Mendocino County Today: Monday 1/5/2026

Rain | False Turkey Tail | Hwy 1 Open | AV Foodbank Update | Pomo Homes | House of Joy | Grewal Suit | Tie Makers | Wrong Turn | John Mattila | Mendocino State Hospital | 12 Days | Lemons Tour | Yesterday's Catch | Arcata Fire | Predicted Venezuela | Night Conference | Bold Prediction | Deep Threats | Tax Break | Profoundly Shortsighted | Don't Like | The Dubliners | The Warfield | Xmas Gifts | Bennett's Heart | Martha Gellhorn | American Character | Bad Ideas | Lead Stories | Say It | Derrick Raising | Donroe Doctrine | Rogue State | Military Coups | Papi Trumpo | Venezuela | Captured | America's Backyard | War Decisions | Milky Way | Stick of Gold

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RAIN continues bringing the threat for both small stream and river flooding. Coastal flooding continues for Humboldt Bay today. A break in precipitation arrives Tuesday, with light rain and mountain snow returning Tuesday night and Wednesday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): I must have slept thru more big overnight rainfalls as I have a surprising 1.22" this Monday morning on the coast. 4.73" for the month & 26.11" for the season. A rainy 48F to start the new work week. Showers to day & Wednesday, less showers Tuesday then an extended dry spell to follow ? Yes really !

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CALTRANS UPDATE Sunday, 1/4 8:30 a.m.: Route 1 is OPEN to one-way controlled traffic near Leggett (PM 104.12 to 105.5) in Mendocino County.

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ANDERSON VALLEY FOODBANK:

For 2026 we have changed the days for our food distribution to the first and third Wednesdays each month:

January 7th and 21st will be the dates for this month.

Many thanks to volunteers and all others who have been helping with donations and distribution.

One important note: Please only bring donations during the distribution hours; 11am to 5pm on these Wednesdays.

Food that is not handed directly to our volunteers may have to be discarded, due to health regulations.

Hoping for a happy and healthy 2026 for all.

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COAST POMO HOMES at the rancheria at Little River, early 1900s.

(Kelley House Museum)

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"HOUSE OF JOY" on the island behind the Union Lumber Company mill at the foot of Pine Street.

The House of Joy operated for a decade on the island. H.S. Kinney built a new bridge to the island in 1920. The Fort Bragg Advocate reported that he lived there at that time. One of the owners was Gus West, owner of the Golden West Hotel and Bar. When it burned in February of 1921 it was reported that "Fort Bragg was blessed with it burning down." It was rumored to be a "house of ill repute." After it burned someone dynamited the island so that it couldn't be built on again. At least one young man is known to have fallen off the bridge to his death. (Submitted by the late Don Nelson)

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HAS FORMER AG COMMISSIONER HARINDER GREWAL settled his long-delayed wrongful termination suit against Mendocino County? We are unable to access the County’s new registration-only case index system. All we know is that the Supervisors haven’t discussed the case in closed session since December of 2022. Last we heard he had dropped his attorney and was representing himself.

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FINNISH TIE MAKERS near Fort Bragg pose in 1903.

Members of the Tie Makers Union organized as a Federal Labor Union in 1903 near Fort Bragg. Note the round lunch pails that they are holding. (Submitted by the late Don Nelson.)

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ASSIGNMENT: UKIAH - WE TOOK A WRONG TURN IN 1955

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

There is no understanding 20th century America without being acquainted with the nation’s mid-century interstate highway expansion.

The massive cross-country freeway linkage was the crowning achievement of President Eisenhower’s eight years in office, and has forever been championed by historians as equivalent to the Great Wall of China, the Moon Landing and polio vaccines.

Maybe historians are right, which also means maybe they’re wrong. I think they’re wrong.

Let’s reimagine America’s plunge into modernity as among the worst things we could have done. Not the very worst of course, not if we consider 20th century architecture, Vietnam, Communism or the Spice Girls.

What brought about the freeway expansions? 1) America’s growing love of automobiles, and 2) General Eisenhower’s infatuation with road systems in Europe. When he saw how traffic flowed he thought it was The Future, and decided America ought not be left behind. So he came home, got elected and built a big highway for us.

What he overlooked was the USA had the finest railway system in the world. We had an interlocked series of lines and trains, rails and stations connecting us with both coasts and everything, and I mean everything, in between.

Cities, towns, villages and townships all had depots for passengers and freight located in convenient spots because, obviously, the trains had arrived many decades before the first Model T came wobbling out of a shack in Detroit.

Parts of Europe may have had better highways in 1945, but not better rail service. We made the wrong choice. We forfeited our longtime advantage when we abandoned tracks in favor of four, or sometimes eight, lanes of concrete. Within a decade rail service dwindled, then disappeared.

But America didn’t just lose her trains. The spread of freeways from Pawtucket to Ukiah also doomed small towns across the land.

All those unique, picturesque, charming and lovely cities and villages would still be standing, still robust and healthier than ever. Instead they were steadily eroded until turning into boarded up joints half a mile from the intersection of Highway 666 and Forgottenville, victims of bypasses and off-ramps and Kwikee Gas Marts.

Drive into any of these once-thriving towns and what we find are Dollar Stores, empty streets and big old beautiful houses at prices to shame us, and that left our great grandparents broke and homeless.

Absent the curse(s) of Highway 70, Highway 80, Highway 40 and a dozen more, the USA would have developed high speed bi-coastal trains decades before they were invented. We would have had rail service from here to there faster than your Oldsmobile could drive and more convenient than Pan Am could fly.

By the 1980s high-speed rail would evolve into bullet trains, and by the 21st century Elon Musk’s Boring Company would have subways beneath big cities all across the country.

Just imagine: We’d have been able to take fast, efficient train service to Omaha, Miami and Bakersfield. We could also have driven the two- and four-lane roads from one small happy village to the next, staying at the Starlight Motel or the Bide-a-Wee Resort.

I can almost see the friendly pink and blue neon, the blinking, flashing little lights. The three uptown diners, hardware store, Ed’s Silver Dollar Saloon, a bookstore, Mac Nab’s Men’s Wear, fireworks and souvenir stands and various tourist options (“See the Underwater Caves! Climb to the top of the tallest cliffs in Kansas, 25-cents. Children Free”).

We lost it all. We lost the beating heart of America, the pulse that kept us connected with one another, the links that made us what we were and could still have been.

Instead we traded it for another truck stop, another on-ramp, another franchise food outlet and another set of signs that say “East Gone Village, 1/2 mile.

“No services.”

(North Carolina is nice this time of year, especially for those of us who thrive in 14 degree weather. Tom Hine, a Buckeye, does yard work shirtless while TWK works on next Sunday’s column. And Happy New Year, y’all!)

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JOHN MATTILA caught this 65.5 pound salmon in Noyo Harbor in the early 1900s.

He is standing in the Noyo Harbor Cannery owned by Klemhasen and managed by Victor Mattila. It later became the Grader Building and was destroyed in a fire in 1998. John was the uncle of Senia Wirta of Fort Bragg. (Submitted by Senia Wirta.)

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RON PARKER: Mendocino State Hospital

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12 DAYS OF TRUMP’S GONE — The Musical

To the AVA Team,

A friend sent me this from the Chop Wood, Carry Water substack (it's at the very end of the post, after all the good news).

"I sang my “12 Days of Trump’s Gone” with my step-father Tom Chapin and my sisters Abigail and Lily Chapin at the Turning Point last week. Lots of harmony! Enjoy!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5sC5LBwnjg

I've always like Tom Chapin.

Very clever and hope it comes to pass!

Happy New Year,

Dobie Dolphin

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, January 4, 2026

JEANNETTE CHAVEZ, 50, Hopland. Petty theft with two or more priors.

AMBER CUNNINGHAM, 38, Carmichael/Ukiah. Controlled substance while armed with loaded firearm, locaed firearm in public, taking vehicle without owner’s consent, paraphernalia, conspiracy.

