew that makes you a Jew, but even if both your father’s parents were Jewish that doesn’t count for you. I know that even the whitest-color of Jews couldn’t really be White until pretty recently, unless they were a movie star or a famous baseball player, and blah blah blah…” I have since learned that it’s a stereotype of white people, honkies, haoles (HOW-leez), etc., that when you ask one what race he is he will tell you a long story of what countries all his people came from. Wouldn’t it be cool if I was the one who started that? But I’d have to be white for that to be, and now I’m not sure that I am. I remember /feeling/ ethnic alongside my new step-brothers and step-sister, who had freckles across their cute little noses, when I met them in 1967 when my mother married Roland, one of whose sets of adoptive parents were both French and they once nearly died by mixing bleach with ammonia to clean the machines in their first laundromat. Never do that. It makes poison gas. Powdered cleansers are often also bleach. Just don’t mix any cleaning products.
We’re all the same species, like dogs are all the same species, no matter what size and shape and color they are. There is one race of people here: the human race, but we’re more different from each other than dogs are or even Star Trek space aliens. Descriptions are required in writing and conversation, and nation-location words and stereotypical characteristics and sometimes attendant skin colors helpfully shortcut telling important parts of a story so it can be visualized. Devout religious people and conspiracy nuts and angry creepy anonymous forum posters and people who believe in astrology and magic spells think so severely differently from the way I do that we might as well all /be/ space aliens from different planets. I prefer to pronounce gala guh-LAH, and vegan VEJ-un and Caribbean kuh-REE-byun and Renaissance re-NAY-s’nss. I’ll talk how I like to talk, and yez all can talk how you like to talk. I only have ten years or so left to live anyway, by the Blue Book. How much trouble can I cause by not crippling my enjoyment of communication to suit people who won’t be happy no matter what hoops I jump through to please them?
Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
Thank you, Marco. Well said.
FOR GAZA’S PEOPLE
Brown Earth
Morning, come to the windows of the street
Selling red watermelon, five cents a piece
Merry boat on the river, freedom
Fresh dreams to deliver, freedom
Over and over and over
I call out your name
God standing on the brown earth
Get up, mama hollers
Shooflies in the doorway
White doves gonna come today
White doves gonna come today
Oh, what a morning, I feel so good
Oh, what a morning of brotherhood
Hold me by the light
Kittens run the neighborhood through
Ragamuffin boys
All the world is new by the light of day
Give with your heart and love will come to you
Kids come in all shapes and colors
To the cool morning dew
Merry boat on the river, freedom
Fresh dreams to deliver, freedom
Over and over and over
And over and over and over
God standing on the brown earth
Lovelight in the morning
Shooflies in the doorway
White doves gonna come today
White doves gonna come today
White doves gonna come today
White doves gonna come today
White doves gonna come today
White doves gonna come today
—Laura Nyro, 1970
And For The People of Gaza—Any of this?
Brown Earth? No, their earth is black, scorched, ruined, despoiled.
Lovelight in the morning? None there.
Kittens-ragamuffin boys-shooflies? No, not around, hiding, hurt, dead.
Fresh Dreams to deliver, freedom? No–no dreams, no freedom.
White doves gonna come today? No, no doves coming, no peace there. Instead— war, death, destruction, destitution.
God standing on the brown earth? No, not for them. Abandoned by God (and the world).
Hold your nose and vote yes in 50???
That’s what is wrong with our country and our state. Justifying bad actions by comparing them to the actions of others is a form of rationalization, and diffusion of responsibility. Anyone who does this is wrong.
I don’t care what they do in Texas, I don’t live in Texas. We elect our representatives to serve our communities. They do so by having shared goals which are often based on shared experiences and needs for the communities. What does Marin County share with the residents of Modoc County. What if the governor focused on fixing the mountain of problems in our state instead of pointing the finger elsewhere to get the heat off of him.
Every single advertisement in support of this legislation clearly says it’s wrong, but…… look what they are doing……
Very sad times for sure.
