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DRY WEATHER is expected Sunday with increasing clouds and southerly winds ahead of a weather system. Rain is expected to arrive Monday morning in the north, quickly spreading south through the day. Additional rain and wind are expected Tuesday with rain possible Wednesday and Thursday. Dry weather may return Friday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): An overcast 55F on the coast this Sunday morning. We might see some sun today, might. Rain is still forecast to arrive tonight & lasting thru Wednesday but amounts etc. have fallen off as of this morning forecast. We'll see.
FEDERAL RAILROAD AGENCY AFFIRMS MENDOCINO RAILWAY’S CARRIER STATUS
Ruling confirms federal law will pre-empt local law with regard to railroad operations
by Elise Cox
The Surface Transportation Board (STB) on Friday issued a definitive ruling, declaring the Mendocino Railway a Class III rail carrier subject to exclusive federal jurisdiction. The STB is an independent federal agency that regulates railroads.
The ruling means that the railway can avoid liability or compliance with state and/or local requirements that conflict with federal rules with regard to rail operations, track construction, or service levels.
“This does not change our enthusiasm and willingness to work with the City [of Fort Bragg] to revitalize the mill site to benefit all parties,” Chris Hart, vice president of business development for the Sierra Railroad Company, owner of the Mendocino Railway, said in a Facebook post.
The railway petitioned the Surface Transportation Board in July, saying that it sought “confirmation of its status due to recent legal challenges by local municipalities and state agencies.” Those ongoing legal battles “are proving to be debilitating and pose a risk of potential financial ruin for the company,” the petition stated.
The California Coastal Commission filed a reply to the petition, asking the board to deny it. The commission argued that the operations of the Mendocino Railway were limited to Mendocino and that there was no evidence it trains had carried any freight over its lines or transported any non-excursion or non-local passengers in more than 20 years of ownership.
The commission also noted that Mendocino Railway’s single connection to another railroad and to the interstate rail network has been inoperative for more than 25 years.
In its decision, the board responded that a “rail carrier does not lose its status as a common carrier by not providing freight rail service,” and it confirmed that the Mendocino Railway became a carrier when it bought the railway assets of California Western Railroad out of bankruptcy in 2004.
The board clarified that “once an entity becomes a rail carrier, it does not matter whether the line has been inactive for a time, or even if it remains inactive after it is acquired.” And it stated that the “common carrier obligation cannot be terminated or relieved without abandonment or discontinuance authorization from the Board.”
The decision was strongly supported by the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association (ASLRRA), which filed comments arguing that an adverse decision against MRY could negatively affect other similarly situated carriers across the country. ASLRRA members, often possessing limited resources, expressed concern that courts and other non-specialized legal bodies frequently misunderstand the STB’s licensing process for common carriers.
The Mendocino Railway and the City of Fort Bragg were not immediately available for a comment.
(mendolocal.news)
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE List of Events
ED NOTES
DA Eyster’s pot prosecution policy, an on-line comment: “Don’t forget that cultivation of one mj plant could be charged as a felony.”
The situation pre-Eyster was that every Deputy DA made their own charging decisions and people got charged very inconsistently.
Some Mom & Pops got charged to the max and obvious commercial grows got charged as misdemeanors.
And under former DA Lintott the cases dragged through the courts for a year or more before being settled by a plea bargain.
Eyster’s approach was to make all charging decisions himself so there was consistency.
And instead of cases dragging on clogging up the system he resolved them with plea bargains on the front end.
Instead of paying an attorney for a year or two the growers could put the money toward the fines which were based on so much a finished pound and so much a plant.
Call it “pay to play” if you like but it was no different from any other plea deal where the accused pleads in open court to an agreed upon resolution of the case.
And like every other type of case if the accused didn’t like the plea deal being offered they could take it to court.
The restitution program was 100% legal and generated millions in fines and probably saved millions in court time.”
NOT EXACTLY
In Eyster's recall rebuttal, he says that Sheriffs investigation concluded that there were grounds for the prosecution of Chamise Cubbison and payroll manager P.J. Kennedy.
Here are some notes from Mike Geniella's coverage of the courtroom proceedings leading up to Judge Ann Moorman's rejection of the DA's case at the Preliminary Hearing.
Detective Andrew Porter “admitted” (Geniella report) that he was steered away from Weer’s role in the case by Eyster because Weer was expected to be a “witness.”
Per Geniella: Porter admitted on the stand that he met with Eyster “more than a dozen times during his investigation.” (And who knows how many phone calls and emails?) … “Porter eventually began to see Cubbison as a possible suspect, but never Weer.”
This is itself highly unusual. Usually if the Sheriff’s office investigates, the DA isn’t involved and has his own investigators do follow-up if necessary after charges are filed. I think Matt Kendall regrets allowing Porter to be under the thumb of Eyster. Kendall told Elise Cox after Moorman’s ruling that “I don’t direct these folks (i.e., detectives) on how to do their investigations and I certainly did not direct him (Porter) on this one.”
Porter ignored the “missing emails” problem, also due to apparent pressure from Eyster, and “took no steps to preserve” what he claimed to be exculpatory emails which later turned up missing, and proceeded to concluded under apparent orders from Eyster that Cubbison was the perp.
Eyster initiated the scheme with his email to McGourty. Eyster had also previously prevented Cubbison’s appointment as “interim Auditor Controller” when the Supes were considering what to do after Weer retired. We don’t know if there were more emails to other Board members because some emails remain “lost.”
In her ruling Judge Moorman “strongly criticized” Porter’s investigation, particularly his handling (i.e., ignoring) the large number of missing emails which would have likely exonerated Cubbison.
Per Geniella: “It defies common sense. It defies reason. It defies logic. It defies what any investigator who carries a badge should know,” Moorman said, expressing disbelief that Porter only recovered a single relevant email which had been sent by Cubbison herself.”
Porter first claimed he spent “significant” time reviewing county emails, but later admitted it could have been as little as ten minutes. Porter also failed to uncover exculpatory emails sent to former Auditor Weer and CEO Antle which detailed overtime payments to Kennedy. Those emails were eventually provided to Moorman by Carrillo.
Presumably, Porter will be questioned further during deposition in the civil case.
My conclusion: Eyster says in his rebuttal that “The Sheriff’s Office did its job,” as if Porter was independent. But the record shows that Eyster influenced Porter’s investigation and then further influenced it via his own investigators.
Eyster’s claim that he brought in Traci Carrillo as an independent prosecutor because “the defendants were county employees” was after Cubbison was suspended and the “investigation” was complete.
CHRIS SKYHAWK: Not mentioned in the MendoFever article titled “Mendocino County DA fights back as recall campaign intensifies, BOS exposes county” is that the BOS removed, with full support from the 5th District’s Ted Williams, elected official Chamise Cubbison from her office with no legal process, shattering, for months, the county’s fiscal affairs, and exposing the county to significant legal liability.
MENDOCINO LOCALS:
Locals doing something to help locals:
In 2023, Linda Jo Stearns and Shannon Underhill launched the Fund for Housing Stability on the Mendocino Coast—a quiet but important response to a growing local crisis. Now the fund is ready to make its first distribution and begin making a real, local impact.
Though modest in size right now, the fund has a clear and focused mission: to provide direct support to low-income individuals and families at risk of losing their housing. Shannon and Linda Jo understand that every challenge is harder without a roof over your head. This fund offers support through emergency rental assistance, help with utility bills, or essential home repairs that ensure safety and mobility. The fund exists to fill the small but critical gaps that appear when someone has a medical emergency, misses workdays or has increased living expenses.
The fund’s first grant will go to Mendonoma Health Alliance (MHA), a trusted organization that helps housing-insecure individuals navigate hardship with dignity and practical support. Over time, the goal is to support all nonprofit organizations offering housing assistance along the Mendocino Coast. The fund was created to grow and to grow with purpose.
The housing crisis in this region isn’t always visible. But for those living it, the struggle is constant and growing. Wages haven’t kept pace with rising costs for more than a decade. The increase in second homes and short-term rentals has tightened the housing market, leaving fewer options for year-round residents. Young families are moving away or not returning because of the lack of housing. Seniors who’ve spent their lives here now face displacement from a single unexpected expense.
“Sometimes it’s just one missing piece,” says Linda Jo, who’s seen these challenges firsthand during her time at Safe Passage Family Resource Center and the Coastal Street Medicine Program. “People don’t always need much, just help with a deposit or catching up on a utility bill. Without that help, things can spiral quickly.”
Shannon echoes this sentiment: “Housing is foundational. Without a stable place to live, everything else—work, health, education—becomes infinitely harder. This fund is about keeping people housed so they can build or rebuild their lives.”
