Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 10/29/2025

Sunny | Priscilla Thomas | Foodbank Days | Covelo Math | Millsite Planning | Gilled Polypore | Roberta Antoinette Bartley | Heart Work | AI Cameras | Officers Ramsey | Yesterday's Catch | Deciding Vote | Autumn Song | Grandparents Music | No 50 | Leading Man | Wealthy Left | Awful People | Mugged/Arrested | Lead Stories | War Nation | Profit-Taking Middlemen | Food Stamps | Murder Machine | Peaceful Morning | Stop Everything | Mass Blackout | Baseball Joy | Anton Chekhov | Two Novels | Meanwhile | Hope Management | June Morning

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GENERAL HIGH PRESSURE continues over the area, creating a dry weather pattern for much of the week. Chilly temperatures in Trinity County and other interior cold valleys overnight. Very light rain or drizzle is possible for the coastal areas of Del Norte Wednesday morning. Slight chance for rain this weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A bit warmer 46F under clear skies but with high clouds approaching this Wednesday morning on the coast. Sunny today, cloudy tomorrow then clear thru Monday, ish. A system is poised to arrive with some good rain early next week, we'll see if it holds together this time ?

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PRISCILLA THOMAS (1936—2025)

Priscilla Thomas passed away peacefully on October 12, 2025, in Ukiah, California, surrounded by her three loving daughters.

Born on December 8, 1936, in Boston, Massachusetts, Priscilla lived a vibrant and purposeful life. She was deeply inspired by the ocean, and her love of nature shone through her art and her activism with Earth First!.

A lifelong spiritual seeker, she found a community and sense of belonging at the Center for Spiritual Living.

For the past 39 years, Priscilla was also devoted to her recovery community, where her compassion and wisdom touched countless lives.

Priscilla is survived by her four children, seven grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.

Her boundless energy, creativity, and commitment to living a positive life will be dearly missed by all who knew her.

Donations could be made to Project Sanctuary or Inland Humane Society.

Love wins.

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DATE CHANGES FOR FOOD BANK DISTRIBUTION

Important update from Anderson Valley Foodbank

For the months of November and December, AVFB will distribute on the first and third Wednesdays:
- November 5th and 19th
- December 3rd and 17th

This change will allow our recipients more time to plan holiday meals.

We also wish to thank all our local volunteers and donors. The response from our community the last few months has been heart-warming.

Thanks,
Greg Brunson for AVFB board

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CHP OFFICERS Heaton and Mann from the Laytonville Resident Post removed over a pound of methamphetamine from the streets of Covelo, California.

Their efforts continue to keep our communities safe.

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FORT BRAGG PLANS PUBLIC STUDY SESSION, WEBSITE TO BOOST TRANSPARENCY ON MILL SITE DEVELOPMENT

Mendocino Railway's application to the coastal commission for a "categorical exemption zone" could take as long as a year

by Elise Cox

City officials say planning for the redevelopment of the former Georgia-Pacific mill site is advancing on several fronts, with new efforts underway to increase transparency and public engagement.

Mayor Jason Godeke reported that the city’s mill site ad hoc committee, which includes Councilmember Lindy Peters, met last week to discuss progress on a categorical exclusion zone application to the California Coastal Commission. The exclusion would apply specifically to rail-related areas and activities on the site.

“That is a process that will take quite a while,” Godeke said. “It will take approximately a year to work that application up, and it is specific to the rail-related areas and activities of the mill site.”

Next steps include a series of archaeological, botanical, and visual studies, according to Godeke. The city also recently requested a 12-month stay in its ongoing litigation with Mendocino Railway to allow continued planning and environmental work in coordination with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) and other agencies.

“We expect to be holding a study session on that whole process in early December,” Godeke said. “That will be an opportunity to hear more about all of these various processes that’ll be working in parallel and to get input from the public on this very important topic.”

To improve communication, the city will also launch a dedicated web page with documents and updates related to mill site activities and planning.

“There’s a lot going on,” Godeke said. “We’re going to have a web page dedicated specifically to mill site activity so the public can go to one space, get updates, see documents, and try to make that as easy as possible for folks to access.”

Councilmember Peters said the December study session will be open to the public and intended as an “information exchange.”

“I know the public has not had a chance to comment on things that are going on — a lot of it has to do with closed session and lawsuits,” Peters said. “But I want the public to know we’re not trying to hide anything. We’re really going to try and make an effort now with the web page and a series of public meetings to get the information out there and start drawing the public into this process as much as we can going forward.”

(www.mendolocal.news)

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ROBERTA ANTOINETTE BARTLEY (1946—2025)

Roberta Antoinette Bartley, of Metter [Georgia], passed away peacefully at her residence on Friday, October 17, 2025.

