Cloudy | ICE Protest | Willits Layoffs | Donald Mitchell | Coho Comeback | AI Nonsense | Pet Tyson | Jean MacCallum | Yesterday's Catch | John Brodie | Michael Parenti | Dismal CalRecycle | Warren & Hunter | Ken Kesey | Machines & Maniacs | Defecating Duck | Green Trumpland | Public Sucks | Something Happening | Pretti Murder | Imperial Boomerang | Lead Stories | Collective Hysteria | My Enemy | After Eden
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Where did this cold 37F under partly cloudy skies come from this Sunday morning on the coast ? Mostly cloudy today, more clear tomorrow, then increasing clouds leading to rain Tuesday night into Wednesday. Then clearing a few days then more rain for the weekend. No really
DRY CONDITIONS will continue across the area today and into early work week with some particularly cold mornings with lows near freezing and freezing. Conditions will slightly warm and moisten next week with increasing chances of wetting rain by mid week. (NWS)
WILLITS BRACES FOR LAYOFFS AS CONSULTANT PREPARES A PLAN FOR A STRATEGIC REORGANIZATION
"There are those of us who will not be here in the future.”
by Elise Cox
(Mendolocal.news Editor’s note: Information for this story has been provided by whistleblowers who have reported misuse of public funds, abuse of authority and gross mismanagement. MendoLocal.News has checked the information they provided that is used in this story with original source material. We will not be identifying these individuals further.)
A week before Christmas, interim City Manager Robert Richardson called an all-hands meeting of city employees.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat this,” Richardson told them. “There are those of us who will not be here in the future.”
Richardson, who had himself been hired just 16 days earlier, said he wanted to set expectations about potential layoffs and explain why cuts were coming. After months of warnings about the city’s financial woes, change was coming quickly for the roughly four dozen people employed by the city.
Employees took the news quietly, asking few questions.
Richardson said he planned to spend January learning how the city operates — who does what, and why — and identifying positions that could be consolidated or reimagined. In February, he said, he would present a proposed strategic plan to the City Council.
Once the plan is approved, Richardson said he would meet with the bargaining units that represent city employees. Employees whose jobs are targeted in the reorganization would receive 21 days’ notice. If Richardson’s timeline holds, notices would go out by the end of February.
Employees who receive notices and qualify for another position within the city would have five days to decide whether to accept the job.
In response to questions, Richardson assured employees that the city would not contest unemployment claims, as it has done in the past.
“The council is pretty much mortified by this,” he said. “They have a lot of personal relationships here. They like you. I don’t see them taking any punitive action against the personnel going through this.”
At the same time, Richardson indicated that employees who had spoken up in the past, may have reason to be worried. “Reorganizations can be fun,” he said. “But they’re really for people who like to work a lot differently than we do. Differently than most cities work. But people have to be very flexible. They have to be incredible team-oriented. They cannot be people who have difficulty with others.”
In private conversations, employees pointed to long-standing management issues and a lack of accountability for decisions that transformed Willits from a city with a balanced budget into one that routinely spends about 50% more than it takes in.
Employees also noted the complexity of the financial picture Richardson described. His framing assumes that the city’s general fund pays 100% of salaries for employees outside public safety. In reality, about 56% of non-public-safety salaries are paid through fees collected by the city’s water and wastewater services and taxes allocated to those divisions.
Water, wastewater and public safety are the three core government functions the city provides.
According to budget documents, the Water Enterprise Fund is projected to bring in $3.58 million in revenue this fiscal year while incurring $2.59 million in expenses — including salaries, benefits, insurance, rent and debt service — leaving nearly $1 million. The Wastewater Enterprise Fund is projected to take in $5 million in revenue and incur $4.54 million in expenses, leaving about $462,000.
The apparent surplus in the Wastewater Enterprise Fund, however, disappears when transfers for capital improvements are taken into account. The largest is a $3.7 million transfer from the Wastewater Enterprise Fund in the current fiscal year to pay for a solar project approved by the City Council in June 2024.
At the time, council members were told the water and wastewater funds held about $5.7 million and $5 million in cash, respectively. The solar project was projected to generate $5 million to $7 million in savings over 20 years — assuming annual PG&E rate increases of 2% to 5% — and to qualify for about $1.8 million in Inflation Reduction Act incentives.
Under state law, utility service fees must bear a reasonable relationship to the cost of providing service. Cities may not charge rates simply to generate surplus revenue unrelated to costs.
A year and a half later, an employee said that investment — which could eventually reduce wastewater rates in the late 2030s — appears to now be coming at the expense of jobs.
A $203,492.85 change order for the solar project, approved by the council at its Jan. 14 meeting, prompted comparisons of the amount to the cost of salaries.
“I went through all our current openings,” employee Nici Caldwell told the council. “We’re looking for a city manager paying between $137,000 and $176,000. A police officer position pays between $43,000 and $59,000. A community service officer position pays between $53,000 and $64,000.”
She added that the city’s lowest-paid employees — operators-in-training hired with no prior experience — earn about $39,000 a year.
Caldwell also criticized the city for preparing to lay off modestly paid workers while hiring consultants whose hourly rates equate to annual salaries of roughly $145,600 to $364,000.
Mayor Tom Allman responded that the consultant’s role was to ensure employee rights were respected and to protect the city from legal claims that could result from the re-organization.
Earlier in the meeting, Allman accepted a nomination to continue serving as mayor. His comments reflected the gravity of the city’s current financial situation.
“In the next 90 to 120 days, this council is going to make some really tough decisions,” Allman said. “Those decisions will be made as a team, with as much input from the public and from employees as possible. I appreciate the trust you’re placing in me — but this is not a banner year to be on the council, or to be mayor. We are not flush.”
(Mendolocal.news)
DONALD BECKLEY MITCHELL
Donald Beckley Mitchell 89, passed away peacefully with his children by his side on December 3, 2025, in Albuquerque.
