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AN APPROACHING UPPER LOW is cooling temperatures. Precipitation chances increase through Friday with light to moderate rainfall forecast. Thunderstorm capable of strong winds will accompany this storm system Friday over the coastal waters and likely through portions of the North Coast. Overnight low temperatures will continue to trend colder over the week and through the weekend, bringing the potential for frost and some freezing interior temperatures. A colder storm systems is forecast early next, and will bring additional rainfall and the potential for some mountain snow. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): An overcast 52F this Thursday morning on the coast. Mostly cloudy today leading to rain Friday then clearing Saturday. More rain on Monday.
BOB VAUGHAN
On behalf of the Anderson Valley Senior Center’s board of directors and “family,“ we would like to express our deepest condolences to Bob Vaughn‘s family as he lost a valiant battle against cancer. He passed away on Saturday, September 13, 2025 with family by his side.
Bob had a larger than life personality and liked to talk about his many life experiences and adventures that took him all around the country, including to the remote areas of Alaska. Bob wore many hats in this community, including hosting a local radio show on KZYX where he earned the nickname “24 Hour Bob.“ He was also known for working at many of the local restaurants such as the Horn Of Zeese, Roadhouse Barbecue and the Buckhorn, to name a few. Closer to our heart, he was the Senior Center’s cook for over two years until he had to make his health a priority. We appreciated his contributions to the Center and our local seniors.
Rest in peace, Bob.
A memorial is planned to honor Bob on Saturday, October 18 from 4 - 6 pm at the Mendocino Dragon Community at 9870 Gray Fox Rd. in Boonville.
MARCO MCCLEAN: Albion Ridge. I just got up from working on this coming Friday's radio show and went outside. It's another one of those perfect-air nights. Cool but not cold. The air is dead-still. No sound, partly because of so much water in the air. Moonlight comes from every direction. Perfect quiet peace, all the angry yammering a million miles away. I love this.
Go outside and see for yourself how nice it is.
BETH SWEHLA: Our school is getting a new track combined with a soccer/football field. Today several of our agriculture classes had a possible career experience relating to turf grass or sod. Students learned about growing and installing turf or sod as a career. Then the classes went out to the track and watched the new turf being installed. They were able to ask questions to some of the crew. It is going to take at least another 3 days to complete the installation. The students can't wait to be able to use the field! So exciting!
PUBLIC HEARING SET THURSDAY IN HOPLAND ON PROPOSED WATER RATE INCREASE
by Sydney Fishman
The Hopland Public Utility District will hold a public hearing this week on a proposed 40% water and wastewater rate increase that would help pay for aging infrastructure, inflation costs and a utility relocation program.
The district prepared a study examining operational costs, water and wastewater treatment, facility replacements and upgrades, and other factors, according to a notice sent by the district to residents.
The study found that the rate increase was needed to increase the district’s reinvestment in aging infrastructure, address the impact of inflation on all costs, and fund a utility relocation project that is being required by Caltrans, the district’s notice states.
The 40% increase in water usage rates would mean that the current rate of $1.90 per 1,000 gallons would rise to $2.66 per 1,000 gallons. If approved, the new rate would take effect Nov. 1. Additional annual increases are proposed through July 2029. The proposed percentage increase for each year can be viewed at this link.
The district will hold a public hearing Thursday at Brutocao Cellars, where residents can learn more about the proposal. If more than 50% of property owners oppose the rate increase with a written protest, it cannot be approved by the district. To be valid, written protests must be delivered in person at the public hearing or mailed to the Hopland Public Utility District at 151 Laws Ave. in Ukiah. The protests must be received before the end of the public hearing.
The public hearing is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Brutocao Cellars, 13500 S. Highway 101 in Hopland.
The cost study prepared by the Hopland Public Utility District is available by contacting the district office at (707) 462-2666.
(Mendocino Voice)
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…
On September 22nd, 2025, The City of Fort Bragg's newest employee, Sage Statham, took his Oath of Office! Sage is Fort Bragg’s new Director of Broadband and Digital Infrastructure.
While this may be his first time working for The City of Fort Bragg, this is not his first foray into working with MCN. He started as a technician with MCN in 1997 and later served as the Manager of MCN for nearly a decade. Please join us in welcoming him to our team!
UKIAH HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMUNITY WORKSHOP
City of Ukiah and the Historical Society of Mendocino County for this community conversation regarding historic preservation!
On Thursday, October 16, 2025, starting at 5:30 p.m., the City of Ukiah and Historical Society of Mendocino County will co-host a historic preservation community workshop at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center.
The purpose of the October 16th workshop is to engage with the community on recommendations for the drafting of the City’s Historic Preservation policy. The City and Historical Society of Mendocino County will provide information of architectural and historic resources in Ukiah, facilitate questions and comments on the historic preservation process, and receive preliminary input on the City’s approach to the drafting of the City’s first-ever historic preservation ordinance.
Event: Historic Preservation Community Workshop
Date and Time: Thursday, October 16, 2025, 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Location: Ukiah Valley Conference Center, Cabernet Room #1, 200 South School Street, Ukiah
https://www.mendocinocountyhistory.org
UKIAH’S REVENUE ANNEXATION
Editor,
No Sane Person Would Want To Be Annexed Into The City Of Ukiah. Protest…Protest…Protest…Just Say No.
Most in the area to be annexed have The Sherriff’s Dept. Wells, Other Water Districts, Septic Tanks, And PG&E.
Ukiah…Sewer is $60 Basic charge with a usage (??) fee. Water has a meter Base charge of $51 and a usage charge. Additionally, the more water you use, your sewer charges go up. So don’t pee, shower, or water your lawn. Then there is a street light fee $2. Electricity has a base fee of $13.50, then a usage fee… and if you medically need electricity, the bill could kill you. Next mandatory garbage services…$32 a month. You do not need police, you have a well-equipped Sherriff department.
Now a family of 2 or 3 is paying around $350. You haven’t turned on the air or watered your lawn.
And you still will pay PG&E for your gas appliances
Ukiah is annexing you for revenue. The street repair on the East side of State St. is Cheap Slurry Seal, not the smooth blacktop for the western hills.
The city of Ukah is Slick about how they promote annexing. It allowed Ukiah Valley Fire district to annex Ukiah. It has cost property owners in Ukiah an additional $100 on taxes. Why? Revenue or cronyism. We had a fire department, paid for with sales taxes and property taxes. Could it be that several at UVFD are Double Or Triple Dipping On Retirement. And every time an Ambulance goes out, so does a Fire Truck, it’s in the contract…Job protection…This is costing Ukiah property owners, and it will cost you.
