Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 10/7/2025

Warm | Food Needed | Grace Steurer | Local Events | Noble Rose | Waidelich Case | PO | 3:30 A.M. | News Roundup | Power Couple | Yesterday's Catch | October Wind | American Witch | Narrows Project | Hungry Computers | Little Walter | Lake-County History | Guelaguetza Celebration | Newsom/Guilfoyle | Cooperation Required | Dream Museum | Believe It | Dying Thoughts | John Brown | Lorena | Your America | War Propaganda | Lead Stories | Take Sides | Hand Thief | October 7 | The Dream | Balfour to Blair | Nice Day

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ABOVE NORMAL TEMPERATURES continue through Tuesday. The pattern begins to change Wednesday with cooling temperatures from an approaching trough. Rain chances increase Friday with much cooler conditions likely. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 49F under clear skies this Tuesday morning on the coast. Really nice weather recently, eh'? More of the same until a good shot of rain arrives Friday before clearing on Saturday. Another batch of rain on Monday, we'll see?

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KAREN OTTOBONI:

AV Foodbank distribution is this Wednesday and our pantry, refrigerator and freezer are empty.

In the 4 years I've been helping this is a first.

We help 200 families every 2 weeks!

If you can help with garden goodies or extra supplies Please bring what you can to the AV grange this Weds. at 11 am.

It takes a Village.

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GRACE L. STEURER

February 16, 1934 - August 14, 2025

Grace L. Steurer, a devoted mother, beloved teacher, passionate naturalist, and fiercely independent spirit, passed away peacefully on August 14, 2025, surrounded by her loving family. She was 91 years old.

Born in 1934 and raised in Norwood, Ohio, Grace's love of the natural world began early. Accompanying her father on camping and hunting trips to the Adirondack Mountains, she developed a deep reverence for the wilderness and an adventuresome heart that would shape her life. As a high school student, she took to the skies as a member of the Civil Air Patrol — an early sign of her lifelong desire to explore beyond boundaries.

Grace married her college sweetheart, Ralph, and together they raised a vibrant family of eight children. In 1969, they purchased land in Point Arena —11 acres of redwood forest near the Pacific Ocean — where Grace found peace in the quiet serenity of the woods. By 1987, she began building her dream home on that land, a cabin nestled in the Mendocino forest that would become her sanctuary in later life.

Her professional life was rooted in service and education. Grace dedicated more than three decades to education, first as a preschool teacher at Cordova Baptist Church, and later as a resource specialist teacher after returning to Sacramento State to pursue a degree in Child Development. Her work touched the lives of countless students and families, guided by her patience, compassion, and tireless dedication.

Grace's curiosity and love for the natural world led her around the globe as an avid birder. She traveled to every continent except Antarctica—a fact she half-joked was her one regret. From the remote Aleutian Islands of Alaska to the high Andes of South America, from the savannas of Africa to the wilds of Papua New Guinea, Grace sought out rare birds with wonder and delight. Her North American birding life list exceeded 800 species, and her world list surpassed 4,100 — testaments to a life lived with keen eyes and a loving heart.

She shared this love of nature with her children, often piling them into a station wagon for rock and fossil hunting adventures across the western U.S., combining science, exploration, and a joyful spirit of togetherness. Grace was a proud member of Fossils for Fun and the American River Gem and Mineral Society, and actively served the Mendocino Audubon Society, where she led the annual Christmas Bird Count for many years. She helped compile a local Mendocino Coast bird checklist and participated in cormorant breeding surveys.

In her community, she gave generously of her time to Coastal Seniors, and later became a grateful recipient of their support which allowed her to live independently in her house until she was 90 years old.

Grace is survived by her seven children— Chris, Tim, Suzanne, Maryanne, Stephanie, Fritz, and Sandra, along with 20 grandchildren, many great-grand-children, and one great-great-grandchild. She was preceded in death by her beloved husband Ralph, her two sisters, and her eldest daughter Cathie.

Those who knew Grace remember her for her strength, unwavering independence, and deep kindness. She welcomed all with acceptance and warmth, and stood by her beliefs with quiet conviction. In her later years, her faithful German shepherd companion, Patty Cake, brought her immeasurable joy and kept her spirit active as she lived alone in her coastal haven.

Grace Steurer lived a life rich with purpose, passion, and love. She will be deeply missed and forever cherished by those who had the honor of knowing her. Her legacy lives on in the lives she touched, the wild places she explored, and the family she nurtured with enduring love. In lieu of flowers, donations are welcomed to the Coastal Seniors of Point Arena.

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LOCAL EVENTS (this week)

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A CALIFORNIA POLICE OFFICER WAS ACCUSED OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE. HE STILL ROSE TO BE CHIEF

by Hyeyoon Alyssa Choi (June 2022)

When Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Jeanine B. Nadel called her courtroom to order in June of 2022, the benches were filled with prominent local women.

They said they showed up at the Judge Nadel’s courtroom to support one of their own, a former county worker who sued the Ukiah police chief — her onetime fiancé — alleging that he abused her.

The case stretches back more than a decade, a time during which Noble Waidelich rose through the ranks of the Ukiah Police Department, from patrol officer to detective to sergeant, lieutenant, captain and eventually chief.

Amanda Carley was there for one promotion and two of his officer-of-the-year commendations, a time when, she alleges, he smashed dishes on the floor in anger, slammed her against bookshelves and a refrigerator, swerved their car into oncoming traffic.

She packed her things and moved her children out of the house they owned together in 2015. She walked away from her job and sued her alleged abuser and the county in 2017. All the while, Waidelich continued to rise in the department.