Donald was born Dec. 1, 1936, in Ukiah, California, to Winifred Beckley Mitchell and Samuel Ewart Mitchell. A Stanford University graduate, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 1959 and was commissioned into the United States Air Force that same year, beginning a 22-year career as a mechanical and aeronautical engineer. He earned a master’s degree from the Air Force Institute of Technology and a PhD from the University of Southern California, received the Air Force Meritorious Service Medal, and retired in 1981 as a lieutenant colonel. He later worked at Sandia National Laboratories until 2001.
Donald met his wife, Barbara, while stationed at Edwards Air Force Base. They married in 1961 and later welcomed two children, Gregory and Marjory. Albuquerque became home in 1972, where Donald lived for the remainder of his life.
Don was a devoted sports fan of Stanford, the San Francisco Giants, and especially the San Francisco Forty-Niners. He was also an avid runner for nearly 40 years, completing several half marathons. Music was a lifelong joy; he sang for many years in the choir at Church of the Good Shepherd and cherished the Cornish Christmas carols of his father’s homeland.
In retirement, Don restored his beloved 1927 Model T, “Sam,” traveled with Barbara to all seven continents, and enjoyed daily walks with his Golden Retrievers.
A brilliant yet humble man with a gentle spirit and memorable chuckle, he lived with quiet strength and unwavering loyalty to his family, faith, and country.
Donald was preceded in death by his parents and siblings Carol and Wallace. He is survived by his wife, Barbara; son Greg (Lisa) ; daughter Marjie (Tony); and grandchildren Zachary, Elena, Natalie, and Olivia. A private service with military honors will be held in the spring. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Create Possibilities, www.create-possibilities.com supporting children and families affected by cerebral palsy.
RESTORATION EFFORTS SPARK REMARKABLE COMEBACK FOR COHO SALMON ON MENDOCINO COAST
by Mandela Linder
After decades of decline, endangered coho salmon have returned to the coast in numbers that more than double the targets set by habitat restoration projects. In 2008, just 5,000 coho were estimated across the entire state, one percent of their historic numbers; over the winter of 2024-25, more than 30,000 were counted in Mendocino County alone, showing that recovery is possible. Conservationists say that while it’s still too early to tell what this season’s numbers might be, it’s looking promising for another good year.
Over the past decade, the Nature Conservancy, Trout Unlimited, the Mendocino County Resource Conservation District, NOAA Fisheries, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, local landowners, tribes and other partners have restored habitat across the Ten Mile, Navarro, Big River, and Noyo River watersheds. Their work has included building side channels, off-channel ponds, large wood structures, and wetlands to support juvenile coho salmon. These structures give young coho salmon safe places to hide from predators, slow-moving water to rest in during storms and abundant food, creating the kind of habitat they need to survive winter storms and grow before heading to the ocean.
Coho salmon were listed as threatened in 1996, and by 2005 were officially endangered due to decades of habitat loss from logging, erosion and sediment from road construction and upgrading, and environmental changes that left rivers and streams inhospitable for spawning. By the early 2000s, populations had plummeted statewide, and restoring the rivers and floodplains became a priority for both conservationists and local landowners, who wanted to give the species a chance to recover.
North Coast Restoration Project Manager Peter Van De Burgt, with the Nature Conservancy, said in an interview that on the Mendocino Coast, the primary driver of coho salmon’s population collapse has been human land use.
“Timber, agriculture and land clearing have affected the habitat that they need to survive their fresh water life cycles. That includes clearing hillsides, and all the sedimentation that occurs, rerouting of a lot of streams, watersheds; they’ve basically been converted into timber conveyance systems,” Van De Burgt said.
He said streams were adapted to timber harvesting and agriculture, and that led to environments that make it hard for coho to survive. Coho salmon begin their life in freshwater rivers, where they need to grow large enough to survive migrating to the ocean, then coming back to spawn before dying. Decaying salmon are an important part of nutrients for the ecosystem.
“They play this outsized role in the health of our overall ecosystem because they’re basically conveyor belts of nutrients from the river to the ocean and back, and they’re one of the only linkages that we have in nature between these ecosystems,” said Van De Burgt. “They’ve done core samples of old growth trees, and you can find salmon-derived nutrients in the middle of these ancient trees.”
He added that salmon are one of the primary sources of nitrogen for redwood forests.
Land restoration takes many steps
Creating floodplains has been a major part of the restoration projects because juvenile coho salmon need them to survive. Logging and other land use in the past left rivers running down steep inclines, so during floods, young fish were either swept out to the ocean before they were ready or sought refuge in higher floodplains, only to be stranded when the water receded too suddenly. By building inlets, gradual slopes, off-channel ponds and wetlands, restoration teams have given juvenile salmon places to rest, feed, and wait out storms.
Ellory Loughridge, North Coast Restoration Project associate with the Nature Conservancy, explained the effect of constrained rivers on juvenile coho. “It was kind of like putting your finger over a hose. It just shoots through. By making these floodplains, the water has a second area to go through, so it makes some nice little water eddies that are good for juvenile fish.”
Conservationists also added fallen logs and root wads to provide another component of essential habitat. They create deeper pools, slow sediment accumulation, offer shelter from predators, create shade during the summer and even support insect life that feeds the fish. Together, these interventions recreate the kind of complex river systems that coho salmon evolved to survive in.
When the restoration projects began, the teams had cautious expectations. The goal was to improve juvenile coho survival through the winter and gradually rebuild the population. Past efforts had focused on summer habitat, like pools created by log structures.
The reality far exceeded those hopes. In winter 2024-25, more than 30,000 coho were counted in Mendocino County, more than six times the statewide number in 2008 and double the year before, far beyond what the projects originally aimed to achieve. Not only were the fish surviving, they were thriving — they were larger, which improves their chances of surviving the ocean. Monitoring antennas showed that juvenile salmon from across the watershed were traveling to the new floodplains and wetlands to rest, hide and feed.
