Mendocino County Today: Monday 11/17/2025

Rain Showers | Ghosts | Beach Rescue | Ukiah Trees | Highway 128 | Growing Pains | Dam Workshop | Eel Dams | Barbara Blattner | Ed Notes | My Mother | Yesterday's Catch | Stewarts Rainbow | No Enemies | Uncle Jake | The Drifter | 49ers Win | Klamath Rebounding | Music Makers | Next Time | Lopsided Reporting | Morning Rush | Available | Mutual Exploitation | Weedhead Tramp | Yugio | Val Tait | These People | Last-Chance Grade | Bitch | November Rain | Winter | Intelligence | Testing | Winesburg | Reincarnation Cure | Lead Stories | Financial Crisis | Sunland | Base Rejected | Sentiment | Genocide Partners | Neruda Memoirs | Not Easy | Sea Wind | Rain

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RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Yorkville 1.88" - Hopland 1.46" - Boonville 1.29" - Willits 1.14" - Ukiah 1.02" - Laytonville 0.97" - Covelo 0.82"

RAIN and gusty winds are forecast to continue through Monday. Breezy winds, scattered showers, and isolated thunderstorms in Mendocino County are possible through the day Monday. An extended period of cold overnight lows with widespread frost and interior freezing temperatures could begin overnight Monday. Additional rain possible Wednesday or Thursday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A healthy 1.82" in the rain gauge this Monday morning on the coast, 49F with showers to start the new work week. Speaking of work, I do not think my roofers will be tearing off our next roof today, ahem..... Showers today then clearing later, dry until later Wednesday when we get out next shot of rain into Thursday. Will it finally dry out after that, we'll see ?

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CALFIRE HOIST RESCUE AT BLUES BEACH

Victim slipped on boulders…

CalFire Mendocino Unit successfully extracted a seriously injured patient from Blues Beach near Westport on Friday morning. After slipping on boulders, the victim fell a 10-15 feet, sustaining major injuries. The crew of CalFire Copter 601 carefully stabilized the victim and hoisted them to safety. The coordinated effort involved CalFire, California State Parks, and Westport Volunteer Fire Department.

Video: https://www.instagram.com/p/DRFor6wEUmL/

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UKIAH VS. TREES

To the Editor:

The latest wisdom coming from City Hall is the “upgrade” of School Street — the only few blocks in downtown where you dare to walk because of the comfort and cooling the mature pistache trees afford when it’s 100F. For the proposed upgrade, 55 trees could be cut down.

For twenty years, while I was a member of Mendocino County Releaf and the Tree Advisory Group for the City of Ukiah, I urged the City to give the pistache more “breathing room”: ideally, pave the sidewalks, or at least, open up a strip between the trees and the curb and top with sand or crushed granite; this would allow more air and water to reach the roots, thus help prevent desperate roots from lifting sidewalks or foundations.

But the City’s tree “care” consists of waiting until problems arise, then cut down the “offenders”. Between 2012 and 2020, the City cut down 160 trees, of which only 60 were replaced, and the record has not improved since then.

Already late Judy Pruden, community leader and Main Street Program organizer, bemoaned that Ukiah is full of saplings that never reach their full potential because of neglect, abuse, and premature death. Of the 300 trees that the Releaf volunteers planted and cared for along State Street 20 years ago, about 100 were cut down for the 2021/22 remodel.

Looks like the City wants to do on School Street what they did on State Street, which they are so proud of (The new tree plantings look good now, but they will start declining once they reach the root barriers and have used up the potting soil in their small tree wells; they also will cause “problems” for awnings, signage, and traffic because they are not being trained/pruned to the correct height and shape).

A petition on change.org, urging the City to preserve the School Street trees, received almost 3,000 signatures and dozens of comments. Despite the outcry, the City will follow their usual playbook: give empty promises, hold meaningless workshops, hire “experts” to tell them what they want to hear — then proceed with their plans. This duplicity and disdain for the public continues because there are no consequences for their generous paychecks and comfortable retirement.

Bruni Kobbe

Ukiah

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ROB DALMAGE: This drive never gets old. Highway 128 heading to the south coast again.

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ASSIGNMENT: UKIAH: THE WELL-WORN PATH TO RUIN

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine the point at which smallish, people-friendly towns evolve into big anonymous cities that grow to the point they become unlivable.

I knew a guy who talked about the wonderful boyhood he’d had growing up in San Jose among the orchards and neighborhoods. By the 1990s he couldn’t stand even to visit San Jose with its congestion, concrete and confusion.

When, and why, did Santa Rosa grow from a city with nice, semi-elegant downtown hotels and a railroad depot a few blocks west with trains coming and going, pretty neighborhoods, beautiful high school and college campuses, into just another collection of big blank buildings and vast acres of suburban housing? Was Coddingtown the first domino?

Or was abandoning the lovely old downtown courthouse and moving into a government-style complex indistinguishable from insurance buildings the first step to ruination?

Today, right now, we watch our smallish, friendly-ish funky old Ukiah being transformed from what it has been into something worse. The new courthouse looks like a monster rising up on Perkins Street, designed to throw dark shadows across downtown.

Do you know anyone in favor of this blindingly ugly building that will soon become the biggest in all of Mendocino County? Why didn’t we get to vote?

On the southeast side of town the massive economic drain that for 25 years has been growing around Fort Walmart has had drastic impacts on all of downtown, all of retail in spite of the so-called “Shop Local!” sloganeering preached, but not practiced, by Ukiah’s city administrators.

Around Ukiah there are huge new apartment complexes being built. They are everywhere all over the city, and if they aren’t they soon will be. This is a significant departure from the kinds of homes in which we have lived and the neighborhoods that have grown in the past 100-plus years.

Do we think young families today yearn to live in two bedroom apartments on the third floor of a cheap building in close proximity with neighbors they will never know? The apartment buildings erected around town back in the 1930s and 1950s were mostly small, pretty units of a dozen units or less, nestled into neighborhoods alongside modest single family homes with yards, gardens, garages and sometimes swimming pools. Who decided to impose expensive, complicated building permits and requirements for basic three bedroom, two bath houses to the point of making such projects impossible, while massive “affordable” housing all get the automatic go-ahead?

Why, your elected leaders, that’s who. California’s and Ukiah’s housing shortages are the product of political decisions; today’s “solutions” come from the same sources.

Did you grow up/arrive in Ukiah wishing it was more like Rohnert Park? Do you yearn to see the population increase by, let’s just say, 10 percent or so? Or maybe 50 percent is more like it. How about a 100 percent population increase?

Why not? Doubling the number of Ukiahans would have lots of benefits that you and I may never consider but that city administrators spend a lot of time dreaming about.

Twice as many citizens would produce twice as much traffic and twice as many stoplights. Think of all the city streets made twice as wide and city officials having twice as much money to play with and grow, with the goal of doubling the size of Ukiah again by 2035. More land! More taxes!

More offices! More programs! More employees! Twice as many employees doing twice as much mischief on twice as much land adds up to a future no ambitious politician could resist.

Twice the salaries! Half the work, meaning plenty of time to go interview for hotshot administrative positions in fancy places like Fresno and Bakersfield.

