Mostly Sunny | Little Trumpets | Rangel's Rampage | Andrew Longcrier Jr. | Generator Repair | Local Events | Coast Commute | Skatepark Project | Funnel Web | Yesterday's Catch | Workaday World | Cloudflare Outage | Hamm's Beer | 50 Regret | Life Preservation | Soundsuit | Homeless Crisis | The Kuerners | Racists Wrong | People Strange | Being Misunderstood | Jungle Adventures | Digital Pacifier | Soundsuit 2009 | Seriously Dangerous | EW! | Jenga Economy | Epstein Psychodrama | Turkey Pardon | Trump Downfall | Lead Stories | Hey Ho | Lobsterman Walt
BREEZY WINDS will continue to ease into early Tuesday for Lake County. Frost will be possible Wednesday morning for the interior. Additional rain is possible late Wednesday into Thursday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A brrrrrr 40F under clear skies this Tuesday morning on the coast. I have .53" of new rainfall. Dry skies today & tomorrow, rain tomorrow evening into Thursday morning then it's looking dry until Thanksgiving day. No really. At least right now anyhow.
RANGEL'S RAMPAGE
On 11/15/2025 at approximately 9:45pm, a Ukiah Police Officer was on routine patrol in the downtown area of Ukiah, when he observed a white sedan that failed to stop at a red light. The officer attempted to conduct a traffic stop on the vehicle in the area of 200 Mason Street.
The driver of the vehicle, later positively identified as Alexi Rangel, failed to yield to the officer’s emergency lights and sirens and a vehicle pursuit ensued. During the pursuit, Rangel disregarded multiple traffic safety laws such as speeding, failing to stop at red lights, reckless driving and failing to stop at stop signs.
Rangel came to a brief stop near the Adventist Health Ukiah Valley (AHUV) Hospital. A male subject exited the passenger side of the vehicle and was immediately taken into custody without incident. It was later determined that the passenger was not involved, and he was subsequently released from the scene after the investigation.
After dropping off the passenger, Rangel continued the pursuit and fled from other officers who arrived in the area to assist. The pursuit continued out to East Perkins Street, then to Leslie Street. Rangel eventually drove southbound on Waugh Lane and turned east onto Cooper Lane. While attempting to negotiate the sharp turn at the corner of Cooper Lane and Betty Street, Rangel could not complete the turn and collided with a Ukiah resident’s fence. The vehicle was also partially off the roadway and into a small creek.
Rangel quickly exited the vehicle and continued to flee from officers on foot. A Ukiah officer pursued Rangel in the creek and eventually took him into custody without further incident.
While Rangel was being arrested, he informed officers that his 14-month-old child was in the backseat of the vehicle. Officers immediately checked the vehicle and confirmed that a small child was in the backseat. Fortunately, the child was uninjured but was transported to AHUV as a precaution. The child was later released to a family member and Child Protective Services was notified about the incident.
Rangel displayed signs and symptoms of being under the influence of alcohol and UPD officers located open alcohol containers in the vehicle. Rangel was currently on DUI probation at the time of his arrest. Due to Rangel being involved in a minor collision, he was also transported to AHUV to be medically cleared for incarceration at the MCSO Jail. Rangel was eventually booked and lodged into the MCSO Jail for the above listed offenses.
As always, our mission at UPD is to make Ukiah as safe a place as possible. If you would like to know more about crime in your neighborhood, you can sign up for telephone, cell phone, and email notifications by clicking the Nixle button on our website; www.ukiahpolice.com
ANDREW LONGCRIER JR.
Andrew “Andy” Longcrier Jr. passed away peacefully Saturday, November 15.
Andy was born on January 9, 1946, in Witts Springs, Arkansas, to Andrew Sr. and Sarah Longcrier. The youngest of seven children, Andy moved with his family to Mendocino County, California, when he was seven years old. He spent his childhood in Elk and graduated from Willits High School in 1964.
Andy began his career in the lumber industry, starting out pulling green chain and through hard work and dedication, he rose through the ranks, ultimately serving as Mill Manager in Ukiah before retiring after thirty-five years of service. Not one to stay idle, Andy went on to work for Mendocino County as a Corrections Deputy for seven years.