“I started here in 2017, and I started out doing the spawning surveys. On a busy day, you might see about ten fish, and now we have crews that will come back having seen 100 fish in a single survey. It’s just like a different world,” said Loughridge. This winter, with the count still in progress, crews are regularly seeing a hundred fish in a single visit.
Loughridge said the restoration sites are getting plenty of use, on a scale also surprising to the conservationists. “We know the fish are using them, and they’re coming from far and wide to use these restoration sites. That’s been really cool because we can see that the fish are getting full bellies and finding good habitat to survive,” she said. She also said that adult coho were using the wetland areas, which is something she hadn’t seen before.
Fist-bumps and reframing the future
When the numbers came in, Van De Burgt said the team was amazed.
“I was stoked, my coworkers were really excited. I’ve been trying to shout it from the rooftops, because I think this is one of the biggest conservation success stories we have, and people should know about that,” he said. Loughridge described a scene of excitement with the team, complete with fist-bumping.
Van De Burgt said this experience has changed the way he views his career.
“I’ve always approached this work from a scarcity mindset, like my job is to prevent extinction. If I retire, and this fish still exists in this geography, then I’ve been successful,” he said. “Now I’ve totally reframed my perspective. I’m not really focused on extinction. I think we can actually go back to recovery and get to the point where we see some semblance of historic huge runs of fish in these rivers.”
Forester Linwood Gill, who lives onsite at the Parker Ten Mile Ranch, where a large portion of restoration efforts have taken place, said the Mendocino results show what’s possible elsewhere.
“Seeing these fish come back, giving them back the habitat they need to survive… I think it’ll happen. I think it can happen anywhere people protect and steward their land,” he said.
The success on the Mendocino Coast offers hope to other watersheds across the state and the country, suggesting that with careful planning, cooperation and patience, threatened species can recover, and that conservation can be about abundance, not just preventing loss.
(mendovoice.com)
BOB ABELES:
It’s fitting that the AVA bookends H.L. Mencken’s 1917 essay “A Neglected Anniversary” and its coda with an existential threat and purported photographic evidence.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella begs us to stop calling AI generated nonsense “slop”, and instead to embrace it with these stirring words, “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our ‘theory of the mind’ that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other.”
H.L. Mencken clearly demonstrates the peril inherent in believing nonsense without evidence. AI slop elevates the threat by constructing evidence from nothing more than a prompt, acting as the cognitive amplifier that Nadella feverishly envisions.
Is that a tub from before the Bronze Age collapse, or is it an AI hallucination?
The threat, in this year of our misery 2026, is truly existential.
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Tyson is a bulldog mix with a big personality and even bigger enthusiasm for life. Our handsome guy has a little extra pep in his step and he's always ready for whatever adventure comes next—playtime, walk time, or just being right in the middle of the action. Tyson is fun, goofy, and full of energy, which makes him an absolute joy to be around. Like all good dogs, he will benefit from basic obedience training to help him polish up his manners. And luckily, he's eager, food-motivated, and ready to learn—especially when treats and praise are involved. With a bit of guidance, Tyson is sure to shine. If you're looking for a lively, lovable bulldog mix who will keep you moving, laughing, and on your toes, Tyson might be a perfect match. This dude's ready to channel all that energy into becoming an amazing companion. He just needs the right person to help show him the way. Tyson is 2 years old and a svelte 60 pounds.
To see all of our canine and feline, guests visit: mendoanimalshelter.com
We're on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter/
For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.
Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!
UNCOVERING JEAN MACCALLUM’S NIGHT
by Averee McNear
Born on December 4, 1882, Jean MacCallum was Daisy and Alexander MacCallum’s second child. The family moved to San Francisco when Jean was around five years old. She visited Mendocino often with her family and would write letters to her Grandmother Eliza. Jean was described as shy among new company, but always kind. She spent much of her adult life living in San Francisco with her Aunt Elise Drexler, whom she adored. Elise’s husband, Louis P. Drexler, left Jean and her brother Donald $2,500 each in his will when he died in 1899 (a sum nearing $1 million in 2026).
Jean travelled extensively through Europe, and she and Elise traveled to Japan together in 1902. After their mother’s death in 1953, Jean and Donald fought a court battle against Gwenlian MacCallum Yonce, their father’s orphaned niece. Daisy and Alexander adopted Gwenlian when she was a child. Daisy promised her an inheritance, which the siblings disputed. Gwenlian won her share of the estate in 1958, but her relationship with Jean remained rocky. On February 17, 1970, Jean passed away at her Pacific Avenue home in San Francisco, which she had inherited from Elise. She’s buried at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, CA, the same cemetery her beloved aunt was laid to rest.
In a Kelley House Calendar article from 2015, writer Molly Dwyer wrote that Jean’s life is not well documented. What is written above is much of what is known about Jean. While this remains true, we have uncovered more about Jean in the past eleven years. The Kelley House Archive is home to 26 diaries kept by women in the extended Kelley family, which are now being digitized. Most of the diaries have been identified as Daisy’s (the authors seldom signed their name to the diary, leaving it as a mystery for us), but one small black leather journal belonged to Jean. Dated in her later years, from 1962 to 1968, it’s surprising that so many years fit into one book. Several of her relatives struggled to contain one year into one book. They often included clippings from newspapers glued onto pages, a practice that Jean did not partake in. In neat cursive, Jean would inscribe the date and a short message about her day. In fact, short would be an understatement, as many entries were simply a sentence. “Mar. 22- Rain all morning.” “Apr. 14. Easter.” “Hair washed Aug-19.” If she did have more to say, she would write almost to the direct end of the page. While we cannot know for sure, perhaps Jean wasn’t the most enthusiastic diarist. In the latter half of the journal, her handwriting appears shaky and tighter, making it harder to read.
From her journal, we can see Jean spent a lot of time with her family. She visited Mendocino occasionally but spent most of her time in the city. In February 1962, she visited the coast and planted two apple trees in “Uncle Russell’s garden.” Located on the east side of the MacCallum House, the garden was planted in memory of Russell Blair Kelley, the second of William and Eliza’s children, who sadly passed at the age of 23 in 1886.