Marsha Depriest
Ukiah
KZYX BENEFIT CONCERT (today)
Upcoming Oak and Thorn Presents Concerts:
10/09/25 - John Doyle - Abalone Room, Little River Inn, Little River, CA
10/15/25 - Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas - Abalone Room, Little River Inn, Little River, CA
11/07/25 - Yann Falquet and Keith Murphy - Abalone Room, Little River Inn, Little River, CA
04/30/26 - Nuala Kennedy and Eamon O'Leary - Abalone Room, Little River Inn, Little River, CA
KZYX 2025 FALL PLEDGE DRIVE
The seasons are changing once again, and with the seasons, we are headed into our Fall Pledge Drive. So much has happened and changed in the Public Media ecosystem since the pledge drive last Spring. CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) was wiped out with the stroke of a pen, leaving rural Public Media stations especially vulnerable, with funds clawed back. Agencies that aid in emergency services, like FEMA or NOAA, are undergoing drastic staffing and capacity challenges. This is a time where we need to show up for our community and decide what is important. We need to be more self-sufficient. Our credo for the last pledge drive was "Resilience." Indeed, this is a time in the world where we need to be resilient in many ways.
This past spring, the landowner where I rent had his fire insurance cancelled. His response to qualify for new insurance was to cut everything down in our garden: trees, plants, and anything else that grew. A redwood tree planted for a departed friend was cut to the ground. An avocado tree grown from a seed by our child, cut down, and every leaf removed. It completely changed the makeup of the garden, which was now in full sun. We adapted. As I was tending to our Fall garden, I saw resilience. Where there was a redwood tree stump, three trees sprouted, the avocado tree with no leaves persevered, and new growth appeared. This was happening all over our garden. What had been brutally cut down was slowly coming back (don't tell our property owner). The same, but different.
That is how I feel about Mendocino County Public Broadcasting. I see sprigs of positive change, slowly growing and making us less reliant on old ways of doing things, and forging ahead with the resilience that our ecosystem has mandated we do.
Without you, we can't do any of it. I know it's a hard lift in these times, but to forge ahead in this new garden and have fertile grounds to grow, we need your help. Please donate what you can. Become a sustaining member if you're not. Together, we can make this KZYX&Z garden flourish and be sustainable.
Thank you.
Andre de Channes, Executive Director
SUPERVISOR NORVELL alerts us to the following report by an organization called the “Capital Research Center” entitled “Infiltrated: The Ideological Capture of Homelessness Advocacy” in which the authors describe “the institutional networks and ideological projects perpetuate the problem under the guise of solving it.” And, “The rhetoric of ‘housing is a human right’ and ‘abolish homelessness’ is seductive, but it functions as a smokescreen. Behind it lies a set of interests dedicated to dismantling enforcement, expanding bureaucracies, and keeping streams of funding owing into activism rather than into effective service delivery to those in desperate need.”
But the authors’ own “ideological” bias leads them far-afield to note that “Extremist networks involved in pro-Hamas activism are also active in homelessness advocacy coalitions.” And one of the report’s chapters is entitled “Marxists In Their Own Words.”
According to Wikipedia, the Capital Research Center “is an American conservative 501(c)(3) non-profit watchdog group located in Washington, D.C., that monitors liberal money in politics.”
Predictably, the report authors, lead by former Heritage Foundation execs, don’t have much to recommended beyond the cliched observation that liberal money is making the problem worse, concluding only that “Reform requires more than funding: it requires accountability, a focus on recovery-oriented programs with measurable results, and vigilance against the misuse of humanitarian platforms for ideological ends.”
The full report is at: https://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/Infiltrated-Report.pdf
ALONG A LONELY ROAD, A BOULDER REWROTE CALIFORNIA'S STORY
The Spyrock site in Mendocino County offers a rare glimpse into California's earliest artistry
by Matt LaFever
Beneath the shifting shadows of California’s redwood curtain, Highway 101 cuts through a dim, perpetual twilight. Between glimpses of wild rivers and backwoods compounds, travelers pass driveways that seem to vanish into the forest — roads that lead nowhere, except to the people hardened enough to live there.
Down one of these lonesome spurs in far northern Mendocino County rests a fabled boulder, long known to locals but, until the early 1980s, never formally documented by science. That changed when a state archaeologist first encountered it, realizing the site provided evidence that ancient Californians possessed an artistic mastery long overlooked in Northern California’s archaeological record.
In 1982, Dan Foster was working as the first archaeologist ever hired by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Before Foster’s time, the state’s foresters and timber planners knew little about the archaeological sites hidden in plain sight across California, often leading to their quiet ruin. Logging jobs were “leading to destruction of sites, and the state didn’t know how big the problem was,” Foster told SFGATE in a recent phone interview.
Naturally, his new role led him to the North Coast — a region forever tied to the timber industry — where he set out to identify and document archaeological sites before logging operations began, a practice that effectively started with his hiring. While surveying a hillside in Mendocino County, Foster was approached by a forester who offered to show him a locally known rock covered in mysterious carvings. It stood along Spyrock Road, a remote mountain route outside Laytonville — about 150 miles north of San Francisco, deep in Mendocino County’s backcountry.
Arriving at the site, Foster realized the petroglyphs sat “right along the Spyrock Road.” In a photo obtained by SFGATE, his old-school work truck is parked on the dirt shoulder, passenger door open, beside a sun-bleached boulder rising from the dry roadside grass.
Reviewing the archaeological literature of the time, Foster realized previous researchers had likely confused the Spyrock site with another, leaving its true location undocumented. He went on to plot it precisely within state records and conduct a comprehensive analysis of its carvings.
“This relatively small rock contains over 100 individual elements,” Foster wrote in a 1983 report — carvings layered across centuries, some ancient, some recent. The most prominent design is what he called the “target,” a “symmetrical arrangement of concentric circles” that are “well formed and often appear in bas relief.” Unlike the simple pecked markings found elsewhere on the North Coast, these shapes were sculpted outward. Bas relief, Foster explained, creates the effect that the circles “pop out of the rock because they’re not just scratched in, but it’s a sculptured work.”
The result, he wrote, is a startling illusion in which “the rings eject out of the rock,” which he says sets the rock site apart “from all of the other concentric circle sites in North America.”
Foster also noted subtler patterns — cup-like depressions, “animal tracks” and crosshatched lines “cut very deep into the rock surface.” He suspected these markings came from different moments in time, each generation leaving its own sign on the stone. “A few wavy lines are present,” he observed, “and seem to be associated with other motifs such as a target.”
Before Foster published his Spyrock findings, academia offered little about the North Coast’s rock art beyond “this little simple description that there’s a few boulders with cupules and incised lines. And that’s it.”
It was this boulder perched alongside a lonely mountain road that demonstrated to Foster “that there are some really interesting and very complicated petroglyph sites in the North Coast region that deserve to have some scholarly attention.”
Looking for answers, Foster turned to Samuel Alfred Barrett and Edwin Loeb, two turn-of-the-century anthropologists who spent time in the region documenting the lives of the Pomo. In texts, they described a fertility ritual involving rock sites carved with cupules and incised lines. Women would visit these stones and perform a ceremonial act around them. “With the flint knife she makes four motions as though to cut the rock,” Loeb wrote. “Then four times she really cuts it.”
Foster said that this early anthropological observation, dating back a century, offers rare insight into the recurring symbology found in the North Coast region. “Most of the time we stand and look at a rock art site and wonder, why was this done? What do they mean?” he said. In this case, though, connecting the baby rock rituals to the carvings allowed scientists to see meaning with unusual clarity — a moment when observation and interpretation finally meet.