Waidelich did not respond to multiple requests for comment. His attorney, James King, declined to speak to The Times. In court documents, Waidelich denied all charges. Christian Curtis, then-Mendocino County counsel, said he could comment only on procedural matters regarding the case and declined to make further comments.

The case against Waidelich isn’t the first incident to plague the department. Just this year, the city paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle two lawsuits filed against its officers — one for use of force, another for sexual battery.

Carley and Waidelich met at the Mendocino County courthouse in 2009 when they were assigned to the same case — she was a victim’s witness advocate and he was a detective. Engaged within two months and joint homeowners within a year, Carley said she felt safe and secure.

But soon, she said, she found herself trying to leave him, one failed attempt after another.

“It started out as a shove and him standing in the doorway when I wanted to take a break. Then he was throwing me down on the table and swerving into oncoming traffic, threatening to drop me off in the middle of nowhere,” Carley said.

She did not hesitate to disclose the abuse to her friends and co-workers.

“I saw her at Schat’s Bakery right across from the courthouse, and she had a black eye, so I asked about it,” Megan Perez, Carley’s former close friend, recalled. After Carley said it was Waidelich’s doing, Perez said she told her friend, “At least you’re not protecting him and hiding it.”

Megan DiFranco, who shared an office with Carley when she worked at the district attorney’s office, said Carley once showed her the bruises.

“I remember being conflicted because we were mandated reporters, but according to them they were in therapy so I wasn’t sure if I should say something,” DiFranco said. She didn’t.

A concerned Ukiah police officer, Freddy Kepplinger, reported the abuse to the Police Department in 2013, prompting an internal investigation. At the time, Carley said she denied the allegations for fear he would hurt her two teenage children, Travis Sousa and Madisyn Carley, who were not his.

Two years later, Madisyn unwittingly blurted out to her middle school’s guidance counselor about the abuse she had witnessed. Another investigation was set in motion by county Child Protective Services.

“I was having such severe depression, and it was so draining to keep it bottled up inside me,” Madisyn said. “Our whole life was a facade, because in public we had to act like the perfect happy family.”

The disclosure triggered Child Protective Services to interview Madisyn and her mother, after which they determined a safety plan was necessary to keep Waidelich away from Madisyn. The agency notified the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, which launched a criminal investigation into the domestic violence allegations.

In a 47-page case report, sheriff’s Sgt. Andrew Porter wrote that he believed Amanda Carley was holding back and minimizing the incidents because of professional and financial concerns.

Carley took her children and moved out of the house within two weeks of the Child Protective Services intervention. Then, she reported Waidelich’s abuse to Porter in full detail.

The sheriff’s investigation continued, but Waidelich was not questioned. Findings were sent to Mendocino County District Attorney C. David Eyster, along with evidence of the injuries Carley had endured throughout the years.

But Eyster declined to file criminal charges against Waidelich because, he wrote in his motion to strike Carley‘s cause of action, “the alleged victim is less than cooperative and presents as less than credible” and that some incidents were “too vague to prosecute.”

The county then opened another investigation — this one into Carley — for allegedly lying about whether she was abused.

At that point, Carley was working at the Probation Department as a deputy probation officer. Her supervisor immediately took her firearm away and reassigned her caseload.

She was interrogated and threatened with criminal charges by the county for withholding the truth. Waidelich was promoted to sergeant.

Taking away her gun seems partisan and premature, said George Kirkham, a criminologist at Florida State University and consultant to more than 50 law enforcement agencies. The investigation leading up to the disciplinary action appeared cherry-picked, he said.

“This was not an objective and thorough investigation in terms of basic elements of interviewing all parties, looking at all evidence physical or otherwise, then rendering an objective report,” Kirkham said. “The county had an obligation to take action, and it certainly would not involve promoting him.”

After the investigation concluded that Carley “did not fully disclose information about the domestic violence — that occurred — in her relationship with Waidelich on three occasions,” she was served with a written reprimand for “providing false or misleading information to a law enforcement officer.”

Judy Albert, program director at a Ukiah domestic violence crisis intervention organization called Project Sanctuary, said it is difficult for anyone to report domestic violence but especially difficult in Ukiah because it “feels very small” and “a lot of people know a lot of people.”

Ukiah is the county seat of Mendocino County with a population of about 16,000.

Waidelich, who was promoted to chief in October of 2021, was well-liked and seemed more accessible than previous chiefs, Albert said. At that time Waidelich was married with two daughters and was a board member of the county’s youth project and homelessness committee.

Albert, who has worked at Ukiah’s Project Sanctuary for nearly 40 years, said she knows of approximately five officer-involved domestic violence reports made through the organization.

Victims of officer-involved domestic violence face unique challenges in reporting the abuse, studies show, given that police have knowledge of domestic violence shelter locations, possess lethal weapons and can leverage their position to protect themselves from legal consequences.

Carley filed a grievance challenging the reprimand and demanded a public hearing to refute the allegations. The county then withdrew the reprimand.

But, because Eyster had “Brady’d” her, she was never reissued her firearm, and she left her job in 2016. She later moved to San Bernardino County, where she filed the complaint.

In early June, the county offered to settle its part of the case for more than $100,000 in attorneys fees.

Carley declined.

“We’ve come this far,” she said, “and I’m not going to sacrifice my story and justice for money.”

