Showers | Morning After | AV Events | Food-Bank Help | Barbara Blattner | Chinese Pistache | SNAP Impact | Local Events | PVP Workshop | Grupo Bella | Ed Note | Pet Woody | County Settlement | Garden Color | Yesterday's Catch | Flatland Blues | TG 2025 | True Cost | Right Way | Fun Billboard | Hard Times | Go Vegan | Tehachapi Hills | Good People | Rejected Again | Marco Radio | Wolfman Jack | Dylan's Blues | Candidate Wilson | Waymo Cat | PTSD Stories | Messianic Madness | Peter Kropotkin | Fentanyl Delusion | James & Nora | The Plains | Line-Storm Song | Lead Stories | Presidential Babble | Admiral McRaven
RAIN CHANCES increase in Lake, Mendocino, and Trinity early this morning. More widespread rain and gusty winds are forecast midday through Monday. An extended period of cold overnight lows with widespread frost and interior freezing temperatures will begin overnight Monday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Our coast forecast has me scratching my head early on today ? There is the So Cal system to our SE trying to move our way while another new front approaches from the NW. It seems the front to our west will win out. Whatever the case rainfall is now forecast to start later today & linger more into Monday than previously thought. We will have to see what happens & when at this early 5am point of the new day ? Meanwhile I do have a 51F under cloudy skies on the coast this Sunday morning.
BILL KIMBERLIN: It rained hard during the night and this morning looked like this. Not a bad trade off. When people greet me lately with the ubiquitous expression, "How are your?", I often say, "I live in California, and the sun is shinning. You can't do better than that."
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE: List of Events
THE AV FOOD BANK NEEDS EXTRA HELP this Wednesday distributing extra turkey-day meals. Stop by the Grange between 10:30 and noon.
KIM SLOTTE MORGAN on the passing of her mother, Barbara Blattner:
I wish I could thank all of you individually and give you all big hugs for all the love, prayers and support. My mom loved and felt things very deeply and I believe I inherited that from her. It’s wonderful and it’s difficult. Right at this moment it’s difficult, but I hold on to the same Jesus my mom held onto. I am so grateful she was my mom and I’m so grateful that I will spend an eternity with her, because a lifetime was just not enough. She would want all of her family and friends to know without a doubt that she loved them all. What a reunion she must be having.
NO RELOADING OF SNAP/CALFRESH/EBT and the Impact On Local NGOs and Food Banks
by Jayma Shields Spence, for The Mendocino Observer
As someone who runs a local non-profit organization (Laytonville Healthy Start, a community & Family Resource Center), which provides emergency food bags, as well as a monthly Food Bank, and assists folks in signing up for benefits such as CalFresh (food stamps/SNAP/EBT) I can confidently say the government budget cuts and recent shut down is impacting how “we do business.”
First, I want to state that I have made the argument for over a decade that food stamps (CalFresh in CA, SNAP on the federal level) is a generator of income for the local economy. When an individual, senior or family signs up for CalFresh, it’s not a simple application, take it from someone who helps people navigate this process. Once the application goes to the county Social Services eligibility office and is approved, the “awardee” of benefits can see as little as $25/month or for a larger family, a few hundred a month.
I’ll use my last shopping trip as an example, Rolo, the dog and I, shop about once a week at various stores and by the time we’re putting the purchased food in the fridge, freezer, or cupboard, we’ve easily spent a few hundred dollars. On weeks where we really had to re-stock, we’ve easily spent $300. Granted, we are both employed and can afford the groceries, but on the weeks where we spend upwards of $400, we’re cutting back in other areas, or delaying paying a big bill until the next pay day.
For families with children, a few hundred on the EBT card won’t go far, but it’s a couple hundred they wouldn’t have otherwise.
In my opinion, few are “milking” the system. Most people I have helped sign up for SNAP are working people or self-employed trying to make ends-meet. That $100 or $200 they get loaded onto the EBT card helps buy groceries, where the hundred or so they have saved can now pay a vendor or a bill. It just brought a little relief to someone.
For those lucky enough to take advantage of our Laytonville farmer’s market “match” program, they can get up to $30/week matched on their EBT card (meaning if I have an EBT card, and I tell Gloria, our market manager, that I want $30 taken from my EBT card that week, she presents another $30 in Market Bucks, meaning my household now has $60 to spend at the Laytonville Farmer’s Market.) That $60 then goes to a local farmer, who when they cash out with Gloria, they then might turn around and spend that money in town at our local gas station, grocery store, liquor store or eatery in Laytonville. Same with the individual or family with the EBT card, they can now shop at any of the local businesses that accept EBT. It’s a win-win. A person gets extra support buying food, and the money can go towards a local business or farmer.
Now, let’s talk about the shut down. Over the Halloween weekend I was sick, so I spent too much time watching TV and the news. All the channels spoke of the SNAP program not being funded due to the shut down, and therefore EBT cards that re-load on the first of the month with new funds were not going onto the card. Every single news station said that if people needed food, they should visit their local food bank. Then they cut to the video of a local food bank and volunteers loading groceries into a car.
Can I paint a bit of a different picture for you? I am the person at the Laytonville Food Bank responsible for making sure there is food delivered for the third Friday distribution day to give to our clients (roughly 150-200 households per month). A year or two ago, the list I could order from was full — it included several options of canned foods, nuts, meats, frozen items, eggs, sometimes bread and most definitely a lot of produce. Rarely did we have to pay for items on the list, as the majority were considered “TEFAP” (a government program that provides commodity food for free to low-income participants of food banks). Our ordered food comes from the Mendo Food & Nutrition Program (Fort Bragg Food Bank) which is the entity that delivers to us, which gets their food sourced from the regional food bank, Redwood Empire Food Bank.
Being under the “umbrella” of Redwood Empire Food Bank, the Mendo Food and Nutrition Program can then turn around and supply food to the smaller food pantries/banks in Mendocino County, another win-win.
A few months ago, the Trump administration cut funding of the USDA that was linked to many of the food bank programs we tap into via our Food Bank partners at the “higher” level. The list I now order from is one-third of what it used to be, the free produce is scarce, and we now have to pay for the meat, eggs and most canned goods. Granted the cost is “nominal,” but it is still a burden on our small budget.
In the past, monetary donations were used to buy more food or “bonus” items to make our food bags fuller. Now, that money is being used to simply get a delivery of basic food to make the food bank run. So, when the news tells the person whose EBT card isn’t being reloaded to “just visit the nearest food bank” there’s an additional burden on that food bank to suddenly make more food appear for more clients.
That being said, for people in need, please utilize your local food bank, we are of course there to serve you. I just want to bring to folks’ attention that while the government has frozen many of these benefit programs, it most definitely impacts us locally and directly.
What can you do? I like what Casey O’Neill wrote in this week’s HappyDay Farms Newsletter, and it’s something I’ve told people they can do to help: donate produce from your garden! Grow an extra row for the local food bank. Pick those extra apples and pears and bring them to us!
Other ways to help are to donate money directly to the organization in your own community. We are the ones ensuring that our local community gets fed. We can use the donations to increase our purchasing power and get more on the food delivery truck.
We can also use holiday items. I will be putting out our annual wish list for the Thanksgiving Dinner boxes we put together for local families and senior citizens, items that will be needed are things such as: boxed stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, green beans… You get the picture.
Finally, advocate on behalf of organizations like Laytonville Healthy Start/Laytonville Food Bank by telling our local, state and federal representatives to support legislation that funds programs such as commodity food, produce, food boxes for seniors, and emergency food. (We lost an emergency food grant a few months ago due to federal budget cuts.) Since federal government budget cuts, I am seeing a direct impact on our organization and funding stream. We have lost a few long-time grants and contracts. It is the first time I am worried about our budget and our ability to operate in the future if funding isn’t restored or re-allocated. If you don’t think that what happens at the federal level impacts us here, Jayma is here to tell you it is and it does. It’s also impacting your neighbors, their children, their grandparents and our community’s economy.
Thank you for taking the time to read my piece. To contribute where you live, choose an organization that serves your community or neighborhood directly. If you feel compelled to help in Laytonville, a donation can be made to Laytonville Healthy Start (Harwood Park-FRC on a check) or food items for the upcoming holiday drive can be dropped at our office located at 44400 Willis Avenue in Laytonville. (PO Box 1382, Laytonville, 95454.) We are open Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, 9-5.
The next Anderson Valley Food Bank distribution will be Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025 from 2:30-5:30pm at the AV Grange. Donations to can be made AV Food Bank, PO Box 692, Boonville CA 95415.)
LOCAL EVENTS (today)
POTTER VALLEY - ‘THE FUTURE OF OUR WATER’
by Justine Frederiksen
A workshop designed to inform local residents on the process of decommissioning the Potter Valley Project and “what’s being done to ensure the region’s future water supply” has been scheduled in Ukiah later this month, the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission announced.
“The workshop will provide factual updates, answer questions, and support a collaborative, informed dialogue about this complex and evolving issue,” the IWPC explained a press release about the meeting, which has been scheduled for Monday, Nov. 24, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center in Ukiah.
“With growing public interest, including recent discussions by the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors at multiple meetings, it is an important time to bring the community together to hear directly from agencies and experts working on long-term water solutions,” the release continues. “There will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentations.”
During the Nov. 4 meeting at which the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution related to the decommissioning process, many residents expressed strong opposition to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s plan to remove the dams built for the hydroelectric plant it has deemed too expensive to continuing operating. Many resident also requested a community forum at which their concerns could be heard, particularly regarding the loss of water that flows through the project’s tunnel and into both Lake Mendocino and the Russian River.
When asked if the workshop, called “The Future of Our Water,” was in response to those calls for a community discussion, IWPC staff member Candace Horsely explained that the commission had sent a letter to the Board of Supervisors “in September regarding a workshop, so IWPC is sponsoring this event,” and that the commission planned to answer a lot of the questions asked at recent board meetings regarding the PVP in both October and November.
Horsely also noted that “it is our plan to be putting out press releases on a regular basis from now on regarding updates with the PVP, Lake Mendocino and ongoing new storage efforts in Potter Valley and areas south.”
According to its website, the IWPC was formed in 1996 “as a joint powers authority to serve as stewards of the Russian and Eel River watersheds, safeguarding the water that plays such a vital role to the region’s economic development, environmental quality, and general well-being of those who use this water.”
Janet Pauli, the chair of the IWPC, told the Board of Supervisors at its Nov. 4 meeting that improving “water storage and infrastructure (for Mendocino County) is critical, regardless of the Potter Valley Project. And those of you who know what the IWPC has been working on over the last 30 years, they understand that that’s been our mandate, that was why we were formed.”