The anthropological record of this Pomo ceremony has provided archaeologists like Foster with a rare look at an important cultural context that may have influenced the rock art they examined so closely: “Native people allowed anthropologists to quietly sit aside and watch, and then we can match those notes to certain carvings. That never happens.”
‘It’s A Church’
Today, archaeologist Douglas Hutt — a member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, descended from the Yuki and Konkow peoples — continues the work of interpreting California’s ancient cultural landscapes. He has served as a tribal archaeologist and cultural resource specialist with agencies including Cal Fire, Caltrans and PG&E.
Hutt said traditional Western archaeologists “don’t get the whole picture,” and part of his role is to tease out the “cultural landscapes” of ancient sites — to take in everything at once and interpret it in context. When working a village site, he looks beyond isolated artifacts to read the land itself: the soil, the contours, the remnants of “house pits” where dwellings once stood. His training, he explained, lets him reverse-engineer what life looked like millennia ago, to build a modern picture of “where they processed their meat … where the men sat … where the women sat.”
When it comes to Spyrock, Hutt pushed back on connecting the site to the Pomo people, saying, “All that stuff up by Spyrock is all Wailaki,” calling the area their “territorial zone.” Thousands of years later, he said, the Cahto adopted the region. The Pomo, by contrast, “didn’t extend north of Willits.”
Foster agreed that attributing Mendocino’s petroglyphs to one group, as Loeb and Barrett did, “proved to be kind of an oversimplified explanation.”
To Hutt, Spyrock’s meaning endures far beyond its carvings. “It’s a church,” he said, a sacred space that continues to hold spiritual weight. He called the site “specifically unique” as “the most decorated rock art site in all of Northern California.”
Despite that distinction, the ancient boulder lies just off a public road, its only protection the remoteness of the mountains that surround it. “Every year we have to deal with looting,” Hutt said. “And not just looting but destruction, intentional willful destruction of sites.”
When Foster first arrived at Spyrock in 1982, he found remnants of ancient people scattered around the large boulder — what he described as “broken stone artifacts.” Less than fifty years later, he said, “There’s no artifacts to be seen at all.”
But Foster doesn’t see his work as a story of loss; it’s a call to awareness. “Getting the public excited about the archaeology of California is a very good thing,” he said, noting that his findings helped shape some of the state’s “strongest regulations” for cultural resource protection.
When Foster was initially hired by the state, loggers were still unknowingly cutting through ancient sites. His work changed that, pushing the state to require foresters to spot, report and protect archaeological resources before the first tree came down.
For Foster, the lesson remains simple and sobering. “All of these natural resources can be managed and renewed,” he said, with one notable exception: “Traces of historic past — once gone, they’re lost forever.”
(sfgate.com)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, October 8, 2025
ARMANDO AJTUN-BARRERA, 39, Harbor City/Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for refusing DUI-chemical test, probation revocation.
RICKIE CURTIS, 52, Willits. Battery, contempt of court.
ARMANDO GONZALEZ, 25, Ukiah. Unlawful sexual intercourse with minor more than three years younger than perpetrator.
CHRISTOPHER LOPEZ, 36, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.
INGRID MITCHELL, 44, Willits. Domestic battery.
FRANK ONETO JR., 51, Ukiah. Parole violation.
NICHOLAS YADON, 29, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, probation violation.
BY GOING LOW WITH PROP 50, CALIFORNIA’S DEMOCRATS DESERVE WHAT’S COMING FOR THEM
Editor,
I thought gerrymandering was a bad thing? Whatever happened to “they go low, we go high?”
Democrats have a habit of blaming their losses on anything but themselves. It was Ralph Nader, then Russia, then Joe Biden. Or there’s always racism, voter ID laws, ignorance in the flyover states and the Supreme Court.
None of those reasons is plausible for why California lost one House seat after the 2020 census and is on track to lose five more in 2030.
Many people have fled (or stayed away from) California’s unaffordable housing, high taxes and hostility toward business. They are justifiably fed up with paying a premium to live somewhere with pervasive homelessness, mediocre public education and low job growth.
May I suggest that the supermajority of Democrats in the state Legislature earn votes by tackling some of those issues?
California’s Democratic leadership missed an opportunity to show they are willing to stand for something. Instead, by supporting Proposition 50’s gerrymandering, they have revealed themselves to be just as debased as President Donald Trump, defined only by what they are against and determined to avoid changing themselves into a party worth voting for.
Whatever losses Democrats face will be well-deserved.
Brendan Bolles
Mill Valley
OSHA VIOLATIONS AT HUMBOLDT SAWMILL COMPANY
Editor,
What company is that? What happened to Humboldt Redwood Company? Was it one of those financial paper shuffles that goes on to limit liability of the ultimate owners? The Pacific Lumber Company got bought out, became Palco, went bankrupt, became Humboldt Redwood Company, then Mendocino Redwood Company, and now Humboldt Sawmill Company?
The change is made to send more profits from here to San Francisco’s Fisher family.
As ownership of enterprises leaves the county, the county suffers. The collapse of the giant roof in Scotia (Marathon Investments, https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/scotia-the-california-town-owned-by-a-new-york-investment-firm) is a graphic example of the lack of care of owners prioritizing profits over longevity. We know how this story goes – fewer jobs, lower wages and benefits, all of which are a drain on the county economy, sales tax revenues, ultimately leading to a poorer county with terrible roads and impossibly tough decisions for the Supervisors to make.
The seeming failures of the fish farm and off-shore wind may not be a bad thing. Between AI and automation, the promise of jobs would likely be abandoned. Humboldt’s strength is its people, the modest ways people find ways to serve each other, creating an economy where dollars circulate locally. We have “needs” and enough people to serve those “needs” to keep people making a living, rather than a killing. We have the natural resource base for such a people-centered economy, but not enough for investment firms that prey on those resources.
Michael Evenson
Petrolia
ON LINE COMMENT:
“The Pacific Lumber Company got bought out, became Palco, went bankrupt, became Humboldt Redwood Company, then Mendocino Redwood Company, and now Humboldt Sawmill Company?”
The author of the letter has a bit of catching up to do.
Pacific Lumber wasn’t bought out — it was subject to a hostile takeover — and it never “became PALCO” which was simply shorthand for Pacific Lumber.
And the progression of companies wasn’t HRC, MRC and then Humboldt Sawmill Company.
MRC was formed first in 1998 and acquired the PL timberlands and sawmills out of bankruptcy in 2008.
Following the acquisition, HRC was formed and later, in 2018, HSC was created — MRC, HRC, HSC and others are all under the umbrella of the “Mendocino Family of Companies” which is one of the tentacles of the Fisher family investment portfolio.
The author is correct about one thing — forming multiple legal entities is a corporate shell game intended to limit liability.
The linked article laments the decline of Scotia but Scotia was never owned by the Fisher family and their host of companies.
The author laments the demise of local ownership, but PL and the people running it were headquartered in S.F. well before the hostile takeover by Hurwitz in 1985.
And Scotia was a company town to the core — the cheap rents and other percs kept the workers tied to the company like feudal serfs to their lord — but also blocked them from home ownership, the number one wealth accumulator for working families.