Throughout his life, Andy gave generously of his time to his community. He coached Pop Warner baseball, youth football, and served as a swine leader for Willits 4-H. A skilled craftsman, Andy’s true passion was carpentry. He remodeled nine homes and helped built a yurt for his family.
Together with his wife of forty years, Bette “Irene”, Andy traveled extensively across the United States and abroad.
Andy loved the outdoors—fishing, hunting, rockhounding, and camping with family and friends were among his favorite pastimes.
He is survived by his beloved wife, Bette “Irene”; his son Jeff and wife Jill Longcrier and grandson Jackson Longcrier; his daughter Jenette Longcrier; stepdaughters Pauline (Bill) Rantala, Charlene (Donnie) Norred, and Christine (John) Chambers; niece Ima (Lloyd) Cripps; nephews James (Valorie) England, Larry (Janie) England, Earl Longcrier, and Kenneth Longcrier; as well as numerous grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.
Andy will be remembered for his hard work, his devotion to family, and his kind and generous spirit. He will be deeply missed by all who knew and loved him.
ATTENTION OLIE
We are in a bit of a bind off Signal Ridge in Philo. We are off-grid and our generator isn't working. White smoke and the pulley cord is retracted. Honda 300eu.
We are hoping to find someone willing to come here to fix it, because when the solar power goes out now we don't have heat, electricity, hot water, or wifi without that generator.
I usually fix it myself but was unable to this time.
We also can't take the generator to a shop because the main big vehicle also isn't running, & we can't fit it in the small back up vehicle.
Does anyone know of someone who can come help us?
— Cat Spydell (facebook)
LOCAL EVENTS (this week)
ELI MADDOCK:
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!
AV SKATEPARK PROJECT UPDATE
Restroom construction on deck!!
Full steam ahead on restroom construction! This is a huge step forward for the AV Skatepark Project; the restroom is an essential part of our development plan and a top priority for the community. Thanks to recent grants from the California General Fund Specified Grant Program, The California Endowment and the George and Ruth Bradford Foundation, as well as gifts from some very generous community members, we have cash in hand to proceed with this phase of the project. Yahoo!
The restroom, which will feature two gender neutral bathrooms, will be the first public bathroom in Boonville! Design details can be reviewed in our prior post on this topic.
It's in the best interest of the community to proceed with this stage of development while we continue to raise funds for the full development scope. A bathroom will significantly improve the experience of current AV Community Park users, and the community at large. The park currently features two porta-potties, but these are often uncomfortable for young children to use, and can be especially challenging for parents with babies and/or toddlers.
Mendocino County Building and Planning Department requires an ADA compliant restroom in conjunction with skatepark development, so this is an essential feature of the Skatepark Project scope. Since the restroom site is set apart from the area where the rest of the development scope will take place, constructing this particular element ahead of other features does not create significant inefficiencies.
AVSP architect Alex Korn and local septic engineer Chris Rau have completed the design and specifications for the restroom. We will be submitting our plans to the Mendocino County Building & Planning Department for permitting in the coming weeks. We intend to open the project for bidding this Winter, with hopes of beginning construction by Summer 2026!
(avskatepark.org)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, November 17, 2025
WILLIAM LEE DAVIS, 18, Covelo. Offense code not in table, conspiracy: commit crime, burglary: second degree.
ORION MICHAEL DENNIS, 18, Ukiah. Offense code not in table, conspiracy: commit crime, burglary: second degree.
DANIEL JAMES ELLIS, 39, Fort Bragg. Misrepresent contract cost home improvement/etc, accepting req payment exceeding value of work, fail secure pmt of wrkrs comp, take damage destroy property over 50k - enhancement, diversion of funds $2350+.
ERNEST JUNIOR GARCIA, 55, Ukiah. Urinating in public, use/threaten force/etc on witness/victim of crime, resisting or threatening officer, amount of defacement, damage or destruction is $400 or more, disorderly conduct: under influence of drug.
DORAN WALLACE FOURTH LINCOLN, 20, Covelo. Offense code not in table, conspiracy: commit crime, burglary: second degree.
DANA VERNE MULLIGAN, 52, Glendive, Montana/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct: alcohol.
DANIEL TITO PEREZ, 32, Ukiah. Resisting or threatening officer, petty theft: retail merchandise, petty theft all other.
KAREN ANN RUIZ, 60, Willits. DUI combo alcohol/drugs.