Born in Oakland, California, Mrs. Bartley was the daughter of the late Robert Kennedy Meader and Margaret Thomas Meader.

In 1964 she married her beloved husband, Robert Louis Bartley, in Placerville, California where they raised their two children.

Roberta was an amazing person and made many life long friends during her employment at Intel, California Department of Corrections and Parole and the California Conservation Corp.

She was preceded in death by her beloved husband, Robert, her son Bobby and her grandson Trevor.

Mrs. Bartley is survived by her daughter Lisa Macdonald and her husband Mac Macdonald; her son, Jason Wayne Bartley and his wife, Cynthia; grandchildren - Darrell Rinde, wife Michelle; Phillip Rinde, wife Leah; Jacob Bartley, Jordyn Hackney, husband Phillip; Jared Bartley, wife Lillian. Great grandchildren – Kevin Rinde and Phillip and Parker Hackney. Sisters - Dianne Wyatt and Sharon Norris.

In accordance with her wishes, no services will be held at this time.

Arrangements are entrusted to Kennedy Funeral Homes, Hooks Chapel, of Metter.

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SUPERVISOR MAUREEN MULHEREN (facebook):

Sometimes I hear people say that organizations helping the homeless are in it for the money, but that’s just not true. The folks doing this work are some of the most caring, hard-working people out there. Case managers, outreach teams, shelter staff, volunteers… they could all make more money somewhere else, but they choose to show up every single day to help people get food, shelter, and stability.

It’s not easy work and it’s definitely not glamorous, but it changes lives. The Mendocino County Continuum of Care brings together local programs and partners who are focused on real solutions for people in need.

If you want to learn more about what they do, check out mendocinococ.org/continuum-of-care. Let’s keep showing up with compassion and support for the people doing this heart work every day.

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FORT BRAGG RESIDENTS ALARMED BY “FLOCK AI CAMERAS” POSTERS

Police Chief says system targets vehicles tied to crimes, not people

by Elise Cox

Posters with the headline “Flock AI Cameras Track Your Every Move” are plastered around Fort Bragg, prompting alarmed residents to contact the Fort Bragg Police Department for information about the city’s use of automated license plate readers.

Interim Police Chief Eric Swift confirmed that the city has installed seven Flock cameras, but he said they are not typical surveillance devices.

“The Flock cameras we have are specifically tied to a crime — so it’s tied to the vehicle itself or the description of the vehicle,” he said. “The cameras are not just taking pictures or videos of people.”

According to Flock Safety, the company that sells the cameras, the system automatically captures license plates of passing vehicles, along with other unique characteristics such as color, make, model, and even bumper stickers or visible damage. This data is compared to police “hot sheets” — lists of vehicles that have been reported stolen or are wanted in connection with a crime. When a match is found, the system alerts local law enforcement.

Swift clarified that the data is owned by the city and deleted after 30 days.

“It’s illegal for us to share that data with the federal government or other federal agencies or out of state,” Swift said.

Swift also promised to address concerns about transparency raised in a recent Mendocino Coast News article that highlighted the absence of a promised data portal allowing the public to verify how the cameras are being used.

Councilmember Lindy Peters noted that the cameras will not be used by ICE and said he hoped Swift’s explanation would help alleviate anxiety that has been expressed, particularly on the MCN listserv. He described the cameras as a tool in the city’s “public safety tool belt” that helps keep citizens safe and their vehicles in their driveways.

Peters also noted that the cameras were acquired using asset forfeiture funds and grant funding, not general fund money. Asset forfeiture funds are money and property seized by law enforcement and forfeited through civil or criminal proceedings. Their use is restricted by law: they cannot be used to supplant routine agency budgets or replace general operating expenses, but they can support task forces or joint operations.

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Statewide ALPR Misuse Fuels Local Fears

Community concerns about ALPR privacy are exacerbated by ongoing reports of data misuse and illegal sharing throughout California.

As reported by CalMatters, agencies across Southern California — including the Los Angeles Police Department and sheriff’s departments in San Diego and Orange counties — violated state law more than 100 times in a single month in 2025 by sharing license plate reader data with federal agents, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Subsequent investigations by Palo Alto Online and the San Francisco Standard found that police departments in Atherton, Menlo Park, and San Francisco also violated state law.

The Lost Coast Outpost recently reported that the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office appears to be routinely violating its own policy and state law by allowing outside agencies access to its ALPR data, often without obtaining legally required information such as the reason for the search or the identity of the officer conducting it.

Senate Bill 34, which passed in 2015, restricts how data collected by automated license plate recognition systems can be shared.

Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the city of El Cajon earlier this month for violating SB 34 and sharing license plate data with federal and out-of-state entities. The suit was filed two days after Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 274, which would have imposed additional restrictions on data collected by automated license plate readers — specifically, a default 60-day data deletion requirement.

Newsom said the bill did not strike the right balance between protecting individual privacy and ensuring public safety, and that it created enforcement costs not accounted for in the current budget.

(Mendo Local Public Media, P.O. Box 362, Mendocino, CA 95460. All contributions go directly to support newsgathering and reporting.)

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CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL Officer Chad Ramsey Retires after 25 Years and holding many positions at the Ukiah Office, including his time helping with the Katrina Hurricane Relief Efforts in Louisiana.

His son, Cameron Ramsey, has followed in his father's footsteps joining the Ukiah office in 2024.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, October 28, 2025

ELECTRA BEARD, 38, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance.

BRIANNA BELL, 22, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ARMANDO GARCIA, 43, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, brandishing, unauthorized entry of dwelling.

JAIR HOAGLEN-ALLEN, 19, Reno/Ukiah. Reckless evasion, opposite traffic.

AHMED HUTTON, 20, Ukiah. Robbery, loaded firearm.

JOSHUA LEACH, 36, Ukiah. Fugitive from justice.

ANTOINE MOORE, 44, Ukiah. Attempted car theft, vehicle tampering, burglary tools, controlled substance, evidence tampering, contempt of court, battery on peace officer, resisting, failure to appear.

NATHAN MORALES-SALDANA, 35, Covelo. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, trespassing and occupying building without consent.

JESSIE PULIDO, 33, Ukiah. Controlled substance, vandalism, suspended license.

JORGE ROSAS, 42, Vallejo/Ukiah. DUI, no license.

BRIAN SCHATZLEIN, 60, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance.

JEFFREY SHEPHARD, 31, Middletown/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

SOCRATES WALLACE, 25, Willits. Domestic battery, false imprisonment with violence, domestic violence court order violation.

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AUTUMN SONG

With long sobs
the violin-throbs
of autumn wound
my heart with languorous
and montonous
sound.

Choking and pale
When I mind the tale
the hours keep,
my memory strays
down other days
and I weep;

and I let me go
where ill winds blow
now here, now there,
harried and sped,
even as a dead
leaf, anywhere.

— Paul Verlaine (1866) translated by Arthur Symons

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ANOTHER BIG REASON TO VOTE NO

by Sophia Bollag

With a week to go, supporters of Proposition 50 have raised more than twice as much as opponents, a gap that has widened significantly in recent weeks.

Supporters have reported $129 million in contributions while opponents have reported just $46 million. Spending is also lopsided, with supporters reporting more than double the expenditures of opponents.

The supporters’ haul, the lion’s share of which has been raised by a committee led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is so massive that state regulators struggled to display the latest campaign fundraising and spending report on the state’s archaic campaign finance website. The report, which was due Thursday, was finally available Monday. A similar delay happened for the previous report last month, too.

Prop 50 would replace California’s congressional maps, drawn by an independent commission, with new maps drawn by Democrats that aim to flip five seats from Republican to Democratic control. They are designed to help Democrats wrest control of the U.S. House of Representatives to provide a check on President Donald Trump, and to counter moves by Republican-controlled states that are redrawing their own maps to favor Republicans.

As of Oct. 18, his campaign reported spending $77 million of its total haul, mostly on television ads. Newsom has been the face of the campaign, and is the star of some of its ads, but in recent days the campaign has also pushed ads featuring former President Barack Obama.

Billionaire Tom Steyer, a former San Francisco hedge fund manager and presidential candidate, has also launched a separate ad campaign in support of the measure using $12 million of his own money. Steyer has used the money to run two ads in support of the measure, including one that stars himself.

Steyer is the second-largest overall contributor in support of Prop 50. The biggest is House Majority PAC, which works to elect Democrats to Congress. It has reported about $15 million in contributions. The Fund for Policy Reform, an organization founded and funded by Democratic megadonor George Soros, has given $10 million. Several labor unions are also among the biggest contributors. The National Education Association and the California Teachers Association have each contributed $3 million, and the California Nurses Association has kicked in $3.3 million.

Michael Moritz, the 71-year-old billionaire Pacific Heights venture capitalist and publisher of the San Francisco Standard, has contributed $2.5 million.

Newsom’s campaign has also raised significant sums from small-dollar donors. It reported more than $31 million in donations of $250 or less. The campaign has reported more than 102,000 individual donors.

That’s a much, much larger donor base than opponents, who have reported about 420 individual donors.