DEMOCRACY DENIED
Editor,
Regarding “Newsom vetoes bill intended to help S.F. expand drug-free housing for homeless people” (San Francisco, SFChronicle.com, Oct. 2): Assembly Bill 255 passed by a unanimous vote in the Assembly and the state Senate.
Over the past few months, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been talking about the need to stand up to President Donald Trump and save democracy. The governor vetoed a bill that was passed unanimously by the citizens’ representatives.
What style and form of democracy is that?
Pete Campbell
San Jose
WHY ARE TAXPAYERS FUNDING KRISTI NOEM’S TV ADS?
Editor:
How is it possible that Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, is allowed to advertise on television? Surely our taxes should not go to a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet to tell us (proudly) of arresting Latinos who have lived, worked, paid taxes and raised families in good faith for many years in the U.S., many of them trying to become citizens all this time. Do we really want our tax money to go to Noem to pay for these adds?
Jennifer Nichols
Sebastopol
MEGA EARTHQUAKE COULD TRIGGER SHAKING ALONG THE ENTIRE WEST COAST
by Tara Duggan
A megaquake in the Pacific Northwest could trigger a large earthquake along California’s San Andreas Fault, creating an unprecedented catastrophe up and down the Pacific Coast, a new study has found.
The study suggests that the fearsome Cascadia subduction zone, a fault line running offshore from Northern California to British Columbia that is capable of producing earthquakes of magnitude 9 or higher, has triggered large quakes in San Francisco and elsewhere along the northern part of the San Andreas Fault. In some cases, it’s possible that quakes on the San Andreas followed the first quake within minutes or hours, according to the study, which was published Sept. 29.
For example, researchers found evidence that the last magnitude 9 earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone — in 1700 and so large that it caused a tsunami in Japan — also produced a major earthquake on the northern San Andreas Fault. That part of the fault extends from the Mendocino Junction offshore of Humboldt County, where it meets the Cascadia, to Hollister (San Benito County). That earthquake could have been as large as the magnitude 7.9 earthquake in 1906 San Francisco, said Jason Patton, a co-author of the study and engineering geologist at the California Department of Conservation.
The authors found evidence of 18 other large earthquakes on the Cascadia that preceded ones on the northern San Andreas over the past 3,000 years, said Patton, who along with lead author Chris Goldfinger has been studying the possible correlation between the two faults for more than 20 years. This latest study has the strongest evidence so far that earthquakes on the Cascadia Fault preceded those on the San Andreas, said Patton.
“We’re used to hearing the ‘Big One’ — Cascadia — being this catastrophic huge thing,” said Goldfinger, a marine geologist at Oregon State University, in a news release. “It turns out it’s not the worst-case scenario.”
Goldfinger is from the Bay Area and has said that if the Cascadia went off when he were home in Palo Alto, he would drive east.
“We could expect that an earthquake on one of the faults alone would draw down the resources of the whole country to respond to it,” Goldfinger said. “And if they both went off together, then you’ve got potentially San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver all in an emergency situation in a compressed timeframe.”
Quakes on the Cascadia are caused when the Gorda Plate is pushed underneath the North American Plate. Overall, the Cascadia subduction zone has a 37% chance of producing a large quake in the next half century, according to some scientists, which could cause devastation from the Pacific Northwest to Northern California and set off tsunamis that could reach the Bay Area in hours.
The frequency of major quakes on the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone — as large as magnitude 8.5 to 9 — happen on average every 220 years. The frequency on the northern San Andreas Fault is an average of 200 years.
Patton said “that may be part of the story” as to why there is a strong correlation between earthquakes in Cascadia and the northern San Andreas. The scientists have found no evidence that quakes on the San Andreas have triggered ones on the Cascadia, Patton said.
San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, which had an epicenter just offshore near the Golden Gate, is the only major earthquake on the northern San Andreas Fault in the past several millennia that was not preceded by a large quake in the Cascadia subduction zone, according to the authors.
(SF Chronicle)
THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT PLASTIC RECYCLING
by Holly Kaufman
Every week, you probably dump a bag of recyclables into a big blue bin. And you probably feel good that you’re sending it off for recycling, including your plastic bottles, milk jugs and berry baskets.
Well, sorry. Most of that plastic waste won’t get recycled. It will likely either be flung into a landfill, shipped to a foreign country and heaped onto an already colossal mountain of trash, burned or dumped in the ocean, degrading into smaller and smaller bits, but never going “away.”
That’s why California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued major plastic producer and recycling myth master ExxonMobil last year, and why he just announced his intention to sue some of their brethren — to unwrap the truth about plastic recycling.
For decades, the plastics industry — i.e., the fossil fuel industry — has misled consumers, claiming that its products are recyclable. But plastic is not like paper, glass and metal. Despite the chasing-arrows symbol printed or stamped on products, most plastics are not recyclable, and only about 5% of plastic waste in the U.S. is recycled. That doesn’t include nylon carpeting, spandex yoga pants, polyester hoodies and all the other ubiquitous plastic textiles, virtually none of which are recycled.
Plastics are not a single material like aluminum. There are many kinds of plastics, made for umpteen uses. They each are a complex mix of polymers and chemicals, mostly made from oil and gas. Even for technically recyclable plastics, there is not always a local facility where that can happen.
Unlike glass and metal, which can be recycled hundreds of times, plastics that are recyclable can only be recycled three or four times. Most plastic that is recycled is only recycled once. Plastic recycling merely delays the time until plastic is just waste again.
Plastic recycling also usually requires mixing the used material with virgin plastic, along with even more petrochemicals. And when heated during the recycling process, other toxic chemicals — like brominated dioxins and benzene — that were not intentionally added can end up in the recycled plastics, too.
Mechanical recycling is a pathway for these chemicals to affect human and environmental health. The process involves washing, shredding, grinding, pelletizing and other steps that shed chemical-laden microplastic and nanoplastic particles into the air, water and soil. These itty-bitty flecks have been found everywhere on the planet and in creatures from the tiniest zooplankton to human bodies. Have you heard that we now all have about the weight of a teaspoon of plastic in our brains?
Even most supposedly “Earth-friendly,” “biodegradable,” “compostable,” “plant-based” and “green” plastics are not fully recyclable. Only about 1% of all plastics on the market today are some form of “bio” plastic, and only 1% of that are actually relatively kosher from an environmental and health perspective, though better alternatives are in the pipeline. The compostable bioplastics — as undefined a term as natural — are also usually only compostable in industrial facilities, which not every community has, nor is the compost that results necessarily healthy for soil and plants, including our food.
Another issue with most bioplastics is that they can shed even more of those pernicious microplastics and nanoplastics than regular plastic. These particles also exacerbate climate change, adding to the blanket of pollution warming the world. Plastic production releases prodigious amounts of greenhouse gas emissions: If it were a country, the global plastics industry would be the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. That does not even account for the greenhouse gas emissions from all the other stages of the plastics lifecycle, including while we’re using plastics and once they degrade into those bits and fibers — which we don’t count because limited data exist.