(LA Times)

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‘IGNORED WARNING SIGNS’: UKIAH PAYS $450K SETTLING SUIT ALLEGING EX-CHIEF’S SEXUAL ASSAULT

by Matt LaFever

A dark chapter for the Ukiah Police Department quietly ended in June when the city agreed to pay nearly $450,000 to settle a federal lawsuit filed by a woman who alleged former police chief Noble Waidelich entered her home in uniform, with his service weapon visible, and sexually assaulted her after she rebuffed him.

Less than a year before the alleged June 13, 2022, assault, Waidelich had been promoted to police chief. He had served with the department for 15 years and was praised at the time by City Manager Sage Sangiacomo as embodying “the best characteristics and core values that are essential for a trusted, effective community police department.”

Four days after the alleged incident, the City of Ukiah terminated Waidelich. In a press release, Sangiacomo said the decision stemmed from “recent events [that] have transpired, illuminating the fact that this individual is not a good fit for the City.”

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office investigated the woman’s allegations for possible criminal charges and forwarded its findings to the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office. District Attorney David Eyster did not file a criminal complaint. His office did not respond to a recent request for comment about that decision.

With no criminal prosecution pursued, the woman, identified in court filings as Jane Doe, filed a federal civil lawsuit in February 2023 against the City of Ukiah and Waidelich. The complaint accused Waidelich of appearing at her home in full uniform and sexually assaulting her after she rejected his initial advances. The filing also alleged that the City of Ukiah enabled the misconduct by ignoring warning signs and failing to supervise him.

An amended complaint expanded on those allegations, asserting that the city and department maintained a “de facto policy, long-standing practice and custom and widespread culture of failing to discipline or adequately supervise officers who engaged in on and off duty criminal conduct, including but not limited to crimes against women.”

The complaint referenced the case of Amanda Carley, Waidelich’s former girlfriend, who more than a decade earlier reported domestic violence allegations against him to the City of Ukiah. The filing claimed city officials failed to act on her reports and, despite their severity, later promoted him to police chief.

According to the complaint, the Ukiah Police Department hired a private investigator who told Carley he was not conducting an internal affairs investigation but had been hired to “cover their asses,” discouraging her from cooperating. The filing also stated that after Carley’s daughter later disclosed the alleged abuse, Carley — not Waidelich — was punished, placed on the Brady List, and stripped of her firearm, ending her career.

Many of the claims in the amended complaint mirrored findings in a 2022 LA Times investigation which detailed years of domestic-violence reports, internal reviews, and inaction that allowed Waidelich to continue advancing through the department.

Despite that history, the complaint alleged, the city promoted Waidelich,eventually to chief in 2021, never reprimanding him or removing his weapon. The filing concluded that the city’s inaction “emboldened Waidelich” and led him to believe “he was free to engage in criminal conduct, including sexual assault, with impunity.”

Just over three years after the alleged assault, the civil case concluded with a $450,000 settlement on June 16. As part of the agreement, Jane Doe dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, releasing Waidelich, the City of Ukiah, and related entities from all liability.

Eric Rose, a spokesperson for attorney Thomas Johnston of the Los Angeles-based firm Johnston & Hutchinson, which represented Doe, said in an email, “We are pleased with the settlement, as former Police Chief Weidelich’s conduct was outrageous and evidence of a highly problematic command climate at the Ukiah Police Department at the time of the incident.”

Rose noted the court’s rejection of the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. “The record in this matter demonstrated that senior police officials and city administrators were aware of past serious allegations against Weidelich, yet promoted him in late 2022 to lead the department,” he said. Jane Doe’s decision to come forward, Rose added, “resulted in Chief Weidelich being terminated from his position as chief and hopefully led to greater oversight of senior police leaders in the future.”

Patrick Moriarty, an attorney representing the City of Ukiah, said the city “provided a defense for former Chief Noble Waidelich, the City, and the Police Department.” He emphasized that the city denied culpability, writing, “From the outset, the City made clear that, if the allegations occurred as Jane Doe described, the City did not cause the assault and could not be held responsible for it.”

Moriarty said the settlement reflected the financial realities of litigation, noting that juries have recently issued large verdicts in law-enforcement cases and that, had Doe prevailed, the city could have been required to pay her attorney fees.

“For those who might suggest the agreement implies guilt,” Moriarty wrote, “the settlement includes no admission of liability. The City takes allegations of sexual misconduct seriously, but this resolution was a business decision made to protect municipal funds.”

Trevor McCann, an attorney who represented Waidelich, said only, “Mr. Waidelich has no comment.”

Author’s note: The allegations described in this article were resolved through a financial settlement. The settlement included no admission of liability by the defendants.

ED NOTE: To this day no charges have been filed against former Police Chief Waidelich.

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ON LINE COMMENTS:

[1] Wow what a shit show.

Ukiah PD has always had a lot of problems.but a couple of thoughts.

a. Just because they settled does not mean he did it. Many times it is cheaper to settle than to fight and win.

b. If they fired him but not criminal prosecution then WTF? Did they cover it up criminally or did they just throw him to the wolves? Me thinks he should have gone to prison.

c. Cops are accused falsely all the time of stuff. That is why when you get a bad one it is hard to get them because of all the false allegations. That brings me back to why did they fire him but no criminal charges? Hummmmmm.

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[2] No criminal charges were filed because it was a he said/she said with no other evidence or witnesses except for…drum roll, please…Sheriff Tom Allman!

The victim, one of Allman’s girlfriends, and something of a cop groupie, didn’t call the police — she called Allman who called the police!

There’s plenty of room for speculation, but the public will never know what really happened unless the people involved all tell the truth and that’s not gonna happen.

