Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 1/13/2026

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 38F with clear skies this Tuesday morning on the the coast at 5am but with fog just offshore clear skies could change. Fog, clouds & sun until further notice. Our hint of rain in the long range is not there today.

HIGH PRESSURE continues over NW California resulting in warm and dry conditions this week. Nocturnal valley fog is possible for northern valleys along the Trinity and Klamath rivers. (NWS)

AUTHORITIES, COMMUNITY SEARCHING FOR MISSING ROHNERT PARK MAN

Kale Gonick-Hallows, 29, said to be experiencing ‘mental health crisis’

by Madison Smalstig

Authorities and community members are searching for a missing Rohnert Park man who is experiencing a mental health crisis, according to family.

Kale Gonick-Hallows, 29, has been missing since about 11 p.m. on Jan. 5, when he left his Rohnert Park apartment, his mother Gail Gonick-Hallows said Monday.

He was wearing black jeans, black shoes and a black zip-up hooded sweatshirt with a white emblem on the front left side. He is about 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs about 160 pounds.

From his apartment, Gonick-Hallows drove his bright blue Tesla Model Y to a charging station at the Graton Resort & Casino parking lot. Automated license plate readers then captured his vehicle moving west in Bodega and then headed north on Highway 1 in Bodega Bay.

Gonick-Hallows’s cellphone, which has been turned off, pinged off a tower in Cazadero twice — just before midnight the night of Jan. 5 and then about seven hours later.

Authorities told Gail Gonick-Hallows that an automated license plate reader in Point Arena did not detect his vehicle, leading them to believe he is somewhere between Bodega Bay and the coastal Mendocino County city, she said. The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office received and broadcast a be-on-the-lookout (BOLO) Wednesday morning for Kale Gonick-Hallows and his vehicle, Capt. Quincy Cromer said Monday.

Gail Gonick-Hallows reported her son missing about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday to the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety. Since then, Rohnert Park officers, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, California Highway Patrol and some park rangers have searched for the man. During the search, the Sheriff’s helicopter Henry-1 and a CHP aircraft scanned the Sonoma County coast.

The night he took off for a drive — which he often did to “blow off steam,” his mother said — was when the final rain in a series of storms occurred. Throughout that day, about 2.3 inches of rain fell around Monte Rio in west Sonoma County and about 2.5 inches were recorded just north of Bodega Bay, according to the National Weather Service.

“He was out there during that storm, driving up the coast,” Gail Gonick-Hallows said.

She said her son loved his blue Tesla, which has a unique color with tinted windows and windshield. The vehicle has the California license plate 9HOS517, Rohnert Park authorities said in a news release.

Anyone searching for Kale Gonick-Hallows should, “really focus on the blue car,” his mother said. “That’s probably the thing to find first and he will probably be in or near that.”

Kale Gonick-Hallows is likely on the Sonoma County coast or in wooded areas within the county, such as Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, Sonoma Coast Redwoods, along the Russian River, the Grove of Old Trees or the Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve, according to the news release.

He loves nature, especially the redwood trees, Gail Gonick-Hallows said. He often enjoyed walking through them or riding his Onewheel, an electric skateboard with one large wheel in the middle, in between the tall trees.

“He had been wanting to go hiking with us over the holidays in the redwoods, but it was stormy and we couldn’t,” she said.

Kale Gonick-Hallows graduated in 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and was currently applying for graduate school programs so he could eventually become a psychotherapist, like both of his parents.

“He has had some mental health struggles, and he felt like he wanted to give back to other people with struggles,” Gail Gonick-Hallows said, adding that she was proud of him for pursuing a path that made him happy.

She said that friends and community members have assisted in the search. A Google document and map were set up to track paths that people have used to search for Kale Gonick-Hallows in the past week. The routes crisscross over west Sonoma County through areas such as Duncans Mills, Jenner and Camp Meeker. Gail Gonick-Hallows and her husband also searched around Timber Cove on Saturday.

“I miss him,” she said. “I’m just really worried because it’s been cold each night.”

The Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety encouraged anyone with information on Kale Gonick-Hallows to contact the department at 707-584-2600.

(pressdemocrat.com)

MODONNA DIANE WADE
November 16, 1945 — January 8, 2026
Ukiah

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the
path of righteousness for his name’s sake…
yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou
art with me thy rod and thy staff they comfort
me. Thou preparest a table before me in the
presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my
head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
of my life; and I will dwell in the house
of the Lord forever.

— Psalm 23

MAZIE MALONE: I was disheartened to see Rest Padd as the operating agency for the PHF. I have personal experience via my loved one, with them and the reviews are less than thrilling. Not a good start a 1.3 million a year contract equates to bare minimum care, 16 patients, at about 225 a day. Did you know the Psychiatrist gets 275 dollars an hour?

THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE — WODETZKI VS STAR THISTLE

(The smart money is on the thistle)

Navarro Point thistle-removing this Wednesday, 10am-noon. Volunteers welcome!

At the Navarro Point Preserve this Wednesday volunteers will spend 10am til noon removing thistles. You’re invited to join us on this beautiful Mendocino Land Trust's coastal property 2 miles south of Albion on what is forecast to be a beautiful sunny late morning. Bring clippers if you have them but they are not needed. Email or call Tom Wodetzki if you have questions: [email protected]; 937-1113.

MARC TENZEL: It was a beautiful day today in Ukiah. The Church and, down the road, the Palace Hotel.

FORT BRAGG WATER TREATMENT PLANT OVERHAUL AND WATER TANK REHABILITATION PROJECT

The Water Treatment Plant Overhaul and Water Tank Rehabilitation Project, City Project No. WTR-00017 was recently completed, improving our water treatment facilities and ensuring the City can provide clean drinking water to its residents for years to come. The project consisted of rehabilitating and improving the filter treatment units and buildings surrounding them, rehabilitating water storage tank #2, improvements to raw water storage and backwash ponds, and improving the piping system at the water treatment plant. These improvements are for the benefit of the city, with the expected life of the project being 50 years. The design for the project was completed by HDR Engineering, Inc. in early 2022 and the project went out to bid in November 2023 after funding was secured, with a construction contract being awarded to Wahlund Construction, Inc. in early 2024. A construction management request for proposals was also distributed on a similar timeline, with the contract for Construction Management Services being awarded to SHN Consulting Engineers & Geologists, Inc.

This project was made possible by the California State Water Resources Control Board which provided the funding necessary to carry out the construction phase of this project. In total, the City was awarded $12,216,480 which was used for construction and construction management costs. Construction began in May of 2024 and was completed in November of 2025. Throughout the project, the City worked closely with the design engineer and contract team to carry out the project in a timely fashion, meeting the required funding schedule. We appreciate the City and County's cooperation and patience throughout the project, especially those residents close to the water treatment plant.

ATTENTION COASTIES!

I was hoping that you or your readers could help me identify, and perhaps contact, an artist named Daryl who made benches from salvaged wood, including the ones in the yard of the Sea Gull Inn. I'm told he worked at the Mendocino Garden Shop 20 years ago, and might still be a regular at Dick's Place.

SAVE THE DOWNTOWN TREES

To the Editor:

To the Ukiah City Council and Staff:

At last month’s Public Workshop for the School Street Project, many of those attending supported the proposal for one-way traffic because they thought it would help save the existing Chinese Pistache trees by opening up more sidewalk space.

The staff answered many questions, but by the end of the meeting there were still concerns about mature trees being removed before needed.

Using one-way traffic to conserve the mature trees was proposed by the City of Ukiah staff during its community workshops last year.

Below is a slide from their presentation, which can be found on the City’s website at https://ghd.mysocialpinpoint.com/school-street-corridor-study/home/ (Workshop Two Presentation). Under “Option 3: Tree Replacement Program”, it states “Will allow younger trees to mature before older trees must be replaced.”

At the December workshop, City staff explained that underground utilities would be moved to the center of the street with feeder lines to businesses that would avoid the tree roots. But they then suggested that the existing trees needed to be removed anyway because the roots were damaging nearby historic buildings, even though another slide (below) suggested that the existing roots could be managed.

They also suggested that the trees, at 60, are nearing the end of their natural life cycle. But Chinese Pistache trees can live to be 150, and not a single existing tree has been identified as diseased or otherwise a danger to the public.

As of this writing, 2,974 people have signed an online petition to save the trees. (https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-removal-of-trees-on-school-street-ukiah)

The City’s tree management guidelines state that “Priority will be given to limiting removal, increasing forest canopy, and preserving appropriate vegetation and shade on city property and streets. … Tree preservation is arguably the single most important goal in maintaining the Urban Forest. A replacement tree requires decades of growth to achieve similar benefits of carbon sequestration, shade, habitat, and beauty. . . . For all these reasons and more, every tree should be treated as a precious resource with all efforts made to protect whenever possible.”

City Council and staff should commit themselves to evaluating each tree on School Street individually to determine if it can be saved.

Removal should be the last option, not the first.

Thank you for your consideration of this important matter. Please incorporate these tree protection measures in any proposal for funding.

Dennis O’Brien

Ukiah

ARTHUR FOLZ: We have vinyl! Our new album is available to purchase at the following locations: The Next Record Store in Santa Rosa, Watts Music in Novato, Red Devil Records in San Rafael, Amoeba Music in San Francisco, and Anderson Valley Market in Boonville. Come support local music and record stores!

A CONVERSATION WITH FORT BRAGG MAYOR GODEKE

by Carole Brodsky

Mayor Jason Godeke is truly one of the more unlikely Mendocino County politicians to surface in many a year.

A graduate of Yale, an accomplished artist and a dedicated part-time art instructor at Fort Bragg Middle School, Godeke is adamant that the last thing he saw on his future-cast was becoming mayor of his town.

“I’d been involved in grass-roots politics when I was teaching in Pennsylvania, where I lived for over ten years,” he explains. Like many people, he supported community-based arts initiatives, volunteered with tree-planting projects and canvassed for political leaders he supported. But when he moved back to his hometown, “Middle school took over everything,” he laughs. “It was definitely a recalibration- going from being a college-level art instructor to working with 12-year-olds. Don’t get me wrong,” he smiles. “I love it. It reinvigorated my interest in teaching. I am continuing to learn from all these kids.”

As he reorganized his life back in Fort Bragg and went to part-time teaching, Godeke began to look around. “I discovered there was a little crisis here. No one was willing to run for office. I get it,” he continues. “Politicians get a bad rap. They are known for having big egos- for talking a lot and not doing anything. I suffered from that same prejudice. But I realized this was kind of like jury duty. People have to show up. Someone has to function up on the dais. I never,” he emphasizes, “had aspirations to run for office,” he smiles. But there he was. He saw the need and launched a no-money campaign. “It was relatively simple. We’ve got about 7,000 people who live here, and only about 3,000 who are registered to vote. And all the people I knew were 12 years old,” he laughs. “I was willing to talk to people. It was fascinating. I walked around town and started knocking on people’s doors. There can be some risk and awkwardness there. But there was also real education. I started learning what was critical for people. I started doing research. I went to Public Works. I took a wastewater plant tour. I learned what city government had been doing.” Today, he’s grateful he took the time to campaign and educate himself in the way he did. “It’s been a quick, steep learning curve.”

He comes back to his middle school students many times during our conversation. “The overarching thing I’ve come to understand about government work? It’s thinking about those kids. So many decisions we make are ultimately about them.”

We discussed some of the most pressing issues that faced the city when Godeke took office.

“I believe water security is the most important function of city government. City councils, public works staff and city managers have been thinking about this in very imaginative ways, and projects like the new desalinization effort are among the fruits of their labors.” He emphasizes that the one-year pilot project spearheaded by Oneka Technologies types of multi-year, grant-funded projects that have required immense concentrations of time and energy to bring to fruition. Recently he attended the ribbon-cutting for the Water Treatment Plant’s rehabilitation project. He adds that it’s not just about “sexy” projects like the Oneka pilot. “Hardened water storage and creating more overall efficiency are just as important. We now have new water pipes and water meters. Some of that technology was from the 1950s. This is super-exciting.” The challenge is educating ratepayers, who fund these improvements. “Our Enterprise Fund provides water treatment and wastewater. The key here- and our struggle, whether here or in Los Angeles is not to burden citizens with enormous monthly costs of capital improvements. This is not a wealthy town,” he emphasizes. “When applying for funding, we qualify as a ‘disadvantaged community.’ Lots of our kids qualify for the free lunch program. People who live here are living close to the economic edge.”