ASHLEIGH ESTES, 40, Garberville/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

RUDRA KNOLES, 18, Willits. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent.

JOSE LOPEZ-FLORES, 25, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

HEATHER MICHAEL, 43, Ukiah. paraphernalia, failure to appear, probation revocation, resisting.

BRANDON SVALESON, 39, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, public urination, camping in Ukiah.

JEFFREY TUNSTALL, 37, Sacramento/Ukiah. Grand theft, stolen property, controlled substance while armed with loaded firearm, county parole violation, loaded firearm in public, felon-addict with firearm, ammo possession by prohibited person, paraphernalia, false personation of another, false ID, failure to appear, no license, conspiracy.

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FIRE DESTROYS SECTION OF DOWNTOWN ARCATA FRIDAY

by Katie Dowd

A wind-whipped conflagration ripped through downtown Arcata on Friday afternoon, destroying seven businesses and leaving a devastating scene in the Humboldt County town.

Around 2:30 p.m. Friday, an Arcata Fire District company that was returning from a medical call noticed a “large amount of smoke” in the downtown area, the department said in a press release. When they arrived on the 800 block of 10th Street, they found a “well-established, rapidly spreading fire” was already tearing through a two-story building. Around the building, flames were expanding “through concealed spaces within the interconnected structures,” the department said.

Although it’s been rainy, the winds were gusting on Friday, quickly spreading the blaze through adjoining buildings. A natural gas manifold was also damaged, and firefighters had to call PG&E to clamp the line.

“Strong winds significantly accelerated fire growth through the older buildings,” the Arcata Fire Department said. Firefighters initially fought the blaze from within the buildings, but when “conditions deteriorated" they were pulled out for their safety. As the fire spread, every ladder truck in the county was sent to downtown Arcata. The fire had the potential to “spread across several city blocks,” Arcata fire officials said, but the assistance from other departments prevented any injuries to civilians or firefighters.

Fire crews stayed overnight to monitor hotspots. Seven businesses and the apartments above the first-floor commercial spaces are destroyed, and at least five more have serious damage, Arcata fire said.

Among two of the businesses lost are Dandar’s Boardgames and Books and Northtown Books, a staple of the area since 1965. “We are still processing everything but we have every intention of coming back,” Dandar’s wrote on Facebook.

One of the town’s most famous buildings was spared, however. On the next block, the Minor Theatre, one of the oldest purpose-built movie theaters in the nation, was undamaged.

The cause of the blaze is under investigation. Preliminarily, Arcata fire officials believe $18 million in damage was done.

“We recognize the profound impact this incident has had on lives and livelihoods, and we encourage the community to continue showing compassion and kindness toward those affected,” the fire department said.

(sfgate.com)

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HOW A MARIN COUNTY-RAISED SPECIAL FORCES COLONEL PREDICTED THE LATEST VENEZUELA “ACTION” In An April 2025 Paper Titled “When The Killing Begins”

Chris Countouriotis is the outwardly handsome face of the Army's troubled Special Ops Forces. Twenty years ago, the young soldier was championed by the pro-Israel MCOE Superintendent Mary Jane Burke.…

https://marincountyconfidential.substack.com/p/how-a-marin-county-raised-special

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I have a bold prediction for 2026: it will be just like 2025, only stupider.

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BEN RODRIGUEZ:

Going into this season the 49ers were supposed to have Aiyuk and Pearsall as wide receiver 1&2 as deep threats to stretch the field. Then also have Jennings, Kittle and MCCafferey underneath. Having all of these 5 great players would put a lot of stress on any defense.

Well Saturday night we went against the number 2 defense! As everyone knows Aiyuk is gone, and Pearsall our fastest receiver was out. We had benchwarmers take their place as our deep threats to stretch the field.

All the 2nd ranked defense had to do was cover two benchwarmers, Kittle, McCafferey and Jennings. This was no challenge for the number 2 defense in the NFL to shut down and blanket our offense. We did not have enough threats on offense to stress their D.

Pearsall was really missed. We had no legitimate deep threat whatsoever, nobody to stretch the field to keep their defense honest. We cannot play against a top defense and expect to move the ball when we have 2 benchwarmers as our deep threat. This was too easy for Seattle. When I found out right before the game that Pearsall was out, I understood that it was going to be a really tough night to get a W with only 3 out of 5 good receivers against their great 2nd ranked D.

Purdy did all he could do. He had nobody open to throw to.

This put the stress on our D to carry our team. I'm surprised that our D actually kept us in it for as long as they did seeing as our D spent most of the game on the field as Seattle controlled time of possession. I'm proud of our D!

Our offense just needs all of its weapons when they go against the better defenses. We were supposed to have Aiyuk and Pearsall as deep threats this year, last night we had neither!

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WE ALREADY KNOW…

Editor,

A recent Chronical editorial on mental health, though well intentioned, offered little beyond what we have known for decades. Awareness without solutions risks becoming complacency.

We already know the legal system is ill-equipped to handle mental illness. Specialized courts have been tried and abandoned. Programs to ensure medication adherence routinely fail due to fragmented care, unstable housing, and lack of follow-up. Meanwhile, millions of mentally ill individuals cycle through jails, shelters, sidewalks, and emergency rooms without meaningful treatment.

The familiar bureaucratic claim that evidence-based practices are “too expensive” is profoundly shortsighted. The real costs — lost productivity, lifelong disability, overwhelmed public systems, and human suffering — are far greater. Governments clearly find money when priorities align.

Perhaps the real issue is that no one wants to confront root causes. Initiatives like Proposition 1 risk becoming temporary Band-Aids once political attention fades.

After more than 30 years in mental health, I believe incremental fixes will not suffice. We must think differently. One step would be to heavily fund an independent, AI-driven effort to identify the genetic and biological roots of mental illness. Another is an AI platform aggregating millions of global case histories to identify what treatments actually work in the real world.

Until we find definitive biological tests or cures, data-driven innovation may be our best hope.

Kohli Singh

San Jose

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THE FURTHER AWAY I am from the human race, the better I feel. Even though I write about the human race, the further away I am from them, the better I feel. Two inches is great. Two miles is great. Two thousand miles is beautiful, as long as I'm able to eat. They feed me because I feed them. I don't like to be near them. When somebody brushes up against me with an elbow in a crowd, I react. I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads. I don't like their faces. I don't like their feet. I don't like their conversations. I don't like their hairdos. I don't like their automobiles. I don't like their dogs or their cats or their roses.

— Charles Bukowski

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THE SAN FRANCISCO VENUE WHERE THE DEAD WERE KINGS AND BOB DYLAN WAS BOOED

by Jessica Lipsky

San Francisco’s Mid-Market District is a microcosm of the city’s history, a main artery for commerce and transit that has seen great highs and deep lows, from the bustling 1920s, which saw expanded development of Market into “one of the great streets in the world,” to divestment and demolishing in the 1960s, and tech-led gentrification in the 2010s and beyond. Among the buildings that have seen it all — and ridden the changing tides — is the Warfield.

While now operated by Goldenvoice/AEG and host to rock, metal and alternative acts, the Warfield’s 104-year-old history touches nearly every genre of music. If it was popular in San Francisco, it probably graced the Warfield’s stage at least once (or, in the case of the Grateful Dead, 15 times in 19 days).

While the Warfield doesn’t host many local or upstart bands, it remains an important place for touring rock and rock-adjacent groups (not to mention the litany of rap and electronic acts on the venue’s calendar). It’s also one of few venues of its size in the city, with a max capacity of 2,454 — a sweet spot for some acts and bookers. Its closest competitor is the Fox Theater in Oakland, which can hold up to 2,800 people and is operated by Another Planet Entertainment.