Microplastics and nanoplastics can also increase global average temperatures by affecting natural carbon sinks on land and in water, including carbon-absorbing processes in the ocean, and they may alter how the Earth reflects and absorbs energy. For example, the particles appear to be decreasing the albedo (reflectivity) of surfaces such as snow and ice — an effect that leads to more global warming.
So what is a do-good, confused consumer to do? Use as little plastic as possible, reuse and refill it as much as possible — though not for consumables. And make sure the product isn’t made with or from fossil fuels and doesn’t contain “PLA” or “PFAS” compounds.
The Plastics & Climate Project recently released a report that reviewed the scientific literature on the plastics-climate nexus, identified the data gaps and highlighted the need for more research on plastics’ range of climate impacts. What is clear is that we are undercounting plastic’s warming effect on our climate. Even if we stopped all plastic production, use, disposal and recycling today, many of these effects would not only continue, they would continue to increase due to shedding.
Owing to the proliferation of renewable energy and electric vehicles, demand for conventional uses of fossil fuels is decreasing, so the fossil fuel industry plans to triple plastic production over the next 30 years.
Recycling doesn’t address any of plastic’s human and environmental impacts. It’s essentially another form of plastic production, one that usually hurts low-income communities more than others. Relying on recycling instead of squarely addressing the overproduction and overuse of plastics would be as flimsy as plastic wrap. So, neighbors, let’s encourage other states to follow in our attorney general’s footsteps to help support his efforts, and call plastic recycling what it is: hoodwinking.
(Holly Kaufman is co-founder and director of the Plastics & Climate Project and is a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute.)
“IF YOU CANNOT READ all your books, fondle them, peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
— Winston Churchill
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Shopping at Whole Foods yesterday, I observed one of our favorite energetic so called "team members" racing around filling bags with groceries for "call-in/pick-up" customers, which, I believe, began with the covid hoax. Being curious, I asked her who was still calling in for groceries. One of the types that she listed was, "people afraid of the covid!" I was floored and responded with, "You're kidding?!" With her positive personality, she is prone to laughing and joking. With an incredulous look, she responded, "I know; can you believe it?!"
“NOBODY HERE could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.”
— Graham Green, ‘The Heart of the Matter’
‘NORMAN EBBUTT, Berlin correspondent for the Times, interviewed Hitler on October 14, 1930, soon after the Nazis had their first big breakthrough in the Reichstag elections.
They met in a small, musty room “in a third or fourth-class hotel in a very grubby street,” which at the time was the Nazis’ advance headquarters in the capital. “I was led upstairs into a tiny bedroom” with a rumpled bed, where Hitler was waiting for him. He ranted at Ebbutt for 40 minutes, speaking calmly at first, then hysterically, as Ebbutt tried in vain to ask a question. “He strikes one not at all as the pale, slender, visionary of certain widely distributed photographs,” Ebbutt wrote, “but rather as an ex-sergeant major with the gift of the gab, and a faraway look in his eyes.” The purpose of the interview, from the Nazis’ point of view, was to offer Hitler the opportunity to deny that National Socialists had smashed in the windows of Jewish shops in central Berlin the night before. Ebbutt had seen police reports showing that 100 out of 108 of those arrested were Nazi Party members or sympathizers, so he knew Hitler was lying.
Ebbutt was contemptuous but wary of Hitler, taking him seriously far sooner than other foreign correspondents and diplomats in Berlin. On three occasions in 1930 he attempted to persuade the Times to let him write an article on the rise of the Nazis, but was turned down. According to Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who called Ebbutt “the best newspaperman I ever met,” he had said two years earlier, in the summer of 1928, that everybody was underestimating Hitler and the National Socialists. Ebbutt believed that they would absorb the other far-right nationalist parties because the Nazis “know what they want and have a concrete program, which is more than the others can claim. I think Hitler is going places.” If the flood of American money invested in Germany ceased, he wrote, “you will see a sudden slump here and general unemployment. That will be Hitler’s chance.”
— Patrick Cockburn
LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT
What We Know About the Hostage Deal Between Israel and Hamas
G.O.P. Blocks Bid to Halt Trump’s Attacks in the Caribbean Sea
Before Trump Ordered in Troops, Federal Officers Called Portland Protests ‘Low Energy’
Appeals Court to Weigh Legality of Deploying Troops to Portland
Judge to Hear Arguments on Whether Guard Troops Near Chicago Can Stay
Man Fascinated With Fire Imagery Is Arrested in Palisades Blaze, Officials Say
‘I’m Not Dying’: Dolly Parton Assures Fans Amid Concerns About Her Health
“JOURNALISM largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
– G.K. Chesterton
ISRAEL AND HAMAS REACH DEAL ON HOSTAGE AND PRISONER EXCHANGE
President Trump said Israel would pull back troops in the first phase of the agreement, raising hopes that the two-year war in Gaza may be nearer to an end.
After months of deadlock, Israel and Hamas have reached an agreement for the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, a long-awaited breakthrough that could point toward an end to the two-year war in Gaza.
President Trump, who helped broker the deal, said on social media Wednesday that both sides had agreed to the first phase of his plan, including that Israel would pull back their troops to an agreed-upon line.
After months of deadlock, Israel and Hamas have reached an agreement for the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, a long-awaited breakthrough that could point toward an end to the two-year war in Gaza.
President Trump, who helped broker the deal, said on social media Wednesday that both sides had agreed to the first phase of his plan, including that Israel would pull back their troops to an agreed-upon line.
In Gaza, Palestinians received news of the planned cease-fire with hope that it might finally bring their two-year-long nightmare to an end. Montaser Bahja, an English teacher displaced in Khan Younis with his family, said he felt “a mix of joy and sadness: joy for the end of the war and the killing, and sorrow for everything we’ve lost.” Everyone, he added, was awake and glued to the news, waiting to hear when the truce might come into effect.
President Trump announced on Truth Social on Wednesday night that Israel and Hamas “have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” declaring that all remaining hostages “will be released very soon.” He said that Israeli troops will be withdrawn from an “agreed-upon line” but his statement left open the question of what comes next and whether Hamas would agree to fully disarm and surrender any claim of control over Gaza
President Trump said Wednesday that negotiations over a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages being held by Hamas were “going very well,” and raised the possibility he may head to the Mideast over the weekend, presumably to mark a cease-fire and release of hostages.
His enthusiasm was bolstered late in the afternoon, during a public event in the East Room, when he was handed a note by Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggesting that negotiators in Egypt were “very close” — the words were underlined — and asked Mr. Trump to “approve a Truth Social post soon so you can announce deal first.”
(NY Times)
KNOWLEDGE OF THE RELEVANT FACTS
by Selma Dabbagh
Israel has assassinated a record number of Palestinian journalists, refused to allow international reporters to enter Gaza, imposed internet blackouts during its most bloody assaults, asked Meta to take down more than thirty million social media posts, and allocated $150 million for its 2025 hasbara (propaganda) budget, a twenty-fold increase on previous years. And yet, despite all these efforts, global public opinion is turning against it.