The IWPC members include the county of Mendocino, the city of Ukiah, the Redwood Valley County Water District, the Potter Valley Irrigation District, and the Mendocino County Russian River Flood Control and Water Conservation Improvement District.
The IWPC describes the decommissioning of the PVP as carrying “significant implications for water supply, habitat, and infrastructure in both the Eel and Russian River watersheds, (and that) IWPC and regional partners have been working for years to plan for a post-Potter Valley Project future, secure continued water diversions, and develop new agreements that protect local water reliability while meeting state and federal requirements.”
Speakers at the Nov. 24 workshop who will be explaining “planning efforts, future infrastructure needs, existing agreements, timelines related to PG&E’s decommissioning application and ongoing storage investigations from Potter Valley and south within the Russian River watershed” include Dave Manning, Executive Director of the Eel Russian Project Authority, Scott Shapiro, legal counsel for IWPC & ERPA, Tom Johnson, New Eel Russian Facility engineering specialist, and Pauli will be moderating.
The event is open to public, and “intended to help people better understand the facts, dispel misinformation, and engage constructively in one of the most significant water supply issues facing the region.” For more information, contact Horsley at [email protected].
(Ukiah Daily Journal)
GRUPO BELLA IN UKIAH
At 2:00PM on Sunday, November 23, the Ukiah Community Concert Association is thrilled to showcase Grupo Bella on the Mendocino College Center Theatre stage in the second concert of our 2025-26 season.
Formed in 2011, LA-based Grupo Bella is fronted by GRAMMY-award winning vocalist and GRAMMY-nominated composer Vanessa Ramirez. With an ever-evolving sound, the quintet brings their own interpretations of Mexican Folk with a depth supported by adept musicianship and sheer passion. Their instrumentation is familiarly Mariachi, which is thrown for a loop with an enticing fusion of Mexican Pop, Boleros, Huasteco, and even American Classic influence.
Tickets for non-season subscribers are $35 in advance and $40 at the door. Advance tickets are available on the UCCA website and at Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah and Mazahar in Willits.
As part of our on-going Educational Outreach Program, we offer free concert tickets to high school students, younger children when accompanied by an adult, and full-time college students enrolled in 12 or more units. Free tickets can be reserved in advance by calling 707-463-2738 with name, phone number and email address.
For more information, please contact the UCCA at 707-463-2738 or email us at [email protected]
ED NOTE:
I'VE LONG BEEN NOSTALGIC for the long-gone times when Mendo's public meetings were interesting, even fun, meetings where violent exchanges of opinions were common and occasionally emphasized with a few actual punches. Why even I, an idealistic citizen simply trying to do my part to ensure clean government, was physically attacked walking out of the first Boonville school board meeting I ever attended. I knew my presentation wasn't being well received when persons seated behind me began muttering, "Sit down. Shut up. Who the hell are you?" The Anderson Valley was, ah, quite insular in 1972. But it was a real community complete with men's leagues and potluck gatherings. Now? Incoherent, transient, a few affinity groups but no community in the known sense of community.
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
If you’re looking for an uber intelligent dog with the energy of a toddler after a double espresso — congratulations, you’ve found him! Woody is a 1-year-old tri-color Australian Shepherd with a heart full of joy and legs that never stop moving. He’s friendly, playful, and very excited about… Well, everything. Toys? Love them. Walks? The best! Meeting other dogs? Heck yea! He recently met a new canine buddy on leash and was all tail wags and smiles. Woody’s ideal home is one that can match his enthusiasm — think hikes, fetch marathons, maybe some herding of the household members (it’s in his job description), and a dog who will rule in canine classes! In return, you’ll get endless affection, loyalty, and a personal clown in a fur coat. Come meet Woody — he’s ready to herd your heart straight into happiness! Woody is a year old and weighs 53 pounds.
To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, tortoise, horse, 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!
FROM THE ARCHIVE (January 2014)
GIVE DENNIS O'BRIEN high marks for doggedness. He is now in settlement negotiations with the County over a free speech matter 18 months old.
ON August 13, 2012, O’Brien, of the Mendocino Environmental Center, filed a $10,000 claim against Mendocino County “for actions of Detective Andrew Whiteaker, failure to process timely complaint by Captain Randy Johnson, failure to initiate an investigation by Sheriff Allman, violation of civil rights, infliction of emotional distress, false authority and imprisonment.”
THE INCIDENT, described fully below, occurred at the Ukiah Crossroads Shopping Center on North State Street and at the Sheriff's office on nearby Low Gap Road.
WHEN O'BRIEN brought his complaint to the Supervisors in late 2012 he and it elicited rude impatience and yawning indifference from them.
“ON APRIL 16, 2012 at approximately 3:30pm I parked in the parking lot of the Ukiah Crossroads Shopping Center at the end of North State Street. As I walked toward Raley's Supermarket I saw a woman on the sidewalk with a clipboard in her hand. She was standing near a large stone pillar on the opposite side from the entrance to Raley's. She was not in any way interfering with foot traffic. If anyone tried to enter the store using the space she was occupying, they would have run into a stone pillar. As I approached, the woman asked me if I would like to sign some ballot petitions. I said I would. She had at least three petitions to get ballot measures on the ballot. I signed two of them. Before I could get to the next one Detective Andrew Whiteaker appeared. He was wearing a shirt with a Sheriff's logo on the left breast and Sheriff's Office badge on his belt. He stated that the woman seeking signatures to the ballot measure must leave. The woman stated what she was doing and said she was just exercising her free-speech rights. Detective Whiteaker stated she was on private property and that the store manager had requested that she leave. I then stated that the Supreme Court had held that a shopping center was the equivalent of a town square and that it could be used for gathering signatures for political purposes. Detective Whiteaker replied that he was enforcing California law and that the owner had the right to ask anyone to leave the place of business. I then asked him to identify himself. He stated he was Detective Whiteaker and confirmed he was a member of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department. I asked if he was on duty and he said Yes. I asked him if he was aware of the First Amendment, and he said Yes. I asked him if he knew that the First Amendment applied to the states. He said that did not affect his enforcement of private property laws. When I stated that I believed that Sheriff Allman would disagree, Detective Whiteaker replied that Sheriff Allman could not tell him how to enforce the law. I replied that Sheriff Allman could tell him if he was making a mistake. Detective Whiteaker then stated that if we did not stop he would have to arrest us for trespassing on private property. The woman gathering signatures left immediately and I walked into the store. I was not able to review or sign the additional ballot petitions that the woman had left with. This is a sworn declaration that I have submitted to the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office as a formal complaint. The back page of what I've just passed out has my conversation with Captain Greg Van Patten who is the immediate supervisor of Detective Whiteaker. If you would like to hear more of that, one of you will have to ask me. I'm out of time.”
THEN-BOARD CHAIR John McCowen, who owns the building at 106 West Standley which houses O'Brien and his activist colleagues, said, “Thank you Mr. O'Brien. As you know, we are not allowed to consider items not on the agenda.”
O'Brien: “You are not allowed to act on them. You are allowed to discuss them.”
Mr. O’Brien is correct, according to the Brown Act and the Board’s own rules. Supervisors routinely engage members of the public in dialog on matters that citizens bring up. They just can’t vote on them.
McCowen: “Well, we are not really allowed to discuss it without having it on the agenda, so thank you for the information.”
HOWEVER, soon after Mr. O'Brien shuffled from the podium, acting County librarian Annette DeBacker and the Supervisors chirpily discussed her new job and the extra money she’s got to work with since Measure A passed last year, giving the Library a big infusion of new funds. The smiley chirp-chirp interlude was not on the agenda.
O'Brien: “You're allowed to ask questions.”
O’Brien is again correct.
McCowen, exasperated and raising his voice: “Thank you!”
O'Brien: “And you have 10 minutes to do that…”
O’Brien is again correct.
McCowen: “Well, thank you for the inform—”
O'Brien: “If any supervisor would like to hear the rest of the issue—”
McCowen: “Thank you, Mr. O'Brien. Thank you.”
NO SUPERVISORS had any questions, including Supervisor Hamburg, who won a nearly identical free speech lawsuit against Walmart a few years ago.
IT NOW APPEARS, however, that the County Counsel's office agrees that O'Brien was and is correct. We hope he gets the full ten grand in damages. One would think that the cops and mall store managers would have long ago understood that this litigated-to-smithereens issue of protests and signature gathering is legal in mall country.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, November 15, 2025
SHANNON GRIFFITH, 34, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
MADISON SAVAGE, 36, Redwood Valley. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
SARAH SCHMITZ, 31, Willits. Domestic battery.
BRITTANY STECKTER, 36, Ukiah. DUI.
MISSISSIPPI FLATLAND BLUES
It was early in the morning
I was almost out the door
Got a call from my bossman
He said, "I cannot use you no more"
I got the Washington County
My factory done shut down blues
There ain't no good news
I got the Mississippi flatland blues
I went out to Boeing
I thought I'd be flying high
But they closed down and sold the parts
And left me high and dry
I got a job at Vlasic
Puttin' pickles in a jar
But they shut down and GMAC
Came and took my car
Cocaine took my fella
The banker took my home
The streets have got my children
And I'm sitting here alone
I'm so blue and downhearted
I've almost lost my will
I've even thought of suicide
But I ain't fit to kill
If the C & G makes enough money
To fix there worn-out track
I'm gonna hop a freight train
I swear I ain't never coming back
— Eden Brent (2008)
TRUE COST OF OBAMACARE
Editor:
The real story underlying the government shutdown is an attempt by the Democrats to continue to mask the failure of Obamacare to reduce the promised cost of health care.
During the COVID crisis, the Democratic administration and Congress passed legislation temporarily authorizing health insurance premium assistance, to be effective through 2025. To force an extension of that assistance, thereby continuing to mask the additional cost of Obamacare, a timely House-approved clean resolution was sent to the Senate authorizing extension of existing spending levels until Nov. 21, which was blocked by a filibuster enforced by most Democratic senators. In the past these resolutions have routinely been accepted by the minority party and the government stayed open.
All congressional compensation or reimbursements should be permanently forfeited and adjournments prohibited during any shutdown.
Jim Haberkorn
Santa Rosa
EASY WAY, RIGHT WAY
Editor:
I’m thrilled that I don’t have to wash my clothes on river rocks or to go wherever I need to go on foot. But our quest for what’s easy is surely smoothing our path to calamity.
Professor Albus Dumbledore echoed many others before him when he told Harry Potter, “Dark and difficult times lie ahead, Harry. Soon we must all face the choice, between what is right and what is easy.”
What is right historically has not fared well, and today isn’t faring well at all against what is easy.