Most of the opponents’ cash has come from Charles Munger Jr., who has given $32 million of the total $41 million raised. Munger is a retired Palo Alto physicist and son of billionaire Charles Munger, who served as the vice chairman of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. More than a decade ago, Munger Jr. bankrolled the campaigns to create the independent redistricting commission and give it power to draw the state’s political districts.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a group that works to elect Republicans to Congress, has kicked in about $7 million. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has donated $1 million through an old campaign account. Thomas M. Siebel, a longtime Republican donor and distant relative of Newsom’s wife, first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, also gave $1 million.

Opponents have spent about $41 million, mostly on advertising, according to the most recent campaign expenditure reports.

(SF Chronicle)

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THE GREAT LEFTIST IGNORANCE SCAM

The new left movement in America is taking off mostly with the very wealthy, which isn't an accident

by Matt Taibbi

I almost died laughing when I read that Graham Platner, the “progressive warrior poet” running for Senate in Maine, went to school at Hotchkiss, one of a handful of prep schools in the Northeast more precious and exclusive than my own Concord Academy. The original comic appeal of the Platner story was in watching the legacy press mouthpieces who denounced Pete Hegseth’s “Crusader Cross” pec-tattoo rally to the defense of Platner’s Nazi Death’s Head tat, which he got in Split, Croatia, while he was so wasted. That’s been hilarious, but the Free Beacon story about the “warrior poet” with accidental Nazi ink who went to a $75,000 high school describes a political scam of chef’s kiss perfection.

He fooled even me, and I basically am Graham Platner: a northeasterner of means who went to high school with sons and daughters of rock stars and CIA chiefs, but also has a few Oyster-shucking scars. It would never have occurred to me to market myself as “working class,” but Platner obviously doesn’t suffer pangs of conscience on that score, describing himself in a launch video as a “working-class Mainer” who can stand a post and chop his own goddamned firewood.

Even more incredible is how far and wide the humble origins tag has flown, with everyone from The New Yorker to the Washington Post to Bernie Sanders and Politico selling him as a “candidate from the working class” taking on the big, bad establishment. It should have been a major red flag that even Bon Appétit ran a gullible feature on Platner’s journey from “working class fisherman to Maine’s Zohran Mamdani,” but I still didn’t catch it, underestimating the sheer stones behind this marketing gambit.

Platner will do well, since his glass-chewing voice and military chops will provide enough on-camera verisimilitude for voters to forgive his salesmanship indiscretions. He’ll be forgiven, unlike Gavin Newsom, already being savaged for his recent effort to rebrand himself as an ex-street waif forced to live off crusts of Wonder Bread. It’s all hilarious until you read other parts of the Platner story, which include hanging out on a Socialist reddit under the name “P-Hustle,” describing himself as a communist and “antifa super-soldier,” and suggesting violence is necessary for social change. An old Bangor Daily News editorial he wrote contained the following passage:

In post-9/11 America, every terrorist is portrayed as evil. We seem to have forgotten the old adage: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

Understanding the motives of terrorists is one thing, but the really concerning theme in Platner’s writing, and in the rhetoric of lefty superstar and New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, zooms past trying to understand certain violent movements into something like sympathy for their underlying goals and mores. The ideas currently fashionable among upper-class lefties are suicidal lunacies that will force actual working class Americans to vote against them out of self-preservation.

What’s depressing for me is that I know exactly how this happened. Only people who can afford the kinds of schools Platner and I attended can afford to be as detached from reality as the new progressives have become. Writing on his site recently, Andrew Sullivan is right. If the new choice is between this brand of leftism and MAGA Republicanism, we’re in for a “very long” period of “MAGA dominance.” And that’s the best case scenario.

In the Tolstoy story The Kreutzer Sonata, a hyperkinetic narrator describes entering a Bearded Lady tent at a P.T. Barnum circus in Paris. Discovering that the woman was just a “man in disguise” he hustles for the exit, whereupon the carnival barker points to him and says to the waiting crowd: “Ask the gentleman if it is not worth seeing!” The narrator doesn’t answer, being too embarrassed that he got conned out of a franc. “It was upon my false shame that the Barnum must have counted,” he concluded.

In The Kreutzer Sonata this is Tolstoy’s metaphor for marriage, but it fits better with modern higher education. After years of exclusive schooling I was horrified to realize not a dime of my parents’ tuition money had been spent preparing me to earn a living. I’d been too stupid to worry about it myself, and schools simply never brought it up, instead encouraging youngsters like me to programs of enlightened self-actualization through drama, political sciences, creative writing, and literature. Great fun, but when you hit the job market — yikes! When I realized the only saleable skill I had in the modern economy was the family business of journalism — which I hadn’t studied — I fled the country in shame, living off money saved up waiting tables and working demolition shifts until I could support myself selling articles.