We don’t know, or at least can’t explain, how this merry-go-wrong got started, so it’s difficult to come up with a strategy to slow it back down. Expect nothing from city council, and that’s exactly what you’ll get.

(Tom Hine writes these weekly columns but is able to avoid taking blame because many years ago he cleverly invented his invisible writing partner, TWK. Please send thoughts, comments and snide remarks to Mr. Kramer and let us sleeping dogs lie.)

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A REALITY CHECK ON THE EEL RIVER DAMS

Editor,

The century-old Eel River dams pose safety risks — Scott Dam is located along an earthquake fault line and adjacent to a massive boulder that is slowly moving, a precursor to a massive natural landslide; are unreliable (aggregated sedimentation surrounds and constrains the needle valve at the base of the dam) and expensive.

The dams have led to heightened invasive species incursion (e.g., Sacramento Pikeminnow) and hazardous levels of mercury toxicity. Fish from Lake Pillsbury Reservoir are inedible due to mercury bioaccumulation, something that impacts the entire aquatic food web.

Chinook, steelhead and coho native to the Eel River, and culturally significant to over a dozen Native California tribes in the region, are at 3% of their historic levels. Water diversions, excessive sedimentation, and ensuing poor water quality (low dissolved oxygen, high temperatures), lack of access to spawning habitat, and poorly designed fish ladders are the culprits: dam removal will address all of these issues.

In other words, maintaining the Scott and Cape Horn dams is a highly risky and ecologically damaging proposition that costs taxpayers and ratepayers far more than the dams are worth.

We’ve seen how rapidly flora and fauna along the Klamath River and its tributaries are recovering following the removal of four equally decrepit and dysfunctional dams, exceeding scientific projections. Genetically unique populations of rainbow trout trapped behind Scott Dam could contribute to the restoration of the southernmost population of summer steelhead, but time is of the essence. The sooner we remove the dams from the Eel River, the sooner we can restore threatened fish populations in this river, too.

Opposition to dam removal is largely based on unfamiliarity with watershed dynamics, leading to dramatically misguided fears regarding future water supplies. Constituents fear the loss of Lake Pillsbury and Lake Mendocino, and the lack of water availability during drought or wildfires.

Yes, if Scott Dam is removed, Lake Pillsbury will transform into a small valley filled with wildflowers and other native plant species, creeks, and various types of aquatic habitats such as ephemeral wetlands. But Lake Mendocino—which is a flood control project (vs. Lake Pillsbury which was always a hydropower project)—will remain, and the quantity of water diverted from the Eel to the Russian will stay the same: it is the timing of the water flows that will change.

Currently, releases into the Eel River mirror the natural hydrographic cycles; thus, when the dams are removed, the river level highs will be a little higher, and the lows a little lower.

It is also important to note that the specifics of future water diversions will be worked out through a separate CEQA process involving water users along both the Eel River and Russian River.

As an ethnoecologist, I’ve resided and worked in Mendocino, Lake, and Humboldt counties, and have worked as a consultant for all three counties, joined the board of the Salmon Restoration Association of Fort Bragg, served as the secretary of the Mendocino Fish and Game Advisory Commission, and volunteered as an ambulance driver for Anderson Valley.

I fish. I swim. I hike. And I can’t wait to see those dams brought down.

Dr. Jeanine Pfeiffer

Ukiah

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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.

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ED NOTES

RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy’ by Vincent Bugliosi. By far the clearest and most convincing book on the subject I’ve ever read. Bugliosi, best known as prosecutor of the Manson Family, puts his prosecutorial skills to effective use here as he lays out the event in chronological order, complete with the detailed movements of Oswald and Jack Ruby with descriptions of their behavior from an impressive number of eyewitnesses. Conclusion? Oswald and Ruby acted alone. Bugliosi also offers the clearest, and it seems to me, most irrefutable account of the wounds Kennedy and Governor Connolly suffered. The so-called “magic bullet” is fully and plausibly explained. A friend lent me the book. I didn’t open it right away, but when I did I couldn’t put it down. I know I’ll hear from people wed to the conspiratorial version of Kennedy’s murder, but Bugliosi’s case will be difficult to undermine.

ANOTHER BOOK that recently captured my feeble attentions is called ‘Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West’ by Dan Schultz. The cover has a Time mag quote calling the book “riveting.” Not for me it wasn’t. But it was interesting and the title turned out to be misleading, in that the “greatest manhunt” really turned out to be a huge clown show of competing police forces who only found two of the three fugitives because the two shot and killed themselves more or less in plain view. The third fugitive should have been found but he, too, was only uncovered by accident years later. ‘Dead Run’ tells the story of three young militia-oriented guys, one influenced by an admix of Ed Abbey, who got together to kill one cop and almost killed another in a crude plot to maybe blow up the massive Glen Canyon dam in Arizona. It’s not clear what exactly they had in mind with a stolen cement truck. Apparently, they intended to pack it with explosives and blow up something big with it, but steal a big truck in broad daylight in a small town and, Whoa, Dude, your conspiracy is off to a bad start. The Cement Truck Gang had read a lot of the usual paranoid bullshit the fascisti put out on the internet about the “ZOG” (Zionist Occupation Government) and how we’ve lost all our freedoms here in Freedom Land, especially our “right” to own military assault rifles. The three dummies bought it all, and prepared for a showdown with ZOG by burying lots of rifles, ammo, explosives, and survivalist gear in remote areas of the Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Colorado deserts… it apparently not occurring to them that the feds, not to mention local police agencies, have more and bigger guns and pay people quite well to use them.

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MIKE GENIELLA:

My mother went to work shortly after my birth. I grew up in the 1950s, explaining to my schoolmates why she was away from home all day, and my father, who suffered heart ailments, was in charge of his three sons during the day. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, and milking the cows were his domain, and you can be damn sure we boys learned to do all those chores early. My mother, bless her, made it to every important school event and teacher’s conference. Her hours as the bookkeeper at the local Singer Sewing Machine shop were long, and during the holidays, she often helped in sales and worked until 9 p.m. My father died in 1964. She had to pick up the pieces, pay funeral expenses, and literally start again. It was cash only. Years later, she showed me her first credit card. Tears ran down her cheeks as she recounted how hard she had worked during the early years, and yet was dependent on my father for the family’s financial decisions. “I earned it, but he managed the money because that is how things were then,” she recalled. In my lifetime, this happened. Make America Great Again? No thanks. Equality and justice for all, please.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, November 16, 2025

LEA BEABOUT, 47, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury, trespassing.

NATALYNN COCKRUM, 19, Ukiah. Embezzlement.

TRAVIS COTTLE, 42, Cloverdale/Ukiah. DUI.

JONATHON DELBELLO, 34, Willits. Failure to appear.

AMANDA FIGG-HOBLYN, 25, Willits. Under influence, controlled substance, paraphernalia, contempt of court, probation violation.

CARLOS FLORES-VAZQUEZ, 31, Willits. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.15%, cruelty to child-infliction of injury.

JESTIN GOTT, 40, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

CASEY IRELAND, 32, Willits. County parole violation.

