Mendocino County Today: Sunday 10/12/2025

Partly Sunny | AV Improvements | Redo Recall | Pet Tonka | CAO to CEO | FBHS Fundraiser | PVP Meetings | Boonville Moonshine | Shellie Sand | Logging Reminisce | Yesterday's Catch | No 50 | Pop Boys | 50 No | My Coffee | Charlie Patton | Failed Seekers | Marco Radio | Green Circle | Blonde Joke | Sweet Home | Young Willie | Close Parks | Woman Ironing | New Laws | Art History | Porter/Piker | Tolstoy Declined | No Nobel | Sixty Knockouts | Beautiful Wave | Antichrist Alive | Little Man | Lead Stories | Pie Throwing | Jack Nimble | Driving Noam | Adam's Diary | Mother Dear | Hurdy-Gurdy Man

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AREAS OF FOG with some dense low visibility are likely this morning along the sheltered valleys. Clear skies overnight will promote strong radiational cooling. Cold air aloft will promote near frost temperatures tonight. A colder, wet storm system is forecast to arrive early Monday, and will bring widespread rainfall, mountain snow above 4500-5000 feet, and the potential for thunderstorms. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cooler 44F under clear skies this Sunday morning on the coast. Another lovely day today then rain tomorrow. Looks like it's a one & done mostly now with clearing on Tuesday for the rest of the week.

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THE LOUISE SIMPSON TRACK AND FIELD, BOONVILLE, CA

The nearby Anderson Valley community park is looking good these days as well.

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PAPERWORK FOR EYSTER RECALL EFFORT REJECTED, ELECTIONS OFFICE REPORTS

by Justine Frederiksen

The paperwork submitted by a group hoping to recall Mendocino County District Attorney David Eyster was rejected by the county Elections Office this week.

Katrina Bartolomie, who serves as the Mendocino County Registrar of Voters, as well as its Assessor, Clerk and Recorder, confirmed Friday morning that “when the proponents published their Notice of Intent to Recall, there were several errors with names and addresses from what was served to our office and to Mr. Eyster.”

Bartolomie explained further that the proponents then “called and requested a meeting for (Thursday) and we went over the errors that we found. They said they had plans to start the process over.”

The effort to recall Eyster was launched by Ukiah resident Helen Sizemore, who said she was unsatisfied with his performance, and unhappy that his current term in office was extended by recent state legislation aligning the terms of District Attorneys with presidential elections.

“I would not be doing this if his term was still expiring in 2026,” she said, noting that she was opposed to “Eyster’s term being longer that what voters elected him to,” noting that it was extended to 2028. Sizemore did not respond to a request for comment Friday on her plans to resubmit the recall paperwork.

Eyster did not respond to a previous request for comment on the recall effort.

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PAUL MODIC: The Eyster recall was rejected by the registrar of voters because the advocates said in their filing papers that he was the DA of Ukiah instead of DA of Mendocino, a lot of unimportant and mistaken periods and commas, and the Notice of Intent which was filed wasn’t identical to the one served to Eyster? Seems pretty minor but jeez, get it together organizers, are you in it to win it or what? (It will be hard enough even getting all the signatures…)

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UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Meet Tonka! This 4-month-old, big-hearted, big-pawed goofball is basically a furry toddler with springs in his legs and floppy ears that deserve their own fan club. Tonka is a large breed mix who thinks life is one big game of “tag” and yes, you’re always it. He’s very playful, loves everyone he meets, and is already working on perfecting the art of “sit,” emphasis on working. Tonka will thrive with an active family ready to keep up with his zoomies, guide him through puppy training, and give him all the love (and chew toys) a growing boy needs. If you’re looking for a future adventure buddy with a face that could melt steel beams, Tonka’s your guy! Tonka will be a large adult; right now he weighs in at 38-ish pounds.

To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, tortoise, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com

Join us the first Saturday of every month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event. For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453. Our dog kennels are now open to the public Tuesday-Friday 1:30 to 4 pm, Saturday 10 am to 2:30 pm, closed for lunch Saturday from 1 to 1:30.

Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

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ON LINE COMMENT:

I wasn’t paying close attention when the county government structure changed from a COO to a CEO, so I asked Duck.ai to give me a synopsis. The answer is below. Looks like the move didn’t really pay off.

Mendocino County’s Transition from COO to CEO

Mendocino County has recently transitioned from a Chief Operating Officer (COO) to a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) structure. This decision is aimed at enhancing leadership effectiveness within the county’s administrative framework.

Reasons for the Change

• Leadership Structure: The shift represents a strategic move to streamline decision-making and enhance overall governance.
• Community Impact: By elevating the COO role to a CEO position, the county aims to better address community needs and service delivery.
• Operational Efficiency: A CEO can provide a more unified vision and direction, facilitating improved collaboration among various departments.

Implications of the Change

• Focus on Strategic Goals: The CEO will be tasked with setting broader strategic aims and ensuring that county departments align with these objectives.
• Public Accountability: This role will likely increase accountability as a single executive will be directly responsible for the county’s operational success.

This change is part of ongoing efforts to improve governance and operational efficiency within Mendocino County, reflecting a commitment to better serving the community.

MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: The County government did not change from COO to CEO. (Chief Operating Officer to Chief Executive Officer.) It changed from CAO to CEO (Chief Administrative Officer to Chief Executive Officer). The reasons that “duck” offers are the usual meaningless word salad that the County and, by extension Duck, may have given at the time. They might as well have said they did it because the garbage was ready to be picked up, the time zone was changing, the wind was blowing, the sun came up, and the moon was in the seventh house. The change occurred because back in the 2010 budget crunch, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, they wanted someone to use unprecedented measures to cut expenses and balance the budget. Then-Health and Human Services Director Carmel Angelo raised her hand and, given her semi-dictatorial predisposition, started making cuts. It was clear at the time that she had obtained the support of the Board as a condition of taking the job. As CEO she could and did dictate budgets to the departments across the County since all but the elected department heads worked directly for the CEO. She immediately implemented a series of budget balancing moves, many of which have not come up in today’s budget balancing discussions: Reducing office hours, implementing a “voluntary time off” policy which didn’t get them where they wanted to get so they moved on to “mandatory time office” where county employees were paid for four days a week instead of five and office hours were juggled accordingly. She also imposed a major cut on the Sheriff who immediately retaliated by switching from a patrol model to a dispatch model. Allman also imposed salary cuts and promotion delays on staff in hopes that doing so would create public backlash and force the Supervisors to back off. Sheriff Allman got quite irritated, but in the ensuing years, the Sheriff’s department was the first to get some budget restoration as the finances improved. So Allman and Angelo started getting along better. Then Allman retired and appointed Matt Kendall who immediately ran afoul of Angelo and a different collection of Supervisors when Angelo high-handedly threatened to personally charge Kendall for budget overruns and to move his computer system to Angelo’s IT department’s control. Kendall balked and hired his own attorney, tensions rose, and it ended up costing the County almost $400k before the dust settled back to the status quo ante. Anyone who follows county affairs knows that none of the gibberish-laden “reasons” given by duck/AI panned out, not that any of it is measurable. In fact, everything is worse, including the CEO and Supervisors themselves. Angelo’s approach may have been over-zealous, but she did what she told the Supervisors she’d do. Her hand-picked predecessor, Darcie Antle, who was hired by Angelo after most of Angelo’s budget cuts had been made, is at best a caretaker, but more accurately simply inert and incompetent. Mendo might as well have duck/AI as their CEO. At least duck seems to be able to generate more articulate empty bureaucratese while doing nothing about the deteriorating budget situation.