Across the next decade or so of embarrassed residency abroad, I saw that real working class people don’t have the luxury to send their kids away to whack themselves off in intellectual spas. It’s understood that large percentages of young people will be needed to design the next generation’s roads, water treatment plants, refrigerators, etc. Living in places like Mongolia and Uzbekistan also introduced me to the idea that less than extravagantly wealthy countries don’t have the luxury of sending class after class of their best young minds through curricula devoted to deconstructing the core premises of their society. In other words, in the rest of the world, rational social planning not only results in fewer kids studying pure theory, but the theorists those countries do graduate are far less inclined to spend their lives denouncing their home countries as forces of historical evil.

In countries where the bulk of people have to be concerned with survival — getting enough to eat, not being conquered by rival nations or revolutionaries, and holding crime and corruption to tolerable levels — colleges don’t teach kids that they’re citizens of oppressor nations that should probably be disbanded. They certainly wouldn’t do it if they lucked into the benefits of citizenship in a country like the United States. This country has problems, even serious ones, but it’s not like gangsters are setting up freelance toll booths on I-95, or the strip steak you ordered at Ponderosa has a good chance of being cat meat. Citizens of countries that have known true suckage — including especially the ones with Marxist or Maoist histories — laugh at the things Americans call “problems.” The only people who think the system that produced the richest, safest empire in history is essentially unfixable are America’s own wealthy, whose current disdain for their own good fortune is like a political version of heroin chic.

This is what we’re seeing now, and in particular with the Mamdani campaign, which to a hilarious degree is manna from heaven for Trump. Mamdani is the face of the new brand of socialism that embraces the preamble theme of the Communist Manifesto, in which all society is divided into “oppressor and oppressed.” Illegal immigration isn’t a problem that needs to be contained in order to make social programming for citizens affordable, as Bernie Sanders once believed (and perhaps still does), but because immigration laws are inherently oppressive. So as Mamdani now proposes, let’s spend $165 million making New York the “strongest sanctuary city in the country.” Let’s not fix police violence by ending stats-based enforcement or doing away with Broken Windows theory, but let’s tweet things like “Queer liberation means defunding the police” (Mamdani says he no longer favors defunding, but be your own judge). On other subjects, here’s how Sullivan sums up:

In 2022, Mamdani declared of his political career: “For me, there’s no point in doing this without D.S.A.” The Democratic Socialists of America favor full amnesty for all illegal immigrants, abolition of the Senate, voting rights for noncitizens, and public ownership of major corporations. Since he won the nomination, he has softened on some of these points, but remains a DSA member and fan. New Yorkers can decide if he’s sincere…

Then there’s Mamdani’s gambit in which he decided to “speak to the Muslims in New York,” telling a story about an aunt who “stopped taking the subway after September 11th” because “she did not feel safe in her hijab.” I lived in New York for most of the 2000s and recall extraordinary levels of amity and cooperation between most of the city’s Muslim and non-Muslim residents. The numbers bear this out. New York is and always has been a liberal city welcoming to people from all over, one of the reasons its Muslim population has more than doubled since 9/11. For a likely future Muslim Mayor of New York to even remotely imply that Muslims in New York were victims of 9/11 is infuriating lunacy. Unfortunately, it fits in the aforementioned “oppressor and oppressed” mindset, in which a “marginalized” community always holds the moral high card over people who built your roads, bridges, and ports, and put out your fires.

Once you see attendees* of $75,000 boarding schools talking about the need to arm the proletariat and a candidate for Mayor of the world’s financial center talking about perhaps toning down the rhetoric on “seizing the means of production” so that “over time, we can bring people to that issue,” its clear neo-Marxist idiocies have been allowed to gain a stronghold. Only people who don’t know how hard it is to build a society think this way, but the number of such people is growing, ironically because of the educational system.

The liberal left in this country used to be about searching for ways to moderate the excesses of capitalism, creating more opportunities for social mobility, and promoting tolerance and generosity. Instead, we’re in the “upper-class twits promoting revolution” space, a script with which most of the rest of the world is sadly familiar. Is there no defense against the ignorant rich?

(racket.news)

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IF A CONSERVATIVE is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.