PEDRO MARTINEZ-ROSALES, 37, Fort Bragg. DUI alcohol & drugs, controlled substance, addict driving vehicle, unspecified offense.

ANDRES MENDIOLA-SANCHEZ, 41, Boonville. Domestic battery.

ALEXI RANGEL, 28, Ukiah. DUI, child neglect, leaving scene of accident with property damage, reckless evasion, suspended license, re-entry of deported alien.

RICHARD SUMMERS II, 42, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

KAITLYN VALADEZ, 20, Santa Rosa/Willits. DUI-blood-alcohol over 0.01% and under age 21.

DANNY WILLIAMS, 47, Willits. Petty theft.

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"HE HAS NO ENEMIES, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”

— Oscar Wilde

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UNCLE JAKE: a lovely new song for Thanksgiving

We’re making plans for our family Thanksgiving.
One day of fellowship, joy and forgiving.
Kindred united in feasting and prayer
Except Uncle Jake, who we hope won’t be there.

Back in the day he had long yellow hair
Led the Queen’s horse at the Renaissance Faire.
Claims he inspired Joan Baez to sing,
And taught Wavy Gravy to throw the I Ching.

I can put up with the Camels he smokes
Rude innuendoes, deplorable jokes
But I will not listen to God’s plan for me
And I won’t let him dandle Elaine on his knee.

Old Uncle Jake, oh our dear Uncle Jake
I brine a turkey and he wants a steak
If we don’t invite him, Aunt Rose will be pissed.
Don’t let him near us, the grandkids insist.

We can’t exclude him, says my husband Fred.
He’s getting old and he soon will be dead.
He’s promised to leave us his house by the lake
So we must be pleasant to dear Uncle Jake.

— Holly

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BROCK PURDY THROWS 3 TDs in return from toe injury, 49ers cruise to 41-22 win over sloppy Cardinals

by David Brandt

GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Brock Purdy had barely settled into his first game back from a toe injury when he checked the opposing defense, made a quick switch at the line of scrimmage and then hit tight end George Kittle for a beautiful 30-yard touchdown in the corner of the end zone.

If the quarterback had any jitters related to his return, it sure didn’t show.

Now the San Francisco 49ers look like a team that might be peaking at the right time.

Purdy threw three touchdown passes, Christian McCaffrey had two rushing touchdowns and a receiving score, and the 49ers beat the sloppy Arizona Cardinals 41-22 on Sunday.

“It was vintage Brock, and that’s a huge compliment,” McCaffrey said. “He was poised, made some great plays, some huge third-down throws. Kept us in the game, was smart the whole game.”

McCaffrey extended his NFL record with his 17th career game with at least one running touchdown and a touchdown catch. Purdy completed 19 of 26 passes for 200 yards.

Kittle caught two touchdown passes.

“Brock’s presence in the huddle is just so elite,” Kittle said. “He plays the game with this joy that’s so infectious and it’s just so much fun to play football with him. I mean, five plays into the game, he hits me 30 yards downfield with a perfect pass.

“He was definitely feeling it. I think he’s got his confidence, got his swagger.”

Arizona lost for the sixth time in seven games. The Cardinals were called for a franchise-record 17 penalties, which was also the most for any team in the NFL this season. They had 11 penalties in the first half — tied for the most before halftime for any team over the past 20 years.

Arizona’s Jacoby Brissett started his fifth straight game for the injured Kyler Murray and completed 47 of 57 passes for 452 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions. The 47 completions set an NFL record in the regular season.

Michael Wilson caught 15 passes for a career-high 185 yards. Tight end Trey McBride had 115 yards receiving and a touchdown.

The 49ers (7-4) had control from the outset, needing just 16 seconds to take a 7-0 lead. Skyy Moore returned the opening kickoff 98 yards to the Arizona 1, setting up a 1-yard touchdown run by McCaffrey on the next play.

Purdy returned after being sidelined for six straight games because of the toe injury and was playing his first game since Sept. 28.

“Coming in, I didn’t want to think about (the toe) at all and I didn’t,” Purdy said. “I just went out and played quarterback like I’ve always played. It feels great now.”

The 25-year-old misfired on his first throw, but then completed three straight passes, including the 30-yard touchdown to Kittle for a 13-0 lead with 9:51 left in the first quarter.

For the Cardinals, it was an eerily similar start to last week’s debacle against the Seattle Seahawks, when they fell into a 35-0 hole in the first half before losing 44-22.

Arizona (3-7) had a slightly quicker response against San Francisco, cutting the margin to 13-7 later in the first on Bam Knight’s 6-yard touchdown run, but the good times didn’t last very long. The 49ers pushed ahead 19-7 early in the second quarter when Purdy hit a wide open McCaffrey for a 9-yard score.

The Cardinals are the first team since at least 2000 to allow two TDs in the opening six minutes of back-to-back games.

“I am a defensive head coach and it’s not acceptable,” Cardinals coach Jonathan Gannon said. “You can’t win when you give up that many points and it really doesn’t matter how you get there. You’ve got to stand up, play better, and keep points off the board.”

Eddy Piñeiro made a 47-yard field goal as time expired in the second quarter to give the 49ers a 25-10 halftime lead. Piñeiro initially had his 62-yard attempt blocked on the previous play, but Arizona’s Calais Campbell was called for a 15-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness, giving the kicker another chance.

The Cardinals continued to make critical errors in the second half. Knight looked like he had a 60-yard touchdown run in the third quarter, but it was called back because of a holding penalty on tight end Pharaoh Brown.

(apnews.com)

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49ers GAME GRADES: Brock Purdy’s return overshadows defensive issues in blowout win

The San Francisco 49ers took full advantage of an inferior opponent on the road on Sunday, marking Brock Purdy‘s return to action in a 41-22 defeat of the Arizona Cardinals.

Offense: A

Purdy looked like he never had been away. After misfiring on his first pass since September, the Niners’ QB1 hit his next three to get his team into the end zone, a solid start to a day he finished 19-for-26 for 200 yards and three TDs. He was sacked once, but scrambled on a few occasions to calm — at least for a week — fears that his bum toe might affect his play. Tight end George Kittle had six catches for 67 yards and two TDs (the 49th and 50th of his career). Christian McCaffrey (3 total TDs) was solid with 81 rushing yards (including the team’s first 20-yard run of the season) and 40 yards on five catches.

Defense: C

If you only saw that Jacoby Brissett threw for 452 yards on an NFL regular-season-record 47 completions and that Stanford alum Michael Wilson (15 catches, 185 yards) had the game of his life, you might assume it was a terrible day for the 49ers. But those gents play for the Cardinals, so it wasn’t so bad after all. Much to San Francisco’s benefit, Arizona couldn’t get out of its way: a missed field goal, a 60-yard TD run nullified by a penalty, a fumble at the 1-yard line scuttled what looked to be a surefire TD. Deommodore Lenoir had the highlight play of the day: a 64-yard zig-zagging return of an interception (the Niners’ second of the game but third of the season).

