Mendocino County Today: Saturday 9/20/2025

By AVA News Service on September 20, 2025

SCATTERED SHOWERS and isolated Thunderstorms will continue to cross the area through Saturday afternoon. Clearer and drier weather will begin to return Sunday and build through next Tuesday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A mostly cloudy 55F this Saturday morning on the coast. Pretty much more of the the same until further notice.

GEORGE DAVID RICETTI SR. (1941-2025)

George David Ricetti Sr. of Upper Lake passed away peacefully at Sutter Hospital in Santa Rosa on August 10, 2025, at the age of 84.

He was born in Ukiah on March 12, 1941, to Steve Ricetti Sr. and Adeline Grandi Ricetti. George was best known for his strong work ethic, which was displayed in the secondhand stores that he owned and operated over the years in Mendocino and Lake Counties. He enjoyed camping, hunting, fishing, gold panning, and taking long drives on the backroads. He knew great spots to enjoy breathtaking views all over the surrounding areas, especially along the coast. In particular, he loved seeing the herd of elk around Willits. He was talented at building and reconstructing properties. One of his legacy properties is the Costa Plenty Ranch, which people enjoy seeing as they pass by on the highway.

He is survived by children George Jr. (Anita Crow), Mike (Kim Tripp), Cindie Ricetti (Rick Chambers) with his first wife Linda Harder, and Kimberly Gusto (Marc), with second wife Judith Ford; nine grandchildren, double-digit great grandchildren; and brother Steve Ricetti, Jr. He was generous to many and is greatly missed.

BOB VAUGHN, popular long-time valley resident and KZYX programmer has died. Correctly described by long-time KZYX programmer Karen Ottoboni as “committed and passionate,” Vaughn often lived hand to mouth, sometimes homeless, but was always upbeat and and took his KZYX responsibilities very seriously. We hope to have an obituary soon.

MISSING PERSON ALERT

Please help us locate Richard Leon Allen.

Last seen: Monday evening, September 15, 2025

Location: Willits, California

Description: Richard has red hair and teal-colored eyes. He is tall, standing a little over 6 feet, and has a heavy build, weighing over 300 lbs. He also has tattoos (details not specified).

Date of Birth: 12/20/74, Age 50

Richard has been missing since that time, and his family and friends are deeply concerned for his safety. If you have seen Richard or have any information regarding his whereabouts, please contact me immediately. Your shares and support are greatly appreciated.

[Please call your local police if you have seen this man.]

MISPLACED PRIORITIES, MUDDLED MISMANAGEMENT

And a $3,000 Comfort Support Dog For The DA’s Victim Witness Office.

by Mark Scaramella

Agenda item 4b for next Tuesday’s Supervisors meeting is entitled:

“Discussion and Possible Action Including Approval or Denial of Requests from Department Heads and Elected Officials Regarding the Funding and Recruitment of Vacant or New Positions Following the Strategic Hiring Process.” 

Attached to that Agenda Item is a three page long description of the CEO’s “Strategic Hiring Process.”

In that description (written last May) we find:

“Human Resources will present a monthly agenda item to the Board of Supervisors, which reviews all departmental requests to fill vacant or soon-to-be vacant positions. Each request will include a justification outlining the necessity of the position, any legal or regulatory mandates, and the proposed funding source.” (Dated May 23, 2025)

There have been no “monthly agenda items” for the Strategic Hiring Process until this month. And even this month, five months after the “monthly agenda items” were promised, there are still no listings of departmental vacany filling requests with justifications, etc. which the Board is supposed to either “approve or deny.”

The Strategic Hiring Process (i.e., leaving positions vacant when staff members resign, retire or otherwise leave County employ) was budgeted to save $6 million dollars this fiscal year (July 2025-June 2026) which we are now almost three months into. Is it? Nobody knows, or cares. Next year the CEO says that the budget deficit will be around $16 million (some say more than that). But we don’t know how that was calculated and whether it assumes that whatever savings were realized from vacant positions carry over into next year.

We have heard that the Strategic Hiring Process is even being applied to Social Services (where every week, it seems, another desk is empty but management keeps insisting that they are fully staffed), even though most Social Services positions are not funded by the General Fund, but through state and federal grants and programs. This, of course, leads to staffing turmoil, morale problems, confusion, higher workloads and stress, delays in handling applications and cases, and further reductions in staff, such as what’s happening in Family and Children’s Services lately.

The long anticipated report of the financial status review of ambulance operations in the unincorporated areas of the County — Covelo, Laytonville, Anderson Valley — is now complete, only one month after it was promised. But it is not on the Board’s agenda for this month, so the mostly volunteer organizations will continue to wait for their county funding supplements. We have been advised by those involved that the report is “positive,” a self-evident conclusion that certainly needed no outside review to determine since the local ambulances are mostly staffed with dedicated volunteers who get only a minimal stipend for coveing 12-hour shifts and being on call during all hours. Presumably this “positive” conclusion means that the Supervisors will continue to provide the meager $67k annual allocation to each ambulance operation as it has done for more than ten years as the value of the $67k is significantly eroded by inflation.

Also not on Tuesday’s agenda is an item important to residents of Gualala about their long-delayed attempts to improve traffic and parking in town on Highway 1, and underground their utility lines. This item has implications for Anderson Valley since, reportedly, CalTrans has plans to pave over an 80-foot wide swath of downtown Boonville to rigid Caltrans standards to the consternation of most local residents on that stretch of Highway 128. Like Boonville, Gualala is trying to get Caltrans to take their local input into account. So far all we have been told is that Caltrans is “listening,” but has not changed any of their all-concrete/all the way plans.

Instead of those high-priority missing local items, the Board’s main agenda for next Tuesday includes: “Discussion and Possible Action Including Direction to Staff for Creation of a County Wide Fee Structure for Public Use of County-Owned Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Stations. (Sponsored by the Executive Office). (Possibly a potential revenue generator, but fraught with potential problems.)

Other items on the regular agenda include: a Fee Schedule hearing, a Willits area cannabis prohibition zone application, Supervisor Madeline Cline’s proposal to regulate the sale of nitrous oxide canisters in the County, the County’s role in Governor Newsom’s anti-Trump redistricting proposal, and a couple other routine matters.

On the consent calendar we found these curious items:

Consent Item 3e: Approval of the District Attorney’s Purchase of a Trained PALS Facility/Comfort Support Dog for the Victim Assistance Unit in the Amount of $3,000; and Approval of Standard Service Agreement from September 23, 2025, through June 30, 2030.”
Consent Item 3y: Approval of Agreement Between Carahsoft Technology, Corp. – Accela Government, and Mendocino County Planning and Building Services In The Amount of $1,103,936.65, For New Automated Permitting Software, The Accela Civic Platform, with a Term Through October 31, 2030. (You thought Mendo was broke? Au contraire; they apparently have $1.1 million sitting around for a new permitting computer program. (And we doubt it will stop at $1.1 million.)
Consent Item 3k: Authorization to Rescind Mendocino County Policies #3 Fee Waivers and #31 Standard Copying Fees; and Approval of Amendment to Mendocino County Policy #47 Master Fee Schedule Policy.

This one is a mystery. There’s no explanation of what fee waivers are being rescinded or why, and there’s nothing about what the cost of copies will be after the “standard copying fees” policy is rescinded.

UKIAH MOVES FORWARD ON CAMPING LAW CHANGES

by Justine Frederiksen

The Ukiah City Council Wednesday voted unanimously to introduce an amendment to the city’s Camping Ordinance that gives the Ukiah Police Department more latitude in issuing criminal citations to people found to be illegally camping.

“This is intended to be one tool the city has,” Assistant City Attorney Darcy Vaughn told the City Council, explaining that the proposed amendment basically reverts the city’s ordinance back to what had been put in place in 2005, before a court ruling in 2019 found enforcement of camping laws in many circumstances to be cruel and unusual punishment.

However, as explained in the staff report prepared for the Sept. 17 meeting, the U.S. Supreme Court last year reversed the Ninth Circuit decision that had prohibited local restrictions on public camping as unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment unless the person was provided access to adequate temporary shelter, which then provided “local jurisdictions greater latitude to enforce anti-camping rules.”

Also, the staff report explains, in July of 2024, “in response to the Supreme Court’s holding that states and their subdivisions can take reasonable actions to clear encampments, the Governor of the State of California signed an Executive Order which directed state agencies to develop policies to prioritize addressing encampments on state property… and to use all available resources and infrastructure, including the historic resources provided by the state, to take urgent action to humanely remove encampments from public spaces.”

before Wednesday’s meeting, the Ukiah City Council received many letters and comments from community members urging them not to support the amendment, and Council Member Mari Rodin said that she definitely agreed with the need for compassion for those camping, but that there were also “people who have expressed their concerns and fears of playing in parks, (so) there is also a public, and we care about their quality of life.”

Noting that she supported the revision to the city’s camping ordinance, Rodin asked Ukiah Police Chief Tom Corning how many times his officers may have written citations for camping violations in the past year if this amendment were in place, but Corning said he could not easily come up with a number.

“What I can tell you this is a last resort, because no police officer wants to stand there for 15 minutes writing a ticket to homeless person for being homeless,” he said. “And typically we get people to voluntarily comply, because most people don’t want a citation.”

City Manager Sage Sangiacomo agreed.

“We’re not wanting to write tickets, but if you have somebody who is camping, continually, in front of a business, over and over, and they have been offered and provided services and outreach, and they continually refuse, this is the last resort that is in play,” Sangiacomo said. “And it’s not a great resort, by any means, that’s why it’s the last resort. But if you don’t have that backdrop, then I don’t know how you get compliance (from) someone continually camping in front of a business, or on a sidewalk, or under a bridge. There’s just simply no other tool at that point than to try and do it through citations and the court system for a different outcome.”

The council then voted unanimously to introduce the ordinance by title only.

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

(L-R) Councilmembers Mari Rodin, Heather Kriss, Juan Orozco, and Mayor Douglas Crane during Wednesday night’s Ukiah City Council meeting on September 17, 2025 in Ukiah, Calif. (Sydney Fishman/Bay City News)

UKIAH SEWER RATES POISED FOR HUGE JUMP AFTER ONE-MINUTE PROTEST HEARING

Sewer costs projected to rise 40% from 2024 to 2030

by Elise Cox

The Ukiah City Council unanimously voted Tuesday to increase sewer service rates by 22 percent after a one-minute “protest hearing.” Combined with last year’s approval of a 14 percent increase, the total sewer rate hike from 2024 through 2030 is 36 percent.

The increase was discussed at the July 16, 2025, council meeting. No public comment was received then, and there was no media coverage of the proposal. (See note to readers at the end of this article.)

The July meeting launched a legal process allowing ratepayers to negate the increase if enough ratepayers protested. On Tuesday, city staff suggested 1,766 active accounts as the threshold for preventing the increase, though this figure was not mentioned in the notice sent to ratepayers. The notice described how to submit a written protest but did not encourage residents to comment publicly.

Twelve people submitted written protests. Here is a sampling of their comments:

“It is just so difficult to manage increasing expenses from every direction while finding no way to earn enough to cover it all,” one ratepayer wrote.
A 30-year resident who has made it a point to pay all her bills on time described the impact on her budget. “I’m now a senior citizen living on a fixed income,” she wrote. “My Social Security payments are less than $1,000 per month. My property taxes are over $500 per month. I feel like I’m being forced out of my house. I can barely afford to make ends meet. After contributing financially to this community for more than 30 years, I feel I am being punished with ever-increasing bills.”
An 81-year-old resident wrote that if the increase took effect, “I would probably find a way to reduce my bills so I can stay in my home. But it will be difficult.”
A 75-year-old resident wrote: “I’m on a budget that keeps getting smaller. … My health care just went up $35, which means I’m paying $300 a month for that. I’ve learned to live without air conditioning. I don’t flush my toilet every time I use it. I budget everything I possibly can.”

At the July 16 meeting, consultant Mark Hildebrand and City Finance Director Dan Buffalo described the decisions that made the rate hike inevitable, starting with grant applications for road projects.

“The success of these road grants necessitated a faster-than-anticipated capital improvement replacement program for underlying infrastructure, including sewer lines,” he said, adding that it was “appropriate and advisable” to do the sewer projects alongside the road work.

From fiscal year 2020-21 through 2024-25, Ukiah spent an average of $2.8 million a year on capital projects to rehabilitate or improve the sewer system. Forecasted spending from fiscal 2025-26 through 2028-29 averages about $1.2 million.

The capital projects, combined with a 4.5 percent decrease in rate revenue in 2023-24, drained the city’s sewer enterprise funds. At the start of the 2024-25 fiscal year, the balance of those funds for operations and rate stabilization was $584,000.

Other factors include rising insurance costs, projected to increase 7 percent annually, and a policy shift allocating some recycled water costs—previously paid entirely by the water utility—to the sewer fund.

Altogether, the rate increase is intended to rebuild depleted reserves, with a target of $1.8 million (25 percent of annual operating costs), and to create a new $1.3 million capital reserve.

This additional $3.1 million will be raised over the next five years. In the short term, the city plans to fund the depleted operating fund with a $2 million internal loan.

Hildebrand told the council on July 17 that even with the increase, Ukiah’s rates are relatively low. A regional comparison of typical monthly sewer bills for single-family homes showed Ukiah with the third-lowest rate.

“It’s not a good thing to be at the bottom necessarily,” Hildebrand said. “Whereas people might want to indicate that that shows efficiency, lots of times being at the very bottom might be an indication that there’s a lack of reinvestment in infrastructure.”

Councilmember Mari Rodin said it was “a consolation” that Ukiah’s rates remain comparatively low. She also noted that because the increase applies to both the fixed monthly charge and the usage-based rate, residents who consume less will see a smaller hike.

“I just want to emphasize, and I think I can speak for all of us, that we’re very sympathetic to the concerns of residents, particularly those on fixed incomes, for whom this increase poses a big hardship,” Vice Mayor Susan Sher said. “It gives us no pleasure to raise these rates. But the city has to deal with inflation, and the inflation is caused by circumstances beyond our control.”

The staff report listed several options for residents struggling with the higher bills:

United Way, Catholic Charities and other nonprofits can provide emergency utility bill assistance to qualifying households.
County and local social services agencies, including Mendocino County Health and Human Services Agency, can connect residents with financial support.
Payment arrangements may be available through the city to help customers manage balances over time.

Editor’s Note

This story illustrates why Ukiah and other municipalities need regular, sustained coverage of local government. Contrary to Councilmember Susan Sher’s comments, our reporting shows that inflation is just one factor driving the rate increase. Sewer rates are rising largely because of policy decisions recommended by city staff and endorsed by the council. Residents may well support those choices, but low attendance at council meetings raises questions about whether the public has enough information to guide their elected officials.