He lauds his staff, who demonstrate the expertise to apply for funds and identify grants like the Community Development Block Grant utility subsidy program, as well as funding for improvements for the waste and water treatment improvements. “These projects have been significantly funded by grants, and it takes a lot of work finding them and following through with them.”

He mentions the other desalinization unit located near the Water Treatment facility. “This can be deployed at the Noyo River intake during a drought. This, compared to a lot of other similar projects was not outrageously expensive.” The unit treats brackish water at high tide and can provide a quarter of the City’s water. “This whole issue is about diverse solutions- creating resiliency through multiple sources, hardening efficiency and expanding storage. We have a new parcel with three new reservoirs that will triple our water storage.” Given that climatic extremes are the new normal, Mayor Godeke feels it behooves the city to store water.

Health Care provision is another of the Mayor’s concerns.

“It’s easy to feel like a lot of this is outside our control- the market forces, the federal government, state legislation. We have serious issues for our local hospitals and other facilities. The seismic retrofit requirements create extraordinarily burdensome costs. We must continue to have robust services on the coast. The last time I looked, the average age of coastal residents went up by ten years.” The aging coastal population is both a blessing and challenge. “We have a very informed, culturally engaged citizenry. There’s a long history of that here. It’s not just retirees moving from urban areas who bring their expertise to the community. But how do we make this a place young people can grow up and afford to continue living here?”

Housing is a piece of that puzzle, says Godeke. “Compared to water, this is almost a more challenging issue to grapple with. We recently put in 65 units of subsidized housing- but is it going to be possible for middle-income people to buy homes here? Where do the new grocers, new teachers live?”

An 83-unit apartment complex south of the Noyo Bridge has been approved by the City Council and the Coastal Commission.

“This represents the first market-rate housing development on the coast in decades,” he continues. Again, Godeke references the many outside forces that are beyond the purview of the City Council that complicate the development of new housing, but he applauds the work of City Manager Isaac Whippey for his work in making permitting more efficient.

“Isaac is doing everything possible to make the process more accessible, more transparent, more online- using a variety of strategies to make it easier for builders to jump through the hurdles- which only increase with larger developments. The fact that we have a large inventory of vacant parcels in the coastal zone adds complexity.”

The remoteness of Fort Bragg contributes to the low increase in population, which, says Godeke is another opportunity and challenge.

“I believe our remoteness can be a strength, but you have to commit. Market forces are unwieldy. We were a mill town. The vast majority of good jobs were at the mill. Today, we’re in transition to a tourist economy. The fishing industry looks very, very different than it did at the beginning of the century. There is real success here, but not enough.”

The problem with a tourism economy, says Godeke, is that most related jobs are low paying.

“Our housing values are half the state average. Our average income is half the state average as well. It’s affordable for retirees to move here, but how do you diversify the economy, and what can City government do about this? We can support market-rate housing and we can upgrade the infrastructure- which is what we’re doing with broadband. If we provide low-cost, high-speed internet, we’re improving accessibility, educational opportunities, health care opportunities. Many people are having robust professional lives as remote workers. This is a nice place to live, so we’re doing what we can to facilitate that.”

Another focus for Godeke will continue to strive toward a resolution to the beleaguered status of the former mill site.

“The pathway includes working collaboratively with the property owner while engaging the public in the process. There are great opportunities here, whether it’s providing economic diversity, housing, or taking advantage of the extraordinary natural setting we have at that location. I see the potential, and I also understand that there is nothing we’re going to do that will make everyone happy- there are so many conflicting sentiments about it. But this is something that has to remain a priority into 2026.”

One thing that has surprised Godeke about his role as mayor is the collegial commitment between staff and councilmembers.

“I’m really impressed with the relations between staff and officials. The communication within the context of structured engagements in our meetings is one example. Staff bring a lot of information to the public, with a lot of sincerity. The council members really take their jobs seriously. They do their reading. They hear from stakeholders and constituents. They come to the meetings prepared. They have opinions, but they develop their opinions and come to the meetings with opinions that are malleable. Our meetings really are where things do happen. Not every vote is unanimous, of course, but we see each other’s perspectives and we work together. I feel like we’re very fortunate in that respect, and in the fact that the public is also very engaged. They electorate doesn’t agree with everything that happens, but they engage in a respectful, collaborative way.”

What can the average person do to support their community?

“As a teacher, I see people volunteering in so many ways, from driving kids to games to coaching. I know it’s hard when people are holding down jobs, but finding volunteer opportunities is so important, whether it’s doing a shift at the Food Bank or walking dogs at the Humane Society. We planted some trees at the dog park, and a bunch of High School kids came over to help. Volunteering gets people more engaged. We have an advantage being a small town, because everyone tends to wear a bunch of hats and our paths cross in many ways.” Godeke mentions that City Manager Whippey is working on creating a volunteer interface program.

“People want to help but don’t know what to do. We want to find ways for people to pitch in- community events like the Coastal Cleanup and the Longest Table- where all kinds of people show up and get to know each other.”

Godeke also encourages people to attend or watch council meetings.

“It’s great when people attend meetings, but now we’ve got livestreaming on Facebook and Zoom access. More people can be passively involved and educated by watching meetings.”

He addresses the recent increase in wages for council members from $510 to $950 monthly- the maximum allowed by state law. “It’s still pretty nominal- you still have to have another job,” he smiles.

“The goal for us was to try to make these jobs more accessible to more people. I really was worried about that crisis of no candidates. I want more people to run, and for these positions to be more possible for people raising families and holding down jobs.” Because ultimately, says Godeke, “it really is about those 12-year-olds,” he concludes.

ATTENTION DEEP ENDERS: Now you don't have to drive all the way to Boonville to shake it loose! Let's meet up at the Floodgate and have some fun. Contact me if you're interested.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Blood in the Vineyards

by Bruce McEwen (November, 2010)

William Crawford is the target of a personal injury lawsuit brought by Nicolas 'Nick' Fross.

Crawford owns McDowell Valley Vineyards in Hopland.

Fross, a former lineman for Mendocino College, was stabbed in the chest at a party held on the vineyard property in early November of 2006.

William Crawford’s son, Kyler Crawford, and some of his teammates from the Mendocino College football team were celebrating the end of the football season.

Celebrating football teams can be rambunctious.

Crawford senior had asked a couple of big guys, the Gonzalez brothers, Ramiro and Marco, to keep an eye on things, chaprone the festivities.

A fight broke out and Marco Gonzales stabbed young Fross, nearly killing the kid. Fross was rushed to the Ukiah emergency room. He survived and Marco Gonzales was arrested.

Marco Gonzales pled guilty to the stabbing and was packed off to state prison in late 2006. He gets out next month.

Nick Fross recovered, kind of, from the knife wound and moved to North Dakota on a football scholarship. But he didn’t recover all the way from his near death experience. He wants compensation for physical therapy — his doctor recommends a massuse — and psychological therapy for the post-traumatic stress he suffers from.

Ben Cartwright came to mind when William Crawford entered the courtroom with his defense attorney, Steven O’Neil. Mr. Crawford looks like a man accustomed to getting what he wants. He's a big, forceful looking guy.

Detectives Andrew Alvarado and Jason Caudillo of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department were called to give the jury an idea of what went down at the Crawford place that night in November of ’06. They were not called to give their opinions, but Fross’s lawyers and Judge John Behnke could hardly restrain them from doing so.

One of Fross’s lawyers, Ms. Close, asked Detective Caudillo if he had formed an impression as to what happened that night.

“Yes, I did. I found that the conclusions I came to were pretty much consistent with the other officers, that what had happened was….."

Ms. Close cut the officer off at this point, reminding him that it was a simple yes or no question.

“But thank you for your enthusiasm,” she added wryly, eliciting a ripple of mirth from the jury.

Detective Alvarado would later show the same enthusiasm in relaying his memory of stab night.

Ms. Close asked Caudillo if he remembered his interview with Kyler Crawford, the son of the owner. Kyler Crawford had thrown the party.

He did, Caudillo said, adding, “I was very impressed with him. He seemed just a very forthright, honest and squared-away young man.”

“Is it your practice to include your own opinion when you testify?” Ms. Close wondered.

“No, not generally in criminal cases.”

“Did Kyler seem nervous?”

“I don’t think nervous is the right way to describe it. He was upset.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate his nervousness?”

“I would rate him around one-and-a-half or two.”

“Did Kyler do or say anything to cause you to question his truthfulness?”

“No, I thought he was honest and forthright.”

Ms. Close asked Caudillo if the fact that he was distantly related to the victim, Mr. Fross, would have any effect on his testimony.

“No, not at all,” he answered. Fross, Caudillo explained, was a shirt-tail cousin of his wife’s. Caudillo hadn’t seen Fross since he was a little kid.

Detective Alvarado was called.

In the early morning hours of November 5, 2006, Alvarado had gone to the emergency room at Ukiah Valley Medical Center to see Fross.

“I spoke with him very briefly. He was in tremendous pain. He had a laceration across his chest and blood was coming from the wound.”

Alvarado was unable to talk with the quarterback until the next day.

Ms. Close asked, “Was he doing better by then?”

“Yes. He appeared to be in a little more comfort.”

“Did he do anything to make you question his testimony?”

“No. In fact, he admitted to smoking marijuana and drinking.”

“Did you identify any discrepancies in his testimony?”

“No.”

“What did you do next?”

“I went with Detective Jason Caudillo to interview Kyler Crawford.”

“Did Kyler appear nervous?”

“Yes. A little bit.”

“On a scale of one to ten…?”

“I’d say about a five.”

Ms. Close was trying to find out why Mr. Crawford had hired a problem guy like Gonzalez, a guy who goes for a weapon at a party of college kids.

Detective Alvarado was reluctant to answer.

The Crawford family's attorney, Mr. O’Neil, florid-faced and blue-suited, objected when Ms. Close asked, “Were the Gonzalez brothers employees of the ranch?”

Judge Behnke sustained the objection. (You often get the feeling that what gets sustained and what doesn't is purely random on the judge's part. This was one of those times.)

No matter, Ms. Close had a recording of the interview Detective Alvarado had conducted that night with Kyler Crawford.

On the recording Alvarado asked what the Gonzalez boys were doing there, and young Crawford had replied, “My dad asked them to keep an eye on things. Juan [the boys’ father] is kind of the manager of the ranch. Then Marco showed up, saying someone was following him. I guess you guys know he’s kind of, uh, ‘gone’…”

Mental Marco seems to have appeared at the gathering in a paranoid state.

Judge Behnke instructed the jury that they were to disregard speculation about Marco’s psychological whereabouts.

On the recording, Alvarado prompted Kyler to continue, “So they were told to watch things?”

“Yeah, they’re big guys, so they’d say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that,’ and things like that.”

Parts of the recording had been redacted, other parts were unintelligible, but somehow a fight broke out over a motorcycle. “Did you see how this incident got started?” Alvarado asked Kyler.

“I was in the house, and when I came out Juan and Miguel had bloody mouths. Marco took off, he ran inside and must have jumped out the window, the window was broken and—”

Who had slugged his brothers Juan and Miguel wasn't clear, but it seems that the mental case had stabbed the quarterback and jumped out a closed window.

Again the judge asked that the volume be turned down, and the transcripts passed forward for further redacting.

The judge clarified: “Since you inadvertently heard that last bit I’ll explain: Because the witness did not see this happen, he simply heard these things that are not in his personal knowledge, so for that reason I ordered it redacted. Okay, we’re gonna try this again.”

Ms. Close started the recording.

Alvarado asked Kyler, “Did you see Nick get stabbed?”

“No, I was inside.”

“Ever know Marco to carry a knife?”

“No.”

The file for the criminal case against Marco had been removed from the court clerk’s office to the court administration office. I had to get special permission to go up there and see it. All three of the Gonzalez brothers —Juan [Jr.], Marco, and Miguel — had criminal records, but Marco’s was the most impressive in its plentitude. So, when Kyler had said to Detective Alvarado, “You guys know he’s kinda gone,” the detective must have had at least a nodding acquaintance with what the kid was talking about.

Mendocino County cops have a pretty good idea of who's who in the miscreant community.

Next day Nick Fross’s doctor was on the stand. Kevin Konicek, another of Nick Fross’s lawyers, was directing the examination of Dr. Joel Erickson.

Dr. Erickson began talking about chest wall injuries and how they can change a person’s posture, making them hunch over.

“Do you see that in Nick?” Konicek asked.

“Yes, he has to find new ways to get comfortable. And then there’s the loss of breathability. It involves the muscles of the chest and diaphram. His chest wall mechanism has been injured, the resulting scar tissue, that would all translate downstream to a loss in breathability, making long runs, cardio-style aerobic exercises, more difficult from the permanent change brought on by the scar tissue.”