Special Teams: B

It was quite a roller coaster day for Eddy Piñeiro. He made three field goals — he’s now 22-for-22 with S.F. in that regard — but missed one extra point and saw another one blocked. That’s three blown PATs in two weeks and he didn’t have a chance for a fourth after injuring a hamstring and being forced out of the game. The return teams had similar ups and downs: Skyy Moore set the tone with a 98-yard return on the opening kick and Brian Robinson added a 42-yarder. But flip the coin and the 49ers allowed a 40-yard return on one of Thomas Morstead’s three punts.

Coaching: A-

That big exhale you heard midday Sunday came from Kyle Shanahan, who finally had a nearly complete set of offensive tools with which to work. Efficiency was the order of the day as the 49ers ran just 52 plays (Arizona ran 71) and gained 281 yards but racked up 24 first downs. Continued use of Robinson (8 carries, 24 yards) could help keep McCaffrey fresh and available. Robert Saleh’s secondary was torched early and often and the ankle injury suffered by LB Tatum Bethune — playing in place of out-for-the-year Fred Warner — could be another major setback for the defense.

Overall: B+

The 49ers might have reason to smile after the blowout win, but there is no room for gloating. The Cardinals are a terrible team seemingly incapable of doing anything right (see also: a franchise-record 17 penalties). A victory was essential for the Niners, while a loss would have been catastrophic to San Francisco’s playoff hopes. The 49ers have an extra day to prepare for Carolina, which should definitely provide a tougher test next Monday night.

(SF Chronicle)

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ONE YEAR AFTER KLAMATH DAM REMOVAL, ‘There’s Just Fish Jumping All Over the Place’: Scientists Describe Improvements to Water Quality and Wildlife

by Ryan Burns

A year after the Klamath River was returned to its free-flowing state by way of the world’s largest-ever dam removal project, scientists say nature has rebounded in astounding ways.

In an online press conference this afternoon, a group of scientists from regional tribes, environmental nonprofits and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife reported observations and data from a year’s worth of fish monitoring, spawning habitat surveys, water quality testing and more.

The consensus was that things have gone better than anyone could have anticipated, particularly when it comes to fall-run Chinook salmon.

“What the fish have shown us is something extraordinary,” said Damon Goodman, Mount Shasta-Klamath regional director for California Trout. “The river seemed to come alive almost instantly after removal, and the fish returned in greater numbers than I expected, and maybe anyone expected.”

Scientists from a broad array of organizations have united under the common goal of learning how salmon, other anadromous fish and an entire ecosystem recover. The removal of four hydroelectric dams on the lower Klamath has allowed for the restoration of more than 400 miles of habitat.

Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department Director Barry McCovey Jr. said the Klamath’s improved water quality, including a dramatic decline in suspended algae, has been a game changer for the tribal fishermen who have fed their people through gillnet fishing since time immemorial.

Fall-run Chinook are entering the river earlier than they used to and traveling further upriver than they’ve been in a century. The ones that returned to the Klamath in August were so robust and chubby “we call them footballs,” McCovey said.

In talking with tribal fishermen, sport fishermen and the community at large, he said, “There’s this feeling that the river just feels different. It feels stronger. It feels cleaner.”

The Klamath is still healing from a century of blockage behind a series of hydroelectric dams, “and the scars are still fresh,” McCovey said. “But the progress that we’ve made in just one year is pretty incredible, and it provides us with a lot of hope for the future.” (To hear more from McCovey, check out the latest episode of the WNYC podcast “Science Friday,” which just came out today.)

While fall Chinook have been an immediate success story, the spring-run Chinook population has a longer road to recovery. It was decimated by a century of blockage. The Klamath’s population of wild spring-run Chinook is down to just a few hundred, Goodman said, adding that the nearby Salmon River hosts one of the last viable populations of spring-run Chinook, and there’s a hatchery population on the Trinity River.

The Klamath’s population of these fish is “on the verge of extinction,” Goodman said, though there is now optimism about its recovery.

“We have a lot of work to do to get spring Chinook back in this river system, but we have an opportunity to do that now with dam removal,” he said.

There were major concerns ahead of dam removal about the release of accumulated sediment behind the dams and the resulting effects on dissolved oxygen levels in the river.

Toz Soto, senior policy and research advisor for the Karuk Tribe, said the drawdown was scheduled for last winter to minimize impacts, and while there was a spike in turbidity immediately after the last cofferdam was removed, the water quality quickly recovered.

“Thankfully, it all worked out in a positive way,” Soto said, noting that there was no large-scale fish kill and the Klamath’s dissolved oxygen levels never rarely fell below the California water quality standard.

Meanwhile, water temperatures in the Klamath have dropped, which is also a positive for fish health. The reservoirs acted as “heat batteries” keeping the water unseasonably warm into the fall migration season, Soto said. The lower temps since dam removal give fish an earlier opportunity to migrate while also improving their health, he explained. The cooler water has reduced the prevalence of toxic chemicals called microcystins, which are produced by algae.

Sami Jo Difuntorum, cultural Preservation officer with the Shasta Indian Nation, focused her comments largely on the impacts to the surrounding landscape.

“We’ve been called the tribe the dams were built on and it is literally true,” Difuntorum said. “The dams were built on our villages.”

When she looked at the landscape immediately after the reservoirs were drained, “It was really stark, really barren,” she said. “Nothing had grown there for, what, 100 years.” While most everyone involved was ecstatic, Difuntorum didn’t immediately share their sentiment. “It didn’t really feel joyous to me,” she said.

It wasn’t until she heard the river rushing through the canyon, hearing rocks popping as water hit them for the first time in 100 years, that she felt happy.

“What it said to me was … the earth and the rocks were welcoming the water back, and so that meant healing,” she said.

Later in the press conference, during a Q&A period with journalists, Goodman said that the Klamath River monitoring work has been impacted by recent federal funding cuts, including the Department of the Interior’s decision to terminate CalTrout’s funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“This loss in funding was a setback for our scientific data collection on the world’s biggest restoration project, but our team is finding other ways to make it work …,” he said. “While we’re already seeing that the Klamath dam removal is a success, we need consistent and accurate data to understand how much of a success this project was, and we’re currently fundraising to fill the gap for that lost funding.”

Below is a press release with more information:

Klamath River, Calif. – This October marks the first anniversary since the removal of the four lower Klamath dams, and scientists, advocates and Tribes are celebrating dramatic ecological improvements for the Klamath River. Ongoing scientific monitoring, which started years prior to dam removal, has enabled the documentation of significant advances in water quality, water temperatures, and the rapid return of native salmon populations to previously blocked habitats.

“The Klamath is showing us the way. The speed and scale of the river’s recovery has exceeded our expectations and even the most optimistic scientific modeling, proving that when the barriers fall, nature has an incredible power to heal itself,” said Barry McCovey Jr., Director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department.

News of fish passing the former dam sites came the same week as the project’s completion in early October 2024. While scientists were actively monitoring fish movements and spawning activity in the weeks and months following the restoration of natural flows to the river, it took several months of analysis to finalize specific data related to fish activity above the former dam sites. We now know that more than 7,700 Chinook Salmon swam upriver of the former Iron Gate dam site (the lowermost dam in the system) last fall to access habitat previously blocked by the dams. This number comes from a combination of monitoring techniques, including the use of SONAR, spawner surveys, and redd counts. This year the monitoring continues, and salmon have made it over the Link River Dam into Upper Klamath Lake.