Jean lived near her Uncle Otis and Aunt Annie in San Francisco. Her cousins, especially Margaret, James, and Katherine (who was 34 years younger than Jean), visited Jean’s house frequently. In her matter-of-fact way of writing (it’s unknown if she spoke in the same manner) she recorded James’s death in 1962. “June 5. Election Day. We voted early. James passed away before midnight. Margaret was there.” As the only two girls out of eight children, Margaret and Katherine appear to have been very close. Jean would call them “the girls,” and it was rare that one visited Jean without the other.
We hope to discover more about Jean’s life as more of her diary is read, in addition to the rest of the Kelley family diaries.
(kelleyhousemuseum.org)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, January 24
JUAN CANO, 41, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, petty theft with two or more priors, burglary tools, paraphernalia, conspiracy.
DAVID CASTIAUX, 65, Ukiah. Contempt of court.
JOSEPH FAUSTINA, 28, Willits. Domestic battery.
KENNETH GOLDING, 35, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
RAY HOPKINS, 41, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.
ERIN JENSEN, 44, Willits. Domestic battery.
JORGE MARTINEZ, 37, Ukiah. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, loaded firearm, controlled substance while armed with loaded firearm, marijuana for sale, probation revocation.
LESLIE MICHAEL, 64, Redwood Valley. DUI.
ERIC MURILLO, 30, Ukiah. DUI.
BIANCA SCHOFIELD, 39, Point Arena. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, vandalism.
FORMER 49ERS QB JOHN BRODIE, SECOND-LEADING PASSER IN TEAM HISTORY, DIES AT 90
by Ron Kroichick
John Brodie, an All-America quarterback at Stanford and the second-leading passer in San Francisco 49ers history, died Friday at age 90, the team announced.
Brodie threw for 31,548 yards in a 17-year NFL career spent entirely with the 49ers, putting him behind only Joe Montana (35,124) in franchise history. Brodie also stands No. 3 in touchdown passes with 214, behind Montana (244) and Steve Young (221).
A two-time Pro Bowl selection, Brodie led the NFL in passing yards in 1965, ’68 and ’70. He won the league’s MVP award in 1970 and guided the 49ers to the NFC Championship Game in both the 1970 and 1971 seasons.
“The 49ers family is saddened to learn of the passing of one of the franchise’s all-time great players, John Brodie,” 49ers co-chairman John York said in a statement. “As a kid, my 49ers fandom began by watching John play quarterback on television. He displayed an incredible commitment towards his teammates and his support of the organization never wavered after his playing days. John became a dear friend of mine, and he will always be remembered as an important part of 49ers history. We express our deepest condolences to his wife, Sue, and the entire Brodie family.”
Much like illustrious predecessors Frankie Albert and Y.A. Tittle, Brodie couldn’t find a way to win a championship. And because of his propensity to throw interceptions, he may have been the most maligned quarterback in 49ers history.
He averaged more than 17 interceptions during one eight-year stretch from 1964 through ’71 (and finished with a franchise-record 224 for his career), which didn’t sit well with rowdy fans at Kezar Stadium. They repeatedly booed him, and sometimes worse.
Brodie had to wear his helmet after games, as he ducked into the tunnel that led from the field to the Kezar locker rooms, because of the bottles and other objects spectators tossed at him.
“If we lost, you knew not to walk off the field with Brodie,” teammate Dave Wilcox once said. “One year, one of the officials was walking off the field with John, and someone threw a bottle. It missed John, but it hit the official and knocked him out. So they built a barrier.’’
The protective screen didn’t stop the beer, but it did keep out the cans and bottles. Brodie persevered, enduring a stint as one of three quarterbacks (along with Billy Kilmer and Bob Waters) in Red Hickey’s then-revolutionary “shotgun” attack in the early 1960s.
Brodie went on to build Hall of Fame-type statistics even though he wasn’t recognized in Canton, Ohio, a point of contention over the years. He ranked third in NFL history in career passing yards when he retired, behind only Hall of Famers Johnny Unitas and Fran Tarkenton.
The 49ers long ago retired Brodie’s No. 12 jersey, but Trent Dilfer secured Brodie’s permission to wear it in 2007 to bring attention to his Canton aspirations.
“I really believe John should be in the Hall of Fame,” Dilfer said at the time, “and hopefully this will create some awareness of his career and how spectacular it was.”
John Riley Brodie was born Aug. 14, 1935. His Bay Area roots ran deep: He was born in Menlo Park, grew up in the Montclair neighborhood of Oakland and graduated from Oakland Tech High School before enrolling at Stanford. He was a terrific all-around athlete in his youth, also excelling in baseball, basketball, tennis and golf.
Brodie threw for more than 1,600 yards and 12 touchdowns at Stanford in 1956, and finished seventh in that year’s Heisman Trophy voting. He also played on the school’s golf team, which forced him to miss spring football practice at times.
“Our hearts are heavy after learning of the passing of John Brodie,” Stanford football general manager Andrew Luck said in a statement. “Stanford’s rich tradition of quarterback play is synonymous with John Brodie. He was one of the standard-bearers for elite quarterback play. His No. 12 is among the most famous numbers in Bay Area sports, and is why I proudly have his Stanford jersey on display in my office.”
The 49ers selected him with the third overall choice in the 1957 NFL draft — two spots behind Paul Hornung, and ahead of Len Dawson (fifth pick) and Jim Brown (sixth).
Brodie contemplated pursuing a career in professional golf early in his NFL days, when he was Tittle’s backup with the 49ers. Brodie even played in some PGA Tour events, including qualifying for the 1959 U.S. Open at Winged Foot in suburban New York.
But he often struggled to make the cut, seldom contended and came to realize he should devote his full attention to football.
“I had to make up my mind,” Brodie once said. “I couldn’t be a pro in two sports and do justice to either one.”
