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DRY WEATHER and above normal daytime temperatures will continue through much of the upcoming week. Overnight and morning temperatures will remain chilly with patchy dense fog along the river valleys and around Humboldt Bay. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 47F on the coast this Tuesday morning. Fog rules the forecast for a couple days it looks like. Light rain next week ? I'm watching.
AURORA BOREALIS: Couldn't see it naked eye. Only thru the camera. (KB)
SHERIFF’S OFFICE CONTINUES SEARCH FOR MISSING PHILO TEEN
by Sydney Fishman
The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office is continuing to search this week for a missing Philo teen whose car was last seen in San Francisco.
Sara Gene Keene, 17, was last seen leaving her foster parents’ home in Philo around 11 a.m. Jan. 2. Her vehicle, a white 2013 Acura TSX four-door sedan with California license plate 9UYY222, was detected by automatic license plate readers in San Francisco the same day, according to the sheriff’s office.
Keene is described as 4 feet 11 inches tall, weighing 115 pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes. The 17-year-old was last seen wearing a black sweatshirt, black sweatpants, and black tennis shoes.
The 17-year-old’s foster parent told authorities that the teenager had expressed an interest in visiting a friend who lives in San Francisco, but her parents told her not to go. The foster parent said that shortly after Keene left home, she turned off the location on her cell phone. Her parents have not been able to track her, and Keene has not contacted them.
The sheriff’s office has issued a Be On the Lookout alert to law enforcement agencies in San Francisco and surrounding Bay Area counties, according to Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Capt. Quincy Cromer. The office has also entered Keene’s information into the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System as a missing juvenile.
The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office has been in communication with the San Francisco Police Department on the case. SFPD checked the possible address of Keene’s friend in San Francisco on Jan. 9, but police were not able to locate Keene, her friend, or the vehicle.
Anyone with information on Keene’s disappearance should contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office by calling (707) 463-4086.
(MendoVoice.com)
Help Find Sara Keene
Sara Gene Keene, a 17-year-old from Philo, California, has been reported missing.
- Name: Sara Gene Keene
- Age: 17
- Gender: Female
- Missing Since: January 2, 2026
- Missing From: Philo, California
- NCIC#: M498775439
Sara may still be in the local area, or she may have traveled to other cities in California.
Time matters. Someone may have seen or heard something that could help bring Sara home.
If you have any information, please contact: Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office (CA), (707) 463-4411, NCMEC: 2073520
Please share. Even the smallest detail could help reunite Sara with her family.
She is missed, she is loved, and she is still being searched for.
HEY POTTER VALLEY!
It’s very important for us to identify those within the Potter Valley Irrigation District whose well might have gone dry after the Aug 4 Flow Variance went into effect that severely reduced irrigation.
There are strong laws in place against blocking access to drinking water. PG&E needs to respect those laws. PG&E has requested permission to PERMANENTLY reduce irrigation flows.
Having this information will help protect future Potter Valley water.
Please spread this within your networks and Message this information to me.
Thank you!
Dr. Rich Brazil, DVM
KATIE SMITH: My brother in law took this photo while up in a tree on Navarro ridge, looking down at Navarro River. 01/18/26
HONESTY, AT A MINIMUM
The Ukiah Valley Water Authority (UVWA) is quietly planning to stun those of us who utilize “water” on a regular basis by increasing the price to it by a lot. A real lot.
A series of water hikes begins March 1. Ukiah’s will go up a “modest” 18% while other districts, (Hello there, Willow, Redwood Valley and Millview!) will take a 54% shot to both the jaw and wallet; Calpella’s will jump 36% on top of a 15% increase in 2025.
These numbers come courtesy of No Ukiah Annexation (NUA) a group of local volunteers who seem to have thwarted the city’s poorly conceived and mostly camouflaged plan(s) to annex a sizable percentage of Mendocino County.
But maybe not. As NUA warns “These (water increase) proposals do not exist in isolation. Over the past two years the city of Ukiah has repeatedly pursued strategies to expand its authority over surrounding communities, first through large scale annexation proposals … and now more quietly through the UVWA.
“There is a clear pattern of consolidating control over regional infrastructure and imposing disproportionate costs on unincorporated areas, creating financial pressure that makes annexation appear inevitable.”
For whom do city officials work? What are their plans? Why don’t these officials explain, in simple words for stupid citizens, their long term goal?
— TWK
GET THE FLOCK OUTTA HERE
The Public Safety meeting will be held on January 21, at City Hall, starting at 3pm.
Zoom app link for those that have the Zoom app on their computer: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85254833329
Browser link for those who want to connect without downloading the Zoom app (join early if you choose this option as you'll likely have to grant additional permissions for your browser to access the microphone): https://zoom.us/wc/join/85254833329
Or join by telephone: +1 253 215 8782 US (*6mute/unmute; *9 raise hand) +1 346 248 7799 US (*6mute/unmute; *9 raise hand)
Webinar ID: 852 5483 3329 Link to the agenda: https://cityfortbragg.legistar.com/View.ashx
To speak during public comment portions of the agenda via zoom, please join the meeting and use the raise hand feature when the Chair or Acting Chair calls for public comment on the item you wish to address.
Written public comments may be submitted to Administrative Assistant Laura Godinez: [email protected]
Now is the time to make your voice heard. Decisions about surveillance technology affect our privacy, our neighborhoods, and our future, and City Council needs to hear directly from the people who live in and visit Fort Bragg. A few minutes of public comment can make a real difference. Please attend or call in to the Public Safety meeting and ask council members to place this issue on a future agenda so it can be discussed openly and publicly. Getting rid of these cameras locally is the first step towards making our community safer for all that live in it.
— Amy
REPORT FROM A SMALL FARM IN BOONVILLE
Petit Teton Monthly Farm Report
Welcome to 2026. It's starting with a more hellish political bang than any since Jan 6, 2021. The pigeons are coming home to roost later this year but first we have to resist through more and more evil destruction.
The other day a pleasant looking middle-aged woman stopped at the farm for eggs. While Steve was retrieving the eggs from the storeroom he suggested she look through the display of canned foods. She was intrigued enough to choose two items, a 16oz jar of beef bone broth and a 4oz jar of Salted Caramel Apple butter. When she entered the commercial kitchen to pay, she expressed surprise—at it's professionalism? it's handsomeness? - and thanked us for the purchases. She was very polite and seemed pleased. Her tab came to $43
Imagine our surprise when we received a Google email saying a recent customer, calling herself a "local guide" had left a message on our site along with 2 stars. It is as follows:
“Very expensive place. A dozen eggs is $13. My bill came to $43. All I got in addition was a small 4 oz jar of pear butter and a small 12 oz jar of bone broth and that cost me another $30. Whoa. Won't be stopping in there again. Whole Foods is cheaper and that's saying something.”
Our response: Yes, we are expensive, which was never part of our business plan when we began operations 22 years ago. Sadly, our products are not accessible for all. It is a reflection of the true cost of production without subsidy support. To compare us to Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, exemplifies your ignorance about the nature of the food system in our country. If you want inexpensive food, shop at the big-box stores that source from suppliers that have access to Farm Bill subsidy support.
You purchased fresh yesterday eggs despite being told the price and expressing surprise. The jam was Salted Caramel Pear Butter, not available at Whole Foods. You have mischaracterized the bone broth. It is 16oz, and was made from bones of humanely raised, 100% grass-fed cows. You didn't check the posted jar prices or ask us before purchasing them.
It is sad to see a "local guide" undercutting us purely on price, with no mention of quality or recognition for the uphill battle we face competing with industrial agriculture. We are good stewards of the land we are on, pay our workers a living wage, offer unique products produced from inputs grown on our farm, and are doing our best to keep small production alive in this country. Many conscious, loyal customers of ours understand this, and we are grateful to them for supporting our unprofitable venture.
We hope you enjoy your purchases.
I think folks are under a lot of psychic stress these days given what's happening in this country and around the world both politically and climatically. It takes effort to be kind and thoughtful; here's hoping we're able to end this maniac run regime sooner rather than later.
Yours, Nikki Auschnitt and Steve Krieg
Boonville
ANTLE’S PRICE
To the Editor:
Darcie Antle, Mendocino County CEO, was vastly overpaid for being incompetent and arrogant!
Darcie Antle earned $319,112 in 2024, according to public payroll data.
According to public records, Darcie Antle's salary increased by 12% ($33,650) from 2023 to 2024. Her salary increased by 24% ($54,917) from 2021 to 2023.
Darcie Antle's salary was 166% higher than the average and 199% higher than the median salary in Mendocino County in 2024.
John Sakowicz
Ukiah
PETROLIA IN WINTER
by Katy Tahja
Twelve hours of driving, 190 miles and $38.00 of gas provided my husband and I all we needed for a Sunday Drive over a road we hadn’t traversed in 40 years. A drive to Petrolia on the Mattole River Road on a perfect winter’s day combined history, adventure and wild empty spaces.
In the dim dark ages of the past (think early 1970s) I was a bookmobile librarian learning to drive the vehicle by driving with an instructor over every route to every location the library serviced. One route came out of Ferndale, south to Petrolia and Honeydew, then east to Highway 101 and back to Eureka. Far more hours were spent driving to tiny rural locations than were spent passing out books. The arrival of the bookmobile once every two weeks was a community event. This treacherous terrain was a great practice for the later years I spent driving out of Willow Creek in the northeastern side of the county to places like Orleans, Weitchpec and Pecwan.