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STATE WATER BOARD SCOPING MEETINGS ON POTTER VALLEY PROJECT PLAN - LAKE COUNTY NEWS

Dear Readers,

If you can’t get to the meetings, there is a link for sending comments. I’ll share mine with you next week. Deadline 4 PM, Monday, November 4.

Lake County News reports, October 10, 2025:

State Water Board To Hold Scoping Meetings On Potter Valley Project Decommissioning Plan

Lake County, Calif. — The State Water Resources Control Board is planning a series of scoping meetings next week as part of its work to prepare environmental documents for the proposed decommissioning of the Potter Valley Project.

The project, located in Lake and Mendocino counties, consists of the Scott Dam and the Cape Horn Dam, both of which are located on the upper main stem of the Eel River, as well as the Potter Valley powerhouse, the 80,000-acre-foot Lake Pillsbury in Lake County, the Van Arsdale Reservoir, a fish passage structure and salmon and steelhead counting station at the Cape Horn Dam, and and 5,600 acres of land.

Pacific Gas and Electric, which has owned the project since 1930, filed the final surrender application and decommissioning plan for the project with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, in July.

That’s part of the process that PG&E is following in its effort to remove the dams.

FERC has not yet responded to PG&E’s final license surrender application.

At the same time, the State Water Resources Control Board is preparing an environmental impact report, or EIR, for the project’s proposed surrender and decommissioning.

The State Water Board has planned several public scoping meetingsduring which it will take public input.

The meetings will take place as follows:

• 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, in-person only, River Lodge Conference Center, 1800 Riverwalk Drive, Fortuna
• 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 15, in-person only, Ukiah Valley Conference Center, Cabernet 1 and 2 Rooms, 200 South School St., Ukiah.
• 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 15, in-person only, North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board Office, DCJ Hearing Room, 5550 Skylane Boulevard, Suite A, Santa Rosa.
• 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 17, in-person and virtual, CalEPA Building, Byron Sher Auditorium, 1001 I St., second floor, Sacramento. To attend via Zoom: https://waterboards.zoom.us/j/86984608826; call-in number: +1 669 444 9171 US; meeting ID: 869 8460 8826.

The State Water Board said it is seeking comments from trustee agencies, responsible agencies, tribes, and interested persons concerning the scope and content of the environmental information to be included in the EIR.

Comments concerning the scope and content of the environmental information to be included in the EIR for the proposed project that are not provided at a scoping meeting are due by 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 3.

Title your comments as “Potter Valley NOP Comments” and send them to [email protected] or mail them to Wilhelmina Chon, Hydroelectric Project Manager, State Water Resources Control Board, Division of Water Rights – Water Quality Certification Program, P.O. Box 2000 Sacramento, CA 95812-2000.

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THE BOONVILLE DISTILLERY

Moonshine was never just corn liquor — it was whatever the land gave you.

In Anderson Valley, that means apples, pears, and a whole lot of heart. Our version of “apple pie moonshine” honors the early makers who worked with what they had — fruit from the orchard, fire from the still, and determination that ran deep.

This is our kind of shine: made by hand, rooted in community, and crafted with the same grit and creativity that built this valley.

American as apple pie — and twice as spirited.

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MICHELLE YEOMAN:

Hi. My name in the valley was Shellie Sand. My parent's were Lovella and Dick Sand. Mom worked for Philo lumber Company that part of my family owned for many years. She then worked for the Superintendent of AV school district, then the principal of the elementary school which she loved. My dad worked for CalTrans and retired, then worked for Eversole Cemetery and drove the Senior Citizen’s bus. I was involved in everything from the 4H to cheerleader in school to a judge in the Mendocino County Fair. I loved every minute of it. I worked for the Redwood Drive In owned by Donald and Donna Pardini and Eva and Floyd Johnson all the way through school. I miss the valley deeply. Eva and Bill Holcomb were my parents’ best friends. Palma and Billy Holcomb are my son Matt Sand’s godparents. I have so many beautiful memories. Two years ago I had a stroke. I was determined to walk out of the nursing home on a cane AND I DID. LOL Doing as well as expected getting stronger every day. Please, if there are any classmates or friends or anybody that would like to post please do. I would love to here from you. God Bless. (Facebook: Anderson Valley stuff)

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R.D. BEACON: Remembering Back to the loggers in 1962, at least in Elk area…

Usually after work some would come in to the local bar, Evelyn's Oasis. It was across the street from Daniels and Ross sawmill in the middle of the town of Elk. Loggers would come from the woods, some from Greenwood Creek, and some from Greenwood Ridge, it would come from the north the highway, and come up from the south, the same way, walk into the local bar, and the smell of sawdust, look on the floor, mud on the shoes of the large, some of the guys wearing, hardhats, but all bellied up to the bar, beer and shots of Jack Daniels, talk of the good days they hope to come to some big trees they would find, ranchers, and ran large properties, would also show up in the evening, they are now, a distant memory, all 220 sawmills all gone, although that exist today, or in the Valley, two sawmills Ukiah, when Willis, and we owe it all, the East Coast, environmentalists, that has chased out, industry from America, has destroyed good work ethic, the good days of vanished.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, October 11, 2025

WILLIAM BOTTRELL, 72, Albion. Domestic abuse.

JAMES CARTE, 58, Ukiah. Trespassing.

SCOTT HARRIGAN, 50, Laytonville. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

BRYAN LOCKWOOD, 34, Ukiah. Parole violation.

FRANCISCO ORTIZ-GUTIERREZ, 24, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun.

ROBERT SALES, 42, Willits, Domestic abuse, probation violation.

ANDY TUCKER, 54, Covelo. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, contempt of court, probation revocation, resisting.