“This is one of the most collaborative and comprehensive restoration studies ever undertaken with agencies, Tribes, and NGOs all coming together to monitor the recovery of the Klamath River salmon post-dam removal,” said Damon Goodman, Shasta-Klamath Director for California Trout. “What we witnessed was extraordinary—the river came back to life almost instantly, and fish returned in greater numbers than anyone imagined.”

Perhaps the most immediate and vital sign of the river’s healing is the dramatic improvement in water temperature—a crucial factor for the Klamath’s ecosystem. The dams and their reservoirs created artificially warm water temperatures in late summer and fall, when fish were returning to the system to spawn, and excessively cold water in the spring, when juvenile salmon out-migrate to the ocean. Ongoing monitoring of water temperatures both pre- and post-dam removal shows that temperatures have returned to a more natural regime that provides improved conditions for salmon during adult spawning migration and juvenile outmigration.

Hand-in-hand with this temperature recovery is a demonstrated monumental improvement in water quality, especially the precipitous decline of harmful algal blooms (HABs) and their associated microcystin toxins. Data collected by the Karuk Tribe since 2006 shows a powerful recovery: while 58% of samples below the former dam once exceeded public health limits, post-dam removal, 100% of water samples have tested within safe limits for people and wildlife. This combination of cooler, cleaner water is creating a resilient, thriving future for both fish and people.

“Since the dams were removed, temperature, algae, and dissolved oxygen levels have all dramatically improved,” said Toz Soto, Senior Policy and Research Advisor for the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources. “The process of removing the dams created temporary water quality impacts as sediments impounded by the dams were mobilized through the system. When we look back at the data over the last year, we see that those short-term impacts were worth it, and the immediate improvements to the system are clearly documented in the data collected by the Karuk Tribe and others.”

The first year of a dam-free Klamath River demonstrates a powerful trajectory towards salmon recovery and an ecosystem with significantly improved health with significant cultural and community benefits for Tribes and others in the region.

(LostCoastOutpost.com)

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NEXT TIME….

Editor,

Even the stone faces on Mount Rushmore are scowling at the government shutdown that just ended. You can almost hear, “I said government for the people, not government for punishing the people.”

Yet each day of the shutdown, the federal workers who keep our country functioning went without pay. Meanwhile, members of Congress continued to receive their paychecks. This was hypocrisy and a breach of public trust.

The shutdown even threatened public safety. Air traffic controllers, the unseen guardian angels who guide millions of passengers through our crowded skies each day, worked without pay. Some couldn’t afford groceries, rent or childcare. In a job that requires total concentration and flawless judgment, financial stress can be an enemy of safety.

If Congress believed the shutdown was worth the pain, then let its members live under the same terms. Next time there’s a shutdown, let them forgo their own paychecks, and better yet, redirect their money to the air traffic controllers and other federal workers who are keeping us safe.

The government is supposed to serve the people, not punish them.

Curtis Panasuk

San Francisco

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LOPSIDED REPORTING

Editor:

Day after day, Associated Press articles focus on Hamas returning remains of Israeli hostages. The authors never forget to mention Oct. 7, 2023.

If only once in a while these pieces would include that the International Court of Justice and numerous international human rights organizations have called Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide or that Benjamin Netanyahu is accused of war crimes. Nor have they educated their readers on what constitutes genocide.

Any report should include the number of Palestinians killed by Israel since the ceasefire (241, as of this writing). That of the 600 aid trucks per day pledged, only 100 have been allowed in. Tents and medicines languish in warehouses, denied by Israel to families who return to their homes after forced displacement to find nothing left. Israeli soldiers continue to occupy large portions of the territories which are no-go under penalty of death.

The U.S. media rightly condemns people going hungry because entitled SNAP and WIC benefits have been denied. Yet imagine going without adequate food for two years.

Why, as in no other conflict zone, have international journalists been denied entry so that what is really going on in Gaza cannot be accurately documented?

Jennie Orvino

Santa Rosa

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THREE DAOISTS AT THE FOOTBALL GAME

Warmest spiritual greetings,

Holding Fast to the Constant

Sitting quietly here in front of a Dell public computer at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Washington, D.C., on the lower level (Fabrication Lab), with the Packers-Giants game on the huge sports screen, which is well attended by fans in chairs set up by library staff, all the while am sipping a Royal King Korean Ginseng Drink with the root already chewed up, and listening to “Three Treasures Daoist Chanting,”

I am awaiting several new membership cards to arrive in the mail, related to health, wealth, and food. The upcoming SSA/SSI disbursement will put the checking account balance in the neighborhood of $5,000.

And I am ready to move on from the Catholic Charities homeless shelter, having now no further reason to be there. To say that I am free and available on the planet earth is an understatement.

“The sage does nothing, yet everything gets done.” ~Famous Daoist saying.

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

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ALMOST ALL of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

— W. H. Auden

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A MUGSHOT OF 19 YEAR OLD PHYLLIS STALNAKER.

Convicted of “smoking weed” and being a “tramp"-which means she was homeless or had no permanent address. Circa 1944.

Taken by the San Diego Police Department, captures more than just an arrest, it offers a glimpse into the harsh realities of how young women were treated under the legal and moral codes of the time.

Labeled as a “weedhead” and “tramp,” Phyllis was criminalized not just for marijuana use, but for existing outside the expectations of mid-20th century society. The term “tramp” in this context often referred to a woman without a fixed residence or one perceived as morally loose, labels that carried deep stigma.

During the 1940s, marijuana was aggressively targeted by law enforcement, particularly under the influence of propaganda-driven campaigns like “Reefer Madness.”

Young women like Phyllis were often singled out for behaviors that today might be seen as signs of independence or hardship. Her expression - equal parts defiant and resigned - seems to speak volumes about the era’s judgment and the weight of societal double standards.

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YUGIO

The Flame Dancer who comes at you
Swinging a loop of burning rope
And Ansatsu, silent and deadly
Who smothers you with false hope
There’s BAD GUYS of every description
Some are in it for money, some are just cruel
All of us are mighty darn lucky
Yugio never loses a duel
There’s Rock Spirit and Phantom Dealer
Ojama who’s half snake and half swine
The Swamp Dweller and the Coffin Seller
The Giant Axe Mummy who will snap your spine
There’s BAD GUYS around every corner
They threaten our country, our city, our school
All of us are mighty darn lucky
Yugio never loses a duel
The Dark Magician and the Dark patrician
The Dark Master with his razorblade wings
Mr. Volcano and his toxic temper
The Homicide Hornet with his Clorox stings
BAD GUYS of every persuasion
Some’ll get you with fire, some’ll get you with drool
All of us till now have been lucky
Yugio never loses a duel
Blind Destruction and the Lady Panther
Gadget Soldiers with armored glass
Come on Kyber, come on Joey
We’ve got to head them off at the pass
BAD GUYS on every tall building
They’re not here to visit, they want to rule
Mankind has been very lucky
Yugio never loses a duel
The Bitch Boss, the Lethal Lawyer
The Dumbass Doctor who keeps you in pain
The Brute Banker and the Fox News Anchor
They’ll eat your lunch and erase your brain
BAD GUYS in every direction
They all think power is super cool
Mankind is mighty darn lucky
Yugio never loses a duel

— Fred Gardner

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"IT IS DIFFICULT to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people."