Brodie nearly left the 49ers in 1965, signing an agreement with the Houston Oilers of the American Football League. The contract was nullified when the NFL and AFL decided to merge, but Brodie got to keep $1 million from the Oilers even though he never played for them, then signed a $900,000 multi-year deal with the 49ers.
With head coach Dick Nolan’s strong defense making life easier for the offense, Brodie led the team into the playoffs for three straight seasons starting in 1970. He made his playoff debut at age 35.
In 1972, he came off the bench after missing nearly two months because of an ankle injury to bring the 49ers back from a 17-6, fourth-quarter deficit against the Minnesota Vikings. San Francisco won 20-17 on Brodie’s late pass to Dick Witcher.
But in each of those three seasons, the 49ers came up just short to the Dallas Cowboys in the playoffs.
Brodie retired after the 1973 season. Still, he was in the locker room in January 1982, happily helping the team celebrate its epic NFC Championship Game win over the Cowboys.
He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1986 and the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame in 1988. After leaving pro football, Brodie spent 12 years as a sportscaster with NBC (as a football and golf analyst) and ultimately joined the Senior PGA Tour.
Brodie posted 12 top-10 finishes in 10 years on the 50-and-older circuit, including two runner-up showings. He won the Senior Tour event outside Los Angeles in 1991, beating accomplished pros Chi Chi Rodriguez and George Archer (a San Francisco native and 1969 Masters champion) in a playoff.
“That was the highlight of my time on the tour,” Brodie once said. “I was 57 at the time, and that’s when they say your quality usually dips. When that happened, I had attained my goal. I never was that competitive again.’’
But Brodie could never quite give up competitive golf. After leaving the Senior Tour, he played on the Celebrity Players Tour.
“For me, that was wonderful,” he said. “Some people can walk away from their own sport and don’t need anything else. But for most top-flight athletes, they really like finding something competitive that stretches them.’’
Brodie, who suffered a major stroke in 2000 that severely affected his speech, is survived by his wife, Sue, and five adult children.
MICHAEL PARENTI, the path-breaking Marxist scholar, historian and political scientist, passed today at age 92. He went peacefully this morning, surrounded by his family “Now he is in what he used to refer to as ‘the great lecture hall in the sky’,” his son, Christian, reflected. (Max Blumenthal)
NEW REPORT LAYS OUT JUST HOW BAD CALIFORNIA’S RECYCLING SYSTEM IS
Will new legislation change anything?
by Tessa McLean
California acts as a model for environmental legislation across the country, spearheading strict regulations and pushing the boundaries on climate action. Even still, its recycling rates remain dismally low.
A recent report from CalRecycle, the state agency that oversees recycling and waste disposal in California, estimates just how few of our milk cartons, peanut butter jars and takeout containers actually end up being properly recycled. Spoiler alert: The results are enough to make any concerned citizen feel miserable about the prospect of their yogurt container getting new life.
Despite California’s best efforts, no material category came in anywhere near a recycling rate of 100%.
The biggest offenders were aseptic and gable-top cartons — the common containers of milk, juice and broth — with less than 1% of those materials recycled. The multi-layered paperboard containers have long been the subject of recycling skeptics. For starters, the material is made with layers of paper, plastic and sometimes aluminum, and can easily contaminate other recyclables when mixed with them. There’s also a lack of a recycling market for the products, making them economically infeasible for recyclers. It’s all going so poorly, in fact, that the receptacles may even lose their recycling symbol altogether.
Recyclables labeled with #6, best known as the foam containers that house food from takeout spots, also have a recycling rate of less than 1%. Plastic utensils are also in that category.
The material with the best success rate — 71% — is a segment of “paper and fiber,” including all forms of white and mixed paper with and without a plastic component. Cardboard is a close second at 68%, but even that’s probably disappointing to online shopping-devotees.
Efforts are already underway to fix some of California’s recycling problems. Passed in 2022, Senate Bill 54 shifts the focus from the consumer to the producers and requires all single-use packaging to be recyclable or compostable by 2032. If successful, the bill is designed to boost recycling of single-use packaging to 65%.
Right now, none of the plastic recycling categories rose above 33%.
Academics and policymakers have revealed that the American recycling system is largely broken, mostly blaming our plastic problem. Even the states with much better recycling rates — California isn’t in the top 5, according to one report — are far off from 100% success.
Some recycling services are pledging to bridge the gap, keeping hard-to-recycle items like plastic film and textiles out of municipal recycling facilities to ensure they’re given a second life. But those services aren’t cheap and don’t get to the root of the problem. Producers also tend to find a loophole: When the original plastic bag ban went into effect in California in 2014, many companies switched to thicker “reusable” plastic bags, making the problem arguably worse. A new plastic bag ban went into effect on Jan. 1.
Under SB 54, this CalRecycle report will be updated every year.
DEATH OF AN AMERICAN POET
by Hunter S. Thompson
[Editor's Note: Singer/songwriter Warren Zevon died of lung cancer Sunday night at the age of 56 (9/7/2003). To celebrate the life of his good friend, Page 2's Hunter S. Thompson offers this look back at a column he wrote about Zevon in May of 2001.]
"Warren Zevon arrived at my house on Saturday and said he was in the mood to write a few songs about Hockey. "Thank God you're home," he said. "I had to drive all night to get out of Utah without being locked up. What's wrong with those people?"
"What people?" I asked him.
"The ones over in Utah," he said nervously. "They've been following me ever since Salt Lake City. They pulled me over at some kind of police checkpoint and accused me of being a Sex Offender -- I was terrified. They even had a picture of me."
"Nonsense," I said. "They're doing that to a lot of people, these days. They're rounding up the Bigamists before the Olympics start. They don't want to be embarrassed in the eyes of the world again."
Warren seemed far too frantic to do any serious song-writing, so I tried to calm him down with some of the fresh Jimson tea I'd brewed up for the Holiday. I knew he was a rabid hockey fan, so I told him we could watch the Stanley Cup playoff game on TV pretty soon.
"Excellent," he said. "I have come to Love professional hockey. I watch it all the time on TV -- especially the Stanley Cup playoffs."