“Can you describe what the surgeons do following a stab wound like this?”

“Well, first they would have to stabilize him, which involves two maneuvers — making sure he was breathing, and stopping the bleeding.

“Were those maneuvers necessary to save his life?”

“Absolutely. They would have to put a tube in his chest to drain the blood from the lung, and that’s before the surgery even begins. Then the surgeon, with the help of the anesthesiologist, had to open the hole up wider to see where the bleeding was coming from, and in this case he couldn’t get to the blood vessel so he had to come in from behind and suture it with a loop around the vessel. Fortunately the heart was not punctured.”

“So over time the breathing capacity gets worse?”

“Naturally. With age this type of injury gets more acute. There is a possibility that with physical therapy — lots of physical therapy — the tendency to hunch over requires a lot of forced exercise, back exercise, but massage can also be useful in getting a person past some of the catches.”

“Can physical therapy help with the pain?”

“It can. If it was me — in fact what I recommended is body work with a good massage professional, a physical modality is really necessary to improve the breathing mechanism.”

“Okay, let’s move along to the post traumatic stress,” Konicek suggested.

O’Neil erupted in objections, but it was real clear that this kid Fross had nearly bought the store, permanently sacked, you might say. He was lucky to be alive.

“There’s no foundation for post traumatic stress,” he huffed indignantly.

“Okay,” Konicek said patiently. “Doctor, could you describe the psychological consequences of this type of injury?”

“Well, first of all the young man had to deal with a knife in his chest — the acute horror of the event. It’s a well-documented fact that those kinds of things will cause long-term psychological effects. And secondly, facing your mortality as acutely as he did — he told me his funeral was what he fully expected — he had to face his own mortality suddenly and acutely, and we know this manifests later as depression. We’ve been working on this for years; we have to put people on antidepressants after open-heart surgery — which doesn’t come unexpectedly and suddenly. Then the third part is his social sphere. I’m sure his friends—”

“Objection,” O’Neil growled peevishly. “This is speculation!”

Konicek bowed his head and rocked on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back, as Judge Behnke sustained the objection.

“One of the things about Nick,” the victim's lawyer said, "is that he left Ukiah after this. What is the significance of that, the loss of community?”

“Well, young people, young men in particular — in the psyche of a young man—”

“Objection,” O’Neil groused again. “This is the purest speculation!”

Judge Behnke said, “It does seem a little outside the expertise of a cardiologist. Why don’t you move along, counsel?”

Konicek asked for Dr. Erickson’s overall opinion on the PTSD.

“When you add it all up,” Erickson said, “he could be a poster boy for PTSD.”

“The person who stabbed Nick gets out of prison in January" —

“Objection!”

“Rephrase.”

“Has he said anything to you about Mr. Marco Gonzalez's release?”

“He said he’s afraid for his mother.”

“Is that one of the reasons he left town?”

“Objection!”

“Overruled. You can answer.”

“It is.”

“The person who stabbed him is Hispanic. Does that have any significance to—”

“Objection. Lack of foundation, outside the expertise of the witness and calls for speculation!”

“Overruled.”

Konicek smiled faintly at O’Neil and said, “Doctor do these kinds of psychological injuries affect the way you deal with your life?”

“Certainly, and he’s done the right thing so far. He’s gotten away from the source of the trouble, he continues to play football.”

“And how about counseling?”

“Absolutely. Finding an expert he can relate to is very important.”

“And this costs money?”

“Correct.”

“How long would he need to—”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

“Again, Nick, as you know, played football. What does that indicate to you, as far as the PTSD is concerned?”

“Objection. Lacks foundation, calls for speculation and is beyond the expertise of the witness.”

“I’ll allow it,” Behnke ruled.

"It is extremely important for the psyche of young men to work with the support of a team, going out and doing something useful like that, being involved with a team is a well known treatment for PTSD.”

On cross, Mr. O’Neil said, “You came into this case at Mr. Konicek's request, didn’t you Doctor?”

“That’s right.”

“Now, when Mr. Fross came to you — what was given to you as documentation of his medical condition?”

“His medical records.”

“So you were aware of a minor elective surgery at the Ukiah Medical Center?”

“No.”

“Were you aware of any other treatment?”

“No.”

“Any treatment for PTSD?”

“No.”

“Depression?”

“No.”

“Anxiety?”

“No.”

“Any anti-anxiety medications?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Do you know where he went in North Dakota?”

“No.”

“Did you know he went there for a football scholarship?”

“No, I wasn’t aware of why he went there.”

“Did you notice the PTSD was diagnosed as mild in Dr. Schmidt’s opinion?”

“Yes.”

“And would you agree with that?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Is it also true that everything you know about the event came from him, from Nick?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“That’s all I have.”

Mr. Konicek said, “Doctor, you have a medical practice in Santa Rosa, true?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s rare that you appear as an expert witness?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any reason to doubt what Nick has told you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“So when you say Nick’s PTSD is mild, it is nothing trivial, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

Mr. O’Neil said, “Are you aware of Secondary Gain, doctor?”

“Yes.”

This question started some furor on the part of Fross’s lawyers, but Judge Behnke settled the quarrel by saying, “He already said he had no reason to doubt Mr. Fross.”

That seemed to settle it, and the trial was recessed until next week.

Comment by Ramiro Gonzalez Jr. (January, 2026)

As I was looking for a few stories I had published when I was incarcerated in 2016. I stumbled upon this article, it broke my heart. There are statements there that are inaccurate. It’s all making it sound like the Gonzalez brothers were some bad people. There was no party for the football team, it was a harvest party for the workers. These so-called friends came and disrespected the owner’s property by going around the premises touching equipment, etc. When it all came down, I seen the guy that supposedly got stabbed. I was one foot away from the victim; the wound wasn’t even deep, not even Kyler was certain it was Marcos. How did Fross even know his name? There was so many people that I find it very very very suspicious in many ways. Marcos did time, and the family as well, because they were all thrown under the bus. I bet they didn’t even drug test Fross. There was all sorts of drugs going on there. In saying all this which I can go on, it’s an old case. But I didn’t get the chance to give my statement or asked as a witness. Things started happening to me years later, and I’m only going to say that there are individuals that don’t want to see others succeed, targeting people that see the truth without looking. Even going to college showed me how others are asked to do or say things to target people. Now I see and hear things on platforms in “social media” of the things my intellect was already processing that I never experienced before or said to anyone about this. This is validation of that. There is something bigger than any of us in this world and it guided me throughout this weirdness of what’s happening. There’s more than meets the eye. I only say all this because I’m Ramiro Gonzalez Jr. and this is my family that gave me life. I see my brother Marcos and I pray that whatever happened to him because I know he got messed with by someone in attorney over tail had/has no right to treat human beings like this. Thank you for at least hearing my part, I’m not against anyone, just those that fuck with people.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, January 12, 2026

JOSHUA BLANCO, 27, Vacaville/Ukiah. Reckless evasion, suspended license.

KENNETH BUTTREY, 67, Willits. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

CHERRI ROBERTS, 49, Ukiah. Under influence, resisting. (Frequent flyer.)

2025 YEAR IN REVIEW

by Paul Modic

With most things I just go with the flow, for example when I sold my place in the hills I asked an old friend if he had any investment ideas and he’d been active in the stock market for decades. From the top floor of his $400-a-month apartment in Guatemala, with a view of the lake, the retired ex-pat suggested a tech ETF which he’d been invested in the last few years. (Unlike just buying one stock, an electronically traded fund is a collection of holdings in multiple companies, in this case VGT had 328, with Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft being the top ones.)

I soon figured out that the ETF was heavy into Ai and rode that profitable wave for two years but the excitement of the surging price made me an addict obsessively checking the price and I got tired of thinking about money all the time. I tried and failed to stop the constant price-checking many times and finally got out completely at the top of the market in November, mostly for my mental health.

There were some fun open mics at the Organic Grace building from January to March where I told some stories, read poems, sung a few of my songs and met some cool people. (At Summer Arts I finally busted my move, though after working on it for five years it’s probably time for a new one.)

During this time I compiled all the letters, including essays and photos, I’d sent to my mother five days a week for seven months until she died in her nursing home from covid in 2021. It’s a huge 600 page document, a record of a moment in time.

I did a couple projects last Summer: I made a gallery in my barn after installing an art hanging system along the thirty foot wall, got about twenty colorful Huichol yarn paintings framed and hung with the chain and hooks system.

While doing the gallery project I started the Gulch Mulch compilation project and collected all forty-three issues of my ‘90’s zine into eleven complete copies.

On April 1st I connected with a volunteer workout coach who showed me some lightweight strength-training exercises which I’ve been doing twice a week for twenty minutes. I watch sports or movies while I do them and I’m actually getting stronger as it’s become easier to open the eight foot sliding glass door.

It was a great river season and I walked the sixty-six steps down to the beach and swam in the Mighty Eel’s cool embrace fifty times, along the trail “drinking” ripe plums in June and eating delicious blackberries in July. (I recently cut my park walks from 65 to 75 minutes to 45-50, thinking maybe I should save some steps for my eighties, coming up in eight years. I also I had a face-to-face encounter with a dying four point buck and decided to not stop singing in the park when someone’s coming the other way, as I had been shyly doing for the last couple years.)

I got necessary repairs done with the contractor in late Spring, including replacing leaking window trim and new vinyl over the hole in the bathroom floor. The painters finally arrived in August after I’d been stressing out for weeks unable to choose the colors. I went through fifteen quarts of test colors and twenty brushes and finally was happy with my choice. I got the violet I wanted into the trim but next year when they paint the barn I want it to be all violet with cream, green, and gold trim, the other colors I used this year. (I sent three people up on the roof to fix a tiny leak: a handyman, the contractor and then the roofers and though they each applied caulk or blackjack, none of them could fix it. I hear the drip…..drip…..drip into the bucket during the rains but it doesn’t bother me anymore and a new roof is scheduled for next year.)

I tried more sleep hacks and none of them worked, like cutting down to one cup of coffee a day in the morning, getting up during an insomnia episode and hanging out in the living room, deep breathing and fluttering my eyes back and forth while closed, which seemed to work the first night. I became obsessed with water intake and tracked liquid usage for a few months then read that warm baths and showers an hour or so before bed could help and tried that for a week. You were supposed to take at least a ten minute shower and during the first one I realized I’d never taken one so long. (My usual is about half a minute, add another minute for shampooing, usually just after saunas.)

Finally I think I figured out the sleep thing and at this moment December 17th I’ve gone forty-nine nights without insomnia and just had the best month of sleep since last January. What was it? Sugar. In the first week of November I got my test results and found that my A1C (glucose/sugar) had gone up another point for the second time this year and I had entered the pre-diabetic range. What was I doing, eating, to put me into that category?

I realized instantly that I had been buying huge amounts of muesli and eating it throughout the day, then for dessert at night. When all the sweet dried fruit at the top was gone from each bottle on the kitchen counter I added more raisins and dates. (I estimated I was eating about 3000 to 5000 raisins a month and didn’t even realize it, though I was aware of the one or two very sweet pastries a week.)

I stopped the sweet muesli and desserts, my sleep instantly got better, insomnia disappeared and I’ve been averaging seven hours of sleep a night after a couple months on the new program. Have I really figured it out this time after all the other times when I thought I had? (When I get these good night sleeps now I realize once again how my mood and inspiration is affected by sleep. I’m looking back at things I’ve said and posted, thinking about how much of that was related to sleep and wondering if I should apologize to anyone for my grumpy attitude?)

I decided I needed more social life and played ping pong with Steve uptown a few times though I’m the worst player. I weirded him out when I wore a pink lady’s thong as a headband (the bulky bandanna was uncomfortable) the second time as I didn’t get my yearly haircut in April so I guess I’m a hippie again.

“It’s embarrassing,” he said.

“I’m not embarrassed,” I said. “Why should you be?”

“I’m embarrassed for you. What will I tell my wife?”

“Really? Your conversations are so boring you have to bring that up?” (Then I had to tell him the whole thong story, how I originally got them to clean my glasses.)

I realized this summer that I can take saunas year round, even on cool mornings when it’s going to be over 100 degrees in the afternoon. My M.O. is to turn on the sauna, go to the park for an hour, and it’s ready when I return. About half the time I forget to turn it on but there’s always tomorrow and the sauna is a bit of a hassle, shampooing after, etc.

I got a few stories in Redheaded Blackbelt this year, many onto the AVA website, wrote a lot of vignettes daily but most of them didn’t seem worth typing up or I was just too lazy. (Last Spring I wrote and posted haikus every morning for six weeks.)