— Jose Saramago

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A MAJOR CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY IS SLIDING TOWARD THE SEA. THERE IS NO QUICK FIX

by Julie Johnson

CRESCENT CITY, Del Norte County — Rattled by earthquakes. Pummeled by wind and rain. Buried in landslides.

This 3-mile stretch of Highway 101 atop a cliff in California’s far north careens through old growth redwood forests and across an earthen river of dirt and rock that is constantly shifting downslope toward crashing waves.

For more than a century, Del Norte County residents have called it Last Chance Grade, though no one recalls who coined the foreboding name.

A freshly paved road should last seven to 10 years, but not here. Six months is about the limit before jagged cracks, bubbling asphalt and falling rocks threaten motorists navigating sharp, treacherous turns.

“Come out in March after a tough storm — it’s a war zone out here,” said Clayton Malmberg, a construction engineer with Caltrans whose sisyphean job is to keep Last Chance Grade from falling into the sea.

Last Chance Grade has been crumbling toward the sea for more than a century due to underground landslides and geologic instability, and is often open only for one-way traffic while crews repair the road.

California’s government has spent more than $100 million since 2015 to keep this crucial lifeline open so residents can leave Del Norte County to the south for jobs, school and medical care, and so tourists can visit some of the world’s most majestic and tallest trees.

Finally, this summer, the state announced a proposed solution: Dig the longest tunnel in state history.

It’s a plan as audacious as the decisions made more than a century ago to perch the highway along a gorgeous yet volatile coastal cliff, but one experts hope will be more sustainable — and safer.

The road shuts down completely nine times annually on average due to landslides and other emergencies as well as for maintenance and repairs, according to Caltrans.

It has also claimed at least two lives.

During a heavy rainstorm in 1972, Kurt Stremberg’s parents drove south from their Crescent City home to drop Stremberg, then a recent college graduate, at a friend’s house 20 miles south in Klamath. It was still dark when Edwin and Aili Stremberg said goodbye to their son and began the drive home. In that short time, a portion of Last Chance Grade had washed away.

“They came around a turn and went over the cliff,” Stremberg said. If they’d left home 15 minutes later, he said that he and his parents “would have gone over the cliff together.”

In the decades since the Strembergs’ deaths, Last Chance Grade has become an even more intractable and expensive problem.

A 2014 landslide forced road crews to shut it down to one lane, and it wouldn’t reopen to two-way traffic for a staggering nine years. After another landslide in 2021, workers repairing the roadway were nearly killed by a tree that toppled when part of the hillside collapsed.

Along with commuters, the chronic closures hamper police and emergency personnel. “We’d shut down our lights and sirens and have to wait with the rest of traffic,” said Del Norte Ambulance driver and supervisor Brandon Johnson.

Expected to cost upward of $3 billion, the tunnel would pass deep within the shifting hillside and underneath majestic and protected old growth redwood forest designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Caltrans estimates the tunnel would cut the average number of accidents on this 3-mile stretch by nearly half.

The closest endeavor in scope and scale is a set of tunnels that opened in 2013 to avoid a landslide-prone portion of Highway 1 called Devil’s Slide in San Mateo County. It was the state’s first major tunnel project in 50 years and cost just under $500 million.

Tunnel Proposed To Replace Section of Highway 101 in Del Norte County

California has proposed a $3 billion tunnel for Last Chance Grade, a problematic stretch of Highway 101.

But tunneling near Last Chance Grade poses a number of expensive and technical challenges. Crews must dig below protected Redwood National and Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Parks through seismically active and geologically unstable territory.

Steve Mietz, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League, said that it was ultimately one of the least disruptive options for the prized and protected old growth forest. Caltrans reported it would require removing 144 large trees, including about a dozen of the largest redwoods with diameters larger than 5 feet.

Caltrans has not yet identified how it would pay for the tunnel. (The $3 billion estimate is a sharp rise from a $2.1 billion figure produced just two years ago; the new estimate adds in both cost increases over the past two years and also further escalations expected over the course of the project.) It’s a rough time to fundraise, with President Donald Trump’s government looking askance at spending, not least in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California. Del Norte County Supervisor Chris Howard said he and others will spend the next four years identifying funding sources, including grants at all levels of government. Caltrans’ current plan is to break ground in 2031 and complete the tunnel by 2038.

“We need to leave no stone unturned and be pretty damn creative,” Howard said.

‘Vital Line’

Walking at the base of a series of three-story tall retaining walls holding up the highway, Malmberg and senior engineering geologist Charlie Narwold described the challenge of bolstering a hill that’s falling at different rates and directions depending. Here at this location, one part of the hill was sagging westward and another was shifting to the southwest.

“You can see the stress fractures,” Narwold said, pointing to cracks in the wall’s massive, horizontal concrete beams.

Over the years, construction teams have pioneered new, unorthodox methods with concrete and steel to support the cantankerous hillside while allowing it to shift without totally buckling the infrastructure. Spines of steel plates bolted together act like a massive expansion joint.

“Ultimately, this will fail,” Malmberg said.

Landslides and slipouts plagued road crews building this northernmost portion of Highway 101 in the late 1930s, a time when California was embarking on major infrastructure projects.

The state opted to extend the highway into Del Norte County by improving an already-troublesome dirt route, noting even then that it would be “expensive to maintain because of the extremely unstable formation” of the hillside. To even out the ups and downs of the road, crews buried redwood trees and built a firm dirt road on top. The segment was completed in 1937, the same year as the Golden Gate Bridge.

In 2012, Caltrans finished building a first set of retaining walls to shore up Last Chance Grade. It was a major construction effort that also straightened out some of the scariest hairpin curves and widened the road, which previously had no shoulders.

But after a few months of blustery winter, Narwold said, “everything was falling apart.”

“I don’t think we fully appreciated, as a department, how much things were moving,” he said.

It’s not just one problem that plagues this roadway. Crescent City lies in a geologically perilous area. Three tectonic plates come together offshore, and this tectonic jostling is gradually shoving the land upward even as rising seas chew at the coastline. Onshore, dozens of underground landslides undulate and shift at different rates and in different directions, although always moving generally toward the sea.

And climate change is expected to bring bigger storms that dump dramatic amounts of rainfall and can trigger erosion.

Since the first retaining walls were built in 2012, crews have reinforced them by boring into the hillside, drilling through layers of old asphalt in some places, to lodge long anchors deep into the earth. But the earthflow is believed to be as deep as 250 feet, and they have yet to reach bedrock.

This month, crews are adding more anchors and exploring whether to build another wall.

“We can only continue this for so long, building walls in front of walls in front of walls,” Malmberg said.