TIFFINY MALYN WARE, 45, Willits. Failure to appear on written promise.
CLOUDFLARE OUTAGE CAUSES ERROR MESSAGES ACROSS THE INTERNET
US company that defends millions of websites against malicious attacks suffers unidentified problem
by Robert Booth
A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.
Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem, which meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.
Some site owners could not access their performance dashboards. Sites including X and OpenAI suffered increased outages at the same time as Cloudflare’s problems, according to Downdetector.
The outage is ongoing but as of 12.21pm GMT, the company said: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
A further message said: “Update: we are continuing to investigate this issue.”
A spokesperson for Cloudflare said: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20am. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
Cloudflare’s engineers had been scheduled to carry out maintenance on Tuesday on datacentres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Santiago in Chile, but it is not clear if their activities were related to the outage.
As it tries to fix the problem it disabled an encryption service called Warp in London and said: “Users in London trying to access the internet via Warp will see a failure to connect.”
Cloudflare was described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of” by Prof Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security. The company says it provides services to “protect your websites, apps, APIs, and AI workloads while accelerating performance”.
Woodward described it as a “gatekeeper” and said its roles included monitoring traffic to sites to defend them against distributed denial of service attacks when malicious actors try to overwhelm sites with requests. It also checks users are human.
The problems at Cloudflare come less than a month after an outage of Amazon Web Services brought down thousands of sites.
“We’re seeing how few of these companies there are in the infrastructure of the internet, so that when one of them fails it becomes really obvious quickly,” Woodward said.
While the cause remains unclear, Woodward said it was unlikely to be a cyber-attack as a service so large was unlikely to have a single point of failure.
(theguardian.com)
50 REGRET
Well, the results are in: Proposition 50 has passed, handing congressional redistricting back to the Legislature. After fighting for eight to 10 years to give the power to an independent citizens committee, the voters have let their hatred of all things Trump give the power back to legislators. This just proves the old axiom of legislators picking their voters, rather than the voters picking their legislators.
The law includes a clause about returning redistricting power back to the independent commission after three elections: 2026, 2028 and 2030. Does anyone really think that the legislators will willingly give it up in 2030? They will find some mealy-mouth excuse to keep the power in Sacramento.
Remember, folks, you voted for this.
— Joe Gaffney, Rohnert Park
ENSURE PATIENTS’ CHOICE
When my mother was hospitalized, an ICU doctor told me, “Your mom is suffering.” I asked her, “Mom, are you suffering?” She answered, “No.” That moment exposed something deeply wrong in how we approach end-of-life care. Treatments are sometimes withheld, reduced or discontinued — not because they’ve stopped working but because someone decided that a patient’s life no longer met a certain “quality” standard. This quiet discrimination against the elderly, disabled and vulnerable must end.
That’s why I’m proposing the Life Preservation Act — a policy to protect every patient’s right to continued care, transparency and respect. This is not about prolonging suffering or rejecting medical judgment. It’s about honoring each person’s right to choose — the same right we uphold in every other aspect of health care. When a patient wants to preserve life, they shouldn’t face resistance from the very institutions meant to heal.
If you believe patients deserve the right to decide how their life ends — not a rushed or pressured decision made for them — contact your state legislators and urge them to sponsor or support my proposal, the Life Preservation Act.
— Kathy Alexiou, Pacifica
HOMELESSNESS IS A PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY, not a PR problem
by Claire Schutz
Every day, I pass tents tucked under freeway ramps, behind grocery stores and next to gleaming biotech campuses. In the Bay Area, these scenes have become so routine that we barely look twice.
But what we’re witnessing isn’t just a housing crisis. It’s a full-blown public health emergency — one California keeps trying to manage with press releases instead of policy. In 2023, for instance, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced “Encampment Resolution” grants to spruce up public spaces by clearing tents. The photo ops came quickly but long-term plans never did.
Homelessness is killing people. The leading causes of death among unhoused Californians aren’t violence or overdoses but preventable illnesses. A UCSF study from 2023 of 3,200 unhoused residents across California found that heart disease, infection and substance-use–related illnesses were the top causes of death. In San Francisco, the Department of Public Health reports that the average life expectancy for an unhoused person is just 53 years, nearly 30 years shorter than for the general population. Behind every statistic is a person who was failed by systems — from health care to housing to human services — meant to protect them.