Dirt Road Hippies: A couple years ago I spent many hours organizing stories and essays with a table of contents, eliminated about fifteen doubles and then they sat there in a file called “Printable.” This summer I looked at the 200 pages and 200,000 words and thought why not? I did some light editing filling gaps between vignettes and stories, redid the table of contents and printed it up. (After blowing out the ink cartridge I learned to print it slowly, fifty pages then rest the printer ten minutes, and after a few weeks managed to make 103 copies, bound at FedEx for four dollars each.

I got the title page and other color photos printed at Emerald Tech and The Paper Mill and voila, I had my book. It’s a mishmash of stories about Southern Humboldt country living and weed growing, travels in Mexico, and I wish I had another hundred copies but I blew out my printer and it doesn’t do double-sided anymore. (I didn’t do a major final edit so it jumps all over time: Humboldt and Mexico essays in no apparent order.)

I sold nine copies at Chautauqua, another ten or twenty on the street, mailed another ten out of the area and gave most of them away to friends. It’s a floppy homemade coffee table book and I have no plans to publish it as a real book but I guess ya never know. (I’ve got more content for a second edition: I lived it, wrote about it and it’s ready to go.)

Sleep was going well until my guest cabin down by the river flooded, plunging me back into insomnia for a week and then I spent the next week cleaning out the cabin and fixing the roof. Then the next storm blew off part of my barn roof and fortunately my helper was here the next morning and she and I put a tarp over it in two hours. The roofers say they’ll fix it next week, now it’s mid-January and I’m back on my good sleep routine.

(And finally, I went to the Trade Fair and visited my old place in the Gulch for the first time since selling it six years ago.)

'THAT IS NOT FAIR!': Hall of Fame coach says NFL screwed 49ers with short week

by Gabe Lehman

After the San Francisco 49ers pulled off a stunning upset of the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, the NFL congratulated San Francisco with a date against the top-seeded Seahawks on a short week — leading one Pro Football Hall of Fame coach to call out the league.

Despite San Francisco having knocked off the defending Super Bowl champions on the East Coast on Sunday in the wild-card round, and the other two NFC teams coming off wins on Saturday, the NFL scheduled the Niners-Seahawks divisional-round tilt for this upcoming Saturday, at either 1:30 or 5 p.m.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Bears will get an extra day of rest when they face off on Sunday after defeating the Panthers and Packers, respectively, last Saturday.

The scheduling shenanigans didn’t sit well with Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy, who took to social media on Sunday night to make his feelings known.

“NFL playoff scheduling is not fair. It might produce good ratings but it’s not fair,” Dungy said on X. “This late in the season recovery time is crucial and it is not given equally. Rams & Bears played Saturday games. They will face each other on Sunday with an extra day of rest. 49ers played on Sunday and will face Seattle on Saturday-short week of recovery. Why?”

The Hall of Famer added, “Don’t force [teams] to play the most important game of their season on a short week just for TV ratings. That is not fair!”

Dungy’s strong words are particularly notable given he’s employed as an analyst for NBC — one of the networks that may air the 49ers-Seahawks game — and a regular contributor on the league-owned NFL Network. It was a point parroted by many reporters who cover the 49ers, with NBC Sports Bay Area columnist Matt Maiocco leading the charge by bluntly stating, “This makes ZERO sense.”

The Niners themselves, who reportedly returned to the Bay Area around 2 a.m. Monday, certainly agree with the sentiment and could use the extra rest.

Going into the Philadelphia game, they were already without Nick Bosa, Mychal Williams, Fred Warner and Ricky Pearsall. Additionally, star tight end George Kittle is done for the year after suffering an Achilles tear against the Eagles. Trent Williams, Christian McCaffrey and Brock Purdy are all playing through injuries of varying degrees. Add it all together, and the Niners need a short week like Robert Saleh needs a hairdresser.

“Very strongly,” answered Shanahan when asked if he’d prefer to play Sunday, rather than Saturday, during a press conference before the schedule had been released.

“Hopefully if the NFL’s cool and understanding, they’ll make it Sunday,” Shanahan added.

The NFL was not cool and understanding, though a number of other NFL personalities weighed in to point out the obvious: The scheduling decisions are mostly about maximizing TV ad dollars.

“Fairness train left the station in 2024, when the NFL began flooding marquee teams with mid-week games, and put games on X-mas Wednesday,” Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer wrote on social media. “For better or worse, it’s about TV only.”

It’s also about giving each No. 1 seed an extra competitive advantage for earning the top spot in the conference. Since the NFL expanded the playoffs to 14 teams in 2020 — meaning just the top seeds would get a bye through the first playoff weekend — the No. 1 seeds have played on the Saturday of divisional-round weekend all but once (in the 2020 season). At this point, it’s become expected that the No. 1 seeds will play on Saturday each year, and the 49ers have been on both sides of that scheduling dilemma before.

In 2021, San Francisco beat the Cowboys on a Sunday during the wild-card round before having to play the Packers on a Saturday the following week. The Niners triumphed over the Packers that year but eventually lost to the Rams in the NFC championship game. Two years later, the 49ers were the No. 1 seed and defeated the Packers on a Saturday after Green Bay had played the previous Sunday.

San Francisco isn’t totally blameless for its current predicament. Had the 49ers beaten Seattle in Week 18 to clinch the top seed, the Niners would likely find themselves in the Seahawks’ enviable position.

Fair or not, the Niners will head to Seattle this Saturday for the arch rivals’ third meeting of the season.

FOX CATCHES 49ERS COACH TAKING MASSIVE WHIFFS OF SMELLING SALTS

by Alex Simon

Fox’s cameras focused in on Kyle Shanahan right as the San Francisco 49ers coach took a big whiff from smelling salts, a substance the NFL banned before the start of this season.

As Fox sideline reporter Tom Rinaldi was discussing how Shanahan got the Niners prepared to play in Philadelphia as part of the network’s pre-kickoff coverage, Shanahan was walking up and down the sideline before he lifted his hand up to just under his nose. With two fingers holding the small packet, Shanahan took at least four whiffs of ammonia inhalant, colloquially known as smelling salts, before handing the packet to a 49ers staffer.

Smelling salts have been a part of football for decades and it is rather commonplace on the sidelines, as the general belief is that a whiff of the strong substance can give a kick of energy and help sharpen focus. But during training camp, the NFL sent out a memo to teams saying they were banning the substance — which was highly controversial.

On the day it was announced, 49ers star George Kittle crashed NFL Network’s interview of his teammate Fred Warner to discuss the ban and said he considered retirement if he couldn’t have the smelling salts. The next day, the NFL Players Association sent its own statement clarifying that the ban was on NFL teams supplying the ammonia inhalant, but players could still use them if they supplied themselves.

The NFL’s stated logic for the ban was that it was following the recommendation of the Food and Drug Administration, which offered an official warning to consumers about ammonia inhalants in August 2024. According to the FDA, the manufacturers of ammonia inhalants “have not demonstrated these products to be safe or effective for their intended uses.” The FDA also said it received reports of adverse effects to smelling salts, including shortness of breath, seizures, migraines, vomiting, diarrhea and fainting. The memo also said the ammonia inhalants could help mask “certain neurological signs and symptoms,” making it harder to properly diagnose concussions.

But that ban clearly hasn’t stopped the 49ers from using them. The San Francisco Chronicle did a deep dive during the season on how the Niners continue to use the product and the systems they created among the players to make sure everyone has smelling salts. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)

Among the people that said they use them: 49ers general manager and former NFL Hall of Famer John Lynch and Shanahan, whom the Chronicle wrote “isn’t opposed to the occasional whiff.”

TWO OF CALIFORNIA’S LARGEST HOME INSURERS TO RAISE RATES BY 6.9% THIS YEAR

by Megan Fan Munce

Two of California’s largest home insurers will each raise rates for customers by an average of 6.9% later this year, according to filings with the California Department of Insurance.

CSAA, the AAA-affiliated insurer for northern and central California, will begin implementing the rate increase for nearly 481,800 homeowners starting on March 15.

Rates for more than 650,000 customers with Mercury Insurance, the third-largest home insurer in California, will begin to change in July. Homeowners’ rates are set to rise by an average of 8.2%, while condo owners and home renters’ rates will decrease by averages of 8.3% and 6.3%, respectively.

The exact amount of increase or decrease will depend on each customer and their wildfire risk. Changes to Mercury rates could range from a 15% decrease to a 124% increase, according to the filing. Some CSAA homeowners will see rates rise less than the 6.9% average, while others will increase by up to 8%.

Both rate filings were approved late last month. They’re the first rate increases to be approved under the year-old Sustainable Insurance Strategy — Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s slate of reforms aimed at improving California’s insurance crisis.

The reforms were expected to lead to rate increases, but Lara promised these hikes would come with the trade-off of insurers writing more policies in parts of the state where insurance has become scarce.

As part of its filing, Mercury committed to writing at least 2,000 more policies by July 2028 in parts of California the Department of Insurance has designated as “distressed” based on the cost and unavailability of insurance. The company had already been scaling up its presence in wildfire-prone areas, taking on roughly 200 new customers in Paradise — the site of the 2018 Camp Fire — in recognition of the town’s work to reduce wildfire risk.

CSAA noted in its filings that it already writes a significant share of policies in distressed areas, fulfilling the regulations’ requirement. However, the company said that it would offer insurance to an undisclosed number of customers currently on the California FAIR Plan in order to support the department’s efforts to move policyholders off the FAIR Plan.

“The difference between this and past rate changes is a commitment to write more policies,” Deputy Insurance Commissioner Michael Soller said in a statement. “Raise rates and run is a thing of the past under Commissioner Lara.”

Both insurers attributed the need for a rate increase to inflation and the risk of catastrophes such as wildfires. But each pledged to offer homeowners new discounts to offset the potential increase in premiums. Mercury offers discounts for customers who complete home hardening measures such as clearing out defensible space, enclosing their eaves or having decks built with noncombustible materials. The company says these discounts can reduce the wildfire portion of a homeowner’s premium by up to a third.

CSAA also offers discounts for home hardening and guarantees renewals for homeowners who secure a certificate from the Insurance Institute for Business and Homes recognizing their mitigation work. As part of the filing, the company said it would also launch new discounts for homeowners who install monitoring devices to prevent water losses.

Customers can reach out to their agent to ask questions about what discounts they might qualify for.

Each insurer applied and was approved for a 6.9% statewide increase. Many companies apply for this level of rate increase, because if they ask for a higher number, they are required to submit to a mandatory hearing if consumer advocates request one. Both Farmers Insurance Group and USAA have also applied for similarly sized increases, but have yet to be approved.

NEW POTATO CABOOSE

Last leaf fallen, bare earth where green was born
Above my doorknob, two eagles hang against a cloud
Sun comes up blood red
Wind yells among the stone
All graceful instruments are known

When the windows all are broken
And your love's become a toothless crone
When the voices of the storm sound
Like a crowd
Winter morning breaks, you're all alone

The eyes are blind
Blue visions are all a seer can own
And touching makes the flesh to cry out loud
This ground on which the seed of love is sown
All graceful instruments are known

— Phil Lesh (1968)

THE BOOKS I READ are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes, Don Quixote -- I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac -- he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books -- Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally and, of the poets, Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I've read these books so often that I don't always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you'd meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.

— William Faulkner

WELCOME TO THE TRIDENT: WHERE YOU COULD GET ANYTHING YOU WANT

by Benito Vila, photos courtesy of Mark Lomas

From its waterfront perch in Sausalito, the Trident’s clientele could see the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge. The club/restaurant was “a trippy space ship” whose passengers just happened to be a Who’s Who of rock & roll (the Stones, Quicksilver, Crosby, Garcia, Lesh, Sam Andrew, Peter Stampfel) and Hollywood (Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, Sterling Hayden) and elsewhere (Alan Watts, Sonny Barger, Bill Cosby), not to mention Robin Williams was one of the busboys and the tequila sunrise was invented at the bar. The Fifties became the Sixties at the club, then the Sixties became the Seventies…Benito Vila takes us back, through the words of those who were there.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It gets people out of bed and into trouble. So do waitresses wearing next to nothing, free-flowing tequila and across-the-bay views of San Francisco. Combine those with the best weed in town and discovering Sonny Barger, Clint Eastwood, Alan Watts, Bill Cosby and Sterling Hayden at the bar––that’s a recipe for trouble, too. And that’s The Trident, the late Sixties’ and early Seventies’ Bay Area go-to spot for organic food, good drugs and fabulous people in much the same way Times Square’s Tin Pan Alley (The Hi-Hat in HBO’s The Deuce) was the place for New York’s pimps, porn stars and prostitutes in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

The Trident’s attraction? The girls? The setting? The menu? The clientele? It depends on whom you ask. But in a place where Robin Williams was the busboy and porn film producer Summer Brown was a waitress; where Keith Richards tasted his first tequila sunrise and cocaine was a currency; where weed was being delivered by boat and Hells Angels could be found banging around on the deck, there were plenty of reasons to go–reasons that had nothing to do with the city view or the brown rice.