A You Gov/Economist poll from mid-August found that 43 per cent of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide. According to a Washington Post poll, 61 per cent of American Jews consider that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza and nearly 40 per cent think that its conduct amounts to a genocide. There have been mass protests throughout Europe – 250,000 people taking to the streets in Amsterdam, two million across Italy – galvanized by the hijacking of the Global Summed flotilla in international waters. Passengers say they were beaten and deprived of food, water, medication and sanitary pads. Most have now been released, including Carlos Perés Osario, though some apparently remain in Israeli custody. On her release, Greta Thunberg urged the world to keep its focus on Gaza, not her. Because the Israeli navy was busy intercepting the flotilla, Gazan fishermen could fish unimpeded for the first time in years.
In July, the Israeli Human Rights organizations Boteler and Physicians for Human Rights published reports entitled, respectively, Our Genocide and Genocide in Gaza. In late August, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights produced its report Voices of the Genocide, which included the testimonies of 1,225 victims. On 31 August, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution declaring that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.”
On 16 September, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that “Israel’s actions amount to violations of its obligations under the Genocide Convention.” As evidence the report cited the bombing of the al-Basma Fertility Clinic in Gaza, which destroyed thousands of embryos; 36 strikes that killed only women and children; and a period of weeks, from 18 March to 9 April, in which 224 residential homes and tents for displaced persons were targeted. “Israel has used heavy unguided munitions with a wide margin of error in densely populated residential areas,” the report stated.
On the question of intent, much fudged and fettered by those legal minds who wish to keep the high standards for genocide untainted by Palestinian blood, the UN commission says: “It is not necessary for the state to share the specific intent, as long as the state has full knowledge of the relevant facts.” The staggeringly high level of civilian causalities (83 per cent) is recorded in Israel’s own military data.
The UK government, however, continues to deny that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. States have a legal duty not only to prevent and punish the crime, but also to avoid actions that might assist or enable it. UK arms exports to Israel reached a record high in June.
Israel’s ground offensive into Gaza City began in August with the mobilization of sixty thousand reservists. This allowed Israel – bankrolled since October 2023 to the tune of $21.7 billion by the US – to level the remaining high-rises, eradicate the skyline, carbonize the earth and further terrorize the starving population. For weeks, I did not hear from K., who had 39 family members in her tiny apartment in Gaza City. On 26 September she told me they had left for the south: “It is very difficult, for my heart, Gaza City, my house,” she wrote.
Rulla Alami’s social media posts include a photo she took of the Rafah checkpoint in 2022 as she returned to Gaza after completing her medical studies in Egypt, about to marry and desperate to be home. In a more recent video she takes one last look around her apartment, not knowing where she will go next. She jolts, flinches, covers her ears at the bombing.
Another Instagram account has two videos I can’t forget. The first shows a modern, marble-floored flat with throw rugs and a breakfast bar. The footage is taken by someone hiding behind a door, filming a far window. Flames roar across it, like a forest fire, except they come on command, at the press of a button, engulfing orange wave after engulfing orange wave. The second image: a dead body spread-eagled on the street as passersby walk around it, barely glimpsing, averting their gaze.
Sara Alkhaldy, one of the contributors to We Are Still Here, a new Gazan anthology of student writing, says: “I wish I could bottle the scent of our home and take it with me as I left.” Rula Elkhair writes of studying during displacement: “Even in places with no electricity, no water and no stable internet, I installed an eSIM on my phone and climbed to the rooftop under buzzing drones to download lectures. I took exams in cafés by the sea. I studied while hungry, while afraid, while grieving.”
On 14 September, Israel bombed the remaining structures of the Islamic University of Gaza, which was housing displaced students. By early September more than 86 per cent of the Gaza Strip was under Israeli displacement orders. “We’ve done the demolition phase,” Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, boasted. Now it was time for a “real estate bonanza.”
Throughout August, Israeli protests demanding an end to the war and the release of the hostages stopped traffic and drew together varied coalitions in their hundreds of thousands (a marked increase from the earlier days of the genocide). On 18 August, Hamas agreed to a ceasefire proposal put forward by Qatari and Egyptian mediators, offering the return of half the Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinians detained by Israel. On 27 August, the Qatari Foreign Ministry was still waiting for a response from Israel. On 8 September, after Israel bombed three more high-rises in Gaza – al-Ruya, Soussi and Mushtaha – the US president warned Hamas that they had to accept his terms. Hamas reiterated its readiness to release all Israelis in exchange for a clear announcement ending the war. On 10 September, an Israeli airstrike on Doha, targeting the Hamas negotiators, was condemned by the UN as a “war crime.” The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, was unrepentant. “Israeli security doctrine is clear – its long hand will act against its enemies anywhere.”
Meanwhile in the West Bank, the massive E1 Settlement – frozen since 2012 because of EU opposition – obtained planning approval. Ostrich said the idea of a Palestinian state was being “erased.” Israel told the Palestinian Authority it would be “destroyed” if it “raised its head.” The financial stranglehold on the Palestinian leadership was tightened as more than 140,000 work permits for West Bank Palestinians employed in Israel were revoked, and Israeli armed forces raided a currency exchange in Ramallah, removing undisclosed amounts of cash and wounding dozens of people.
To date, up to two thousand people have been killed seeking aid from the perversely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The BBC revealed that members of the Infidels Motorcycle Club, “a US biker gang with a history of hostility to Islam,” were among those being paid $1000 a day to provide “security” for the GHF. One of them invited any of his Facebook followers who “can still shoot, move and communicate (this will be tested)” to get in touch. On a visit to the site, Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, saw no problem with the GHF and declared that starvation did not exist. According to Unisex, Gaza’s entire child population under five is at risk of acute malnutrition.
It is grating, galling and grotesque to have to take Trump’s monstrous proposition, for which he expects the Nobel Peace Prize, seriously. For a start, where is the Palestinian representation? It is also peculiar, to say the least, that Israel is being given, in a “peace deal,” land that it has not managed to capture militarily. As the Indian diplomat Talmiz Ahmad has pointed out, Gaza is not a “corporate sector”: it’s home to more than two million people. “A Jewish observer has called it a concentration camp and you set up a board with the American president to discuss real estate? It’s an embarrassment and it’s a travesty.”
How one sustains one’s spirit when a genocide stretches into its third year – with the “carcass of Western liberal democracy,” as Arundhati Roy puts it, “buried under the rubble” – is a source of discussion, particularly among those averse to therapeutic models that encourage them to avoid political situations they supposedly can’t change. Legal challenges are winning, despite the asymmetry of financial resources: a US judge earlier this month dismissed a lawsuit accusing UNRWA of funding Hamas. “For law,” as Ghassan Abu Sitta said in the Jimmy Reid Memorial Lecture last week, “is the Achilles heel of capitalism.”
Personally, I found regeneration in solidarity when I travelled to Mexico in September, for the Hay Festival in Querétaro. It felt good to view the world from a different angle. More than 150,000 people filled Mexico’s largest square, el Zócalo, for a free concert by the Puerto Rican rapper Residente. He was accompanied on stage by a young Gazan family who had fled the genocide, arriving in Mexico the previous day.