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3:30 A.M.

Sleepless in Mendo.
Best way to eat an It's-It?
Bite.  Taste.  Chew.  Swallow.

— Jim Luther

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MENDO LOCAL WEEKLY NEWS ROUNDUP — October 5, 2025

Rural post deliveries are cut in "optimization" plan, sneaker waves break on local beaches, and sunflower sea star sightings

by Elise Cox

You can look for your ballots in the mail next week — and if they’re slow to arrive, it could be because of the U.S. Post Office’s new “Regional Transportation Optimization Plan.” Also in the news, Ukiah is set to get 22 miles in new trails, Point Arena has secured money to make needed repairs in Arena Cove, and “functionally extinct” sunflower sea stars have been spotted on the Mendocino coast.…

https://www.mendolocal.news/p/mendo-local-weekly-news-roundup-october

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NAME THIS UKIAH POWER COUPLE

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, October 6, 2025

MALISHA ALVAREZ, 53, Willits. False ID, probation revocation.

ARIANA ARNOLD, 21, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation.

MATTHEW FAUST, 50, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

JOSHUA HANOVER, 37, Ukiah. Parole violation.

VICTORIA IDICA, 27, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

NATHANIEL KUGLER, 22, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

HUGO SANCHEZ-SALGUERO, 19, Ukiah. DUI.

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ESPECIALLY WHEN THE OCTOBER WIND

Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.

Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make you of the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

— Dylan Thomas (1934)

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NARROWS PROJECT HAS TAKEN FAR TOO LONG TO COMPLETE

Editor,

I’m not sure we should be celebrating the near-completion of the 16-mile-long Marin-Sonoma Narrows widening project, considering it took 14 years of construction and about as many years of planning.

For comparison, the Golden Gate Bridge took four years to build. Hoover Dam took five. The Panama Canal, started in 1904, took 19. The Erie Canal, started in 1817, took eight. The Transcontinental Railway, started in 1863, took six. And the Roman Colosseum, started in the year 72, took eight. More recently, China’s 26,000-mile high-speed rail system has taken 15 years to build and is still expanding.

There is nothing to celebrate about the time it took to complete the Narrows expansion, nor will there be for forthcoming work on Highway 37, which I expect will also take way too long.

That we are unable to compete with the Romans is a disgrace. That we, as citizens, tolerate and normalize such failure and incompetence is beyond my comprehension.

Author Dan Wang tackles the issue in his book titled “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.” One problem Wang points to is that the U.S. is a nation seemingly run by lawyers. In the past, we were engineers — just like the Romans were then and the Chinese are today.

Chet Seligman

Point Reyes Station

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HAS YOUR ENERGY BILL GONE UP?

by Eliza Barclay

For most Americans, the utility or energy bill is a fairly predictable monthly expense. It may go up in the winter and summer when we use more electricity, natural gas or heating oil to keep our homes warm or cool. But we count on the base rate to stay about the same through the year.

Not anymore.

In the last year, Americans around the country have seen their energy bills jump, up 20 percent in some cases, and more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living. And it’s just the beginning.

Demand from new data centers powering artificial intelligence and the cloud is beginning to make electricity more expensive on top of other rising costs that utilities are passing on to customers. In the Mid-Atlantic region, where data center growth has been greatest, some residential electric bills have leaped up astonishingly quickly in recent months. Data centers now use about 40 percent of Virginia’s electricity, compared with 5 percent in 2010, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

(NY Times)

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LAKE COUNTY HISTORY: ZIONISM, FREE SPEECH, AND ‘SOCIAL’ MEDIA

by Betsy Cawn

During the summer of 2009, several independent video producers provided original content to our PEG [public-education-government] “tv” channel, a few of whom were attacked by other producers, including a number of pro-Zion Jewish residents who accused the station of anti-semitism.

The complaints rose to the attention of the Governing Board of the PEG service and after a summer of discussions and community conversations, the Board instructed the volunteer “staff” to institute restrictions on the times when certain content could be broadcast.

The immediate reaction to said restrictions became the seed of a contest between “free speech” proponents and the County’s conformist culture, but the Zionists were lost in the dust of ensuing events.

Present at the September 2009 PEG Governing Board meeting were the Station Manager (responsible for all operations of the broadcast facility) and two members of the Board’s Advisory Committee.

A breakdown in communication between those Advisory Committee members present and those absent added, quickly, to the confusion about whether the Governing Board had violated the FCC regulations or not, by specifying the appropriate times for specific (and controversial) content.

The Station Manager and a few of the content producers created some special content programs in protest of the Governing Board’s directives. Members of the Governing Board were accosted in public and pressured to act strongly to stop the protests, which then added fuel to the fire in what became a major issue for the City of Clearlake, the County Board of Supervisors, and the PEG channel users.

The local manager of MediaCom, the cable provider that carries the PEG channel, after consulting the cable corporation’s attorneys, resigned from the Governing Board in October, 2009.

By the end of the year, audible activists making use of KPFZ’s “open mic” format were hectoring the Governing Board and the small group of Zionists, while continuing to broadcast edgier content and using the platform to advocate for free speech on the PEG channel.

The City of Clearlake responded by “firing” the volunteer Station Manager (a legal relationship that was later verified under state employment law) and, in a public meeting that was conducted by the Governing Board, illegally revealed the Station Manager’s personal medical information and mental health care status. Threats of shuttering the station quelled the objections of its dedicated users and producers, but not without collective dismay.