— Tom Wolfe

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LEAD STORIES, WEDNESDAY'S NYT

Hurricane Melissa Makes Landfall in Cuba After Lashing Jamaica

Judge Admonishes Border Patrol Leader for Tactics in Chicago

Just Before Trump’s Visit to South Korea, North Test-Fires Missiles

U.S. Military Kills 14 More People Accused of Smuggling Drugs on Boats

Trump Administration Reinstalls Confederate Statue in Washington

Netanyahu Orders Strikes in Gaza, as Israel Says Hamas Violated Cease-Fire

The Website Reshaping Live Music, One Set List at a Time

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ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Greatest country in the world… Yet we have 42 million people on SNAP benefits, we cut medicaid and we're about to kick millions off of health insurance. We have billions for Argentina and for military hardware. What good is that going to do if we're hungry and ill?

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ANNIE DOOLEY:

Time to cut out corporate grocery chains raking in billions for frozen pizzas and sugary breakfast cereals. Eliminate SNAP and return to the agricultural commodities program to feed our poor children and mothers. Milk, cheese, bread, peanut butter, dried beans and rice, meats, fruits and vegetables, minimally processed, can be and once was distributed direct from USDA "stores" for pickup or delivered. Like our broken healthcare system, there is no economic sense in paying profit-taking middlemen to do what government can do cheaper and efficiently when government is empowered to do it and dedicated to the mission of feeding the hungry as so many good public servants are.

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IT’S JUST NEWS STORY after news story about the US and its allies terrorizing the world today.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been filming themselves committing horrific massacres in Sudan over the last couple of days, reportedly murdering some two thousand civilians. You can see the bloodstains on the ground in satellite images. As we discussed the other day, the RSF and its atrocities are backed by the UAE, a close partner of the United States.

Meanwhile Israel has committed another wave of massacres of its own throughout the Gaza Strip, reportedly killing 104 people in a single day, including 46 children. This is as many Palestinians as would typically be killed on any given day in Gaza prior to the so-called “ceasefire”.

CBS News’ 60 Minutes has released a cartoonishly blatant war propaganda piece on “Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator” about how poor and unhappy the people of Venezuela are under their current government. The piece featured an interview with Republican Senator Rick Scott, who said that “If I was Maduro I’d head to Russia or China right now; his days are numbered.”

The US can make threats, impose sanctions and amass war machinery, but you don’t truly know they’re serious about attacking a country until they start churning out Pentagon propaganda in the mainstream press.

In the same interview, Scott also said that if Maduro is successfully ousted, “it’ll be the end of Cuba.”

“America is gonna take care of the southern hemisphere and make sure there’s freedom and democracy,” he added.

The senator’s statements suggest that the US is preparing a push in Latin America similar to what it has been executing with Israel in the middle east, eliminating any powers which refuse to bend the knee. South of the US border the top two disobedient governments are the socialist states of Venezuela and Cuba. In the middle east the US and Israel have spent the last two years bombing Iran and Yemen, securing a regime change in Syria, and doing everything they can to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah in order to rule the region uncontested.

And of course we’ve still got the horrifying US proxy war in Ukraine, where soldiers continue to be dragged off against their will to fight in a nightmarish conflict that most Ukrainians now oppose, but which Zelensky is saying he intends to keep fighting for years against the will of the public. This whole miserable ordeal could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but the western power alliance avoided off-ramp after off-ramp in order to ensure that Russia would get sucked into another costly military quagmire.

All over the world the US and its allies are murdering and abusing people in order to dominate the planet and ensure the survival of the capitalist system with which its power is intertwined. It is a giant murder machine feeding on human blood and the life force of our biosphere while providing nothing but obstacles to a healthy world.

The US-centralized empire is a disease that affects our entire species. We had better find a cure, and fast.

— Caitlin Johnstone

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MITCH CLOGG:

It's stunning to see most everybody going about their business as if things are normal. There's reassurance in the protests and the oceans of ink being spent on our common malady, our collapse under the weight of greed and corruption, a sense that "we'll get through this."

I get a physical sense of danger, seeing people going to the store, hearing the schoolkids near my home, watching the traffic thrumming along busy streets.

A thing like the 2011 tsunami is in the early stage. Our awareness of normalcy recedes as the ocean did then, the sea drawing away from the coasts, people watching, flabbergasted, then running and climbing, then mingling with houses and cars, unbelievably dying, high aerial shots of entire regions, farmland, places and things one assumes are anchored and rooted permanently, rising, floating, tumbling, vanishing…

It's like that. The moment has no precedent. My mind has no clear response, what to make of it.

"Courage!" say the French, in the face of disaster, but courage is not the main thing we need. We need plans, fast, and action, immensely forceful action.

Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King, history's martyrs and gentle and rational people everywhere agree that violence is not the right response. I'm not sure. I am absolutely certain that the prospect of violence must--MUST--remain in the air. Images of Mussolini hanging dead by his heels must stay in circulation, maybe should be projected onto buildings, as people have, in recent years, projected startling images on buildings.