"Well," I replied with a smile, "tonight is our lucky night. Game 1 is coming up on ESPN very soon. We will drink some more of this Tea and get ourselves Prepared for it."
"Bless you, Doc," he said. "We can Watch the game together, and then write a song about it." He paused momentarily and reached again for the teapot…. "This is very exciting," he said eagerly. " I can hardly wait to see Patrick Roy in action. He is one of my personal heroes. Roy is the finest athlete in Sports now. I worship him."
I nodded, but said nothing. There was a far-away look in his eyes now, and he spoke in an oddly Dreamy voice. I could see that he had forgotten all about his troubles in Utah, and now he was jabbering happily….
When the phone rang he ignored me and picked it up before I could get to it. "Patrick Roy fan club," he said. "Zevon speaking. We are ready for the game, here -- are you ready?" He laughed. "Are you a Bigamist? What? Don't lie to me, you yellow-bellied pervert!" Then he laughed again, and hung up.
"That will teach those Bigamists a lesson," he chuckled. "That fool will never call back!"
I jerked the phone away from him and told him to calm down. "You're starting to act weird," I told him. "Get a grip on yourself."
The game was the most dominating display of big time hockey either of us had ever seen. The Avalanche humiliated the favored defending champion N.J. Devils.
Patrick Roy got his shutout and "could have beaten N.J. all by himself," Zevon boasted. "He made midgets of us all. I will never forget this game. Our song will be called 'You're a Whole Different Person When You're Afraid.' "
Which proved to be true, when we played it back on his new-age Hugo machine 40 hours later.
Zevon is famous for his ability to stay awake for as long as it takes -- often for 85 or 90 straight hours. "I wrote 'Hit Somebody in 75 hours,' " he said, "and look what happened to that one."
Indeed. It rocketed to the top of the charts and was hailed as "the finest song ever written about hockey" by Rolling Stone and "Songs of the Rich and Famous."
Warren Zevon is a poet. He has written more classics than any other musician of our time, with the possible exception of Bob Dylan. … He is also a crack shot with a .44 magnum and an expert on lacrosse -- which we also watched while we worked. He went wild when Princeton beat Syracuse for the NCAA Championship on Sunday.
He disappeared in the middle of the night, still without sleep -- saying he was headed to Indianapolis to write a song with Colts owner James Irsay, who just returned from buying Kerouac's original manuscript of "On The Road" for $2.43 million at Christie's Auction House in New York. Irsay is another one of Warren's heroes.
Warren is a profoundly mysterious man, and I have learned not to argue with him, about hockey or anything else. He is a dangerous drinker, and a whole different person when he's afraid."
— HST, ESPN, 2001
KEN KESEY
Sixty years ago today, Ken Kesey faked his own suicide and fled to Mexico—marking one of the most mythic turning points of the psychedelic era.
Facing drug charges tied to LSD, the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author and Merry Pranksters staged a dramatic disappearance, leaving behind a truck near the California coast and a note suggesting he’d taken his life. Instead, Kesey crossed the border, cementing his status as both countercultural hero and outlaw.
The move symbolized the end of the wide-open, playful phase of the psychedelic underground—and the beginning of a more cautious, criminalized era. The Acid Tests were over. The culture was changing.
But the ripple effects of that moment still echo today.
JAMMING WITH THE FRIENDLY OLD GUY
I met Ken Kesey in Boulder, Colorado at the big Kerouac gathering in 1982. I had read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1968 and Sometimes a Great Notion summer of ’75 when I worked for the Forest Service in southern Washington. I had started to read it a couple of times before that and didn’t get very far, but living and working out there in the big woods with the wind and the rivers, that book really resonated. I loved it, and thought highly of Kesey. I had seen pictures of the handsome young writer and prankster but had never laid eyes on him.
I hitched from Lake Tahoe to Boulder for the On the Road conference. Kesey and lots of other luminaries were supposed to be there. I had picked up a little bag of psilocybin mushrooms from a young couple who gave me a ride, so I wasn’t exactly making it to every reading and panel discussion, but was having a very good time.
One night there was a party at a house where the poet Andy Clausen was staying. Lots of people were there, including Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. I’ll never forget sitting at the kitchen table talking with a group of people when Allen walked in, put a big bag of pot and rolling papers on the table and then walked away again. “Thanks, Allen!” we shouted after him, and someone rolled a joint.
Some time later I wandered out to the back yard and was drawn to a pretty blond girl playing fiddle and an old guy blowing harmonica. The old guy was really friendly and enthusiastic, “I just met this girl,” he told me. “She’s great!”
His enthusiasm was contagious so I happily hung out with them and sang along. We played “O Susanna” and “Freight Train” and other standards, even “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad.” Poet Ray Bremser showed up with a bottle of 151 rum and passed it around. Andy Clausen came out and joined in on his harmonica. I can’t remember all the songs we played but we finished at about 4 AM with Lead Belly’s classic, “Goodnight, Irene.”
Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in the town,
And sometimes I take a great notion,
To jump in the river and drown.
I said goodnight to all and wandered away. Not long after, I noticed the friendly old guy putting on his jacket, getting ready to leave. I asked another guy who he was, kind of like, “Who was that masked man?”
“Don’t you know?” he replied. “That’s Ken Kesey.”
The last day of the conference there was a picnic. Kesey and his buddy Ken Babbs hosted a joke telling session and just generally carried on pranksterishly. They had driven a Buick convertible from Eugene, Oregon and brought with them a mirthful spirit that they shared generously. They were fun to be around. I told one joke: “Why don’t cannibals eat clowns? They taste funny.” That’s representative of the jokes that were told. Wish I could remember more of them.
Five years later I was working at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California, where my friend and colleague Ira Sandperl introduced me to Vic Lovell, the psychologist who had told Kesey he could sign up for government sponsored psychedelic drug experiments at the Menlo Park V. A. Hospital. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is dedicated to him: “To Vic Lovell, who told me dragons don’t exist, then led me to their lairs.”