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NO ON PROP. 50: IS IT EVER APPROPRIATE TO RIG ELECTIONS?

Editor:

I am perplexed that California is having an expensive special election for a proposition to rig elections. Most people I know agree that what Texas did was wrong. What is right about California rigging elections too? Rigging election results is rigging election results, right? Or do they think it’s legitimate because it’s on a ballot and they get to vote for it?

I’ve heard it’s only temporary and the only way we can get the cheaters out. Is until 2031 temporary? Is temporary rigging OK? Is cheating to get the cheaters out right? I’ve heard I don’t think “we” have a chance to take the House unless “we” do this. Isn’t that rigging, and is it really OK because it’s for “us”? My biggest concerns if this passes are the precedent it will set and the can of worms of unintended consequences that will come after.

Kim Clouse

Santa Rosa

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VOTE NO ON PROP. 50 FOR CONGRESSIONAL REDISTRICTING

Editor,

As a voter not affiliated with a political party, I am frustrated and angry about the many initiatives of President Donald Trump. I am also angry and frustrated about Proposition 50, which would gerrymander California’s congressional districts to further favor the Democratic Party.

It was former First Lady Michelle Obama, a leader in the party, who said “when they go low, we go high.” What happened? This proposition is unfair to the 55% of Californians who are not registered Democrats.

The independent redistricting commission was created after years of gerrymandering, often by Democrats. I think that history is a big reason why Democrats currently hold 83% of seats in the House of Representatives while representing only 45% of voters.

Proposition 50 will make redistricting even more extreme. And I have a hard time picturing the Democrats giving back that power in 2030, when the independent commission is supposed to come back.

California politicians always take pride in showcasing their policies as models for other states. This shows we are going backward. It has been reported that more Republican-inclined states have opportunities to redistrict than Democratic ones. It feels like California is just joining the race to the bottom.

I think Proposition 50 will prove to be unnecessary. Trump’s policies — including deportation roundups, free-speech cancellations and inflation-inducing tariffs — appear to be wildly unpopular. I think Republicans will get hammered in the midterm elections regardless of redistricting.

Please vote no on Proposition 50. It is a foolish move that will disenfranchise many more Californians. Our country’s revolution started because of taxation without representation. Proposition 50 will recreate severe taxation without representation for many Californians.

Robert Stenson

Larkspur

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“THERE ARE FEW THINGS I care about less than coffee. I have two big cups every morning: light and sweet, preferably in a cardboard cup. Any bodega will do. I don’t want to wait for my coffee. I don’t want some man-bun, Mumford and Son motherfucker to get it for me. I like good coffee but I don’t want to wait for it, and I don’t want it with the cast of Friends. It’s a beverage; it’s not a lifestyle.”

― Anthony Bourdain

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“A GENERATION OF PERMANENT CRIPPLES, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic … a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority.” The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister … all the way up to “God.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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MEMO OF THE AIR: Kashmir.

Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (9pm PDT, 2025-10-10) eight-hours-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part. The first hour-and-ten is Harry Houdini's 1910 Egypt travel story ghostwritten on commission and somewhat embroidered upon by H.P. Lovecraft in 1924. https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0665

Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

Tom Waits - Make It Rain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3kRc9nvv94

Maya Beiser - Kashmir. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVRW7jGtJE

Rerun: Norma Tanega - You're Dead (1966). It's the opening theme of What We Do In the Shadows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImAlx0amAIc

And John Flynn - The Victim Tree. "What you do to the least of these you do to me." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Vr-axr-nk

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

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BLIND OLD COWPOKE walks into a bar, finds a stool, orders a beer and says “So bartender—would you like to hear a blonde joke?”

Bartender says, “Listen old cowboy.you might want to think twice before you tell that joke because I’m blonde, 6-3 and weigh 175, and I’ve got a black belt in karate. The bouncer over there is blonde and she’s got a billy club. On your left is a blonde weightlifter. On your right is a blonde who’s a professional wrestler and behind you is a blonde boxer who holds the middleweight crown. Now are you sure you want to tell that blonde joke?”

Ol’ cowboy sighs. “Well, I reckon not,” he says. “Not if I’m going to have to explain it five different times."

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HOME SWEET HOME

You know I'm a dreamer
But my heart's of gold
I had to run away high
So I wouldn't come home low
Just when things went right
It doesn't mean they were always wrong
Just take this song and you'll never be
Left all alone

Take me to your heart
Feel me in your bones
Just one more night
And I'm comin' off
This long and winding road

I'm on the way, well I'm on my way
Home sweet home
Tonight, tonight I'm on my way
I'm on my way, home sweet home

You know that I've seen
To many romantic dreams
Up in lights, fallin' off
The silver screen
My heart's like an open book
For the whole world to read
Sometimes nothing-keeps me together
At the seams

I'm on my way, well I'm on my way
Home sweet home
Tonight, tonight, I'm on the way
Just set me free
Home sweet home

— Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee (1985)

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‘DANGEROUS AND RECKLESS’: YOSEMITE CHAOS SPARKS URGENT PLEA TO CLOSE PARKS DURING SHUTDOWN

by Aidin Vaziri

Reports of illegal BASE jumping, unauthorized camping and unpermitted climbing in Yosemite National Park have reignited warnings from current and former park officials to close the park during the ongoing federal government shutdown.

“This is exactly what we warned about,” Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said in a statement Friday. “And this is why national parks need to be closed until the government re-opens. This shutdown is making an already bad situation at national parks and public lands far worse. The situation is dangerous and reckless for our parks, public lands, and the visitors who love them.”

The coalition — made up of more than 40 former National Park Service leaders — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum before the shutdown, urging that all 433 park sites be closed if funding lapsed.

The letter, signed by dozens of retired superintendents, called leaving the parks open “reckless” and warned that the agency was already suffering a “severe staffing crisis.”

Since January, the National Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent workforce, leaving many sites without adequate rangers or emergency personnel.

With most Yosemite staff furloughed, BASE jumpers have been spotted leaping off El Capitan in broad daylight — a practice banned for decades.

BASE jumping, the extreme sport of parachuting from cliffs or other fixed structures, was pioneered in Yosemite in the 1970s but outlawed in the 1980s. Despite the prohibition, enthusiasts have long continued to jump in secret, often launching at dawn or dusk and disappearing before rangers can respond.

“You hear them before you see them,” climber Charles Winstead, who has watched a dozen jumpers this week, told the Chronicle this week. “Then the parachute pops and there’s no more noise.”

The National Park Service, whose Yosemite staff remain largely furloughed, said it was aware of the activity and investigates such reports. In an email statement, the agency reiterated that BASE jumping is prohibited in all national parks because of “significant safety risks to participants, the public, and first responders.”