So I wanted to know — was the countryside as beautiful as I remembered from 50 years ago? The answer is yes. If you like a stunningly beautiful environment empty of most people this is the place to take a drive — but give yourself LOTS of time, or plan on spending the night in some place like Fortuna. Believe me — 12 hours driving time is excessive for a day’s drive.
To start this adventure we drove up Highway 101 and started west at Humboldt Redwoods State Park’s northern boundary exiting to drive through the Rockefeller Forest along the Mattole Road. Twisting and turning through big trees and narrow roads you pass Bull Creek, crest over Panther Gap at 2742’ and glide down into the river valley and Honeydew.
Yes, I remembered southern Humboldt was famous for marijuana growing but I was astounded by the number of huge commercial hoop house grows, and the fact most seemed abandoned. Long gone are the days before legalization when a pound of weed was worth $2000. Happily, surviving thriving homesteads with cattle and sheep operations feature tidy houses and barns now 150 years old. We stopped to picnic at A.W.Way County Park and found the campground full of fisherman out for salmon.
Just before Petrolia is a Lighthouse Road going out to the mouth of the Mattole. The Mattole Lumber Company 110 years ago had a two mile railroad going out to a shipping point we hoped to see, but it was on the far side of the river. The beachfront campground had “Bear Warning”: signs all over it. The old Punta Gorda Lighthouse south on the coast there is long gone.
The road continues northwest to Petrolia where the first commercial oil well in the state was drilled in the 1860s. While hopes were high production was insufficient to continue and people settled on ranching and fruit growing. The Petrolia Store (cash only) has the post office, a tiny food service, local arts and crafts, home baked goodies, a lending library and a community bulletin board. And yes, the county library bookmobile still comes to Petrolia.
Continuing west you reach a hill overlooking miles of empty beach and Cape Mendocino and Sugarloaf Rock to the north. The beach is private property and browsed by cows, horses and elk. There is no “official” beach access but a few cars were parked as people were checking out the tide pools on a low tide. Just south of the Cape is “Ocean House” which I remembered from long ago and I’d bet that ranch has been there 100 years. Talk about a jaw dropping beautiful place to live if you love being in the middle of nowhere.
The road leaves the coast at Capetown and starts zig zagging up Bear River Ridge towards Ferndale. Herds of elk browsed beside the road ands cattle were wandering all over the road. In places there were some truly gigantic moss covered old Hemlock trees. From Ferndale we took Grizzly Bluff Road through the Eel River valley to Rio Dell and Highway 101 to start the long drive home. Dairy farmers were prosperous here and built large well crafted barns and homes that have lasted more than a century.
Readers who follow my writings know I love the names put on places. We traveled with a 60 year old Metsker map that labeled every wide spot on the road. Landforms and creeks were named for wildlife including buzzard, coon, eagle, moose, panther and rattlesnake. Horse names were on a hilltop, and on Horse Collar Creek and Saddle Mountain. There wasn’t just bear — it was Bear Trap Ridge and Grizzly Creek. Deer names were in Little Buck and Fawn creeks.
The devil got his name on stuff including the Devil’s Elbow (in a river) and Devil’s Gate (on a stream). The politically incorrect word Nig**r was applied to a Head (a hilltop) and a Heaven (an opening). Color words appeared in Coffee Creek, Red Rock and Green Pond. Named places I might not want to visit included Sweat Creek and Fly-Blow Gulch.
I strongly recommend getting out on the road and off on an adventure whenever possible.
EVER WONDER why Petrolia is called PETROLia? In 1865, the first commercial oil well in California was drilled on the North Fork of the Mattole River, near what would become Petrolia. It was owned by the Union Mattole Oil Company and produced coal oil that, at the time, was primarily used in lighting.
The first shipment of crude oil was sent to the Stanford Brothers in San Francisco for refinement on June 12th, 1865, and consisted of about 6 packages of 15-20 gallons each. It was then sold for $1.40 per gallon. This was the first oil from a Californian well to be distilled and sold.
This marked the start of California's first oil boom. Between 1865 and 1866, several wells were drilled in and around Humboldt County. Like the Union Well at the North Fork Mattole, the Joel Flat well, and the Brown & Knowles well, at the Junction of the North Fork, were drilled by hand. Each were between 300 and 500ft deep. There were three wells in Oil Creek, two at Bear River, one at McNutt Gulch, one at Petrolia, and one at Buckeye. Bear River, Oil Creek, and Joel Flat had the heaviest gas flow. While Joel Flat, Buckeye, McNutt, and Brown & Knowles were the best oil producers.
The oil boom would not last long - all the producing wells faced issues. The wells had trouble with caving, water, crooked holes, low production, and the difficulty of transporting it out of the county. The Union Mattole well only produced only a few thousand gallons in total. This all led to the oil boom officially dying in 1866, though this was not California's last attempt at mining for oil. There were other booms in 1894, 1899, 1900, 1907, 1921, and 1935 but they did not have much success.
OLD ORNBAUN HOT SPRINGS, some clues
This piqued my interest —
Not much info to be found on Old Ornbaun Hot Springs but I did find this print to digital post from an old 1934 Healdsburg Tribune article that is a fascinating read and may provide some clues to accessing the hot springs if it is still possible to do so.
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=HT19340414.2.14
— “Seanti”
FROM EBAY, A PHOTOGRAPH OF SEMI-LOCAL INTEREST (via Marshall Newman)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, January 19, 2026
SERGIO LOPEZ, 35, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
THOMAS PATTEN, 57, Albion. Failure to appear.
DARRELL PIKE JR., 31, Hopland. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, county parole violation.
AARON STILL, 44, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation, smuggling controlled substance into jail.
TOO MANY OBSTACLES
Editor:
Mobile homes are being rapidly threatened by corporations wanting to relocate longtime residents. Rents are around $3,000 a month. It makes no logical sense. Applying for “low income” housing is complicated and confusing. It’s impossible to find an experienced counselor to guide the process. You wait five to 12 years on lists to get in, fill out boxes and piles of paperwork, then get into a lottery (if you’re lucky), with names picked out of a hat, I guess. Then, the odds of qualifying, with just so much income and this much savings, is a crapshoot.
We can’t stay in our own communities. Being over 73 and in this dilemma is not uncommon. The entire system of housing needs a major overhaul. Think outside the box. Build more homes with at least one large window to see out of and with transportation to town. Qualify people for affordable places who demonstrate local involvement over the span of years. Reduce taxes on the sale of homes for people over 72 — help them downsize. Limit people who own more than one home and do not live here.
Katy Byrne
Sonoma
ALTERNATIVE INFO SOURCES
Editor,
We, the American “people,” are asea on the U.S.S. Bounty, Captain Bligh at the helm and nary a Fletcher Christian in sight. A bit turgid, I admit, but the real perils far exceed any of Buck Turgidson’s wildest fantasies.
The dark history of our antecedents’ slaughter and exploitation of defenseless indigenous peoples, writ unspeakably in “Genocide and Vandetta,” is the present in the Middle East, at the behest of bloodthirsty charlatans holding our institutions hostage.
Our saving grace (AI bogeymen notwithstanding) may be the availability of real time videos and politically knowledgeable historians and commentators provided on line. I’m a novice at this theater of information, but some of these are very instructive, if not comforting.
There was a time, when a different future was imagined, if that helps:
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 377 (V), 1950, “Uniting For Peace”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_377_(V)
2002 Arab League Summit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Arab_League_summit
Today’s perspective is de-mystified by these informed commentators: Phil Giraldi, Gilbert Doctorow, Glenn Diesen, Pepe Escobar, Alex Krainer, Matthew Hoh, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Justin Podhur, Dimitri Lascaris, Ali Abunimah (The Electronic Intifada) and many more, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=electronic+intifada
Some of the sum and substance of our times as seen through this amazing cyberverse, but not good news.
Betsy Cawn
Upper Lake
P.S. — These thoughtful interlocutors join the gifts of Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnson, and others brought to us by the implacable AVA, in my daily survey of our world’s dismays. Solidaridaj.
ATTENTION TOTO:
Editor:
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” We are all like Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz.” We have been forced from a place of relative safety and familiarity and find ourselves out of place, alienated, apprehensive. We are like Moses: strangers in a strange land. We long for a sense of belonging, and we are yearning for a new home.
Like Dorothy, we must join with our friends and commence a frightening adventure to defeat President Donald Trump, the wicked witch. We must face obstacles worse than flying monkeys, poppy fields and the Emerald City, where things are not what they seem. If we can overcome our own fears and doubts and stand united, we will outsmart and overpower the wicked witch. We will douse him with water until he says, “I’m melting! Melting.”
As Glinda the good witch says, “You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.” So, let us pull on our ruby slippers and understand clearly that “there’s no place like home” — and we will get there.
Gene A. Hottel
Santa Rosa
OUR DARKEST HOUR
Editor:
Winston Churchill spoke to the British people at the beginning of World War II. He indicated that it was their darkest hour — fearing an invasion by German troops. It seems to me that we are now in our darkest hour, and our enemy is the current administration as it is killing American citizens, attacking sovereign countries without authorization, making efforts to deny people the right to vote, trying to control educational institutions and trying to tear down the independence of the Federal Reserve — to name a few examples. We must make sure we are all registered to vote and vote. We must support Congress’ effort to obtain the Epstein files. We must continue to protest as we, the American people, will overcome and emerge as a stronger country as a result.