Until recently, the Ukiah City Council was covered by the news department at Mendocino County Public Broadcasting (KZYX). That department was shut down June 30, ahead of a congressional vote to rescind federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. At the time, KZYX was the only locally owned and locally run newsroom employing a full-time reporter/editor/news director. (The Mendocino Voice’s full-time local Mendocino reporter is paid by UC Berkeley through Bay City News, which is based in the East Bay. The Ukiah Daily Journal, owned by an Alden Global Capital subsidiary, also employs at least one reporter in Mendocino County. Besides Mendo Local, Mendocino County has excellent local publications like the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Mendocino Coast News, MendoFever, Willits Weekly and the Independent Coast Observer — but these do not cover the Ukiah City Council.)

Local ownership matters. Local editing and reporting matters. Full-time wages, health care and retirement benefits matter. A sustainable business model matters. So do smart operations. When communities allow local news to be defunded, other costs often rise without scrutiny.

To address that gap, I founded Mendo Local Public Media on Aug. 22, after leaving my role as KZYX News Director. The project is currently 100 percent underwritten by me and my husband. Our goal is to build a self-sustaining, locally owned newsroom that produces news in multiple formats, from print to broadcast. Achieving that will require broad community support. MendoLocal.news is intended to spotlight the kind of reporting we need — but volunteers alone cannot fill the void.

Although Mendocino County Public Broadcasting has since raised 215 percent of the funds it lost to federal rescission, none of those funds support Mendo Local Public Media. Local news needs your support. Donations can be sent directly to:

Mendo Local Public Media , P.O. Box 362,  Mendocino, CA 95460

All contributions go directly to support newsgathering and reporting.

— Elise Cox, Founder, Mendo Local Public Media

DEATH OF WILLITS ARRESTEE RULED A HOMICIDE

Update 09/19/2025 at 03:00 P.M.:

As a part of the original investigation conducted on 06-05-2025, the Mendocino County Office of the Sheriff-Coroner conducted a coroner’s investigation into the death of Nicholas Bakewell, a 36-year-old male from Willits.

An autopsy was performed by a pathologist on 06-06-2025, where blood and tissue samples were obtained for forensic analysis and testing. On 09-14-2025, the forensic pathologist determined Bakewell’s cause of death was restraint-associated asphyxiation and type 2 myocardial ischemic injury. Other significant contributing factors were determined to be acute combined methamphetamine, psilocin, dextromethorphan and gamma-hydroxybutyric acid toxicity; hypertensive cardiomyopathy, and W.H.O class III obesity. The manner of death determined by the pathologist was homicide.

The autopsy report, toxicology report, and findings of the forensic pathologist were shared with the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office for their investigation into this incident involving Bakewell.

Additional information regarding this investigation will be released as it becomes available.

Previous Update 07/15/2025 at 08:00 A.M.:

As a part of this continuing investigation being conducted by the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office, additional information is being released to provide the identity of the involved Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office personnel and the identification of the decedent.

The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office employees involved in this incident on 06-05-2025 were Deputy Jesus Lopez and Sergeant Sam Logan. Deputy Lopez has approximately 5 years of law enforcement experience and Sergeant Logan has approximately 13.5 years of law enforcement experience. Both Deputy Lopez and Sergeant Logan have law enforcement experience in the Corrections and Patrol Divisions with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.

During the coroner’s investigation related to this incident, the decedent was identified as Nicholas Bakewell, a 36-year-old male from Willits.

Pursuant to California Assembly Bill 748, dispatch and video footage of this incident are being released publicly on the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office YouTube page. The video release can be accessed by utilizing either of the following links:

YouTube Page https://www.youtube.com/c/MendocinoSheriff

YouTube Video (https://youtu.be/XBzx08v3s7U)

Original Press Release:

On 06-05-2025 at approximately 07:02 P.M., the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Communications Center received a call from the California Highway Patrol (CHP) who requested Sheriff’s Office assistance for a call in the 2000 block of Hearst Willits Road in Willits.

CHP informed the Sheriff’s Office of a call they received regarding a hitchhiker who was picked up by a motorist in the area and the subjects were now involved in a physical fight. CHP Officers were responding to the call with an extended response time and Willits Police Department (WPD) Officers were also requested to assist. This investigation revealed the male subject had brutally assaulted the driver of the vehicle after he was offered a ride and entered the vehicle. This assault was unprovoked and resulted in injuries that caused the driver to be admitted into a local hospital.

A Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Deputy responded to the area and contacted a male adult subject walking in the middle of the roadway in the 1200 block of Hearst Willits Road. The male subject failed to comply with the lawful orders of law enforcement and immediately took a fighting stance and lunged at the Deputy. The Deputy pointed his department-issued Taser device at the subject while ordering the male to comply and surrender.

The Deputy moved away from the male in the roadway and attempted to speak with him and de-escalate the situation. The Deputy continued to employ de-escalation tactics that were ignored by the male.

The male subject fled along the north side of the roadway when a Sheriff’s Sergeant arrived to assist. The male subject ran into the brush north of the roadway as Sheriff’s Office personnel continued to order him to surrender. Multiple warnings were provided to the male subject that he would be Tased if he did not comply with their orders. During the attempts to lawfully arrest the male subject, Sheriff’s Office personnel utilized Oleoresin Capsicum (OC) spray.

The male subject moved onto his stomach, so Sheriff’s Office personnel attempted to place the subject in handcuffs. The male subject physically resisted attempts to place him into handcuffs and assaulted a Deputy so a Taser was deployed to overcome the resistance and arrest the individual.

Willits Police Department Officers arrived as Sheriff’s Office personnel continued to inform the male he was under arrest and ordered him to comply with the arrest.

Sheriff’s Deputies and WPD Officers removed the male from the brush and continued to attempt and place him into handcuffs as the male physically resisted. Law Enforcement personnel were able to eventually handcuff and arrest the male subject.

The male subject was monitored at the scene after being arrested and Law Enforcement personnel determined the male became unresponsive. Restraints were removed from the male as Law Enforcement provided emergency medical treatment at the scene. Cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was initiated by Law Enforcement personnel as emergency medical assistance was requested.

Law Enforcement personnel administered Narcan on the male subject and CPR was continued for approximately 5 minutes when emergency medical personal arrived at the scene. Fire and EMS personnel continued life-saving efforts, to include CPR and other emergency medical treatment. Life-saving efforts continued for approximately 25 additional minutes until the male subject was pronounced deceased by medical personnel at the scene.

Since the male subject was in the custody of law enforcement and died during the incident, the County-Wide Fatal-Incident Protocol was initiated. The Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office was contacted and is the lead agency for this ongoing investigation.

A coroner’s investigation was initiated, and a post-mortem examination will be conducted to determine the official cause and manner of death. The decedent has been identified as a 36-year-old male from Willits, but his name is not being released at this stage of the investigation.

Pursuant to Sheriff’s Office Policy, the two Sheriff’s Office personnel involved in this incident have been placed on paid administrative leave while this matter is being investigated.

Investigations are continuing regarding the crimes committed against the motorist who provided the subject a ride.

Anyone with information related to this investigation is requested to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Communications Center at 707-463-4086 (option 1). Information can also be provided anonymously by calling the non-emergency tip-line at 707-234-2100. Any information provided regarding this continuing investigation will be forwarded to the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office as the primary investigating agency.

ON-LINE COMMENT: The police did what was necessary to restrain a violent drug addict — the fact he chose to take a boat load of drugs, chose to fight the cops and chose to live an unhealthy lifestyle is on him — his death was brought about by his own poor decisions. Just imagine the blame game if the cops had backed off and let this violent criminal go on his merry way until he assaulted the next innocent person.

MENDOCINO COUNTY SENTENCES NOTORIOUS CAR THIEF AFTER DECADES OF CRIMES

by Matt LaFever

A 46-year-old man with a long record of auto theft convictions has been sentenced to four years in state prison after stealing yet another car — this time from a working mother in Sacramento.

Peng Yang of Rancho Cordova appeared in Mendocino County Superior Court Friday morning for sentencing on his fifth felony auto theft conviction. In addition to the prison term, he was ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution to the victim, according to the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office.

In July, authorities said, Yang stole a Toyota Camry out of a Sacramento driveway and was later caught by the California Highway Patrol driving the car north of Piercy.

Court records show Yang is no stranger to prison. His history includes felony auto theft convictions in 2000, 2006, 2008, and 2018 in Sacramento County, along with a string of other theft-related crimes ranging from burglary to receiving stolen property.

District Attorney David Eyster prosecuted the case, which was investigated by CHP and the DA’s Bureau of Investigations. Eyster has asked that Yang be paroled back to Sacramento County, rather than Mendocino County, when he becomes eligible for release.

(mendofever.com)

A READER WRITES: Rumors are swirling around legal circles in Ukiah about a possible/proposed settlement offer being considered by the County, the County’s insurance carrier, and the attorney for Chamise Cubbison in her defamation/wrongful termination civil suit against the county, perhaps in the millions of dollars. The stipulations that might accompany the agreement are not included in the rumors.

A READER WRITES: Cats out of the bag. Fort Bragg City Manager Isaac Whippy needs to go. He has no business being the City Manager of Fort Bragg. The entire city is in shambles including the police department. Is it true the Police Chief will soon retire with a pension and six month severance pay and be a consultant at $200 an hour? Fort Bragg will soon be in the same position as Willits, bankrupt. If Whippy is utilizing these reprimanded terminated city employees as consultants, he needs to go, Look at the bright side Whippy, you might become a consultant as well. You won’t have to collect unemployment!

Jauan Jennings of the San Francisco 49ers and Starling Thomas V of the Arizona Cardinals fight after the play during the second quarter at State Farm Stadium on Jan. 05, 2025 in Glendale, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

A READER WRITES: CPS management, always a sh** show. Personal agendas, power hungry, self righteous, selfish, looking out for themselves always. Nothing changes, its been that way for a million years. CEO comments are outrageously laughable, since when do the top leaders admire the first line staff for real? Ha! She’s taking names and retaliation awaits. All those leadership initiatives…..great teachers came but staff were never allowed to implement anything learned. If you did, you were gone. The CPS staff speaking out are brave, and to be commended, but I hope they all have back up career plans and good mental health therapists. They are going to need both.

CHUCK DUNBAR (retired long-time FCS Staffer):

There were some good management folks, off and on, over the time I worked there in Family and Childrens Services – 1996 to 2014. Most of them had extensive field experience, knew what was what, cared deeply about the work, cared about staff, cared about children and families. They did their best to listen to staff. When we worked for these folks, even disagreeing at times, we felt supported and valued. These kind of leaders had our backs. We could go about the hard work of CPS and not have to worry about the next management betrayal. I”ll name a few: Bryan Lowery, Deborah Moody, Deborah lovett, AJ Barrett,and way back in time, Steve Prochter.

What’s happening now at CPS is scary and outrageous–and I’ve recently heard direct reports from past and current supervisors and others, as well as Mark’s recent piece–needs to be addressed directly by the BOS. CPS staff clearly state what is wrong and what needs to change. Bold action by the BOS to correct this course is needed. It’s clearly an out of control situation, with management staff who are out of their league, overwhelmed, and don’t have the trust of staff. They have turned in their frightened, stressed state to the crudest kind of managerial style–brute power, threats and maltreatment of staff. That of course makes it all worse.

BOS–you now know the extent of the problem, made clear in the staff petition and other documents. Do your jobs. Take action.

Bernie Norvell, I know, from your history here on the coast, that you know how to deal with difficult situations, know how to listen, know how to plan and execute plans of action in difficult matters. As our BOS representative now for the coast, I especially hope you will assert yourself in this matter, and assist in resolving it, making it right. Without bold, effective, BOS intervention, this matter will just go on, and will just get worse–a certain outcome, and a disservice to the County’s citizens.

SUPERVISOR BERNIE NORVELL sends along this note from FCS staffer Jeff Weston who presented the petition to the supervisors recommending that a restructuring proposal for family and children’s services be delayed:

Good afternoon,

On Tuesday, Sept. 9, during the public comment of the Board of Supervisors meeting, members of the Family & Children’s Services (FCS) department of Mendocino County Social Services supplied a Petition and separate attachment titled “Executive Summary” regarding changes being implemented to the FCS and issues occurring within the department.

I would like to officially withdraw the “Executive Summary” attachment from the Petition that had been supplied to members of the board, CEO Antle, HR and to Director Dede [DeNeese] Parker.

Given the short time the department was under, a rushed version of the Petition had been assembled collaboratively. The attachment was, as it turns out, not written with the attention of the staff who had signed on to the Petition. We cannot in good faith support the statements made in the Executive Summary, as they do not reflect the opinions of all the staff as had previously been thought.

Today, management has met with staff to formulate a reasonable time frame going forward with input being included from staff. Our hopes to have time to collaborate further as an organization have been reached.

Thank you for your time and your attention in this matter.

Jeff Weston
Eligibility Specialist Supervisor
SEIU Executive Board At Large member and Mendocino County Area Representative local 1021
Mendocino County Department of Social Services
Family and Children’s Services Division
[email protected]
Desk phone: 707-463-7965
Cell phone: 707-830-0365

MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: Apparently the “Executive Summary” portion of the attachment was assembled by a manager in FCS and added to the petition/attachment after it was signed. The situation regarding the petition and its authorship has become confused, but the conditions in the department remain bad.

IN MENDOCINO FOREST, CAL FIRE UNDERCUTS CLIMATE EFFORTS

by Evan Mills and John O'Brien

Cal Fire State Forest Program Manager Kevin Conway walks toward Redwood trees marked to be cut in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest. (Genaro Molina — Los Angeles Times, 2022)

In these times of climate denialism in Washington, some look for signs of reason in California.

Sadly, one particular agency can’t see the forest for the trees.

Cal Fire, the state’s chief fire agency, has a little-known side hustle managing 14 state-owned forests, totaling 85,000 acres.

To pay those bills, Cal Fire logs the public’s trees in its largest holding – Jackson Demonstration State Forest – which spans 50,000 acres in Mendocino County. The agency also wields absolute approval power for logging on California’s vast private lands.

Trees are about half carbon by dry weight. Coastal redwood forests contain more of the stuff than any other, storing it for more than two millennia if undisturbed. Highly resistant to rot, insects and fire, old redwoods provide an extremely durable carbon piggy bank storing up to 1,300 tons per acre. At odds with California’s climate goal of achieving zero-net carbon pollution, logging and milling wastes promptly release half a tree’s carbon into the atmosphere. The rest resides for a time in lumber, which in the case of redwood is mostly used for picnic tables, fences and decks that all too soon decay and release the remaining carbon.

Yes, the carbon may be recaptured if trees regrow. However, that’s hardly guaranteed and takes far too long given the current climate emergency. Troublingly, Cal Fire’s flawed models systematically underestimate logging emissions and overestimate regrowth, conveniently ignoring how climate change hamstrings regrowth and fuels wildfires that release yet more emissions.