Violations can result in fines of up to $5,000 or six months in jail under federal “aerial delivery” regulations.

Elsewhere in the park, visitors are taking advantage of the absence of enforcement. Squatters have moved into campgrounds, and climbers have scaled Half Dome’s cables without required permits.

“It’s like the Wild Wild West,” said John DeGrazio, a Yosemite guide. One park employee told SFGATE that only a single volunteer is currently patrolling the park. (SFGATE and The San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently.)

A Chronicle staff member visiting Yosemite this week described squatters taking over a reserved campsite at North Pines Campground. When the rightful occupants arrived, the group falsely claimed the site was “first come, first served” because of the shutdown.

A ranger later intervened to remove them — one example of the confusion and rule-breaking spreading through the park amid limited staffing.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has begun firing thousands of federal employees as the shutdown enters its second week, escalating tensions in Washington.

Advocates warn that, without intervention, parks like Yosemite could face the same fate as during the 2018–19 shutdown — when vandalism, trash and damage left scars that took years to repair.

(SFGate)

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NEWSOM SIGNS SLATE OF NEW LAWS AFFECTING MEDICATION PRICES, WOMEN’S HEALTH CARE AND SCHOOL THREATS

by Megan Fan Munce

A day ahead of a legislative deadline, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a wide-ranging slate of bills Saturday affecting everything from prescription drug prices to health care for women.

The Legislature wrapped up its session last month, sending hundreds of new bills to the governor’s desk. Many of those have already been signed into law — including a ban on immigration officers wearing masks to conceal their identity, changes to zoning standards around public transportation and reforms aimed at facilitating rebuilding following wildfires.

Now, Newsom will have to decide by Sunday whether to sign or veto the rest of the legislation that’s still waiting for a decision.

The bills Newsom signed Saturday affect prescription drug prices, threats against schools, parental and child health care and consumer safety.

Prescription drug prices

State Sen. Scott Wiener’s, D-San Francisco, SB41, a bill that aims to lower prescription drug costs by placing more stringent regulations on pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs — third-party companies that act as intermediaries between health insurers and drug manufacturers.

The new law implements a number of new restrictions and oversight measures. Starting in 2026, PBMs will be prevented from charging insurance companies a different amount than it pays to pharmacies in order to profit off the difference. It also requires PBMs to pay any rebates obtained from drug manufacturers back to the health insurer, among other measures.

Similar legislation regulating PBMs passed the Legislature last year, but was vetoed.

Threats against schools, daycares and places of worship

Newsom also signed SB19 into law — legislation by state Sen. Susan Rubio, D-Baldwin Park and Assembly Member Darshana Patel, D-San Diego County, that makes it easier for prosecutors to charge individuals with threatening violence against daycares, schools, universities, workplaces, places of worship and medical facilities.

The new law clarifies that credible threats of death or great bodily harm against such places are illegal even if they do not target a specific person.

Parental and child health care

Several of the bills signed Saturday dealt with improving access to maternal health care and children’s services.

AB55 by Oakland Assembly Member Mia Bonta, D-Alameda, removes the requirement for alternative birthing centers — health care facilities that offer childbirthing services, but are not fully equipped hospitals — to offer comprehensive perinatal service in order to be licensed and eligible for Medi-Cal reimbursement. It also removes the requirement that such centers be within 30 minutes of a hospital.

AB836, authored by San Francisco Assembly Member Catherine Stefani, D-San Francisco, requires the state Department of Health Care Access and Information to fund a statewide study on midwifery education. Stefani noted the goal of the study is to identify opportunities to expand midwife education in order to support better access to reproductive care.

In addition, Newsom signed SB520, a bill by state Sen. Anna Caballero, D-Merced, which creates a fund in the state Department of Health Care Access and Information to create nurse-midwifery education masters programs within the CSU and UC systems. The fund will rely on money from the state budget and private donations.

SB271 by state Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-Colton, requires California community colleges and California state universities to proactively provide student parents with information about resources available to them, such as childcare subsidies. It also requests that the University of California system do the same.

Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire’s, D-North Coast, SB669 establishes a 10-year pilot program to establish standby perinatal services at up to five hospitals. Hospitals in the program would provide emergency obstetric and neonatal care to parents and children, aiming to fill a gap in resources among rural hospitals.

Assembly Member Lisa Calderon’s, D-Whittier, AB798 amends the State Emergency Food Bank Reserve Program’s list of supplies to include children’s diapers and wipes. During declared state of emergencies, such as the Los Angeles wildfires, food banks would be able to use state funds to purchase diapers and wipes for distribution.

SB258 by state Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, expands the state’s definition of rape to include instances where spouses are unable to legally consent due to mental, developmental or physical disabilites.

Consumer safety

SB646 by state Sen. Akilah Weber-Pierson, D-San Diego, requires manufacturers of prenatal vitamins to test their products for arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury and to disclose those test results to the public starting in 2027.

SB236, also authored by Weber-Pierson, gives the state Department of Toxic Substances until 2030 to ban the sale of chemical hair relaxers with specified harmful ingredients.

State Sen. María Elena Durazo’s, D-Los Angeles, SB754 requires manufacturers of disposable tampons or menstrual pads to disclose the concentration or potentially toxic chemicals in their products to the Department of Toxic Substances. The department could then publish this information alongside its own oversight analyses of product safety.

(SF Chronicle)

(Mark Scaramella Notes: Why don’t they ever highlight some of the bills the Governor vetoed?)

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TAIBBI AND KIRN ON KATIE PORTER

Walter Kirn: Here’s the thing, when I found out that she was the leading gubernatorial candidate, just after seeing that first video, I thought, what is California politics? I mean, how do you become that repulsive? And you’ve obviously been that way your whole life. I mean, even in high school, you were the person people hated. And yet, you get to be the leading gubernatorial candidate? Is there some backroom process or set of protocols that has nothing to do with appeal, nothing to do with, I don’t know, eloquence? Or maybe she’s accomplished amazing things. I don’t know. If she has, it’s because people just say yes and want to get out of the room. I mean, that is the person who you just vote yes during the meeting because they want you to, so you can get the hell out there.

Matt Taibbi: She does have some skills, politically.

Walter Kirn: Is she a lawyer?

Matt Taibbi: One of them, she is a lawyer. She can be very confrontational in, let’s just say a politically entertaining way with CEOs, executives from Wall Street. She has a shtick that everybody knows, which is writing on a whiteboard, explaining complex issues in a way that’s accessible to some people, and she’s reliably orthodox on all the progressive issues of the day.