There’s more for your money in a Warfield show

As with most major cities, San Francisco has long loved stage and screen. For decades, the city’s movie theater district was concentrated along Market Street between Mason and Polk streets, anchored by studio-run chains like the Fox, Paramount, Embassy and Strand. The district included several live‐production theaters that, together, attracted people from throughout the Bay Area.

“Theater venues like the Warfield were tied to thriving, diverse cities like San Francisco, where, importantly, residents had access to cheap public transportation,” said Felicia Angeja Viator, an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University. “They were spaces for free expression, cheap enough for working-class folks and as popular as amusement parks.”

The Warfield opened on May 13, 1922, as Loew’s Warfield — a “grand dame of a theatre” dedicated to film and vaudeville with a capacity of over 2,650 and a 33-foot-deep stage. The venue was the 300th theater commissioned by Marcus Loew and the 26th opened by his company within 18 months. The Warfield was built by local architect Gustave Albert Lansburgh; the early ’20s were a boom time for Lansburgh, who simultaneously designed the neighboring Golden Gate Theatre (which also opened in 1922).

Loew’s new theater featured a marbled lobby with gilding and chandeliers, a grand staircase and, in the theater itself, a “lyrical mural … of floating matadors and their senoritas, as well as the dismembered head of their animal victim,” per the Warfield’s website. Loew seemed to spare little expense, hiring lauded muralist Albert Herter to paint the theater’s proscenium arch.

The San Francisco Chronicle lavished praise upon the new theater in its issue on May 7, 1922, spilling much ink about the design. “One is struck on entering the Warfield by its width and the symphony of tones in which it is decorated,” writer George C. Warren opined. “… The mural decoration carries out the general design of the house — that of a fan. From the painting spreading panels extend to the walls, narrow where they join the mural; and widening as their rays reach out, each ending in a sunken circle which will be lighted and in each of which there is a sunburst in metallic colors.”

A theater of such grandeur demanded a weighty name. Though it was originally set to be called Loew’s State, Loew decided to name the space for his friend David Warfield, an SF native who began his career as an usher and who grew to become a renowned stage actor — one of the few millionaire actors in the pre-film age — though it’s unlikely Warfield performed at his namesake venue, having moved to New York in 1890.

The day before opening, the Chronicle ran nine pages about the new venue. Opening day saw a host of celebrities in attendance, including Viola Dana, star of “The Fourteenth Lover,” which screened for a week. If such fanfare was typical for the era, Loew knew how to keep audiences coming back for more: A five-story high billboard on the side of the building proclaimed: “There’s More for Your Money in a Warfield Show.”

Rocking at the Warfield

Per the Warfield’s website, “All of the big names in entertainment played on The Warfield’s stage.” Beyond film, the venue hosted Al Jolson, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin and even “dog” shows with “the likes of Rin Tin Tin,” the website says. Vaudeville acts — which often required large casts — were accommodated with 20 dressing rooms in the backstage area.

“In the early 20th century, vaudeville performances functioned like variety shows, where you’d be treated to a bit of stand-up comedy, a short skit, maybe a drag show along with a short, projected film and a live music performance,” Viator noted.

Viator described vaudeville shows as the Warfield’s “bridge between its early start as a movie house and its later reputation as a live music venue.” Much like the Castro Theatre, which opened in June 1922, the Warfield eventually turned its focus to movies.

Today, the Warfield building is subdivided into 22 condominium units (the 23rd unit is the theater itself), which have hosted a variety of businesses and characters in its century-plus run. 7x7 reported that Al Capone rented a penthouse office space within the building before his Alcatraz imprisonment.

The Fox West Coast Theatres chain — which had a namesake theater at 1350 Market St. — leased executive office space in the Warfield building in the mid ’30s. After the Fox Theatre was demolished in 1963, the Fox chain took over operations and renamed the space the Fox Warfield; it operated as a movie theater, under various management companies, into the ’80s. During that period, the venue was occasionally used as a nightclub called Downtown.

The times were a-changin’ for the Warfield by the late ’70s, however. The venue came under the management of Bill Graham Presents in 1979, which brought in Bob Dylan for a slate of 14 shows in November for his gospel tour era. (Dylan would play another run of 12 shows in November 1980.) Crowds and concertgoers weren’t pleased — mostly due to Dylan’s born-again material.

“By all accounts, the opening-night response was the worst. Isolated boos and catcalls (‘We want Dylan!’ ‘Rock & roll!’) punctuated the twenty-five-minute opening set by Dylan’s black backup gospel singers,” Rolling Stone reported at the time. “… After ninety minutes, Dylan, who didn’t talk to the audience throughout most of the set, said, ‘That’s the show for tonight. I hope you’ve been uplifted.’ At that point there was more booing, and several members of the crowd walked out in apparent disgust.”

Bad press didn’t deter Dylan, his fans, Graham or generations of rockers to come. Many legends performed on the Warfield stage in the ensuing years, from Prince, James Brown and David Bowie to the Clash, Green Day, Slayer and Rancid. Multiple scenes from 1991’s “The Doors” were filmed at the venue.

The final Bill Graham Presents performance was held in 2008 with Phil Lesh; the venue’s management lease was subsequently taken over by AEG’s Goldenvoice Presents. The Warfield closed briefly for a renovation — the Chronicle noted in September 2008 that the mixing console was moved to make space for 30 more prime reserved seats, the lobby walls were painted to match new carpets and the chandeliers were polished — before reopening with comedian George Lopez.

Behind the lens with Jay Blakesberg

During the Bill Graham Presents years, the Grateful Dead became something of the Warfield’s house band. They performed at the venue 21 times between 1980 and 1983, including 15 gigs in 1980 alone. That particular run — an acoustic and electric performance — was the longest in the band’s history and was memorialized on multiple live albums, including “Reckoning,” “Dead Set” and “The Warfield.”

The Dead were then playing arena gigs; to see them in a 2,200-capacity theater (at the time, the venue still had seating in its orchestra section) was a special treat for fans. “There were a lot of people hanging out on the streets, busking, playing music,” said photographer Jay Blakesberg, who flew in from New Jersey to catch six of their 15 shows.

BGP didn’t even put the band’s name on the marquee, letting a Steal Your Face skull and a banner with the words, “They’re not the best at what they do. They’re the only ones that do what they do,” be a beacon. The lobby was turned into a Dead museum, with photographs, posters and artifacts in glass cases. Those November 1980 shows were the first time that Dan Healy, the Dead’s audio engineer, put speakers in a venue lobby. “It was like a big psychedelic, swirling scene going on in the lobby with people dancing with all the doors closed,” Blakesberg said.

An inside marquee featured quotes and lyrics from the band, “So as you were walking out, you sort of got this Grateful Dead lyric to send you home,” Blakesberg remembered. “They really decked it out for the fans and really made it a fan experience.”

The photographer also recounted that the venue lobby was wallpapered when BGP took over. He noted that BGP stage manager Bob Barsotti “found a bunch of Deadheads and said, ‘If you guys come in and peel the wallpaper off of the marble, I’ll give you free tickets to some shows.’ So he bartered labor with Deadheads to restore the lobby to its glory of yesteryear.”

The Warfield run holds great importance in the Dead’s lore. “1980 was just before things started to blow up. It was still sort of a pure period of Grateful Dead history,” Blakesberg recounted, adding that the same period saw lineup changes. “It sort of reinvigorated this band … they started rehearsing again. And by the summer of 1980, the Grateful Dead were a band that was on fire. By the time they got to the Warfield, they were really, really firing on all cylinders.”

It was also the beginning of Blakesberg’s own relationship with the venue. He officially moved west in the mid-1980s and became a volunteer usher at the Warfield — “It was a great way for me to get to see free music,” he said — and brought his camera along. Blakesberg shot Yoko Ono, Elvis Costello and Prince’s 1986 show. “My girlfriend at the time was an usher, and she stuck my camera in. I took a couple pictures of Prince before his security caught me and found me and threw me out.”