Located on the waterfront in Sausalito in what once was the San Francisco Yacht Club, The Trident was the brainchild of Frank Werber, the manager and producer of The Kingston Trio––the top pop-folk hit-makers of the late Fifties and early Sixties. When Werber first came across The Trident in the late Fifties, it was a nightclub known locally as “The Dock”, a sawdust-on-the-floor, bucket-of-blood for local mariners. In 1960, he and The Kingston Trio befriended Village Vanguard manager and Lenny Bruce pal Louis Ganapoler on a trip to New York and soon invited Ganapoler to Sausalito. In being convinced by Ganapoler to hire him as their new restaurant manager, Werber and the band collectively transformed the gloomy club into a Beat jazz bar, where patrons were treated to local pianists Vince Guaraldi, George Duke and Flip Nunez as well as headliners Jon Hendricks, Bill Evans, Sergio Mendez, Bola Sete and Willie Bobo.

By 1966 Beat poetry, Brazilian jazz and The Kingston Trio had fallen out of favor, setting Werber to forego his life as a music producer and instead turn The Dock into the sort of place his hippie rock star and Hollywood friends would want to go. That decision led to a gutting of the club’s interior and the introduction of curved wooden partitions, private banquet seating, a see-the-whole-place bar and a colorful peyote-culture ceiling mural by local artist Steve Elvin. That renovation also led to a new name––The Trident––the old yacht club taking on the name of Werber’s production company. It also led to hiring practices and standard operating procedures that would create front-page lawsuits today: Polaroids of all applicants, a be-as-bold-as-you-dare dress code, an ample drug cache for employees and patrons alike and the constant suggestion of sex.

Walls don’t talk but people do. Here are behind-the scenes stories from The Trident:

Trident hostess Cathleen Civale: Sausalito in 1969 was a whole different time. The park was still open, there were all these little shops full of all these interesting characters who had survived the Depression and World War II. I asked the old man who ran the dry cleaner and the grocery store why he worked so hard, and he said, “I no work, I die.” I had moved there from New York with a girlfriend into an apartment on Bridgeway. We had no furniture, just our bags, and half of those got stolen after we moved in. We took a job at a shop on Main Street making patchwork lace dresses; a couple of them sold and the next we knew we had Barbra Streisand and Miles Davis coming in. Miles liked to play chess, and we had a chess set in the window.

I needed to make some extra money so I went across the street to The Trident. I remember someone taking my picture and asking me what sign I was. I told them I was a Scorpio because Scorpios are supposed to be sexy, wary and appealing and all that. I’m really an Aries and I thought Aries were assholes. I was hired to be a hostess and that’s what I did at The Trident for four or five years, on and off. As the hostess, I didn’t dress as freely as everyone else did; I wore lot of vintage clothes. But we all dressed with not a lot of clothes on; we never wore bras. My belly button was always sticking out. Most of the other girls wore a lot of transparent stuff. They didn’t do it to be sexy; everyone who worked there was sexy. It was a way to be yourself, to be feminine, to be flowing––long hair, flowers, ripped jeans, T-shirts. There was no dress code and it was a bit of a shock for people coming in––a beautiful girl, nearly naked, revealing a part of herself––waiting on you. Customers came in and didn’t always know what to do with that. It was exciting and interesting for them, and for the girls––in their cowboy boots, jeans and cut-off tops, in cowboy shirts and short shorts, or long, delicate dresses.

Sharlee. According to Mark Lomas: Sharlee had a spectacular diamond set in one of her front teeth. When she smiled, and the light hit her diamond, she literally dazzled anyone caught in her spell. Others tried to replicate her bling, but no one came close.

Trident patron George Walker: The Trident was all about hippie chicks; scantily clad hippie chicks. It was an interesting hangout––to get a drink or a bite to eat, meet your dealer, look at the chicks. That’s pretty much what was going on. I remember a boat full of weed from Thailand came in there; it was at the dock and got busted. There’s a guy who was in on that who I met in Hawaii that is still, I believe, all these years later, on the FBI’s most wanted list. I was going around with a whole gang of people in those days, none of whose names I actually knew. Everybody went by a phony name and everybody knew everybody was using phony names. We just figured it was best never to use our real names on phone calls and stuff like that, or on anything that you ever mentioned to anybody. One guy in our circle got busted and then everybody vanished. I made zero effort whatsoever to find any of those people. They didn’t ever come after me and I figured that’s just fine.

Trident hostess Mae Mougin: It was 1972, I had graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and I wanted to spend the summer in Marin [County]. Someone said, “Oh, you should go work at The Trident in Sausalito.” I went there and I was told you had to show up three Mondays in a row and that once you showed up three Mondays in a row, Frank would see that you were interested. So I did that, and I got hired to be a daytime hostess. When he hired me, Frank was in jail. The deal was that he could work at the restaurant, Monday through Friday, but he had to sleep at the jail. That was his deal when he got sentenced: he slept in jail every night that summer. [Editor’s note: Werber managed to skate free of several marijuana arrests, beating all but one conviction. In that conviction, the judge ruled Werber’s use of pot for personal religious purposes wasn’t constitutionally protected.]

Trident Waitresses – Kathleen Delehanty and Karen Fudeman

There was a sexy, hippie draw to The Trident because of its time, its location and the sun. There was lots of skin: girls wearing tied-up handkerchiefs for a top, and wearing loose flow-y skirts. I noticed guys would come in in groups to sit at the bar. A lot of them became regulars that summer because of the girls, but it was a good vibe. It wasn’t a predatory vibe or anything like Hooters is today. We didn’t dress provocatively; we did our best to be sensual.

Trident patron Carl Gottlieb: The Trident had a deck with an expansive view of all of San Francisco and the most gorgeous waitresses north of the Playboy mansion. No airbrushing and no implants. Trident women had rings in their noses and tattoos of flowers and butterflies where you could see them, and sometimes where you couldn’t. There was no house uniform so waitresses could wear anything from Victorian velvet to see-through Indian gauze. Some shaved, some didn’t.

Trident waitress Nancy Winarick: There was a day I wore a crochet top with a crochet skirt. I didn’t have stitch on underneath. I loved it, feeling that free. I got tipped in cocaine that day, which really wasn’t that unusual.

Trident bartender/juice-maker Mark Lomas: I got out to Sausalito in 1973. I had two brothers who claimed they were in California surfing, having a great time. I came out to find nobody was surfing––it was more about taking drugs, having sex and people discovering themselves––it was all very curious for a college kid. I went into The Trident as a customer and was blown away. I came back a couple of weeks later and applied for a job. At that point, I had long hair, with a ponytail all the way down my back. My interview consisted of answering one question and taking a Polaroid, which is how the Trident hired people. The question was about my astrological sign. Apparently, they wanted Geminis that week.

I went in for my first day and was trained to be a busboy by Robin Williams. I worked with him bussing tables, emptying garbage, doing all the shit work that busboys do in a restaurant. We spent more time talking about the girls than clowning around.

Cathleen Civale: Robin [Williams] came when he was out of school [Julliard]. I always remember his humor was a little too much––it wasn’t my taste––but we became very close. He had a knack. He could be all over the place, jumping onto things, surprising people. He was funny and very, very smart. When there were people around, he was on. When people weren’t around, he was quiet, pensive. He wasn’t famous then, but he could stop the room, even when he was just clearing tables.

There was a bar in Sausalito that used to have talent night. Robin met the people from Laugh-In there [for the failed 1977 Laugh-In revival]. We all showed up to support him. He landed that and then he went on to more.

Trident busboy Robin Williams on David Crosby: I never knew David then, I just knew they would park their sailboat and all of the sudden, beautiful girls would be picked up in a dinghy and taken out to the boat. It was like shore leave. Shore leave with caviar and coke. Take on provisions and two sultry women in batik. [Long John Silver voice] Grab her, aye; have her washed and brought aboard. Fire a couple of bongs over the bow, Johnny [As himself again] David would park it right there; drop the sails and then drop trou.

Mark Lomas: Crosby was in a lot, but then again so were Steven Stills, Graham Nash and the members of Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Country Joe McDonald, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, Buddy Miles, Big Daddy Donahue [legendary ‘free form’ radio deejay], Van Morrison, Bob Marley, Link Wray, Joe Walsh, Leon Russell, Merl Saunders, the Smothers Brothers––they all came through [The Record Plant, a much sought-after recording studio that broadcast a live radio show, was located blocks away]. You can see The Trident from those days in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam. There’s a scene at The Trident that goes through the restaurant and out onto the deck; I don’t think they used extras. I think they shot it late in the lunch shift.

Cathleen Civale: Lots of Hollywood and lots of big names came through The Trident: Julie Christie, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Bill Graham. We had Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood, Lily Tomlin, Walter Matthau, Dino DeLaurentiis, F. Lee Bailey, Sterling Hayden, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary––if Leary’s wife or girlfriend used the word “intergalactic” one more time, I was going to shoot her. We were used to having these people around all the time; they just came and went. No one did anything different when they were there, except for when Groucho Marx came in. He was such a notable figure that he stopped the room. We had the [San Francisco] 49er football players in a lot, too. One of them had a kerfuffle with some Hells Angels, and everyone went charging out of the place when the fighting started.

Trident runner Thomas Burford: The day the Hells Angels and a San Francisco 49er had a confrontation I was on a first date with a young lady I was trying to impress. We were up on the third level. On the second level was the 49er on a date with his girlfriend and on the first level, overlooking the bay, is where the Hells Angels came in. There were two of them; they sat down and ordered coffee. Unfortunately, the waitress wasn’t moving fast enough, so they started using expletives and made her even more nervous while she was getting their coffee ready. I don’t know exactly what happened, but they started getting louder and then they started yelling at her.

One of them picked up a glass ashtray and threw it at her. The ashtray hit a wooden railing and it broke. Part of the glass flew up and hit the back of the hand of the girl who was on the date with the 49er. He yelled down for them to come up and apologize to his girlfriend. The two Hells Angels used some very unfriendly words towards him and made references to his girlfriend that he didn’t like. He said, “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you: get up here and apologize to her.”

Now, I’m telling my date not to move because I’m not sure which direction this is going to go. Meanwhile, the Hells Angels came up to the second landing, and when the 49er started to get up out of his chair, he kept getting up––he must have been about six-foot-eight; he was a man mountain. I had no idea anyone was that big. One Hells Angel jumped on him and then the other one. They were beating him; they had him on the ground. All the sudden, they were airborne––both of them––like you see in the movies. He sorted them out from there; this was a fight went on for a couple of minutes, again, like in the movies. It was ferocious; it was noisy; a few people were hurt but it wasn’t the 49er.

The Hells Angels got off the ground and ran out. I imagine they went out to go get some help from their buddies out on the street. By this time, though, Lou, the manager, had run up to find out what was going on. An hour or so later, Sonny Barger, the president of the Hells Angels, who was in town that day, was the one who came back. Sonny had a conversation with Lou and started kicking out $100 bills to pay for damages, buying everybody’s lunch and apologizing to everybody. You could tell Sonny didn’t want to be banned. The whole chapter was in town that day; they had come through like rolling thunder. Sonny wanted to be able to be at The Trident with its celebrities and he made himself humble, in his way.

Mark Lomas: Sonny [Barger] was hanging out with Clint Eastwood at the bar a lot back then because he thought that Clint would make him more famous. And Clint was hanging out with Sonny because he thought Sonny would make him more famous. All I heard is that Sonny was afraid that he was going to be kicked out forever. I understand he got up to about $1,600 dollars before Lou told him he was fine, that he could still come in. As you might imagine, that’s not the only time someone put in an immense effort to get into The Trident. Some mafia frogmen pulled up underneath and robbed the place [in October 1971]. They came in on some sort of skiff after hours. You can read all about that in A Rookie Cop vs. The West Coast Mafia; it’s a book written by the detective who was on the case.