Thanks to such voodoo carbon accounting, sellers of forest carbon offsets elsewhere are having to refund buyers due to unmet growth projections. In fact, forest growth has been slowing around the world, including in Mendocino County’s Jackson forest, which could devolve into a “zombie forest” like that in the Sierra foothills where growth of established trees has fully stalled and new ones cannot sprout.

Cal Fire’s management of Jackson demonstrates a happy marriage of industrial logging with conservation and recreation – or at least, that’s what they want us to think. Truth be told, this is a rocky marriage, to say the least.

After acquiring the land in 1947, Cal Fire liquidated nearly all remaining old-growth trees (20,000 acres worth), continuing into the 1980s. The only period in modern times that carbon storage increased there was during a decade-long moratorium following protests and litigation. Logging later resumed under an archaic mandate and approval processes that a past Cal Fire director and others say still violates key laws such as the California Environmental Quality Act and works at cross purposes to the missions of other agencies.

Only 7% of old-growth forests remain, most of which are now protected. Because most second-growth trees – which can be up to 175 years old – are still fair game, only 2% have avoided the ax.

Cal Fire claims to manage half of Jackson to promote such old-forest conditions. In reality, it’s closer to a third. For the rest, happy talk about “sustainable management” is code for perpetually growing and then cutting young trees. As a result, tree sizes and growth in state-managed forests embarrassingly lag others in the coastal range, achieving a meager 10% of their carbon-storage potential.

Putting the cart before the horse and reneging on public commitments to the contrary, Cal Fire is forging ahead with more logging before completing a long-overdue update of its overarching forest management plan to ensure environmental protections and resolve ambiguities as to whether they are in compliance with legislation calling for tribal co-management. These antics are supercharging a decades-long controversy.

Cal Fire’s newest proposal for Jackson, dubbed AMEX, targets nearly 500 acres with a patchwork of small clearcuts and is silent on tree sizes to be felled. Cal Fire’s use of a “black-box” carbon calculator hampers external review. Observers say claimed carbon benefits from regrowth ignore future carbon capture if the removed trees were allowed to keep growing and undercount above- and below-ground carbon emissions.

Another similarly sized proposal in Jackson – Camp 8 South – focuses on a rare second-growth forest in the name of “restoration.” Measuring up to 6 feet in diameter and exceeding 200 feet in height, money indeed grows on these trees. But thanks to logging abstinence since the late 1800s, the grand trees are already widely spaced and flammable deadwood is sparse, a textbook example of healthy and resilient forestland on-track to produce tomorrow’s giants. In a nearby plot, natural self-thinning over 80 years reduced crowding from 275 to 70 trees per acre.

Projects like these also increase vulnerability to the ravages of climate change.

Wildfire risk escalates as logging litters the forest floor with discarded fuels and admits sunlight that dries soils and woody debris while promoting brushy native undergrowth and flammable invasives. Unlike natural thinning, large fire-resilient trees are typically high-graded for felling in Jackson, creating tinderboxes of 300 to 500 mostly juvenile trees per acre.

Endangered salmon decimated by early logging are slowly returning to the already at-risk Noyo River, downslope from the Camp 8 forest. They are now challenged by climate-driven drought, warming waters, carbon-laden mudflows from proposed timber operations and water withdrawals to control dust from logging trucks.

While greenwashing is usually seen as the domain of private companies, Cal Fire is a public agency also deeply engaged in the practice.

Citizens, environmental groups and tribal stakeholders are demoralized by this and the prioritization of industrial logging, embrace of pseudoscience, non-transparency, poor responsiveness to public and expert comments and meetings held while stakeholders are at work. Bad-faith actions elsewhere further undermine public trust.

State Senate President Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and Assembly member Chris Rogers, D-Santa Rosa, recently wrote to the Board of Forestry and Cal Fire asking that Jackson’s decade-old Forest Management Plan be completed and its nearly two-decade-old environmental impact report be updated prior to further logging.

Looking forward, wiser practices include low-intensity prescribed fire, urgently needed after decades of overzealous suppression – often by none other than Cal Fire. The agency could likely generate comparable revenue from thinning smaller trees in truly overgrown areas.

It’s time to rethink Jackson’s mission, Cal Fire’s broader role and forest management itself.

The stewardship of public forests – holding a third of all timber nationally – must evolve to demonstrate genuine science-based climate solutions to be emulated by private industry.

Let’s start here in California.

Evan Mills is an environmental scientist specializing in energy and climate change. He is a retired senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. John P. O’Brien is a climate scientist specializing in atmospheric dynamics, forest health and climate change. He has worked as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and he’s a board member of the Environmental Protection Information Center. From the Bay Area News Group.

(pressdemocrat.com)

ROOTS OF MOTIVE POWER HISTORY TALK THIS SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21ST

The Historical Society of Mendocino County and Roots of Motive Power invites you to a special program on September 21st at the Little Lake Grange in Willits. Chris Baldo will present the history of the Northwestern Redwood Company.

Following the presentations, attendees are invited back to the Root of Motive Power facilities (420 East Commercial Street, Willits) for refreshments and tour of their collection. Roots of Motive Power is an all-volunteer organization founded in 1982 to preserve and restore steam and diesel-powered equipment used in the California north coast logging industry from the 1850s to the present.

$10 at the door

Where: Little Lake Grange, 291 School Street. Willits, CA

When: Sunday September 21st at 1PM

UNITY CLUB NEWS

I had fun at the Fair and I hope you did as well. Sometimes when you volunteer to help at a Community Event, you just want to get through it. Not for me, not this time; I felt energized and delighted. Maybe it was the Coastal theme. Maybe it was the people I worked with. I'm just glad to be a little part of our Apple Fair.

It's time for the Unity Club to return to regular business. Our first meeting of the 2025-26 year will be held Thursday October 3rd in the Fairgrounds Dining Room, at 1:30. Our hostess crew will be Mary Ann Grzenda, Jean Condon, Janet Lombard, Dawn Trygstad, and Mary Pat Palmer. What a line up!

If you heard good things about the Unity Club at the Fair, visiting Hendy Wood's, or just out and about, this would be a great meeting for you to attend. Come join us for an hour and see if we're some folks you'd like to be with.

We will hear from our Librarian Liz about the reopening of the Community Lending Library at the October meeting.

I'm so happy the heat got beat by the gentle rain. Ah, that's better. See you October 3rd at 1:30 in the Dining Room for our first meeting of the year.

— Miriam Martinez

REMEMBERING JIM SHIELDS

We are planning a celebration for my dad on Saturday, October 4th from 3-6 p.m. at the Laytonville Rodeo Grounds (next door to the Water District Treatment Plant) Please consider yourself cordially invited. More info on his memorial celebration will be shared soon.

Thank you for your support,

Jayma Shields Spence

UPDATE ON THE MENDOCINO OBSERVER

by Jayma Shields Spence

I want to thank all of our Observer readers, advertisers, subscribers and fans for the outpouring of love and support during the shocking and unexpected departure of my father, Jim Shields. The enormity of his passing is coming in waves for so many of us. I want to thank everyone who has called, stopped by in person or sent an email or card, your words keep me going when I felt like I’m about to drown.

As smart, organized and efficient as my dad was, he didn’t leave us with much of a plan. I was notified by the bank last week that due to his account being under a designation of sole proprietorship, and me just being merely a signer on the account, not a beneficiary, I am unable to utilize the Observer’s finances at this time. Many of those who we have to cut checks to have been incredibly understanding while I wade through these murky waters. Our family had obtained and will be obtaining further assistance from the Legal Eagles of the world so we can develop next steps in our new weird-reality show.

Fear not, The Observer will not go anywhere for now, but we do need your help! Please send along any written contributions you would like to see printed. Supplying us with content helps tremendously. I can’t guarantee it will all make it in, but I am trying my best. While I grew up around my parents running this newspaper, and I did absorb so much, I am left with many challenges and hurdles.

Together, with our wonderfully supportive community, we will get through this difficult time without Jim Shields taking control and guiding us all. It brings me comfort to know I am in the same boat as those who relied on him for so many things.

If you would like to be in touch with me, you can reach me at (707) 984-6223 or [email protected] or PO Box 490, Laytonville, CA 95454.

SALMON NEARLY GONE, BUT GUALALA COMMUNITY FIGHTS FOR THE RIVER’S RETURN

by Matt LaFever

The Gualala River [Photo from the Redwood Land Conservancy]

For generations, the Gualala River was a lifeline for coho salmon. Today, those fish are nearly gone, the river listed as “impaired” under the Clean Water Act after more than a century of logging, erosion, and habitat loss, according to a press release from the Redwood Coast Land Conservancy.

On Saturday, Oct. 11, neighbors, scientists, and local advocates will gather at the Gualala Arts Center for Restoring the River: Community Event, a free public gathering aimed at bringing life back to the estuary. The release notes that the afternoon will include a 2 p.m. panel where scientists from Prunuske Chatham, Inc. and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife will share early proposals to improve fish habitat. Visitors will also find historic photos of the river, booths from local and state partners, and the announcement of winners in the Gualala River Photo Contest.

“Since Mill Bend Preserve’s earliest days, the community has urged us to prioritize salmonid habitat restoration,” said Jim Elias, executive director of the Redwood Coast Land Conservancy, in the press release. “This plan is a huge step forward toward increasing native fish populations.”

The event builds on the group’s 2022 Mill Bend Preserve Conservation Plan, which identified estuary restoration as the community’s top priority. By improving survival rates for juvenile salmon and steelhead — species the release describes as “umbrella” indicators of watershed health — organizers say restoration will benefit not only fish but also the broader ecosystem and community.

Leading up to the Oct. 11 gathering, the Conservancy is hosting a bird walk at the estuary on Oct. 4, a guided kayak tour with a state scientist on Oct. 5, and a photo contest open through Sept. 27. Full details are available at rclc.org.

(mendofever.com)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, September 19, 2025

KYL AYERS, 24, Willits. Protective order violation resulting in injury, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

CHARLES BLUNT, 39, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.

MICHAEL FRANCE, 36, Kelseyville/Ukiah. Attempted murder, mayhem, robbery, use of firearm during a felony, domestic violence court order violation.

JUAN GAMEZ-ESTRADA, 24, Willits. DUI.

TIANA GARCIA, 32, Sacramento/Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

SHANNON HENSON, 29, Willits. Domestic battery, burglary, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

GEORGE MENDOZA, 53, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

ALEXIS RENTAS, 40, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

JAIREN SYLVESTER, 44, Pittsburg/Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

WALT'S AB

San Francisco native, 83 year old Walt Firstbrook feeling nostalgic, showing off his favorite. (My privilege to be his friend and dive partner)

SONG OF MY HOUSE BEING BATTERED BY THE AUTUMN WINDS

by Tu Fu (translated from the Chinese by Marilyn Chin)

In the eighth month of autumn high angry winds howl
Blowing three layers of thatch off my humble house
The thatch fly over the river, scattering shards
Some pieces soar so high they hang on treetops
Some plummet down to earth covering ditches and pools
A gang of hoodlums from the southern village appear
They bully me ruthlessly, but I’m too old and weak to fight
They dare to rob me in front of my face
Then grab the spoils and run into the bamboo wilds
Mouth parched, lips burning, I shout after them in vain
I feel defeated, slump against my cane, and heave a deep sigh
The winds finally calm down, the clouds turn dark as ink
The autumn sky is hovering ominously, slowly turning black
My old worn cotton quilt feels as cold as iron
My dear children sleep poorly, thrashing and ripping the covers
Bed after bed is soaked, the roof is dripping, no room is dry
The rain batters us endlessly, falling as heavy as hemp
I am lost in chaos and misery and can barely sleep a wink
Such a damn long night—I am soaked and exhausted, I cry out, “Why?”
If I could build a grand palace with a thousand, ten-thousand rooms
A safe-house standing on a hill so strong that violent storms can’t destroy
If I could shelter all the impoverished poets and scholars under heaven
Offer them a gathering place of peace and joy—
If I could hold this spectacular vision in my eyes
Then I would gladly freeze to death in my lonely broken home

About this Poem

“In 760, after having been banished from his last appointment in Chang An, the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu moved to Chengdu to serve as a local bureaucrat. His wealthy friends provided resources to help build a comfortable thatch house for his family in the beautiful rural countryside. In Chengdu, Du Fu lived in relative peace for four years and wrote over two hundred poems. ‘Song of My House Being Battered by the Autumn Winds’ is one of his most famous poems from this era. The storm did not only depict fierce weather but represented the political upheaval of the time, [when] scholar-bureaucrats like himself were caught in the power struggle among warring factions and were often displaced and exiled and lived in constant insecurity.”
—Marilyn Chin

A NATION STILL INCAPABLE OF CIVIL DISCOURSE

Editor:

“Violence is as American as cherry pie,” activist H. Rap Brown said in 1967, a year that saw no shortage of violence as urban centers across the nation exploded into fires of rage that summer. The country had already witnessed President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and would see two more public figures killed in 1968, with the slaying of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Later that same year, there was violence at the Democratic National Convention.

We were born of violence it seems — it is a birthmark of sorts. And with easy access to firearms, whether bought or stolen, it is a small jump to literally pull the trigger when untamed emotions surface — whether it be on the streets of our cities or within the walls of our children’s classrooms.

Such violent behaviors continue to reinforce the fact that although we are almost 250 years old, we are still an adolescent nation — unable or unwilling to conduct civil discussions to resolve our political differences and, sadly, still unable to comprehend that what we reap we shall sow — that in fact we are sowing.

Gene Gross

Santa Rosa

STAYING IN DC

I am staying on in the District of Columbia! Got my D.C. driver’s license yesterday. The rest, i.e. EBT, SSI, etcetera I am applying for today. Am down to $149.60 in the bank and $100 in the wallet. My 76th birthday is September 28th…please let everybody know that I am accepting cash gifts at Paypal.me/craiglouisstehr (adding to my upcoming $488 monthly SSA benefit). This is what democracy looks like.

Craig Louis Stehr
September 19th, 2025 Anno Domini

D.C. Peace Vigil Dismantled: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/19/white-house-peace-vigil-dismantled/

Philipos Melaku-Bello comforts a woman as he sits on his regular spot at the 44-year-old peace vigil outside the White House in Washington on Saturday. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

ARMED MAN ARRESTED AFTER STORMING CALIFORNIA CITY COUNCIL MEETING

by Lester Black

A man armed with multiple weapons stormed the Arcata City Council on Wednesday night in a chaotic and violent encounter that local officials said is a reflection of heightened political tensions in the community.

The Humboldt County town’s council had just started taking public comments when the man allegedly pushed toward the sitting council members, appearing to have a firearm under his clothes and was refusing to sit down. City Manager Merritt Perry said he jumped up and restrained the man, who then punched Perry multiple times before police officers were able to arrest him.

“I just grabbed him, and he started pushing him back and he started pushing against me, so I threw him to the ground and started restraining him,” Perry said.