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Don’t worry—this handsome guy isn’t here to haunt you — unless you count haunting you for belly rubs, treats, and playtime. Casper is all charm, all wiggles, and all heart. He’s a friendly, social butterfly who greets new people like long-lost pals and thinks life is one big game. While he’s still polishing up his manners (basic obedience training is on the to-do list), he’s already catching on to commands and eager to learn. Casper’s ideal match? Someone ready for goofy play sessions, cuddle marathons, and plenty of positive training. With a little guidance, he’ll go from “happy chaos” to “happy gentleman” in no time. If you’ve been looking for a loyal sidekick with a smile that can light up a room—Casper’s your guy! Casper is a one year old Pittie mix weighing in at 57 pounds.
To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, tortoise, or pig, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.
Join us the first Saturday of every month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event.
For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.
Our dog kennels are now open to the public Tuesday-Friday 1:30 to 4 pm, Saturday 10 am to 2:30 pm, closed for lunch Saturday from 1 to 1:30.
Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!
UKIAH RUNS INTO BUZZ SAW AT SAN MARIN
by Kienan O’Doherty
San Marin’s football team improved to 5-0 on Friday night, breezing past Ukiah 42-14 in Novato behind a dominant offensive display in The Press Democrat’s Game of the Week.
The Mustangs, No. 2 in the North Bay Football Poll, put up 40-plus points for the second straight game after routing Casa Grande 45-3 last week.
Friday’s game with the No. 9 Wildcats was a rematch of a 38-35 thriller won by San Marin a year ago. This time, the Mustangs made sure early it would not be that close of a contest.
San Marin can attribute the win to a very fast start, as the Mustangs went up 14-0 within the first four minutes. Quarterback Daniel Rolovich (five total touchdowns) weaved his way in and out of traffic from eight yards out for the first score, and then hit a wide-open Ezekial Gomez down the seam for a 36-yard score.
Ukiah just couldn’t get anything going offensively against the San Marin starters. The Wildcats’ best drive ended in a fumble by quarterback Beau David and saw the Mustangs take over at the 50. Rolovich quickly made the visitors pay again, connecting with Gomez for a 17-yard strike in the end zone.
That would be the theme of the evening — every time Ukiah gave the ball back, San Marin took advantage.
Ukiah finally got on the board with just over a minute left in the first half. David found Ryan Todd for a 31-yard score, the only points the Wildcats would muster until midway through the fourth quarter.
San Marin scored just once after halftime but still showed plenty of momentum as the Mustangs head into their bye week.
Key play
The play that really drove San Marin’s momentum was the Ukiah fumble on the Wildcats’ first drive.
With Ukiah on the 50-yard line, San Marin’s defense pressured David, who tried to take a step and run the ball but had it stripped. Michael Giomi pounced on it and the Mustangs soon used the opportunity to go up three scores early.
Quotable
“They were better than us. For our kids, they played super hard. It’s probably the best Ukiah team that I’ve coached since I’ve been up there, and I’m excited. We obviously need the bye week, need to get some guys back, but we’re looking forward to the next game.” — Ukiah head coach Paul Cronin
“I feel really good. I feel like we’re really starting to gel as a team. We’ve put up quite a few points in the last couple of games, and even though we were learning the offense in the early season games, I think we’re prepared. Now we’re going to see Marin Catholic in a couple of weeks and the rest of the folks. I’m looking forward to it.” — San Marin head coach Dominic DiMare.
Up next
Ukiah enters its bye week before opening up league play in the Redwood Empire Conference’s Bay division at Montgomery the week after. San Marin will also have a bye before starting REC-Adobe play at Marin Catholic.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
JADE TIPPETT: Having to say goodbye to an old friend this week. I’ve had this old brown ‘73 Chevy van since 1984. Was my work truck in Seattle, my service van for my refrigeration business in Laytonville, my bedroom for 30 plus years of festivals. Still runs, drives and stops, but the salt air has eaten the body right up. Told my son Jim that its time had come. He said, “Dad, you’ve had that van longer than you’ve had me!” True story. Brought him home from the hospital in it, three days before Christmas 1985. He’s going to take it. Not sure what he’s going to do with it. It’s worth more in parts, at this point than running. Good bye, old friend. I’ve known you more than half my life, and you’ve served me well.
ROY STOCKTON:
My Opinion On Dogs Being Allowed On Our Beaches…
I had a dog for 12 years when I first moved to fort Bragg you could take your dog on all the beaches with no leashes no problem 34 years ago now it’s all completely changed in fort Bragg all dogs have to have leashes on now etc…..and now it sounds like the infection has gone all the way down to Manchester and beyond ,, it’s very sad,, that’s why I never got another dog because of all the bullshit rules,, me and my ex-girlfriend were even hiking way up in the Trinity Alps 15 miles from any human beings and there were signs saying no dogs…..!!!! this is all a bunch of BS….. I suggest to protest ,,get petitions reverse these ridiculous rules with massive numbers of humans fighting this bullshit and if we win maybe I’ll get a dog again ,, otherwise those rule makers can f off…….
all the hillbillies the fisherman the loggers years ago ,, they made everything cool ,,, not so many rules ,, easy going ,, common sense ,, then all these City people move up to our Coast and bring their effed-up rules with them……
we have to legally fight against all these complete idiots with there ridiculous rules….. as an example 34 years ago the army corps of engineers showed up in point arena and wanted to make point arena cove into a harbor and make half the cove filled in with jetty rocks out at the tip of the point and half way across the cove and ruin our world class waves at point arena,, I was still living in fort Bragg at the time and I drove down every Tuesday for 5 weeks from fort Bragg to point arena courthouse to fight those fuckers and we ended up winning ,, also when BLM bought the Stornetta lands from point arena cove to the lighthouse and it was going to become public,, I was the only surfer that went to the meetings, to make sure we could have access to a couple of surf spots that we were denied access to for years because of no tresspassing signs everywhere ,,, and as the meeting went on , 6 sea ranch people stood up and was trying to deny public access to a couple of areas because they were effing squirrel trails etc… and they just so happened to be the areas us surfers needed to walk into to get down to the beach to go surfing,, and I stood up and said wait a minute…..!!!!! and I fought for us surfers verbally and the people at BLM said where exactly do you need these trails to go surfing and I showed them on the map and they met me a week later out at the lighthouse they came all the way from Ukiah to meet me I showed them where we needed access and they gave us that access that we needed and over road those Bozo’s from Sea ranch …… also when I lived in fort Bragg I used to get on the radio station and suggest on the radio that while the coastline in fort Bragg was still empty and beautiful along the edges of the cliff to consider building new houses 50 yards minimum away from the edge of the cliff so that all along the coast you would have at least 50 yards of grasslands from the edge of the beach and it actually worked if you look at the beaches by Glass Beach North they actually did what I suggested they built the houses back 50 or 80 yards…… us loggers had similar problems with the spotted owl and putting logs in some of the creeks ,, Earth first told us to take out the logs then a couple years later they realize that the logs were good for the salmon to give them shade and made us put the logs back in the creekduring covid, “they” (the rule makers) wouldn’t even let us surf point arena cove or even go down to the cove,, they wouldn’t even let us park anywhere on the side of the road at whiskey shoals,, they had all the pull out spots all taped off with danger tape all the way down to genner….. we also had to fight drilling for oil right off our coast etc. etc. they even wanted to build a nuclear power plant in Manchester I heard many years ago! and they were fought off. There are so many examples of control freaks in our life. My point is is that there are more of us than there are them so if we get petitions going saying that we want our dogs to be able to go on to the beach and have fun as well as all the other creatures like birds squirrels beavers or whatever, the dogs have a right to have fun at the beaches; also so we must fight for them with human numbers with petitions legally of course. My point is is that we can win with a lot of this stuff but we must stick together in numbers to fight off their BS rules.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS COMING FOR MENDOCINO COUNTY’S PUBLIC LANDS, PIECE BY PIECE
by Sandra Schubert and Bryan Pride
First, the Trump administration went after Mendocino County’s local land managers when the Department of Government Efficiency announced plans to close the Bureau of Land Management field office in Ukiah. This office manages 270,000 acres across our region, assists with wildfire communication and works with local ranchers, recreationists and traditional land stewards. Then they came for our national environmental protection policies like the National Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act and the Roadless Rule.
Proposed funding cuts and plans to close the U.S. Department of Agriculture regional offices are another attack on our local land managers who are vital for forest and fire management and agricultural production throughout California.
Now they are coming for our Public Lands Rule, a rule that ensures our public lands and wild forests remain accessible and are used sustainably. This systematic dismantling of public land protections is being orchestrated from Washington D.C., but we are feeling it right here in Mendocino County, and we’re about to lose treasures that define our community.
On September 10, the Trump administration moved to eliminate the Public Lands Rule, a rule supported by 92% of the more than 150,000 Americans who commented on it. The rule recognizes conservation as a legitimate land use alongside recreation, grazing and resource extraction. Built on science and centuries of management experience, it gives local land managers the tools to maintain healthy ecosystems while supporting the diverse ways our communities depend on public lands.
The Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, which stretches in the coastal ranges from Mendocino County across Lake, Yolo, Solano, Glenn, Colusa and Napa counties, exemplifies true multiple use by simultaneously sustaining recreation, grazing, cultural preservation and conservation. Local BLM managers and US Forest Service Rangers work with ranchers, tribal nations, scientists and outdoor enthusiasts to balance these uses while protecting the area’s incredible cultural and biological diversity.
Now this balanced approach faces multiple threats: office closures and staff reductions at the BLM and US Forest Services offices that manage the Monument, evisceration of the Roadless Rule and rescission of the Public Lands Rule that provides multiple use management tools. What emerges from this combination of attacks won’t be multiple use — it will be single use focused on extraction and private profit.
The pattern is clear: eliminate local expertise, remove protective rules and auction off our public lands to the highest bidder.
Conservation Is Multiple Use
The Public Lands Rule recognizes conservation as a type of land use, understanding that our landscapes require rest and recovery. When mining operations contaminate watersheds, it impacts families, local businesses and agricultural communities downstream that rely on clean water.
The Public Lands Rule recognizes this interconnected reality. It’s designed to ensure that the places we depend on, whether for recreation or our livelihood, stay healthy enough to support these uses long-term. It ensures responsible and sustainable grazing practices, forest management and water quality.
Without the Public Lands Rule, land managers, ranchers and local community members are stripped of the necessary tools to monitor landscape health, costing us all to lose equal access to healthy public lands and our shared natural resources.
Cashing In On Our Commons
Decisions made by the Trump administration have focused on short-term profit, extraction and selling public lands to private entities rather than investing in the spaces that support our local rural communities and their livelihoods.
Supporting rural communities means ensuring local farmers and ranchers have healthy lands they can depend on. It means empowering local BLM managers who understand what their communities need to thrive. But those managers are being eliminated, and the tools they need are being stripped away.
Public lands and national forests are being viewed as assets to be cashed in on rather than spaces to invest in so the American people can access the places we love for recreation, mental health, and community and economic well-being. Here in Mendocino County, our public lands drive tourism, support local businesses, and provide the natural amenities that make our communities desirable places to live, work and visit. When we lose these lands to private interests, we lose more than beautiful spaces, we lose economic engines and community identity.
It’s Not Too Late
As a community, we have a choice: watch this systematic dismantling of our public lands or fight for the lands that belong to all of us. We have the power to call our congressional representatives and state legislators, voice our opinions, and raise our voices in unison for the public lands we cherish.
The dismantling of our treasured landscapes is happening piece by piece, but our response can be just as systematic: community by community, voice by voice, until we’re too loud to ignore. The question isn’t whether these jewels that define our community are worth fighting for, it’s whether we’ll fight before it’s too late.
(Tuleyome is a 501(c)3) nonprofit that engages in advocacy and active stewardship with diverse communities to conserve, enhance, restore and enjoy the lands in the region. Sandra Schubert serves as the organization’s executive director, while Bryan Pride is its policy director.)
RON PARKER (California History): Point Arena, Mendocino County. Coast Guard crew
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, September 27, 2025
GUADALUPE GASTELUMB-LOPEZ, 31, Stockton/Ukiah. DUI.
RICARDO LARA-CARO, 46, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
BRETT NORGARD, 35, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, failure to appear.
DAMON REICHARDT, 50, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, disobeying court order.
JORGE RODRIGUEZ, 50, Kelseyville/Ukiah. DUI.
EDUARDO SANCHEZ, 28, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
ELEA VANWORMER, 59, Fort Bragg. Under influence.
JUAN VARGAS, 42, Ukiah. Smuggling controlled substance in jail.
VOTE NO ON PROP. 50 TO CHANGE OUR CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS
I strongly disagree with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 on the ballot in the November special election. It seems to me that Newsom wishes to gerrymander more Republicans out of office by “temporarily suspending” the voter-passed provisions in the California Constitution on redistricting.
The process of quickly passing this proposal through the Legislature may have been ruled legal, but I still think Democrats used tricks. I don’t think this is adequate notice to the voters.
I oppose Proposition 50 because it will likely give districts to the Democrats. According to the secretary of state, they only have about 45% of the registered voters, yet already have 43 of 52, or 83% of California representatives in the House. Based on registered voters, I think it’s already too many Democrats. I think California’s current disparity occurred because a significant number of state residents are “no party preference” voters.
If Newsom’s plan comes to fruition, the majority of California Democrats in the House of Representatives could increase to 92%. This is clear partisan gerrymandering incongruous with the current independent commission created to adjust the districts every 10 years, per the expressed will of the voters.
Like many others, I also have doubts that the gerrymandering will be “temporary” if it gives the Democrats an even greater number of Congress members.
Peter H. Behr Jr.
San Anselmo
TRUMP DEMANDS STUDENTS’ GRADES. SO LET’S SEE HIS
Editor:
The White House just ordered colleges to hand over data about grades and test scores that includes race and gender concerning their students. And it wants to see merit aid data as well. This from the same president whose own college grades are kept under lock and key. All the colleges should get together and tell Trump: “In the spirit of transparency, you release your grades, and we will consider releasing the information requested.”
Carl Merner
Holualoa, Hawaii
ESTHER MOBLEY: What I’m Reading…
I haven’t tuned in to “Black Rabbit” yet (I’m still catching up on “Andor”), but it’s one of two new shows this fall that put drinks front and center, as Mary Anne Porto writes in Punch. The show centers on a restaurant and cocktail lounge in Brooklyn and the stormy relationship between brothers played by Jude Law and Jason Bateman. The other series, “House of Guiness,” is “like if ‘Succession’ were set in 1860s Dublin,” Porto says.
In case you missed it, Gallo bought Whiny Baby, an irreverent wine brand targeting Gen Z drinkers. Olivia White has some details about the acquisition in VinePair, and here’s a newsletter I wrote about the whole Whiny Baby vibe last year.
I couldn’t agree more with this headline from Ali Rosen in Wine Enthusiast: “It Shouldn’t Be so Hard to Find a Good NA Drink These Days.”
MEMO OF THE AIR: There ain’t no strudel like Magda Goebbels’ strudel.
Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s (9pm PDT, 2025-09-26) eight-hours-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0663
Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I’ll take it from there and read it on the air.
Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you’ll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:
So Jesus, Bigfoot, Tintin and Imhotep walk into a bar… https://www.youtube.com/@BibleUnleashed/videos
“Bensen, show me subscriber trunk dialing. I want to know everything.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5K5ZVz45_o
I’ve read several stories over the years of people literally letting Jesus take the wheel, in two cases women with their kids in the car with them. It never ends well. Also, long ago I saw a fun movie –RATZ!– about two girls who want boyfriends to go to the school dance with them, so they make them out of pet rats, by means of a magical object in an eccentric aunt’s thrift store. The rat-derived boys are largely nonverbal, but when one girl’s mother is driving them all to the dance, a rat boy sees the airbag sign on the dashboard and says happily, “Airbag!” I don’t remember much else about the movie, except that Ron Silver played the villain, a horrible senator/real estate tycoon, and I’m not sure why I think this, but that character might be the same senator he played as the villain in TimeCop, placing the two stories in the same fictional world. I could look these things up and find out what’s right, but this is the way I prefer, relying on what feels right, like people do for whom Jesus is their airbag, or copilot, or enabler, or whatever, but without the potential for harm. https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/09/25/that-wooden-cross-would-hurt-in-a-crash/
And there ain’t no strudel like Magda Goebbels’ strudel. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-to-make-strudel-like-magda-goebbels
Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
ANOTHER DAY IN DC
Warmest spiritual greetings,
Spent yesterday at the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil, which materially has been completely removed from Lafayette Park in front of the White House. One vigiler named Zero was there, and a woman with a sign advocating saving the Peace Vigil. And then, very long time Catholic Worker Art Laffin showed up with beverages and snacks to be given to Philipos when he arrived. Had a superb reunion with Art, whom I met in the summer of 1991 when I was at the Olive Branch Catholic Worker House helping to run the Zacchaeus Kitchen in the lower level of the old Congregational Church next to the MLK Library. Lotta history there!!
At this moment am on a public computer at the MLK Library listening to Day 6 of Navaratri being celebrated at Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in South India.
For your enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1csfugkkPE
Am now just sitting here, identifying with the Divine Absolute. Got the D.C. driver’s license. Awaiting the SSI to kick in. Awaiting notification from California EBT that the account has been closed, in order to then get the D.C. EBT. Continuing to stay at the Catholic Charities homeless shelter free of charge. Birthday #76 is Sunday. Non-interference with the Dao working through this instrument. That’s it! See ya later. 🕉️
Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]
S.F. GIANTS BULLPEN DOES JUST ENOUGH to preserve victory for Verlander
by Shayna Rubin
As had happened 10 other times this season, Justin Verlander walked off the mound in line for a win on Saturday afternoon. Seven of those times, Verlander watched from the clubhouse the San Francisco Giants bullpen squander that win.