The problem is that her personality, and just watch the clip of her being interviewed by CBS’s Lori Watts, and it’s for a series of interviews with all of the California gubernatorial candidates. The point is, this is pretty standard political fare where it’s almost like political speed dating. You’re being asked a series of questions that every other candidate is getting the same stuff, and the whole point is to read off a pro-forma response and then move to the next thing and get the fuck out, right? That’s what it is. It’s a free commercial, CBS is basically giving free commercials to all the candidates, right?

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: And this happens.

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Walter Kirn: I’m going to tell you the truest thing you’ll ever hear about Hasan Piker. I’m not telling you this because I don’t like him. I fear him, because I fear his type, because I’ve seen it. The reason he’s a socialist is because he has absolutely no empathy at all for other beings, for dogs, for old ladies, for poor people, for anything. But, when you have zero empathy, which is the mark of psychopathy, you compensate by adopting the politics of total empathy.

In other words, when you have to be… It means the lady doth protest too much. You know what I mean? You’re always finding out that Republicans who seem like all they care about is their portfolio and stuff, but they’re like fun people and they’re kind of nice guys and sort of generous. Or you find out the Democrats who are all really principled and whatever, they crack a dirty joke at a card game, and you’re like, “Right on.”

That guy though, he can’t be a mixed bag, because he knows a fact about himself. The ineradicable ubiquitous fact that follows him every minute. He is, “I am an empty howling wasteland of nothingness. And everything that I do must be contrived to hide that from the world, or I can’t use them as my victims, or I can’t use them as my sexual partners, or I can’t get them to clean my house, or I can’t get them to serve me in a restaurant, or I can’t get them to represent me and make my podcast really big. So, I’m going to be a socialist with a cuddly dog, who just hangs loose, because I like rock and roll. Oh, yeah, I got to put a ZYN in because I’m just kind of that guy.” He is a complete artifact covering an ice-cold Antarctic wind.

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LEO TOLSTOY refuses the Nobel Prize in Literature, October 8, 1906

At the age of 78, the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy declined consideration for the Nobel Prize in Literature, firmly convinced of the moral harm of money.

When the Russian Academy of Sciences nominated him, Tolstoy wrote to his Finnish friend and translator Arvid Järnefelt, asking him to intercede with the Swedish Academy to award the prize to someone else.

Järnefelt — surprised but loyal — fulfilled the unusual request. As a result, the 1907 prize went to the relatively unknown Italian poet Giosuè Carducci.

Tolstoy later said that his refusal spared him the heavy burden of deciding what to do with such a large sum of money. He believed that “in money itself, in the very possession of it, there is something immoral.”

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PEACE IN TRUMP’S TIME — EXCEPT HERE

by Maureen Dowd

This is one piece of gold that President Trump is never going to get his short, stubby fingers on: an 18-karat gold medal with three naked men embracing, awarded to those who promote peace, democracy and human rights.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been given to some beauts — like Henry Kissinger, for helping end the Vietnam War he perpetuated to aid Richard Nixon’s re-election.

But the prize was not designed for someone like Trump. The Norwegian Nobel Committee would no doubt discontinue the award before it would give it to him.

His longing is partly inspired by his jealousy of Barack Obama, who absurdly got a Nobel Peace Prize after only eight months in office for just being a cool dude. Our 79-year-old president admitted recently that he also envies Obama for the way he airily bopped down the stairs of Air Force One, while he himself has to slowly creep down, grasping the railing, worried that he’ll fall and look as unsteady as Joe Biden.

I’ve always thought we were lucky that Trump was not more prone to invasions, à la his fellow draft dodger Dick Cheney, given his belligerent persona, vengeful nature, fascination with military trappings and U.F.C. macho bluster. He insisted on having a military parade here in June and he’s planning a U.F.C. fight next June on the White House South Lawn for the country’s 250th birthday.

Even though most liberals have tried to paint Trump as a deranged hawk at heart, the former real estate developer always seemed, blessedly, more drawn to the art of the deal than shock and awe. While he bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, threatens Venezuela and strikes alleged drug boats off its coast, he more often seems to consider war a waste of time and money that could be better spent building a beachfront property in North Korea or Gaza.

“Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct,” he said in his first foreign policy speech in Washington during the 2016 race. He added, “A superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength.”

Even though he tepidly supported the invasion of Iraq, amid the rah-rah patriotic push to punish somebody, anybody, for 9/11, he would later call it “the single worst decision ever made.”

In May, he denounced the debacles of “neocons” and “interventionists,” vowing a future “where people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.”

If Trump can untie the Gordian knot of the Middle East, it will be a spectacular feat — although it will have been accomplished by accommodating Bibi’s brutal annihilation and starvation of Gaza. And, of course, there’s probably some money in it for him and his family somewhere.

But the region is a graveyard of peace deals. As David Sanger wrote in The Times: “Much could go wrong in coming days, and in the Middle East it often does. The ‘peace’ deal Mr. Trump heralded on Truth Social on Wednesday evening may look more like another temporary pause in a war that started long before Israel’s founding in 1948, and has never ended.”

As Tom Friedman pointed out, it is Trump’s moral indifference to the human rights transgressions of his partners in the peace plan that allows him to break through old paradigms.

That is the same moral indifference that will prevent him from ever getting a Nobel. You can’t get a medal for promoting democracy when you tried to overthrow the democracy you were running.

He has shown utter disdain for our Constitution and the laws that have made us the greatest democracy in the world.

Once in 2016, I asked him about the violence that was breaking out at his rallies. He said he thought it added some excitement to the proceedings.

Trump is constantly posting cruel, nasty images on Truth Social. He loves gladiatorial combat, the scenes of masked ICE officers roughing up people, even if they have their American passports in their pockets.

What sort of person — much less a president — does not object to headlines like this in The Hill: “Top DHS Official Defends ICE Officer Who Shot Pastor With Pepper Ball”?

The Rev. David Black was protesting peacefully at an ICE facility in a Chicago suburb, hands out, offering to pray with officers, when an ICE officer on a roof shot him in the head with a pepper ball.

While Trump may have sparked dancing in the streets in the Middle East, he’s sparked danger in the streets in America. He is siccing American troops on blue cities, distorting the National Guard’s largely humanitarian mission and turning it into, as The Times’s John Ismay put it, “a partisan strike force at the whim of the president.”

Trump expressed another chilling whim to the generals recently when he said he had told Pete Hegseth: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Even as he says he should have won the Nobel five times over for his work solving foreign conflicts, he is creating conflicts in America, concocting perilous crises in American cities.

Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, the Republican chairman of the National Governors Association, told The Times that the president was violating states’ rights: “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”

While he’s freeing hostages in Gaza, Trump is seizing some here. He’s forcing Pam Bondi to play the tortured servant Renfield to his dark, narcissistic Dracula. She is scurrying around eating insects, doing the president’s dirty work of indicting his foes and purging anyone who worked with them. The Department of Vengence, nee Department of Justice, has indicted James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, and more Trumped-up vindictive indictments are surely coming.