It’s easier to lie than to tell a difficult or unpleasant truth.
It’s easier to dictate and bully than to lead through collaboration and a free exchange of ideas.
It’s easier to parrot than to question prejudices.
It’s easier to surrender to, than to resist, the lure of corruption.
It’s easier to steal than to earn.
It’s easier to shop online than to patronize local retailers who enhance a community.
It’s easier to hand a child a mesmerizing screen than to devise a healthier way to engage her.
It’s easier to renege than to do whatever necessary to honor a commitment.
We could steer our actions and decisions vigorously in the direction of what is right. Sadly, that won’t be easy.
Chris Smith
Santa Rosa
BETH NICOLAIDES:
I always did like the setup Heinlein proposed in ‘Starship Troopers.’ If you want the franchise, earn it with some sort of service, military or otherwise.
As an Xer, I came of age just as Reagan ascended, and I prospered by snapping up the scraps left by the Boomers. It was not easy, but it wasn't horrible, either. I don't understand the despair of younger generations . . . Not as someone who graduated into Carter's bleak, stagflated world with farmers in my area killing themselves and their families. Even worse, preceding generations faced conscription and bloody death, not to mention dust bowls and depression. Student loans and housing bubbles pall in comparison.
SPARE THE TURKEY
Editor,
‘Peace on plate’ of vegetarian meals should be considered.
Articles and advertisements for turkey dinners on the Thanksgiving holiday are flooding our inboxes and the media landscape now.
If you are one of many people who cannot imagine the day without eating turkey, how about all the days that are not Thanksgiving? During those 364 days, I urge everyone to try some vegetarian or vegan meals.
A web search on any recipe you like with the word vegan before it will yield thousands of possibilities. Try oat, almond or soy milk instead of cow milk in your coffee tomorrow. Try a bean salad or a chickpea salad instead of tuna for lunch today. Pasta primavera is always a delicious dinner.
The possibilities are endless. If we want more peace in the world, it has to start in our hearts. And peace on the plate is an easy way to open our hearts to animals any day of the year.
Patti Breitman
Fairfax
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
There are a lot of good people out there who are armed to the teeth. I am one of them. We have seen too many end of the world dystopian movies where society de-evolves into Mad Max kind of shit. I don't believe that will happen. There will be roving bands of gangs, sure, but they won't last long. If there is no law, people will take the law into their own hands and large mobs of fair minded people will put down and eliminate the roving bands of gangs. There might be a time of chaos and ugliness but it will be short.
Evil is alive and well in this world but there is still much good out there and many good people who won't put up with the bullshit for very long.
REJECTED AGAIN (I can’t give it away!)
by Paul Modic
I was feeling a little depressed last month after coming out of the doctor’s office (minor stuff but the worry can be worse than the reality) and decided to live a little and go to a Mexican restaurant, my first time eating out in about eight months. I used to really like La Costa in Fortuna, the salsa amazing, the chips ultra-refined and tasty, but this time the enchiladas and beans were just so-so. (I had had an amazing tostada at home the day before with beans, hummus, feta, pico de gallo, avocado, lettuce, arugula, and kale, a glorious feast.)
After eating I thought what the hell, why not do a “giveaway?” I went out to the car to get some of my homemade dictionaries to randomly hand out to my fellow diners.
“Would you like a free English/Spanish dictionary? I made it,” I said as I walked around the tables. Only one of the six (Fortuna rednecks?) I asked took me up on the offer and that’s why I was smiling so broadly in the car driving away, as it seemed amusing that my largess was almost completely rejected and I started to wonder why?
Is it suspicious to give something away, do people think there’s a catch, that I’ll try to steal their soul or come back for “the kill” moments later and ask for money? I was like a reverse-panhandler and I couldn’t give it away. (Reminds me of the personal ads: the more I said the faster they ran.)
(“You’re the only one who wanted one,” I told a woman in one of the booths.
“I was a teacher,” she said. Okay, I guess that explains something.)
Granted they didn’t know what a cute little work of art it was with nice drawings of cactus and goofy phrases, but no, these Fortunans wanted no part of my game. Well, to be fair, they don’t know where the booklets have been, maybe in some moldy contaminated place, and better to just say no? (They had been stored in my traveling case on the front seat and were in good condition.) I didn’t feel personally rejected, just amused by human nature or paranoid society?
When I got home I ran it by my neighbor and he said he wouldn’t have accepted one either.
“Really?” I said. “What if it were a Russian dictionary?” Still no. “Okay, how about if a hot Russian woman was handing it?” Okay, then he’d take one. (South of the border I’m never refused by a Mexican when I do this routine.)
Maybe people just don’t want more clutter? I was visiting a couple in Oregon last year and gave the man a copy. He looked at it with interest, his woman saw it sitting on the counter and gave it back to me, saying, “Oh yeah, we already have one of those.”
But I had given it to him, right? Well, their house is one of those perfect homes with art carefully displayed, not a spot of dust anywhere and a pretty amazing guest room for me too. Maybe she just doesn’t want any unnecessary clutter in the house and she’s doing damn better about it than me.
(That reminds me of the time I wrote possibly the best letter of my life to Brenda, she said she’d keep it forever, then a year or so later when I asked to borrow it back to make a copy she said she’d tossed it. When I reminded her of her “vow” she said, “If I saved everything I’d be overwhelmed with stuff.” It did take me a while to get over that one.)
MEMO OF THE AIR: Nor are we out of it.
"There's really nothing an agnostic can't do if he really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not." -Graham Chapman
Marco here. Here's the recording of Friday night's (9pm PDT, 2025-11-14) 7.5-hours-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on KNYO.org, on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part.
https://memo-of-the-air.s3.amazonaws.com/KNYO_0670_MOTA_2025-11-14.mp3
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:
The top country songs this week were all written and produced entirely by A.I. Here's one that doesn't have any swears in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU71XDWYeIk
The journey of Harry and Edna. Kodachrome, you give us the nice bright colors, you give us the greens of summer. It makes you think all the world's a sunny day. https://flashbak.com/found-kodachromes-harry-and-edna-478629/
"What if all the sun's energy were drawn into a single one-meter-diameter beam aimed at Earth?" https://www.neatorama.com/2025/11/12/Pondering-a-Deadly-Laser-Beam-from-the-Sun
A machine that counts money like my grandmother did at the restaurant. In those days everybody paid with real money. She would lick two fingers and the thumb of her right hand, vibrate them like the blades of a fan through a stack of bills, and then write down how much was there. By the time my grandmother was the age I am now her hands were ruined by arthritis. Her knuckles were as big as walnuts. Her prestidigitating money-riffling days were over. (via Massimo) https://twitter.com/i/status/1989204146868592780
And Mister Trump goes to Heaven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AQGLmM6NWA
Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
BOB DYLAN'S BLUES
Well, the Lone Ranger and Tonto
They are ridin’ down the line
Fixin’ ev’rybody’s troubles
Ev’rybody’s ’cept mine
Somebody musta tol’ ’em
That I was doin’ fine
Oh you five and ten cent women
With nothin’ in your heads
I got a real gal I’m lovin’
And Lord I’ll love her till I’m dead
Go away from my door and my window too
Right now
Lord, I ain’t goin’ down to no race track
See no sports car run
I don’t have no sports car
And I don’t even care to have one
I can walk anytime around the block
Well, the wind keeps a-blowin’ me
Up and down the street
With my hat in my hand
And my boots on my feet
Watch out so you don’t step on me
Well, lookit here buddy
You want to be like me
Pull out your six-shooter
And rob every bank you can see
Tell the judge I said it was all right
Yes!
— Bob Dylan (1963)
SANTA ROSA LAWYER MOUNTS CONGRESSIONAL BID AGAINST HUFFMAN, ET AL
by Austin Murphy
Kyle Wilson’s mother worked at Walmart. His father installed countertops. They weren’t affluent — not even close — but three decades ago his parents still earned enough to buy a modest home in Windsor.
“It was a simple house,” said Wilson, now a Santa Rosa-based labor lawyer. “But they owned it. They were invested in this idea of a social contract — you work hard, and you’ll be able to build a life with your kids, and make sure they have that same opportunity.”
Today, he said, that contract is in shreds, and the path for young people to save and eventually own a home has “gone completely missing.”
That erosion of the American Dream is one of the main reasons Wilson is running for Congress in California’s recently reconfigured 1st District — a vast nine-county stretch with Santa Rosa at its southern edge.
Wilson, who turns 33 on Saturday — the same day he’s holding a 1 p.m. “Coffee with Kyle” event at Brew in Santa Rose — has never run for or held elected office. But that lack of political experience, he argues, is exactly what appeals to the voters he hopes to reach.
A labor attorney who sues employers for wage theft, Wilson aligns himself with progressive, democratic-socialist candidates like Zohran Mamdani, whose Nov. 4 victory in the New York City mayor’s race over establishment Democrat Andrew Cuomo stunned political observers.
Wilson recalls seeing Mamdani last summer on TV or social media. “He’d taken the world by storm, put together a movement built on people that were tired of the establishment, tired of not being heard.”
He said he senses that same undercurrent here. “People have had enough of the broken system, and they want something different.”
He filed paperwork for his campaign, Kyle for Congress, on June 27. The bid is widely seen as a long shot — but, he notes, so was Mamdani’s run a year ago.
“I’m not naive about how difficult it’s going to be, and the uphill battle I’m facing,” Wilson said.
Such is his desire to drive change, Wilson said, that any hardships ahead would be far outweighed by the regret he’d feel if he never tried. “I just felt like I had to do it.”
Wilson’s political worldview was shaped long before law school. His great-grandfather fled the Dust Bowl, settled in Sebastopol and worked as an apple farmer. One of his nine children, Owen Wilson — Kyle’s grandfather — served as a battalion chief for the Santa Rosa Fire Department in the 1990s and later as the firefighters union president. That lineage, Wilson said, instilled an early appreciation for public service.
In 2005, his family relocated to Spanish Springs, Nevada, following construction work. During his junior year of high school, Wilson won an essay contest that sent him to Washington, D.C., for lectures and tours of historic monuments. That came in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which cost his father his job and the family its home.
The trip left a “deep impression,” he said, adding he was “watching the government bail out the banks while my family and millions of other families across America were left to fend for themselves.” It also gave him an early sense of “the power of the law, and what it can do to help people’s lives.”
The family returned to California in 2009. Wilson finished high school at Analy, studying for AP exams while the family cycled through weekly motel rooms depending on what they could afford. He excelled nonetheless, earning a Regents Scholarship to UCLA and becoming the first in his family to attend college.