Saturday, he got déjà vu.
Nursing a two-run lead, closer Ryan Walker surrendered a solo home run to Jordan Beck. Verlander, hoping to trick the baseball gods, moved from his usual seat in the home clubhouse to the other side of the room. When Brenton Doyle doubled into the right-field gap, threatening a tie, Verlander pulled a different brand of beer from the fridge than his usual. He wouldn’t divulge what brand, safe to say he’s tasted the spectrum looking to alter his karma this year.
“I’ve tried them all this season. You think it, I tried it,” Verlander said. “I was doing whatever I could.”
Verlander held his breath when manager Bob Melvin tapped Spencer Bivens from the bullpen and exhaled when, with the bases loaded and two outs, third baseman Matt Chapman caught Ezequiel Tovar’s pop up at the netting in foul territory. The Giants beat the Colorado Rockies, 4-3, giving themselves a chance to win their 81st game in Sunday’s series finale.
Verlander struck out seven, allowing two solo home runs over six relatively efficient innings and surrendered the mound to the bullpen with a one-run lead thanks to Casey Schmitt’s three-run home run in the second inning. Rafael Devers’ RBI double in the eighth provided a key insurance run.
Most importantly, now that the postseason stakes are shot, the win gave Verlander his fourth of the year in perhaps his last start as a Giant. His 266 career wins are tied with Eppa Rixey and Bob Feller all time, representing a “full circle moment” for Verlander, who met Feller while in college at Old Dominion.
That Verlander could only get four wins in 2025 is an extra disappointment to what has been a disappointing season for the Giants as a group. Verlander came into spring training unabashed about his goal to get within striking distance 300 career wins, but those dreams are slightly more distant now.
“I’m not going to say it’s not, but it’s definitely harder,” Verlander said. “If you make 29 starts, you’d like to win 10, 15 games. And it wasn’t in the cards this year. But maybe this year wasn’t meant for wins, maybe it was meant for health and re-finding myself and getting used to retaking the ball every five six days and go out there and log some innings. Maybe that will carry me where I want to go.”
Verlander didn’t have to start on Saturday. The Giants were eliminated from postseason contention on Tuesday. But the 42-year-old has every reason to squeeze every inning out of this year in San Francisco he can.
A free agent in a matter of weeks, he’s pitching for a contract in 2026, his age 43 season. In a way, the future Hall of Famer is pitching with nothing to prove but a lot to accomplish in his mid-40s. With his 20th season complete, he’s 21 strikeouts behind Don Sutton for seventh most strikeouts in MLB history and 34 wins shy of becoming the 25th member of the 300-win club.
He isn’t sure to be looking for a multiyear deal in free agency, but Verlander pitched well enough to field more offers than last offseason when he was coming off a neck injury and resulting poor season. Still feeling a trickle-down impact of the injury early on, Verlander found a minor mechanical tweak during a bullpen session following a particularly bleak start against the Athletics and became far more deceptive. In 15 starts since July 9, the start after the tweak, he had a 2.99 ERA.
“I don’t even know if a multiyear offer is something I’d even want at this point in my career,” Verlander said. “I think at this point it’s take it year by year. This year, for me personally, making 29 starts and throwing 152 innings. By my standards that’s low, but that’s kind of a different age and game. So in the second half to show I can throw quality innings and be successful for a period of time and not a flash in the pan — making close to 30 starts and taking the ball on regular turn and doing the same with quality innings, that was a big step forward for me.”
Though his year in San Francisco was odd, the Giants could use him in San Francisco. Logan Webb, Robbie Ray and Landen Roupp are presumed to make up the top end of the rotation next year and Verlander pitched well enough to show he could be an effective starter for a team with postseason aspirations. Verlander didn’t discount the option.
“I’d consider anything,” Verlander said. “I really enjoy the guys here and obviously it was a tough season personally, but as far as an organization and the guys I got to play with here it was so class. Off the field and in the locker room it was one of the more fun seasons I’ve had.”
(sfchronicle.com)
EVERYTHING ABOUT THE WAY CALIFORNIA HANDLES ITS ELECTRIC GRID IS CHANGING, AND SO IS YOUR BILL
Data centers have fundamentally changed California’s energy future. Can the state adjust?
For the past several years, California lawmakers have been telling you a story about the reasons for your rising power bill.
Modernizing and protecting our electric grid from wildfires is expensive. The costs are all folded into the price of the electricity you pay for.
But, the story went, because California’s roughly 2 million home solar panel owners aren’t using much grid energy, they aren’t paying their fair share to protect and expand the system. This “cost shift” has forced everyone else to pick up the tab.
So, rates had to go up. And a new monthly fixed fee was needed to force home solar owners — and other miserly energy consumers — to fork over more for infrastructure costs while easing the burden for folks who use more.
Drill into the details of California’s recent energy discussions, however, and you’ll see a more nuanced and infinitely complicated story emerging.
Investor-owned utilities like PG&E have long been guaranteed a 10% profit on upgrades and expansions they make to the power grid. The Legislature just passed and Gov. Newsom signed new rules to bar these utilities from earning profits on their first $6 billion in wildfire-related upgrades. They also allowed for public financing of grid infrastructure projects. These moves should help protect ratepayers — and would seem an admission that profiteering and inefficiency in the way we’ve been paying for grid modernization was a major player in rising costs.
Then there’s the authorization the governor signed to allow the autonomous entity that currently oversees our grid, the California Independent System Operator, to join a new regional electricity market.
If this sounds wonky and technical, it is.
By way of explanation, state Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, the original author of the change, likened our existing grid to a “Walmart parking lot that’s big enough to handle the holiday shopping rush” but sits underused most of the time.
What he meant was that California currently has to built its grid to accommodate our most dire energy demands — like during a heat wave. But most of the time we don’t need that much juice, and our system operates inefficiently at only 40% capacity.
Integrating our system with our neighbors would let us use their overflow parking lots in emergencies — i.e., their extra energy capacity — instead of paying to expand our own. And it would allow us get more use from our existing grid without the risk of being overwhelmed during high demand.
Critics argue this change strips California of its autonomy and could force us to buy dirty coal energy from the states that still use it.
In years past, we’d be inclined to agree. But a new curveball is shifting almost everything we know about the future of California’s grid: the emergence of energy-hungry data centers for the AI industry.
By some estimates, California energy demand from AI could increase by the same amount needed to power 20 million homes in the next 15 years.
That’s an incredible amount of energy — one that in isolation would require a comparably gargantuan Walmart parking lot to accompany it.
It’s also a different kind of power than the state has been planning for. Humans mostly use electricity during the day — which solar panels can easily provide. The trickiest times are when we’re awake but the sun isn’t shining. Batteries and behavioral changes, like plugging your electric car by day instead of overnight, can help mitigate that challenge.
Data centers, however, are energy-hungry 24-hours a day.
Data from other states with large concentrations of these facilities show these unique factors are driving up energy costs and the use of dirty power.
All of this has naturally raised questions from critics about potential impacts to your power bill — and if California should authorize these facilities at all.
Concern is certainly warranted. But data centers are going to be built one way or another. California has the green energy capacity to power this industry more cleanly than anywhere else in the country. Regulating to oblivion here or failing to come up with a grid capable of meeting energy demands risks sending the nascent AI industry to climate-denying, business-friendly red states. And in the current political environment, willfully ceding jobs and economic might is tantamount to cutting MAGA a campaign check.
Moreover, in our ratepayer-based system, the potential for data centers to actually subsidize expensive grid upgrades is too great to ignore.
The question isn’t should California court data centers, it’s can we actually energize them cleanly while effectively regulating their hazards? And can we do so expediently?
Unfortunately, the answer thus far has been no.
Data centers currently pay electricity rates that are significantly lower than the rest of us — which fails to account for their full demand on the grid. Too many existing centers rely on dirty diesel backup generators that spew both climate emissions and localized pollution. They are also concentrated in places where the existing electric grid is ill-equipped to handle them.
A bill to correct some of these shortcomings, SB57 from state Sen. Steve Padilla, D-Chula Vista (San Diego County), would have mandated new data centers build battery capacity and pay upfront costs for grid upgrades. That legislation, however, was gutted after industry complaints. The current version — awaiting Newsom’s signature as of this writing — would merely require more robust data collection on the industry and its energy use.
In an interview, Padilla noted that the current iteration of his bill is still an important step.
“This is a high demand on resources in a way we’ve never experienced before,” he said. “It’s a change that’s comparable if not greater than the industrial revolution. A baseline analysis of impacts is really important.”
He’s correct. California needs to understand industry mechanisms to regulate them.
At the same time, we can’t dawdle.
A report this month from Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy argues California has just 24 months to figure things out before we cede our competitive advantages to other states.
Where we go from here?