Blakesberg soon got his credentials and shot his first assignment for Rolling Stone in November of 1987. By the end of the decade, “I was a regular at the Warfield, and I shot everybody from David Bowie to Lenny Kravitz to Nirvana, numerous Phil Lesh and Friend shows, and the Jerry Garcia band.” He’s since photographed hundreds of concerts.

History rings on

The Warfield looks strikingly similar to the way it was over a century ago, save for some paint and new seating design. There are empty wooden telephone closets and, as SF Weekly reported, visible “tracings of the ironwork that lifted elephants from below the stage.”

“[The Warfield has] has this old, opulent interior that dates back a century. You don’t get it from the outside but inside, you can still squint and imagine you’re in the past,” said Crispin Kott, the co-author of the “Rock And Roll Explorer Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area.” He continued, “I think that kind of lends itself to a bit more reverence when it comes to shows. People feel like it’s an experience and it’s different.”

Some of the Warfield’s most interesting relics are underground, surviving when the construction of BART shrank the venue basement. Still, per SF Weekly, “neon paintings from the era when Bill Graham himself ran the venue can still be found on the walls. There are also bullet holes in one wall that date from a party in the ’80s when a guard let attendees fire his gun for fun.”

Also below the theater floor is an infamous autograph room, a wall-to-wall (and floor-to-ceiling) who’s-who of performers. In a photo posted to Instagram, scribblings from David Byrne, Johnny Ramone and Bill Clinton are visible. SF Weekly found signatures and marks from former President Barack Obama, Nirvana and Anna Nicole Smith.

The Warfield was also home to “a lot of really important Bill Graham people” who went on to have influential careers in the Bay Area concert business. Blakesberg cited Sherry Wasserman and Gregg Perloff (who now run Another Planet Entertainment), promoter Danny Scher, booker Michael Bailey, and stage manager brothers Pete and Bob Barsotti.

The future of 982 Market St.

Just as the neighborhood has evolved, so has the future of the Warfield. The building was purchased for $12 million in 2005 by local broker and real estate investor David P. Addington, whose company declared bankruptcy in 2012. Addington then sold the venue portion of the property to Sonoma-based A&C Ventures for about $6.5 million in 2013. That company extended Goldenvoice Presents’ booking contract, which it’s had ever since.

The larger Warfield building — of which the venue sits at the easternmost corner — has had its own share of ups and downs. At times home to tech companies such as Match.com and Spotify, and at others the site of planned residential development, the Warfield building has been impacted by public safety and quality of life issues common to the neighborhood — long before the pandemic led to an exodus of workers.

Yet the building remains steeped in its media roots. In August 2025, an arts and culture hub dubbed Warfield Commons opened its doors. The Commons’ anchor tenant is public radio station KALW, which has equity in the building now owned by the Community Arts Stabilization Trust. The trust aims to bring “the Warfield back to life as a place for collaboration, production, and creative operations,” SFist reported.

The Warfield and Goldenvoice staff did not return requests for comment, but the venue’s website declares that “the soul of the building ripens with each passing year.” Blakesberg doesn’t go to the Warfield as often as he used to, but he believes in the venue’s legacy — especially among his fellow Deadheads.

“People outside the rock ’n’ roll world look at rock ’n’ roll venues as this frivolous thing,” Blakesberg mused. “But rock ’n’ roll was serious business, because rock ’n’ roll meant something different in 1980 than it does today. The Warfield was really important to San Francisco.”

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THE WILD STORY OF TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY BEHIND TONY BENNETT’S ‘I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO’

by Peter Hartlaub

“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” was written in Brooklyn by two young men — neither of whom was Tony Bennett.

It sat in storage in songwriters Douglass Cross and George Cory’s New York recording studio for more than seven years, with no buyers, before Bennett took it on a whim, because he wanted a song to perform as his tour swung through the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. “I Left My Heart …” was recorded as a B-side.

“A few weeks after it came out,” Bennett would tell The Chronicle decades later, “a Columbia rep called me up and said, ‘Turn the record over. ‘San Francisco’ is really catching on.’ ”

With Tony Bennett’s death Friday at age 96, the soaring ballad is appearing in headlines and the first paragraph of obituaries, unquestionably his signature moment as a performer. But the song — and its evolution — have a complicated backstory. It includes triumph, tragedy and a notably cruel rejection by San Franciscans, all of which may have forged an even stronger bond between the performer and his adopted city.

San Francisco was just another tour stop when Bennett first recorded the song in 1961. It was written by Cory and Cross, who grew up in the Bay Area, met in the Army in 1948, and wrote “I Left My Heart …” in 1954 as a nod to their home. They had mixed feelings about the song from the beginning.

“Originally we called it ‘When I Return to San Francisco.’ We didn’t like that so we changed it to ‘When I Come Home,’” Cory told The Chronicle in 1966. “We didn’t like that either so we changed it to the present title. And I always thought that one was too corny.”

At first, the song was a complete failure.

“Everybody in the business said it wasn’t commercial,” Cross told The Chronicle. “They told us, ‘Who’s going to sing a song about San Francisco in Sioux Falls?’ ”

Record industry executive Mitch Miller suggested they self-publish the tune, print a couple thousand copies and sell it in San Francisco tourist traps. Cory and Cross had other hits with Billie Holiday (“I’ll Look Around”) and Mabel Mercer (“You Will Wear Velvet”) while “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” languished.

Seven years later, Bennett’s musical director, San Francisco native Ralph Sharon, reportedly asked the pair whether they had a song for Bennett’s upcoming residency at the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel. “I Left my Heart in San Francisco” was in the bottom of a box filled with several inches of music.

Bennett said his band tried the song out in a small club during their tour through the American South. It went over well with the audience of one — a bartender who was cleaning up.

“He said, ‘If you record that song,’ ” Bennett told The Chronicle’s Sam Whiting in 2016, “ ‘I will be the first one to buy it.’ ”

Herb Caen offered the first San Francisco review of the song, calling it “an innocuous ditty.” The songwriters initially were self-deprecating; George told Caen that homesickness didn’t inspire the lyrics, “we were sick for a little money.”

But to nearly everyone’s surprise, the 1962 record, a B-side to “Once Upon a Time,” was an enormous hit. The single sold 500,000 copies in the first few months and won Bennett his first Grammy. In the next year, it was recorded by 200 artists in eight languages, including German, Japanese and Czechoslovakian. The song was No. 1 in sheet music sales in 1963, and Cory and Cross were sharing $50,000 in annual royalties.

San Francisco supervisors in 1969 voted unanimously to make it the official song of San Francisco, but a backlash was building and for the next two decades, the song appeared to be cursed.

The pair moved back to California in the 1960s, and Cory set up a San Francisco studio on Brannan Street. Cross died in 1975 at age 54, and Cory died just three years later, reportedly taking an intentional overdose of painkillers. S.F. Weekly’s Bill Christine later reported that Cross and Cory were a romantic couple for most of their working years.

They didn’t live to see the lowest point for “I Left My Heart …”

In 1984 Chronicle columnist Warren Hinckle penned a vicious takedown headlined “Save Us From I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which called the song “flatulent and dopey,” “a wheezy old goat of a song” and “barely suited for elevator music.”

“Voting for ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ in 1969 is susceptible to the analogy of selling scrap metal to the Japanese in 1939,” Hinckle savagely wrote, later calling Bennett “an over-the-hill Italian croaker whose face is as familiar to San Franciscans as faded wallpaper in a North Beach flat.”

After Hinckle launched a campaign to replace the song with Jeanette MacDonald’s “San Francisco” from the 1936 musical of the same name, The Chronicle and city supervisors followed his lead. The newspaper commissioned an unscientific phone poll where more than 36,000 participated — logging 24 calls per minute — and 75% chose to jettison “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” to the curb.

Mayor Dianne Feinstein, a Bennett fan, threatened to veto any legislation that changed the status quo. But Bennett himself didn’t reply to the attacks and endorsed a compromise that made few happy: The supervisors voted to make “San Francisco” the city song, and leave Bennett’s tune as “the official city ballad,” a designation that still stands in 2023.