The firearm turned out to be a Nerf gun, but the man was also armed with pepper spray and a switchblade, according to the Lost Coast Outpost, which first reported on the incident.

Perry told SFGATE that he saw the man as soon as he entered the council chambers on Wednesday night, noticing that he was carrying something wrapped in a towel and that he had “a pretty crazy look in his eyes and clearly intended to do something.”

“He was carrying something under his arm, and it looked like something wrapped in a towel or cloth. For some reason, my mind went to the Charlie Kirk shooting with the shooter wrapping the gun in the towel,” Perry said.

A police officer at the meeting stopped the man and took away the object, which ended up being “something that looked like a molotov cocktail but was actually a 40 ounce malt liquor bottle,” according to Arcata Police Lieutenant Luke Scown. The officer then let the man return to the meeting “because at that moment, he wasn’t doing anything else wrong,” Scown said, but then the man quickly moved to the front of the council chambers.

City Council Member Sarah Schaefer was sitting behind the dais when she saw the man approach and said she was “freaked out” because she saw the butt of a gun sticking out of his shirt.

“At first, I was like, ‘Oh that’s a gun, but it’s not the right color’,” she told SFGATE. Schaefer said the man did not say anything or make it clear what his motives were.

After officers restrained the man, he was arrested and charged with battery, assault, disorderly conduct and disturbing a public meeting, among other charges, according to Redheaded Blackbelt.

Arcata’s City Council meetings have become argumentative in recent months as controversy surrounding homelessness issues and the Israel-Hamas war have dominated public comment periods. Perry said the man arrested on Wednesday had attended those meetings.

“He got up and said he would return with his friends. He was upset about that at a prior meeting,” Perry said.

Perry said the incident and previous meetings reflect an increasingly toxic political climate across the entire country.

“It’s really unfortunate where we’re at as a community and a country today with people resorting to violence,” Perry said.

Schaefer said the incident was an escalation in a time with high “political tension.”

(SFGate.com)

ON-LINE RESPONSE:

It isn’t both sides. Sure. There are some hotheads amongst those of us in the left (ahem). But only the most mental amongst us resort to violence. Most of the lethal episodes occur when disturbed white men, usually young, pick up a gun or other weapon and attack. When their politics are examined, most of them have right wing biases.

What this clown’s motive was, who the hell knows. Right, left, or indifferent, charge his sad ass appropriately, don’t accept a plea, and prosecute him to the fullest. It’s time to put these idiots where they belong, away from us decent people who aren’t guilty of criminal stupidity.

MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio all night Friday night on KNYO and KAKX!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight’s (Friday night’s) MOTA show is five or six or so. If that’s too soon, send it any time after that and I’ll read it next Friday. That’s fine. There’s no pressure.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week’s MOTA show. By Saturday night I’ll put up the recording of tonight’s show. You’ll find plenty of other educational amusements there to educate and amuse yourself with until showtime, or any time, such as:

Somehow I had not registered that it was Kirsten Dunst who dubbed Kiki in English. Out of all the Studio Ghibli films, Kiki’s Delivery Service is the one I’ve watched most often, then Spirited Away, then Porco Rosso, then The Cat Returns, /then/ the others, which are all wonderful but, I don’t know why, I just don’t feel as much like putting them on, not even Princess Mononoke. Not even Laputa Castle in the Sky, or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, or Howl’s Moving Castle, and so on. Anyway, behind the scenes of voicing Kiki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf9U3ecXgRQ

A chunky steampunk revolver gas-cartridge pistol that silently shoots real five-inch-long needle-nails all the way through a sheet of plywood in Kevlar body armor and sticks hard in the brick wall behind it. You don’t need a license for this; it’s considered a toy. What could go wrong? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UCc25KhI-p8

And Glurpo the Underwater Clown, the Aquamaids, and Ralph. (via Nag On The Lake) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL2rlpWLJPI

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

HEADLINE FROM FRIDAY’S SF Chron:

“Gavin Newsom has hundreds of bills on his desk. These ones are a window into his political future.” (These ones?)

FEAR AND BOASTING IN S.F.: A Day With The Idea Hustlers At One Of The City’s Many AI Conferences

by Rachel Swan

AI conference attendees stand in a corridor (Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle)

Nearly everyone who attended the AI Conference at San Francisco’s Mission Rock this week had something to sell: an idea, a startup, an obscure software product, an abstruse patent, a dream.

A few people who had lost their jobs to artificial intelligence were hawking resumes.

“It’s really the good, the bad and the ugly,” said David Greenfield, a former New York City council member who now runs a social services nonprofit, where he is trying to incorporate machine learning without laying anyone off.

During a whirlwind 36 hours in San Francisco, Greenfield rode in his first Waymo robotaxi, disembarking at the massive, warehouse-style conference center at Pier 48. Inside, he listened intently as people in lanyard badges discussed all the issues that have captivated San Franciscans since OpenAI unveiled its first iteration of ChatGPT three years ago.

In partitioned theaters, experts spoke on everything from regulation, to corporate leadership, to reining in tech-generated child pornography. But Greenfield said he gained a lot of insight simply by talking to people at the lunch tables or beside water coolers or within the maze of vendor booths, gathering perspectives on how AI would make life easier — or leave a lot of people behind.

“I’ve met people who are deploying AI to do research on degenerative brain disease,” Greenfield said. “And then I’ve also met out-of-work programmers, or people who hop from one conference like this one to another, and just seem a little lost.”

AI has already spurred a post-pandemic Gold Rush in San Francisco, and a calendar littered with conferences and conventions, of which the one at Mission Rock is a standard-bearer. A bystander need only roam the conference’s sprawling trade show to see entrepreneurs vying for attention and seed money. At individual booths, CEOs made elevator pitches, brandished business cards and distributed all types of swag: stickers, canvas tote bags, tube socks in company colors, Ghirardelli chocolates, tiny stuffed animals, Rubik’s cubes; phone chargers; refreshments made by jamming straws into coconuts, a camera that snapped flattering AI headshots with an optional rock star motif.

Many attendees seemed palpably excited about the future of AI — which, incidentally, was the conference’s theme. Yet no amount of exuberance could hide the anxiety underneath, both from unsettling prophesies that artificial intelligence will transform society in irrevocable ways, and by the fear of an AI bubble bursting after an MIT research paper found that 95% of AI pilots stumble.

“Well, everyone here keeps quoting that 95% fail statistic,” said Aimee Lefebvre, director of customer experience at the medical tech company AbleNet. She came to the conference with co-workers, mostly for the educational value.

“We’re not trying to replace anyone,” with a bot, Lefebvre said.

It may be fitting that of the most popular seminars on Thursday, “Why Your Organization Is Built to Fail at AI (And What To Do About It),” drew a standing-room crowd of people seeking guidance on how to “rewire” corporations and by some alchemy “reskill” all the people with suddenly outdated skills in graphics or programming. Dr. Garth Andrus, who delivered the talk, spent nearly an hour afterward addressing a scrum.

Then there was the cross-section of businesses in the exhibition hall, most of which fell into one of two categories: About half of them were dedicated to some form of infrastructure build-out, providing the tools or software for companies to add AI “agents” to their workforces. The other half, by contrast, were selling “guardian” agents to watch and manage the other AI, on the notion that it could spiral out of control at any moment.

“You need guardrails,” said Ibby Rahmani, vice president of marketing at Trust3 AI, a San Francisco startup that produces an AI “accountability” platform, directed mostly at insurance companies and banks.

Artificial intelligence is unpredictable, Rahamani explained. The agents can give out bad information. They easily violate rules pertaining to privacy and personal data. Human workers only add to the chaos, he said, because people now feel empowered to create their own AI bots without telling management. Hence the need for companies, like his, to help police this wild frontier.

“We are going through a honeymoon period, but then reality will hit,” Rahmani warned, striking a sober tone.

Trust3 wasn’t the only company focused on managing and restraining AI. Others, such as Markup, promised to review and fix AI-generated content so that it complies with a company’s standards for “tone, quality and accuracy,” said CEO Matt Blumberg. Still others appeared fixated on reorganizing the world’s information so that AI bots can consume and process it. Nexla, a San Mateo startup, specializes in “connecting” data from different systems — say, orders from a wide variety of restaurants or food stands that all get funneled into one delivery app, said founder Avinash Shahdadpuri.

Amid all these founders and marketing professionals were people who looked a bit older, or who wore business casual attire rather than a polo shirt with a corporate logo. Some wandered alone through the cavernous venue, clutching backpacks or the complimentary boxed lunch. A few said they had come to the conference out of curiosity, or with an abstract hope of being discovered.

Among them was Andre Thompson, a teacher at a technical college in Georgia. He had written a patent, he said, for technology that would fact-check AI for hallucinations, bias and “topic drift.”

Thompson found the San Francisco conference through an Internet search and saved up money to go, believing he might find experts to peer-review his patent. After failing to grab anyone’s attention at the vendor booths, he stood up during a Q&A session Wednesday, following a panel on ethics.

“I was the kid in the back of the class raising my hand, ‘Pick me! Pick me! ‘” Thompson recalled with a sheepish smile. Nervously, he introduced himself, described his company, and said he was looking for collaborators. By that time, Thompson — who is Black — had gotten the unsettling sense that people might respond more enthusiastically, “If I had been of a different pigmentation.”

But after the panel, a tech worker from Italy approached Thompson, saying the patent was interesting. Maybe the conference had paid off.

THE S.F. GIANTS' PLAYOFF HOPES TOOK A HIT WITH A LOSS TO DODGERS

by Shayna Rubin

The Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani (17) celebrates with teammate Enrique Hernandez homering against the Giants during the fifth inning at Dodger Stadium on Friday. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES — Dodger Stadium shook when Shohei Ohtani’s three-run home run off Robbie Ray gave the Dodgers a two-run lead. Then the old park quaked when Mookie Betts homered right after. The deafening cheers of their rival fan base doubled as daggers for the San Francisco Giants.

No, their season isn’t technically over after a 6-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night, but they’re hardly breathing. The New York Mets won earlier, meaning the Giants are four games back of the third wild-card spot (with New York holding the tiebreaker) with eight games to play.

The Giants hoped to conjure their best baseball for a game rife with pomp, circumstance and stakes. Instead, their last-chance grasps at postseason relevance were drowned out by the Dodgers Show — even if the Giants tried to reroute some vibes for themselves.

“There was energy the whole night, you feed off of it and felt good the whole night,” Ray said. “When the ballpark is loud like that, it’s nice.”

Friday night was all about Clayton Kershaw. A thorn in the Giants’ side for his 18-year Dodger career, the future Hall of Famer was making one final regular-season start at his home park, fittingly against his longtime rival.

Kershaw, 37, didn’t have a throwback performance in him. He walked to the mound to a standing ovation and his teammates waited nearly 30 seconds to join him on the field to give him and the fans their moment alone. Heliot Ramos, the only Giant without a strikeout against Kershaw, quickly silenced the noise with a leadoff home run he hit 431 feet to left field.

“He’s Kershaw at the end of the day, but he doesn’t have the stuff he used to have,” Ramos said. “We were trying to be aggressive. He’s still a great pitcher, still executes, still makes his pitches and makes you work.”

The Giants drew four walks off Kershaw, who allowed four hits, including Wilmer Flores’ RBI single in the third inning that allowed him to tie his career high of 71 RBIs set in 2022. It wasn’t picture-perfect. Kershaw departed — hugged his teammates, tipped his cap to both dugouts, and slowly walked off the field to a crowd chanting his name — after striking out Rafael Devers looking to start the fifth inning.

All said, Kershaw sat down in the dugout with one impressive résumé against San Francisco. No pitcher in history has a better ERA, 2.09, than Kershaw against the Giants (minimum 150 innings). His 421 strikeouts are also the most by any pitcher against the Giants.

President of baseball operation Buster Posey wasn’t in L.A. for the game, but part of him was. He faced Kershaw more than any other player in baseball has, clashing during the years when Kershaw’s career peaked and the Giants were on their World Series runs. Before the game, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said it would have only been fitting for Posey to suit up for Friday’s game. Kershaw reminisced after his final outing.

“We’ve had some great battles over the years,” Kershaw said. “You know, Buster is still over there. Whenever I think of the Giants, Buster is kind of the first one, him, and (Madison Bumgarner) and (Tim) Lincecum and (Matt) Cain. I think I’ve gone through all the guys that they’ve had over there, they’ve got a great squad, and I have a lot of respect for them over the years. It does feel appropriate that I’d face the Giants, for sure. I’m just glad we won one more time.”

Added Ramos: “Just the fact I faced a legend and Hall of Famer, and I have the chance to face him in his final game is a privilege for me. Just being here in the big leagues is obviously a privilege.”

Kershaw’s teammates made sure Ramos didn’t steal his thunder.

Ray had success against Ohtani heading into Friday: Nine strikeouts and two extra-base hits in 17 at-bats. For that reason, and because there were two aboard with Betts in the on-deck circle, it made little sense to intentionally walk Ohtani with a one-run lead and two outs in the fifth inning. With a 2-2 count against Ohtani, Ray threw a 95 mph fastball on the outer half of the plate, on the black. Ohtani flicked his bat on it, but with his powerful swing and quick hands, that contact was enough to send the ball several rows deep over the fence in the left field corner.

“I put it on the black, he put a good swing on it,” Ray said. “If it’s not down the line it probably isn’t a homer. Just caught it deep enough to where he was able to get it over the wall.”

Added Roberts: That was a great at-bat because Robbie Ray pitched a heck of a game. You know, we finally got to him, but early on, I mean, it was plus fastball, plus slider, and he was having his way with us, but when Shohei hit that, I think that that surprised Robbie as well, because I thought was a pretty good pitch.”

The very next at-bat, Betts took Ray’s first-pitch fastball deep to send the crowd into a frenzy.

The Giants tacked one run on against the Dodgers bullpen. They didn’t have enough to completely silence the noise.

(sfchronicle.com)

THE SENATOR, THE GOLD MINE & THE SUNDANCE KID

by Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair

“If you see anyone not mourning the death of Robert Redford the way you would like them to, please call their employer and get them fired!”

– Covie93

I met Robert Redford in 1989, when Redford thought he could use his personal charm to resolve the fight over the future of the National Forests, which had intensified after the late, great federal Judge William Dwyer issued his first injunctions halting timber sales in Spotted Owl habitat. So he summoned the bigwigs in the timber industry, the environmental movement, the Forest Service and the Bush Administration to Sundance for a long weekend to hash things out over steaks, French wine and long hikes on the flanks of Mt Timpanogos. Redford floated through the gathering in a cloud of beautiful young women as if he were a mountain deity surrounded by mountain nymphs, each one of whom probably had a Ph.D. in ecology from the Yale School of Forestry. Each side played nice for a blissful few days in the Wasatch, then went back to ripping each other’s throats out when they got home. So much for consensus.