Taylor Bohlen, Wilson’s UCLA roommate and a Sonoma native, recalls him as more “reserved” than he is now. Wilson, he said, had “strong convictions about what’s right and wrong” and the ability to “analytically evaluate” problems. “It does not shock me in the slightest that Kyle pursued a kind of fighting-for-the-people profession.”
After majoring in neuroscience — he seriously considered medical school — Wilson earned his Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School in New York City. He worked at Santa Rosa’s Spaulding McCullough & Tansil before joining Blackstone Law in Los Angeles last year.
Pamela Stevens, his former colleague in Santa Rosa and now a deputy line attorney in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, remembered Wilson telling her early on that he wanted to run for office.
“Here’s this young guy, great resume, Columbia Law, just killing it, working for one of the best firms in Sonoma County,” she said. “He wouldn’t have to do anything else if he didn’t want to. But he’s thinking big. He really wants to use the tools he’s been given, to be part of the change.”
Wilson’s already-steep climb grew steeper Thursday when state Sen. Mike McGuire, of Healdsburg, ended months of speculation and announced he would run for the newly drawn district. He joins Chico educator and nonprofit leader Audrey Denney, a fellow Democrat, and the incumbent, Republican Doug LaMalfa.
While McGuire — the current president pro tem of the California senate — is “really good at working within the system,” Wilson said, “my goal is to change the system. People are tired of the establishment and tired of the status quo.”
The politics of the redrawn district make that challenge evident. The further north one travels — past Ukiah, toward Red Bluff, Susanville and other conservative strongholds — the more Trump flags fly and the fewer voters embrace democratic socialism or its policy platform: universal health care, free child care, paid family leave, and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
But Wilson insists those communities aren’t out of reach. “If you look at the data and who these people vote for, there’s a very strong preference for Bernie Sanders in a lot of the voting history in our district,” he said. “I’m going to have some disagreements with people in these red areas. But I don’t think the answer is to rush to the center. The answer is to lead with an economic message that connects with everybody.”
The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) lists LaMalfa’s other opponents in the 2026 election as Democrats Rose Penelope Yee, Casey Stewart, and Kyle Wilson, as well as Erika Rhoden, who listed her party affiliation as “unknown” in her FEC filing. James Salegui of Siskiyou County – which like Shasta, will shift to District 2 and out of LaMalfa’s purview
Residents of Shasta and other North State counties moving into the new District 2 boundaries will be presented with fresh choices for their congressional representation in 2026. Jared Huffman, a Marin county Democrat, has been the congressional representative of District 2 since 2013, and like LaMalfa, has indicated plans to run for re-election in 2026. In the last District 2 election, Huffman won 71% of the vote against Republican Chris Coulombe.
Three additional candidates have already thrown their hat in the ring for District 2 representation, according to the FEC database. They include Democrat Kevin Eisele, a healthcare worker and former army medic, Independent Colby Smart, the superintendent of the Humboldt County Office of Education, and Cody Nikolas Polundiak, who has no campaign site and no party preference.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
WAYMO WAS THRIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO. THEN ONE OF ITS DRIVERLESS CARS KILLED A CAT.
The self-driving taxis have become ubiquitous in the city, but an uproar ensued when one ran over a beloved feline.
by Heather Knight
At Delirium, a dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, the décor is dark, the prices are low, the drinks are strong, and the emotions are raw. The punk rockers and old-school city natives here look tough, but they are in mourning.
Kit Kat used to bar-hop along the block, slinking into Delirium for company and chin rubs. Everybody knew the bodega cat, affectionately calling him the Mayor of 16th Street. Kit Kat was their “dawg,” the guys hanging out on the corner said.
But shortly before midnight on Oct. 27, the tabby was run over just outside the bar and left for dead. The culprit?
A robot taxi.
Hundreds of animals are killed by human drivers in San Francisco each year. But the death of a single cat, crushed by the back tire of a Waymo self-driving taxi, has infuriated some residents in the Mission who loved Kit Kat — and led to consternation among those who resent how automation has encroached on so many parts of society.
“Waymo? Hell, no. I’m terrified of those things,” said Margarita Lara, a bartender who loved Kit Kat. “There’s so many of them now. They just released them out into our city, and it’s unnecessary.”
Kit Kat’s death has sparked outrage and debate for the past three weeks in San Francisco. A feline shrine quickly emerged. Tempers flared on social media, with some bemoaning the way robot taxis had taken over the city and others wondering why there hadn’t been the same level of concern over the San Francisco pedestrians and pets killed by human drivers over the years.
A city supervisor called for state leaders to give residents local control over self-driving taxis. And, this being San Francisco, there are now rival Kit Kat meme coins inspired by the cat’s demise.
But all of that is noise at Delirium. Kit Kat was loved there. And now he is gone.
“Kit Kat had star quality,” said Lee Ellsworth, wearing a San Francisco 49ers hat and drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
Before Kit Kat’s death made headlines, Waymo was on a roll. The driverless car company owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, fully rolled out its San Francisco taxi service in 2024 and now has a fleet of 1,000 vehicles in the Bay Area. It announced an expansion this month with freeway service down the Peninsula and pickups at the airport in San Jose. Waymo expects to serve San Francisco International Airport soon, too.
Just a couple of years ago, the white Jaguars with whirring cameras on top were considered oddities. Passers-by would do double takes when they saw the steering wheel turning with nobody in the driver’s seat.
Waymos are now a top tourist attraction, however. Many women find them a safer choice than relying on an Uber or Lyft driven by a man. So many parents have ordered them for their children that some schools can look like Waymo parking lots.
And Grow SF, a moderate political group with ties to the tech industry, found that San Francisco voter support of Waymo had jumped from 44 percent in September 2023 to 67 percent this July.
Still, Kit Kat’s death has given new fuel to detractors. They argue that robot taxis steal riders from public transit, eliminate jobs for people, enrich Silicon Valley executives — and are just plain creepy.
Jackie Fielder, a progressive San Francisco supervisor who represents the Mission District, has been among the most vocal critics. She introduced a city resolution after Kit Kat’s death that calls for the state Legislature to let voters decide if driverless cars can operate where they live. (Currently, the state regulates autonomous vehicles in California.)
“A human driver can be held accountable, can hop out, say sorry, can be tracked down by police if it’s a hit-and-run,” Ms. Fielder said in an interview. “Here, there is no one to hold accountable.”
Ms. Fielder has strong ties to labor unions, including the Teamsters, which has fought for more regulation of autonomous vehicles, largely out of concern for members who could eventually lose their own driving jobs in other sectors.
Ms. Fielder has posted videos to social media, showing her walking the streets of the Mission as she discusses Kit Kat.
“We will never forget our sweet Kit Kat,” she says in one of them. “The poor thing … suffered a horrible, horrible, long unaliving.”
(The word “unaliving” is used by some social media users to avoid algorithms that suppress videos using words such as “death.”)
Memorials have sprung up at Randa’s Market, where the owner, Mike Zeidan, took in Kit Kat six years ago to catch mice. The cat hung out on the shop’s counter when he wasn’t roaming 16th Street. One neighbor used to bring him slices of salmon every day; another texted a photo of Kit Kat to his mother each morning.
On a tree outside hang photos of the cat and a sketch of him with a halo above his head.
“Save a cat,” the drawing reads. “Don’t ride Waymo!”
Floral bouquets, a stuffed mouse and a Kit Kat candy wrapper round out the memorial.
One tree over is a display of a different sort.
“Waymo killed my toddler’s favorite cat,” a sign reads. “Human drivers killed 42 people last year.” (Actually, according to city data, human drivers killed 43 people in San Francisco last year, including 24 pedestrians, 16 people in cars and three bicyclists. None were killed by Waymos.)
The sign was an attempt to put the cat’s death in context, in a walkable city where pedestrians still face peril. In 2014, the city pledged to end traffic fatalities within 10 years, but last year’s total was one of the highest on record.
The city does not track how many animals are killed by cars each year, but the number is in the hundreds, according to Deb Campbell, a spokeswoman for Animal Care and Control in San Francisco.
She said the agency’s cooler last week contained the bodies of 12 cats thought to have been hit by cars in recent weeks. None of them seemed to have prompted media coverage, shrines or meme coins.
Waymo does not dispute that one of its cars killed Kit Kat. The company released a statement saying that when one of its vehicles was picking up passengers, a cat “darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away.”
“We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and the community who knew and loved him,” Waymo said in a statement.
Waymo is adamant that its cars are much safer than those driven by humans, reporting 91 percent fewer serious crashes compared to human drivers covering the same number of miles in the same cities. The data was in a company research paper that was peer-reviewed and published in a journal. Waymo also operates full taxi services in Los Angeles and Phoenix and provides rides through a partnership with Uber in Atlanta and Austin, Texas.
Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco has been a big fan. He said earlier this year he would allow Waymo to use Market Street, the city’s central thoroughfare, which for five years had been accessible mainly to pedestrians and public transit vehicles. He also defended the autonomous taxis in an interview on Thursday with the tech journalist Kara Swisher after she brought up Kit Kat.
“Waymo is incredibly safe,” he said. “It’s safer than you or I getting behind a wheel.”
Rick Norris, who works at the Roxie Theater in the Mission, said that he liked Waymos and had noticed that they were navigating the city’s tricky streets better and better. But he was concerned after he spoke with several people who had witnessed Kit Kat’s last moments and recounted how they had tried to stop the Waymo when they saw the cat beneath it.
The car just drove away.
It was at that moment that Sheau-Wha Mou, a Delirium bartender and karaoke host, took her cigarette break. She saw people panicking as they stood on the sidewalk. She rushed over and found Kit Kat suffering, with blood streaming from his mouth.
“I knelt down, and I was talking to him,” she recalled. “‘What happened? Are you OK?’”
She said she had used the bar’s sandwich board sign as a stretcher. A stranger then drove her and Kit Kat to a nearby emergency animal clinic. Mr. Zeidan, the bodega owner, arrived soon after.
An hour later, the veterinarian told Mr. Zeidan that Kit Kat was dead.
Photos of Kit Kat still sit next to the cash register at Randa’s Market, alongside the dice and cigarette lighters for sale. Mr. Zeidan said he still misses the mouser that became the block’s mayor.
Darrell Smith stopped by the market on Monday, part of a weekly ritual that also involves ordering a mixed plate at the nearby Hawaiian barbecue spot. He missed Kit Kat, he said, but felt that dwelling on the robot car seemed like a waste of time.
“I’m skeptical about those Waymo cars myself,” he said. “But A.I. is the future. We can’t stop it whether we like it or not.”
(NY Times)
TAIBBI & KIRN
(This conversation is pegged to a discussion of William Golding's novel ‘Lord of the Flies.)