From there, it was a slow redemption for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” as Bennett, who was in a career lull in the 1980s and early 1990s, seemed to double down on the song and his connection to the city that inspired it.

San Francisco Chief of Protocol Charlotte Shultz would later say that Bennett, who never lived full time in San Francisco, granted every request for charity events. He showed up to Feinstein’s 1980s rallies to save the cable cars, and performed for fundraisers through the 2000s and 2010s, including a 2012 appearance for heart research, and a 2016 performance for pediatric care at San Francisco General Hospital.

As Bennett’s career rebounded with an MTV Unplugged record in 1994 and duets with pop artists including Lady Gaga, he recognized the value of the song to San Francisco and was proud of his role as a tourism driver to the city. In 2020 Bennett led a citywide sing-along of the song to honor coronavirus frontline workers.

“They love it everywhere,” Bennett told The Chronicle’s Carl Nolte in 2012. “You’d be surprised how much they respect the city. I get in everywhere in the world. England, Paris, wherever I play. Internationally it is the most respected city in America.”

Even with Bennett gone, new generations will fall in love with the song. It continues to be played after every victory at San Francisco Giants home games, echoing into nearby neighborhoods. And in his final years, even as Bennett succumbed to memory loss, he clearly felt the city’s appreciation

“I’ve never been bored with singing ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco,’ ” Bennett told The Chronicle in 2016. “I adore the song, and it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

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1934. A 26-year-old journalist named Martha Gellhorn moves into the White House. Not as a guest for dinner. As a resident. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had read Gellhorn's reporting on the Great Depression—raw, unflinching accounts of American poverty and suffering. Roosevelt was so impressed she invited Gellhorn to live at the White House while working on relief programs. Imagine that happening today. A war correspondent moving into the White House with the First Family.

But Martha Gellhorn wasn't someone who played by normal rules. Born in 1908 in St. Louis to progressive parents, Gellhorn began her journalism career in the 1930s covering the hardships of the Depression. But comfortable Washington life didn't suit her restless spirit. She wanted war. Not because she glorified violence—but because she believed the world needed to see what war actually looked like. Not from generals in command rooms, but from soldiers in trenches and civilians in ruins.

In 1936, everything changed. She walked into Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, Florida and met Ernest Hemingway. He was already famous—the celebrated author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. She was an ambitious journalist determined to make her mark. They were both heading to cover the Spanish Civil War. In Madrid, they stayed at the Hotel Florida—a building regularly shelled by artillery.

While other journalists fled to safer locations, Gellhorn and Hemingway stayed, reporting from the heart of the conflict. She sent dispatches describing the terror of civilians under bombardment. He wrote fiction inspired by what they witnessed. Their relationship was passionate, competitive, and ultimately doomed. They married in 1940—celebrating with a feast of roast moose at a remote lodge—and tried to build a life together in Cuba. Their home had Gellhorn's gardens (dahlias, petunias, morning glories) and Chopin playing on the phonograph. But domesticity suffocated her.

When World War II erupted, Gellhorn left Hemingway in Cuba and headed to Europe. She covered the London Blitz, walking through rubble-filled streets while German bombs fell. She flew with RAF bomber crews on raids over Germany—one of the few journalists, male or female, permitted to do so.

Then came D-Day: June 6, 1944.This is where her rivalry with Hemingway reached its peak. Hemingway had official war correspondent credentials. Gellhorn did not—he'd used his influence to get the only slot available, effectively blocking her from landing credentials. So while Hemingway watched the D-Day invasion from a ship offshore with the other credentialed press, Martha Gellhorn did something absolutely audacious: She stowed away on a hospital ship. She hid in a bathroom until the ship reached Normandy beaches. Then she went ashore with the medics, becoming one of the first journalists—and possibly the first woman—to report from the beaches on D-Day.

While Hemingway wrote about watching from the ship, Gellhorn sent dispatches from the actual battlefield. She wrote about wounded soldiers. About medics working under fire. About the chaos and terror and courage of men hitting those beaches. Her accounts were shattering. Visceral. Real.

The marriage didn't survive the war. They divorced in 1945.Hemingway claimed she cared more about her work than their relationship. He was right. And she wasn't apologetic about it. "I had no talent for marriage," she later said. She had married him, she admitted, partly for adventure—and once the adventure faded, so did the marriage. But here's the thing Hemingway never understood: Gellhorn didn't need him to be a great war correspondent. She already was one.

After their divorce, she just kept going. She covered the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, writing accounts so horrific that editors initially refused to believe them. She reported from Indonesia, Vietnam, the Middle East.

In the 1960s, she covered the Vietnam War, sending back reports that challenged official narratives about American progress. She interviewed Vietnamese civilians whose stories contradicted what the U.S. government was claiming.

In the 1980s, well into her 70s, she traveled to Nicaragua to cover the Contra War. In 1989, at age 81, she covered the American invasion of Panama. Eighty-one years old. In a war zone. She described herself as "permanently dislocated—a voyager on the earth. "She never stayed anywhere long.

She never belonged anywhere completely. She went wherever the story was, no matter how dangerous, no matter how uncomfortable. She reported from wars across six decades. From the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to Panama in 1989, she witnessed and documented some of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century. And she did it all while fighting a constant battle: being taken seriously as a woman in a profession dominated by men. Editors dismissed her work as "too emotional." Military officials denied her credentials. Other journalists patronized her.

For years, she was primarily known as "Hemingway's third wife"—a label she despised. She once said: "I see myself as a journalist and nothing else… I do not see myself as a historian, and I most emphatically do not see myself as Hemingway's widow.”

Martha Gellhorn died in 1998 at age 89, nearly blind from glaucoma and suffering from ovarian cancer. Rather than endure further decline, she took her own life—one final act of control over her fate. She left behind decades of war reporting that changed how the world understood conflict. She proved that war correspondence wasn't about watching from safe distances. It was about being there, in the ruins, with the people who had nowhere else to go. She showed that women could report from battlefields just as capably—often more capably—than men. And she demonstrated that you didn't need a husband, a settled home, or anyone's permission to live a life of purpose and adventure.

For decades, she was footnoted in Hemingway biographies. Today, scholars recognize her as one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. Not a "female war correspondent.” Not "Hemingway's wife who also wrote." One of the greatest. Period. She lived in the White House. She married Hemingway. She stormed D-Day beaches while he watched from a ship. And then she spent sixty years proving she never needed him at all.

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CHRISTOPHER KRUGER:

Eliminating the draft ended the antiwar movement and silenced its leaders. Endless war was normalized and remains the norm.

You cannot appreciate how lopsided wealth is currently distributed unless you were a sentient being in the 60s, when the wealth curve was at its flattest.

Computer technology was benevolent, or at least was thought to be, until the Snowden/NSA revelations.

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As a 17 year UAW member, and former president of a small local union, we could go on into volumes concerning the labor movement. Suffice it to say that the Reagan Republicans were, in the main, responsible for the policies that busted unions, collapsed the industrial sector, and lowered wages.

Fun fact: Reagan actually liberalized immigration to benefit scab employers, a concept foreign to today's ICE protesters.

A lot of the history of the last 50 or so years has been Democrats perfecting bad Republican ideas, like Clinton signing NAFTA and legalizing Wall Street casino style trading on his last day in office.

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LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT

Maduro and His Wife to Be Arraigned in Manhattan Federal Court

Trump Says U.S. Is ‘In Charge’ of Venezuela, While Rubio Stresses Coercing It

‘No One Is Ready for This’: How a Deadly Bar Fire Upended a Swiss Town

Vaccines Are Helping Older People More Than We Knew

Even the Sky May Not Be the Limit for A.I. Data Centers

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"THIS MAY BE the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 330 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

— Hunter S. Thompson

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TRUMP KIDNAPS VENEZUELA’S PRESIDENT TO STEAL THE COUNTRY'S OIL

The “Donroe Doctrine” comes for Venezuela's sovereignty, and any other challenge to "American dominance."

by Aaron Maté

In announcing the US military’s attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of president Nicolás Maduro, an operation that reportedly killed at least 80 people, President Trump laid bare his real motive.