I had two more encounters with Redford over the years. Both of them involved trout streams and internationally-known professors of literature at the University of Chicago. In the fall of 1995, I got word from sources in Montana that Redford the environmental champion was sending out fundraising letters for the state’s perpetually embattled Democratic Senator Max Baucus, despite the fact that Baucus had a dismal environmental record and his family had a stake in a giant open-pit gold mine slated to be blasted into the headwaters of the Blackfoot River, a sacred stream to anglers around the world and the subject of Norman Maclean’s celebrated novella, A River Runs Through It, which Redford had recently made into an Academy Award nominated film. ) This is the very gold mine that may have set off the Unabomber, brooding over the toxic monstrosity from his cabin in Lincoln.

The hypocrisy here was too ripe to pass up, so Cockburn and I investigated further and pitched the story to Jefferson Morley at The Washington Post, where it was eventually printed as the lede story in the Sunday Outlook Section on December 16, 1996.

—JSC

Redford wasn’t pleased and griped that we hadn’t given him a chance to exculpate himself, although his letter spoke for itself and our repeated attempts to reach him had failed because he was spending the holidays on some remote Hawaiian Island beyond the reach of phone, telegraph or passenger pigeon. I reread the piece the day Redford’s death was announced and was bemused to find that it’s one of the very few occasions in the hundreds of articles and a dozen books we wrote together over 20 years when I got top billing on the byline ahead of my more famous/infamous co-editor, who always justified putting his name first because “C comes before S, Jeffrey. You know that.”

I didn’t receive another personalized invitation to Sundance (Oh, the Sting!), but a few months later, I did get a letter from one of Norman Maclean’s old friends, the acclaimed literary theorist Wayne Booth (A Rhetoric of Fiction), a seasonal neighbor of Redford’s. Booth was born and raised in American Fork Canyon under the shadows of Sundance Peak and Mt. Timpanogos. Booth, who had taught at the University of Chicago with Maclean, kept a summer place in the canyon and invited me out to Alpine, Utah, to show me how raw sewage was leaking down from Redford’s supposedly benign Sundace resort into the trout streams of the canyon and the American Fork River itself. I wrote up the malodorous saga for Our Little Secrets (the precursor to Roaming Charges) in the old CounterPunch newsletter, earning me the lasting enmity of the Sundance Kid, America’s last real movie star. – JSC

The Senator, the Gold Mine and the Sundance Kid

December 16, 1996

Washington Post

In recent weeks, letters from Robert Redford have been dropping softly into the mailboxes of the A-list Hollywood liberals. The 10-paragraph missive flails at Republicans for their plans to rape the environment and concludes with an urgent plea to send money to Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. By letter’s end, Redford has managed to convey the impression that Baucus is up there with John Muir and Rachel Carson as a guardian angel of green America.

If Baucus needs a star to rouse sympathetic liberals, Robert Redford is certainly the ideal man to pitch his virtues. Redford lives on a ranch in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and funds environmental causes through his Sundance Foundation. Since he filmed Norman Maclean’s trout-fishing novel “A River Runs Through It,” the Sundance Foundation has given large amounts of money to Blackfoot Challenge, an organization set up to protect and restore Montana’s Blackfoot River, the stream that runs through Maclean’s book.

In a recent speech before the National Press Club, Redford spoke out passionately against the mining companies: “I can only believe that their bottom lines will win out over the health of our lands and our people. I’ve already seen enough bright orange rivers with no fish, thanks to mining companies who swore their operations were safe — like the Blackfoot, for example, in Montana.”

Yet Max Baucus, the beneficiary of Redford’s fund-raising, is an unrepentant, self-described “friend of mining” who stands to profit personally from what is being heralded as the largest open-pit gold mine in North America — which will be located in the headwaters of Redford’s beloved Blackfoot River.

Phelps Dodge, the mining colossus that will operate the mine, says that roughly a billion tons of dirt and rocks will be gouged and blasted out, crushed, dumped into heaps, and then saturated by water laced with cyanide, a process that leaches small flecks of gold from tons of rock. By the time the mine, known as Seven-Up Pete, is tapped out there will be a hole in the earth more than a mile across at one point and 1,000 feet deep. And when the gold runs out in 12 years, Phelps Dodge and its minority partner, a Colorado-based gold mining company called Canyon Resources, will leave behind cyanide-sodden dirt for all eternity, just a few hundred feet from what may well by then be the lifeless waters of the Blackfoot River. Aportion of the mine’s operations will be on land that belongs to the Sieben Co., an 80,000-acre sheep ranch owned by the Baucus family. The Baucus clan now stands to make a great deal of money, since the Sieben Ranch will take home 5 percent of the gross value of any minerals extracted from their land. Phelps Dodge and Canyon Resources expect to gross at least $4 billion overall from the mine.

The Sieben Ranch is managed by the senator’s brother, John Baucus Jr., who also serves as president of the Montana Wool Growers Association. Max Baucus maintains a financial interest in the ranch and receives regular dividend checks from the company.

Asked for his views on the effect of the mine on the Blackfoot, Baucus responded with a written statement saying, “I have a great love and respect for the Blackfoot River, its heritage and its history. Because of the sensitivity of the upper-Blackfoot, if this mine is to proceed I think it should meet a high standard of environmental protection.” Baucus earlier issued a similarly pious statement about the Crown Butte mine near Yellowstone National Park.

Given the awesome amount of boodle due to be collected by the Baucus family, it is not hard to understand why the senator is demure on the subject of Seven-Up Pete. It is harder to understand why Redford is raising money for Baucus. Redford knows first-hand the threat to the Blackfoot. When he came to Montana to film “A River Runs Through It” in 1992, the river had been badly trashed by logging and by mining. There were few trout left and the river’s canyon was heavily scarred with clear-cuts. So Redford shot many of the film’s scenes on the Yellowstone and Gallatin rivers farther south.

Over the past few years, though, the Blackfoot River has been starting to heal, thanks largely to the aggressive work of local environmental groups, such as the Clark Fork Coalition and the Montana Environmental Information Center. Now, just as some cutthroat and bull trout runs have returned, progress is endangered. Already exploratory excavations at the Seven-Up Pete site have resulted in the state-approved dumping of millions of gallons of arsenic and lead-contaminated water into the Blackfoot. The larger story here is Baucus’s career role in fighting off environmental regulation. Across the length and breadth of Congress it is impossible to uncover a more tenacious front-man for the mining, timber and grazing industries. For example, it was Baucus who crushed the Clinton administration’s timid effort to reform federal mining and grazing policies and terminate below-cost timber sales to big timber companies subsidized by the taxpayers. In March 1993, Baucus engineered a session at the White House with Mack McLarty, Clinton’s then-chief of staff, and emerged boasting to a Washington Post reporter that this was the last time the Clinton crowd would dare to try and cram public land reforms down Western throats.

Nothing new here. Back in 1991, Baucus voted to kill a bipartisan effort to place a moratorium on the sale of mineral-rich federal lands to multinational mining companies for $5 an acre; the moratorium failed by one vote.

Baucus also has a deep personal interest in the present perquisites of the Western ranching industry. The Sieben Ranch is also one of the largest sheep operations in North America and it enjoys an exceptionally close and profitable relationship with public grazing lands adjacent to the ranch and administered by the U.S. Forest Service. Here, Baucus sheep graze for the standard federally subsidized rate of 22 cents per animal per month, less than a fifth of the going rate on private lands.

One of the grazing permits held by the Sieben Ranch is in the Helena National Forest. This wild landscape is home to the threatened grizzly bear, fewer than 800 of which now survive in the Lower 48. The Baucus family ranch holds one of Montana’s only remaining sheep grazing permits in critical grizzly habitat. This is not a happy situation for the bears, since they like to eat sheep and when they do, the ranch manager calls in the government hunter, who duly shoots the perpetrator with sodium pentothal and exiles the bear to another area.

If the bears return, as they sometimes do, they are either captured and placed in a zoo or, more typically, just killed. That’s why sheep grazing permits have been denied in other federal forests in Montana occupied by grizzlies. According to Fish and Wildlife Service reports, there have been four non-natural deaths of grizzly bears on Sieben Ranch allotments since the mid-1970s when the bear was protected as a threatened species. A representative of the Sieben Ranch did not respond to inquiries about grizzly mortality on company grazing land.

Baucus has also criticized local environmentalists for using Hollywood celebrities, such as Woody Harrelson and Glenn Close, to promote their campaign for the ecosystem.

“National money, glitz and glamour are reaching into Montana,” the man who has now corralled Robert Redford as a fund-raiser warned in June 1992. “These interests, mostly based out of California, are doing all they can to see that Montana’s 12-year civil war over the wilderness issue continues on and on.”

Baucus scarcely needs money from the Hollywood liberals. In his last re-election run in 1990 he was the second largest recipient of PAC money in the Senate: $1.86 million in a state with fewer than 500,000 registered voters. What Baucus needs from Redford is political cover. The big question is why Redford is providing it for him. Redford declined to respond to questions about Baucus and the gold mine. An aide to Redford said that the actor (like the national environmental groups based in Washington who have also raised money for Baucus) is willing to work with him because he is a Democrat and any Republican who replaced him would be worse.

But Redford’s fund-raising letter doesn’t even brave that argument. Redford does not excuse Baucus as the lesser of two evils but hails him as a true friend of nature. The Sundance Kid should go back to the Blackfoot and take one last look.

*En turist i Paris* (1930) by Folke Bulow

“THE VAST BULK of men are not pure individuals, and never will be, for the pure individual is a rarity, almost a kind of freak. The vast bulk of men need to belong to a self-governing group, a tribe, a nation, an empire. It is a necessity like the necessity to eat food.”

— D.H. Lawrence

RAYMOND CARVER once walked into a creative writing class reeking of booze, read a story about a broken marriage, and left half the students in tears before staggering back out.

It was the 1970s, he was already publishing, already broke, already unraveling. His students didn’t know whether to be inspired or horrified—but they never forgot it. That was Carver: messy, raw, incapable of separating his own wreckage from the words he put on paper.

Carver’s stories looked simple—working-class kitchens, couples fighting over ashtrays, a kid with a nosebleed—but inside them was violence, loneliness, tenderness that cut like glass. What readers didn’t always see was how much of it came straight from his own life. He drank hard, fought with his first wife, broke furniture, broke promises, broke himself. Friends said you could hear the clink of bottles in the rhythm of his sentences.

The scandal of Carver’s life was that his genius was inseparable from his ruin. He was hospitalized more than once, sometimes teaching with a hangover so brutal he’d barely make it through class. His publisher and editor, Gordon Lish, chopped his stories down to the bone—so much so that Carver later admitted he barely recognized them. Was the minimalist style really his, or the product of another man’s knife? The literary world still argues about it.

But Carver did what few thought he could: he clawed his way out. In the 1980s he got sober, found love with poet Tess Gallagher, and began to write with a clarity that felt like sunlight after years underground. He knew the clock was ticking—lung cancer was already growing in him—but in those last sober years, he produced some of his most beautiful work.

Raymond Carver’s life wasn’t tidy. It was fractured, scandalous, tragic. But that’s why his stories feel like they belong to us: because he never pretended life was anything but brutal, ordinary, and occasionally—miraculously—full of grace.

NATHAN WOODARD: Perhaps in place of draconian hate speech laws, we could enforce speech laws that penalize adults for acting and talking like deranged toddlers. Could we mandate placing people in corners with dunce caps? Maybe deny playground time. Take away internet privileges? Perhaps we can call it: the “Lemon Law”?

LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT

The Campaign to Punish Critics of Charlie Kirk

Being a High-Profile Comedian Right Now Is No Joke

What to Know About Jimmy Kimmel’s Show Being Suspended

With Calls for Retribution Over Kirk, Some See Rise of a ‘Woke Right’

Inside The Times’s Reporting and Judgment Calls on Kirk’s Assassination

The ‘Manosphere’ Reacts to the Kimmel News

A Week of Deepening Political Divides

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

If Donald Trump has a license to kill men in a boat off the South American coast, then any American has the right to kill any person anywhere, including Charlie Kirk, and laws prohibiting murder are simply words on paper. We’re in a free-fire zone, and we better get used to it. No utterance is free of risk, and reading this comment could be dangerous.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I remember Kimmel performing hand motions on butts, and the country laughed. I then remember Al Franken doing exactly the same thing on a USO plane and then have him be cancelled by Senators with the names Feinstein, Gillibrand, Hirono, Murray, Cantwell. Now these same political groups are having seizures because the US Govt just cannot cancel people. Is the US Senate part of the government? And I will not bore people here but I can go on and on with examples of various branches of the US Govt censoring and cancelling people. This has been the play book of the Democratic Party and its media allies for a decade or longer. To act as if this did not happen is simply ludicrous. It is not becoming of serious people and believe me people out here in the country are clued into the hypocrisy.

As a Dem myself, I often wonder what 2024 would have been like with Franken vs. Trump. It certainly may have been an improvement over the dementia patient or the cackling dry drunk. But we will never know. Regular non-elite Dems just have no voice and they are not allowed to have nice things. It is far more important for our elite Dems to promote self-important nitwits preaching and scolding and censoring about identity politics and wokeism.

I for one have been fed up for a long time. This past two weeks has been the icing on the cake. I am done. My neighbors are done. My colleagues are done.

Dems, you started it. It is quite the show watching you being force fed your own medicine.

THAT WAS FAST.

by Matt Taibbi

From Variety:

Disney’s ABC said it would take Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show off its schedule ‘indefinitely’ after one of the biggest owners of TV stations in the U.S., Nexstar Media, said it would pre-empt airings of the program following remarks the host made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk… The company said it "strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming…”

In his monologue Monday night, Kimmel said that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points off Kirk’s murder… “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said.

Well, shit. This could get ugly. Just before Disney’s decision, FCC chair Brendan Carr said Kimmel’s statements were “some of the sickest conduct possible” and his agency had a “strong case” for holding the company accountable for trying to “lie to the American people” about a major news story. “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” he continued. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr added that he wanted to “reinvigorate” the FCC’s “public interest standard.” He listed people like Joy Ann Reid, Stephen Colbert, and Terry Moran, noted that Donald Trump successfully ran against such legacy media figures, and that “their grip on the narrative is slipping.” Still, he said, the FCC still needs to make sure firms leasing public airwaves uphold their public interest obligation.

Of all the network late night acts, Kimmel’s was the most vicious and unredeeming, continually hitting new lows during the pandemic in particular, with the aforementioned AntiVax Barbie and his “Rest in Peace, Wheezy” monologue sure to go down as cultural anti-landmarks. Virtually everything he said in the Trump era was DNC messaging with a punchline, putting him on course to spend the afterlife doing laps in media hell with Keith Olbermann. With his ratings in freefall, Disney was going to drop the axe sooner or later.