Drawn to the fracas from the more remote interiors of Lake County’s many mountainous inhabitants were a number of more socially radical personages, some of whom portended the deployment of detention camps by FEMA (remember, this was 2009).

Today our PEG channel is operated by a team of media advocates working closely with the Governing Board, which ultimately reports to the County Board of Supervisors. Content is unexciting but reliable, and the chances of producing controversial content are slim to none.

We’ve learned the harsh lessons of catastrophes, over the years, but teeter on the edge of civil disintegration, with the harbingers of chaos popping up on Facebook — vicious enough to kill a well-loved business and its workers without legal consequences.

Not the scale of terror inflicted on the City of Chicago, but not that far from its implications, either. I wish you well, AVA friends.

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A VICTORY FOR CULTURAL RIGHTS IN CALIFORNIA'S CENTRAL VALLEY

Titled "Resistance, Culture, Roots, Tradition," this year's Guelaguetza celebration in Fresno held added significance amid intensifying immigration raids.

by David Bacon

FRESNO, Calif. — According to Sarait Martinez, preserving culture is more than just continuing tradition, language, or custom. It is “a means of survival.”

Martinez heads the Fresno-based non-profit Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indigena Oaxaqueña, which advocates for Indigenous Mexican communities in and around California’s Central Valley. She helped organize Fresno’s September 28 Guelaguetza celebration, a fabulous display of dancers in elaborate masks and tall headdresses, performing to music from Indigenous towns in Mexico, particularly in the southern state of Oaxaca.

“As indigenous people from Oaxaca, we have celebrated the Guelaguetza now for 25 years,” said Martinez. “But this year it was especially important to do this, because of the threats of detention coming from ICE and the Trump administration.  We could not let that stop us.”…

https://americancommunitymedia.org/arts-entertainment/a-victory-for-cultural-rights-in-californias-central-valley/

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POLLY FROST:

I live in Newsom land. Ever since I saw that ridiculous photo spread of him and Kimberly Guilfoyle trying desperately to look like Jack and Jackie I've known he'll do anything to get to the White House, he'll turn CA into a gulag where we can't call his bluff (hate speech!) and our vote doesn't matter, so he can prove to his party he should win the nomination. Having watched him I don't think he's enough interested in anything but his own face - he doesn't care what he turns America into, he just wants his own museum, dollar bill, Rushmore … And speaking of rigging, no one will convince me that Kamala's book is #1 on bestseller lists because people are actually buying it rather than some donor buying the thousands of copies to get that slot for her — then dumping them. And now I kinda like Kimberly because she's just waiting to give what she has on Newsom.

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THE SITUATION, an on-line analysis:

Walmart correctly read the room in the 90s, as our deindustrialization gathered steam, and it became clear that a newly impoverished working class would buy cheap over good because they couldn’t afford anything else. They also modernized their accounting and inventory systems, which left K-mart and Montgomery Ward floundering. When MW finally did a thorough computerization they discovered they’d been bankrupt for some time.

I worked corporate industrial jobs from 1980 to 2011, skating from plant closing to plant closing. What I saw from the plant floor was a generation of management terrified at having to do hard stuff like make things correctly, and keep skilled trades onboard. What they wanted to manage was an org chart and a budget, so they sold their factories, kept their offices, and became marketing departments for foreign goods sold under American trademark brand names. The smart ones formed monopoly trusts with their competitors and bought legislators. The old-fashioned ones followed Eastman Kodak into oblivion. They and their owners despise (it’s too mild a term) innovators like Jobs and Musk, and massively fund media and government efforts to establish and maintain permanent profits in a decayed but static feudal economy. The only purchases most folks even try to make anymore are coerced ones they can’t do without; food, clothes, housing, transportation, and network connection.

The positive response and only fix for this situation is cooperation, as it has been since prehistory. This explains to thinking people why we are under so much pressure to fear and loathe each other.

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MILKEN AND FRIENDS BUILD A $500 MILLION MONUMENT TO THEIR VERSION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

Hope is not a strategy

by Eric Salzman

I almost fell off my chair a couple of weeks ago when I saw a Bloomberg article titled “The Junk Bond King Opens a Shrine to Capitalism Near the White House.” My thoughts instantly turned to an episode of “The Sopranos” in which Tony and the crew discuss building the Newark Museum of Science and Trucking.

The $500 million Milken Center for the Advancement of the American Dream (MCAAD) is funded by such titans as Citadel Enterprise America’s CEO Ken Griffin, Carlyle founder David Rubenstein, music mogul David Geffen, Walmart multi-billionaire Alice Walton, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. MCAAD’s website highlights The David Geffen Hall of Dreams, The Kenneth C. Griffin Holodeck Experience, The Word Cloud and much more! I decided to see it for myself, but first, a quick story.

Back in 2017, a Bloomberg interview with Milken caught my attention: "Michael Milken Says Private Equity’s 'Golden Age' Will Continue"

Milken stated about PE:

“This is their golden age. You can leverage, you can borrow without covenants, and so for equity holders it affords you very unusual rates of return.”

There was also this: “For bond investors today the yields are extremely low, and so therefore you’re not really getting paid much of a premium to invest, but even more important is that the covenants are gone.”

I opined on my former employer’s small blog that PE’s “Golden Age” might be disastrous for the bond and loan holders if they are getting small yield risk premiums with little to no covenants (financial instruments that lenders use to control their risk).

I also noted that in the end, Milken pleaded guilty in 1990 to six felony counts of securities fraud and reporting violations (for which Trump pardoned him in 2020) that resulted in nearly two years of prison, a $600 million fine, and a lifetime ban from the securities industry.