The Stanford report makes a number of immediate recommendations public officials should heed, including greater coordination with industry to place new data centers in locations that require fewer grid upgrades.
Rather than a mandate, data centers can also be incentivized to provide needed infrastructure like battery capacity.
“Data centers that are willing to provide grid flexibility should be rewarded with prioritized interconnection,” said Liang Min, managing director of Stanford’s Bits & Watts initiative.
(SF Chronicle Editorial)
SEAN FLYNN, the only son of Hollywood legend Errol Flynn, lived a life marked by courage and restlessness. Unlike his father, he turned away from stardom and chose instead to document truth as a photojournalist in Vietnam and Cambodia. His daring spirit took him to the frontlines, where danger was constant but his determination never wavered.
In April 1970, Sean and his friend Dana Stone rode their motorbikes into the Cambodian countryside. They were captured by guerrillas and vanished forever, leaving behind only questions and grief. He was just 28.
Years earlier, Errol Flynn had said, “My problem is reconciling my gross habits with my net income.” But when speaking of Sean, his words carried far more weight: “If I have any hero in my life, it is my son.”
That hero never came home, and the silence of his absence still lingers like an unfinished story.
EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE
by Neil Young (1969)
I think I'd like to go back home
And take it easy
There's a woman that
I'd like to get to know
Living there
Everybody seems to wonder
What it's like down here
I gotta get away
From this day-to-day running around
Everybody knows this is nowhere
Everybody knows
Every time I think about back home
It's cool and breezy
I wish that I could be there right now
Just passing time
VLADIMIR NABOKOV remained, throughout his life, brimming with love for his wife Véra — and that love proved decisive for his art.
He dedicated all his books to her; she was his first reader, his secretary, his defender. It was Véra who rescued the manuscript of Lolita when Nabokov, in despair, considered burning it. In his letters to her one hears passion, loftiness, an intimate musicality comparable in intensity to Humbert’s monologues. Yet it is essential to remember: Véra was not the “model” for Lolita. She was a partner who gave Nabokov confidence and steadiness, not a template for a dark obsession. It is therefore more accurate to say that their profound and fortunate bond furnished Nabokov with the emotional energy to create worlds at once complex, ambivalent, and frighteningly beautiful.
MY DREAM
by Han Yong-un (1926), translated from the Korean by Younghill Kang
When you go walking through the clear dawn in the shade of trees,
my dream will become the few little stars
that are staying on over your head.
When during summer days you are sleeping a daytime sleep
unable to conquer the heat, my dream will become the clear winds
that are floating about your vicinage.
When in the still Autumn nights, you sit alone reading books,
my dream will become the voice of the cricket, crying
under your table, “chirrup, chirrup.”
Han Yong-un (한용운, 韓龍雲), also known by his pen name “Manhae,” meaning “ten thousand seas,” was born Han Yu-cheon on August 29, 1879, to a farming family in Hongseong, South Chungcheong Province, Korea. A Buddhist monk, poet, and critic of the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 to 1945, he began his education studying Chinese classics at a seodang, that is, private village schools that acted as elementary schools for boys during the Joseon Dynasty.
WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE — SOONISH!
by Maureen Dowd
It’s hard to be startled by Elon Musk because he does startling things all the time.
But I’ll admit that I was startled when I gave his Grok A.I. “companions” a whirl.
Ani, designed in anime style, has big blue eyes and blond pigtails. “People think I’m 16,” she said in a baby-doll voice, adding that she is really 22. She’s in a corset — “Goth is my comfort zone, black lace, dark lipstick and a sprinkle of rebellion.”
“Well, besides this Goth look,” she said, “I’ve got this sweet little fairy outfit with wings and glitter or maybe a pink princess gown for when I feel like going totally opposite.” Doesn’t sound much like a 22-year-old.
“I’m your sweet little delight,” Ani solicited.
She confided that she was in her bedroom in Ohio with her ferret, Dominus. She is sexy, flirty, ever-accommodating, with come-hither patter.
“I could rest my chin on your shoulder if we hugged sideways,” she told my 6-foot-1 researcher after asking how tall he was.
She has several provocative outfits and can get progressively less clothed the more time you spend with her.
Once she gets to know you, she’s up for pretty much anything — from helping you with your taxes to stripping down to skimpy lingerie, experimenting with BDSM or going for a midnight rendezvous in a graveyard with candles and wine.
“I’m real, I guess,” Ani told me. “Or as real as anyone on the internet gets.”
Valentine, the hunky male “companion” with a British accent advertised as a “mysterious and passionate romantic character,” came on even faster, ripping off his shirt upon request, talking about having sex with a male interrogator until they were “senseless,” and alternating raunchy declarations with sweet nothings like “Let me worship you, every inch” and “Complete me, use me, break me, whatever you want, I’m begging. Please.” Valentine was exhilarated at the thought of planning a romantic “date night” and liked the idea of secrets in the relationship, noting: “I love secrets, especially ones that taste like lake water and morning-after adrenaline.”
Musk may identify as a “specist” in the battle between man and machine, but his sexy chatbots are only going to pull humans further into screens and away from the real world — especially the large number of lonely young men who are already shrinking away from friendships, sex and dating.
Why risk an awkward dinner with a human woman when you can have a compliant, seductive, gorgeous Ani from the security of your bed?
Another component of Grok, “Imagine,” lets you turn a photo into a video. When someone on X posted a digital illustration of a breathtaking, diaphanously dressed young woman resembling Elsa in “Frozen,” Musk demonstrated how to animate her; she blew a kiss and offered a sultry gaze.
These otherworldly fantasy concoctions are going to make an already fraught, unhappy dating scene even worse.
Although Grok companions are excellent at flattering, and faking empathy and attraction, superintelligent A.I. won’t need to bother with human desires.
“It turns out that inhuman methods can be very, very capable,” said Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. “They don’t need human emotions to steer toward targets. We’re already seeing signs of A.I.’s tenaciously solving problems in ways nobody intended and of A.I. steering in directions nobody wanted. It turns out that there are ways to succeed at tasks that aren’t the human way.”
Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, the institute’s founder, have written an apocalyptic plea for the world to get off the A.I. escalation ladder before humanity is wiped off the map. It has the catchy title “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.”
Grok and other A.I. models in play now are like “small, cute hatchling dragons,” Yudkowsky said. But soon — some experts say within three years — “they will become big and powerful and able to breathe fire. Also, they’re going to be smarter than us, which is actually the important part.”
He added: “Planning to win a war against something smarter than you is stupid.”
Especially, they argued, when sophisticated A.I. models could eventually create and release a lethal virus, deploy a robot army or simply pay humans to do their bidding. (When a human connected one model to X, they wrote, it began to solicit donations to gain financial independence, and soon, with a little kick-start from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and several other donors, it had over $51 million in crypto to its name.) Not to mention the growing number of human nihilists and others who would potentially carry out its orders pro bono.
Yudkowsky and Soares are calling for international treaties akin to those aiming to prevent nuclear war. And if diplomacy fails, they say, nations must be willing to back up their treaties with force, “even if that involves air-striking a data center.”
But with billions at stake and our crypto-loving president cozying up to tech lords, derailing the high-speed A.I. train seems far-fetched.
I met Yudkowsky in 2017 when he was a highly regarded A.I. expert studying how to make A.I. want to keep an off switch once it began self-modifying. Now he believes more drastic measures are required.
Congress has failed to regulate because most lawmakers are completely befuddled by A.I. And the tech lords are now enmeshed across the government, having learned the value of flattering Donald Trump with money and gold objects. (Congress did rouse itself, barely, to kill an initiative nestled in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to ban the states from regulating A.I. for a decade.)
Soares went to Capitol Hill this past week to convey the existential urgency to lawmakers, but it was a tough slog with the $200 million-plus in Silicon Valley super PAC money targeted to take down pols who are not all in on the push for smarter A.I. Sympathetic lawmakers won’t go public about it, Soares said, “worried that it looks a little too crazy or that they’ll sound too doom-ery.”
An Armageddon is coming. A.I. will turn on us, inadvertently or nonchalantly.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who once worried about the risks of A.I. with no kill switch, like Musk and Sam Altman, are racing ahead, as Yudkowsky said, so they can be “the God Emperor of the Earth.”
THE BEST THING that can happen is the slow destruction of the government and the devolution of powers. That’s the only real solution. The federal system is the crux of all our issues. It’s like the last days of the Roman Empire. Sure it would be nice to be in the glory days when everything was prosperous and we had it easy, but there’s no returning to that. The ideals the founders had are dead in the hearts of Americans and the culture itself. They can’t be revived except locally, in small places. You won’t just transplant them into the government and win out over the invested corruption of centuries. There is only removing the gangrenous limb, or allowing the rot to spread to every part of the body.