Walter Kirn: Right. You know, think about those soldiers who came back from World War II to England and the United States. They were absolutely feted in a way that has never happened since. They were given parades and photographed kissing young women and sort of reconquering the homeland with their goodness and their virtue, Johnny Come Marching Home.
But on the real level, as human beings, they had almost all seen or participated or been exposed to stuff that didn’t fit with ticker tape parades, didn’t fit with things that are usually celebrated. So they had this weird juxtaposition of private experience, private knowledge, with an almost social obligation to celebrate victory in a just war. And what a double bind that is for the human being.
Matt Taibbi: And this is a way to cope, I think, this book.
Walter Kirn: Yes.
Matt Taibbi: But he’s making a point about how if you don’t stay on top of it, the fear, the panic, the aggression, especially in an all-male environment, as you point out, this is Eden without women, and that has to be, it’s not just because Coral Island was written that way. It’s because that’s what the war was for most of these guys. It was so…
Walter Kirn: And you know what I find this book oddly predictive of is how the Vietnam War turned out for the American GI. From the Deer Hunter to Apocalypse Now-
Matt Taibbi: Apocalypse Now, yep, mm-hmm.
Walter Kirn: … et cetera, we basically see stories of the American GI who goes over somewhat disciplined in a World War II-like military context, and then becomes feral, you know, putting, tying headbands, smoking dope, becoming grandiose and tribal, and also sort of almost identifying with the-
Matt Taibbi: Even First Blood. He’s unfit for society when he comes back, right?
Walter Kirn: Dude, I just watched it for the first time last week.
Matt Taibbi: Oh, my God. Great movie, right?
Walter Kirn: Great movie, but-
Matt Taibbi: I didn’t expect it, frankly, yeah.
Walter Kirn: So much to talk about, but… And Stallone, I’ve got to say, my esteem for him as an actor and a figure goes up every year. Like, wait a second, Rocky, First Blood, what was the other franchise he was involved in? I can’t remember. But-
Matt Taibbi: I can’t even remember. Well, he’s doing Tulsa King now.
But, yeah, Rocky, that was a true story, but he understood, I think he went to that fight, The Bayonne Bleeder. He was from right around here, the Chuck Wepner-Ali fight, and which is… And then Rocky was based on that thing. And he saw that it was a real-life story of perseverance and how even somebody who is nobody can be, can have a moment of glory that lasts forever. And that it was a beautiful story for an actor to write.
And First Blood, I think that was a… What was interesting about First Blood compared to the other Vietnam movies, is that it was popularized in a way that the other ones could not be. In other words, it was a great action movie that reached people of all classes, but it told the kind of a true story about, I mean, the idea that the whole world was against every Vietnam veteran who came home, and that’s a little exaggerated.
But there was something, what we’re talking about here is that when you go to that experience and you come back and you’re not quite fit for civilization anymore, I think he nailed that, you know?
Walter Kirn: The book I’ve been finishing forever and I am just this many hours from finishing now includes, it’s a road trip around America, and it includes a lot of togetherness with a PTSD-afflicted Afghanistan vet. And one of the things we both know, I mean, one of the things he told me along the way, he said, “You know, the Great War on Terror doesn’t equip you to come back and live an American life. It really equips you to be homeless.”
And that’s kind of the story of First Blood.
Matt Taibbi: Totally.
Walter Kirn: He’s come back as an absolutely perfectly equipped homeless drifter and, yeah, but the bourgeois, little, small town orderly society doesn’t want drifters anymore, you know?
Matt Taibbi: Right, right.
Walter Kirn: But we’re back to Golding. We are dealing again with, I think, this very conflicted attempt to work out the contradictions learned in war and the hard lessons about the atavism, the atavistic nature of human beings, how fast they can regress and how, in a weird way, we’re built to regress. That’s where we came from. We want to go back, almost.
Why wouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t we want to go back to a world of hunting-
Matt Taibbi: Hunting pigs like Rambo did, by the way.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, fires, war and so on.
I mean, Cormac McCarthy, in his way, had the same theme, that essential human activity is war, and we’re drawn back to it fatally and perennially, and tragically.
But in this story, we’re allowed to see it in a way that is a little less scary because it’s schoolboys on an island. And I think that it’s laid in pretty quickly that they probably are going to be rescued at some point from themselves.
THE MESSIANIC MADNESS OF DONALD J. TRUMP
by Don Lattin
Donald Trump has long given me flashbacks, troubling echoes from the 1970s and 1980s, when I was a young reporter covering the “cult wars” of that era, from the controversies surrounding the Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to the ill-fated saga of the Rev. Jim Jones.
These ominous echoes came up when Trump first surfaced as a serious presidential contender, and they only got louder in his second presidential campaign. That’s when Trump offered his “I was indicted for you" defense to his MAGA base. “In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
That reminded me of the most notorious cult leader of the 1970s, the Rev. Jim Jones of San Francisco’s Peoples Temple, who fled the city to a remote South American jungle compound he named Jonestown. In November of 1978 he led more than 900 followers in a horrifying ritual of murder and suicide. A friend and colleague, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, was among the victims — gunned down on an airstrip trying to flee Guyana with Bay Area Congressman Leo Ryan, who was also murdered.
Many people forget that Jones, an ordained Disciples of Christ minister, was for a time seen as a respected — albeit feared — progressive political force in San Francisco. He was appointed chairman of the city’s Housing Authority in 1976 by Mayor George Moscone, who was himself murdered by a political opponent the same month the Jonestown horror erupted in Guyana.
Like Donald Trump, the Peoples Temple leader had undeniable messianic tendencies. Jones often compared himself to God or Jesus Christ. He preached a left-wing message of “apostolic socialism.” Only he could save his followers from the CIA and the cruelties of a corrupt capitalist regime.
To my ears, that paranoid, grandiose message sounds like the political flip side of Trump’s constant boasts that the only he can rescue his aggrieved right-wing base from the oppressions of the “deep state” and its corrupt left-wing politicians.
Jonestown researcher Fielding McGehee told me he got lots of calls and emails from former People Temple members back in 2016 when Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
“The message that they repeated over and again was, ‘I just heard the voice of Jim Jones,’ ” said McGehee, a founder of The Jonestown Institute.
Anti-cult activist Steve Hassan, a former member of the Unification Church, also has Trump-induced flashbacks to his time as a “Moonie,” a follower of the late Sun Myung Moon, the controversial Korean evangelist and fervent anti-Communist.
Hassan, founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, recalls an infamous moment early in Trump’s first presidency, when television cameras recorded his cabinet members heaping slavish praise upon the great leader. “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda,” said chief of staff Reince Priebus.
The scene — replayed in the current Trump cabinet — reminds Hassan of private meetings with Moon back in the 1970s. “All of us in the room understood how blessed we were to be in Moon’s presence,” he writes in his book The Cult of Trump. “We adored him as the greatest man who ever lived. If we had doubts or criticisms, we were taught to block, or ‘thought stop,’ them. If we dared disagree or point out inconsistencies, we would be kicked out.”
In Trump 2.0, presidential cabinet meetings have sunk to new lows. Last month, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer invited Trump to come see his how his “big, beautiful face” has been plastered on the side of her department’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, thanked Trump for leading a third American revolution. “We are saving America,” he said.
This was followed by global envoy Steve Witkoff, who has failed to fulfill Trumpian prophecies about ending the Russia/Ukraine war “on day one.” But this is Trump World and, in Witkoff’s mind, the Nobel Committee and the rest of the world must “wake up” and realize that Trump’ is the “single finest candidate” ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Last week, the fear, fealty and rising fascism was once again on display when Trump summoned tech leaders to a White House dinner to watch them bow down. With Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg seated at the right hand of the messiah and Microsoft’s Bill Gates on the other side of Melania, Open AI CEO Sam Altman profusely thanked Trump for being “such a pro-business, pro-innovation president.”
The chorus of brown-nosers have devolved into such a sickening symphony of sycophancy that it now envelopes what now passes for “journalism” in the expanded White House press pool. At last month’s cabinet meeting, the first person other than Trump to speak out was an actual cultist posing as a reporter, planted there by Trump. “I heard you were savagely mugged in the city,” the president asked the representative from the Epoch Times, a right-wing news outlet tied to a Chinese political cult. "Thank you for now making D.C. safer,” replied Iris Tao, obediently.
Rev. Moon, who claimed to be the new Christian messiah brought to Earth to fulfill Jesus’ unfinished mission, must be posthumously jealous.
This longing for a messiah, for an enlightened being to save us from our persecutors, is an ancient impulse. “Messiah” is a Hebrew word meaning “anointed with oil” and “Christ” is the Greek word for the same. The ancient Jews used the word to refer to anyone who was anointed for a holy purpose, including prophets and kings — and the coming messiah was seen as fulfilling both roles.
The Jews seemed to have picked up the idea from the Zoroastrian faith when they were exiled to Babylon. Messianism is hard baked into Christianity. What separated the early Jesus movement from the Jewish culture from which it emerged was the Christian belief that the carpenter from Nazareth was indeed the Messiah foretold in the Hebrew Bible.
Trump’s solid support among conservative evangelicals puzzles some who point to his playboy tendencies, his mean-spiritedness, his lack of church attendance, his narcissism, and the absence of empathy for the poor and the oppressed.
Few Christians or Jews would go so far as to claim — like followers of the reverends Moon or Jones — that Donald Trump is the Jewish messiah or the Second Coming of Christ. But some have compared him to King Cyrus, a Biblical figure that some ancient Jews viewed as a kind of “messiah.”
This connection was explicitly made in 2018 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who lavished praise on President Trump for declaring that in the eyes of the United States Jerusalem is now the true capital of Israel.
“I want to tell you,” Netanyahu told Trump, “that the Jewish people have a long memory, so we remember the proclamation of the great king, Cyrus the Great, the Persian king 2,500 years ago. He proclaimed that the Jews exiled in Babylon could come back and rebuild our temple in Jerusalem…Mr. Trump, this will be remembered by our people through the ages.”
According to the Book of Isiah (45: 1), God “anointed” King Cyrus and grasped his right hand “to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes.” This imagery, says the Rev. John Mabry, a retired Bay Area pastor in the liberal United Church of Christ, has inspired some conservative evangelical Christians he knows “to get behind Trump because he is like Cyrus.”
“In the evangelical imagination, this is the way they can justify Trump, with all his sin,” said Mabry, who runs a small publishing outfit that (full disclosure) put out my last book, God on Psychedelics — Tripping Across the Rubble of Old-time Religion.