But acting so quickly after Carr’s “easy way or the hard way” line opens a can of worms. Now the organic demise of legacy media (definitely happening, and at lightning speed too) can’t be an unmuddied story. What Carr described would reimagine the FCC as a press regulator in a full-on truth-arbiter role, in the spirit of Britain’s hated OfCom. That feels like a big jump from where the Administration was in February, when J.D. Vance lambasted Europeans in Munich for losing sight of basic tenets of democracy, including the “freedom… to make mistakes.” Either way, wild news; Walter and I will talk it through on the next America This Week.

*Portrait of the Painter Rocchi* (1931) by Filippo De Pisis

JIMMY KIMMEL’S FIRING MAKES ME ASHAMED TO BE AN AMERICAN

by Drew Magary

In a vacuum, ABC’s sudden suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” won’t change my life in any meaningful way. Kimmel operated in late night, a genre whose cultural influence died off many years ago. And I myself never watched Kimmel’s namesake broadcast, which has run on ABC without incident for 22 years. I’m sure it’s a perfectly decent show, but it was never one that I felt the urgent need to tune into. I’m glad it existed, but I lived without it.

The rest of this country will now also have to do likewise. ABC, owned by Disney, took Kimmel off the air indefinitely (and almost certainly forever) yesterday. This move did not happen in a vacuum. Quite the contrary. In fact, Kimmel’s demise was quickly engineered by a number of factors after the host said this during his monologue on Monday night:

Some context here. Extreme right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk was killed in cold blood last week. The man suspected of shooting Kirk is Tyler Robinson, who recently turned himself in to the authorities. Kirk didn’t deserve to be felled by an assassin’s bullet — no one does — but Jimmy Kimmel never stated, nor implied, as much. In fact, Kimmel went out of his way on Friday night to distance himself from any sort of macabre gloating over Kirk’s murder. (“Some people are cheering this, which is something I won’t ever understand.”)

Unless you consider it a remarkable feat of “conservative activism” to declare the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to be “a huge mistake,” or to claim that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people,” there was very little to admire about Kirk’s professional accomplishments. He was an unremarkable commentator who trafficked largely in ugly, spiteful rhetoric. Kirk’s dedication to his particular craft naturally endeared him greatly to President Trump. Where Kimmel went wrong was in the follow-up episode when he went after Kirk’s allies, the President included, who immediately, and recklessly, attempted to portray the politics of the shooter, which are still nebulous, as violently left wing.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

The petty grievance machine went into overdrive the second those true words escaped from Kimmel’s lips. After Brendan Carr, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chief, heard Kimmel’s remarks, he went on the podcast of another Trump ally, Benny Johnson, to issue the following warning:

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, we can do this the easy way, or these companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

The not-so-implicit threat here was that Carr would revoke the broadcasting licenses of ABC affiliates, which would cost Disney billions of dollars. Follow the money even further, and you’ll find companies who own 66 local ABC affiliates across the country. One of them is Sinclair, whose penchant for forcing local news anchors to recite scripted right-wing propaganda was documented extensively by my former Deadspin colleague Tim Burke seven years ago. The other is Nexstar, which also leans right and currently has a $6.2 billion consolidation deal awaiting formal approval by Carr’s FCC. Both companies wanted Kimmel gone from the air, and ABC helped oblige them. Carr gloated online after the fact.

This comes in the wake of CBS canceling “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” when that network’s parent company, Paramount, was also awaiting FCC approval on a merger with Skydance Media. Play ball and you get your consolidation. Make any trouble and you’ll get put out of business.

That’s reality as it stands right now, and well into the future. In the wake of Kimmel’s ouster, our President has set his eyes on a clean sweep, and it’s smart money to bet that he’ll get it:

So you see, this isn’t really about some joke that Jimmy Kimmel made. It’s not even about Charlie Kirk. It is — predictably, infuriatingly, exhaustingly — about our awful president whose every diseased musing has infiltrated every aspect of American life for nearly a decade now. With the bureaucratic powers of the federal government at his disposal, Trump has now commenced the process of booting all dissenters off the airwaves while remaking the entirety of American media in the MAGA image. Not only has Trump succeeded thus far, but he’s done so at such a remarkable speed that I fully expect Seth Meyers to be homeless by sundown. Once that happens, our miserable president will move on to making all of us miserable in some other way, and some other way after that, and on and on until there’s nothing good or truthful left.

Throughout Trump’s ruinous second term, I have done a fairly effective job keeping my head on straight and getting on with my life. Last night, I felt as if that ability had been forcibly taken from me. I didn’t realize I needed Jimmy Kimmel to prosper this badly, and I’ll wager you didn’t either. He was harmless in the aggregate: a professional comedian doing routine professional comedian’s work. But because he dared to attract the Eye of Sauron, he’s now exiled.

I see no reason why you and I won’t be next on the list, because well-resourced opposition is all but nonexistent. All this country needs is one leader of industry, just one, to tell this administration to go f—k itself. To date, not a single one of them has. Not even Disney chair Bob Iger, whose company has willingly defied MAGA persecution in years past. Iger is the most powerful man in Hollywood, and Trump still found a way to cow him anyway.

All of this makes me want to vomit. It leaves me quivering with equal parts hopelessness and aggravation, and it makes me want to scream out questions that I already know the answers to. Doesn’t anyone in this country have a goddamn spine anymore? (No.) Aren’t the alpha predators at the top of our economic food chain as tired of this s—t as I am? (No.) Don’t they have enough money already? (No.) Will avenging the ghost of Charlie Kirk solve any of this country’s problems? (No.) And where the f—k are DEMOCRATS on all this? (peacefully asleep under their 500-thread bed linens).

Every question I ask makes me feel bilious, and every answer makes me feel worse. I hope all of these people end up in a Hell that’s worse than the one they’re constructing right in front of us. I don’t just feel embarrassed to be an American in the wake of Kimmel’s firing, I actively dislike being American because of it. I wish I was from f—king Norway or something. Did you know that Sinclair will air an hourlong tribute to Kirk in place of Kimmel’s show on Friday night? What will those 60 minutes entail, screenshots of tweets? I f—king hate all of this.

Because Trump has ruled over American culture for so long now that I understand, innately, that no one in his MAGA coalition will stop until all of us are as miserable as they are. The war for truth is over, and the truth has lost by a resounding margin. I’d make a sly joke about it, but what reason is there to laugh anymore?

(SF Chronicle)

THE POWER OF GOD COMPELS YOU!

by James Kunstler

“You have no idea the fire you have ignited.” - Erika Kirk

He was about as fine a young man as you could have dreamed up in a country so busy disgracing itself, Jesus-like in quality, if not in exact manner. Jesus, after all, was not a family man. But then there was nothing supernatural about Charlie Kirk. He was vividly of this time and place on earth. Now, in death, you can imagine him up on a mural in the post office. They’ve gone and turned him into legend, like Davy Crockett, Joseph Smith, Abe Lincoln. Yeah, it goes that deep.

The Woke-Jacobin Left broke into a happy-dance when they heard the news, and I bet 90-percent of them didn’t even know what Charlie was about, except that their minders had painted a bullseye on him and somebody hit it. They have forgotten what their country is about, too. They have unwittingly acted-out Biblical-grade wickedness. Jimmy Kimmel didn’t just tell a bad joke about the president — “This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish” — he made a Judas of himself. He demonstrated exactly what it means to betray whatever remains of goodness in this land.

You are at a loss to understand how bad it got, years of officially enforced insanity, absurdities jammed down your craw, treasonous mischief, vile abuses under color-of-law (Tina Peters still rots in jail in Colorado!), and, lately, gunning down whoever stands in their way. You look at an old, established political party and you begin to see actual demons. You understand that destroying the country might not be enough for them.

At this point, nothing will save the Democratic Party from itself. It will not fade quietly into irrelevance like the Whigs did in the 1850s. No, you are witnessing something more like spontaneous combustion, a conflagration of the vicious and unholy. If you happened to watch Kash Patel in the Senate Judiciary Committee the other day going at Adam Schiff, what you saw was an actual exorcism.

Mr. Patel said, “You are the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate. You are a disgrace to this institution and an utter coward. You continue to lie from your perch and put on a show so you can go raise money for your charades. You are a political buffoon at best! I challenge you to say anything credible to the truth. Go ahead and run to the cameras where you wanna go now!”

He might as well have just said: “I cast you out, unclean spirit, along with every satanic power of the enemy, every specter from hell, and all your fell companions. . . .” In the process, Mr. Patel reminded Senator Schiff that he is Director of the FBI now and, well. . . things have changed. Perhaps other Senators who have trafficked in sedition and malicious perfidy — say, Mark Warner on the Intel Committee — viewed these goings-on with a twinge of dread for what is coming.

Notice that no one on the Judiciary Committee dared move to hold Mr. Patel in contempt, because what he said is self-evidently true, and they all know it. Senator Schiff is, of course, already under investigation for mortgage fraud, which is inconvenient enough, but before long he will have to answer graver charges for offenses against the nation, along with many co-conspirators in and out of office. His over-speaking the witness (Mr. Patel) in committee the other day was the sort of climactic mummery you see in movies when the iniquitous are brought low in an official proceeding — think the babbling Bryan character in Inherit the Wind or Captain Queeg in the Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Schiff knows he is cooked and Mr. Patel just flambéed him.

If Mr. Trump had any qualms about turning the full force of the law on this party and its demonic confederates in government and the old news media, then you can safely assume that after Charlie Kirk’s murder every lever of power will be used to get them all into courtrooms under fair and correct proceedings with the basic aim of laying out the truth of what has happened to our country, so that everyone can see what it was.

By the way, and in case you missed it, Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed Martin, on or about September 5, visited Tina Peters in her cell in the Colorado State Prison at Pueblo. Peters (who turns 70 today), the former Mesa County Clerk convicted in 2024 of nine felony counts related to a security breach of voting equipment (stemming from efforts to “prove” 2020 election fraud claims), was sentenced to nine years in prison. The DOJ has filed a “review” of her conviction in federal court. I wouldn’t want to be Jena Griswold, Colorado Secretary of State, who spearheaded Tina Peter’s prosecution for daring to voice concern over election fraud.

Then, just this week, the same Ed Martin paid a call to the Fulton County, GA, election headquarters to initiate federal grand jury proceedings to access 148,000 ballots held under seal and unexamined in a county warehouse since the 2020 election. The ballots have long been suspected of irregularities and possible fraud. “Joe Biden” won the state by 11,799 votes out of 5,017,000 cast (a 0.23% plurality), and thus the national election — as did both of Georgia’s Democratic senators, Jon Ossof and Raphael Warnock.

The post Charlie Kirk America is a new reality. Prepare accordingly.

ANTIFA, A DISCUSSION

by Chris Hedges

“Trump’s designation of the amorphous group antifa, which has no formal organization or structure, as a terrorist organization permits the state to charge us all as terrorists. The point is not to go after members of antifa, short for anti-fascist. It is to go after the last vestiges of dissent. When Barack Obama oversaw the coordinated national campaign to shut down the Occupy encampments, antifa -- so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass and seek physical confrontations with police — was the excuse.

“I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post. “I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

I have no love for antifa. The feeling is mutual. I was a fierce opponent of the Black Bloc anarchists who identified with antifa. They embedded themselves in Occupy encampments and refused to take part in the collective decision making. They carried out property destruction and initiated clashes with the police. Occupy activists were antifa’s human shields. I wrote that antifa was “a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.”

David Graeber, whose work I respect, wrote an open letter criticizing my position.

I was doxed. My lectures and events, which received phone threats forcing venues to hire private security, including bodyguards, were picketed by men dressed in black, their faces were covered by black bandanas. They all carried the same sign, no matter which city I was in, that read: “Fuck You Chris Hedges.” During a debate with an anarchist supporter of antifa in New York City, several dozen black-clad men in the audience jeered and interrupted me, often yelling out sarcastically “amen.”

The state effectively used antifa -- I am certain antifa was heavily infiltrated with agents provocateurs -- to shut all of us down. The corporate state feared the broad appeal of the Occupy movement, including to those within the systems of power. The movement was targeted because it articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines.

Antifa, let me be clear, is not a terrorist organization. It may confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution, but its designation as a terrorist organization has no legal justification.

Antifa sees any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, as the enemy. They oppose all organized movements, which only ensures their own powerlessness. They are not only obstructionist, but obstructionist to those of us who are also trying to resist. They dismiss anyone who lacks their ideological purity. It does not matter if individuals are part of union organizing, workers’ and populist movements or radical intellectuals. and environmental activists. These anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

John Zerzan, one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan dismisses a long list of supposed “sellouts” starting with Noam Chomsky and including myself.

Black Bloc activists in cities such as Oakland smashed the windows of stores and looted them. It was not a strategic, moral or tactical act. It was done for the sake of destruction. Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism are justified, in the jargon of the movement, as components of “feral” or “spontaneous insurrection.” These acts, the movement argues, can never be organized. Organization, in the thinking of the movement, implies hierarchy, which must always be opposed. There can be no restraints on “feral” or “spontaneous” acts of insurrection. Whoever gets hurt gets hurt. Whatever gets destroyed gets destroyed.

“The Black Bloc movement is infected with a deeply disturbing hypermasculinity,” I wrote. “This hypermasculinity, I expect, is its primary appeal. It taps into the lust that lurks within us to destroy, not only things but human beings. It offers the godlike power that comes with mob violence. Marching as a uniformed mass, all dressed in black to become part of an anonymous bloc, faces covered, temporarily overcomes alienation, feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness and loneliness. It imparts to those in the mob a sense of comradeship. It permits an inchoate rage to be unleashed on any target. Pity, compassion and tenderness are banished for the intoxication of power. It is the same sickness that fuels the swarms of police who pepper-spray and beat peaceful demonstrators. It is the sickness of soldiers in war. It turns human beings into beasts.”

But while I oppose antifa, I do not blame them for the state’s response. If it was not antifa it would be some other group. Our rapidly consolidating police state will use any mechanism to silence us. It actually welcomes violence. Confrontational tactics and destruction of property justify draconian forms of control and frighten the wider population, driving them away from any resistance movement. It needs antifa or a group like it. Once a resistance movement is successfully smeared as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob — which those in the Trump administration are working hard to do — we are finished. If we become isolated, we can be crushed.

“Nonviolent movements, on some level, embrace police brutality,” I wrote. “The continuing attempt by the state to crush peaceful protesters who call for simple acts of justice delegitimizes the power elite. It prompts a passive population to respond. It brings some within the structures of power to our side and creates internal divisions that will lead to paralysis within the network of authority. Martin Luther King kept holding marches in Birmingham because he knew Public Safety Commissioner ‘Bull’ Connor was a thug who would overreact.”

“The explosive rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement came when a few women, trapped behind orange mesh netting, were pepper-sprayed by NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna,” I went on. “The violence and cruelty of the state were exposed. And the Occupy movement, through its steadfast refusal to respond to police provocation, resonated across the country. Losing this moral authority, this ability to show through nonviolent protest the corruption and decadence of the corporate state, would be crippling to the movement. It would reduce us to the moral degradation of our oppressors. And that is what our oppressors want.”