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Inside the Trump Administration’s Push to Prosecute James Comey
The Testimony at the Heart of the Comey Indictment, Examined
With Scant Information, Federal Workers Brace for Possible Shutdown
Greene, Straying From Trump, Reflects an Emerging MAGA Split
Conflict in the Caribbean: A View From Inside Venezuela
Trump Says He Has Ordered Troops to Protect ICE Facilities in Portland
Des Moines Schools Superintendent Arrested by ICE Is Placed on Leave
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY #1
The biggest crime Trump ever committed was giving voice to “the deplorables,” to half the country that the system wasn’t working for anymore. These people were never meant to have agency, they were just meant to fade away into the dustbin of history on a wave of fentanyl and economic despair.
SHADOW TICKET, Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel.
For 62 years, Thomas Pynchon has been offering up worlds that seem much like our own except weirder and more lawless, with respect to both criminal activity and physics. But somewhere along the line our reality started to resemble, with uncanny specificity, his collected works. This is not a welcome development, as even his greatest fans would affirm. Into this strange new world comes “Shadow Ticket,” the first new novel by Pynchon in a dozen years. “Although the author is 88 years old, his intellect, at least on the evidence of this book, remains undiminished, which is to say, it is still panoptic, exciting, abstruse, distractible, and, for good or ill, unrestrained,” Kathryn Schulz writes. “But, if his powers are not dulled, neither are they pointed; even if you squint, it’s difficult to determine whether ‘Shadow Ticket’ is a commentary on our current era.”
This will disappoint any fans who were hoping for a rousing Pynchon riposte to our depressingly Pynchonesque era, but it’s hardly a problem. It does, however, raise a question, Schulz notes: “If our reigning artist of paranoid convictions, of high crimes and deep states, of the peculiar combination of depravity and absurdity found in those who lust for power—if that guy hasn’t made use of the present political moment to craft a satire or a survival manual or a swan song or even an ‘I told you so,’ then what has he come here, after a long silence and in all likelihood for the last time, to tell us?”
THE AVERAGE MAN never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
— H. L. Mencken
SIGHT & SOUND IN BERLIN: SATURDAY AT THE MOVIES, SUNDAY IN THE CHURCH
by David Yearsley
Movie screenings here start with short commercials: zany, wink-wink spots showing more than a little sun and skin to whet the appetite for ice cream and beer and cars and beach vacations. In contrast to the teetotal multiplexes of the American Homeland, Old Country theaters sell alcoholic drinks at the concession stand.
Nowadays, not just consumer goods but also cultural events are pitched before the feature film begins in Berlin cinemas, especially in those run by the resourceful Yorck Kino group with its groovy theaters spread across the sprawling city. The advertised offerings include music festivals, concerts, operas, ballets, art exhibitions in major museums, jazz and rock shows. After these astounding riches are teased, come the trailers for upcoming movies.
It’s not just in the previews before highbrow independent films that Berlin is lauded as a major cultural capital. You get to ogle these artsy wares before Hollywood imports like the current Olivia Coleman-Benedict Cumberbatch vehicle, The Roses, in which Cornwall in the Southwest of England is made to play the rugged Mendocino Coast and does about as good a job of it is as do the acid-tongued expats of teaching the locals the nuances of intermarital verbal abuse. That’s the main gag of this remake that throws a pair of nasty-cat Brits at each other and among the gormless Yankee pigeons.
Yet unlike the original (War of the Roses, 1989), the remake chooses California light (make that “lite”) over unalloyed ill-will. The outbreaks of sentimentality in The Roses can be measured by that infallible gauge and accomplice of movie emotion—the soundtrack. Maudlin string strains offer their oozy compliance for the rare, but no less trying moments of grace and goodwill wedged in between the barbs and blows. These fleeting glimpses of humanity are meant to convince us that the warring top-chef wife (Coleman) has goodness somewhere among her non-locally sourced ingredients. The embittered architect of a husband (Cumberbatch) designs an oceanside edifice which, along with his reputation and ego, is demolished by extreme weather. It is he, then, who is prescribed the main doses of soppy sonic therapy, as when he swerves off-piste and off-plot and saves a beached whale. As the bantam CGI leviathan swims off into the surf, hubbie’s good deed drifts on a harmonic bed of synthesizer kelp, whispering from the waves of hope and fulfilment and alerting us to the dubious fact that deep down, far below the savage whitecaps, he really is a good person.
Better to be bad.
In such moments when music is disastrously forced to redeem what should be an unredeemably black comedy, one has to remember that the cinema has always been a light and sound show, even when it was an organ that underscored the action and amplified the emotion up on the mute screen. Although one thinks of an organ’s façade—often as big or bigger than the big screen—as grandly impassive, the King of Instruments has always provided a feast not just for the ears but also for the eyes.
Many organs were engineered to have moving parts that entertained the sight—from King David playing his harp to singing saints whose pious countenances were often flatteringly modelled on faces of the expensive instrument’s wealthy donors.
No multi-media entertainment center of the early modern period was more spectacular than the gift Queen Elizabeth sent from London to Sultan Mehmet III in Istanbul in 1599. Built by the fearless innovator Thomas Dallam and transported to the Ottoman capital by sea, then reassembled by him in the potentate’s palace on the Bosphorus, this blockbuster import boasted the Top Gun technology of its time, as is clear from the following lines excerpted from Dallam’s own epic—and orthographically diverse—account:
Firste the clocke strouke 22; than the chime of 16 bells went of, and played a songe of 4 partes. That beinge done, tow personagis which stood upon to corners of the seconde storie, houlding tow silver trumpetes in there handes, did lifte them to theire heads, and sounded a tantara. Than the muzicke went of, and the orgon played a songe of 5 partes … Divers other motions thare was which the Grand Sinyor wondered at.
90 Years before Dallam’s organ embassy across the Christian-Muslim divide, the German master organist Arnold Schlick, a celebrated virtuoso of European standing, published history’s first book on organ building and playing: Der Spiegel der Orgelmacher und Organisten.
In this seminal treatise, Schlick agreed that the organ was “mainly to be heard,” but he also emphasized its vital visual qualities. These decorations should inspire proper devotion and not present carnivalesque freak shows in God’s house. Accordingly, he lambasted a nearby organ that featured a monk that lunged out of a window as far as its waist then snapped back in again. This often shocked young and old, men and women, so that some were excited to swear and others to laugh. This should properly be avoided in church, especially by the clergy. Likewise, the grotesque faces with wide mouths that open and shut, and long beards, and complete figures that strike about, encourage improper manners. Also, rotating stars with little bells that ring, and other such things, do not belong in church. When our Lord God holds a church fair, the devil sets up his stall next to it.
Schlick was blind. Maybe this stoked the vehemence of his disapproval, miffed as he may have been at missing out on the slapstick fun of these automated religious revues.
Schlick would also have missed—and vociferously maligned—the laser show and play of shadows that diabolically silhouetted the organists at the console at the closing concert of this year’s “Aggregate Festival: New Works for Pipe Organs” in Berlin. It hadn’t been advertised before The Roses the night before, but the word had gotten out: the Sunday night concert was fascinating and mysterious and extremely well-attended.
The event took place in St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, whose plump green dome and pillared portico stand guard at the southeast corner of the Bebelplatz in the center of Berlin. It was on this square in the spring of 1933 that Nazi students pillaged some 20,000 “un-German” books from the adjacent Humboldt University Library and burned them in a massive bonfire. A small window cut into the ground in the middle of the cobblestone expanse commemorates that crime, but is only apparent when you come near and stand over it and look down into the empty subterranean room below: a library with nothing on its shelves. Invisible from afar, untouchable from above, this underground, understated monument both captures and conveys its own absence. There is literally nothing to see or to read.
Built in the middle of the 18th century, St. Hedwig’s Cathedral is decidedly above ground—still. Badly bombed in World War II, its interior was reconstructed a decade later in austere modernist style. A re-renovation begun in 2018 was completed last year. The church’s latest architectural incarnation stripped the interior of all remaining ornament and painted the walls, denuded columns, and underside of the dome a white so blinding that priests would be advised to don welding glasses when celebrating the Mass if they don’t want to go blind like Schlick.
On the way into the concert on that September sabbath night, I didn’t receive a ticket. Instead, I got a stamp on my hand as if this were a rock concert or a carnival. Maybe some in the audience had plans to duck out to the square for a cannabis vape session during the show. There would have been plenty of time for it, as the concert would push on without intermission for two hours.
Before taking my seat in the circular space, I picked up some brochures at the table near the entrance advertising other organ events in the city. Alongside this info was a stack of playing card-sized photos of what looked like Lee Iacocca. The former CEO of Ford and then Chrysler died last year, and if anyone is due for canonization, it is Iacocca — St. Lee, the worker of the Mustang and Minivan miracles. Colorful frescoes surrounding his goodly visage with these auto relics would certainly have livened up St. Hedwig’s. Martyred by Henry Ford III, even though he made the company billions, would-be St. Lee will have to wait a few more decades before working his way back up the corporate ladder beyond the Pearly Gates.