Invoking the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which has underpinned decades of US aggression against Latin American governments, Trump bragged that “they now call it the Donroe Doctrine… American dominance in the Western Hemisphere won’t be questioned again.” The main target of that dominance is Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest. With US oil companies leading the way, Trump vowed, “we’re going to get back our oil… the money coming out of the ground is substantial.”

While Trump intends it as a riff on his first name, his signature doctrine is additionally fitting for mirroring the behavior of a Mafia Don: using violence, threats, and theft to obtain wealth.

In Venezuela, that has meant more than two decades of bipartisan US policy to destroy the country’s Bolivarian Revolution, which began under Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez.

In April 2002, a rogue military faction kidnapped Chávez and installed Pedro Carmona, a business leader with close ties to the George W. Bush administration. (In a tactic that would be replicated in Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan coup, snipers fired on both pro and anti-government protesters to provide a pretext for Chávez’s ouster, an episode captured in the documentary “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”)

A de facto dictatorship was imposed under the Carmona Decree, which suspended the country’s democratically approved 1999 constitution and dissolved both the National Assembly and Supreme Court. Within 48 hours, a popular uprising of Chávez’s supporters, alongside a rescue operation by loyalist members of the Venezuelan military, returned the imprisoned leader to the presidential palace.

While the 2002 coup was quickly reversed, the foundation was laid for a long-term campaign of regime change. Among the signatories of the anti-democratic Carmona Decree was María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition figure who, along with her allies, has received extensive US government support via regime change conduits the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and US Agency for International Development (USAID). Machado, who has promised to hand over Venezuela’s valuable oil and mineral wealth for US exploitation and openly campaigned for US military intervention, was recently rewarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

The post-coup period coincided with a boom in oil prices, allowing Chávez to devote considerable resources to social welfare benefiting Venezuela’s poor majority. By all indicators, his program helped a marginalized population long excluded from Venezuelan politics. Under Chávez, unemployment was reduced by half, extreme poverty sharply reduced, and GDP more than doubled. These social gains, along with Venezuela’s open defiance of US hegemony and promotion of Global South cooperation, angered Washington, which has long targeted governments that defy its control. As a State Department cable advised in 1960 about Cuba, the US response would be to impose policies that “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Chávez’s death in 2013 of cancer gave Washington and its opposition allies a new opening. Maduro, the chosen successor, lacked Chávez’s charisma and would quickly face a drop in the oil prices that had funded the Bolivarian program.

In March 2015, the Obama administration declared Venezuela to be an “extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” That move, Anya Parampil writes in her essential book “Corporate Coup,” hurt Venezuela’s economy by sending “international financial institutions a message to steer clear of Venezuela or risk facing Washington’s wrath.” Upon taking office, the Trump administration escalated that wrath with crippling sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil sector, which accounted for 95% of the country’s export revenue. They also engineered the theft of valuable Venezuelan assets, including Citgo, the US subsidiary of its state oil company, and gold reserves held in UK banks.

According to Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez, a harsh critic of Maduro, Trump’s sanctions “drove a collapse in oil revenues, contributing to the largest peacetime contraction in modern history.” The sanctions also fueled a wave of migrants fleeing their country’s dire conditions, as top Trump officials had anticipated. Thomas Shannon, who served as undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department, recalled warning that “the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration.” But for Trump’s first term National Security Advisor John Bolton, a proud architect of the sanctions, economic collapse and migration were an intended result. “There was no doubt the sanctions, along with the general economic deterioration before we imposed them, was driving a lot of people out of the country,” Bolton said. “ … That, to me, was a way to put pressure on the country.”

Bolton’s admission underscores the cynicism of the Trump policy: knowingly crushing Venezuela’s economy, and then solely blaming Maduro for its collapse; and knowingly creating millions of economic migrants, and then demonizing them when running for office.

In his first term, Trump sought to replace Maduro with Venezuelan politician Juan Guaidó, who was recognized by the US as the legitimate president and feted with a bipartisan standing ovation in Congress. While Trump and his successor Joe Biden ultimately abandoned Guaidó, they did not give up on the overall goal. Since taking office last year, Trump has renewed his regime change campaign under the leadership of its biggest champion, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

One year ago this month, Trump envoy Rick Grenell visited Caracas and successfully negotiated a deal to free American prisoners. Grenell’s back-channel diplomacy raised hopes of a broader rapprochement, but Rubio quickly put that to rest. “One of my priorities is to ensure that U.S. foreign policy sends a signal that it’s better to be a friend than an enemy,” Rubio explained. And Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua – long targets of US regime change -- are “enemies of humanity.”

Under Rubio’s watch, the US escalated its baseless claim that Maduro was overseeing a drug cartel flooding the US with narcotics. Never mind that Maduro’s alleged cartel, the Cartel de los Soles, is not an actual organization, and to the extent that it has operated, only did so as a US partner. As CBS News reported in 1993, the CIA worked with a Venezuelan asset to ship cocaine into the US as part of an operation to infiltrate Colombian drug cartels. That effort was informally described as involving the “Cartel de los Soles,” a figure of speech referring to corrupted Venezuelan generals. It is for this reason that the Drug Enforcement Administration and State Department’s annual reports on the drug trade have never even mentioned the “Cartel de los Soles” by name. And while accusing Maduro of heading a fictional drug conspiracy, Trump recently pardoned the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted narcotrafficker who accepted more than $1 million in bribes to transmit drugs through Honduras and was caught on tape vowing to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”

Trump and Rubio have made equally dubious claims about Maduro directing the gang Tren de Aragua (TDA), the pretext for deporting Venezuelan immigrants to a torture-ridden prison in El Salvador without due process. The Trump administration’s rationale was undermined earlier this year by a US intelligence report that concluded that the Venezuelan government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing” its activities in the United States.

Unburdened by the facts and contemptuous of international law, the Trump team escalated this fall with a military buildup in the Caribbean and regular bombings of boats it claimed were shipping drugs. The US also opened a new campaign of piracy, seizing Venezuelan tankers to ensure that Venezuelans can’t even benefit from the oil that they manage to produce under crippling sanctions. Trump, the Wall Street Journal explained, “sees the more aggressive campaign as a foreign-policy win that could be an economic boon for the U.S. given Venezuela’s vast reserves of oil and other natural resources.”

Under these conditions of economic strangulation and military aggression, it is no surprise that Trump and Rubio finally got their man. The fact that Maduro was seized by US forces with little resistance indicates that Washington had cooperation inside the Venezuelan leader’s inner circle. As for the broader public, Venezuela is deeply divided, a split deliberately exacerbated by years of crippling sanctions.

What happens next in Venezuela, where Maduro’s remaining government is still in power under Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, remains to be seen. In his remarks, Trump threatened a second invasion, a clear threat to Maduro’s successors for complete submission.

The one certainty is that the Trump team’s aggression does not end in Caracas. In their public comments on Saturday, Trump and Rubio identified more potential targets. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a critic of the campaign against Venezuela, “does have to watch his ass,” Trump declared. As for another critic, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, arguably Latin America’s most popular leader, “something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” he added. And Rubio, who has long sought regime change in his family’s country of origin, offered his own threat: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned, at least a little bit.”

Under the Donroe doctrine, the warning applies to any vulnerable state that resists American dominance.

(aaronmate.net)

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AMERICA THE ROGUE STATE

The evisceration of the rule of law at home and abroad solidifies America as a rogue state.

by Chris Hedges

The ruling class of the United States, severed from a fact-based universe and blinded by idiocy, greed and hubris, has immolated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.