The fearfulness that is the flip side of the jubilation from scamming the whole world is a place to start, a squishy soft underbelly

People who are bringing this on and taking unheard-of advantage of it have among them big contingents of cowards, curs and cowards. Everybody knows this, and it adds to the feeling that something salvational will prevail, but there's no reason to think so, no correlation between how bad I want something and how likely I'll get it.

I read editorials, statements of every kind, calling for redress, change of direction, recognition of evil--or stupidity and wrongheadedness, whatever.

Tell it to the tsunami.

With almost no exceptions, the courageous statements call us to attention, confirm the rumors of danger, advise us to stock up and take care, to defy and protest, to ready ourselves and stand fast (etc. etc.). They stop there. Advertisements with no products or services on offer.

As far as I'm concerned, until somebody has a better idea, we must stop: stop everything. Leave empty the streets and the stores, the schools and the offices, the planes and the trains, the factories and places of entertainment--EVERYTHING! I have more food than I can eat. You want some? Happy to share. Come on over.

What we should NOT stop is meeting each other. Let there remain places we can get together out of the rain. Let the marches and protests go on. Maybe the signs can hold new messages, ominous ones.

This is a form of violence nobody can do anything about. It will damn sure work. While we wait for better ideas, for people of righteous power to rise and take command, this is an excellent, clear and forceful action. It has to be a MASS action, and it has to be sustained.

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WITH BASEBALL, I NO LONGER CARE WHO WINS

by Edward Hirsch

For the past ten years I have been gradually losing my sight, not totally, but steadily, irreversibly. These days I can’t see much in the dark, but I can still make out things in the light, especially if they are right in front of me, and a baseball outing to a day game seemed like a good challenge, an overdue pleasure.

So, on a sparkling afternoon last month I took a field trip with my office mates to watch the Mets battle the Padres for a playoff spot.

At the stadium in Queens, I was reassured by my first glimpse of the field. There is something timeless about a baseball diamond bathed in sunlight. Sure, there’s a pitch clock now and enlarged bases, but the basic pastoral feeling is the one I had as a kid. When you watch a ballgame, the outside world disappears.

What I did not expect, however, was that my experience of the game would be so changed. Since I can no longer follow the ball, which looks like an aspirin and moves too quickly for me to spot, I had to figure out what was going on by tracking the movement of the players, whose bodies I could still distinguish. This isn’t as difficult as you might expect, because it’s all very choreographed when something happens, like a lazy fly ball to center field or a double into the gap in right.

I’ve always been so concentrated on the ball, on winning and losing — on achievement — but now that I can’t see the ball anymore, that all seems less important. What matters even more is the experience itself, the crack of a bat and the fielders springing into action, their sudden turns and well-timed leaps, the runners rounding the bases, someone thrown out at second, someone else coming home, the beauty of bodies in motion, the thrill of art.

From my new perspective, a baseball game looks like a dance piece, which takes rhythm and timing, precision and grace. The field is a clearly marked performance space.

The performance begins with the pitcher. He winds up, cocks the ball, strides forward and whips it to the plate, and the hitter instantly responds — he swings or doesn’t swing; he connects or doesn’t. Say, he slams a hard grounder to the left side of the infield. The third baseman dives to his left and misses, the shortstop goes deep into the hole, stabs the ball, pivots and throws while the runner races up the baseline and the first baseman reaches for the ball. I have seen first basemen who can practically do the splits. The umpire hovers nearby to make the call: an infield hit.

Now the runner dances off first. The right-handed pitcher looks over his shoulder; he turns quickly and tosses to first. Safe. The runner glides off the base again, only this time he takes off when the pitcher throws to the plate. The batter steps forward but doesn’t swing, the catcher gloves the ball and throws all in one motion, the second baseman darts to cover second, the runner slides headfirst into the bag. The fielder tags his hand, and the umpire raises a clenched right fist — it always seems to be his right fist. The runner is out. The third-base coach runs onto the field to protest — it’s almost required — but the call stands. The runner jogs back to the dugout, the infielders toss the pill around and the dance begins again.

When you watch the game this way, it becomes a form of ritual art. There’s a reason the players call the major leagues “The Show.” The outcome is not predetermined, but neither was an experimental dance piece by choreographers like Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. The rules may be old, but a baseball game now looks to me like a fluid piece with a different outcome every night, tragic for one team, comic for the other.

Walt Whitman said that baseball “has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere.” That’s why fans play such a participatory role. There is chatter on the field, but the fans provide the louder soundtrack. I’m not a fan of the music between pitches, the stadium announcer’s telling everyone what to think, the mascot’s clowning for laughs. But true baseball fans are not distracted. Voices shout out, some encouraging, others derogatory. It’s all predictable. Cheers and boos. The hometown crowd rises on home runs and sulks on strikeouts, right on cue.