“God is using this pagan ruler to do God’s work, just like Cyrus,” Mabry told me. “God has anointed Trump to enact all these policies that are going to benefit God’s kingdom. So, in that sense, he is their messiah.”
(Don Lattin is an almost retired journalist and author of seven books, including the best-selling "Harvard Psychedelic Club." Learn more at www.donlattin.com)
PETER KROPOTKIN (1842–1921)
Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist and philosopher who believed that mutual aid—helping and cooperating with others—was the key to human progress. Unlike capitalism, which focuses on competition, Kropotkin argued that people thrive through solidarity and working together.
His famous book, ‘Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution’ (1902), challenged the idea that only the strongest survive. Instead, he showed how cooperation exists in nature and human societies, proving that kindness and teamwork are just as important as strength.
Kropotkin’s ideas inspired labor movements, anarchists, and socialists in the 20th century. Even today, his message matters: in a world of inequality and isolation, building strong communities and sharing knowledge can create a fairer, better future.
By spreading compassion and working together, we can follow Kropotkin’s vision—a world where everyone supports each other, not just the powerful few.
OUR DEADLY FENTANYL DELUSION
by David Herzberg
It’s one of President Trump’s favorite stories: The Democrats weakened the borders, allowing Mexican drug cartels to smuggle fentanyl into the United States, where it devastated white suburban and rural communities. To stop this “evil scourge,” he has imposed tariffs on China for its role in fentanyl production. His administration is reportedly considering military strikes in Latin America. And Mr. Trump has built up the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country,” he told reporters of his campaign of deadly strikes.
The killing has already started. Since September, the military has carried out 20 strikes on boats supposedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth celebrates these “lethal kinetic strikes” by posting aerial footage of the explosions on social media. Mr. Trump falsely boasts that each destroyed boat saves the lives of 25,000 Americans.
The brazenness is shocking. There is apparently no time to nitpick about imposing the death penalty on civilians never formally accused of a crime or to consider the destructive precedents of extending U.S. military force into the Americas.
The fentanyl story is based on an argument about history: The United States went from greatness to crisis because open-border Democrats betrayed the honest, hardworking people of America by exporting jobs and allowing in foreign drugs. Stopping the drugs, Mr. Trump wants us to believe, will let the wholesome, traditional American culture that he idealizes to flourish again. As a historian of drugs, I can tell you that this argument is wrong in almost every way.
There is no wholesome, traditional drug-free America that we can return to. Americans have always used a lot of drugs — even in the white suburbs and rural areas that Mr. Trump’s supporters call the “real America.”
The first drug crisis came in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. In the unregulated, buyer-beware markets of that era, sales of pharmaceutical morphine, cocaine and heroin rose precipitously. Addiction rates skyrocketed, mostly among the white, propertied class of Americans who had ready access to a doctor.
New medical guidelines and federal laws curtailed the runaway opioid markets by the 1920s, but drug crises remained a persistent feature of American life. A combination of booming global trade, capital flight (“white flight”) and racial segregation led to repeated waves of heroin addiction in major cities from the 1950s to the 1970s. This “junkie” menace dominated the headlines, but non-urban America experienced even larger drug crises during the same period.
That’s because after pharmaceutical heroin and cocaine were reined in, their makers flooded markets with new drugs that did not face the same regulatory constraints. The first out of the gate were barbiturates, introduced in 1903, provoking warnings of “promiscuous use” by 1937 and contributing to the nation’s biggest wave yet of addiction and overdose by the 1950s. As barbiturates faded, they were replaced by “minor tranquilizers” such as Miltown, Valium and eventually Quaalude, which were among the best-selling medicines and the most common substances found in emergency room overdose victims of the 1960s and 1970s.
Meanwhile, after widespread military use in World War II, amphetamine burst onto the scene in the 1950s and 1960s as a popular energizer, antidepressant and diet pill, increasing the extent of addiction and related harms even further.
By 1967, an estimated 31 percent of women and 15 percent of men had used a sedative or a stimulant in the past year, with use most common among white and middle-class people.
A more complex story was unfolding with opioids. Many Americans had developed addiction before freewheeling markets were regulated in the early 20th century. But punitive narcotics enforcement focused on the urban working classes, leaving wiggle room for physicians practicing in rural regions. At least through the 1950s, my research suggests, an outright majority of Americans with addiction may have been rural and small-town residents quietly maintained on morphine by sympathetic physicians. One of the few major studies of nonurban opioid use during this period suggests that Kentucky had among the highest per capita rates of opioid addiction into the early 1960s.
In other words, “real America” is no stranger to drug crises, especially the areas served by what I call “white markets.” White markets are the familiar ones that sell the prescription psychoactive drugs in your medicine cabinet — that is, legal sales by pharmacists of drugs designated as medicines to the relatively privileged consumers designated as patients.
Unlike fully illegal “prohibition markets” where “drug dealers” sell very similar drugs, white markets are regulated for consumer safety. The Food and Drug Administration ensures quality ingredients and accurate labels, and physicians provide expert guidance on when and how to use. But white markets are in a dynamic, long-term game of cat-and-mouse between drug companies and drug regulators and, at times, these regulations are too weak to prevent sales booms and addiction crises.
The recent fentanyl crisis is just the latest and worst of this long history of American drug crises. It was initially caused by shifts in domestic white markets. Those shifts began in the 1990s and 2000s, when the U.S. opioid industry burst free of longstanding regulatory restraints and began to market powerful opioids like OxyContin as a mostly nonaddictive solution for an expanding range of painful conditions.
The United States truly did need new approaches to widespread undertreated pain, and unleashing the private sector to offer them had strong political appeal in the anti-regulatory zeal of the Reagan era. Moreover, the scare over crack cocaine in the 1980s had associated addiction with urban racial minorities. Opioid marketers targeted white parts of the country, benefiting from the widespread stereotype that good heartland consumers (“patients”) were unlikely to become addicted.
Of course, race has no impact on someone’s risk of addiction. Trauma does, though. Research suggests that experiences of significant trauma increase the chance that a person will develop an addiction after using drugs. In the 1990s, as opioid sales boomed, rural and small-town white areas were suffering from unemployment, population decline and the erosion of social institutions such as labor unions and churches. The huge industry-driven expansion of opioid white markets in these already struggling communities led to a similarly huge rise in addiction.
When the authorities moved to address the crisis in the mid-2000s, opioid industry lobbyists told them that the problem wasn’t the drugs, but the “abusers” — that is, the people with addiction. Governments took steps to prevent those people from buying in white markets. They set up prescription drug monitoring programs, for example, to prevent doctor shopping and early prescription refills, and clamped down on so-called pill mills.
People with addiction are strongly motivated to continue using drugs, however. Increasingly unable to buy in white markets, they formed a large potential consumer base for illicit opioids. In the 2010s, new suppliers emerged to meet the demand.
This moment of market disruption in the flow of opioids led to innovations that echoed the 21st century’s e-commerce revolution. Old supply chains moved heroin from poppy fields to central markets in major U.S. cities; traffickers in the 2010s built new supply chains bringing synthetic products such as fentanyl sourced with chemicals from China to American consumers wherever they lived — including the rural areas and small towns struck by the opioid crisis.
Which is to say: Fentanyl traffickers were responding to consumer demand. They did not create it. The opioid crisis initially struck white areas not because of a conspiracy to destroy heartland America. Rather, it was a devastatingly ironic result of white Americans’ privileged access to the medical system. Physicians’ willingness to recognize and treat their pain opened their communities to pharmaceutical companies’ flood of opioids. The drugs’ ubiquity meant that they were easy to get whether one had a prescription for them or not.
Three decades in, the opioid crisis is no longer mostly white. In recent years, overdose rates have been going up fastest among some racial minorities. They are now highest among Native Americans and in some of the poorest Black urban neighborhoods. This is in part because fentanyl outcompeted heroin everywhere, including the segregated, economically struggling urban neighborhoods where heroin’s prohibition markets had been quarantined by municipal authorities.
The people in these neighborhoods had weathered repeated waves of addiction in the 20th century, but they had no familiarity with fentanyl and few tools to prevent the crisis of fatal overdose it brought.
Since traffickers were not the root of the problem, shutting them down won’t solve it. As far as we know, most of the chemicals and equipment used to make the fentanyl sold in this country come from Mexico and China. But even if the United States were to choke off this supply chain, history strongly suggests that it would just be replaced by newer, possibly even more dangerous supply chains. There is no shortage of global pharmaceutical production capacity. And in a world where people and goods circulate freely, there will always be ways for a tiny powder to travel with them.
Drug war critics call efforts to shut down supply chains a futile game of Whac-a-Mole. If supply is disrupted without decreasing demand, prices go up. Because addicted people are so motivated to buy, they make for an “inelastic” demand — it stays strong even when the supply shrinks. The mismatch between supply and demand raises prices. Once the prices get high enough, they attract new suppliers willing to take risks. The market disruption created by toppling existing dominant players unleashes a Darwinian competition favoring the most effective newcomers, who are often the most ruthless.
Fentanyl displacing heroin in the 2000s is not the first devastating “innovation” caused by prohibition. When nonmedical opioids were criminalized in the early 20th century, the newly illegal markets switched from bulky and foul-smelling smoking opium to an odorless and potent miracle drug: a recent discovery by the pharmaceutical company Bayer trade-named Heroin. In the second half of the 20th century, efforts to quash cocaine trafficking from South America created opportunities for modernizers such as Pablo Escobar to consolidate new, larger and increasingly violent supply chains. Once the demand for a drug has become entrenched, the efforts to eliminate the supply of the drug do not solve anything.
If President Trump’s story is so wrong, why does it have such political power? Because it dramatizes the overarching narrative of the MAGA movement: that globalist elites betrayed the heartland by inviting in foreign threats and the cultural corruption that comes with them.
It’s easy to see why this is so politically compelling. It acknowledges the very real problems caused by fentanyl and empathizes with the pain of so many Americans who have lost loved ones. And by identifying the villains responsible, it promises a clear and emotionally cathartic way forward.
The trouble is, there is no drug-free utopia to return to. Efforts to achieve this impossible goal will only mire us in wars and encourage the drug trafficker “innovations” that intensify violence, contribute to destabilizing our neighbors and favor increasingly dangerous drugs.
Luckily, history offers more than a depressing parade of failure. There have been significant stretches of time between drug crises in the United States. Something worked during those times. What was it?
The biggest white market drug crises have been brought under control by a prosaic mixture of consumer protection policies. On the one hand, this involves limiting the risk of new addictions by, for example, sharply curbing or even eliminating drug marketing, favoring sales of the safest drugs in a class (Valium, say, instead of short-acting barbiturates). It also involves providing consumers with accurate information about how to use a drug safely, and introducing practical barriers — market friction such as limits on prescription refills — so that a deliberate, determined decision must be made to shift from occasional to long-term use.