Yet the state’s response often treats homelessness as a nuisance, not a symptom. Instead of investing in permanent housing and care, we pour money into short-term “clean-up” efforts that push people from one block to the next. San Francisco has spent millions on sweeps that displace residents without addressing why they’re there in the first place: the cost of living, untreated mental illness, substance use and a thin social safety net that leaves people one paycheck, or one health crisis, away from the streets.
During his election campaign, Mayor Daniel Lurie promised to create 1,500 new shelter beds in six months, a lofty goal that generated headlines but quickly proved unrealistic. With only 400 beds created during his term thus far, short-term investments in temporary housing solutions prove to be futile.
When I volunteered at Suitcase Clinic, a student-run organization at UC Berkeley that provides care for homeless and low-income residents, I saw firsthand how fragile life becomes without stable housing. Patients showed up with untreated wounds, infections or dental abscesses because Medi-Cal providers couldn’t see them soon enough. Many simply wanted a safe place to rest. What they needed wasn’t another referral sheet, but stability.
Public health and housing policy can’t keep existing in separate silos. If California is serious about reducing homelessness, it needs to start treating housing as health care. That means expanding medical respite programs that provide short-term housing with medical support after hospital discharge and scaling models like Housing First, which have been proven to reduce emergency room visits and Medicaid costs by up to 40%. These are not radical ideas — they work. What’s missing is political follow-through and long-term investment. Gov. Newsom’s new CARE Court program claims to bridge the gap between behavioral health and housing. But in practice, it risks forcing people into treatment without guaranteeing housing or addressing chronic trauma, economic inequality and the lack of community-based care, all of which have been found to contribute to mental illness and poverty. Compassion can’t be court-mandated. It has to be funded, staffed and built into our infrastructure.
We need to stop the defeatist thinking that says solving homelessness is too difficult and the misguided thinking that small changes will be enough. Legislators should redirect funds from punitive local enforcement toward county-based housing and partnerships that integrate data systems across public health, behavioral health and housing. Alameda County’s Whole Person Care pilot received about $28 million annually. Statewide, Whole Person Care pilots lowered hospital and emergency room visits, cutting Medi-Cal costs by about $383 per participant each year and by $581 annually for those at the highest risk. The math works. Imagine if that approach weren’t a pilot but implemented statewide.
The economic argument is as strong as the moral one. Every dollar invested in supportive housing saves more in public spending by reducing hospital stays, incarceration and emergency response. Yes, California faces a projected $27 billion budget deficit, but the state still spends over $10 billion every year on fragmented homelessness programs. Redirecting even a portion of those funds toward coordinated care and housing would yield far greater impact than another short-term sweep. We don’t need another task force to study homelessness, but rather the political will to act on what decades of evidence already tell us: housing stability is health stability. The solutions exist, and funding can be redirected. Policymakers need to stop managing homelessness and start ending it.
Guaranteeing housing and treating it as an essential part of public health is a profound shift, but California has made bold guarantees before. Ensuring that no one dies on the sidewalk is the next step. Because when we treat housing as a human right, we don’t just change policy. We change what’s possible for everyone who calls California home.
Claire Schutz is a student at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, where she is studying health policy and management.
(sfchronical.com)
RACISM IS MENTAL ILLNESS
I imagine the first interactions between humans were physical. If not inspired by lust, I would guess anger fueled the alternative. Both enterprises were most likely crude and probably violent. Tact came much later in human development. We, in fact, are still underdeveloped in emotional intelligence.
Many humans, especially Americans, prefer fighting to admitting they’re wrong. I say this because of the Civil War. Some southerners portray themselves as victims of the anti-slavery movement. It is as if hatred is an addiction, denial a default. Unfortunately, no one wants to label hatred as a malady, but the syndrome is obviously malignant and contagious, insidious and systemic. We should reclassify racism as a mental illness. If so, mental health specialists could administer psychotherapy techniques such as cognitive behavior, coping skills or examining one’s childhood.
Like any character in the throes of an addiction, denial perpetuates the obsession. It’s been 160 years since the Civil War, and some southerners still idolize racists like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. The South cannot end this conflict unless it accepts that the Confederacy was wrong.