I have hope, and all of us must believe as Churchill did in 1940, that we will overcome. It took the allies five years to accomplish the task, but we may do it sooner if we keep up the pressure and Congress begins to reassume its oversight responsibilities.
Ed Shenk
Napa
FROM A GERMAN WAR PRIMER by Bertolt Brecht
(via Bruce McEwen)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
A call for unity and grace from the mountains high, to the wave crashed coasts:
The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country, Not Theirs
AFTER 49ERS’ HISTORICALLY BAD PLAYOFF LOSS, KYLE SHANAHAN ISN’T CRUSHED. HE SHOULDN’T BE.
by Ann Killion
After the worst playoff loss of his head coaching career, Kyle Shanahan was businesslike.
In the past, when the San Francisco 49ers’ season abruptly ended, he has come to the postgame podium emotional. Stunned. Hollow-eyed.
But not on Saturday. After the 41-6 thrashing by the Seattle Seahawks in the NFC divisional round, now the second worst playoff loss in 49ers history, Shanahan told his team how proud he was of them, then spoke to reporters in a matter of fact manner. The loss was, in so many ways, inevitable for a damaged and shorthanded team that had fought with heart all season.
“We’re obviously real disappointed … we obviously didn’t have it today,” Shanahan said. “I just thanked them for the whole season, how much they battled through everything. They were sick about tonight.
“But I tried not to make it be about tonight.”
This was the earliest exit for Shanahan, who has made the NFC Championship Game every time his team has made the postseason, always winning two games. It was a historically bad loss, ranking only behind the infamous Massacre at the Meadowlands in January 1987, when Jim Burt sent Joe Montana to the hospital and the 49ers fell to the Giants 49-3. Saturday’s loss surpasses another terrible postseason performance, when the 49ers lost 31-6 to Tampa Bay in January 2003.
Both of those shellackings led to enormous, franchise-altering moves. In 2003, then-owner John York fired coach Steve Mariucci with no successor in mind and sent his team wandering in the wilderness for eight seasons. In 1987, Bill Walsh traded for Steve Young, creating a quarterback controversy that spurred Montana to new levels of greatness.
No similar sea change is likely to take place in the coming months. Because, while what happened Saturday at Lumen Field was ugly and seemed a foregone conclusion 13 seconds into the game after Seattle returned the kickoff for a touchdown, this season was not a failure. To the contrary, it provided more optimism and excitement than expected.
The final game was the fated outcome of the 49ers season-long war of attrition, one that started deliberately in the spring with a purge of defensive veterans and continued all season as star player after star player was felled by the cruel business of football.
The shorthanded 49ers didn’t stand a chance against the team that had throttled them two weeks ago in the regular-season finale. The Seahawks will host the NFC Championship Game next Sunday and could — to team owner Jed York’s horror — be lifting the Lombardi Trophy at Levi’s Stadium on Feb. 8.
But, as Shanahan noted, the main takeaway wasn’t the Lumen Field coda, but the arc of the entire season. The 49ers’ resilience resulted in 13 wins, a road win over the defending Super Bowl champs and dreams of a conference championship. But the wild ride was bound to end.
“It’s nothing to hang your head over,” left tackle Trent Williams said. “Nobody even thought we would be here, let alone thought we would win this game. At the end, we were playing with house money.”
Williams was one of the veterans who thinks the future looks bright, largely because the young players got so much experience and grew so much this season.
Another area of growth? The head coach. This season, Shanahan became wiser, more intuitive, motivating and inspiring his players in many ways beyond the technical aspects of game day.
“Coach of the Year, in my opinion,” Williams said. “Y’all see what he does on game days. But what he does during the week, the message he conveys to the team every week, the way we prepare, the way he has guys bought into just giving their all, no matter what the scoreboard looks like. Guys just playing their butt off.
“A lot of that goes towards Kyle because he’s obviously the leader of this team. It all starts and stops with him. He definitely has done a great job.”
At the end of last season, Shanahan asked his entire team to buy in, to show up to OTAs, to put aside contract disputes or personal agendas. And they did. He took his foot off the gas, and didn’t focus on making the playoffs but on incremental improvement. He encouraged his veterans to take on active leadership roles. He adjusted his coaching style from the normal Super Bowl or bust mentality to what the younger team that he had right now needed.
The result was enormous growth, a tight brotherhood and a bond that helped the team overcome the loss of key players.
“I’ve never been part of a program or a team that was so behind the eight ball and found a way to compete every week,” said Williams, a 16-year veteran.
This loss will sting. It will linger. It should. But it won’t be soul-crushing, like the overtime loss in the Super Bowl or the NFC Championship Game loss when quarterback Brock Purdy was injured, eliminating a team Shanahan believed could win it all. There won’t be a devastating hangover, no matter how historically lopsided the final score was.
“It’s a loss,” Shanahan said. “It’s very understandable to see how it got away. We’ll do that from a football standpoint — evaluate that throughout the offseason. It was a tough playoff loss, but you definitely don’t make more of it than it was.”
The 49ers are optimistic that they will build on the spark that fueled them all season. They will get many of their injured players back — though not all — and they believe their Super Bowl window is still wide open.
That remains to be seen. The 49ers are an older team at several key positions. The injuries may be rehabilitated but they will still take their toll on bodies and longevity. And the competition within the division is definitely fiercer.
A message has been sent this January: The Seahawks are a team to be reckoned with not only in the past two weeks, but for the future. They are talented on both sides of the ball: ferocious on defense, effective on offense. They have drafted better than the 49ers. They have an excellent young coach. They play in one of the great atmospheres in the NFL. And they dealt the 49ers a historically humbling loss. The rivalry is definitely reignited.
The 49ers will be back. They collectively learned valuable lessons this season. That includes their coach who, despite the ugly ending, may have done his best coaching job yet.
ZODIAC KILLER: SLEUTHS ARE STILL OBSESSED WITH S.F.’S MOST NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLER
by Ryan Ocenada & Kevin Fagan
The Zodiac Killer hasn’t actively terrorized Northern California since the late 1960s, yet Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan still receives hundreds of tips a year from readers claiming to know new details about San Francisco’s most notorious serial killer.
Fagan has been covering the Zodiac for more than 25 years, but the San Francisco Chronicle has been inexorably linked to the case from the beginning. Of the 22 known bizarre letters and ciphers the Zodiac sent to Bay Area newsrooms, 17 of them came to the Chronicle. Each letter was more frightening than the last, especially when the killer threatened to shoot children riding a school bus and started targeting Chronicle staffers. Probably the most chilling of them all was a Halloween card the Zodiac sent to Chronicle reporter Paul Avery that included the phrase “Peek a boo you are doomed.”
Zodiac Killer: ID of Donna Lass skull helps prove the Zodiac killed her in 1970, sleuths say
These eerie messages, when combined with his rampage of brutal killings, continue to fuel the public’s decades-long obsession with the unresolved Zodiac Killer case. As internet sleuths comb over the case archives in search of potential clues, here’s a summary of what the Chronicle knows about the Zodiac Killer, his victims and his twisted legacy.
When was the Zodiac Killer active?
The Zodiac Killer’s officially verified murder spree began in 1968 and ended in 1969. The Zodiac Killer claimed he murdered a total of 37 people dating into the 1970s, but authorities have only confirmed four attacks. Five victims were killed and two survived.
Here are the incidents in chronological order:
Dec. 20, 1968: David Faraday, 17, and his date, Betty Lou Jensen, 16, were parked on Lake Herman Road in Benicia when the Zodiac Killer snuck up on them and fired a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Scrambling in terror, the young couple died in a spray of gunfire.
July 4, 1969: Darlene Ferrin, 22, and her friend Michael Mageau, 19, drove to a secluded parking lot at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo to chat. A car pulled up toward the driver’s side, and the silhouette inside the car watched them for a moment before taking off. The car returned minutes later and parked toward the passenger’s side. The shooter fired five shots through the window. Only Mageau survived.
Sept. 27, 1969: Cecelia Shepard, 22, was sitting on a blanket with her longtime friend and ex-boyfriend Bryan Hartnell, 20, at Lake Berryessa. A man came out of the bushes wearing a hooded costume with a rifle-sight crosshairs symbol on the chest (the symbol Zodiac used in his letters) and stabbed them repeatedly. Hartnell survived and was able to describe the Zodiac’s costume in detail.
Oct. 11, 1969: Paul Stine, 29, was working a late shift as a taxi driver. He was hailed by a man on San Francisco’s Geary Street. After driving the passenger to Presidio Heights, he was shot to death with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol. The killer mailed a piece of Stine’s shirt to the Chronicle with a letter claiming credit for the murder. The taxi’s blood-spattered door is among the San Francisco Police Department’s pieces of Zodiac Killer-related evidence.
Although his carnage spanned less than a year, the moniker was cemented into history. The Zodiac Killer was never caught.
What is the origin of the Zodiac Killer’s moniker?
The killer referred to himself as “Zodiac” in the many letters he sent to newsrooms. His first letters came in a salvo of three, simultaneously sent on July 31, 1969, to the Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and Vallejo Times-Herald, and claiming credit for the first two attacks — but he didn’t use his infamous moniker then. The spooky name didn’t debut until his next letter, sent to the Examiner on Aug. 4, 1969. It’s never been determined why the killer gave himself that name, but the press soon started calling him “The Zodiac Killer.”