About a week later I received an email from someone at the Milken Institute, the philanthropic think tank that Milken founded in the early 1990s. Milken wanted to speak to me about the article. I told my company, and was told I couldn’t do it. I said to myself, “I’m speaking to Michael Milken!”

My financial career started in the 1980s when Milken was a giant. There are essentially four money-making roles in Wall Street’s bond business: traders, salespersons, strategists and desk heads. Milken had a reputation as being the best at all four roles at the same time. Like it or hate it, the man reinvented finance.

On the appointed day, I called Milken. After exchanging greetings, he said that I was mistaken in my article, mainly because overall, companies are better managed as private entities — basically the same message he had been giving since the early 1980s. I told him that all I was saying was that if it’s a great time for PE borrowers, it probably wasn’t a good time for the lenders (bond and loan holders) because they weren’t getting compensated enough for their risk.

Milken realized that I wasn’t criticizing the private ownership model; I was just taking the other side of the coin. From there we had a very pleasant 15-minute discussion, really just about life in general. After we hung up I said to my wife, “That guy really could sell ice to an Eskimo. Today is Tuesday and if he told me it was Thursday, I’d believe him!”

The Museum

First the good news. Admission is free except for the Kenneth C. Griffin Holodeck Perpetual Story Machine exhibit, which is $15. The MCAAD is a beautiful space with lots of cool digital art displays and a very friendly and helpful staff. Interestingly, the center is located in the old Riggs Bank Building, which is kind of funny considering that a scandal involving the failure to monitor millions of dollars of suspicious transactions from Saudi Arabia after 9/11 eventually sank the bank in 2004.

Overall though, I was disappointed. After reading Bloomberg’s review, I thought the center would be some sort of wild Clockwork Orange experience where words, slogans, visions and flashing lights would come at me in rapid succession to alter my cynical mind into buying into the Milken and Friends version of the American Dream. The David Geffen “Hall of Dreams” sort of did this with charts and graphs about America’s changing opinions on topics such as gay marriage, but I walked out of it as cynical as ever. Words like “Opportunity” and “Immigration” were on the ceiling, and strange white digital clouds “floated” on the glass railings. Perhaps they were supposed to represent dreams.

It made me feel like I was back in the 3rd grade being taught the super-sanitized fairytale version of American History from a textbook published in 1962. Boring pablum. Nowhere was this more evident than the Holodeck. Three saccharine-sweet clichéd stories of making it in America against steep odds that made nearly zero use of the advertised cutting-edge tech. Instead of talking holograms, we got cartoonish-looking people on a screen.

A Bit Of A Disconnect From Reality?

The feel-great American dream vibe of the MCAAD differs quite a bit from a recent Wall Street Journal and NORC survey:

“The share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found.

Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys.”

Interestingly, soon after entering the MCAAD you can sit down at a little booth and pick videos from the “Foundations of the Dream Gallery” and listen to both everyday Americans as well as famous ones like Katie Couric and Elmo from Sesame Street. Yes, Elmo shares his American dream story. You could choose different themes or groups of people like “Walmart.” This option provides testimonials from Walmart employees who got their start at the company and have made a nice life and career. That jogged my memory that Alice Walton, a scion of the family that started Walmart, was a big contributor to the center.

This was pushback against the narrative that Walmart was one of the main actors in hollowing out America’s manufacturing base, such as in this 2015 study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute that showed the effect Walmart had on American manufacturing jobs and the trade deficit with China.

When the U.S. supported China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, the argument was that millions of jobs would be created in China which in turn would create tremendous demand for U.S. imports. Those imports would create great jobs for Americans displaced by manufacturing moving to China.

That didn’t happen. Instead, companies like Walmart expanded like wildfire with their low-cost product strategy as their vendors moved out of the USA and profit margins for much of corporate America increased sharply with the reduction in labor costs. However, for the displaced American worker, labor unions were broken, wages stagnated and good jobs with benefits were replaced with part time, low-wage jobs at companies like… Walmart.

Meanwhile, the Chinese consistently manipulated their currency, subsidized industries and essentially broke many WTO rules while the United States looked the other way. The combination of cheap imports and stagnant wages in the U.S. dramatically lowered inflation. Lower inflation drove interest rates down substantially. Then when Wall Street had its subprime mortgage bubble burst in 2008 causing “The Great Recession,” we had a decade of Federal Reserve interest rates at or near zero. The chart below shows the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury Note from 1990 to 2021. We start at about 9% and end up lower than 2%.

Significantly wider corporate profit margins combined with historically low interest rates were nirvana for corporate America, especially Wall Street and hence, the $500 million Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. Perhaps they should add another floor to the museum with a hologram exhibit of this bit of history. The MCAAD didn’t have to go full-bore pessimistic, but at least Milken and Friends could give a nod to the serious challenges America still faces to make the dream come true for millions more. Instead, there are only brief mentions of things like racial and gender exclusion sprinkled about in the different exhibits.

If the MCAAD is, as Rachel Goslins, the center’s executive director stated, “unapologetically hopeful about the American dream,” shouldn’t the many challenges and potential ideas to solve them be addressed somewhere? After all, hope is not a strategy.

“Why?” was my biggest question when I left the MCAAD. Why would Milken and the other billionaires spend lots of money and time putting all this together?

The messaging of the MCAAD is consistent with what we have witnessed over the last few years from both sides of the political spectrum. Economists-turned-pundits like Paul Krugman told Americans in 2023 that they shouldn’t feel crappy about the economy as inflation raged. He blamed the disconnect between strong economic data and many citizens’ negative opinions on the economy on political partisanship.