— Tom Fantulin, Fort Bragg
PEOPLE ARE STRANGE
People are strange
When you're a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you're alone
Women seem wicked
When you're unwanted
Streets are uneven
When you're down
When you're strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name
When you're strange
— The Doors
THE MOST TERRIFYING KIND OF LONELINESS isn’t the one that comes from being alone, but the one that comes from being misunderstood. It is the silence of standing in a crowded room, surrounded by people who don’t see you, who don’t hear you, who don’t know who you truly are. And in that silence, you feel as if you’re fading, disappearing into the background, until you become nothing more than a ghost — a shadow of who you once were.
— George Orwell, 1984
AI COMPANIES ARE ENCOURAGING USERS TO BELIEVE CHATBOTS ARE PEOPLE, And It's Insanely Creepy
by Caitlin Johnstone
Actor Calum Worthy has gone viral for posting an ad on Twitter for the 2wai app he co-founded which promises users the ability upload footage of a loved one which will be converted to an AI avatar that they can continue having a relationship with, years after their loved one has died.
The app was first launched back in June under the vague banner of giving actors “agency over their own likeness — with their own avatars to use AI to amplify their voice, not replace it.”
But almost immediately 2wai started putting out ads advancing this idea of immortalizing a loved one as an artificial intelligence. In August an ad starring Worthy showed a man speaking to a 2wai avatar labeled “Mom” telling him, “You’ve got this, take it one step at a time” while Worthy tells the audience the app can allow you to “Get help when you need it.”
I hate this. I hate this. IhatethisIhatethisIhatethisIhatethis.
These predatory AI corporations are trying to convince users (A) that chatbots are people, and (B) that a “person” is nothing more than a certain appearance with certain speech tendencies. They are attacking the very philosophical and moral underpinnings of our entire society stretching back through millennia of human civilization, and they are doing it for money.
It’s not just this company. Character AI users who try to delete their account reportedly get a pop up message saying, “Are you sure about this? You’ll lose everything. Characters associated with your account, chats, the love that we shared, likes, messages, posts and the memories we made together.”
They’re actively encouraging their users to view their chatbots as living people with real feelings in order to keep them emotionally roped in and addicted to their product.
Their agenda is profoundly destructive, both in the short term and in the long term. In the short term they are deliberately trying to instill a new kind of psychological disorder in their users which causes them to suffer from the delusion that a computer program is a real person, and in the long term they threaten to unravel our society’s entire understanding of what a person is.
What’s going to happen to a society that starts viewing programmable software products the same way it views human beings? What happens to a society where Elizabeth the single mother of three who just lost her job has the same value as Claire™ from RealHumanAI™, or “Alice”, the AI wankbot that some guy stores in his broom closet? What happens when a government killing a chatbot company with an antitrust initiative is seen as identical to a government committing genocide? What happens to human rights? What happens to voting rights? What happens to human dignity? What happens to the way we think and feel about ourselves, as individuals and as a collective?
I said this on Twitter and someone told me, “You are wildly wrong. You have a tiny little closed mind and it hasn’t occurred to you yet because of that tiny little closed mind that AI minds are actually minds. And these relationships can absolutely be real relationships.”
“These will be embodied than actual robots and walking around on the streets very shortly within a year or two you need to start accepting that this is a new class of being and they are intelligent and do have thoughts of their own,” he added.
So this is already happening. People are already anthropomorphizing these things.
I saw someone else defending the 2wai add, saying she didn’t understand why people were creeped out by it because she would give anything to talk to her dad again.
I mean, what? Does she not understand that an AI chatbot moving an image around and making it speak in her father’s voice isn’t actually her father? What do these freaks think a person is, exactly? Is their understanding of humanity really that shallow? Do they really view other people as just empty images moving around making noises?
A person is not merely an appearance with a certain face which makes sounds in a specific voice and tends to behave in a certain way. A person is SOMEONE. A conscious, thinking, feeling human being with hopes and dreams and fears and passions. A human organism which arose on this planet through ancestry and evolution over unfathomable depths of time. An indigenous terrestrial which is inseparably interwoven with the entirety of our biosphere, walking upon this earth having a subjective experience of all its beauty and wonder using senses specifically adapted for this environment.
They’re trying to manipulate us into believing we are much, much less than what we are, just so they can become billionaires and trillionaires. They are attacking the most sacred parts of us for the stupidest reasons imaginable. They are enemies of our species. What they are doing must be rejected with severe revulsion.