The Zodiac Killer’s coded messages
One of the most chilling characteristics of the Zodiac Killer was the string of letters with cryptograms and taunts he sent to newspapers. In total, there are 22 known letters, 17 of which were sent to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Chronicle also received three of his known cryptograms, including:
408 Cipher: Parts of Zodiac’s first cipher were sent to the Chronicle and two other newsrooms on July 31, 1969. It was quickly solved by Bay Area residents Donald Gene and Bettye June Harden.
340 Cipher: Dubbed the “Z-340,” the cryptogram was sent on Nov. 8, 1969, and remained unsolved for more than five decades. The solution was finally cracked by a code-breaking team in December 2020.
My Name Is Cipher:The brief 13-character cryptogram was sent on April 20, 1970, as part of a letter that begins with “This is the Zodiac speaking. By the way have you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name is….” No one has been able to solve the following 13 letters and symbols — though they’ve definitely tried.
Why was the Zodiac Killer’s identity so hard to uncover?
The Zodiac Killer used disguises and rarely left direct evidence at crime scenes. He targeted random victims and often changed the ways he carried out his killings — all of which made it difficult for investigators to trace him through typical investigative means.
The Zodiac case has led to numerous suspects over the years. When asked who is his No. 1 suspect, Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan says Arthur Leigh Allen is “probably the best bet,” citing similar suppositions by former Chronicle reporter Robert Graysmith and the late San Francisco homicide inspector Dave Toschi, and noting that Allen — a Vallejo man who died in 1992 — is still the only suspect ever officially named by investigators.
In 1996, San Francisco detectives also looked into the possibility that Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski was also the Zodiac. Among the possible links were that Kaczynski lived in the Bay Area from 1967 to 1969, the same period that the Zodiac’s confirmed killings occurred in California. Kaczynski also once signed a high school yearbook with a symbol similar to the Zodiac’s.
Another notable claim was from 2009 when Deborah Perez alleged that her father, Guy Ward Hendrickson, was Zodiac. Perez, a real estate agent in Orange County, said she accompanied her father on at least two of the slayings and has a pair of brown horn-rimmed eyeglasses she said her father snatched from victim Paul Stine. Investigators said they weren’t aware of receiving anything from Perez, but would look into her story.
As time keeps passing, witnesses and potential suspects have aged, died or disappeared, making this cold case almost impossible to solve.
Are there any new Zodiac Killer clues?
Though the case has been officially cold for decades, amateur internet sleuths keep finding ways to breathe new life into the Zodiac mystery.
In 2021, a private team of investigators calling themselves the Case Breakers said they had determined the Zodiac was a man in the Sierra foothills who died in 2018, but police officials said the tip didn’t hold up.
Also in 2021, Fayçal Ziraoui, a business consultant from Paris, claimed that he had cracked two ciphers and identified the killer as Lawrence Kaye, a South Lake Tahoe resident that other sleuths had scrutinized previously. Kaye died in 2010, and authorities never officially identified him as a suspect.
Then in June 2023, Ziraoui alleged that an eerie rock formation in the Sierra Nevada was the same symbol that the Zodiac Killer used in his correspondence during his reign of terror. The rocks are arranged in a bull’s-eye pattern about 25-feet wide, on a 6,000-foot plateau overlooking Hell Hole Reservoir near Tahoe.
Ziraoui told the Chronicle by email he had to keep some details of his investigation private, but said he had been interested in the Hell Hole Reservoir area before seeing the photos online. According to sources close to the official Zodiac investigation, the rock formation doesn’t appear to be a case-breaking development.
THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods...
But there is no road through the woods.
— Rudyard Kipling (1910)
TRUMP WRITES A LETTER TO NORWAY
…and it's insane
by Anne Applebaum
Remember the time, during the election campaign, when Donald Trump got bored of his rally, turned on his playlist and started dancing? Or when, more recently, he got up in the middle of a meeting with oil executives, looked out the window and started talking about the White House ballroom? There have been so many bizarre moments in the past two years that it can be hard to recall them all. But the word “bizarre” isn’t really sufficient to describe the strange things happening right now in Washington. Hence this newsletter, following so soon after the one I published yesterday.
On Sunday, Trump wrote a letter to the prime minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. The White House National Security Council distributed the text of the letter to foreign ambassadors in Washington. The Norwegians have confirmed that it is real.
Here is the text of the original letter:
“Dear Jonas,
Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
There is a lot to criticize, from the bad grammar to the bad history (yes there are “written documents,” including some signed by the United States, recognizing Danish sovereignty in Greenland). But the overall message is more important:
“Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.”
Where is this leading? To a financial crisis, as Europeans sell US assets and block US companies? Or perhaps to a military crisis:
“Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it?”
Nobody around him wants to stop him. They are too craven, or too cowardly, or too greedy. Only Congress can call a halt to this charade. But in order for that to happen, a handful of Republicans have to find the guts to say that 2 + 2 = 4. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time.
“HOW TWISTED WE ARE. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How insignificant we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others."
— Roberto Bolaño
LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT
How Trump Is Remaking America, State by State
Trump Links His Push for Greenland to Not Winning Nobel Peace Prize
Powell Will Attend Supreme Court Arguments on Trump’s Effort to Fire Fed Official
‘Like an Earthquake’: How 40 People Died in a Spanish Train Crash
Suicides Were Frequent at the Golden Gate Bridge. Not Anymore.
How Italy Is Racing to Finish an Ice Rink Before the Olympics
MONSTERS OF THE DEEP
"Timing, not haste, drives what will happen next." —Thomas Sowell
by James Kunstler
Minneapolis, the sucking chest wound on America’s body politic, gets a break this week from Gawda’mighty, who is turning the heat down to subzero so that ICE-Watch nose-rings can hole-up in their Soros-paid motels, play League of Legends with their DoorDashed Chick-fil-A nuggets, and rest up for the next inning of their motley revolution. ICE itself might even have to lay off its daily round-up of rapists, cut-throats, and child-molesters, to wait out the cold-snap.
Meanwhile, things elsewhere roughen up a little. For instance: Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum (WEF) holds its annual jamboree of vampire squids. Klaus Schwab is out, by the way. He skulked off in a malodorous cloud of embezzlement and sexual irregularities, to be replaced by Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the hedge fund that owns everything in the USA and wants more.
Larry Fink is living proof of the banality of evil, an early pioneer of mortgage-backed securities, which nearly blew up the global banking system in 2008-09, after which he pioneered the wholesale purchasing of foreclosed houses by hedge funds. Neat trick. Cornered the market on all the inventory, so, now, nobody under age-fifty in America can afford to buy a house — but you can rent one from BlackRock!
Larry Fink landed as interim head of the WEF largely because BlackRock has been espousing Klaus Schwab’s ideas about “Stakeholder Capitalism,” which allows global corporations to pretend that they have beneficent “societal purpose” while they go about ass-raping the common folk of Western Civ. Climate change and green new deals top that agenda, along with diversity, equity, and inclusion and additional bullshit about “environment, social, and governance factors” (ESG) in its global strategies portfolio — meaning, mandates for exactly the kind of policies that are destroying Europe’s economies, de-industrialization foremost.
Among the invited speakers at Davos this year: one US President Donald Trump. He is going to kill them with kindness, a tongue-bath of Trumpian compliments — you are the greatest. . . beautiful leaders like the world has never seen before — while he artfully inserts a stiletto in the WEF’s liver. You might not even know that the org is a walking corpse until a few weeks after the Davos meeting shuts down. But Mr. Trump is going to terminate its influence and send a message that the era of globalist shenanigans is over.
The president can point to two demonstration projects. First, the USA’s acquisition of Greenland one way or another, either ownership or some leasing agreement or revised treaty arrangement. You can be sure that the EU does not like that — big bully America picking on cuddly little Denmark, “the world’s happiest country.” But since they are happily oblivious to Greenland’s strategic importance (vis-a-vis China’s nefarious ambitions there) it is up to America to prepare the game-board. The art of the deal, of course, is making it fait accompli before the targeted property-owner has even entered the discussion. How that works will be a painful discovery for the walking dead Davosanistas.
The second demo will be how the recent arrest of Nicolás Maduro leads to revelations of the globalist conspiracy to interfere in elections here, there, and everywhere. Señor Maduro sold his Smartmatic system to all comers, and you can bet that the plea bargain talks are already underway in Brooklyn (if not already concluded). Yes, it is our old friend, the Kraken, which is a related species of giant squid to the vampire variety convened in Davos.
The Kraken breeches…
This election fraud business is really consequential. It redounds to the criminality of the Democratic Party that had the impudence to jam an enfeebled marionette, “Joe Biden,” into the Oval Office, allowing a treasonous cabal of nihilists to nearly wreck the country. The massive evidence of that crime was clumsily suppressed by the cabal and its allies in the news business.
But it is surfacing again, now with Señor Maduro’s imprimatur, and it will turn into a force five storm off the coast of Florida as grand juries in Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale were empaneled a week ago to consider the myriad lawless operations mounted against Mr. Trump since 2015, including election fraud. The lawless are going to be rounded up, from Raffensperger in Georgia, to Katie Hobbs in Arizona, to Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, to Jena Griswold in Colorado, to dozens of other officials who were in on the big vote switcheroo of Nov. 3, 2020.
And when the revelations finally come, it will be too much for the foot-dragging villains in the US Senate to continue resisting — they will have to pass the SAVE Act or some legislation like it that requires voter ID, one election day, and paper ballots counted by humans, not machines. It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Party goes extinct because of its exposed, widespread criminality, or because it simply can’t win an election without massive ballot fraud.