I saw how antifa was weaponized to break the Occupy movement. Now it is being weaponized to throttle any resistance, no matter how tepid and benign.

This justification for widespread repression is absurdist theater, characterized by fictions, including the supposed “Red-Green” alliance of Islamists and the “radical left.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy adviser, insists there was an “organized campaign” behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk, whose martyrdom has turbocharged state repression. Any Trump opponent, including billionaire financier George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, will soon be caught in the net.

“We are all antifa now.”

CHARLIE KIRK AND HIS KILLER WERE SPAWNED BY THE SAME DARK SOUL OF US POLITICS

A declining US superpower needs to rationalise its failures – glaring, monstrous crimes abroad, economic collapse at home – as a war against homegrown terrorists

by Jonathan Cook

Predictably, the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week has sparked a wave of commentary about the growing dangers of political violence in the United States – debate that is itself bound to stoke yet more political violence.

The Trump administration has made clear it wants to weaponise Kirk’s killing, making the case that his assassination reflects something inherently violent about what it calls "leftist" ideology.

That just happens to be the exact reverse of what the statistics show: the right is historically far more prone to using political violence than the left.

Even the two men alleged to have tried to assassinate Donald Trump last year, before the presidential elections, had at best confused political agendas. Neither could realistically be described as “leftists”.

But nuance is not what this administration in interested in, as it prepares to ratchet up other forms of political violence against anyone it labels as “the left”: critics, opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the transgender community, Muslims, non-white immigrants and asylum seekers.

On Monday Vice-President J D Vance and a senior Trump aide, Stephen Miller, both vowed vengeance against this amorphous group they are characterising as a left-wing “domestic terror movement”.

Hosting Kirk’s podcast in his stead, Vance said the administration would "work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country".

On the same podcast, Miller promised "to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks."

Meanwhile, social media tycoon Elon Musk framed the future in more graphically apocalyptic terms as he rallied crowds of Tommy Robinson-led, flag-waving white nationalists in London at the weekend. Speaking to them via video link, he warned: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

Draconian response

Early targets of this “war”, as former Trump aide Steve Bannon calls it, have already been selected.

Those who refuse to canonise Kirk – and his Christian white nationalism and bigotry towards women and minorities – are being sought out and punished.

A leading right-wing analyst, Matthew Dowd, was sacked from his post at MSNBC for noting the obvious: that Kirk’s own vocal intolerance of others contributed to the politically charged mood that led to his killing.

More draconian measures are clearly in the pipeline. The direction of travel is highlighted by a new legislative proposal to strip US citizens of their passports over political speech disliked by the administration.

This week, Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, vowed to make a First Amendment exception for "hate speech" – which is certain to open the door to prosecutions of any speech, such as criticisms of Kirk, that the administration objects to.

And after a popular TV show host, Jimmy Kimmel, was summarily sacked for noting that free speech was being curtailed in the wake of Kirk’s killing – reportedly following huge pressure from the Trump appointee heading the Federal Communications Commission – Trump himself warned that networks could be punished for covering him “negatively”.

In death, Kirk is being moulded into a saint for the right, largely by suppressing the things he actually said,to foment the right's sense of grievance and anger. His presumed assassin, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is being similarly turned into a caricature.

Robinson’s backstory is barely known, though the one clear thing is that he was raised in a strictly Mormon, and Republican, family. Instead there is a scramble to find any connections that can paint him as a “leftist” hate figure, one useful in crafting a revenge narrative for the right.

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has been central to shaping the narrative about Kirk’s killing so far.

He was among those “asking” where Kirk’s assassination leads next: “The question is, what kind of watershed? That chapter remains to be written. Is this the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter in our history?”

This is really a non-question posing as a question. The MAGA right views Kirk’s death as the firing of a starting pistol: it will legitimate a rapid escalation of more political violence from the emerging US fascist right for whom Trump is the figurehead.

It will provide the far right with the grounds to rationalise for itself ever greater legal and social repression of its opponents – repression it wanted from the outset.

Bubble of denial

Kirk’s killing is an alibi for the fascist right to tell itself its own political violence is nothing more than "self-defence".

This is a tried-and-tested formula.

Israel has been flogging this strategy to death these past two years by claiming that its slaughter and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is "self-defence".

That makes sense to Israelis only because their political and media class have erased the preceding decades of Israeli state violence – apartheid, ethnic cleansing and a brutal 17-year siege of Gaza – that directly led to the attack on 7 October 2023.

Israelis inhabited that same bubble of denial this week as the United Nations concluded unequivocally that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Trump’s MAGA movement has been busy doing much the same in the US, erasing its own forms of violence that preceded Kirk’s assassination. It has, of course, lost no time in scrubbing from the record the right’s January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol that marked the end of Trump’s first term as president.

In power for less than a year, the second Trump administration has also been chipping away rhetorically and materially at the bedrock of the country’s constitutional and legal safeguards to smooth the way to more heavy-handed repression.

That includes disappearances into detention by ICE immigration officials of domestic opponents vocal about Palestinian rights. It includes the deportation of immigrants and asylum seekers to third countries, often in defiance of court rulings.

It includes a move to end birthright citizenship for children born in the US to undocumented immigrants. And it includes savage funding cuts to universities to incentivise them to further crack down on students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

These forms of structural oppression are far more politically dangerous and violent than anything a gunman could achieve with a single bullet.

Surface narrative

Perhaps understandably, those trying to counter the push for harsher legal and social repression are keen to find plot holes in the administration’s narrative.

That task is being made significantly easier by the way the FBI is publicly putting together its case.

Robinson supposedly wrote a note confessing to the crime – one that FBI head Kash Patel has quoted from – even though Patel also says the note was destroyed. He has not explained how it was destroyed or how he is able to quote from a document that no longer exists.

The FBI’s account of how Robinson prepared for and carried out the killing is so unnecessarily labyrinthine it beggars belief that anyone would behave that way unless they wanted to be caught.

And yet Robinson not only carried out a remarkably precise assassination from 200 yards away, but also successfully evaded law enforcement until his family reportedly turned him in.

All of this smacks either of gross incompetence by a highly politicised FBI under Patel, or a convenient, manufactured narrative produced by a highly politicised FBI under Patel keen to implicate "the left" and trigger a further, more violent round of culture wars.

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that some observers – looking to a spate of assassinations of political leaders identified with the left in the 1960s, such as President John F Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King – are less than ready to believe the official narratives being promoted.

But there is one thing that the mainstream left and right do seem able to agree on. They readily blame the "dark corners" of the internet – a dehumanised, video-gaming culture, and faceless, polarising interactions on social media – that appear to be especially harmful to disaffected, aimless young men often seemingly with poor mental health.

Certainly, it is satisfying to ascribe a deteriorating civic fabric to this group’s increasing flight from the real world into online seclusion or anonymised exchanges. But even this way of understanding the rise of social and political disharmony serves to skate over deeper truths, and to prioritise another surface narrative.

Violence baked in

Overshadowed by Kirk’s killing, there was yet another school shooting in Denver, Colorado, on the same day. A 16-year-old, reportedly known for espousing neo-Nazi views, critically injured two fellow students with a handgun before turning the gun on himself.

The data show that gun violence is a uniquely US phenomenon, not replicated in other countries that have a similar or even greater video-gaming culture to which these young, lone gunmen are so often drawn.

Conveniently, our gaze is directed at these damaged individuals, not the wider political context they and we inhabit.

Some wish to argue that the reasons for their violence can be found in their individual behaviours. Others seek to attribute guilt along largely meaningless, partisan dividing lines – political divisions manufactured for us by a state apparatus equally served by the two main parties that control Congress.

Kirk’s killing is neither the opening nor the closing of a “dark chapter” of domestic political violence. It is a continuation of a violence baked into the US political system.

Most obviously, violence has long been normalised in Washington’s bipartisan “shock and awe” foreign policy.

In just the past few years, the US has materially supported Saudi Arabia in its years-long bombing of Yemen into the dark ages. The US has denied aid to Afghanistan, still reeling from a recently ended, two-decade US military occupation, that is now producing mass starvation among the country’s children. And the US has supplied the bombs and diplomatic cover for Israel to erase Gaza and engineer the starvation of its people.

The impact of this relentless, all-too-visible violence inflicted by Washington on large parts of the globe, and a media coverage that so readily celebrates and sanctifies it, cannot be ring-fenced from a watching US public.

Where would Robinson have gotten the idea of etching meme-like hate messages on to his bullet casings? Could it have been from seeing former Republican governor and failed US presidential candidate Nikki Haley scrawl “Finish them” on artillery shells to be used in Israel’s genocide on Gaza?

Such depraved glorification of mass violence by the US political establishment barely raises an eyebrow. And yet our focus is firmly directed at Tyler Robinson, as though his suspected lone act of violence is some sort of watershed moment that only now requires serious soul-searching – and, predictably, only from “leftists”.

Fuel on the fire

Our real focus ought not to be on damaged individuals so much as the political, social and economic systems that damaged them, and that provided them with the means and motives to carry out their twisted agendas.

Video gaming and social media aren’t the cause of the problem. They are the fuel being poured on to a fire that was already raging among a section of alienated, nihilistic youth across the US.

That nihilism – a sense that the world and its values are utterly meaningless and our lives without purpose – cannot be explained simply by the escape into a world of video games. Such addictions are where the nihilist seeks solace, fleeing from a reality that has become too much of a burden.

The cauldron for the nihilistic worldview of these lone gunmen is the unique role the US has taken for itself in shaping the world over the past 80 years – both as an imperial hub for the reinvention of western colonialism and as the chief exporter, and rule-enforcer, of a turbo-charged neoliberal capitalism.

Exemplified by the current genocide in Gaza, US foreign policy not only requires a constant campaign of racist intimidation and violence towards the Global South, but celebrates this violence as a moral value and as a duty, one championed by the right and figures like Charlie Kirk.

Meanwhile at home, the MAGA right extols the excesses of neoliberal capitalism while ignoring the exploitative abuses of the weakest and most marginalised, the ravaging of the planet’s health, and the resulting threats to the future of the human species.

None of this is a sane political environment in which to grow up.

Charlie Kirk’s Christian nationalism took as its premise – against all evidence – that America was doing God’s work in promoting "values" at home and abroad that serve only the narrow interests of a billionaire class represented by Donald Trump.

Although it is impossible to yet know Tyler Robinson’s reasoning, it seems likely he had lost that kind of unthinking faith.

Who is to say which of them harboured a darker vision of reality?

Raised as a devout Christian no less than Kirk, maybe Robinson could no longer buy into the narrative sold by Kirk’s Christian nationalism of God’s will, Trump’s will and Israel’s will being identical.

All guns blazing

What is much clearer is that a growing section of disaffected youth in the US are ever less ready to stomach a system of bipartisan values that require permanent wars and genocidal starvation abroad, their own impoverishment and marginalisation at home, and a bleak future in which a suicidal neoliberal capitalism, premised on infinite growth on a finite planet, runs out of quick fixes.

If those are the only values on offer, some – like the school shooters and Kirk’s killer – choose no values at all. They choose to go down all guns blazing.

Why was Charlie Kirk selected by his killer? Because most likely they were not so different.

Kirk’s flight from reality into a world of violent American exceptionalism, supposedly justified by the Bible, was every bit as nihilistic as his killer’s flight into the world of memes and video games.

Both were tied to a system where meaning derives chiefly from the ability to inflict violence on others. Kirk through existing, oppressive power structures; his killer through the barrel of a gun.

Kirk exercised his influence through the internet, stoking resentment and anger online. His killer’s nihilism and alienation were fed by screens where a dark, life-is-cheap world of video games merged with a dark, real world where starving babies to death has become normal.

That kind of parallel-drawing, of course, is not one the MAGA right can abide. Because it indicts not some imagined “left” but the right’s own vision of an ultimate dog-eat-dog America, one in which models of solidarity and shared values have been stripped out. One where might alone is right.

“The left” will be blamed for Kirk’s killing, whatever the truth. Because the logic of a US political system predicated on structural violence towards others at home and abroad, long predating Trump’s arrival in the White House, necessarily excludes real soul-searching.

A US empire, one rapidly running out of steam and legitimacy, needs its scapegoats. For decades, those have been supplied on foreign fields, where the US has chosen to export its violence in a supposed war against the “terrorists”.

Now, a declining US superpower needs to rationalise its failures – its glaring, monstrous crimes abroad, and economic collapse at home – in similar terms, as a war against homegrown terrorists.

The real terrorism is inflicted by a bipartisan US political establishment that cares only for its own enrichment, and is ready to use whatever violence is needed to protect its position and wealth.

Make no mistake, that means a lot more political violence – precisely from those claiming to be bringing it to an end.

(jonathancook.substack.com)

*Girl Looking at Landscape* (1959) by Richard Diebenkorn

30 Comments

Kirk Vodopals September 20, 2025

The highly credentialed author of the article about Jackson Stae Forest lost all credibility with this statement “Cal Fire, the state’s chief fire agency, has a little-known side hustle”
But he was right about one thing: all carbon accounting is complete voodoo.
You have sections of Jackson state forest that are dark as night on a perfectly sunny day cuz of 1,000 pencil thin trees per acre then you have plots with some of the highest basal area in the county.
All the private timberlands follow the highly lobbied Forest Practices rules which basically allows you to clear cut the ridges and leave strips of good stands along the creeks.
The whole industry is a constant tug between idiotic lobbyist interests and voodoo carbon programs by feel-good nonprofits.
These carbon credits are sold to Disney and U-Haul.
It’s a joke.

Reply
- Paul Modic September 20, 2025
  
  Some enterprising heir is investing in buying out people in partnerships and pieces of land outright, out here in the wooded hills, and making people happy they can get rid of their land, cashed out, for reasonable prices. Then the guy trades the parcels on the carbon credit market somehow, not sure how that works but it seems to…(Anyone in Sohum seeking to get rid of their mountain land should talk to Chris W about this)
  
  Reply
  - Kirk Vodopals September 20, 2025
    
    That dude is working the system which is designed to benefit such dudes…but it might be the best option now for all the hill muffins who went titts up in the weed debacle
    
    Reply
Kirk Vodopals September 20, 2025

What we are watching now in our federal government is a complete dumpster fire. Team Red is throwing poop on the wall and Team Blue is sitting in their hands.
All of the supposed moral high ground of the right in terms of states rights, government overrreach, personal liberties have been thrown in the toilet. No rational person can seriously defend any of it. Cabinet members who swore to expose Epstein or put a stop to endless wars have done a complete 180 and look like complete buffoons. Patel and Bongino are the worsts.
The election of the first Trump administration was depressing. The next election result was more depressing. A second Trump administration confirmed that we are truly in an Idiocracy.
Now Gavin and Kamala are apparently bailing out of the Democratic Party.
Neither of them have any core beliefs.
None of the above please.
Please stop voting for morons

Reply
- Paul Modic September 20, 2025
  
  The shit show puts the lie to “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, voting doesn’t matter.”
  Now all we have left are the voters to try to slow the shit show down by voting yes on 50 and then getting to the polls in 2026 congressional races across the country…
  (People like Supe Cline and the sheriff, who are against 50, should be honest and say, “Don’t vote for 50 because that will hurt Trump and I support him.”)
  