Tamera Leighton, executive director of the Del Norte Local Transportation Commission, said locals have known for generations that the road was untenable, but they struggled to get the state’s attention. That began to shift about 15 years ago. They’d formed a local stakeholder group with Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, and Caltrans produced an economic impact report that, for the first time, highlighted “how big of a problem it was for the state of California,” Leighton said.

The report, which was updated in 2018, analyzed a scenario in which a major slide closed both lanes and transformed a half-hour drive between Del Norte and Humboldt counties into an eight-hour odyssey into Oregon and looping back through winding mountain highways.

Highway Closure Would Block A Critical Route

Closing Highway 101 to build a tunnel at Last Chance Grade would cut off the only roadway between Crescent City and Klamath, turning a 22-mile route into a 449-mile detour.

Such a disruption could cost the traveling public, from truckers to tourists, an estimated $650,000 more per day in added vehicle fuel and operating costs. Del Norte County businesses stand to lose $1.2 million every day the road is closed. An extended closure could jeopardize as many as 3,800 jobs.

“Without that vital line to get people in and out of Del Norte, we’re literally cut off from the world,” said Cindy Vosburg, executive director of the Crescent City-Del Norte County Chamber of Commerce.

A Land Like New Zealand

About 10 miles north of Last Chance Grade, coastal Crescent City lies on a square peninsula jutting in the Pacific Ocean. It’s about a dozen miles from the Oregon border and home to the vast majority of Del Norte County’s roughly 28,000 residents.

Tsunami-prone and rugged, this coastal outpost is a migratory stop for Aleutian geese and home to Roosevelt elk and salmon runs on the Smith River — the only major California river to never have been dammed.

The Smith dumps into the Pacific Ocean on a sprawling coastal ranch with about 6,000 milk cows where the land looks “more like New Zealand and Ireland than anywhere else in the country,” said longtime dairyman Blake Alexandre. The cool, wet weather keeps the green grass and the cows outside grazing year round.

When Highway 101 is closed, Alexandre’s milk trucks, headed for San Leandro, must travel north into Oregon and hook around to Interstate 5, adding about four to five hours and between $1,500 and $1,800 in costs per trip.

Alexandre said his company, Alexandre Family Farm, has so far weathered short-term disruptions, but a long-term closure could be devastating. He estimated that a month of detours through Oregon could cost $150,000.

“We’re just going to have to eat it and survive and get through it,” Alexandre said of the scenario.

Del Norte County had a vivid glimpse at isolation on Valentine’s Day in 2021 when the hillside above the highway gave way, sending tons of rocks and debris tumbling from the hillside across the highway. The 22-mile route between Crescent City and Klamath, two deeply connected communities, became a 449-mile detour.

Children and parents were trapped at schools or jobs on separate sides of the slide. People were cut off from health services, jobs and schools.

The road was still partially closed one month later when the land above crumbled again, sending a towering tree crashing onto road crews working below. Three workers were hurt, including a Caltrans engineer who lost a foot.

“It was terrible. It was a disaster,” Vosburg said.

Del Norte County declared an emergency, and Caltrans installed portable bathrooms on either side of the slide. Fearing the economic losses from lost tourism, Vosburg said, the chamber launched a marketing campaign to rebrand the long traffic delays caused by one-way traffic controls as part of the travel experience.

“You’re stuck in one of the most beautiful places in the world,” Vosburg said. “Even if you were stuck in the traffic for a couple hours: Turn off your engines, step out, breathe in, look at beautiful trees around you.”

Boring Through The Hillside

The tunnel, if built as planned, is slated to run just over a mile. Caltrans has begun taking samples from deep within the hillside to find what it might encounter when, and if, the digging begins.

Men in hard hats stood around a rattling, jolting machine at the side of a steep roadside berm amid towering redwoods. They grabbed a canister about 6 feet long, inserted it into a hole in the hillside, aimed a large hydraulic ram and sent a powerful stream of water gushing forward to propel the canister deep into the hill.

They had pulled about 830 feet of rock samples so far with a goal of getting at least 1,200 feet of rock to give tunnel engineers a sense of what they might encounter.

Minutes later, the group pulled a chain and the canister came out. Supervisor Giovanni Vadurro, an engineering geologist with SHN Engineers & Geologists, carried it over to a table and opened it up lengthwise, revealing a dark gray rock mottled with slivers of white.

“Sandstone with quartz vein,” Vadurro said.

“Hey man, this is good stuff,” said Narwold, who was visiting the worksite with a reporter. The sandstone was largely intact instead of crumbly, which could mean the hillside is more stable in that area, he said.

Some Del Norte County residents are wary of a tunnel taking them through a notoriously shifting landscape. Others doubt the state can pull off a massively expensive project in such a remote and sparsely populated area of the state.

Stremberg said he too was initially wary of a tunnel but is now convinced it’s the best alternative.

After his parents died on Last Chance Grade, Stremberg considered moving to Europe — he had emigrated with his parents from Finland as a toddler. But he stayed in Crescent City, starting a realty business, getting married and raising two sons.

And he kept pushing local leaders to agitate the state to act.

“It’s just never ending,” Stremberg said. “Something needs to happen.”

(SF Chronicle)

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NOVEMBER RAIN

When I look into your eyes
I can see a love restrained
But, darlin', when I hold you
Don't you know I feel the same? Yeah

'Cause nothing lasts forever
And we both know hearts can change
And it's hard to hold a candle
In the cold November rain

We've been through this such a long, long time
Just tryna kill the pain, ooh yeah
But lovers always come and lovers always go
And no one's really sure who's lettin' go today, walkin' away
If we could take the time to lay it on the line
I could rest my head, just knowin' that you were mine, all mine

So, if you want to love me
Then, darlin', don't refrain
Or I'll just end up walkin'
In the cold November rain

Do you need some time on your own?
Do you need some time all alone?
Ooh, everybody needs some time on their own
Ooh, don't you know you need some time all alone?

I know it's hard to keep an open heart
When even friends seem out to harm you
But if you could heal a broken heart
Wouldn't time be out to charm you, whoa-whoa

Sometimes, I need some time on my own
Sometimes, I need some time all alone
Ooh, everybody needs some time on their own
Ooh, don't you know you need some time all alone?

And when your fears subside
And shadows still remain, ooh yeah
I know that you can love me
When there's no one left to blame

So, never mind the darkness
We still can find a way
'Cause nothin' lasts forever
Even cold November rain

— Guns and Roses (1991)

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

If we can’t even agree on what it means to be intelligent, the entire discussion of whether some genes might increase a person’s base level of it is moot. And that’s besides the whole nature vs. nurture debate. So anyone who says that they can measure “smartness” is instantly suspect in my book. And doubly so if all their measures always seem to put the group that they belong to at the top of the heap. We’ve probably all met someone in our lives who had a limited formal education but was extremely smart. Maybe it was a Depression-era grandparent who could make anything out of anything. Maybe it was a friend who had an unerring ability to read someone’s true character. Maybe it was an autodidact with a passion for something like Victorian novels or trains or whatever. These are smart people. There are also people who can solve Wordle in two moves and calculate in hexadecimal numbers and so on. These are the people that the traditional IQ test picks up as smart. They are such a tiny sliver of what I consider smart people that to focus on them and to try to ascribe a genetic component to their skills seems to me to be ludicrous.