(kunstler.com)
IN THIS DYSTOPIA YOU CAN’T VOTE AGAINST WARS BUT YOU CAN GAMBLE ON WHEN THEY’LL START
by Caitlin Johnstone
I can’t get over the fact that people were casting bets on whether the US would bomb Iran the other day. It just says such dark things about the type of civilization we are living in.
In this dystopia, Americans are never given the option to vote for a president who won’t bomb foreign countries in wars of aggression. But they do have the option to gamble on when those bombs will be dropped.
They’re not allowed to vote against war, militarism and imperialism, but they can go to an app on their smartphone and place bets on how the war, militarism and imperialism will unfold.
Preventing your government from raining military explosives onto foreign countries full of civilians who are just trying to live their lives? No. Thumbs down. You don’t get to do that.
Pouring money into “prediction market” scams like Kalshi and Polymarket with bets on when those military explosives will end the lives of those foreign civilians? Yes. Thumbs up. You are encouraged to do that.
You’re allowed to get rich making an app which lets westerners gamble on military atrocities of immense humanitarian consequence.
You’re allowed to get rich starting a company that manufactures missiles, sells those missiles to the US government, and then pays think tanks and lobbyists to convince US decision makers to use those missiles in gratuitous acts of mass military violence.
You’re allowed to get rich buying stocks in the arms industry and then funding the political campaigns of politicians who pledge to help start wars.
As long as it’s profitable and sits within the extremely broad parameters of acceptable liberal norms, it’s perfectly legal. But when it comes to doing anything that might eat into those profits by making the world a less violent place, there’s not even a viable option at the ballot box.
Our world looks the way it looks because our entire civilization is driven by the mindless pursuit of profit.
It’s profitable to start wars, so the wars never end.
It’s profitable for corporations to destroy the ecosystem and offload the costs of industry onto the environment, so it keeps happening.
It’s profitable for capitalists to keep wages down and worker’s rights at a minimum, so wealth inequality gets worse and worse.
It’s profitable for plutocrats to manipulate legislation and government policy using campaign funding and corporate lobbying, so the government gets more and more corrupt and oligarchic while society gets more and more unjust and oppressive.
As long as we have systems in place which cause mass-scale human behavior to be driven by the pursuit of profit, things are going to keep getting more and more violent, abusive, poisoned, polluted, unjust, unhappy, and dystopian.
This will continue until we as a collective decide we’ve had enough and force new systems into place. Until then the object in motion shall remain in motion.
(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)
A REVIEW OF ECONOMIC TRENDS AND GOVERNANCE
by Larry Bolinger
My lengthy research on “How Political Acts Lead a Country into a Recession/Depression” gives arguments on different acts having several consequences. The comprehensive research is in Volume III of “Politics: Last Act of Defiance.” Major corporations' actions can create changes in economic development, and so can political leaders' actions. Many researchers have tried arguing able to predict economic trends based on business trends or business trends based on economic trends, but my arguments is focuses more on political leaders creating change by unethical means. With a theory of utilizing militarism to create an industrial war revolution in war profiteering schemes. The government profits from war to improve economic development to make up for taking actions on poorly custructed decision.
In the 1920s 30s depression, the Rockefellers and JP Morgan created monopolies. During the 2020 pandemic, there was a monopoly created by the 4 largest meat-packing plants in the USA that more than tripled the price of meat during a time of distress. In the 2025 Recession, President Trump hired Elon Musk as a special government employee tasked with eliminating government waste, fraud, and abuse. Musk is the wealthiest person in the world who owns SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal, and many other companies. Musk fired more than 600,000 federal workers. But created more demands for Tesla and SpaceX, creating more of a monopoly on electric run vehicles and space exploration. That is something that the government under Trump could dump hundreds of billions of dollars into.
Profiteering could be done by forced demand for electric vehicles and space exploration. War profiteering could be done by selling weapons to India in their attacks on Pakistan, Israel in their war against Pakistan, aiding Rebels in Syria, aiding Ukraine, and/or Russia in their conflict. In war, there will always be someone who has the task of rebuilding. This may create jobs, but some countries or many countries will bear the expense of rebuilding. The trillions in damages to Ukraine could create economic disaster for the countries paying for the rebuild if managed poorly. It will also create significant wealth for the banking industry and for the wealthiest. Bank loans will go through the roof, but fast loan expansions has created several depressions.
“Unemployment, overproduction, and low standards of living would be permanent, except when war destroyed enough goods to justify a temporary spurt of production.” (Burns, 1949) An odd statement, but it gives something to think about. A government could simply invest in communities rather than war to force an increase in production. In many eras of development, war forced change, forced investment, forced tax increases, and forced industrial revolutions. The dispersion of war pushes an acceptance of the people to put more of their income in taxes and self-sacrifice to help the government in a show of Nationalism, which would not be there if they or their country were not under distress. Make the claim that it is all for the safety of our defense, and a government could add vass amount of money into their military. After a war, the need for production decreases, the job market decreases, and unemployment increases. A massive loss of work affects the economy due to individual loss of income, loss of taxes, loss of ability to pay mortgages and vehicle loans, which results in increased bankruptcies and foreclosures. Responsible governance would be able to change the workload to something other than war-related so that there would not be a significant loss of jobs. War has brought countries out of depressions, but it is always short-lived, as they go right back into a depression shortly afterwards. Unless they keep warring and always invest in wars, trading soldiers for dollars. A never-ending war will continue to place a high demand for military weapons, accompanied by high taxes. In 2025, there is war between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Pakistan, the US and Venezuela, and the US border control and the dehumanizing and removal of immigrants, the US and Nigeria. And a threat of US vs Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland (which is a NATO ally). There is no wonder why there is a proposal of a 1.5 trillion dollar military budget for 2026.
In a capitalist society, the wealthy are protected through bailouts and do not have to pay taxes. If they get into financial trouble, they get a government bailout or forgiveness of loans, while if a mid-sized business or homeowner falls behind, they lose their business, home, and assets. The banking system for the middle class and poor is designed to compound the debt to force foreclosure and bankruptcy. Through several depressions, when large corporations fail, it creates a tax burden on the working class and the poor. The working class and poor suffer through over-taxation to help keep the wealthy in power. Is it overtaxation to help the government or to help the wealthy? This could give arguments for Marx's Social Class inequality theory.
The 2025/2026 USA conflict with Venezuela might fit well in the research on economic development and problems with isolationism and war profiteering. War has been used to help get countries out of a recession or depression, which creates a war industrial revolution, expands that business, but when the war is over, you have a decrease in production, a decrease in business, loss of jobs, and loss of workforce due to the loss of lives. The economy dives right back into a depression. For ill-equipped leaders, it creates desperation to look for the next war to fix an economic disaster. The tariff wars and war mongering have distanced the USA from its allies and most of the world. USA allies, even NATO allies, are turning their backs on the USA. Forcing high tariffs and mocking world leaders has decreased support from those allies, creating isolationism. In this conflict, you have general war profiteering as well as confiscating several oil tankers, which will create significant losses to Venezuela and the countries that rely on that oil, while at the same time, it will help the USA decrease its oil prices, giving a upsurge in the oil/gas industry. Gas prices decrease in the US. Is it by good governance or bad? That would be determined at the polls. One should not have to create a war or steal products in what I would call good governance. However, it has been done several times in US history. So, it leaves two options: we learn and don’t repeat our mistakes, or we learn and repeat the mistakes, believing this is how the system is supposed to work. Creating high tariffs, instability in international relations to force isolationism, and war profiteering have been done before and have failed many times. Any type of stability by implementing such acts is short-lived.
Larry Bolinger has a Bachelor of Science Degree and a Master's in Public Administration. 20 years of experience in politics, Author of “Politics: Last Act of Defiance, Volume I and II. Volume III TBA.
THE LAST ELECTION
The presidential election in 2024 may be the last free vote taken in the United States. Dictatorships only hold elections with predetermined outcomes or do not hold them at all. Trump is no exception.
by Chris Hedges
Donald Trump’s threat to cancel the midterm elections is not a feign. He attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and said he would not accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost. He ruminates about defying the Constitution to serve a third term. He is determined to retain absolute control — buttressed by an obsequious Republican majority — in Congress. He fears, if he loses control of Congress, impeachment. He fears impediments to the rapid reconfiguration of America as an authoritarian state. He fears losing the monuments he is building to himself — his name emblazoned on federal buildings, including the Kennedy Center, his scrapping of free entry to National Parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and replacing it with his own birthday, his seizure of Greenland and who knows, maybe Canada, his ability to put cities, such as Minneapolis, under siege and snatch legal residents off the streets.
Dictators love elections as long as they are fixed. The dictatorships I covered in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans staged highly choreographed election spectacles. These spectacles were a cynical prop whose outcome was preordained. They were used to legitimize iron control over a captive population, mask the enrichment of the dictator, his family and his inner circle, criminalize all dissent and ban opposition political parties in the name of “the will of the people.”
When Saddam Hussein held a presidential referendum in Oct. 1995, the only question on the ballot was “Do you approve of President Saddam Hussein being the President of the Republic?” Voters marked ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The official results saw Hussein win 99.96 percent of some 8.4 million votes cast. Turnout was reported at 99.47 percent. His counterpart in Egypt, the former general Hosni Mubarak, in 2005 was re-elected for a fifth consecutive six-year term with a more modest mandate of 88.6 percent of the vote. My less than reverential coverage of the elections held in Syria in 1991, where there was only one candidate on the ballot, President Hafez al-Assad, who reportedly got 99.9 percent of the vote, saw me banned from the country.