Our democratic institutions are moribund. They are unable or unwilling to restrain our ruling gangster class. The lobby-infested Congress is a useless appendage. It surrendered its Constitutional authority, including the right to declare war and pass legislation, long ago. It sent a paltry 38 bills to Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law last year. Most were “disapproval” resolutions rolling back regulations enacted during the Biden administration. Trump governs by imperial decree through Executive Orders. The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, from Jeff Bezos to Larry Ellison, is an echo chamber for the crimes of state, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezula, and the pillage by the billionaire class. Our money-saturated elections are a burlesque. The diplomatic corps, tasked with negotiating treaties and agreements, preventing war and building alliances, has been dismantled. The courts, despite some rulings by courageous judges, including blocking National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, are lackeys to corporate power and overseen by a Department of Justice whose primary function is silencing Trump’s political enemies.

The corporate-indentured Democratic Party, our purported opposition, blocks the only mechanism that can save us — popular mass movements and strikes — knowing its corrupt and despised party leadership will be swept aside. Democratic Party leaders treat New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a flicker of light in the darkness — as if he has leprosy. Better to let the whole ship go down than surrender their status and privilege.

Dictatorships are one-dimensional. They reduce politics to its simplest form: Do what I say or I will destroy you.

Nuance, complexity, compromise, and of course empathy and understanding, are beyond the tiny emotional bandwidth of gangsters, including the Gangster-in-Chief.

Dictatorships are a thug’s paradise. Gangsters, whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley or in the White House, cannibalize their own country and pillage the natural resources of other countries.

Dictatorships invert the social order. Honesty, hard work, compassion, solidarity, self-sacrifice are negative qualities. Those who embody these qualities are marginalized and persecuted. The heartless, corrupt, mendacious, cruel and mediocre thrive.

Dictatorships empower goons to keep their victims — at home and abroad — immobilized. Goons from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Goons from Delta Force, Navy Seals and Black Ops CIA teams, which as any Iraqi or Afghan can tell you are the most lethal death squads on the planet. Goons from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — seen escorting a hand-cuffed President Nicolás Maduro in New York — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and police departments.

Can anyone seriously make the argument that the U.S. is a democracy? Are there any democratic institutions that function? Is there any check on state power? Is there any mechanism that can enforce the rule of law at home, where legal residents are snatched by masked thugs from our streets, where a phantom “radical left” is an excuse to criminalize dissent, where the highest court in the land bestows king-like power and immunity on Trump? Can anyone pretend that with the demolition of environmental agencies and laws — which should help us confront the looming ecocide, the gravest threat to human existence — there is any concern for the common good? Can anyone make the argument that the U.S. is the defender of human rights, democracy, a rule based order and the “virtues” of Western civilization?

Our reigning gangsters will accelerate the decline. They will steal as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The Trump family has pocketed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts since the 2024 re-election. They do so as they mock the rule of law and tighten their vice-like grip. The walls are closing in. Free speech is abolished on college campuses and the airwaves. Those who decry the genocide lose their jobs or are deported. Journalists are slandered and censored. ICE, powered by Palantir — with a budget of $170 billion over four years — is laying the foundations for a police state. It has expanded the number of its agents by 120 percent. It is building a nationwide complex of detention centers. Not solely for the undocumented. But for us. Those outside the gates of the empire will fare no better with a $1 trillion budget for the war machine.

And this brings me to Venezuela where a head of state and his wife, Cilia Flores, were kidnapped and spirited to New York in open violation of international law and the U.N. Charter.

We have not declared war on Venezuela, but then there was no declared war when we bombed Iran and Yemen. Congress did not approve the kidnapping and bombing of military facilities in Caracas because Congress was not informed.

The Trump administration dressed up the crime — which took the lives of 80 people — as a drug raid and, most bizarrely, as a violation of U.S. firearms statutes: “possession of machine guns and destructive devices; and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.”

These charges are as absurd as attempting to legitimize the genocide in Gaza as Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

If this was about drugs, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández would not have been pardoned by Trump last month, after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S., a conviction that was justified with far greater evidence than that which supports the charges levied against Maduro.

But drugs are the pretext.

Flush with success, there is already talk by Trump and his officials about Iran, Cuba, Greenland and perhaps Colombia, Mexico and Canada.

Absolute power at home and absolute power abroad expands. It feeds off of each lawless act. It snowballs into totalitarianism and disastrous military adventurism. By the time people realize what has happened, it is too late.

Who will rule Venezuela? Who will rule Gaza? Does it matter?

If nations and people do not bow before the great Moloch in Washington, they are bombed. This is not about establishing legitimate rule. It is not about fair elections. It is about using the threat of death and destruction to procure total subservience.

Trump made this clear when he warned interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Maduro’s kidnapping was not carried out because of drug trafficking or possession of machine guns. This is about oil. It is, as Trump said, so the U.S. can “run” Venezuela.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said during a press conference Saturday.

Iraqis, a million of whom were killed during the U.S. war and occupation, know what comes next. The infrastructure, modern and efficient under Saddam Hussein — I reported from Iraq under Hussein so can attest to this truth — was destroyed. The Iraqi puppets installed by the U.S. had no interest in governance and reportedly stole some $150 billion in oil revenues.

The U.S., in the end, was booted out of Iraq, although controls Iraqi oil revenues which are funnelled to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The government in Baghdad is allied with Iran. Its military includes Iran-backed militias in Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, the UAE, India and Turkey.

The debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost the American public anywhere from $4 to $6 trillion, were the most expensive in U.S. history. None of the architects of these fiascos have been held to account.

Countries singled out for “regime change” implode, as in Haiti, where the U.S., Canada and France overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004. The overthrow ushered in societal and government collapse, gang warfare and exacerbated poverty. The same happened in Honduras when a 2009 U.S-backed coup removed Manuel Zelaya. The recently pardoned Hernández became president in 2014 and transformed Honduras into a narco-state, as did U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, who oversaw the production of 90 percent of the world’s heroin. And then there is Libya, another country with vast oil reserves. When Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by NATO during the Obama administration in 2011, Libya splintered into enclaves led by rival warlords and militias.

The list of disastrous attempts by the U.S. at “regime change” is exhaustive, including in Kosovo, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. All are examples of the folly of imperial overreach. All predict where we are headed.

The U.S. has targeted Venezuela since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez. It was behind a failed coup in 2002. It imposed punishing sanctions over two decades. It tried to anoint opposition politician Juan Guaidó, as “interim president” although he was never elected to the presidency. When this did not work, Guaidó was dumped as callously as Trump abandoned opposition figure and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. In 2020, we staged a Keystone Cops attempt by ill-trained mercenaries to trigger a popular uprising. None of it worked.

The kidnapping of Maduro begins another debacle. Trump and his minions are no more competent, and probably less so than officials from previous administrations, who tried to bend the world to their will.

Our decaying empire stumbles forward like a wounded beast, unable to learn from its disasters, crippled by arrogance and incompetence, torching the rule of law and fantasizing that indiscriminate industrial violence will regain a lost hegemony. Able to project devastating military force, its initial success lead inevitably to self-defeating and costly quagmires.

The tragedy is not that the American empire is dying, it is that it is taking down so many innocents with it.