Trident custodian Patrick Pendleton: About 2:30 in the morning, I was mopping the kitchen floor and I felt something behind me. I turned around to see the largest gun I’d ever seen, pointed right at my face. The guy holding it was a little shorter than me, dressed in a wetsuit that was not wet. He had a neoprene hood that covered everything but his eyes and his nose. He asked me who was here and I told him about Tom [Ribar], the window washer, in the dining room. They grabbed a dish-apron off a counter and threw it over my head. Tom and I were led to the men’s room and told not to talk, and to sit on the floor and stay there.

We could hear the guys drilling the safe. They came in periodically to check on us. After about an hour and a half, we risked talking and determined that these guys had gone and that we ought to tell somebody about it. So we got up and quietly checked the premises for stray bad-guys. Once we saw it was all clear, I hit one of the panic buttons and went out into the parking lot to wait for the cops to show up. Meanwhile, Tom cleaned up evidence of our drug use before the police got there.

After being interviewed by the detectives, I still had to finish cleaning the kitchen. Chef Pierre [Flaubert] was not one those guys I wanted to disappoint. I was just finishing up when he came in at about 6:30 am. After I told him our sad tale of woe, Pierre had this amused look on his face as if to say, “Goofy, I’m glad you managed to not get your head blown off.” It turned out the robbery guys had come all the way over from San Francisco in a zodiac boat and somebody saw them on their way back and that’s how they came to be caught.

Cathleen Civale: The robbery, impromptu parties, calls from Patty Hearst––those were just another day for us. The Trident was constant showtime; it was like you’d stepped into a play, or onto a trippy spaceship. It was sort of like Star Trek: we were the crew and we never knew what was coming next. When the call from Patty came, her lawyer Bill Choulos, [who represented Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Timothy Leary, and who had represented Jack Ruby with law partner Melvin Belli], had to go to a pay phone to figure out where Patty was and what the SLA wanted next.

That first night the Rolling Stones came with Bill Graham [June 1972], the restaurant had been closed. A handful of people were called in to open it up for them. I still remember exactly what I wore: satin thigh-high boots and an old Chinese kimono top and nothing underneath, or at least not on my boobs. I opened the door for the band and their entourage; it was about 35 people. I saw their bodyguards had a gun. I was shocked by that. They came into the restaurant, walked around and got comfortable at the big roundtable and we waited on them. We didn’t leave until 5:30 in the morning, but no one got so outrageous because you didn’t want to blow it. Do you know what I’m saying? You had to be cool and you had to do your job, but everyone was out of their minds. Everyone always was.

Patrick Pendleton: I have a distinct memory of Patsy and Josie in the ladies room trying to decide if Josie should go sans panties. The ladies of the Trident pushed the envelope to its extreme that night. Bill Graham arrived with about eight stretch limos and our “guests” were shown inside. The point man for this whole crew of was [the tour manager] Peter Rudge. Once the ice was broken, Frank, Lou and Bill retired to a quiet corner to swap “promoter stories” that nobody but themselves would ever appreciate.

At one point, Frank asked me to turn on the tiny faux fireplace for the sake of ambiance. As I finished lighting the fireplace, I felt something hit the back of my head, so I turned around and there was Keith Richards, biting into cocktail shrimp and tossing the uneaten tails around the room. He had a mischievous grin on his face––like he was daring me to do something about it. Right then, I suddenly felt this presence next to me and I turned to found myself eye-to-eye with one of the most menacing looking black men I had ever seen [Mick Jagger bodyguard, Leroy Leonard].

“I know what you’re thinking. Don’t do it”, he said to me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name’s Leroy, and I’m the head of security for this tour.” He was built like a linebacker.

“You want a drink, Leroy?” I asked.

“Nope. Working,” he replied.

“Well, how about some coffee?” I asked.

“Sure”, he said.

So I went and got him a cup of coffee, and we sat and talked for a couple of hours. At one point I looked up and Stones bassist, Bill Wyman was getting tag-teamed in backgammon by [Bill Graham Presents’] Jerry Pompili and Barry Imhoff. Peter Rudge was chasing Josie all over the restaurant, in vain, and saxophonist Bobby Keys was telling road stories in his Southern drawl: how he and Waylon Jennings burned out a hotel room somewhere in Ohio and how Bonnie Bramlett punched out Elvis Costello onstage. Charlie Watts was sitting in rapt attention, drinking what looked to be scotch.

Trident bartender Bobby Lozoff: Mick Jagger came up to the bar and asked for a margarita. I asked him if he had ever tried a tequila sunrise, and he said, “no”. So, I built him one––Jose Cuervo tequila, orange juice and a drop of grenadine over ice––and they all started sucking them up. After that night The Stones took that drink with them all across the country. In fact, Keith Richards called that [Rolling Stones 1972 American STP] tour “the cocaine and tequila sunrise tour” in his autobiography, Life.

That particular recipe came about because [fellow bartender] Billy Rice and I started experimenting with using tequila to make drinks that were usually made with gin or vodka. Our first tequila sunrise was really a tequila version of the Singapore Sling. We built it in a chimney glass: a shot of tequila with one hand, a shot of sweet and sour with the other hand, the soda gun, then orange juice, float crème de cassis on top, grenadine and that was it. We were serving hundreds of drinks per hour, dozens of drinks per minute. We had four or five registers and two bars going, so we didn’t run anyone a tab. It was cash money, only. We were all about volume, volume, volume––using both hands, going as fast as we could. Eventually, we simplified the recipe to just tequila, orange juice and grenadine.

Eventually, Lou talked to the Jose Cuervo people––we were their biggest outlet in the United States and they were talking to us––and that first recipe, the one with crème de cassis, went on the back of their bottles. At one point, our “new” Trident recipe made it on the back of the gold bottle [Jose Cuervo has since used their Rolling Stones/Trident connection from time to time in commercials, most recently, with “Miss You”, a 1978 track, playing over a 1972 scene].

Patrick Pendleton: The STP tour followed the release of Exile On Main Street and was The Rolling Stones’ first US tour without Brian Jones. [Editor’s note: It was actually their second tour without Jones; they toured with Mick Taylor in 1969]. You may remember the distinctive album cover: it had a jumbled anarchy, punk-look––it was designed by John Van Hamersveld, using Robert Frank photos. Mick Taylor, who had been in John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, handled second guitar duties on the tour and was conspicuously absent from the party––not that anybody missed him. Jagger seemed rather subdued for all the publicity surrounding his escapades––maybe he was pacing himself since the tour was only about a week into it. Terry Southern wrote “Riding the Lapping Tongue” for The Saturday Review on that tour [http://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1972aug12-00025]

Mark Lomas: There was a happy, positive, get high, stay high, drop off, turn-the-wheel–and-drop-in kind of mentality to The Trident, but there was also a dark side as you might expect in combining drinking men and beautiful women with drugs like cocaine and Quaaludes. Bill Cosby was also a regular at The Trident, and when one of the waitresses said he seduced her, drugged her and raped her, we didn’t give it the attention we should have. Things like that that happened. One waitress came in ecstatic that Warren Beatty had left her a message on her answering machine because then she could prove that she’d been out with him––but the message was that he’d gotten syphilis and wanted to do the responsible thing and call her back to let her know if by any chance he’d infected her, she could go see a doctor. Those were our kind of work stories. Every bartender who worked the liquor bar claimed they’d gotten laid on the bar.

When you got your paycheck, you were asked you if you needed anything––there was always either marijuana or cocaine. When you exited The Trident, there was a sign that read, “stay high”, with the letters carved into a wooden pole: S-T-A-Y H-I-G-H. During our breaks, we were allowed to go across the street, get high and come back to work. Meanwhile, I remember seeing Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh come in, sneak out on the deck to smoke––hiding in the corner––when nobody gave a rat’s ass.

Cathleen Civale: Everyone took drugs. I don’t know anyone who didn’t. People smoked pot; there was lots of cocaine, lots of tequila and there were psychedelics there, for sure, from time to time. We were a lot more innocent, especially when it came to drug use. It’s not like we knew them as “bad”. You had to work. It was hard work, in the midst of pandemonium. You had to hold your own because if you didn’t you’d break the flow.

Mae Mougin: Frank taught me how to read a table, work with the waitresses and the bartenders and how to keep people moving. He also pushed me into the arms of Marshall [Blumstock], the manager. I was 22. Marshall was cute, and I ended up hooking up with him. I don’t think that would fly today. You can’t just hook up and move in with your boss like that.

Mark Lomas: The Trident reflected the times. People were trying to figure out what that love, peace and happiness thing from the Sixties really meant and how it was going to play out in the Seventies. Frank and Lou saw themselves as being part of that, of making a scene that was hip, cool and next level––they wanted to create a special experience for everyone who entered the building. Between the architecture, the location over the water and the people they hired, they nailed it. And it was more than just the staff being beautiful; most of us were talented artists, writers, creators and working at things beyond what we were doing at The Trident. To succeed at The Trident, you had to have personality and you had to be able to work. Management drove you hard––you’d get to work and you wouldn’t stop working. You had to have the smarts to deal with a high-pressure environment and had to be able to give people the sort of experience they were willing to wait two hours for.

Trident patron Sam Andrew: I had a friend come into The Trident with a roll of Necco Wafers. You remember the candy? The wafers in his roll had a drop of Blue Acid on each one. He went around The Trident that morning giving one wafer to each person––each waitress, each busboy, the manager––who was then Skip Cutty––and all the kitchen staff. Everyone got one. The place was dosed big-time as the lunch hour peaked––and so was the staff. One waitress poured coffee until her customer started shouting at her as the coffee overflowed from the cup to the saucer and onto the table––all while the waitress stared at the wonder of it all.

There was another day at The Trident when the two cold-side cooks––the guys that made the salads and sandwiches as opposed to the guys on the hot-side that made steaks and hot dishes––they decided to share a hit of windowpane [LSD]. They put it on the cutting board in front of the containers that held the day’s portions of ambrosia, greens and mixed salads to cut it in half. As the chef’s knife cut through the gelatin of the windowpane, the two halves popped out of sight. They froze looking at each other for a second––and then started laughing. Later that afternoon, there was a woman who was so enthusiastic about the deliciousness of her salad that the hostesses thought maybe she was a bit tipsy. She was stoned out of her head.

Trident patron Peter Stampfel: Mad creative happens when you have more than one alpha in the room. It’s not a matter of merely getting a group of people together. It’s when there’s more than one alpha in the room that kicks everything into gear. That’s what was really happening at The Trident. There was a charge going through the place with so many alphas in there that everyone could feel it––like, they were onstage and in on “it”. Poor delusional stoners. It was just lunch.

(Benito Vila is a features writer living on the East End of Long Island, where he can be found on the water when he’s not researching and typing. The former head of a New York City graphic design firm, he helps companies with their operations and marketing.)

THIS HOUSING POLICY WAS TOO RADICAL FOR CA DEMS — UNTIL TRUMP EMBRACED IT

The president’s ban on corporations buying single-family homes has blue lawmakers scrambling to change their positions.

by Kevin Nguyen

“People live in homes, not corporations.”

That didn’t come from a leftist on the campaign trail but from President Donald Trump.

Between defending the killing of Renee Nicole Good and disparaging the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, the president announced Wednesday(opens in new tab) on Truth Social that he was “immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes.” He called on Congress to codify the policy without details about how it would be implemented or whom it would affect.

“[The] American Dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans,” the president wrote.

Republicans were quick to cheer the announcement(opens in new tab), but the news caught Democrats in California flat-footed. A day after the president’s declaration, Gov. Gavin Newsom followed suit during his final State of the State address, imploring lawmakers to “tackle” the “urgent” issue.

“These investors are crushing the dream of homeownership and forcing rents too damn high for everybody else,” Newsom said. “I think it’s shameful that we allow private equity firms in Manhattan to become some of the biggest landlords here in our cities in California.”

It was a whirlwind reversal for state Assemblymember Alex Lee of San Jose, who has spent the last two years trying to get a corporate landlord ban passed, only to be blocked by lobbyists and his colleagues in the Democrat-controlled Legislature.

The two bills introduced by the self-described Democratic Socialist aimed to prevent any company that owns more than 1,000 single-family homes from purchasing more properties and converting them into rentals. Neither bill passed the state Senate.

Lee said he is in early discussions with the governor’s team about next steps after Thursday’s speech. Newsom said he understood that efforts were already under way to codify the ban, adding that reining in “monopolistic behavior” would require more oversight, enforcement, and tax-code changes.

“His approach sounds different from mine,” Lee told The Standard. “I’m not worried about the methodology as long as we land on the same outcome.”

Lee said his party’s about-face — and the unlikely alignment of Trump, Newsom, and himself — proves just how potent the topic has always been. If anything, Trump’s public leadership on the issue should serve as a wake-up call for Democrats.