In the 2024 Civil War movie the eventually successful “Western Alliance” defeats the President’s forces. Curiously the Western Alliance was California and Texas in Alliance (also strangely, Florida had also rebellious forces). The thinking of the script writers behind the linking up of Texas and California isnt clear.
Proposition 50 is a temporary necessary measure to confront a corrupt and criminal President with at least a Dem-majority in the House. We’re that seriously in trouble.
It’s throwing out the baby with the bath water. And it’s going come back around on us in a fashion no one will like. Maybe when we have a really heinous crime., our judges will just start throwing out the fourth amendment.. Things like this are where it begins, where will it end?
I think I understand your point related to the option of temporarily bypassing the independent commission but the judicial rulings re 4th amendment issues took a bad turn recently when the Supreme Court overruled lower courts restricting ICE from using job locations, ethnic appearance, language being spoken etc as probable cause basis to detain and question people.
Didn’t the Supremes just throw out the fourth amendment sheriff?” “More unAmerican than the Supreme Court just deciding that it’s perfectly legal for army-armed gangs of ICE officers unidentifiable in sunglasses, hats and facemasks to kidnap people away to prison camps in swamps and deserts for not being white? Because that’s what they just decided. Being brown and speaking Spanish constitutes probable cause.”
I think our Sheriff said it well.
When I hear the justifications for Prop. 50 what I really hear is “we need to destroy democracy to save democracy”. A slippery slope for sure.
For those of us who live in CA’s rural areas and appreciate a country way of life…Katie bar the door when our voices have been silenced by those only exposed to concrete and an urban way of life.
Proposition 50 is a coffin nail for our country way of life.
Ted, that is exactly what I’m saying. I live in a world where the end can never justify the means. I’ve lived inside this world for my entire adult life as a peace officer.
Every case a deputy or detective works he must remain within the boundaries of the 4th amendment,, 5th amendment, the Miranda decision, and a huge number of case law decisions which define how laws are applied. Circumventing the system and working outside of these lines will never produce tue desired outcomes. What it will do is get evidence in front of a highly educated non biased practitioner of the law who is wearing a black robe.
That honorable subject will then throw out your evidence and dismiss your case. Yes murderers have walked free because someone decided the ends were worth the means. And worst of all that deputy’s reputation is shot to hell while criminals to walk free.
If a magistrate will let a murderer walk free before allowing a violation of our constitutional amendments it tells me we will stay on the right path and we have hope.
Short cuts like this are basically shaking hands with the devil and eventually we will get burned. We are headed in the wrong direction on this one and it’s beyond comprehension we have leaders calling for this.
This is more about something than not living in Texas, with the other states in play. It is living in the United States and saving our Constitution. Sometimes one has to hold one’s nose, when it is time to vote, to find the best compromise of the available options. Surprising how many moan about the lack of viable choices, but variations of rank choice voting are slowly catching traction, so in time we can make our best efforts into just law, and rekindle benefits of natural resources economic growth, and technological labor parity with commonwealth.
An experienced politician would say that making legislative compromise in law wrangling, is like making sausage. Sure ain’t pretty but hopefully passes the smell test with the outcome. What we are up against is a federal political disorder straw boss in charge cashing out the County and the country, along with the Mendocino thoughts that you express involving Modoc and Marin counties, perhaps seeing the light of day.
—>. September 16, 2025
Trump asks the Supreme Court to give him total control over the US economy.
The next few months could be the most consequential period for US constitutional law since the Roosevelt administration.
In a trio of cases, two currently pending before the Supreme Court and one that is likely to land on the justices’ doorstep as soon as Tuesday, President Donald Trump claims new powers that, if he prevails, would give him near-total control over all US fiscal and monetary policy.
https://www.vox.com/politics/461677/supreme-court-trump-dictator-economy-tax-spending
The side that is cheating is basically telling the other side “you can’t cheat”. That just doesn’t work for me.
There it is, nicely said.