  Reply
  - Jimmy September 20, 2025
    
    Agree 100%
    
    Reply
Jacob September 20, 2025

Re C’s thoughts on FB
The current police chief will receive severance per his employment contract–you only get severance if you aren’t leaving of your own accord–but he has no consulting agreement with the city so he won’t be receiving any consulting income, let alone $200 per hour. This is just a false rumor. Isaac is a good City Manager, IMO, and is actively working on improving the city, including the PD. He hires and fires the police chief. In fact, he is hiring a new Interim Chief of Police, Eric Swift, whose contract is on Monday’s agenda at around $80 per hour, which is a cost savings compared to the current chief and a far cry from $200.

Reply
Mazie Malone September 20, 2025

Happy Saturday AVA’ers,🍁🔮

Camping ordinance….

The City Council talks about this ordinance like it’s the solution to homelessness. Unfortunately, the reality is there’s not enough shelter or housing, and the “collaboration with services” they describe doesn’t happen the way people think, especially not after hours. What’s left is citations and jail for people with nowhere else to be.

The answer to homeless “camping” “encampments” is housing, shelter, safety, treatment & support!

mm💕

Reply
- Mike Jamieson September 20, 2025
  
  Sent this email to city clerk for their next mtg:
  
  Dear Members of the Ukiah City Council,
  
  The plan to amend the camping ordinance to enable issuance of citations to homeless persons, or their arrest, even when no shelter beds are available, is lacking a measure that would likely help the situation.
  
  The city could designate safe sites for car/rv campers and outdoor tents. The sites would have 24/7 security, porta potties, water access, and individual storage structures. And, the delivery of mental health, substance abuse treatment, and social services would be made easier.
  
  Reply
  - Chuck Dunbar September 20, 2025
    
    Yes, this is a common-sense, humane, solution to this growing problem. There needs to be a “somewhere legal and safe” place for these folks. Homelessness should not be criminalized.
    
    Reply
  - Mazie Malone September 20, 2025
    
    Thanks Mike,
    
    Safe camping parking spaces would be a logical approach to address these issues. Sadly I do not see logic as a strong attribute of those making decisions.😢🙃
    
    mm💕
    
    Reply
Paul Modic September 20, 2025

The Trumpers uptown on Main Street had a new sign out last week: “We Are All Charley Kirk’s Family,” and a friend just told me that as he drove by he shouted out the window at the maga guy standing there, “Fuck you!”
I think that’s kind of ironic because of all my friends/acquaintances he has more in common with Kirk than any of them, as he thinks there’s never enough Palestinians killed in revenge for October 7th.

Reply
Julie Beardsley September 20, 2025

I guess “free speech” only applies to MAGA supporters now. I’ve said Charlie Kirk said some pretty awful things, and posting his actual quotes has caused some on-line so-called “Christians” to tell me I was taking his comments out of context, to call me “evil”, “hatefilled”, and “a demon” (oh gosh!). (Not sure how you would take these comments out of context, but whatever….)
I’ve been called a little devil before, and I guess I’ve graduated to demon. The idiocy of some of the comments including: “Kamala Harris was a DEI hire”, “You are all leftist lunatics” , “Kirk was spreading God’s words” and “I’ll pray for you”, (don’t bother, I’m an atheist), are just unbelievable.
Watch out, the White Christian Nationalists are coming for all you Lefties!

Reply
Matt Kendall September 20, 2025

(People like Supe Cline and the sheriff, who are against 50, should be honest and say, “Don’t vote for 50 because that will hurt Trump and I support him.”)

Not true Paul, California has the gold standard on districting. Also California has roughly 60% Democrat and 40% republican voter base. That being said the representation is roughly 17% republican and 83% Democrat. Do we want to make that even worse.

Rural counties are the counties which will suffer, trust me on that. Will Marin County equally represent the communities in Modoc County? If your answer is yes you should think again.

I don’t support Newsom and doubt I have time or energy to list all of the reasons why. Ask yourself, is California doing great right now under basically 1 party rule and do 2 wrongs make things right?

Why aren’t we demanding other states move to the Independant non partisan model that we likely will no longer have? Whatever they are drinking in Sacramento, I will pass on. That koolaid isn’t working for anyone.

Reply
- Mike Jamieson September 20, 2025
  
  Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and California’s former Secretary of State, and Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.-18) held a press conference introducing bicameral legislation to combat Republican efforts to rig the rules and implement partisan racial gerrymanders before the next census. The Redistricting Reform Act of 2025 is co-led by Senators Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Angus King (I-Maine), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
  
  As Republicans in state houses across the country heed President Trump’s orders to redraw congressional maps in their favor, the bill would prohibit states from mid-decade redistricting and would require every state to adopt nonpartisan, independent redistricting commissions (IRCs). For the past 15 years, California has had its own IRC, and the state continues to push for similar commissions nationwide while fighting back against Texas and other Republican-controlled states’ partisan mid-decade redistricting efforts.
  
  More:
  
  https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/watch-padilla-lofgren-introduce-legislation-to-establish-independent-redistricting-commissions-end-mid-decade-redistricting-nationwide/
  
  Other bills including one by a lonely Republican have also been introduced.
  
  The Democratic bill would establish independent commissions in all states.
  
  Reply
  - Matt Kendall September 20, 2025
    
    That’s good news. Sadly it likely won’t come into play before prop 50.
    
    Reply
    - Mike Jamieson September 20, 2025
      
      I found a very detailed report on the political alliances in California….from Public Policy Institute California site:
      
      The share of registered voters who are Democrats (45.3%) has decreased slightly since 2021 (46.2%), the year before the last gubernatorial election. The share who are Republicans (25.2%) has seen a small uptick (24.1% in 2021).
      About two in ten voters (22.3%) are independents (also known as “decline to state” or “no party preference” voters); this share has declined somewhat since 2021 (23.7%). Meanwhile, the share registering with a minor political party has increased from 6.0% in 2021 to 7.2% today.
      Twenty years ago, Republicans made up a much higher share of the electorate: in February 2005, about one in three voters (34.5%) were registered as Republicans. The share of independents (17.9%) was lower than it is today, and the share of Democrats (43%) was slightly below the current level.
      A majority of independent likely voters are ideologically moderate, compared to fewer Democrats and Republicans.
      In our surveys over the past year, independent likely voters have been most likely to lean toward the Democratic Party (39%). About a quarter lean Republican (26%) and about a third say they do not lean toward either party (34%).
      Independent likely voters are far more likely to be moderate (51%) than liberal (29%) or conservative (21%). In contrast, 22% of Republican likely voters say they are moderate (76% conservative, 2% liberal) and 31% of Democratic likely voters describe themselves as moderate (64% liberal, 5% conservative).
      
      Reply
- Paul Modic September 20, 2025
  
  It’s not about Modoc, not just about California, it’s about the whole country and the world, really. However, one way this may backfire for the Dem scheme in Ca is if we had just shut up and let Trump steal five more congressional seats in Texas, the Dems might still have overcome that scheme and won back The House in Nov 2026. But now that Cali is all in, other Repug states are moving in too and they may be cumulatively too much to overcome. So no one knows but it’s time for the Dems to play the hardball the Repugs play and Newsom has the right idea, the only idea, and so drama ensues. Tell me if anything significant happens, this is my main news source.
  
  Reply
  - Ted Stephens September 20, 2025
    
    Here is what I will tell you. It isn’t time “for the Dems to play hardball”. The dems always playing hardball is exactly why we have Trump.
    Trump is a reaction to our world being turned on on it’s head due to all politics all the time and the end always justifies whatever means mission the dems adopted. It has been a one way highway defying common sense. Always playing hardball got us to where we are and it isn’t going well. You will get more reactions like Trump and lose much of the ground you would have been able to keep.
    My 2 cents as a dude that saw “free speech” and “individuality” come and go via the dems in my lifetime.
    
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    - Matt Kendall September 20, 2025
      
      The reason we have all of these screwballs on both sides of the isle, is because the parties have become so powerful and control their personnel with punitive actions, that they no longer serve the people. They serve the parties.
      
      It’s not about Modoc? What state do you live in again? California. The Dems were foolish and cruel to run Biden for a second term. I know what he was going through. I saw my father go through the same thing. Sad and cruel on the part of those who stood that man up then denied his decline. Absolute elder abuse. Then they throw in Kamala last minute?
      
      And by the way Paul, don’t hazard a guess at whom I chose to vote for, I’m an equal opportunity hater of foolishness and self service no matter which party it is in.
      
      Reply
    - Paul Modic September 20, 2025
      
      Republican hardball examples:
      Obama’s supreme court nominee is denied without even a hearing
      Multiple voter restriction laws in Republican states
      
      Dems? Can’t think of any examples off hand
      I suppose I could be massively wrong with my opinion,
      happy to be proved wrong, but be specific…
      
      Been studying the scene for a while and just don’t see it your way…
      
      “My 2 cents as a dude that saw “free speech” and “individuality” come and go via the dems in my lifetime.”
      
      I don’t get it, here you are, we are, expressing our free speech, zillions of people on line bloviating their
      opinions…Lack of free speech? Hmm…
      
      Reply
      - Ted Stephens September 20, 2025
        
        “Dems? Can’t think of any examples off hand
        I suppose I could be massively wrong with my opinion,
        happy to be proved wrong, but be specific…”
        
        Here are some examples of the dem hardball extremes with Trump that put us where we are today.
        Russian collusion manufactured and paid for by the dem party, later the 50+ intelligence experts that said Hunter’s laptop had all the ear marks of Russian interference…when they had it for months and knew what it was, arresting the little goofball Roger Stone in the wee hours of the morning with machine guns after making sure CNN would catch it all for show, same with shackling John Eastman and Peter Navarro in public, suspending the statute of limitations for 1 year so E Jean Carrol could sue Trump, all the other legal shenanigan’s and telling us the boarder was secure. We were told repeatedly the sitting president was “sharp as a tack”, but as the sheriff said we could all see it just wasn’t so. No chance for another choice, you had to vote for someone who was not in the position because of their qualifications. Calling parents domestic terrorists and racists and Christians haters added to the pushback. Trump was called every terrible name that one could think of. After all this and being shot, his comeback was “fight, fight, fight”. This is why we have Trump today and the hardball “ends justify the means” failed. Most of America could see what was happing wasn’t true or was it fair. The tempo has escalated to the extreme and this is not good for any of us not profiting from politics.
        
        Reply
        
        Paul Modic September 21, 2025
        
        We were told repeatedly the sitting president was “sharp as a tack”…
        
        Well, that’s a bunch of opinions, often loosely quoting fringe characters, individuals or apocryphal statements which don’t reflect the mainstream of the Donkey party.
        I prefer facts, two of which I laid out there on top.
        (You got me with the “sharp as a tack” quote, I suppose that’s hardball to keep that charade going, but it was self-inflicted hardball against the Dems themselves, and hurting them/ us and the nation by denying a chance for a better candidate, though it may not have made any difference when the Elephants weaponized fringe woke views cleverly. The Donks will have to clean up their trans act to catch up with pubic opinion, if we ever want to win any more national elections. )
        I really liked Newsom’s dad the judge, now that was a real liberal, though I only know what Herb Caen said about him…
        It’s all tribal, the elected officials who don’t like 50 will go for their big guy no matter what and so will we, ie, me. The difference between Trump supporters and my fellow Donkies is they will support their guy no matter what (cult) and if our guy espoused all that authoritarian hateful crap we would not like it.)
        
        Reply
      - George Hollister September 21, 2025
        
        This a quote from a WSJ editorial on 9/18″
        
        “Progressives lobbied against the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group’s attempted merger with Tribune Media, and failed Biden FCC nominee Gigi Sohn urged the agency to examine Sinclair’s broadcast license. The agency in 2023 opened public comment on a left-wing petition to deny a license renewal by a Fox aﬃliated station in Philadelphia.
        
        Disney ﬁred an actress in “The Mandalorian” who expressed politically incorrect views. NBC pushed out Megyn Kelly for comments deemed insensitive. The Biden White House urged tech platforms to censor contrarian views on Covid.
        
        Most important is that, for a decade or more, the voters who backed Mr. Trump watched and listened as the coastal elites of media and entertainment showed their contempt for middle American values. Those coastal grandees shouldn’t be surprised now if the public isn’t as outraged as they are by the Carr FCC’s abuse of its power against opponents.
        
        We want to be clear that none of this justiﬁes the right’s resort to regulatory censorship. As victims of cancel culture for so long, conservatives more than anyone should oppose it. They will surely be the targets again when the left returns to power.”
        
        Fortunately, the US Supreme Court has consistently supported the 1st amendment, and will likely continue doing so. They are currently the only adults in the room.
        
        Reply
- Jacob September 21, 2025
  
  Agree 100%
  
  Reply
David Gurney September 20, 2025

Re: “Cat’s out of the bag. Fort Bragg City Manager Isaac Whippy…”

It’s funny how they’re so quick to replace the Police Chief, but not so much when it comes to two other high-level City of Fort Bragg positions:

Community Development Director: Position vacant since July 7, 2025 (2.5 months)

Finance Director: Position vacant since Jan. 3, 2025 – 1 year, 9.5 months – when Mr. Isaac Whippy became City Manager on Jan. 3, 2024.

Right now, Mr. Whippy occupies all three crucial $100 K+ positions – the City Manager, the Finance Director and the Community Development Director.

This is in blatant violation of Gov. Code 1099 “Incompatible Offices” – Sections (a) (1), (2) & (3) (b) (e) & (f)
It is ethically wrong, is overtly corrupt and gives the definite appearance of further corruption.

The matter has been referred to the Fort Bragg Police Department, the California Attorney General and the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

# # #

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Linda Bailey September 20, 2025

A local government official was very surprised when I mentioned that the BOS used to meet 4 times a month, exclaiming in disbelief, “They met every week! “Yes” I replied “and the Clerk of the Board was a separate office, not the CEO” .

Perhaps those changes is why now BOS meetings are less productive and why the Agenda is in arcane bureaucratize and why consent calendars are so long.

Surprise might also have been expressed if I had noted that county elected officials did not have to use the Public Expression time to be able to address the Board.

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- Norm Thurston September 20, 2025
  
  +1
  
  Reply
Lily Heller September 20, 2025

I know what the problem was… Arizona Cardinals wearing Nike.

Reply
- Paul Modic September 21, 2025
  
  Go red!
  
  Reply