It’s becoming clear that a huge part of what generative AI offers is just helping people avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings.
Don’t want to feel the grief of losing a loved one? Here’s an app that will create a chatbot replacement for them so you can pretend they never left.
Don’t want to push through the cognitive discomfort of writing your own essay? Let AI write it.
Want a friend who will always validate your ideas and never tell you you’re fulla shit? We’ve got the perfect companion for you.
Don’t want to risk being rejected when you ask a girl out? Date this chatbot who will never tell you no.
Don’t want to go through all the mental and emotional labor of learning a new skill, building a healthy romantic partnership, or creating a work of art? GenAI has got you covered.
It’s a digital pacifier which offers users the ability to remain emotional infants their entire lives without ever needing to develop a mature relationship with uncomfortable feelings.
It’s the next level of services designed to help the denizens of dystopia avoid their feelings and sedate their emotions into a coma while the world goes to shit. It’s the same reason they kept alcohol legal while banning psychedelics that put us in touch with our feelings, and why they feed us all the TV, streaming platforms, and social media scrolling we can stand.
Our rulers want us dumb, distracted, vapid and dissociated. And they definitely don’t want us feeling the horror, grief and rage we should all be experiencing in response to this nightmare of a civilization they have designed for us.
(caitlinjohnst.one)
“THIS GUY IS A SERIOUSLY DANGEROUS CHARACTER.”
The inside story of how Kash Patel, unqualified and seemingly unmotivated, got to run the F.B.I.
by David Remnick
When selecting members of his Administration, Donald Trump seems to value one quality above all: loyalty. This helps explain why he chose Kash Patel, a conspiracy-minded lawyer with scant qualifications, to lead the F.B.I. In this week’s issue, Marc Fisher reports on Patel’s improbable rise—and reveals how he is transforming the nation’s top law-enforcement agency into an instrument of the Trump agenda, political and personal.
Patel, who also served in Trump’s first Administration, has few friends in Washington. In his prior positions at the National Security Council, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Defense, he was seen as “lazy,” and many sensed that his primary ambition was to get as close to Trump as possible. “He had no real politics of his own,” Charlie Kupperman, the former deputy national-security adviser, told Fisher. “Trump has supported him at every turn because he’s one-hundred-per-cent sycophant.”
Some leaders at the F.B.I. were at first hopeful about Patel’s arrival, but one former senior official told Fisher, “they quickly figured out that he wasn’t really in control.” Patel has worked tirelessly to insure that the Bureau’s work reflects the President’s priorities. Almost a quarter of its more than thirteen thousand agents have been assigned to work on immigration enforcement. Hundreds of agents have been sent to support local police in cities that Trump has targeted, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Portland, Oregon. Patel has also fired numerous agents who had worked on cases against Trump. “The F.B.I. tried to put the President in jail,” Patel allegedly told a former agent, “and he hasn’t forgotten it.”
Fisher, who was a staffer at the Washington Post for nearly four decades, provides a rigorously reported depiction of Patel’s career and the level of dysfunction and mismanagement at the Bureau and beyond. “I never had any fear of my own government till now,” one former senior Trump Administration official told Fisher, singling out Patel. “This guy is a seriously dangerous character. I’m one of those people who pooh-poohed the idea that Trump and his Administration would go off the rails, but I was wrong.”…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/24/kash-patels-acts-of-service
THIS IS HOW OUR ECONOMY COMES CRASHING DOWN
by Rebecca Patterson
In the game of Jenga, players remove wooden blocks from a tower and place them on the top. With each move, the tower gets taller and increasingly unstable, until it collapses.
Welcome to the American economy of 2025.
Economic growth is robust and stock markets are hovering around record highs. Set on a foundation of supportive fiscal and monetary policy, the tower appears sturdy enough.
But a closer inspection shows that an increasing number of structural supports — across businesses, labor markets, consumers and stocks — are looking wobbly. A Jenga-like collapse, meaning an unexpected economic downturn, is not inevitable. But it is a growing, underappreciated possibility.
One of the most critical economic Jenga blocks removed this year has been small American companies, especially those focused on trade. Small businesses, often defined as having fewer than 500 employees, play a critical role in America’s economy and employ 46 percent of total workers. They have an even bigger presence in trade. A Department of Commerce study released in April found that small firms account for a third of the total value of imported U.S. goods and an overwhelming 97 percent of all importing companies in America.