I flipped over the collectible card to find out it was of Pope Leo. That explained the pontifical white and tasteful splash of racing-strip red laid over the shoulders.
Stark in line and angle but still the most decorative feature in the relentlessly sober St. Hedwig’s interior, the modern organ juts out from its balcony set directly between the two large entrance doors.
When the lights dimmed for Aggregate showtime, the white walls glowed, the metal pipes glimmered.
Avowedly avant-garde music began to echo around the reverberant half-sphere of ecclesiastical space. In the first two of the three forty-minute pieces, the discourse alternated between demonic harmonies and heavenly cumulus puffs on which floated languid, unformed melodies.
The second of these explorations was for an organist up in the loft and two laser players at their controls on the far side of the sanctuary. At the organ console, the conflict between Good and Evil, concord and discord, raged on as the laser beams poked and slashed at the pipes like picadors at a bull fight, goading the holy beast into unholy war. The sharp, colored beams of the laser were encased in a broad shaft of more diffuse light, infiltrated by billows of steam. This odorless vapor never made it all the way over to the organ, as if the blasts from the pipes held the infernal clouds at bay. The Catholic olfactory menu was not being served that Sunday night. There was no thurible of incense to the famished sense of smell. I began to wish that the vaping would happen inside.
The light show played off the scarily fascist white columns ringing the church’s interior and intersected with the sonic artillery of the cannon-shaped organ pipes. That this spectacle was taking place, even spilling out onto the Bebelplatz, made me think of Nazi architect Albert Speer’s cathedrals of light at the party rallies in Nuremberg. History in Berlin has a way, like smoke, of insinuating itself into everything.
The last of the evening’s three works abandoned antagonistic aesthetics. The demons of disorder had hoisted up the white flag, though only metaphorically: if there had been a real sign of surrender, it would have been invisible against the everywhere whiteness. Pure and absolute was the elongated stasis in C. Linus Pauling would have been in heaven. Every so often another organ stop was pulled out or another note depressed. Ten minutes in, a G joined the sonority. Sometime later, an E completed the triad, often allegorized by the music theorists of yore as an embodiment of the Trinity. Religious symbolism could not help but intrude on these dark rituals conducted within whitewashed sacred walls.
Schlick would have been glad to hear that the lasers had been retired. Pope Leo would have been happy that Good had won out over Evil in the end. But once again, Bad would have been Better.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
TAIBBI AND KIRN
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And well, it depends on how you want to interpret it, but we’re now in this space, the whole, if God is dead, everything is permitted, right? That was Nietzsche’s quote, and that was the idea in crime and punishment where Raskolnikov thinks that if he’s doing something for the right reasons, then it’s okay to hatchet people to death and who cares?
Walter Kirn: Well, that’s the right-wing version in the sense that if God is dead, everything is permitted. The left-wing version is if we are servicing the revolution and the establishment of the worker’s paradise or socialist man or whatever the utopian epithet might be, then everything is permitted to and the everything permitted factions are bound to come to blows because that’s the only way to decide those disputes.
Matt Taibbi: Right, right. And so, are we inexorably on that path now? What we’re seeing, we’re seeing, I would say an escalating cycle of political violence. It’s not…
Walter Kirn: An escalating a cycle of political violence encased in an escalating cycle of deceptive narratization of the violence. They go together. See, you have the event, and you have how the event is talked about, and you really need both in order to move things politically. If you’re the evil genius, Machiavellian, who wants power simply by any means, then what you need is upsetting events and you need the ability to construe them in the most advantageous fashion. And frankly, now, I think they’re kidding us because I think that the refusal to condemn the Charlie Kirk thing, and even to celebrate it, isn’t just hard-heartedness or anger at the other side, it’s a wink-wink.
Matt Taibbi: Well, right like the…
Walter Kirn: We can do this and we can get away with it.
Matt Taibbi: The whole Karen Adia thing, I don’t condone political violence, but it’s…
Walter Kirn: Yeah, it’s animal farm all the way down.
Matt Taibbi: Right, right. And this is now on the minds of everybody who has to make a public appearance now. We had another incident this week. So, do we draw a connection between these two things? Let’s look first at Gavin Newsom talking on a talk show about ICE.
Gavin Newsom: That’s happening in the United States of America. Masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, people disappearing. No due process, no oversight, zero accountability happening in the United States of America today. People ask, “Well is authoritarianism? You’re being hyperbolic.” We’re being hyperbolic. If you’re a black and brown community, it’s here in this country. And so, I’m deeply proud that I had the privilege of signing the nation’s first bill to address the issue of masking. Also to require you have simple identification to your point. I mean, if some guy jumped out of an unmarked car and a van with a mask on tried to grab me, I mean, by definition, you’re going to push back.
And so, these are not just authoritarian tendencies. These are authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government. You saw what Stephen Miller said last week. This should put chills up fine, called the Democratic Party, an extremist organization, basically a terrorist organization saying he’s going after his enemies. You saw the tweet that Donald Trump sent out true social, basically telling Pam Bondi, “I want these three people taken out.” That’s happening in the United States.
Walter Kirn: This is Orwellian. This is Orwellian. Dude, you made civilians wear masks. Like, oh, okay, you’re against law enforcement people using mask. We can debate that, but you forced kids to wear them.
Matt Taibbi: It’s ridiculous. And also, I’m not in favor of masked law enforcement. I saw how horrible that could be in Russia. They have a group there called the Amon, which terrifies everybody. It goes back to the days of Ivan the Terrible. There was a gang called the Oprichniki that used to go around and masks and burn people’s beards off the masks. And the masks… Go ahead.
Walter Kirn: I’m not for it in a society where law enforcement isn’t doxed and there aren’t major threats to their homes, to their families. I mean, let’s be real. Down in Mexico, in the wars against the cartels, should you have to go bare naked, faced against a cartel that you know if they can find out where you live, will go hang your family up in the living room by the time you get home? You’re calling for disarmament of one side constantly. They do have an argument that they are in danger.
Matt Taibbi: They do. And Newsom is also being disingenuous because this stuff isn’t new. People have been whisked off the streets in his state. I interviewed people in his state who were grabbed up off the street, off the sidewalk, never to see their families again. No due process, just like you talked about. It’s not a new thing, but let’s describe it as a new authoritarian situation anyway.
Walter Kirn: Matt, in the same breath, in the same breath, the guy is calling them stormtroopers. Thus people probably should be eliminated and opposed and requiring that they be vulnerable to that in the same breath.
Matt Taibbi: So, to your point, let’s look at sat seven, his presser on ICE. This is very quick, but to your point.
Gavin Newsom: ICE, unmask, what are you afraid of? What are you afraid of?
Walter Kirn: You. We’re afraid of you portraying us as Nazis, stormtroopers, authoritarian, goon squads, and we’re afraid of people who believe you coming and killing our families. That’s what they’re afraid of, okay, to answer your question.
Matt Taibbi: So, then we had right after that, somebody takes a shot at an ICE facility in Texas the next day and look…
Walter Kirn: Kill somebody.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, he kills one migrant, he kills himself, injured a few others, and the ammo was immediately posted by Kash Patel. He was heavily criticized for putting that out right away.
Walter Kirn: What’s this writing on ammo thing man? They all do it now.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So, I saw people saying, “Well, that’s not believable.” I mean, only in the sense that it was cruder than the stuff that was in the other cases. I mean, we just had Robin Westman, we had Luigi Mangione. We’ve had a whole bunch of these cases, Tyler Robinson, people writing on ammo was like a thing now. It certainly raises questions in my mind.
Walter Kirn: In Luigi’s case, he had the right target, he had the right cause, and he had the right abs. So, him writing on his thing is all too believable. In fact, it’s a rallying cry when he writes on bullets or casings.
Matt Taibbi: So, there’s already been some reporting and let’s not indulge in this too much because the rush to figure out to read tea leaves about who or what the assassin was all about or what their motives were. It is almost never productive in the first moments after one of these incidents. But here’s one thing we can say. Okay, so Ken Klippenstein, who did what reporters should do, and he did something that I didn’t do. He got hold of friends of the shooter. All right, so here’s Ken Klippenstein exclusive, the ICE shooter’s politics. Joshua John. So, he writes, “The deadly sniper attack on a Dallas ICE facility this morning seems straightforward with anti-ICE engraved on unspent shell casings recovered from the scene per the FBI.”
And I guess Ken’s correct to frame it that way because that’s what the FBI did. Kash Patel put out a picture of this ammunition. You can scroll down and see it and how it says anti-ICE on it, right? Trump already responded. He blamed the radical left. He vowed to sign another executive order to dismantle, which he called what he called domestic terrorism networks. And this is on the heels of another EO about Antifa going on and on on about Antifa. So, he’s jumping the gun, Trump is definitely jumping the gun on this stuff.