These spectacles are the model, I expect, for what comes next, unless Trump gets his deepest wish, which is to emulate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia — whose security detail assassinated my colleague and friend Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — and hold no elections at all.
Wannabe president-for-life Trump floats the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, telling Reuters that, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” When President Volodymyr Zelensky informed Trump elections were not held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump gushed, “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
Trump told The New York Times he regrets not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. He wants to abolish mail-in voting, along with voting machines and tabulators, which allow boards of elections to post results on election night. Better to slow the process down and like the Chicago political machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley, stuff boxes with ballots after the polls close to ensure victory.
Trump’s administration is prohibiting voter registration drives at naturalization centers. It is imposing nation-wide restrictive voter ID laws. It is reducing the hours that federal employees have to leave work and vote. In Texas, the new redistricting map blatantly disenfranchises Black and Latino voters, a move upheld by the Supreme Court. It is expected to eradicate five Congressional Democratic seats.
Our money-drenched elections, coupled with aggressive gerrymandering, mean few races for Congress are competitive. Recent redistricting has, so far, all but guaranteed the Republicans another nine seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio and six for the Democrats, five in California and one in Utah. Republicans intend to carry out more redistricting in Florida and Democrats plan a redistricting ballot initiative in Virginia. If the Supreme Court continues to gut the Voting Rights Act, then Republican redistricting will explode, possibly cementing into place a Republican victory whether the majority of voters want it or not. No one can call redistricting democratic.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United took from us any real input into elections. Citizens United permitted unlimited money from corporations and wealthy individuals to rig the election process in the name of protected speech under the First Amendment. It ruled that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is an application of the people’s right to petition their government.
Our most basic rights, including the freedom from wholesale government surveillance, have been steadily revoked by judicial and legislative fiat.
The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke.
There are few substantial differences between the Democrats and Republicans. They exist to provide the illusion of representative democracy. The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women’s rights and sexual identity, and pretend this is politics. The right wing uses those on the margins of society — especially immigrants and the phantom “radical left” — as scapegoats. But on all the major issues — war, trade deals, austerity, militarized police, the vast carceral state and deindustrialization — they are in lockstep.
“One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin noted in his book “Democracy Incorporated,” “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”
Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism.” It paid outward fealty to the façade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, while it allowed corporations and oligarchs to effectively seize all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.
The emptiness of the political landscape under “inverted totalitarianism” saw politics merge with entertainment. It fostered a ceaseless political burlesque, a politics without politics. The subject of empire, along with unregulated corporate power, endless war, poverty and social inequality, became taboo.
These political spectacles create manufactured political personalities, Trump’s fictitious persona, a product of “The Apprentice.” They thrive on empty rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising, propaganda and the constant use of focus groups and opinion polls to loop back to voters what they want to hear. The vapid, issueless and celebrity-driven presidential campaign of Kamala Harris was a sterling example of this political performance art.
The assault on democracy, carried out by the two ruling parties, set the stage for Trump. They emasculated our democratic institutions, stripped us of our most basic rights and cemented into place the machinery of authoritarian control, including the imperial presidency. All Trump had to do was flick the switch.
The indiscriminate police violence familiar in poor urban communities, where militarized police serve as judge, jury and executioner, long ago handed the state the power to “legally” harass and kill citizens with impunity. It spawned the largest prison population in the world. This evisceration of civil liberties and due process has now been turned on the rest of us. Trump did not initiate it. He expanded it. Terror is the point.
Trump, like all dictators, is intoxicated by militarism. He is calling for the Pentagon’s budget to be raised from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. Congress, in passing Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act, has allocated more than $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE over the next four years. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined.
“When a constitutionally limited government utilizes weapons of horrendous destructive power, subsidizes their development, and becomes the world’s largest arms dealer,” Wolin writes, “the Constitution is conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.”
He goes on:
That the patriotic citizen unswervingly supports the military and its huge budget means that conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public that the military is distinct from government. Thus, the most substantial element of state power is removed from public debate. Similarly, in his/her new status as imperial citizen the believer remains contemptuous of bureaucracy yet does not hesitate to obey the directives issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the largest and most intrusive governmental department in the history of the nation. Identification with militarism and patriotism, along with the images of American might projected by the media, serves to make the individual citizen feel stronger, thereby compensating for the feelings of weakness visited by the economy upon an overworked, exhausted, and insecure labor force.
The Democrats in the next election — if there is one — will offer up least-worst alternatives while doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward authoritarianism. They will remain hostage to the demands of corporate lobbyists and oligarchs. The party, which stands for nothing and fights for nothing, could well hand Trump a victory in the midterms. But Trump does not want to take that chance.
Trump and his minions are energetically closing the last exit built into the system that prevents absolute dictatorship. They intend to orchestrate the sham elections familiar in all dictatorships, or abolish them. They are not joking. This will be the death blow to the American experiment. There will be no going back. We will become a police state. Our freedoms, already under heavy assault, will be extinguished. At that point, only mass mobilizations and strikes will thwart the solidification of the dictatorship. And such actions, as we see in Minneapolis, will be greeted with lethal state repression.
The subverting of the next elections will offer two stark choices to Trump’s most vocal opponents. Exile or arrest and imprisonment at the hands of ICE thugs.
Resistance to the beast, as in all dictatorships, will come at a very high cost.
(chrishedges.substack.com)
‘THE NONSTUDENT LEFT’
by Hunter S. Thompson
At the height of the “Berkeley insurrection” press reports were loaded with mentions of outsiders, nonstudents and professional troublemakers. Terms like “Cal’s shadow college” and “Berkeley’s hidden community” became part of the journalistic lexicon. These people, it was said, were whipping the campus into a frenzy, goading the students to revolt, harassing the administration, and all the while working for their own fiendish ends. You could almost see them loping along the midnight streets with bags of seditious leaflets, strike orders, red banners of protest and cablegrams from Moscow, Peking or Havana. As in Mississippi and South Vietnam, outside agitators were said to be stirring up the locals, who wanted only to be left alone.
Something closer to the truth is beginning to emerge now, but down around the roots of the affair the fog is still pretty thick. The SprouI Hall sit-in trials ended in a series of unexpectedly harsh convictions, the Free Speech Movement has disbanded, four students have been expelled and sentenced to jail terms as a result of the “dirty word controversy, and the principal leader, Mario Savio, has gone to England, where he’ll study and wait for word on the appeal of his four-month jail term—a procedure which may take as long as 18 months.
As the new semester begins—with a new and inscrutable chancellor—the mood on the Berkeley campus is one of watchful waiting. The basic issues of last year are still unresolved, and a big new one has been added: Vietnam. A massive nation-wide sit-in, with Berkeley as a focal point, is scheduled for October 15-16, and if that doesn’t open all the old wounds, then presumably nothing will.
For a time it looked as though Governor Edmund Brown had sidetracked any legislative investigation of the university, but late in August Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, an anti-Brown Democrat, named himself and four colleagues to a joint legislative committee that will investigate higher education in California. Mr. Unruh told the press that “there will be no isolated investigation of student-faculty problems at Berkeley,” but in the same period he stated before a national conference of more than 1,000 state legislators, meeting in Portland, that the academic community is “’probably the greatest enemy” of a state legislature.
Mr. Unruh is a sign of the times. For a while last spring he appeared to be in conflict with the normally atavistic Board of Regents, which runs the university, but somewhere along the line a blue-chip compromise was reached, and whatever progressive ideas the Regents might have flirted with were lost in the summer lull. Governor Brown’s role in these negotiations has not yet been made public.
One of the realities to come out of last semester’s action is the new “anti-outsider law,” designed to keep “nonstudents” off the campus in any hour of turmoil. It was sponsored by Assemblyman Don Mulford, a Republican from Oakland, who looks and talks quite a bit like the “old” Richard Nixon. Mr. Mulford is much concerned about “subversive infiltration” on the Berkeley campus, which lies in his district. He thinks he knows that the outburst last fall was caused by New York Communists, beatnik perverts and other godless elements beyond his ken. The students themselves, he tells himself, would never have caused such a ruckus. Others in Sacramento apparently shared this view. The bill passed the Assembly by a vote of 54 to 11 and the Senate by 27 to 8. Governor Brown signed it on June 2. The Mulford proposal got a good boost, while it was still pending, when J. Edgar Hoover testified in Washington that 43 Reds of one stripe or another were involved in the Free Speech Movement.
On hearing of this, one student grinned and said: “Well, I guess that means they’ll send about 10,000 Marines out here this fall. Hell, they sent 20,000 after those 58 Reds in Santo Domirigo. Man, that Lyndon is nothing but hip!”
Where Mr. Hoover got his figure is a matter of speculation, but the guess in Berkeley is that it came from the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper calling itself “The Monarch of the Dailies.” The Examiner is particularly influential among those who fear King George III might still be alive in Argentina.
The significance of the Mulford law lies not in what it says but in the darkness it sheds on the whole situation in Berkeley, especially on the role of nonstudents and outsiders. Who are these thugs? What manner of man would lurk on a campus for no reason but to twist student minds? As anyone who lives or works around an urban campus knows, vast numbers of students are already more radical than any Red Mr. Hoover could name. Beyond that, the nonstudents and outsiders California has legislated against are in the main ex-students, graduates, would-be transfers, and other young activist types who differ from radical students only in that they don’t carry university registration cards. On any urban campus the nonstudent is an old and dishonored tradition. Every big city school has its fringe element: Harvard, New York University, Chicago, the Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University of Caracas. A dynamic university in a modern population center simply can’t be isolated from the realities human or otherwise, that surround it. Mr. Mulford would make an island of the Berkeley campus but, alas, there are too many guerrillas.