“The populist and morally correct position cannot be ceded to the right,” Lee said. “Most Americans have a healthy skepticism toward unchecked greed. If we don’t stand up to price gouging and fucked-up housing practices in a state where half of the people are renters, then we are really out of touch.”

Corporate homebuyers such as Invitation Homes, a publicly traded real estate investment trust (whose stock took a slight dip(opens in new tab) after the president’s announcement), bought more than 10,000 houses in California when the subprime mortgage crisis led to a wave of foreclosures, according to an analysis(opens in new tab) by residential appraiser Ryan Lundquist.

In 2024, the Dallas-based company agreed to pay $3.72 million in civil penalties and refunds to resolve allegations that it illegally raised rent on hundreds of homes. Critics argue that investors like Invitation Homes have exacerbated the state’s housing crisis by hoarding supply. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Observers who have opposed the ban on corporate landlords paint it as a misguided attempt(opens in new tab) to address the issue of housing affordability, arguing that increasing supply is a much more effective way to make homes cheaper.

“This topic has hit a nerve with consumers, but it’s still largely disconnected from the housing market,” Lundquist said. “If politicians aren’t doing anything else to promote housing affordability, then this just gives off the appearance of doing something.”

A 2023 study by Freddie Mac found that large investors in the single-family-home rental business likely own less than 4%(opens in new tab) of the country’s total housing stock. But a 2024 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office identified Atlanta, Jacksonville, Florida, and other markets where the share was as large as 25%(opens in new tab).

Gov. Gavin Newsom took a stance against institutional investors buying single-family homes after Trump announced his ban. | Source:Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard

California’s high home prices have limited the mass buyout of properties by institutional investors. However, the number of business entities that own more than 1,000 single-family homes grew from five in 2024 to nine last year, according to the State Library’s California Research Bureau(opens in new tab).

Still, Lundquist believes the issue is worth addressing on its own merit. “Investment funds might not be active in the single-family market today, but what happens in the next 50 to 100 years if they keep buying 1% more?” he asked.

When Lee’s ban was first floated in 2024, the National Rental Home Council slammed the legislation as an “attack” on housing providers. This time, with Trump making the call, the organization, which advocates for landlords of single-family homes, took a more measured tone.

“We appreciate the administration’s focus on ensuring Americans have access to a diverse mix of housing options,” said an NRHC spokesperson. “We look forward to engaging the White House and other policymakers in this important discussion.”

BOTH AMERICAN MEN and women are working pretty hard to make themselves sexually unappealing. Obesity is epidemic now that the national diet consists almost entirely of pizza and soda pop. You have to wonder how the idea of facial piercings, nose-rings, and massive tattoos caught on. Half the women in this country look like they could be harpooners on the whaler Pequod. Meanwhile, the tubby men with no prospects can occupy themselves with free porn on their phones — which, you might admit, kind of cuts down on their motivation to even try to meet real women, let alone protect and care for them.

— James Kunstler

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The nose rings or coke carbs a small earring in the side of the nose, I find very repulsive. Does snot shoot out of the little hole when you blow your nose?

Is the bull ring so your boyfriend or girlfriend can tie you down at night or lead you around BY THE NOSE?

“IT IS FOOLISH TO BE CONVINCED

without evidence,

but it is equally foolish

to refuse to be convinced

by real evidence.”

— Upton Sinclair

*Second Youth* (2016) by Marius van Dokkum

TRUMP ASSUMES THRONE

Editor,

Our American justice system just pivoted from the presumption of innocence to the presumption of guilt.

President Donald Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Vice President JD Vance all pronounced Renee Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a guilty criminal and terrorist before any investigation.

Today, federal immigration authorities are empowered to act as judge, jury, and, in Good’s case, executioner, without all the fuss of due process.

This is the justice approach of a totalitarian government.

MAGA officers are deemed to be blameless, correct and superior to all other citizens simply because they have the leader’s blessing.

A reporter asked Trump recently, “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage?” He reflected for a moment and answered, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

There it is, folks, the MAGA leader is now righteous God and king to all of his subjects in the Western hemisphere. He personally bestows or denies justice and salvation to all. Rule of law is king no longer.

Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah

RAY RICHARDS

I need to say something that's been bothering me for a while, and I'm saying it as a Marine Corps veteran who leans center-right.

This isn't partisan. This is observation.

We've slow-faded into accepting militarized police as normal, and nobody seems to notice or care.

Even as a USMC pilot, I went through six months of infantry training as an officer before flight school. I've worn the gear. The helmet, the tactical vest, the whole kit. And I can tell you from experience, it changes you.

There's a psychological shift that happens when you strap that stuff on. You feel different. You carry yourself different. You start seeing the environment differently. In the Marine Corps, that shift was appropriate because it's a combat culture and organization.

But these are American streets. American citizens. And we've got law enforcement dressed like they're kicking down doors in Fallujah to serve warrants in suburbia.

What happend to high standards and real policing tactics? Think Adam-12…Officers Reed and Malloy. Crisp uniforms. A revolver. A baton. High standards and professionalism. They looked like public servants because they were public servants. They de-escalated. They talked to people. They were part of the community.

Now? Tactical gear, beards, ball caps, Oakley sunglasses, sleeve tattoos, and a tactical kit that would make special operators jealous. And we've turned it into a fetish. We celebrate it. We assume that because someone looks hard, they must be a professional.

They're not.

I loved the Marine Corps. But I'll be honest, I was also blinded by it for a while. Mission first. Unit over everything. And that mentality made sense in that context.

But law enforcement doesn't get that critical examination. "Back the Blue" has become a shield against accountability. A blanket assumption that a badge plus gun equals hero. That tactical gear equals competence.

It doesn't.

Most people who join law enforcement aren't special operators. They're average people who desperately want to belong to something bigger than themselves. I understand that impulse deeply, it's why I joined the Marines. But wanting to belong doesn't make you qualified. Looking the part doesn't mean you can perform under pressure. And wrapping yourself in warrior aesthetics doesn't make you a warrior.

Old school law enforcement represented something. Standards. Bearing. Discipline. Professionalism that was demonstrated, not costumed. A revolver and a baton meant you had to rely on your training, your words, your judgment, not overwhelming firepower.

What I see now in law enforcement is the costume without the culture. The gear without the training. The authority without the accountability.

Are there good people in law enforcement? Of course. I know some personally. But this reflexive "law enforcement can do no wrong" mentality is lazy, dangerous, and intellectually dishonest.

A woman is dead. And before we sort ourselves into teams and start assigning blame, maybe we should ask harder questions:

Why do we accept a militarized police force as normal?

Why do we assume tactical gear equals tactical competence?

Why have we let "Back the Blue" become a substitute for actual standards?

I wore the uniform. I went through the training. I know what that gear does to your head.

It shouldn't be normalized on American streets against American citizens.

And we shouldn't pretend everyone wearing it is qualified to carry it. The fact that he called her a “fucking bitch” after he shot her three times should be a huge red flag for all of us.

ESCALATION WEEKEND

Three Days of Confrontations Between ICE and Protesters in Minnesota

by Ford Fischer & Matt Taibbi

After protester Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week, freelance videographers poured into the city. Toward the weekend, many left town, but our partner Ford Fischer – with whom we’ll be talking live on today’s America This Week – stuck around covered the continued escalation. He’s following a convoy of protesters and ICE agents at this writing.

Donald Trump and Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem had already dispatched 2,000 ICE agents to Minnesota before Good’s shooting in what was called the “largest immigration operation ever.” After the shooting, he sent at least “hundreds” more, with those officers arriving this past weekend.

“You’re tripping over feds now,” Ford says.

The hour-long montage above is a compilation of six scenes between Friday and Sunday. Only one, from Saturday, is what Ford calls “a traditional march, people walking around Ilan Omar speaking from the back of a truck,” i.e. “your standard First Amendment activity.”

The other protests have a more complex character. “What’s more fascinating to me is the people who are directly trying to follow around what ICE is doing, and their purpose is basically to make a ton of noise everywhere that ICE goes, in order to warn people around them.”

These protests exist in a gray area. As you watch the tape you see ICE agents — to the extent you can see them, given how much face-covering they wear — scrutinizing protester behavior, here and there determining it’s crossed a line. Ford has been trying to monitor where that line is and talk to anyone he can about the status of these confrontations, which were tense to start and grew more so as the weekend progressed.

A catalogue of this weekend’s heated events:

January 9, Friday. The tape starts on Friday night at the Canopy Hilton, where you can hear hearty chants of “You’re a Tom!” (1:41) and “You’re a piece of shit!” and “Fuck ICE!” (2:18) Meanwhile, Hilton security guards plead for calm, saying “We’re just doing our jobs” and “We’re not the bad guys here” (4:30). Some protesters throw water, one spits, others tag the hotel windows with graffiti, while windows are banged, some glass is broken, and “No Justice, No Peace!” is chanted as the group mass-kicks the building. Roughly 30 were arrested that night, as police say protesters tried to force their way in at about 9:45 p.m. Mayor Jacob Frey told demonstrators not to “take the bait” because “this is what Donald Trump wants.”

January 10, Saturday. At (12:54), man throws bologna slices at ICE vehicles exiting the Whipple Federal building, yelling: “Bitch!” One officer stops to take a picture.

“My impression was he had done it before,” says Ford. “When that guy showed up, some people were like, ‘Oh, the bologna guy.’ For whatever reason, they seem to take very unseriously baloney being thrown at them, but who knows?”

Later, as an ICE vehicle leaves a facility, the chant is, “Suck my fuckin’ dick, asswipes!” (13:50). More trenchant commentary: “You are what you fuckin’ eat, assholes!” (17:17). Not clear what had been eaten. At the (20:43) mark you hear Representative Angie Craig explain that she, Ilhan Omar, and Kelly Morrison were “rejected” from entry, and building employees would “not have a conversation” with the trio. At (26:21) Omar says something interesting, talking about how ICE detainees have been “denied the ability to contact their members of Congress,” in addition to being denied a chance to talk to families or their attorneys. Citizens and noncitizens are included in the census and in apportionment counts, and Omar clearly feels that noncitizens are part of her constituency.

January 11, Sunday. At (40:52) you see what’s believed to be the arrest of a Honduran national. Ford: “What happened in the seconds before it was that they told him to roll down the window and he didn’t comply… So that first arrest that you see… my understanding is that that is someone accused of being an illegal immigrant.”

At the same gas station later (44:20) there is another arrest. “The second arrest that you see in that video is at the same gas station, and the reason for the arrest is unclear. Again, this stuff happens really fast.”

At (55:03), back at the Whipple Center, you see ICE agents firing non-lethal pellets at protesters. At (56:10) you begin to see protesters carted away. At (58:08) a man on his knees talks about friends with expired passports who are afraid to come out. At (59:00) a woman who’d been detained for seven hours addressed the crowd. “They were accusing us of, uh, what you call it, it’s with an O,” she said.

“Obstruction?”

“They were accusing us of obstruction…”

She went on. Ford explains:

“She describes, from her perspective — again, hard to verify these details — she describes that she was in her car and out of the way [of ICE vehicles]. ICE was [according to her] perfectly capable of driving past them, and that they were approached and accused of obstructing and being in the way.” Hence the arrest and reported seven-hour detention.

“I think that the Feds are getting very much sick of being followed around like this,” said Fischer. “I would say that from the Feds’ perspective, it’s making their job more difficult, but also more dangerous.”

Ford’s out on the road right now. Walter Kirn and I will try to get him on live at 4:00 p.m. ET.

These “watch and warn” protests seem to have the backing of Democratic Party politicians like House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who said about Trump’s deportation agenda, “We’re going to fight it in the streets.” There is significant disagreement about the definition of legal and illegal fighting.

Provided protesters keep a distance and don’t touch or obstruct officers, they’re generally on safe ground, but the Trump administration in a pointed announcement Friday put demonstrators on notice that “you will not stop or slow us down,” and “if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

The Friday Homeland Security press release claimed a 1300% rise in “assaults against DHS law enforcement” and included photos of other car ramming incidents. Assistant Secretary Tricia McGlaughlin denounced “dangerous criminals” who might be “illegal aliens or U.S. citizens” who are “assaulting law enforcement and turning their vehicles into weapons.” The DHS media campaign now focused on “sanctuary politicians” like Frey and Tim Walz, who they point to as encouraging this behavior.

This fundamental difference of belief about the legitimacy of federal immigration operations goes back decades.