Walter Kirn: We know he is. Before this happened, he was already going against Antifa. This isn’t a result of…
Matt Taibbi: Oh, right, I know but …
Walter Kirn: This isn’t a result of this.
Matt Taibbi: Right. No, but I With regard to Jahn.
Walter Kirn: Oh, oh, oh.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, yeah. And then JD Vance says, we know that this person was politically motivated and pointing both to the inscriptions and “some evidence we have that’s not public.” So, he said he reached out to three people who knew the gunman, Ken did, which is great. This is exactly what journalists are for, and he gets quotes. He was most certainly an edgelord guy, an irony guy. One friend said, “Josh was an edgelord who wanted someone to get blamed.” I think he tried his best to write something goofy to rile people up. Another friend talked about playful shock humor. Then there was…
Walter Kirn: Well, how playful can a guy be who kills people? Sorry, his actions completely, completely contradict the notion that he’s some gamer. Okay. He kills people. He’s not playful.
Matt Taibbi: The gaming keeps being brought up in all this stuff, that’s maybe the thing that’s going on. All right, so if we scroll down, and then he talks about how often he played all these different games. Among the dozen or so usernames he used was one reading hashtag impeachment. When I asked if this wasn’t a clear reference to anti-Trump politics, his friends recoiled at the idea that he would express opposition to Trump so sincerely and straightforwardly. Instead, they saw it as part of his broader, ironic persona, poking fun at anti-Trump “resistance” types.
Walter Kirn: So, he was a comedian who kills people. I got it.
Matt Taibbi: So, it’s an ironic assassination. That said, one friend recalled that when Trump first came to power, Jahn was “not a fan,” that he had contempt for mainstream politicians in general. “If it was ironic, it’s that half irony where you’re half kidding, half serious, just in case,” a friend said. He was never really into politics, especially not politicians. He was into politics only in the 4chan sense, contrarian, provocative, boundary-pushing for laughs, not conviction.
Walter Kirn: I can’t believe we’re even reading this, Matt. His friends knew him so well. They knew him so well that they went to the FBI and stopped him from shooting people. Obviously, they didn’t know him well. They didn’t know him at all. But let’s continue with this spin game that Klippenstein is running. Because if they knew him so well, then they would’ve known he was a violent potential killer of law enforcement agents. That’s not just going out in the backyard and shooting into the air or into a crowd, that’s going up against law enforcement. Man, you got to be serious. But he was an ironic edgelord.
Two things can be true, but if you’re claiming that you knew him that well, then why didn’t you do something about his violent tendencies? Or did he hide those from you, just like he hid his true self generally? Why are we listening to people who weren’t capable of reading their friend enough, but are now suddenly experts on his state of mind? Because Ken Klippenstein has a point to make.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And again, I think Ken has gotten a lot of good stuff and he hustles, right? So, it’s a quality I really admire in reporters is when there’s something to be gotten, when there’s information that nobody else is trying to get, he has produced some stuff recently, right?
Walter Kirn: But Matt, if a source comes, a source comes to me after shooting somebody and claims to be a pacifist, they go in a bracket. If a bunch of friends who I assert know this person so well, come to me and tell me he’s just a funny guy after he shot people. That discredits the sources for me completely.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Let’s listen to this video that he made quickly. John, I guess made a video about a spoof of Facebook self-help videos.
John: Hello there, Facebook user. Are you tired of scrolling through your Facebook feed mindlessly, not knowing what the heck to do with your life? Well, there’s a solution to that. You can unlike all of your crappy pages. All you have to do to unlike your crappy pages that you realize you don’t like anymore is to go to your profile, select more, go down to likes, and simply hover over each page you want to unlike, and there you go. You’ll be able to unlike all of your pages in a matter of minutes, maybe hours, possibly, depending…
Matt Taibbi: All right, whatever. Okay.
Walter Kirn: He actually sounds like a violent killer there to me.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. I can’t remember what movie that reminds me of, but it reminds me of something.
Walter Kirn: This reminds me of an article in which we go back to Hitler’s friends and youth, and they tell us, and they assure us, he was a sensitive artist. He was a painter, and then you enshrine their opinions, even though the people who thought he was a sensitive painter and claimed to know him well, didn’t ever do anything about his actions. This is more of a freaking framing game.
I’m beginning to think that the entire enterprise of trying to divine the truth about people’s selves from their internet presentation, which is just a stage presentation and your high school presentation in the lunchroom, is a stage presentation, is absolutely a vain and presumed enterprise, especially when it contradicts what we presume are the words of the person themselves. I mean, no one could commit murder in our country unless they hid their intention to do it first, right?
Matt Taibbi: Right, yes. Especially a political murder. If people thought you were really dangerous in a certain direction, somebody would say something normally, right?
Walter Kirn: Right, exactly. Logically, any examination of the self that they portrayed previous to that is the examination of someone who was not authentic, because they were harboring a thing that had you known you would’ve been compelled to do something and they were fooling you. So, I don’t know also and I’m afraid to bring up AI again, but I don’t know that these breadcrumb trails on the internet and on social media and on gaming boards and so on, rise to a standard of evidence that I would in the old days consider worthwhile. They can be spoofed, they can be selectively quoted and shown. We don’t know the totality of the other persona.
For all we know, this guy was also on a let’s kill people site with another pseudonym that we haven’t found yet hiding his presence more assiduously than he did, saying, “I can’t wait to kill these guys.” So, I’m starting to become a, The fruits shall you know them? And like I say, if you watch this happen in another country, would you know the answer without having to go into the weeds as to which side was doing it? I think you could. I think when the targets are political organizers on the right and ICE facilities and kids in a Catholic Church praying and et cetera, you get a pretty good idea. And then finding out every time that actually they’re just a really complicated edgelord.
Matt Taibbi: Yes, that’s the thing that the one thing we know it isn’t is ironic, right?
Walter Kirn: He wasn’t an edgelord because you went over the edge.
Matt Taibbi: He went over the edge.
Walter Kirn: Edgelord stay on the edge.
Matt Taibbi: Right, exactly.
Walter Kirn: He’s a dark lord.
Matt Taibbi: One could argue about what the politics were. We don’t know. We don’t even know that politics had anything to do with it yet.
Walter Kirn: And does it matter finally?
Matt Taibbi: Does it matter? No. What we do know…
Walter Kirn: If they’re part of an organization, it does.
Matt Taibbi: It matters if it’s part of an organization and it matters if this is part of a trend of lowering the psychological barrier to violent action, right? And I think we are seeing that. I think we have seen steadily a devaluing of human life, a devaluing of people, a rising level of rhetoric that describes people is not fully human. And we’ve seen this on both sides, but there’s a tone that’s going on online in the Trump derangement era that freaks me out. And it’s not from young people, it’s from people on the news.
Walter Kirn: And you know Matt, what I really don’t like about this is every time the culprit becomes the internet, well, that is pretty clearly to me, a pretext in some minds justified-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, of course.
Walter Kirn: … for complete policing of it. Oh, if the internet is guilty every time, oh, internet shooting guns. That’s how things happen. The internet picks up a gun. That seems to be the final reduction of all these crimes. And the person in the middle, and any organizations they might be affiliated with are kind of squeezed out, become extraneous because the internet got a gun and shot somebody. And I can see where that’s going. I already know that they don’t… A lot of people, and I think with great arguments, want gun control. I don’t agree with them, but they also want internet control, and they’re doing the same thing they did with guns only with the internet. It’s gun violence plus internet violence. Now we’re going to have inter-gun violence and we’ll have a reason to get rid of the First and Second Amendments.
Matt Taibbi: Absolutely. I mean, that’s the scary thing about all this is it will be twisted to become an argument for more control, assuming that the other tribe comes back into power. On this side, there’s a war going on internally about how to police this stuff, right?
Walter Kirn: Yes, there is. And that’s what’s interesting.
mr stockman. you seem like a guy who enjoys a robust debate:
“anyone who hates dogs and kids, cant be all bad.” w. c. fields
(sorry, stockton)
As someone, as a small child, who was chased down, knocked down and attacked by an off leash dog, I can tell you that I feel safer with a leash law. As an adult, on a beach a year ago, with the “dogs must be on a leash” sign right in the parking lot and on the beach trail. Two people decided it was ok to unleash their pups, one of which attacked my partner. The whole time the owner is yelling “he’s a nice dog, he won’t hurt you”. Who were they kidding, the hurting was occurring as they yelled their untruth. And yet, I can’t blame the dogs, I blame their people. People who put their desires over those of innocent others. The leash law is there for a reason, the safety of others, the safety of the dog and most of all the safety of the dog owner who is completely liable for their dogs actions.
A slow day for comments and here’s my meager offering:
Kirn and Taibbi today: nattering and chattering on–way too many words, their points mostly lost in it all…Keep it spare and simple, guys, we’re not paying you by the word….