Meanwhile, President Trump recently proclaimed in a Truth Social post that, “Prices are WAY DOWN in the USA with virtually no inflation.”

There’s plenty of inflation. Healthcare costs continue to rise, housing costs continue to rise, food prices continue to rise, auto and home insurance continue to rise. It’s a long list of rising.

The politicians and the plutocrats of all stripes can lie to the American people about many things and get away with it. However, when it comes to how Americans are feeling about their economic reality, as Dylan said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

(racket.news)

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“IT’S CALLED THE AMERICAN DREAM because you have to be asleep to believe it”…

— George Carlin

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“THEY LAID ME DOWN again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of my mouth. ‘The artery's gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting—I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale comer of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me—wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.”

― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

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JOHN BROWN, CIRCA 1856.

When I first learned about John Brown in school, he was portrayed as a fanatical, almost unhinged figure, a religious zealot who took his crusade against slavery too far. The lessons focused on his violence, his failed raid, and his execution, painting him as a warning rather than a hero.

But even then, I couldn’t help secretly admiring him. Beneath the chaos and controversy, there was something raw and courageous about a man who refused to accept slavery as the price of peace. While others debated and waited, John Brown acted and even though his methods were extreme, his conviction forced the country to confront its greatest moral sin.

There’s a very famous quote that I think perfectly captures the essence of John Brown: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” He lived in a time when slavery was not only legal but deeply woven into the moral and economic fabric of society, and instead of adjusting to that sickness, he rejected it entirely. While most white Americans of his era accepted, ignored, or rationalized slavery, Brown saw it for what it truly was—an unforgivable evil.

Before his execution, John Brown was calm and resolute. Imprisoned in Charlestown, Virginia, he spent his final weeks reading the Bible, writing letters, and expressing no regret for his actions. Even his captors admired his dignity and calm demeanor.

On December 2, 1859, he faced the gallows without fear, and left a note which read: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”

The American Civil War would begin less than two years later.

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LORENA

(A song popular with soldiers on both sides of the Civil War)

The years creep slowly by, Lorena,
The snow is on the grass again.
The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena,
The frost gleams where the flow’rs have been.
But the heart throbs on as warmly now,
As when the summer days were nigh.
Oh, the sun can never dip so low
A-down affection’s cloudless sky.

A hundred months have passed, Lorena,
Since last I held that hand in mine,
And felt the pulse beat fast, Lorena,
Though mine beat faster far than thine.
A hundred months, ’twas flowery May,
When up the hilly slope we climbed,
To watch the dying of the day,
And hear the distant church bells chime.

We loved each other then, Lorena,
More than we ever dared to tell;
And what we might have been, Lorena,
Had but our lovings prospered well —
But then, ’tis past, the years are gone,
I’ll not call up their shadowy forms;
I’ll say to them, “Lost years, sleep on!
Sleep on! nor heed life’s pelting storms.”

The story of that past, Lorena,
Alas! I care not to repeat,
The hopes that could not last, Lorena,
They lived, but only lived to cheat.
I would not cause e’en one regret
To rankle in your bosom now;
For “if we try we may forget,”
Were words of thine long years ago.

Yes, these were words of thine, Lorena,
They burn within my memory yet;
They touched some tender chords, Lorena,
Which thrill and tremble with regret.
‘Twas not thy woman’s heart that spoke;
Thy heart was always true to me:
A duty, stern and pressing, broke
The tie which linked my soul with thee.

It matters little now, Lorena,
The past is in the eternal past;
Our heads will soon lie low, Lorena,
Life’s tide is ebbing out so fast.
There is a Future! O, thank God!
Of life this is so small a part!
‘Tis dust to dust beneath the sod;
But there, up there, ’tis heart to heart.

— lyrics by Henry D. L. Webster (1856)

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“ALL THE WAR-PROPAGANDA, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

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LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

What Is the Insurrection Act That Trump Says He’s Considering?

Texas Troops Head to Chicago as Trump Weighs Use of Emergency Powers

Trump Calls Off Diplomatic Outreach to Venezuela

Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August

Treasury Defends Lawfulness of Minting a $1 Trump Coin

Flight Delays Begin as Air Traffic Staffing Shortages Worsen

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From Ghislaine Maxwell

We Finally Have Free Anti-Robocall Tools That Work

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“SOONER OR LATER…one has to take sides — if one is to remain human.”

— Graham Greene, ‘The Quiet American’

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EVERYTHING BEFORE AND AFTER OCTOBER 7 Explains Why October 7 Happened

Israel supporters don’t want you looking at what happened before October 7, and they don’t want you looking at anything that’s happened since.

by Caitlin Johnstone

Everything before October 7 explains why October 7 happened, and so does everything that’s happened since.

Look at what happened before October 7 and you’ll see year after year of murder, oppression and abuse.

Look at everything that’s happened since October 7 and you’ll understand the kind of sadistic, psychopathic regime the Palestinians have been living under this entire time.

Israel supporters don’t want you looking at what happened before October 7, and they don’t want you looking at anything that’s happened since. They just want you to pretend history began and ended with a bunch of Hitlerite savages attacking innocent Jews for no reason.

And they don’t even want you looking at the day of October 7 too closely, either. Looking too closely at the events of that day bring up inconvenient questions about the Hannibal Directive and what percentage of the death toll was actually caused by the IDF firing on their own people. Inconvenient questions about the suspicious stock trading in the lead-up to the attack and the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence that high-level Israeli officials allowed the attack to proceed undefended in order to advance the genocidal land grab we’re seeing advanced now.