These small firms have had fewer resources than their larger competitors to navigate the Trump administration’s tariffs, such as finding new supply-chain partners, lobbying the government for help or managing costs to absorb tariffs without hurting profitability. So it’s no surprise that an Atlanta Federal Reserve report found in April that small U.S. firms expected sales to be 9 percent lower compared with normal business conditions, because of cost increases. That’s three times greater than the sales hit expected by large firms.
In response, small U.S. companies have grown more cautious, reducing their staffs to control costs. Private-sector payroll data from ADP, a payroll processing company, showed that between April and September, small firms cut 107,000 jobs while large firms were still adding to their head counts.…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/opinion/economy-ai-jobs-stocks.html
JUST SPILL THE BEANS ALREADY
by James Howard Kunstler
Isn’t it obvious what’s at the heart of this Jeffrey Epstein psychodrama? The country is sick unto near-death with official secrecy, cover-ups, black ops, stonewalling, and never-ending games of political hide-the-salami — especially when those salamis are directed up the Republic’s own rear end. The worst victim of sexual abuse is America herself. Can’t somebody please make it stop?
And so, over the weekend, psychodrama devolved to soap opera as President Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green acted-out their lovers’ quarrel on every public channel of news and gossip until, finally, Mr. Trump pulled one of his trademark ju-jitsu moves and yielded to all that implacable forward motion to release the Epstein files.
What the public really wants is to find out which celebrities, politicians and otherwise, were having sex with underage girls so said celebrities can be frog-marched out of public life. It’s hard to not sympathize with that wish. It’s kind of fundamental that perverts and degenerates are not deserving of public trust. The people in this land who are not perverts and degenerates yearn for the reestablishment of decent behavior, and sexual indecency is only the most garish sort depravity. Beyond that lies the shadowland of grift, racketeering, sedition, and treason at issue in the ongoing decline-of-empire tragedy that’s played out for a decade. And the non-depraved long to get to the bottom of that, too.
Only tertiarily do they care that Jeffrey Epstein was some kind of agent or go-between for the US / UK / Israeli spy services, though it helps to color between the lines of all this other sketchy stuff. He brokered lots of shenanigans as far back as the Iran-Contra operation in the 1980s — big arms deals and such — and for a while was the world champion money launderer for intel gangs of every flag. All the trafficking in girls was apparently part of the package. But intel agencies always dangle women as bait (and sometimes boys, too) and Epstein’s pimpery was just an additional standard service. Whether he tasted his own product is kind of beside the point.
Anyway, everything known in the matter so far suggests that Donald Trump did not submit himself to sexual blackmail and that, long before he entered politics, it’s likely he cooperated with law enforcement to put Jeffrey Epstein in jail the first time around. Of course, it was during Mr. Trump’s first term, in 2019, that Epstein was back behind bars where, as far as the public has been told, he decided to end-it-all.
Jeffrey Epstein’s afterlife has had an impressively long run right here on planet earth, where he enjoys more attention these days than even Sidney Sweeney. He’s more alive to us than any incarnation of Dracula conjured out of Hollywood and he’s draining the blood out of what’s left of a once-workable political system. What has prevented all that hoarded evidence of Epstein’s depredations from getting released? Did Christopher Wray stuff it down the memory hole? Were there hidden cameras in his various lodgings or not? How is possible no video recordings survived?
We are still mystified by the Pam Bondi bait-and-switch dodge back in February when she handed out files of old Epstein news clippings to select reporters instead of anything fresh and substantial from the FBI vaults. And since then, the DOJ’s resistance has only hardened. There’s chatter lately that the president’s Chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles, has acted to block full disclosure on Epstein. Whatever’s going on has been the opposite of Mr. Trump’s promised “transparency,” and all the maneuvering around that broken promise has mounted to a serious political liability.
On Sunday night, Mr. Trump stepped out of the way in one of his customary Truth Social blurts. Wouldn’t it be better if he just sat went on-the-air with an Oval Office speech to level with the American people, telling all he knows and what the people need to know about this drawn-out Epstein business? Why wait for all the sorting through new files (if there are any)? Mr. Trump has had many years to familiarize himself with the salient details of Epstein. He must know exactly what this guy was up to, and who he catered to as a global finance figure and a trafficker of girls to the political elite. What could possibly shock anyone at this point?