Richard Nixon had an enemies list, but he didn’t do much with it. He could only dream of doing the kind of stuff Trump has gotten away with.

Trump seems oblivious to the paradox of enforcing peace abroad and disrupting it badly at home, of soothing violence overseas and inflaming it here.

While he’s rechristened the Pentagon the chesty “Department of War,” he’s bragging about forming a Board of Peace — with himself, of course, the chief peacenik — to oversee Gaza’s new governing body.

The contradiction is hard to square. It’s not going to win our president a peace prize.

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JACK DEMPSEY:

“Nobody owes anybody a living, but everybody is entitled to a chance. I was a miner and I was a cowboy but mostly I was a hobo. I fought wherever I could, in school halls, outside saloons, any place they were putting up a purse. I once walked thirty miles across the desert to a town called Goldfield in Nevada so I could fight for twenty dollars.

“I got beat a lot. I improved, but I remember the beatings I took. Once got beat so bad they had to take me out of the ring in a wheelbarrow. I was a pretty good fighter. But it was the writers who made me great.

“I took out other guys quick. That much is true. I got more one round knockouts than anybody, sixty knockouts in the first round. I beat a good Heavyweight in New Orleans once in fourteen seconds. I knocked out Fred Fulton, six-foot-four, 250 pounds, in nineteen seconds. How come? Not because I was a killer, other way round, I was always afraid that l'd be the one who was killed. Get them quick and you live to fight another day.”

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“MAYBE IT MEANT SOMETHING. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

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DOROTHY THOMPSON:

“When I walked into Adolph Hitler's salon in the Kaiserhof hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” Thompson later reflected. “In something like fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.”

She recognized that Hitler was a masterful propagandist and orator in front of a crowd but she wasn't prepared for how pathetic he appeared one on one. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man,” she wrote after their meeting. Thompson found the interview nearly impossible to conduct: “One cannot carry on a conversation with Adolph Hitler… In every question, he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus in some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice, which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance. He bangs the table.”

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LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

A Test Now for Israel: Can It Repair Its Ties to Americans?

Israelis and Palestinians Await Hostage-Prisoner Swap With Relief and Elation

Here’s What’s Left to Be Done in the Gaza Cease-Fire Deal

Black Unemployment Is Surging Again. This Time It’s Different.

Trump Is Blowing Up Boats Off Venezuela. Mexico’s Cartels Are Watching.

Air Traffic Controllers Reject Credit for Ending the Last Shutdown

Appeals Court Allows Federalized Guard, But Leaves Block on Chicago Deployment

Trump Says He Will Pay Troops Despite Government Shutdown

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“SOME have contended that it was America’s love of pie-throwing that led the nation to develop the atomic bomb. This may or may not be true, but certainly it does help explain the country’s current panic over the possible proliferation of the bombs to unfriendly nations: it’s a cardinal rule of the act that one custard pie leads to another, and he who throws one must sooner or later face one coming from the other direction.”

– Robert Coover

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THIS STARTED AS "ROAMIN' NOAM IN MARIN," AVA March 20, 1991

by Fred Gardner

Noam Chomsky, who lives in Lexington, Mass. and teaches linguistics at MIT, spends almost every weekend on the road, giving talks on political themes. His classes are scheduled towards the end of the week, so he also has Mondays and Tuesdays to carry the message (which is principally a critique of U.S. foreign policy). He takes off July and August.

Chomsky is a thin, soft-spoken man in his late 50s, with graying wavy hair and light eyes that sparkle behind his glasses. This weekend he and his wife Carol were in the Bay Area. His talk Saturday night to a full house at the Berkeley Community Theater was a benefit for KPFA. His talk at the Victoria Theater in SF on Sunday at noon was a benefit for Barricada Internacional, the Sandinista newspaper. At 3 p.m. on Sunday he was at Bill Graham's capacious house in Corte Madera, talking to 100 people who had paid $100 each to hear him – a fundraiser for the Marin Interfaith Task Force.

Introducing Chomsky, Graham said, "God bless the man for speaking his mind and standing behind what he believes in… You couldn't believe the shit I heard from people this week [for lending his house for the event]: 'How can you call yourself a Jew?'"

I interviewed Chomsky while driving him from Graham's to his 7 p.m. appearance at the College of Marin. He held the tape recorder on his lap.

AVA: Could you explain your work in the field of linguistics? I once tried to read a book of yours on the subject and didn't make much headway.

Chomsky: Let me suggest a book that might work: "Language and Problems of Knowledge," which was a series of lectures that I gave in Managua under pretty adverse conditions. Things aren't so great there. Also, I was talking in English because I don't know a word of Spanish. And I was getting translated by non-professional translators, sort of phrase by phrase. But people were really sitting there listening carefully, and they did say they understood it, and people tell me the book's very readable.

Basically what it's about is that there is a distinctive human capacity which no other organism has at all, and which every human has normally. It's virtually identical across the species and it seems distinctive to the species. Biologically, rather isolated properties like it don't exist elsewhere. It's at the core of human life and thought. And the question is: "What is it?" Well, it seems to be in the first place a very complex computational system with very specific properties. Rather surprising properties often. It's a system of conceptual structures, again with very specific properties that are shared by everyone – all of this is known without any experience, every child grows into it. You just grow into it the same way you grow into getting bigger or going through puberty.

AVA: You learn language…

NC: You really grow language in your head the same way you grow your arms and your legs. If you're not in the right environment it won't happen, but if you're in the right environment it will grow – you can't do anything about it. It's something that happens to you, and you end up with these quite refined and highly distinctive conceptual capacities and this astonishing capacity to express yourself in novel ways and over an unlimited range of situations. And the purpose of the subject is to try to find out what does that capacity consist of? How much of it is just part of our common nature? How much of it is modifiable by experience? Ultimately we would like to know things like: How does it relate to physical mechanisms? How did it originate in the species? How does it relate to other forms of human action? Similar things could be discovered about human moral and aesthetic capacities that haven't been investigated seriously.

AVA: Like what?

NC: Well look, there's a simple point of logic and that is, if people are capable of making systematic judgments in some area and they don't have any evidence for it, then it's got to be coming from the inside. So you and I can make systematic judgments about sentences of English. You never heard these sentences before but you're understanding them right off; which means you're making highly systematic and quite complex judgments about very intricate matters. You had no experience that enabled you to do it, so it must be something that is coming out of your nature. Unless there's angels around, anything you do is either a result of your internal nature or some impact of experience. And experience is extremely impoverished. It does not have much of an effect on what you are. It modifies it a little bit but, just like your physical growth: you couldn't have eaten different food and had wings rather than arms.