Ira knew Lovell and Kesey and just about everybody. He had worked at Kepler’s off and on since it started in 1956. He was very active in the civil rights and draft resistance movements, a mentor to Joan Baez and many others. To picture Ira, picture Gandhi, thin with short gray hair and a short pointed gray-black beard. He usually wore corduroy slacks and a nicely tailored suit jacket with a button down shirt, no tie.
Ira told me he liked Kesey, who used to come into the bookstore and challenge him to arm wrestle. I think it was a joke between them, thin old Ira and big ex-wrestler Ken. Probably Ken just wanted an excuse to hold hands with Ira, to feel his strength. In a contest of physical strength Ken was sure to win, but Ira had spiritual and psychic strength that was inspiring.
In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe writes about another inside joke, Kesey’s fake suicide: “. . . the goddamned romantic suicide desolate foaming cliff was so goddamned desolate, nobody noticed the truck for about two weeks, despite the Ira Sandperl for President sign on the rear bumper.”
Ira said two other young guys who used to come in the store were aspiring musicians named Jerry and Bobby. They told Ira they needed a place to practice. Ira talked to Roy Kepler about it and they gave the boys permission to use the store after hours. They started a band called the Warlocks and got a regular Wednesday-night gig at a local pizza place, Magoo’s.
When I met Vic Lovell we talked awhile about books, music and people. His psychological specialty was psychodrama. I remembered a line about that in the song “Along Comes Mary.” Eventually he asked me when I had first arrived in the Palo Alto-Menlo Park area. “Nineteen seventy-four,” I told him.
“Ahh,” he said, “by then the circus had already left town.”
Kesey’s gone now. He died in 2001 in a hospital in Eugene from complications after a cancerous tumor was removed from his liver. I feel like he left us much too soon. I have his books on my shelf and I’ll read them all again. I’ll remember him as a great writer and an amazing and courageous social experimenter and performer. But mainly I’ll remember his friendliness and good cheer, and what he told me about playing harmonica, “In Dharma Bums Kerouac says ‘You can’t fall off a mountain.’ Harmonica is like that for me—You can’t make a mistake in C.”
NOT SO NEW: MACHINES THAT PLAY
by David Yearsley
In early 1746, the parfumier and glovemaker Pierre Dumoulin left his native Lyon and headed north towards Germany. He was on his way to foreign lands to exhibit three remarkable objects constructed by the celebrated maker of automata, Jacques de Vaucanson. This unlikely trio was made up of two robotic musicians and a mechanical duck.
One musical figure, dressed like a dancing shepherd, could play “twenty Tunes, Minuets, Rigaudons, and Country-dances” on a pipe held to its mouth with one hand while beating on a tabor with the other. The duck appeared capable of all the movements of a living animal, the most remarkable of which were internal: after dabbling greedily at handfuls of corn offered it, Vaucanson wrote that, “The Matter digested in the Stomach is conducted by Pipes, quite to the Anus, where there is a Sphincter that lets it out.” The grains had been miraculously transformed by the automaton’s ingenious gastrointestinal apparatus into stinking excrement. The canard was later revealed to be an elaborate fraud, one so effective that it had fooled many an eighteenth-century scientist.
Though he perpetrated this infamous anatine hoax, Vaucanson was not an across-the-board quack. After Frederick the Great was unable to convince him to come to Berlin and become his personal mechanic of marvels, Vaucanson went to work for King Louis XV of France, and he invented a mechanical loom, which proved to be a crucial technological impetus for the Industrial Revolution.
Vaucanson’s first and most famous musical invention, the one he triumphantly presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1738, was a faun that played the flute. Nearly six-and-a-half feet tall, the construct was not a stiff, unmoving machine, but astonishingly realistic: it had fingers with leather pads that stopped and unstopped the holes of the flute it held in its hands; it had lips and a tongue and a throat through which came a variable breath. That Vaucanson was able to create a convincing facsimile of human performance on this most difficult and nuanced instrument, one that required the life-giving, God-given gift of breath, was a testament to the masterful engineering concealed within: three sets of bellows produced different wind pressures; a series of levers and pulleys allowed the lips to protrude and to change the size of the windway, controlled the action of the tongue, and the movement of the fingers—all these carefully constructed parts, engineered to minute tolerances, were governed by a precisely pinned cylinder that delivered a diverse repertory. Vaucanson claimed that his figure could enact motions—and music—comparable to “those of a Living Person.”
The mechanical flautist had startling implications for human musicians. Writing in 1752, Johann Joachim Quantz, flute master to Frederick the Great, claimed rather defensively that, however impressive it might be, the faun’s impeccable technique only highlighted what it lacked—the ability to perform a piece with the “proper fire.” Whereas human musical utterances were, at their best, stoked with emotion and ignited by imagination, machines were cold and unfeeling.
One of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ardent supporters, the theologian Johann Michael Schmidt, was equally dismissive of Vaucanson’s invention, though the critique of it he published in 1754 also revealed his fearful unease about technological encroachment:
Not many years ago it was reported from France that a man had made a statue that could play various pieces on the flute, placed the flute to his lips and took it down again, rolled its eyes, etc. But no one has yet invented an image that thinks, or wills, or composes, or even does anything at all similar. Let anyone who wishes to be convinced look carefully at the last fugal work (The Art of Fugue) of Bach … I am sure that he will soon need his soul if he wishes to observe all the beauties contained therein, let alone wishes to play it to himself or to form a judgment of the author.
What would Quantz and Schmidt have said about AI, and with it modern recording and sound-manipulating and generating technology—about all those precise, nuanced, and infinitely repeatable and transformable “performances” accrued from the exponentially expanding stores of digital detritus? Part of Quantz’s objection was to the unvarying approach of the faun’s “interpretation”—it always played a given piece the same way, since its actions were determined by the pinning of the cylinder. But what Quantz never answered is why the person responsible for pinning the cylinder could not produce a single performance that follows principles of human good taste, elegance, and even fire.