I also loved being part of the advisory team for the Together for Palestine concert at Wembley Arena on 17 September. It was tough to get a venue to host it, to vet and appoint charities, and important to keep our messaging clear, our performers on board, to credit those who have spoken out for years but balance them against new voices, including a mixture of Palestinian talent. The Gazan artist Malak Mattar and stage designer Es Devlin curated the visuals. The outcome was exhilarating and magnificent, with a unique interplay of the legal, political, cultural, humanitarian, musical and the literary. It has so far raised close to $1.5 million for Gaza and is still open for donations.
(London Review of Books)
Why would God care of my belief in such God if my actions are what matter most? I will never believe in a God that makes a decision on judgement day based solely on beliefs and not actions. You can have your so-called heaven of “believers “ full of hypocrites.
I believe I’ll be somewhere else. The mystery is more interesting to me.
I’ve been singing rock classics in the park for the last couple years. I print them off from the internet and stuff a sheaf of ten to twenty songs in my back pocket when I take off on my walk. (The “Cab Commander” in the passenger seat is stuffed with about eight sheafs of lyrics, over a hundred songs.)
I usually walk the first section of the park musing about life or writing ideas and almost every day I try to let go of thinking and just gaze at nature for a minute. I soon realize after ten to twenty seconds that I’m thinking again, try just gazing again later and might total just a minute or two of “mindlessness” over the whole week. (3-4 times out there.)
On sketchy trails through the woods or fields with ruts and fissures I won’t sing as I keep attention to the ground where even a little stick or rock could lead to a stumble, a sprained ankle or worse. When I reach a nice straightaway I alternate glancing at the lyrics and watching the path for obstacles or little holes.
Whenever I come up to people walking toward me or when I’m catching up to slower walkers I always stop singing well before we pass each other. Why do I stop, out of courtesy or fear? I’ve been under self-imposed censorship with the singing and I’m wondering why be concerned or worry about what others might think? (When people come walking toward me in twos or threes chatting merrily, they sometimes quiet down when I arrive in their vicinity.)
Yesterday I decided to keep singing as I passed by people, looking up from the lyrics and giving a little wave instead of my usual greeting to the friendly people in the park…
I love this post, Paul. Makes me smile, good on you.
Good morning, ✌️😔
In regard to the recent mention of the Capital Research Center report and Supervisor Norvell’s comments, I’d like to offer a different perspective.
Housing and homes do solve homelessness. Housing is a human right, no matter how much anyone tries to twist that truth or deny it.
Calling advocacy a “smokescreen” is actually the real illusion. Enforcement of behaviors caused by homelessness doesn’t solve the problem, it only hides people and creates more barriers continuing the cycle!
Those who shout “accountability” the loudest often lack understanding & awareness in the conditions that lead to homelessness and the barriers that exist, personal and systemic! The system they defend has none. That word has become another distraction, another way to dodge responsibility while demanding it from others.
Real accountability looks like transparency, measurable outcomes, and compassion in action not politics dressed as reform.
Effective service delivery is not policing or punishment. It’s housing, treatment, and sustained support.
And if Supervisor Norvell truly believes in his Care Response Unit, then where is the data? Even the Grand Jury couldn’t find it. That isn’t accountability that’s a smokescreen.
Happy Thursday 🤪
mm💕
As always Mazie, you are the single most credible voice writing in these pages about homelessness and mental illness. Thank you.
Mazie, the offer still
Stands. If you would like to do a ride along with CRU and form
Your own opinion, let me know.
Bernie,
I appreciate the invitation, but I’ll decline. My perspective comes from learning and connecting with individuals and families like mine who experience the realities of these issues firsthand. If I change my mind in the future, I’ll let you know.
mm💕
A friend of mine’s attitude sums up what most people think, and why we have, and have had a problem dealing with the consequences of mental illness and debilitating substance abuse. “Build houses for them, I don’t care. Just put those houses far, far away so I don’t have to deal with them.” It is a similar attitude people have about their garbage, and with similar results.
Hiya George, ☹️🫥
That’s a shitty attitude and you’re right very common.,sadly. And isn’t that the crux of it, as long as I do not have to witness the suffering who cares where, when, how or why they are here and how we can fix it, just get’ em outta here.
Enjoy your evening.
mm💕
+1
Mazie – I read with great interest your perspective and experience with the homeless situation. I know you have a big heart, are trying to do your best to address this problem and and are frustrated with the progress. I haven’t had the interest or experience, but think I have become more aware from reading your comments.
I am a champion of your passion and try to fully appreciate where you are coming from.
This said, I have to take exception to your statement that “housing is a human right, no matter how much anyone tries to twist that truth or deny it”. It certainly isn’t an inalienable right. This is because to provide it, you would have to take rights from others to do so. I know the UN and some other groups have stated that housing is a “human right”, but those groups think rights come from government. Our foundation is that we are born with rights, they come from God and nature, they are ours before the government existed. The govt. can’t give them, the govt. can only help protect them or destroy them.
Providing housing may be a good idea. It may be something we decide we want our society to be involved in through govt. taxes and/or charity. But I do not think it is a right like the right to be free from slavery, to be able to have my own thoughts, my own religion, protect my family, pursue my life, to have fairness, the right to work (or not work), own my property and the right to express my ideas. Those are all rights that I should have entered the earth with and we should all be very focused on preserving. Man doesn’t need to provide them to me; man needs to not get in the way of these rights. When we start talking about taking from one man to provide a right to another it can’t be a “right” as it doesn’t exist by itself, it only exists by taking another’s right.
We’re a rich country, one of the richest–probably the richest the world’s ever seen. If we cannot provide basic housing to all, even the least of us–we choose that. Let Musk and Bezos and all the rest of the hogs at the trough keep their billions and billions, while others sleep on the streets. We make that choice. What we call shelter for all–a right, a privilege, a giveaway–is kind of beside the point. We make the choice as a community, as a nation. At our moral peril.
Happy Friday Chuck, 😔✌️
Absolutely it can be fixed and the repercussions for not doing so are more homelessness,, more crime and irreparable damage to communities and the citizens, especially those who suffer these horrendous circumstances.
mm💕
We have been a rich country since before we were a country, and we (the government) have “housed the homeless” for a big part of our time as a nation. What did that look like? The initiative may have been begun out of compassion, but often ended as a horror show. I see the same for today. It isn’t about blame, wealth, or who should pay for it. Putting people who are unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their personal lives in a house they may not even want will end badly. When people are unable or unwilling to take responsibility, others are left with the task. And when those others decide what is best is housing, this will be done in an environment that is out of sight and out of mind from everyone else. That is because everyone else wants the problem to just disappear.
Hiya George, ✌️☔️
Providing housing was not the failure the lack of adequate support and follow-through is where the system fails. And honestly, we can’t say “we housed the homeless” when so many people are still on the streets without even that first step. Can you clarify what you mean by “we housed the homeless and look what happened”?
Thanks
mm💕
14 cm
Thank you Bob,
You are welcome, I am grateful you appreciate my contributions. It is not easy to write about these matters, however I will continue because truth and compassion matter.
mm💕
There is no possibility that the evil twins, T & N, have anything in mind but more suffering for Gaza.