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MICHAEL GRANDE:

In the course of any discussion regarding the heritability of intelligence, there is always the underlying notion that intelligence is something that can be definitively measured and quantified. Sure, you can quantify performance on a test of cognitive functioning (IQ test), but is it an accurate measurement of what we think of as intelligence? There are innumerable factors that determine performance on an IQ test, both environmental/cultural and situational, and using the quantification of that performance to indicate the entirety of one’s thinking skills is ludicrous. Don’t get me wrong - tests of cognitive functioning can be extremely helpful in understanding functioning in the real world (e.g., learning, school behavior, social functioning), particularly when used with other sources of information. I used them for over forty years as a psychologist but never thought that a result of a performance on an IQ test gave me a definitive measure of “intelligence”. There is no agreed upon definition of intelligence, so how can we measure it? And if we can’t measure it, why are we even talking about so-called differences between groups? I think of myself as being relatively smart. However, every time I go to an auto mechanic, I’m reminded of how situational my smarts are. These arguments about the heritability of “intelligence” are all founded on this misguided notion that we can quantify something that we can’t even agree on what it is. Doesn’t sound very intelligent, does it?

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"THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU that reincarnation won't cure."

— Jack E. Leonard

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LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT

Trump Says House Republicans Should Vote to Release Epstein Files

Border Patrol Fans Out Across Charlotte, N.C., Arresting 81 People on First Day

Homeland Security Missions Falter Amid Focus on Deportations

U.S. Airport Restrictions to End Monday

White House Scraps Cash Payments for Delayed or Canceled Flights

How Fraudsters Use Cryptocurrency A.T.M.s to Target Victims

25 Movies, Many Stars, 0 Hits: Hollywood Falls to New Lows

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IS IT HAPPENING ALL OVER AGAIN?

Lax risk management, an incurious Federal Reserve, credit rating agency shopping, greed and garden-variety stupidity. Welcome to what could be the next great financial crisis.

by Eric Salzman

Perhaps the quote that will define the next Great Financial Crisis will be this one from an executive at a former lender to the $10 billion fraud known as First Brands.

“You’re not paid to do due diligence in this market.”

There have been three high-profile Private Credit (PC) blowups in the past month. All were due to fraud, and all had telltale signs of problems ahead if anyone bothered to look under the hood. However, in the mad rush to get the deals done and put investor funds to work to earn those sweet management fees, as the First Brands lender said, “You’re not paid to do due diligence in this market.”

The same was true leading up to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. No one was looking under the hood of either the borrowers or the lenders. The game plan was to make your money, move on to the next deal, feign ignorance when it all blows up, get a bailout, and let others pay the price.…

https://www.racket.news/p/is-it-happening-all-over-again

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ECUADOR REJECTS FOREIGN MILITARY BASES

by David Swanson

In 2007, then-President of Ecuador Rafael Correa said he wanted a military base in Miami if the United States were to continue using a military base in Ecuador.

Bye bye, U.S. bases!

More recently, however, times changed. Pressures were applied. A new Ecuadorean government expressed its willingness to do as it is told.

But there was one flaw in the new plan for the spreading of U.S. democracy by force, namely democracy. The people of Ecuador have just voted down their government’s proposal to amend their constitution to allow foreign bases.…

https://worldbeyondwar.org/ecuador-reject-foreign-military-bases

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"SENTIMENT WITHOUT ACTION is the ruin of the soul."

— Edward Abbey

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CHRIS HEDGES:

Western nations will do nothing to halt Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians. They will do nothing to alleviate the hunger and disease that is decimating Palestinians in Gaza. Our nations have been, and remain, full partners in the genocide. They will remain partners until the genocide reaches its grim conclusion.

Unless we stop them.

At least 242 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel since the “ceasefire” was announced. The first major ceasefire breach led to Israeli airstrikes that killed more than 100 Palestinians, including 46 children, and wounded 150 others. Palestinians in Gaza continue to endure daily bombings that obliterate homes. Israel has destroyed more than 1,500 buildings since the ceasefire began, often decimating entire neighborhoods with demolition charges. Shelling and gunfire continue to kill and wound civilians, while drones continue to hover overhead, broadcasting ominous threats or firing on civilians. Essential food items, humanitarian aid and medical supplies remain scarce because of the ongoing siege. And the Israeli army controls more than half of the Gaza Strip, shooting anyone, including families, who come too close to its invisible border, known as the yellow line. Their offense? Returning to the ruins of their homes.

https://youtu.be/ZUrjCxK1SaM?si=wTtG7aedmCo7DpIc

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THERE ARE NO EASY FIGHTS in the struggle against the empire. Lots of losses and no clean wins.

You spend years protesting the genocide in Gaza, and you get a fake, shitty “ceasefire” deal that’s just designed to shut you up while Israel continues creating hell for the Palestinians and carving off more pieces of their territory.

Humanity manages to avoid nuclear conflict at the most dangerous points of the Ukraine war, but the country continues getting torn apart for years in an idiotic bloodbath that could have been easily avoided with a little diplomacy and common sense.

Assange gets free, but only after he agrees to plead guilty to doing journalism, and only after years of cruel treatment have made an example of him for all the world to see.

Public trust in the mainstream media finally gets obliterated, only for the imperial perception managers to come up with Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and plutocrat-owned AI chatbots to retain control of the narrative.

The capitalists get everything they want, and succeed in advancing any ecocidal, dystopian agenda of their choosing so long as it generates profits or bolsters the imperial power structure.

Republicans win and they still act like underdog victims. Democrats win and they act like Republicans. Meanwhile any real political opposition which starts getting its legs underneath it gets stomped into the dirt in its infancy.

Your heroes let you down. Your allies die. The geopolitical developments you hope to see never quite pan out. Whenever there’s a moment of relative calm the dissident factions get restless and start cannibalizing themselves with counterproductive infighting and lateral-punching.

And the treads of the imperial juggernaut keep rolling forward.

Some days it makes you feel like a crippled child throwing a rock at a tank.

There are no easy fights. No wins by first-round knockout. At best it’s a grinding slog from bell to bell where you’re spitting out blood between rounds and sucking wind through your gum shield with broken ribs and a busted nose.

But you fight on anyway.

Not because you enjoy it. Not because you’re good at it. Not because you feel like you’re going to win. You keep biting down on your mouthguard and throwing hands for no other reason than because that’s all you can do.

These freaks are killing our planet. They’re committing genocide. They’re waving armageddon weapons around like cocks and playing chicken with the lives of every terrestrial organism. They’re driving us further and further into a tyrannical mind-controlled dystopia while doing everything they can to choke off our artistic brilliance and poison all the best things about our species.

You fight them because what the hell else are you going to do? Even if the treads of the machine are going to roll over us all in the end, at least you’ll go down knowing you left it all in the ring.

So you fight on. You give it everything you’ve got, even when it feels like you’re throwing haymakers at a mountain. You eat some leather, you spit out a tooth, and you return fire.

Because there’s nothing else you can do.

And there’s nothing that matters more.

— Caitlin Johnstone

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RAIN

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

— Edward Thomas (1916)