The Mets were leading 5-1. But I wasn’t concerned with the result. I stood with the crowd for the seventh-inning stretch, a tradition that never gets old. Everyone from my office looked crazily happy — joshing and taking photos and blowing fake horns and singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I could see what was going on, not perfectly, but enough to take in the spectacle. And then my eyesight blurred, not because I was losing my vision, but because I was seeing something that I had missed. I was crying from the intense, fleeting, overwhelming joy of it all.

(Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, played Division III baseball at Grinnell College. His most recent book is “My Childhood in Pieces.”)

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ANTON CHECHOV

He spent his life listening to coughs, to laughter, to the quiet heartbreak of ordinary people. By day, he was a country doctor, tending to peasants who could barely afford bread. By night, he turned their pain into art. Anton Chekhov believed that to understand the human soul, you first had to sit with its suffering.

Tuberculosis ate away at his lungs, but he never stopped writing. He once said, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.” Between the two, he learned the anatomy of both the body and the heart. His stories are not about heroes or villains, but about people, fragile, flawed, fumbling through existence.

In The Cherry Orchard, his final play, Chekhov wrote not of triumphs, but of goodbyes. The fall of an old estate becomes the quiet end of an era, and his own farewell to life. There’s no bitterness in it, only acceptance, a soft sigh that lingers like the echo of an ax cutting through wood.

Chekhov’s genius lay in his tenderness. He didn’t judge; he observed. He showed that comedy and tragedy often share the same heartbeat, and that endurance, not glory, is what defines humanity.

Even as his body failed him, he kept writing, gently, truthfully, until the end. When he died, he whispered in German to his doctor, “Ich sterbe,” “I am dying” — and asked for champagne. It was the final act of a man who faced death with grace, irony, and an unbroken love for life.

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BOBBY LIME:

Here are two great American novels which hardly anyone has heard of:

1. ‘Stoner,’ by John Williams
2. ‘Morte d'Urban,’ by J.F. Powers

When I finished ‘Stoner,’ I thought, "I have just read a perfect novel." The next week, I learned that William's biographer titled his book about him, "The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel."

Powers began Morte d'Urban in the early 1940s. It was published to universal acclaim in 1962. It proves the glory of perfectionism. One of Powers' daughters said he would stick all day on which article to use. Most of the book is hilarious, but at its end, it becomes grand and magnificent.

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HOPE MANAGEMENT

by Gavin Francis

Four hundred years ago Robert Barton concluded his majestic (and majestically unwieldy) treatise ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ with a few words of distilled wisdom that remain as useful for sufferers of depression now as they were then: “Be not solitary, be not idle, SPERATE MISERI CAVETE FELICES” (unhappy ones, have hope; happy ones, be cautious.) Hope is the golden promise of every therapeutic encounter: through the judicious application of medical science, allied with human kindness, one’s suffering might be eased, one’s dignity and autonomy honored. This remains true even when the condition is one that cannot be cured.

Psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and primary care physicians like me try to meet and sustain those hopes every day in our clinical practice. Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that “in the treatment of nervous diseases, he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.” In 1850 S.B. Woodward, the superintendent of a Massachusetts state asylum, wrote of good psychiatric care, “The mind must be managed, hope inspired, and confidence secured.” Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins and a practicing psychotherapist, says that with ‘Fires in the Dark’ she set out to write a book about healing but instead wrote one about being a good healer.

It’s also a book about hope. Her exploration of what makes for an effective healer is interwoven with much biography (notably of Paul Robeson, William Osler, and W.H.R. Rivers) and autobiography (readers will be reminded of Jamison’s superb 1995 memoir about her bipolar illness, ‘An Unquiet Mind’).

It’s a wistful, celebratory book, digressive and discursive, sometimes melancholy, always enlightening.

Jamison examines Paul Robeson’s polymathic achievements in the light of his own bipolar illness and repeated deep, suicidal depressions. Robeson was thwarted by America’s savage midcentury racism, and his “sense of moral purpose gave strength to tens of thousands of those less strong,” despite or perhaps because he carried so many wounds. Jamison describes how his legacy was poisoned by the anti-Communist witch hunts of the period that barred him from traveling or performing. He was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and told the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, “Here [in Russia] I am not a Negro but a human being. Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be.” When he was summoned in 1956 to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was asked (by the Republican representative Gordon Scherer) why he hadn’t stayed in Russia, where he felt so at home. He replied, “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

(New York Review of Books)

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