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/10/a-time-to-redouble-our-efforts-for-palestine/
My strong fear, also, Jim. I hope we are wrong, but we have watched too much evil unfold there so far…
If the bombing begins anew as soon as the hostages are freed I will not be one bit surprised. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t.
Some small trespass or contrived event will be the trigger to justify more slaughter.
Bob Vaughn was a good guy. We always talked when I ran into him in Ukiah. He was smart, interesting and argumentative. I liked his late-night shows on KZYX.
R.I.P, Bob. You are now among the gratefully dead and other spirits.
BY GOING LOW
…” fed up with paying a premium to live somewhere with…”
I call that a “Paradise Tax”. That is what we pay to live in the Paradise of Boonville and California.
…”low job growth”.
Have you seen the number of jobs (and not all tech) currently being advertised on “Monster.Com”? A large proportion of them having starting salaries of $250,000 dollars?
The SF Bay Area is flooded with Asian employees and University students whose grandparents ran small grocery stores after immigrating here. I can’t get a complaint out of any of them, and I’ve tried. They are too busy saving and buying houses.
There are thousands of medical profession jobs in California. From my recent observation the vast majority of them are Asian, from technicians, to nurses, to doctors.
I always ask them, “Where did you get your training”? The answers are varied, City College, various UC’s, the hospital or medical office itself, the military.
These are well paying jobs that won’t be replaced by AI or otherwise disappear anytime soon. But when I ask young people in Ukiah, “Are you going to school”, I get, “No, I’m just working here in this gas station.” Don’t you think that could be a problem?
Hiya Ted, 🙃✌️
I really do appreciate your thoughtful reply and glad that I helped you become more conscious of the issues!
So if you disagree that housing is a human right, because it is not an inalienable right given by “God” or “nature” would you agree that without housing or shelter it becomes extremely difficult to pursue those God-Given rights?
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
If you are homeless, your life is in constant danger. A person is at risk for violence and abuse, starvation, and a victim to the elements that could ultimately cause death.
There is no freedom in being homeless, you are stuck, looking for safety, for protection, for food, there is no sense of security. It’s gone.
Not sure how much happiness one can pursue if they are hungry, cold, emaciated and afraid!
To be free from slavery, I don’t know I view homelessness as its own sort of slavery because honestly it is very difficult for people to navigate their way out of the loop.
Providing housing and shelter doesn’t strip anyone of their rights; it’s about using the funds we already pour into mental health and homelessness in ways that actually work.
And if we actually did that, you wouldn’t need to worry so much about your own rights they’d be safer in a community that cares for everyone.
mm💕
Let me try again as I may have been a bit clumsy with my distinction.
I didn’t say taking care of the homeless wasn’t a noble cause. I just said it wasn’t a right you are born with (because it requires someone else to give it to you).
I don’t know much about the homeless except that we have continually dedicated more resources and the problem only appears to become a larger one. I tend to think substance abuse appears to be a big part of it.
If I remember correctly I think the stats came out last year that CA had dedicated $23 billion over 5 years only to almost double the amount of homelessness. That concerns me for a whole bunch of reasons and makes me cautious about spending any more funds.
I do hope we make inroads to helping solve this situation and that is why I always read your comments with such interest.
Good Morning Ted, ✌️☔️
Thanks for clarification, yes enormous amounts of money dedicated to solving these issues, yet they are not getting better. I am with you. I do not find it necessary to spend more money to “solve the issues” it is truly about consolidation, collaboration, protocol, education, understanding, intervention, and appropriate action!
You would not fix a leaky roof by repairing the crack in the floor!
Enjoy your Friday!
mm💕
That the wealthiest nation in the history of the world refuses to care for those that cannot care for themselves, because it might require the obscenely wealthy to pay a fair amount of tax, is shameful. I’d like to think we are better than that, but I’ve been wrong about these things before.
Good Morning Norm, 😢🕊️
It is shameful and morally unjust!! 😢
mm💕
Dear Mazie and friends,
Human beings are shell-less fragile creatures that need surroundings that are not harmful, at least, and that are nourishing, at best.
We all need food, water, air, and physical comfort in order to live, base line, minimum “sustainability” elements.
Not only are our tender carcasses easily punctured, burned, crystalized, broken and sanguinated, but the lack of protection from injuries puts our brains on hyper-alert, and the body’s natural cycle of sleep is shredded.
Constant shifting of situations, unsteady spurts of digestibles and proximity to chronic lawlessness, social and civic disconnect so profound that your former neighbors won’t even say hello on the street.
People NEED shelter. Apparently, a bunch of people need a different kind of shelter than the Good Germans think they should have, or how they should get it.
Maybe accept the fact that there are people who can’t and won’t “adapt” to this anodyne whitebread “culture” simply because they don’t have the mental wherewithal to “perform” the requisite social tasks that the rest of us have managed, somehow, to deliver on demand — some of us even happily so.
Well, nobody wants “them” on the streets. Where is the ingenuity and creativity that would craft low-cost, safe, easily maintained, single and double occupancy units, close to practical services, with on-site workplace choices and personalized training? The old Salvation Army farm in Sonoma County comes to mind, and the Sheriff’s highly lauded gardening and cooking inmates could probably help “raise” the consciousness of medically-supported, really RESTED men and women.
The conundrum of which came first — the chicken (homelessness) or the egg (mental illness) — diverts effort from projects to help the helpless, some of whom may never be “productive,” but who at least will not be relegated to the gutters and ditches of civilized communities. Everybody needs what everybody needs, no matter who you are.
Hello Betsy, 🕊️🫥
Shellless fragile creatures made me laugh. I’m a Pennsylvania Dutch German crab with an impenetrable shell. 🦀 The people living through homelessness are far from fragile. They’re full of strength and resilience.
Sometimes the real fragility shows up in how easily people judge what they cannot understand. The key to addressing homelessness lies in our ability as communities to stop living in the past and create safe interventions, treatment, housing, and support.
mm💕
What is “a fair amount of tax”?
It seems every time I hear this it is just another guise to make someone else pay for something one thinks is important, but not important enough to contribute to oneself. A slippery slope for sure.
If we think it is important enough to make “them” pay, shouldn’t we be making a contribution ourselves?
If govt has messed this up so badly, $23Billion and a huge increase in the problem it was trying to solve, is it “fair” to go take from those rich rascals and use their money to about double the problem again?
If it is this messed up, wouldn’t it be better for us to contribute directly and make sure the program really works?
When I look at the money spent, the results, and the cry to go take the money from those rich rascals…I think what I really hear is I don’t care that much about the homeless, but I would really like to stick it to the rich rascals!
Hello friends,
Well, this just in, Newsom signs bill to support the 2023 prop 1 Care Act!!!
https://krcrtv.com/news/local/newsom-signs-bill-boosting-mental-health-support-in-california?fbclid=IwdGRleANWYadleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHrfih-HCYz3LgxEuNYSbol7hhtJkkkWY-9i6XSGW3RTBh2KFQgZWWakZ9NMT_aem_IZpQ-NJ1_XeTPjYzeN9rXg
Enjoy the rain and the fact you have housing & shelter!!!!
mm💕