On the other hand, consumer protection also means robust support for people with addiction. Effective policies have invested heavily in various forms of addiction treatment, most importantly including regulated, low-barrier access to the safest versions of a person’s drug of choice. In the United States, this has meant providing cheap long-acting opioids such as oral methadone or buprenorphine to replace expensive, short-acting heroin or fentanyl for injection.
These successful policies all do one thing: They make drugs boring again. Drugs are not magic, they are not demonic, they are not fundamentally different from all the other problems society faces. They are highly desirable and highly dangerous consumer goods. They are not unique in that regard.
Nor are the people who sell them uniquely evil. They are capitalists trying to make money, and they mostly behave in predictable, comprehensible ways.
We’ve been at this capitalism game for centuries. We have developed tools to incentivize sellers to prioritize consumer safety. This is true even for potentially dangerous goods: think airbags and anti-lock brakes for automobiles. But we have chosen not to apply these tools to drug markets. Instead, we govern them by brute prohibition — a war on drugs.
This is a catastrophic narrowing of policy imagination. We need to explore adapting white market regulations and incentives to help us prevent the flooding of all drug markets. For example, we could require accurate labeling, consumer education, waiting periods or other kinds of friction to slow down or prevent impulsive or risky purchases in what are now unregulated prohibition markets. We also need to build tailored, low-barrier, quality-controlled markets for those who become addicted despite protections. The goal is to reduce, not eliminate, drug use and to minimize the chances that a consumer who does drugs will experience addiction, overdose or other unwanted outcomes.
Already studies suggest that the vast majority of nonmedical opioid use does not lead to addiction or problematic outcomes, but would you want to drive a car whose brakes work only most of the time? Again, drug dealers are capitalists out to make money; we have had success getting capitalists to accept burdensome regulations as the price for access to profitable U.S. markets.
Some drug scholars and policy analysts work on these approaches. Perhaps because these ideas cut against a century of drug war politics, however, we are not paying enough attention to them. Instead, we remain committed to wars against foreign traffickers — a strategy that has been tested again and again with persistently destructive consequences.
The only place we can see real policy creativity in action is in ad hoc innovations by drug consumers themselves and the pragmatic harm reductionists who know and care about them. Drug testing kits, needle exchanges, over-the-counter nasal-spray naloxone to reverse opioid overdoses, housing-first programs for people with addiction: These and other solutions were pioneered not by our political leadership but in spite of it, by people with virtually no resources working under enormous duress.
To move these street-level policy experiments to the next level, we need to take a hardheaded, realistic view of fentanyl. Why is it so much worse than the heroin crises of yesteryear, and what can we do about it?
It’s not that foreign traffickers have become more devilish. The biggest problem is that fentanyl is so potent that it’s difficult to manufacture a product that is safe for consumer use. Fentanyl products must be mixed very carefully, and contamination of other drugs with fentanyl must be prevented. This calls for finicky, high-tech, quality-controlled production. While white market vendors are required to take such extra costly steps for consumer protection, illicit supply chains have no incentive to do so. It is just as illegal for them to sell high-quality, properly labeled fentanyl as it is to sell poorly mixed, inaccurately labeled fentanyl.
Fentanyl’s flaws as a consumer item have also led to dangerous creativity. It came to dominate the market because of its suitability for smuggling, not because consumers particularly wanted it. Many people who used heroin reported disliking fentanyl’s shorter duration of action and sleepier high when it first appeared in the United States. But because the crackdown on drug-supply routes created a favorable environment for an ultrapotent, synthetic and thus easy to smuggle drug like fentanyl, consumers didn’t have much of a choice. What they could do, however, is buy fentanyl mixed with other drugs such as the veterinary sedative xylazine to lengthen the effects. This has introduced significant health risks such as skin infections or passing out cold.
In short, prohibition has actively made drugs more dangerous. This was not a grand drama of good and evil, but a predictable result of bad policy. It won’t be easy, but we can do the same in reverse: We can adopt policies that incentivize less dangerous products, sold in ways that are less likely to lead to addiction and overdose.
This does not mean blanket legalization. As the opioid crisis (and arguably the cannabis boom) shows, free or unregulated markets are like prohibition markets in that they are not oriented for consumer protection. We need to rethink supply-side drug policies to fill in the vast space between prohibition and free markets. Luckily, we already have a sophisticated set of effective market regulatory tools.
This isn’t glamorous or heroic work. There is no “one weird trick.” It’s more like housework that must be constantly attended to than a once-and-for-all climactic victory. And just as there are still car accidents despite all the safety features, there will always be some harms related to opioids. But, without a doubt, we can use drug policy to deliver significantly safer drug markets.
Understandably, American politicians have long been drawn to more emotionally satisfying stories like the ones where foreign traffickers are to blame for the decline of rural and small-town America. Again, drugs are not unique: The MAGA movement has many other such morally simplifying stories, about Big Pharma’s vaccines as the cause of chronic disorders or about tariffs as a magical solution to unemployment. These stories may serve the needs of politicians, but they can’t fix the actual problems.
To reduce the overdose crisis, we need to stop exploiting drug tragedies to serve other geopolitical agendas. It wasn’t started by villainous foreign traffickers, and there is no drug-free utopia waiting for us if we shut off one illicit supply chain.
We can save a lot of lives, and support a lot of struggling communities, by aiming for the “least worst” solutions. Fentanyl is a hard problem that has cost a lot of lives. Let’s stop being distracted by foreign boogeymen and do something about it.
(David Herzberg is professor of history and director of the drugs, health and society program at SUNY’s University at Buffalo. He researches drug commerce, use and policy in America.)
SHE WAS A CHAMBERMAID. HE WAS A STRUGGLING WRITER.
On June 10, 1904, James Joyce saw a young woman walking down Nassau Street in Dublin. He didn't know her name. He didn't know anything about her. But something made him approach her.
Her name was Nora Barnacle. She was 20 years old, worked as a chambermaid at Finn's Hotel, and had recently arrived in Dublin from Galway.
James was 22, a struggling writer with big ambitions and no money. He was arrogant, brilliant, difficult, and completely unknown.
They talked. Nora agreed to meet him again.
Their first real date was June 16, 1904. They walked together, talked for hours, and—according to Joyce's later writings—Nora made the first physical advance, initiating their sexual relationship on that very day.
That date—June 16, 1904—would become the most famous day in literary history. Joyce immortalized it by setting his masterpiece Ulysses on that exact date. Today, it's celebrated worldwide as "Bloomsday."
But back then, it was just a young chambermaid and a broke writer falling intensely, urgently in love.
Within months, they made a decision that shocked everyone who knew them: they would leave Ireland together.
No marriage. No family blessing. No money. Just two young people running away to continental Europe because they believed in each other more than they believed in convention.
On October 8, 1904—barely four months after meeting—James and Nora boarded a boat and left Ireland. They would spend the rest of their lives in exile, moving between Trieste, Rome, Zurich, and Paris, never returning to Ireland together.
Their families were horrified. Joyce's friends thought he was throwing his life away. Nora's family considered her ruined.
But James and Nora didn't care. They had each other.
Life in exile was brutal. They were constantly poor. James struggled to find teaching work to support them while trying to write. They moved frequently, always one step ahead of unpaid rent.
In 1905, their son Giorgio was born. In 1907, their daughter Lucia. Two children to feed, and James was still an unknown writer working on fiction that no publisher wanted.
Nora managed everything. She stretched their meager money. She raised the children. She dealt with James's moods, his drinking, his obsessive work habits.
She had no intellectual pretensions. She didn't understand his writing. She reportedly never finished reading Ulysses, his masterpiece. When someone asked her about his work, she famously said, "Why don't you write sensible books that people can understand?"
But she understood James. And that mattered more.
James was not an easy man to love. He was self-absorbed, often drunk, jealous, demanding. He required constant reassurance. He had intense mood swings.
But Nora saw through all of that to something essential. She saw his genius. She saw his vulnerability. She saw the boy from Dublin who needed someone to believe in him absolutely.
And she did. For their entire lives, Nora believed in James Joyce.
Her influence on his work was profound and undeniable.
The character of Molly Bloom in Ulysses—one of literature's most famous female characters—was directly inspired by Nora. Molly's famous final soliloquy, with its stream-of-consciousness style and frank sexuality, reflects Nora's direct, uninhibited way of speaking and thinking.
Joyce himself acknowledged this. He said Nora had "a quality of complete naturalness" that he tried to capture in his female characters.
But Nora was more than just inspiration. She was James's anchor to reality. While he disappeared into his own mind, creating labyrinthine novels that pushed the boundaries of language itself, Nora kept them fed, housed, and functioning.
She didn't romanticize his genius. She loved him despite it, and because of it, and separate from it.
Joyce's letters to Nora reveal a side of him most people never saw. They're passionate, vulnerable, explicit—sometimes shockingly so. They show a man completely surrendered to love, wholly dependent on one person for emotional survival.
In one letter, he wrote about how thoughts of her consumed him, how he'd given himself "utterly to the memory" of her. His letters oscillate between romantic devotion and raw sexual desire, showing the full spectrum of their intimacy.
Nora kept every letter. Later biographers would use them to understand Joyce's psychology, his obsessions, his genius. But for Nora, they were simply letters from James.
In 1931, after 27 years together and two children, James and Nora finally married. Not because they felt they needed to, but to ensure legal protections for their children in a world that still cared about legitimacy.
The ceremony was quiet, bureaucratic. The real marriage had happened decades earlier, on that first walk through Dublin in 1904.
James Joyce died in Zurich on January 13, 1941, at age 58, from a perforated ulcer. Nora was devastated.
She lived another 10 years without him. She remained in Zurich, visiting his grave, telling stories about their life together to anyone who asked.
She died on April 10, 1951, at age 66.
Today, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle are buried together in Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich. Their shared grave is visited by literature lovers from around the world.
The inscription is simple: James Joyce, 1882-1941. Nora Barnacle Joyce, 1884-1951.
But the real inscription is Ulysses itself—the novel set on June 16, 1904, the day they first made love. Every June 16, people worldwide celebrate Bloomsday, dressing in period costume, reading passages from Ulysses, walking the routes Leopold and Molly Bloom walked.
They're celebrating James Joyce's genius. But they're also, whether they know it or not, celebrating Nora Barnacle—the chambermaid who believed in a broke, difficult writer when no one else did.
Critics have argued for decades about Nora's role in Joyce's life. Some say she held him back, that her lack of education limited him. Others say she was his essential muse, the grounding force that made his flights of genius possible.