They only want you looking at the parts of October 7 that make Israel look like an innocent little lamb who was attacked completely out of the blue and had no choice but to reluctantly respond with military force.

Forget the scorched earth incineration of the Gaza Strip.

Forget the bombed-out hospitals and methodically dismantled healthcare system.

Forget the hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been deliberately starved to death.

Forget the fact that every relevant human rights institution on earth has determined that Israel is committing genocide, and that zero comparable humanitarian institutions have said it isn’t.

Forget the fact that human rights experts had been describing Gaza as a giant concentration camp or open-air prison for years prior to October 7.

Forget the fact that Israel had been routinely murdering Palestinian children and other civilians in the months prior to the Hamas attack.

Don’t look at any of that stuff. Just look at the stuff that makes Israel look like the victim.

That’s the story, anyway. Luckily, fewer and fewer people are buying into it.

The longer this genocide goes on for, the more the world has come to view October 7 as Israel reaping what it had long been sowing.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

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BALFOUR TO BLAIR

by Anne Irfan

The British government has formally backed Donald Trump’s latest plan for Gaza, which proposes a leading role for Tony Blair in the Strip’s future governance. Under the Trump plan, which was devised in consultation with Israel but without any Palestinian input, a “technocratic apolitical committee” will govern Gaza under the supervision of a “Board of Peace” headed by Trump himself. The 20-point plan states that the committee will include “qualified Palestinians” as members, but names no one other than Blair.

The idea of a governing role for Blair in Gaza revives the legacy of British colonial rule in Palestine, which formally ended in 1948. On November 2, 1917, the day that the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote his letter declaring support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” British troops marched into Gaza from Egypt (which they had occupied since 1882). A month later, the British army seized Jerusalem. Within a year, they had occupied the whole of Palestine.

Five years later, the League of Nations issued Britain with its Mandate for Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the text of the Mandate, which directed Britain to “secure the establishment of a Jewish national home” in the country.

In other words, British rule was supposed to both prepare Palestine for self-governance and to deny self-determination to the majority of its people.

Under the Mandate, the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) was given significant autonomy, with a recognized role for the Jewish Agency and its para-state institutions, including the paramilitary Haganah. Palestinian Arab institutions, by contrast, had considerably less autonomy and no recognized representative role in the Mandate government. The establishment of the state of Israel on 78 per cent of Palestine in 1948 was, in no small measure, enabled by three decades of British occupation. When the British left Palestine in May that year, they handed over control of much of the state infrastructure to the Jewish Agency, headed by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

But British interference in Palestine did not end with its formal withdrawal in May 1948. Eight years later, Britain had a direct hand in Israel’s first occupation of Gaza. In league with France, they plotted an offensive against Nasser’s Egypt that involved a coordinated invasion of Gaza and Sinai in the autumn of 1956. The Israeli army stayed in Gaza for four months. The brutal occupation that included massacres of Palestinians in Khan Younis and Rafah refugee camps. Some men were forcibly disappeared, their bodies later discovered in mass graves. Many of the victims had been driven out of their homes in Palestine eight years earlier, when Zionist militias and the Israeli army had expelled Palestinians across the country as part of the drive to create a Jewish state. As countless Palestinians have pointed out, the Nakba did not end in 1948.

When Israel occupied Gaza again in 1967 – this time along with the West Bank – it drew directly on the British Mandate’s Emergency Regulations to impose military rule on Palestinians in the occupied territories (as it had in its regime over Palestinians inside Israel until 1966). Israeli practices such as administrative detention (arresting and incarcerating Palestinians indefinitely without trial), land grabs, house demolitions and restriction of movement were all grounded in British laws.

In the 1940s, the British Mandate authorities had used the Emergency Regulations against both Palestinians and Jewish immigrants to Palestine, including Zionist insurgents such as Menachem Begin, who led the Irgun Zvai Leumi militia when it massacred more than a hundred unarmed Palestinians at Deir Yassin in 1948. Serving as Israeli prime minister from 1977 to 1983, Begin deployed the same measures against thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Forty years later, the Israeli regime continues to draw on the same Emergency Regulations to facilitate mass detention, forced disappearances, land grabs and displacement in the Gaza genocide.

Directly or indirectly, Britain has had a hand in the governance of Palestine since its troops invaded in 1917. Blair’s envisioned role in Gaza would not be a first for him personally, either. He served as the Middle East envoy of the so-called Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia) from 2007 to 2015 – a period that saw the imposition of the Israeli blockade and the three most devastating wars on Gaza before 2023. As envoy, Blair spent little time in Gaza and was criticized for possible conflicts of interest in his opaque private business dealings in the region. Palestinian figures condemned his lack of even-handedness and “gross efforts to please the Israelis’. He was already widely reviled in the Arab world for his part in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

By endorsing the Trump plan, Keir Starmer continues the long-standing British position of denying the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination. The UK’s recognition of Palestine at the UN last month was, it seems, a mere blip, that will go no further than its symbolic function. In October 2023, when he was still leader of the opposition, Starmer said on LBC that Israel had the right to cut off the power and water supply to Gaza. The water stoppage was widely condemned on supposedly apolitical humanitarian grounds – even President Biden called on Israel to reverse it, and Starmer two weeks later told Parliament that “basic services … cannot be denied” – but the denial of essential services is inextricably linked to the denial of political rights. The Trump-Blair plan for Gaza, which continues to deny both, is colonialism by another name.

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