In 1958, I drifted north from Kentucky and became a nonstudent at Columbia. I signed up for two courses and am still getting bills for the tuition. My home was a $12-a-week room in an off-campus building full of jazz musicians, shoplifters, mainliners, screaming poets and sex addicts of every description. It was a good life. I used the university facilities and at one point was hired to stand in a booth all day for two days, collecting registration fees. Twice I walked almost the length of the campus at night with a big wooden box containing nearly $15,000. It was a wild feeling and I’m still not sure why I took the money to the bursar.
Being “non” or “neo” student on an urban campus is not only simple but natural for anyone who is young, bright and convinced that the major he’s after is not on the list. Any list. A serious nonstudent is his own guidance counselor. The surprising thing is that so few people beyond the campus know this is going on.
The nonstudent tradition seems to date from the end of World War II. Before that it was a more individual thing. A professor at Columbia told me that the late R.P. Blackmur, one of the most academic and scholarly of literary critics, got most of his education by sitting in on classes at Harvard. In the age of Eisenhower and Kerouac, the nonstudent went about stealing his education as quietly as possible. It never occurred to him to jump into campus politics; that was part of the game he had already quit. But then the decade ended, Nixon went down, and the civil rights struggle broke out. With this, a whole army of guilt-crippled Eisenhower deserters found the war they had almost given up hoping for. With Kennedy at the helm, politics became respectable for a change, and students who had sneered at the idea of voting found themselves joining the Peace Corps or standing on picket lines. Student radicals today may call Kennedy a phony liberal and a glamorous sellout, but only the very young will deny that it was Kennedy who got them excited enough to want to change the American reality, instead of just quitting it. Today’s activist student or nonstudent talks about Kerouac as the hipsters of the ‘50s talked about Hemingway. He was a quitter, they say; he had good instincts and a good ear for the sadness of his time, but his talent soured instead of growing. The new campus radical has a cause, a multipronged attack on as many fronts as necessary: if not civil rights, then foreign policy or structural deprivation in domestic poverty pockets. Injustice is the demon, and the idea is to bust it.
What Mulford’s law will do to change this situation is not clear. The language of the bill leaves no doubt that it shall henceforth be a misdemeanor for any nonstudent or nonemployee to remain on a state university or state college campus after he or she has been ordered to leave, if it “reasonably appears” to the chief administrative officer or the person designated by him to keep order on the campus “that such person is committing an act likely to interfere with the peaceful conduct of the campus.”
In anything short of riot conditions, the real victims of Mulford’s law will be the luckless flunkies appointed to enforce it. The mind of man could devise few tasks more hopeless than rushing around this 1,000-acre, 27,000-student campus in the midst of some crowded action, trying to apprehend and remove—on sight and before he can flee—any person who is not a Cal student and is not eligible for readmission. It would be a nightmare of lies, false seizures, double entries and certain provocation. Meanwhile, most of those responsible for the action would be going about their business in legal peace. If pure justice prevailed in this world, Don Mulford would be appointed to keep order and bag subversives at the next campus demonstrations.
There are those who seem surprised that a defective rattrap like the Mulford law could be endorsed by the legislature of a supposedly progressive, enlightened state. But these same people were surprised when Proposition 14, which reopened the door to racial discrimination in housing, was endorsed by the electorate last November by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.
Meanwhile, the nonstudent in Berkeley is part of the scene, a fact of life. The university estimates that about 3,000 nonstudents use the campus in various ways: working in the library with borrowed registration cards; attending lectures, concerts and student films; finding jobs and apartments via secondhand access to university listings; eating in the cafeteria, and monitoring classes. In appearance they are indistinguishable from students. Berkeley is full of wild-looking graduate students, bearded professors and long-haired English majors who look like Joan Baez.
Until recently there was no mention of nonstudents in campus politics, but at the beginning of the Free Speech rebellion President Kerr said “nonstudent elements were partly responsible for the demonstration.’’ Since then, he has backed away from that stand, leaving it to the lawmakers. Even its goats and enemies now admit that the FSM revolt was the work of actual students. It has been a difficult fact for some people to accept, but a reliable poll of student attitudes at the time showed that roughly 18,000 of them supported the goals of the FSM, and about half that number supported its “illegal” tactics. More than 800 were willing to defy the administration, the Governor and the police, rather than back down. The faculty supported the FSM by close to 8 to 1. The nonstudents nearly all sided with the FSM. The percentage of radicals among them is much higher than among students. It is invariably the radicals, not the conservatives, who drop out of school and become activist nonstudents. But against this background, their attitude hardly matters.
“We don’t play a big role, politically,” says one. “But philosophically we’re a hell of a threat, to the establishment. Just the fact that we exist proves that dropping out of school isn’t the end of the world. Another important thing is that we’re not looked down on by students. We’re respectable. A lot of students I know are thinking of becoming nonstudents.”
“As a nonstudent I have nothing to lose,” said another. “I can work full time on whatever I want, study what interests me, and figure out what’s really happening in the world. That student routine is a drag. Until I quit the grind I didn’t realize how many groovy things there are to do around Berkeley: concerts, films, good speakers, parties, pot, politics, women—I can’t think of a better way to live, can you?”
Not all nonstudents worry the lawmakers and administrators. Some are fraternity bums who flunked out of the university, but don’t want to leave the parties and the good atmosphere. Others are quiet squares or technical types, earning money between enrollments and meanwhile living nearby. But there is no longer the sharp division that used to exist between the beatnik and the square: too many radicals wear ties and sport coats; too many engineering students wear boots and Levi’s. Some of the most bohemian looking girls around the campus are Left puritans, while some of the sweetest-looking sorority types are confirmed pot smokers and wear diaphragms on all occasions.
Nonstudents lump one another—and many students—into two very broad groups: “political radicals” and “social radicals.” Again, the division is not sharp, but in general, and with a few bizarre exceptions, a political radical is a Left activist in one or more causes. His views are revolutionary in the sense that his idea of “democratic solutions” alarms even the liberals. He may be a Young Trotskyist, a Du Bois Club organizer or merely an ex-Young Democrat, who despairs of President Johnson and is now looking for action with some friends in the Progressive Labor Party.
Social radicals tend to be “arty.” Their gigs are poetry and folk music, rather than poliltics, although many are fervently committed to the civil rights movement. Their political bent is Left, but their real interests are writing, painting, good sex, good sounds and free marijuana. The realities of politics put them off, although they don’t mind lending their talents to a demonstration here and there, or even getting arrested for a good cause. They have quit one system and they don’t want to be organized into another; they feel they have more important things to do.
A report last spring by the faculty’s Select Committee on Education tried to put it all in a nutshell: “A significant and growing minority of students is simply not propelled by what we have come to regard as conventional motivation. Rather than aiming to be successful men in an achievement-oriented society, they want to be moral men in a moral society. They want to lead lives less tied to financial return than to social awareness and responsibility.”
The committee was severely critical of the whole university structure, saying: “The atmosphere of the campus now suggests too much an intricate system of compulsions, rewards and punishments; too much of our attention is given to score keeping.” Among other failures, the university was accused of ignoring “the moral revolution of the young.”
Talk like this strikes the radicals among “the young” as paternalistic jargon, but they appreciate the old folks’ sympathy. To them, anyone who takes part in “the system” is a hypocrite. This is especially true among the Marxist, Mao-Castro element—the hipsters of the Left.
One of these is Steve DeCanio, a 22-year-old Berkeley radical and Cal graduate in math, now facing a two-month jail term as a result of the Sproul Hall sit-ins. He is doing graduate work, and therefore immune to the Mulford law. “I became a radical after the 1962 auto row (civil rights) demonstrations in San Francisco,” he says. “That’s when I saw the power structure and understood the hopelessness of trying to be a liberal. After I got arrested I dropped the pre-med course I’d started at San Francisco State. The worst of it, though, was being screwed time and again in the courts. I’m out on appeal now with four and a half months of jail hanging over me,”
DeCanio is an editor of Spider, a wild-eyed new magazine with a circulation of about 2,000 on and around the Berkeley campus. Once banned, it thrived on the publicity and is now officially ignored by the protest-weary administration. The eight-man editorial board is comprised of four students and four nonstudents. The magazine is dedicated, they say, to “sex, politics, international communism, drugs, extremism and rock’n’roll.” Hence, S-P-I-D-E-R.
DeCanio is about two-thirds political radical and one-third social. He is bright, small, with dark hair and glasses, clean-shaven, and casually but not sloppily dressed. He listens carefully to questions, uses his hands for emphasis when he talks, and quietly says things like: “What this country needs is a revolution; the society is so sick, so reactionary, that it just doesn’t make sense to take part in it.”
He lives, with three other nonstudents and two students, in a comfortable house on College Avenue, a few blocks from the campus. The $120-a-month rent is split six ways. There are three bedrooms, a kitchen and a big living room with a fireplace. Papers litter the floor, the phone rings continually, and people stop by to borrow things: a pretty blonde wants a Soviet army chorus record, a Tony Perkins type from the Oakland DuBois Club wants a film projector, Art Goldberg—the arch-activist who also lives here—comes storming in, shouting for help on the “Vietnam Days” teach-in arrangements.