The truth is simpler: James Joyce loved Nora Barnacle absolutely, and she loved him back. And that love created the conditions for one of the 20th century's greatest literary careers.
She was a chambermaid from Galway. He was a broke writer with impossible ambitions. They met in June, eloped in October, and spent 37 years in exile together, poor and struggling and absolutely committed to each other.
She inspired Molly Bloom. He wrote her into literary immortality.
They're buried together in Zurich, and every June 16, the world celebrates the day they fell in love.
That's not just a love story. That's proof that sometimes, the person who believes in you matters more than anything else.
James Joyce was a genius. But Nora Barnacle made him a genius who could function, create, and survive.
She was his chambermaid, his muse, his wife, his anchor.
And without her, the world would never have had Ulysses.
That's the real story of June 16, 1904—not just a date in a novel, but the day a chambermaid and a writer fell in love and changed literature forever.
A LINE-STORM SONG
The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.
The birds have less to say for themselves
In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,
Although they are no less there:
All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, easily shattered rose.
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
Where the boughs rain when it blows.
There is the gale to urge behind
And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
From which to gather your gown.
What matter if we go clear to the west,
And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast
The rain-fresh goldenrod.
Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea’s return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.
— Robert Frost (1907)
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Homeland Security Department Shifts Its Focus to Deportations
Epstein Emails Reveal a Lost New York
Church and College Leaders Work to Free an Afghan Student Detained in New York
U.S. Border Patrol Launches Operation in Charlotte, N.C.
Former Fed Official Violated Trading Rules, Disclosures Show
Trump Organization Is Said to Be in Talks on a Saudi Government Real Estate Deal
Women Toiling in India’s Insufferable Heat Face Mounting Toll on Health
Nobody Really Knows How Many People Die in India From Hot Weather
FROM TRUMP'S RECENT TALK AT QUANTICO:
I always put the fire department in because they're great. They're great, and I got 95% of their vote too, that helps. When you get 95% of the vote, you always have to mention them, but they're great. And they're brave in our inner cities, which we're going to be talking about because it's a big part of war now, it's a big part of war. But the firemen go up on ladders and you have people shooting at them while they're up on ladders. I don't even know if anybody heard that. And actually don't talk about it much, but I think you have to. Our firemen are incredible. They're up on one of these ladders that goes way up to the sky rescuing people, and you have animals shooting at them -- shooting bullets at firemen that are way up in death territory. You fall off that ladder, it's over, it's over. They don't even have to inspect you when you hit the ground. And you have people shooting bullets at them in some of these inner cities. We're not going to let that happen. So, I always mention the firemen because that's actually a big problem we have. They are unbelievable.
POTTER VALLEY – ‘THE FUTURE OF OUR WATER’
Too many monkeys for its available habitat…no matter how you alter nature.
I agree that population growth is causing many problems, including the overall quality of life. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, population control was an active part of our social and political discussions. I wonder why it is not discussed more now.
Population growth is still discussed, but the metrics are nebulous. How many is too many? Is population growth slowing or increasing? How do countries best deal with the economic, and social downside of a shrinking population? Etc.
There’s a lot of BS floating around about population. You are one of those BS peddlers. Kaputalism depends on everlasting growth to survive and prosper, so its fans and perpetrators lie to us.
Look around, population reduction agenda in silent mode. What it is, isn’t exactly clear.
—> October 6, 2025
To counter the effects of Canada’s low fertility and aging population, federal and provincial governments must overcome growing resistance to immigration…
First, let’s place Canada’s situation in a global context. The United Nations Population Division, which once predicted that the human population would reach 11.2 billion by 2100, has revised its projections downward to a peak of 10.3 billion by the 2080s. Nearly a billion people have disappeared from the planet’s future. But even those estimates are too high.
The total fertility fate (TFR) for China, once the world’s most populous country, has dropped to 1.01, one full baby short of the 2.1 children per woman needed to sustain a population. That country of 1.4 billion is now losing more than one million people a year, and could see its population halved by the end of the century.
The TFR for India, which now has more people than China, has fallen to 1.9. Within a few decades, India too will start to lose population. In many countries, fertility rates aren’t just declining, they’re plummeting. The Philippines went from a TFR of 2.7 in 2017 to 1.9 in 2022. Turkey’s TFR was about 2.2 in 2014; today it’s just under 1.5…
In September 2025, an Economist survey predicted the human population could top out at no more than nine billion by the 2050s. As developing societies urbanize, women acquire greater autonomy through education, access to birth control, and weaker familial and religious restrictions. Women who have control over their lives generally choose to have fewer children. In that respect, declining fertility is good news.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/population-declines-loom-large-over-canada-and-other-countries
Great input Eric, thanks. Countering some your points is the fact that many economic and political projections depend on population growth for positive outcomes. Maybe we should be planning on ways to successfully adapt to lower population levels.
—> November 25, 2025 The Atlantic
The story Trump tells isn’t truly American; in fact, his story is the one Russian nationalists tell: The good people of the heartland are under threat from foreigners and urban modernizers; I will protect you.
…over time, it will become clearer that Trump’s ethos doesn’t address the real problems plaguing his working-class supporters: poor health outcomes, poor educational outcomes, low levels of social capital, low levels of investment in their communities, and weak economic growth.
The Trumpists focus on their civil war against the elites—hurting Harvard, hurting USAID, hurting the National Institutes of Health. Cutting off public broadcasting may be emotionally satisfying…
During his Apprentice days, as the journalist Tina Brown has pointed out on her Substack, he learned that Americans have at most a two-week attention span, so to control the conversation, you need to stage a series of two-week mini-dramas, each with high-stakes confrontations and surprises.
— David Brooks
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/11/autocracy-resistance-social-movement/684336/?utm_source=apple_news
Did not the Chinese implement policies in preceding decades that limited birth rates by limiting reproductive rates? Seems I recall an uproar when they limited the number of children (first one child, then two) per family.
“I’m skeptical about those Waymo cars myself,” he said. “But A.I. is the future. We can’t stop it whether we like it or not.”
The attitude of a loser. AI can, and should be, stopped in its tracks. It’s no more than another means of controlling us.
Ah, yes… Wolfman Jack. Radio station XERB “Border Blaster Radio Station out of Mexico.
On a hot summer night, 1963, on grassy ridgetop west of Garberville, a friend of mine and our Girlfriends were parked, listening to Wolfman Jack. There was a full moon, the windows were rolled down on my 1951 Ford Victoria hardtop two door. We brought snacks. Life was about as good as it gets.
Then, a little ways of to the north a blood curdling scream came out. It sounded exactly like a terrified woman. It ended with a gurgle and a cough like her throat was ripped out.
The girls were scared… I laughed and told them that it was just a mountain lion and the ridge was a well known historical path for mountain lions. I was a pretty dumb kid, I thought that would make everything ok. The windows were rolled up tight and we took the girls home…………… I hate mountain lions.
(Ernie’s memoir made me think of this one:)
Lion in the Park
Well, I did it again: shared everything on my mind without thinking of the possible consequences and I lost my walking partner over it.
I got to the park the other day just as a couple of women were leaving. One had a long staff with a fierce-looking metal hook attached to the end. “You got your protection!” I quipped.
Gabrielle, the one not holding the weapon, said, “We saw a mountain lion here yesterday at the edge of the forest.”
Just then my walking partner showed up. “They saw a mountain lion,” I said.
“Oh! I'm afraid of lions,” she said.
“Are you menstruating?” I asked.
“Yes!” she said. “Let's walk the other way, away from the forest.”
We walked to the barn, by the houses, and over to the stage. I made jokes about mountain lions that weren't appreciated. When we got to the stage I recited my latest two minute show and she was her usual appreciative audience, clapping, laughing and chirping. We doubled back avoiding the section of woods we usually walk through.
The next couple days she was oddly distant and I went on the walk myself although it wasn't as much fun without her. She had made me paranoid as I retraced our steps past the barn and houses then over to the stage where I practiced my show using a small fat stick as a microphone.
Yesterday she invited me over to her workplace to pick figs and I brought her a nice bouquet. She finally admitted she wasn't going to walk in the park any more at dusk. She had been watching mountain lion videos online and was having difficulty sleeping.
“Come here to Redway tonight and we can walk,” she said.
“No, I don't like the pavement and cars,” I said. “Really, I think only five people have been killed my mountain lions in California the last hundred years. More people are killed by bees, snakes, and lightening strikes.”
“We could go early in the morning before work,” she said.
“No, I don't want to disrupt my morning routine,” I said.
She texted and invited me to Redway the next night but I returned to the park, walking more wearily. Afternoon research had produced some guidelines for encountering big cats: Don't curl up on the ground, don't run, and don't just stand still. Make yourself seem bigger and have a weapon ready.
I told her that I'll bring my three iron and as soon as I see the mountain lion I'll attack it while she scampers off back to the parking lot.
Great memory Ernie. Mine was cruising main street Fort Bragg in 1972 , between Stony’s and A and W listening to KFRC 610 with Dr. Don Rose fading in and out.
Wolfman Jack,
We used to camp out under the stars in Fort Bragg at one of our many campsites, look at the stars and listen to the Wolfman on our transistor radio until we fell asleep and wake to static on our radio, great music, great times, great life, so lucky to have lived it and are still living it, what a life!!!!!!
I don’t usually get to spend much time with an ocean view but my current job has provided the gift of commuting from Comptche to south of Elk/coastal bluffs. I choose to drive via Albion/Little River rd rather than hwy 128 to avoid… well , 128. Comptche Ukiah RD is slick as ever, the failed attempt by the decision makers to seal the existing pavement with a single lift of chip/seal a few years back is showing in a bad way. It’s sealed alright but, the chip/grip component is long gone. Leaving behind the slick tar that was supposed to magically bond 3/8” rocks to a smooth surface. The winds have laid down several nice layers of tree debris to add to the fun.
Navarro river is free flowing to the sea in a big way as of Nov. 14 early AM. Probably not a surprise to anyone with the rain and big surf this season. But it’s sure to be a hot topic in the next drought cycle. Rutting bucks and cautious deer are still commanding our attention as well as the rest of the regular critters.
Today at lunchtime, on the coast, I saw a Bald Eagle! Right by Beacon’s place. No mistaking that beauty, big white head and white fan tail. First one I have seen on the mendo coast. But there it was! Of course the camera was elsewhere haha. On my way home a cow was grazing on the west margin of hwy 1 just south of the Salmon Creek bridge. Hopefully she makes it! I didn’t stop but a local VFD vehicle was approaching just then.
Drive safe!
Eli Maddock