(chrishedges.substack.com)

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PAPI TRUMP

https://twitter.com/PapiTrumpo/status/2007927104713933060

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VENEZUELA

I met her in Venezuela
With a basket on her head
If she loved others she didn't say
But I knew she'd do, to pass away the time in Venezuela
Pass away the time in Venezuela

I gave her a silken sash of blue
A beautiful sash of blue
Because I knew that she could do
With all the tricks, I knew she knew
To pass away the time in Venezuela

And when the wind was out to sea
The wind was out to sea
And she was taking leave of me
I said: Cheer up there'll always be
Sailors ashore on leave in Venezuela

Her lingo was strange but the thought of her beautiful smile
The thought of her beautiful smile
Will haunt me and taunt me for many a mile
She was my gal and she did the while
To pass away the time in Venezuela

— song lyric by Sammy Cahn (1972) famously sung by Harry Belafonte

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REGIME CHANGE IN AMERICA’S BACK YARD

by Jon Lee Anderson

Early Saturday morning, when President Donald Trump launched a bombing raid on Venezuela and captured its strongman President, Nicolás Maduro, few observers were entirely surprised. Trump has long said that he wanted Maduro out of power, branding him a narco-terrorist and placing a fifty-million-dollar bounty on his head. In recent months, Trump and his “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, have deployed a huge military force to the region, launching attacks on at least thirty so-called narco-boats and killing more than a hundred alleged drug runners.

Maduro and his wife were taken into custody aboard the U.S.S. Iwo Jima, an assault ship; unverified photos circulated of Maduro in handcuffs. Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly congratulated Trump, saying that Maduro had been indicted in the Southern District of New York on drug-trafficking and other charges and would “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who by all accounts was key to the campaign, re-shared a post on X that he made in July: “Maduro is NOT the president of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government. Maduro is the head of the Cartel de los Soles, a narco-terror organization which has taken possession of a country.” Rubio’s assertions, like Trump’s claims that the attacks on boatmen have stopped fentanyl smuggling into the U.S., were unaccompanied by any publicly available evidence.

I interviewed Maduro in 2017, as Trump began agitating for his removal. Maduro spoke of his mentor, Hugo Chávez, the founder of the Bolivarian revolution. Chávez was a fierce ideologue, but, Maduro said, even he had avoided pushing the U.S. too far. “He understood that he needed to have a good relationship with el poder”—the power. Maduro’s own relationship with Trump was tendentious. He mocked Trump in rallies, calling him the “king of wigs.” But he was also willing to meet with his envoy Richard Grenell last year, reportedly to discuss a deal under which Venezuela provided access to its oil reserves, the largest in the world. That deal was evidently set aside as various members of the Administration debated how to proceed.

Back in 2017, the prospect of an outright attack on Venezuela seemed remote. “No one involved in real military planning has ever thought of this as a place we’d put blood and treasure into—because, quite apart from anything else, there’s no national-security threat,” a U.S. official told me at the time. In Trump’s second term, though, he has sought to reassert the Monroe Doctrine, by which the U.S. had dominion in its sphere of influence. In a celebratory press conference Saturday morning, he proclaimed, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” He also spoke forthrightly about taking over the Venezuelan oil industry, which he has repeatedly argued should belong to the United States. Right-wing leaders in Latin America seem happy to enable him: Javier Milei of Argentina and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, jubilantly welcomed the attack on Venezuela. On the left, Presidents Gabriel Boric of Chile, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico expressed deep concerns. The Communist leaders of Cuba called for the international community to resist “state terrorism”—no doubt fearful that the Trump Administration intends to go after them next. Trump suggested as much in his press conference. Rubio, a longtime critic of Cuba, came to the lectern to add, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government I’d be concerned, at least.”

The operation to remove Maduro came precisely thirty-six years after President George H. W. Bush sent the U.S. military to invade Panama and depose General Manuel Noriega. A former American proxy, Noriega had begun criticizing the United States in rallies and machete-waving speeches; he was taken into custody and, like Maduro, accused of drug trafficking. When I met Noriega in prison, in 2015, two years before his death, he largely insisted on his innocence but expressed regret at having taken on the Americans. If he had the chance to do things over, he said, he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Trump insisted in Saturday’s press conference that, by deposing Maduro, he had removed the “kingpin of a vast criminal network” that trafficked huge amounts of cocaine into the U.S. Ironically, just weeks before, he had extended a full pardon to the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who in 2024 was convicted in the Southern District of New York of cocaine trafficking and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. Trump’s reasoning was that, like him, Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” by political opponents.

When I met with Maduro in 2017, he spoke bluffly about the limits of the effort to remove him from office. “They want me out, but, if I leave this chair, whom shall we put in it?” he said. “Who can be the President?” Many Venezuelans support Edmundo González and María Corina Machado, the apparent winners of the Presidential election that Maduro stole in 2024. González was the Presidential candidate, but the real power is Machado, a conservative Catholic from a wealthy family who built a following as an ardent critic of the Maduro regime. Both have been in hiding, though Machado appeared in Oslo last month to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. Cannily, she dedicated the award “to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump.”

In the press conference, Trump called Machado “a very nice woman” but said that she doesn’t have the “respect within the country” to lead. Instead, he said, the U.S. would “run” Venezuela in the immediate term, as part of a “group” that also apparently included U.S. oil companies. They will have to contend with Maduro’s senior officials, who remain largely in place. They include the hard-line military chief General Vladimir Padrino López; Diosdado Cabello, the equally hard-line interior minister; and Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, a tough-minded operator. All have denounced Maduro’s abduction. Padrino, in a press conference of his own, condemned “the most criminal military aggression” and declared the activation of a national-defense plan, including widespread mobilization of Venezuelan forces on land, sea, and air. Reportedly, in response, Trump said that the U.S. was prepared to mount a second military intervention. Yet many questions remain unanswered. Why take out Maduro and leave his supporters in place? Can his loyalists still carry the timeworn Bolivarian revolution forward? Will Trump offer Maduro refuge in another country—perhaps Turkey—in exchange for his asking his comrades in Caracas to stand down? Or will the remaining officials find a way to hold on to power? (In the press conference, Trump praised Delcy Rodríguez, saying that she had been exceptionally coöperative.)

It remains to be seen how Venezuelans, both in government and in the street, will respond to the increased presence of U.S. power in their country. Twenty-four years ago, I spoke with Hugo Chávez in Fuerte Tiuna, a military headquarters in Caracas that was bombed in last night’s raid. He told me that he would never let the Americans take him alive, to parade him around like a trophy. Chávez, who died of cancer in 2013, avoided such a humiliation. Maduro did not have the insight, or the instincts, to forge a different destiny for himself.

(The New Yorker)

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WARS ARE SOLD to populations as necessary for their protection or prosperity, but when you trace the actual decision-making, you consistently find a small group of people with specific interests, geopolitical positioning, resource control, domestic political consolidation, that don't align with the wellbeing of the people who'll actually fight and die.

The populations bear the costs while a narrow power structure captures whatever benefits exist.

This isn't conspiracy, it's how incentive structures work when decision-makers are insulated from consequences. The people making war decisions don't send their own children to fight. They don't live in the cities that get bombed. They don't experience the trauma or rebuild the infrastructure. So they can rationalize choices that would be unthinkable if they bore the actual costs.

How do we design governance systems where the people making decisions about collective violence actually experience the consequences of those decisions? Because as long as war remains profitable or politically useful for those who don't have to fight it, this pattern will continue regardless of how many populations suffer from it.

— Leo Tolstoy

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HOW THE MILKY WAY WAS MADE

My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-
fast flood. Able to take

       anything it could wet—in a wild rush—

                                 all the way to Mexico.

Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one-thousand four-hundred and fifty miles,

pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers

      in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds,
loosed them in our heavens, set them aster —

      ‘Achii ‘ahan, Mojave salmon,

                                Colorado pikeminnow—

Up there they glide, gilled with stars.
You see them now—

      god-large, gold-green sides,

                                moon-white belly and breast—

making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,
rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.

The blurred wake they drag as they make their path
through the night sky is called

      ‘Achii ‘ahan nyuunye—

                                our words for Milky Way.

Coyote too is up there, crouched in the moon,
after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet

      and empty, slung over his back—

                                a prisoner blue and dreaming

of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth.
O, the weakness of any mouth

      as it gives itself away to the universe

                                of a sweet-milk body.

Just as my own mouth is dreamed to thirst
the long desire-ways, the hundred-thousand light year roads

      of your throat and thighs.

— Natalie Diaz (2015)

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