It is all very friendly and collegiate. People wear plaid shirts and khaki pants, white socks and moccasins. There are books on the shelves, cans of beer and Cokes in the refrigerator, and a manually operated light bulb in the bathroom. In the midst of all this it is weird to hear people talking about “bringing the ruling class to their knees,” or “finding acceptable synonyms for Marxist terms.”
Political conversation in this house would drive Don Mulford right over the wall. There are riffs of absurdity and mad humor in it, but the base line remains a dead-serious alienation from the “Repugnant Society” of 20th-century America. You hear the same talk on the streets, in coffee bars, on the wall near Ludwig’s Fountain in front of Sproul Hall, and in other houses where activists live and gather. And why not? This is Berkeley, which DeCanio calls “the center of West Coast radicalism.” It has a long history of erratic politics, both on and off the campus. From 1911 to 1913, its Mayor was a Socialist named Stitt Wilson. It has more psychiatrists and fewer bars than any other city of comparable size in California. And there are 249 churches for 120,300 people, of which 25 per cent are Negroes—one of the highest percentages of any city outside the South.
Culturally, Berkeley is dominated by two factors: the campus and San Francisco across the Bay. The campus is so much a part of the community that the employment and housing markets have long since adjusted to student patterns. A $100-a-month apartment or cottage is no problem when four or five people split the rent, and, there are plenty of ill-paid, minimum-strain jobs for those without money from home. Tutoring, typing, clerking, car washing, hash slinging and baby sitting are all easy ways to make a subsistence income; one of the favorites among nonstudents is computer programing, which pays well.
Therefore, Berkeley’s nonstudents have no trouble getting by. The climate is easy, the people are congenial, and the action never dies. Jim Prickett, who quit the University of Oklahoma and flunked out of San Francisco State, is another of Spider’s nonstudent editors. “State has no community,” he says, “and the only nonstudent I know of at Oklahoma is now in jail.” Prickett came to Berkeley because “things are happening here.” At 23, he is about as far Left as a man can get in these times, but his revolutionary zeal is gimped by pessimism. “If we have a revolution in this country it will be a Fascist take-over,” he says with a shrug. Meanwhile he earns $25 a week as Spider’s star writer, smiting the establishment hip and thigh at every opportunity. Prickett looks as much like a Red menace as Will Rogers looked like a Bantu. He is tall, thin, blond, and shuffles. “Hell, I’ll probably sell out,” he says with a faint smile. “Be a history teacher or something. But not for a while.”
Yet there is something about Prickett that suggests he won’t sell out so easiIy. Unlike many nonstudent activists, he has no degree, and in the society that appalls him even a sellout needs credentials. That is one of the most tangible realities of the nonstudent; by quitting school he has taken a physical step outside the system—a move that more and more students seem to find admirable. It is not an easy thing to repudiate—not now, at any rate, while the tide is running that way. And “the system” cannot be rejoined without some painful self-realization. Many a man has whipped up a hell broth of reasons to justify his sellout, but few recommend the taste of it.
The problem is not like that of high school dropouts. They are supposedly inadequate, but the activist nonstudent is generally said to be superior. “A lot of these kids are top students,” says Dr. David Powellson, chief of Cal’s student psychiatric clinic, “but no university is set up to handle them.”
How then are these bright mavericks to fit into the super-bureaucracies of government and big business? Cal takes its undergraduates from the top eighth of the state’s high school graduates, and those accepted from out of state are no less “promising.” The ones who migrate to Berkeley after quitting other schools are usually the same type. They are seekers—disturbed, perhaps, and perhaps for good reason. Many drift from one university to another, looking for the right program, the right professor, the right atmosphere, the right way to deal with the deplorable world they have suddenly grown into. It is like an army of Holden Caulfields, looking for a home and beginning to suspect they may never find one.
These are the outsiders, the nonstudents, and the potential—if not professional—troublemakers. There is something primitive and tragic in California’s effort to make a law against them. The law itself is relatively unimportant, but the thinking that conceived it is a strutting example of what the crisis is all about. A society that will legislate in ignorance against its unfulfilled children and its angry, half-desperate truth seekers is bound to be shaken as it goes about making a reality of mass education.
It is a race against time, complacency and vested interests. For the Left-activist nonstudent the race is very personal. Whether he is right, wrong, ignorant, vicious, super-intelligent or simply bored, once he has committed himself to the extent of dropping out of school, he has also committed himself to “making it” outside the framework of whatever he has quit. A social radical presumably has his talent, his private madness or some other insulated gimmick, but for the political radical the only true hope is somehow to bust the system that drove him into limbo. In this new era many believe they can do it, but most of those I talked to at Berkeley seemed a bit nervous. There was a singular vagueness as to the mechanics of the act, no real sense of the openings.
“What are you going to be doing 10 years from now?” I asked a visiting radical in the house where Spider is put together. “What if there’s no revolution by then, and no prospects of one?”
“Hell,” he said. “I don’t think about that. Too much is happening right now. If the revolution’s coming, it had better come damn quick.”
(Originally published in The Nation, 1965)
There is absolutely no reason to provide an additional forum to Kunstler. He doesn’t provide a meaningful “other side”; he is just sick.
James Kunstler has been predicting collapse for so long that what stands out now is his consistency in being wrong. I read his “urban planning” book The Geography of Nowhere in college, where he treated peak oil as a near-term, civilization-ending event. It wasn’t. Oil production kept rising for decades, blowing up his doomsday timeline. Instead of owning that miss, he just rolled on to the next crisis narrative. That’s been the pattern ever since: sweeping claims, moral fury, total confidence, and no real reckoning when the predictions fail. For what it’s worth, I agreed we needed to move beyond oil, but Kunstler’s tactics have done more harm than good. Constant doomsaying turns a serious issue into a quasi-religious end-times story. Kunstler is a snake oil salesman.
Others here have been predicting collapse for quite awhile for all together different reasons than Kunstler. The thing about doomsayers is eventually they are right, even though it might take centuries, and the cause by reasons they never would have imagined. Quasi-religious is more like religious by people who have a problem distinguishing their faith from fact.
So, you seem to be saying that religious people believe total hokum, by admitting that faith is not fact.
HEY POTTER VALLEY!
Obviously too many monkeys for the habitat. Drain the reservoirs and bring back natural stream flows!
Without Kunstler and TWK the AVA would be a one sided echo chamber. I commend the staff for ‘keeping it real’.
Really? It couldn’t be some other voice from the right? It has to be Kunstler? Though I can’t just now think of a sensible voice from the right. They are all sellouts now, apologists for fascism.
Such a relief! The current edition shows that the species is only accelerating its demise, caused by itself, as a result of uncontrollable greed, along with a strong inclination toward utter stupidity.
NATO need not take Trump seriously regarding Greenland. If Trump sends troops to take over Greenland he will be immediately impeached, thrown out of office, and left saying, “et tu Brute.”
You have far more regard for the robots in “congress” than do I.
Not with our current crop of sycophants kowtowing to his every threat.
Maybe Tommy Wayne Kramer ought to put down his corn cob pipe, and update himself on local issues upon his return from yet another sojourn at his second home in North Carolina.
Kramer declared in a recent column: “The Ukiah Valley Water Authority (UVWA) is quietly planning to stun those of us who utilize “water” on a regular basis by increasing the price to it by a lot. A real lot.”
Inland Mendocino County’s water woes are not new, nor stunning.
I suggest Kramer do some research. He can start with this coverage of the proposed water rate hike.
https://localnewsmatters.org/2025/11/14/ukiah-valley-water-authority-plans-water-rate-increases-public-hearing-set-for-february/
Significant revelations by many witnesses were expressed today in a presser at the National Press Club. The press conference fleshed out details of the 1996 Varginha, Brazil UFO/ extraterrestrial beings case:
https://www.youtube.com/live/99hRVeBzTzE?si=VW-Dv6Qg5ZBLOg9q
Breaking News. One of ’em is the current prez of freedomlandia!
Katy Tajha writes: “The old Punta Gorda Lighthouse south on the coast there is long gone.”
I think a two hour hike on the beach added to her 12 hour drive would have shown her to be wrong, thankfully.
Otherwise a nice tale of familiar places.
Excepting war and depression years, we have just finished the worst one in American history with more possibly to come.
I think, though, the Orange Fool on the Hill may be about to implode, taking his administration of morons with him.
We can only hope the utter mess he has made is reparable.
Second paragraph–+1.
I thought the same about the lighthouse.
+2 Second paragraph.
I was thinking of functional lighthouses…and I was probably also thinking of the lighthouse transported to the county fairgrounds…
Pairing:
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/missings-kids.jpg?resize=686%2C888&ssl=1
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Sarcee1896.jpg?resize=555%2C726&ssl=1
To the happy on-line comment of the day, about unity…
I’m all for hugs and standing together and all that, but the person down the street who votes differently than me is very much my enemy, if they’re hating on Somalis for eating the dogs and cats and hating on gays for their gayness and hating on science and facts and education and vaccinations and hating on everyone and everything they’ve been told to hate.
It ain’t 1958 and we are no longer disagreeing about tax rates and zoning rules. Many of the people down the street who vote differently than me want to kill me and kill friends of mine, and I’m not ready willing or able to make nice with such people.
Well said. I was bristling reading that load of crap. Reminded me of that woman a while back who had voted for Trump and was feeling persecuted. They’ve shown who they are and it’s obvious no amount of neighborly bonhomie is going to change them into decent people.