The sanctuary city movement started with a handful of priests in Berkeley and San Francisco in the seventies and eighties, but has grown exponentially. The original aim of advocates like the Quaker Jim Corbett and Reverend John Fife was to provide shelter for victims of death squads by “American-backed regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala.” The Los Angeles city council in 1985 declared the city safe for immigrants “fleeing persecution and violence,” and St. Paul, Cambridge, and West Hollywood passed similar resolutions. This was back at a time when nuns defying the Reagan administration made headlines for “smuggling” a few immigrants at a time.

RENEE GOOD & THE RAGE THAT FUELS STATE VIOLENCE

by Ruth Fowler

We are at JFK, waiting for the ground staff to retrieve our stroller. The baby is crying. He holds his arms out and looks at me, wailing and hot.

Please give him to me, I say quietly.

He’s fine, my husband snaps, and refuses to meet my eye. The baby cries harder.

He’s not fine. He wants me. He wants his mum.

He’s fine.

He’s not. Please, just give him to me. Give him to me?

I’ve started crying now too. Hot milk prickles at my breasts.

No.

Just give him to me! My voice is high and panicked. My baby cries harder. Husband looks at me now, his eyes cold, blue and furious. His voice is low, controlled, a malevolent, vicious undertone. He speaks slow as if there’s a period after every word. Will you stop you psychotic – fucking – bitch.

There are many of us who recognize this word, “bitch,” and the hot, scorching punch of it in this kind of context. After the shots are fired in the footage of Renee Good’s death, a voice can be heard calling her warm, dead body leaking hot blood over children’s stuffies, a “fucking bitch.”

The agonizing moment-by-moment breakdowns, the analysis of angles, the legal justifications, the endless videos which will continue to surface as neighbors trawl through their RING cameras – none of this mattered in that moment. That “fucking bitch,” to those of us who have been victimized by coercive control, was a conviction.

In Civil Protection Orders, the most common gender insult was ‘bitch.’ There are so many studies which track the way verbal dehumanization starts to pave the way for eventual violence, from studies with women surviving near fatal attacks, to social worker reports, to beyond. It’s a detail defenders want us to ignore — a slip of the tongue in a stressful moment. But language matters. Slurs emerge when professionalism collapses and something more primal takes over. They reveal how the speaker understands the person in front of them: not as a citizen, not as a human being, but as an object of contempt. The “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis” matters, because it is a sign that common decency will not suffice at a time, at a moment like this, when the breakdown is so acute.

Fucking bitch is not a phrase uttered in desperation, in pain, or in terror, but in anger. In retaliation. It is a sign of verbal dehumanization that signals contempt, not panic. Fury, not fear. How dare you refuse to acknowledge my power. You are worthless.

That contempt is the emotional precondition for violence.

Even before the personal footage believed to belong to Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee surfaced this morning, the rage of that ‘fucking bitch’ slapped me in the face and took me back to a time when the person I trusted most in the world was subjecting both myself and my baby to unrestrained rage on a daily basis. America as an abused spouse is a trope that has been oft repeated throughout Trump’s centuries long regime of terror, which has apparently only been about a year long. Domestic violence is not a shorthand for politics, but rather that the current regime incorporates coercive control as a political technology.

Renee sounds and looks calm in the footage we have. She’s in her car. I imagine the heat blasting, probably a thermos of joe in the cupholder next to the stuffies crammed into the glove compartment. Her hot breath frosts in the frigid Minneapolis morning. Her wife walking outside the car, throwing smart comments out, is pissed. But she’s not out of control. She’s not threatening. Being annoying, and annoyed, is not grounds for murder. Throwing smart ass comments out to law enforcement is a First Amendment Right. Renee herself is not threatening. She’s de-escalating.

But then that furious hot spat of anger, the anger which rises out of nowhere, the anger which erupts and destroys in seconds, the anger which pops out three bullets because those queer bitches are pissing you off and getting in your way at 9:30am on a Tuesday morning, the anger which leaves the victims reeling and screaming on the side of the road saying it’s my fault it was my fault I made her do it while the perpetrator of that rage puts their gun back in their holster and calmly walks around for several minutes showing no visible signs of either injury, distress, fear or sorrow. Just satisfaction.

He looks satisfied.

Rage is not incidental to state violence. Rage is the fuel for state violence. And as every person in a coercive controlling relationship knows, the victim will be blamed and the “fucking bitch” will be manipauletd, until that was never rage at being disobeyed and disrespected, but always fear and desperation and pity. Fear can be perfectly retrofitted onto rage. Panic can be rehearsed after violent consequences have been meted. And they will be accepted by the system because violence is an acceptable corrective when the victim has committed the crime of being black, being queer, being a woman, being an other, or being obviously opposed to the regime.

Domestic violence is always about control. It is about one person’s impossible need to control every single aspect of another person’s life, and the rage emerges from the futility of this exercise. It’s often triggered by something inconsequential: a refusal, a delay, a tone of voice, a choice of words. Looking happy, looking sad, looking queer, looking straight. Control perceives this inconsequential slight as vast humiliation, and responds with excessive punishment.

What we see in the Good footage follows this script with chilling precision. Orders are barked. Compliance is demanded instantly. There is no meaningful attempt to de-escalate, no pause, no retreat. When the situation slips even slightly out of the officer’s control, the response is lethal.

Authoritarian power borrows the same emotional logic as domestic violence.

The tools are familiar: intimidation, humiliation, unpredictability, and the promise of consequences if you don’t comply fast enough, perfectly enough, gratefully enough.

Trump did not invent this logic — but he has normalized it. For Trump and his cronies, violence is not a last resort. It is a corrective, and it is the first instinct.

ICE, in particular, has become a perfect vessel for this ideology with its masked agents, minimal oversight and constant posture of threat. It has instilled an institutional culture that treats civilians as potential enemies and disagreement as provocation. In this context, Ross’s rage is not an aberration. It is how Trump’s America will continue to enforce itself.

What chills me is not whether a jury will find Ross legally justified. It’s that the system seems uninterested in whether rage itself should disqualify someone from holding lethal authority. The state has taught its agents that they should defend reflexively. They have taught law enforcement for years that civilian death, particularly of young black civilian lives, will be litigated as a PR problem rather than a moral one. Over a decade ago, I quoted Malcolm X in an article I wrote about Christopher Dorner, the LAPD cop who went rogue and started killing his colleagues. I was not scared of Dorner, I said. Or no more scared of him than any other cop with a gun in the United States of America. “The chickens come home to roost”.

The foundation for Trump’s America has been laid in the fabric of American society decades before Tuesday’s horrors. It is no rurpsie that all it took was one vile idiot to build a Trump Tower on top of it and transform the tragedy of American policing into the humanitarian hell that it has become. Renee Good’s death is being processed by the right as an isolated incident, and by the left as a symbol of the horrors of Trump’s America. It isn’t. It’s part of a decades-long continuum in which state violence has increasingly come to resemble the dynamics survivors recognize from private life: domination framed as protection, punishment framed as necessity, rage framed as fear. Trump could only achieve this because America was already rotten before he arrived.

(Ruth Fowler was born in Wales and lives between Los Angeles and London. You can find out more about her RuthIorio.com and Venmo @ruthiorio. CounterPunch.org)

FOR THE LOSS OF RENEE GOOD

We blow our whistles
And we all throw our snowballs
And cry Shame! Shame! Shame!

— Jim Luther

LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

Minnesota and Illinois Sue Trump Administration Over ICE Deployments

F.B.I. Inquiry Into ICE Shooting Is Examining Victim’s Possible Ties to Activist Groups

Supreme Court to Hear Challenges to State Bans on Transgender Athletes

E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution

U.S. Attacked Boat With Aircraft That Looked Like a Civilian Plane

‘Shoot to Kill’: Accounts of Brutal Crackdown Emerge From Iran

The Rise of the Self-Serve Blood Test

Maxim Naumov Earns U.S. Olympic Figure Skating Spot, Embodying Team’s Resilience

PRIORITIES STRAIGHTENED: "The E.P.A. used to consider how many lives would be saved when setting air-pollution rules. In a reversal, the agency now plans to calculate only the cost to industry, according to internal documents seen by The Times." (nytimes.com)

"THE MAIN PROBLEM in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece."

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

IF I MUST STARVE

If I must starve,
let it be with dignity in my children’s eyes,
not with my hands tied by silence.

Let the world witness
that I did not bow to the hunger
but stood, even as the sky emptied
and the earth closed her mouth.

If I must starve,
let it be while I still cradle my child’s hope,
not as a number lost in footnotes.

Let the sea carry my name
to shores that forgot my people,
and let the wind whisper:
she fed love when bread was gone.

— Nour Abdel Latif (2025)

EXPOSING THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Paper of Zionist Record

The New York Times is an accomplice to the genocide in Gaza, serving as a mouthpiece for American imperialism and shaping elite consensus around foreign policy. Times editors have told reporters to avoid “inflammatory terms” like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” — and even to avoid saying “Palestine.” Headline writers have manipulated the English language and deployed tricks of syntax to obscure the U.S. and Israel’s perpetration of atrocities and blame Palestinians for their own oppression. Reporters have printed the Israeli military’s lies.

The Times’ commitment to Zionism is systemic and generational. For decades, critics of U.S. foreign policy have offered crucial analyses of the paper’s bias. This dossier borrows from and adds to that body of criticism by exposing the material and ideological ties to occupation and apartheid held by many high-ranking editors, journalists, and executive officers at the Times. The employees included in this dossier are individually as well as structurally incentivized to run cover for war criminals. That these individuals are empowered to frame the discourse around Israel’s genocide is an indictment of the entire institution of The New York Times.

Such an indictment demands a public response. Journalistic malpractice enables the weapons shipments that sustain the war on Gaza. The mass slaughter of a besieged people must be named for what it is: a genocide. The New York Times must be held accountable for its complicity. We continue to call on readers of the Times and members of the public to boycott, divest, and unsubscribe from the paper of criminal record. You can learn more about our campaign here.

This dossier is an ongoing and evolving project. To submit information about a Times staffer’s ties to occupation and apartheid, write to our secure tipline: [email protected]

(newyorkwarcrimes.com)

Musical gathering at the Kansas City home of Thomas Hart Benton ca 1940; Benton is seated on the floor, his son TP is playing flute next to his mother, Rita.

13 Comments

George Hollister January 13, 2026

Would banning corporations from owning housing change the supply of housing or the cost of housing? Would it increase the supply of housing? Would housing be more affordable? Would building more housing be easier? The answer to all those questions is, no.

- Harvey Reading January 13, 2026
  
  Banning corporations from owning yet more is ALWAYS a good idea. They represent wealthy kaputalist scum, the filth of the nation.
  
  - George Hollister January 13, 2026
    
    OK, a position based on hate and nothing else.
    
    - Harvey Reading January 13, 2026
      
      The “position” stems from observations of reality of how this country has acted over the last 60 years. You seem to be a dyed-in-the-wool, “true believer” in the mythology that “history” and “social studies” classes crammed into your skull in grade school and high school.
      
- Kirk Vodopals January 13, 2026
  
  How many corporations are owner-occupiers?
  
  - George Hollister January 13, 2026
    
    How many of those houses are occupied by renters? My guess is almost all of them, or what is the point of ownership?
    
- Whyte Owen January 13, 2026
  
  The population is no longer growing, in many places declining, but housing stocks are shrinking. What gives?
  
  - George Hollister January 13, 2026
    
    The last time I looked, when immigrants are included, including illegal immigrants, the population is growing. In California the population is shrinking. The price of a house is too high for most home buyers. Government is a big part of the problem. Front end costs are unnecessarily high. The building code needs to be substantially reformed. This can be done if there was a will to do it, which there isn’t.
    
    - Bob Abeles January 13, 2026
      
      California’s population grew by 1.20% from 2023 to 2024. Source: U.S. Census Bureau 1-Year American Community Survey.
      
      - George Hollister January 14, 2026
        
        Thanks for the correction. Are we not losing Congressional seats?
        
        
        Bob Abeles January 14, 2026
        
        US House seats are apportioned by relative population as measured by the Decennial US census. In 2021 California lost 1 seat due to this calculation. Simply put, it means that some other states had populations that increased at a rate greater than California’s. I’m certain that AVA readers can grasp the difference between a relative change in population, which did occur, as opposed to a net loss of population, which did not.
        
James Tippett January 13, 2026

On Trump and corporate ownership of single family homes: even a blind hog gets and acorn every once in a while. Doesn’t make it any less a blind hog.

Iggy January 14, 2026

Zizek may be funny, but Monthly Review laid bare his reactionary politics several years ago. He is still humorously (?) carrying on the good fight against the Stalinist Soviets. Amusing, but misguided! The anti Marxist bases are already well covered.

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