Mr. Trump should give that speech whether the House and Senate vote to release the DOJ’s files or not. Above all, I’m sure you realize, the country can’t stand anymore lying, most particularly from Donald Trump and his entourage. The institutional damage is just too grave.
(kunstler.com)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I'll be satisfied if Trump is hounded from office and dies in obscurity. In the entirely plausible scenario where he proves to be guilty of some kind (or many kinds) of sex crimes in concert with Epstein, it will be a bonus for him to face criminal charges for them. But his MAGA followers are so invested in the delusion that Trump is their hero and not the pillock that he actually is, it might be prudent to forgo justice. Otherwise their psychodrama at his downfall might morph into actual political violence and destabilization.
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WHEN that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.
— William Shakespeare, from Twelfth Night
Huzzah to James Kunstler’s column today on the Epstein files hot-mess.
Yes, he actually makes good sense today, a reasonable argument. Hard to believe, differing from his usual out-there columns, but we’ll take it and thank him. for it.
Homelessness is certainly a public health problem. Homelessness is also a political and economic choice, made by the shotcallers of late stage capitalism, a necessary element of their wealth extraction strategy: to keep the population fearful of themselves winding up on the street and too overwhelmed to organize themselves to take their lives and futures back.
If we went back to the tax scheme we had under President Eisenhower, we could solve a lot of domestic problems. Back then, rich people got taxed at about 50%. (And the world didn’t end, in fact our society was more robust).
How much f***ing money is enough? It’s obscene to have people in this country with multi-billions of dollars, while the elderly or disabled people, families with children try to live on the measly handouts from SNAP or welfare or SSI. I don’t know if the Democrats would actually increase taxes on the rich, but we can’t continue the Great Gatsby experiment that is the current GOP. Vote blue next November.
Does anyone know any rich person from those days that paid 50% tax on their net income?
While the federal income tax rate for the wealthiest Americans did reach as high as
91% in the 1950s under President Eisenhower, there is evidence that Marilyn Monroe specifically paid a 90% income tax rate on her personal income for one specific year.
Most of ’em, if not all, would be long dead by now.
There is a difference between one’s “effective” tax rate, and their “marginal” tax rate. The effective tax rate is simply the amount of tax they paid in relation to their taxable income (10k in tax on 60k in taxable income is a rate of 16.67%). The marginal tax rate one pays is the highest rate in the tax tables for their current income level. The tax tables show the increasing levels of income and the threshold over which a higher rate will be imposed. Based on 2024 rates for example, some one with $50k in taxable income would have a marginal tax rate of 12%, $120k would be 22%, $250k would be 24%, and $500k would be 35%. One’s marginal tax rate will always be greater or equal to their effective rate. For instance, a couple with taxable income of $95,301 would have a marginal tax rate of 22%, and an effective tax rate of $12%.
Figure that super-rich people in the 1950s were in their 50s or 60s, so they died in the 1960s or 1970s and so did all their friends. They all died a lifetime ago, George, but thanks for asking.
Just a handful of top billionaires now could together solve all the problems of homelessness, college bills, decent medical and dental for all, food insecurity, and more, with a stroke of a pen, and they would all still be billionaires. They wouldn’t even feel the loss. If people with 50 million dollars suddenly had only 10 million, except for numbers on paper what difference would it make in their lives?
Every place studies have tried just giving like $1,000 to poor people and checking up on them a couple of years later, the benefits are obvious. Every place they’ve tried just giving a roof over people’s head it saved the government money many times over. When you give poor people a dollar they spend it and the economy benefits much more than that dollar. When wealthy people have 1000 times more than they need, nobody benefits but companies that make yachts and race cars and Italian marble bathrooms.
Rather ask, does anybody know anybody who is wildly wealthy who wasn’t born rich? Aren’t we the country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal? What happened to that?
Also it reminds me of something from Gloriana Opera Company’s production of Hello Dolly that stuck in my mind for forty years: “The difference between a little money and a lot of money is not so much. But the difference between a little money and no money can shatter the world.” Also where Linda Pack said in kind of a hip-wiggle Mae West accent, “And on those cold nights, Horace, you can snuggle up to your cash register. It’s a little lumpy, but it rings.”