The same is true of intellectual development. And the same is true in moral life. You're constantly making choices and decisions and judgments. Sometimes you don't know how to do it, but over a wide range, you know what's right. And other people agree with you about what's right. And even when you disagree with people, you find shared moral ground on which you can kind of work it out. That's true on every issue. Let's take the war in the Gulf. You find someone who thought the war was terrific and overwhelmingly you find they share your moral grounds, they just are basing themselves on different judgments about the facts, or something like that. The same is true of slave-owning. You take a look at the debate over slavery; it was largely on shared moral ground. And some of the arguments were not so silly. You could understand the slave owner's arguments. A slave owner says, "If you own property, you treat it better than if you rent property. So, I'm more humane than you are." We can understand that argument. You have to figure out what's wrong with it, but there is shared moral ground over a range that goes far beyond any experience. And this can only mean –again, short of angels– that it's growing out of our nature. It means there must be principles which are embedded in our nature or are at the core of our understanding of what a decent human life is, what a proper form of society is, and so on and so forth.

Now, here we're moving into speculation because no one has done the proper work, but if there is ever to be sort of a liberatory social understanding, it's going to have to come from inquiry of this sort. That's still in the future, but it's something one could contemplate. That's the way to proceed to gain some rational understanding of human beings. One of the few areas where we can do it successfully happens to be language. That's why it's interesting to study. It shows a lot about what humans are like.

AVA: This isn't the mainstream approach to linguistics.

NC: Right, it's a specialty. In fact, when I got into the field, this wasn't linguistics at all.

AVA: What was it called – your area of research?

NC: It was called nothing. (Laughs) That's why I'm teaching at MIT. I had no real backround, no professional training. I hadn't been to college for years, I didn't have any intention of staying in academic life – which I couldn't stand. MIT was this scientific university that was willing to take a chance on something that looked intriguing. The professional linguists didn't know what I was talking about. The first years in which I was working, I would publish in journals that were, you know, library science or engineering journals, not linguistics journals. I was never published in a linguistics journal. And then the field sort of took off, it became its own field. So now this is a field that we call linguistics, if you want, or you can call it something else, but by now it's really developed enormously. Out of its own internal intellectual challenges it just grew up. And the old linguistics basically disappeared because there was nothing to do in it.

AVA: Who has done the most interesting work on the physiological side of language development? What do we know about that?

NC: We know very little – as compared with, say, the physiology of vision – and there's a very simple reason for that. The reason is that we allow ourselves to torture cats and monkeys – maybe it's right or maybe it's wrong, but we permit it. If you torture monkeys and cats, you can learn something about their visual systems. You stick electrodes into their striae cortex when they're looking at something and you see what fires and what doesn't fire. With intrusive experimentation – which is basically torture – you can learn a lot about an organism. You don't do it to humans, but you figure human visual systems are pretty much like monkey visual systems, which is probably true, you can tell by autopsies.

But you can't do this with language because there's nothing like a language faculty in any other organism. So, you can't torture cats and monkeys and find out anything about human language. Fortunately, we don't have Nazi doctors, so the only types of experimentation that can be carried out on the brain are, basically, nature's experiment: a guy gets hit in the head with a crowbar or somebody has a seizure. But that kind of evidence is just too unselective.

AVA: Can't they figure out the sequence in which abilities are lost as different kinds of seizures onset, and eventually develop a map of the brain?

NC: You get very weak data. Pathological data is extremely poor, because the experiments aren't controlled. In natural experiments too much goes wrong. If you want to do an experiment, you have to stick an electrode in a particular cell and determine what that cell is doing. But nature doesn't do that. If you had a stroke, let's say, some class of things goes wrong and we try to pick out what was relevant to language there. It's very, very hard. The brain sciences can't do much at this point. We don't have methods of non-intrusive experimentation which would allow you to learn a great deal about human language. There's some –you can learn things about electrical activity through experimentation that's not intrusive, but it's not selective enough to teach you much.

AVA: Do the computer scientists use your research? Or contribute to it?

NC: Computer sciences is a wide range of things. At one point I worked in automata theory. There was interest in developing a general mathematic theory of various kinds of symbolic systems in which language is one and computer languages are another. There's work on complexity theory, which tries to talk about the complexity of algorithms: what kind of programs are harder to carry out and which one's aren't? We try to look at language applying some of what's known about complexity theory. But those are pretty weak connections. The closest connection is just simulation. There are lots of complex processes where you can learn something by trying to simulate them. And languages are, at their roots, complex kinds of computational systems; so you can try to simulate some of the things by computers. If you have a model of speech perception, let's say, you can try to simulate it and see if you can learn anything by how the simulation works.

AVA: Howard (a mutual friend) told me that your son writes software.

NC: At the moment. He finished a year of graduate math at MIT and decided it's not for him, and he dropped out. Came out here.

AVA: I'd heard he'd written a symphony.

NC: (Blushes) When he was a kid – he was a good musician and in elementary school and junior high he took part in composition competitions and he wrote something in one of the classes… It wasn't a symphony.

AVA: And one of your daughters is still working in Nicaragua?

NC: She's working with Barricada Internacional. She had worked in desktop publishing up here and went down there and has been there about three years, I guess.

AVA: What exactly is Barricada International?

NC: It's the international edition of Barricada, which was the Sandinista newspaper.

AVA: It's not anymore?

NC: It's not officially the Sandinista newspaper, but it's still sort of related.

AVA: And what does she do?

NC: She has skills which, by the standards of a third world country, are pretty extensive. She does things - kind of troubleshooting, or teaching people how to do desktop publishing and the use of computers. Desktop publishing – that whole technology is very good in third-world countries. It sounds high-tech, but the fact is that it's extremely cheap as compared to the standard printing, and it's just the appropriate technology for people without resources.

AVA: Along what lines would you like to see this society reorganized? Do you ever think about a serious party forming in the U.S. that could gain power and change things?

NC: I think the United States desperately needs just ordinary reformist parties of the social democratic type. And the reason is, we're unusual among the industrial societies in lacking elementary human services that are taken for granted in the civilized world. National health service. Just guaranteeing that people have health care, have a place to live, have something to eat. Nothing very fancy, just the things you would think that a civilized society would take for granted. Day care. Preventive medicine - not just dialysis but things that people need in their lives to prevent them from getting sick. We have to have an educational system that works. We have to have some way of keeping people in school instead of jail. We have by far the highest prison population per capita. What's happening to the country is that it's moving towards a third world-society with a sector of very wealthy and a vast sector of people that are just out of it. This is such a rich country that the proportions are different than say in Brazil; but the similarities are very striking. And that's got to be retarded. In other state-capitalist societies there's some kind of social contract that we don't have. Like Germany where – I don't think they're very nice places, myself; in many ways this is a much freer and better society – but they do have that.

AVA: Why should we shoot for such a limited goal?

NC: That's not shooting very far. That's joining the civilized world.

AVA: Right.

NC: That's a first step. Beyond that… in my view, the 18th century revolutions were aborted. I'm an old-fashioned conservative. I think the 18th century libertarian ideals were basically correct: there shouldn't be concentrations of power. Power should be under popular control. The centers of power that people thought about in those days were the church, the feudal system and the absolutist state. And so they said, "Okay, let's dissolve that."

But in the 19th century a new center of power developed: corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism destroyed liberalism. Liberal thought kind of broke on these rocks of rising corporate capitalism. A new center of control and concentration of power developed, out of public control. The same standard libertarian ideals that made you opposed to an absolutist state make you opposed to capitalism. And it's always corporate capitalism, because it's going to concentrate. The mechanisms of production and distribution - the determination of what happens in the society has to be under public control. Now that can mean workers' councils or community control of industry and financial institutions or whatever, but it's got to be basically worker and community controlled. And unless that's achieved, we will never have achieved the 18th century revoution. That's only part of it; there's lots of other forms of authority and domination and oppression in the world. You look at relations between people of color and whites, men and women, parents and children - anywhere you go there's forms of authority which have to justify themselves. Any form of authority requires justification; it's not self-justified. And the justification can rarely be given. Sometimes you can give it. I think you can give an argument that you shouldn't let a three-year-old run across the street. That's a form of authority that's justifiable. But there aren't many of them, and usually the effort to give a justification fails. And when we try to face it, we find that the authority is illegitimate. And anytime you find a form of authority illegitimate, you ought to challenge it. It's something that conflicts with human rights and human liberties. And that goes on forever. You overcome one thing and discover the next. In my view, what a popular movement ought to be is just basically libertarian: concerned with forms of oppression, authority and domination, challenging them. Sometimes they're justifiable under particular conditions, sometimes they're not. If they are not, try to overcome them. Now the major one in our society has to do with the fact that the country is owned by a small group of people. And that determines what is produced, what is distributed, what is consumed, what you see, what you read, where you work, whether you work, what happens in the political system. Virtually everything is traceable back to that centralization. And until that's overcome - until the power in that system is diffused - there isn't going to be any operative political freedom. There isn't going to be any operative electoral freedom, and so on. But, that's not the whole story. There's plenty more.

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AFTER his talk, a woman had asked Chomsky, "Do you think we're doomed as a species?"

He replied, "If the only value in human life is maximization of gain, if the only thing that drives people is greed, then you can bet your life that the civilization is not going to survive very long. If that's all there is to human life, you can forget it, this is not a viable species. I don't see any reason to believe that's true, incidently. Those are really characteristics of modern capitalism. There are other forms of vicious, destructive social organization, but this is really the only one that has said that people are simply entities driven by greed and has turned that into a virtue.

"I don't see any reason to believe that. People don't act like that in small social groups. Like in a family: unless you're pathological, you don't try to steal food from your children because you're hungry or simply because you have the power to take it."

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FAAAs

I couldn’t really picture what Chomsky was saying about Homo Sapiens’ unique linguistic ability, until many years later, when I heard Raphael Mechoulam discussing Fatty Acid Amino Acids (FAAAs) at a meeting of the International Cannabinoid Research Society.

An "F-Triple-A" is just what the name says: a fatty acid bound to an amino acid. FAAAs are signaling molecules, abundant in the brain. They include the body’s own endocannabinoids, anandamide and 2-AG. Several FAAAs are known to have therapeutic effects. Arachidonoyl Serine, for example, lowers vasoconstriction and brain trauma effects. Arachidonoyl glycine lowers pain. Oleoyl serine counters osteoporosis. Palmitoyl ethnaolamide (PEA) concentrations are enhanced after damage in a specific brain region. “There may be hundreds of compounds formed by fatty acids binding to amino acids or their derivatives in the brain,” Mechoulam reminded his colleagues. Very few of these compounds have been studied.

“Why does the body spend so much energy synthesizing so many different compounds?” Mechoulam asked. “It doesn’t make sense. There should be something behind it… It is tempting to assume that the huge possible variability of the levels and ratios of substances in such a cluster of compounds may allow an infinite number of individual differences — the raw substance which of course is sculpted by experience.”

Mechoulam said he had asked a statistician if 200 compounds could yield eight billion distinct personalities. “The answer was ‘Of course.’”

I flashed on Chomsky’s talk all those years ago… If some 200 FAAAs in the brain can shape aspects of personality, surely they can enable the understanding of language! Integrating what I heard from two sages, I conclude that the "hard-wiring” for our unique ability as Homo sapiens – language! – consists of about 200 minuscule globules of fat in the brain!

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MOTHER DEAR

“Husban’, I am goin’—
Though de brooklet is a-flowin’,
An’ de coolin’ breeze is blowin’
            Softly by;
Hark, how strange de cow is mooin’,
An’ our Jennie’s pigeons cooin’,
While I feel de water growin’,
            Climbing high.

“Akee trees are laden,
But de yellow leaves are fadin’
Like a young an’ bloomin’ maiden
            Fallen low;
In de pond de ducks are wadin’
While my body longs for Eden,
An’ my weary breat’ is gledin
            ’Way from you.

“See dem John-crows flyin’!
’Tis a sign dat I am dyin’;
Oh, I’m wishful to be lyin’
            All alone:
fait’ful husban’, don’t go cryin’,
Life is one long self-denyin’
All-surrenderin’ an’ sighin’
            Livin’ moan.”

“Wife, de parson’s prayin’,
Won’t you listen what he’s sayin’,
Spend de endin’ of your day in
            Christ our Lord?"
But de sound of horses neighin’,
Baain’ goats an’ donkeys brayin’,
Twitt’rin’ birds an’ children playin’
            Was all she heard.

Things she had been rearin’,
Only those could claim her hearin,
When de end we had been fearin’
            Now had come:
Now her last pain she is bearin’,
Now de final scene is nearin’,
An’ her vacant eyes are starin’
            On her hom.

Oh! it was heart-rendin’
As we watched de loved life endin’,
Dat sweet sainted spirit bendin’
            To de death:
Gone all further hope of mendin’,
With de angel Death attendin’,
An’ his slayin’ spirit blendin’
            With her breath.’

— Claude McKay (1912)

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