The AI successors of Vaucanson’s flute player are now calling the tune.
It is now not hard to imagine digital performers and performances that “think” for themselves, ones that can artfully navigate their way through the massive quantity of information stored within, ones that are capable of changing nuances of tempo, dynamics, and ornament in infinite and pleasing combinations, perhaps calibrated to the algorithmized preferences of the human audience whose data they crunch as they hurtle through a uniquely riveting cadenza. Our artificially intelligent performer could even learn to throw in an occasional mistake—the artfully placed error, the human blemish that brings the beauty of the interpretation into even greater relief. Even in the good old analog days, some recording editors already did that, purposefully seeking out one, or even two, elegant miscues to work into the final, collated take.
Does all this portend, at last, the devoutly-to-be-wished-for destruction of the virtuoso ego? One way to accomplish this might be through a grand digital synthesis, an artificially intelligent alloy of Schnabel, Rubinstein, Horowitz, Schiff, Lang Lang, and Yuja Wang. Might a new Vaucanson devise a musical automaton with the left hand of Pollini and the right hand of Richter? Or perhaps a digital test-tube baby, the techno-love child of Martha Argerich and Van Cliburn, his data exhumed and made now to rest not so peacefully.
I’ll bet that my master-mix version of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata gathered from the most famous twenty pianists active today could fool any international competition jury and might even be better than the sum of its parts, thus defeating the Romantic notion of unique, individual genius. Deep Blue V beat Kasparov at chess long ago; Schroeder XXVI could well clear the field of human competition and then give a charming AI-powered post-concert interview lighted by the incandescent humor of a Schnabel.
The God-loving philosophers and musicians of yore could claim that one can never edit in, or artificially generate, those ineffable elements that make up a convincing performance. This is a version of the Quantz and Schmidt critique of Vaucanson’s flute player: that the soul will shine through.
Yet even old-fashioned recordings have long been battering away at this metaphysical Maginot Line. More than any other musician, Glenn Gould was the pioneer of obsessive editing in the hermetic confines of the studio, all in pursuit of the perfect and, once achieved, immutable interpretation. He brought this approach to bear most famously—or infamously—on Bach’s keyboard works. Gould was the pre-digital prophet who first worked the dubious miracle that has now become standard operating procedure. Faultlessness became the ideal, one more easily attained through digital means. As has often been pointed out over the last decade, this standard has a controlling effect on live performances, which inevitably strive to match these levels of exactitude at considerable cost to the kind of variety and warmth Quantz and others cherished. The circle of live performance and digital recording spiraled downward towards dubious perfection.
Then there is the Canadian piano virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin, whose digital technique (I mean his fingers, not his post-production editing chops) and his capacity for synthesizing various keyboard styles are so colossal that artificial intelligence and robotics might not overtake him for another few years—or maybe just months. This much is obvious from his jaw-dropping, brain-frying, finger-busting Twelve Études in the Minor Mode. The set is an homage in title and concept to that of the nineteenth-century French piano and organ genius Charles-Valentin Alkan, whose fiendishly difficult music Hamelin also tosses off with dumbfounding brilliance. Hamelin also happens to be the name of the German town from which came the fairy tale about the rat-catching Pied Piper, though the Canadian turbo-pianist could never be satisfied with a single, fluting line. With this Hamelin it’s an ebony-and-ivory blitzkrieg.
Finished in 1992 when Hamelin was in his early thirties, the first of his twelve test pieces is a “Triple Étude,” riffing simultaneously on no less than three different Chopin piano works, each supremely difficult in its own right. Hamelin’s two-minute sprint starts off innocently enough, but by the halfway point it’s as if the pianist has sprouted two more arms, each equipped with five super-accurate fingers.
The nonchalance is terrifying, and if he were a machine (I’m assuming he isn’t), one might shudder, even weep as the frolic fizzes on.
The miraculous feat ends in an expansive, pianissimo chord in A major, the minor escapade flashing a mischievous grin as it evaporates into thin air, the whole thing so unbelievable it must have been a mirage. From here, the collection gets even more superhuman.
Hamelin’s digits move at bullet-train speed, but do they move the spirit? The music is fun but freakish, the man is many phenomenal pianists in one.
Will Hamelin retain his superiority of intellect and dexterity over robotic, machine-learning competition, or has he already lost it? The centuries-long virtuosic drive for more and faster has met its match—indeed, is responsible for making its supposed adversary.
The mania turns back on itself and, in doing so, shows the way out.
What musical culture needs—what the world needs!—if it is to fend off the machines and maniacs is the real shit, not Vaucansonian tricks: honest imperfection, unlikely imagination, and more humanity.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
TAIBBI & KIRN
Taibbi: I have a premonition about an all against all imminent future, and I’m worried about it and would love to have a second home in Palau or someplace like that.
Walter Kirn: The problem is getting to the second home. You have to have a warning that shit’s going to fall apart. And even the Illuminati, I don’t think get that much warning. So, you need to find a pilot, fuel up, file a flight plan, and hope you get out before whatever the disaster is.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. There are some friends of mine who have pilot’s licenses, and I’m beginning to become envious of them. Well, part of that is because of what we witnessed this week, and we’re going to talk in an interesting way about the developments of this week, which was yet another showdown between Donald Trump and Europe, partly over Greenland, partly over some other things. But let’s just roll the tape that everybody is wigging out about. We’ll start with that briefly before we veer into the stuff that we think is really important.
President Donald Trump: “We never asked for anything and we never got anything. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be frankly unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay, now everyone’s saying, oh, good. That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force, I don’t want to use force, I won’t use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland, where we already had it as a trustee, but respectfully returned it back to Denmark. Not long ago after we defeated the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, and others in World War II, we gave it back to them.”
Walter Kirn: Trump has invented a whole new way of giving a political speech.
Matt Taibbi: What’s that?
Walter Kirn: Well, I mean, if you heard that speech that plainly put that in the language and the logic of the streets, if you heard the kind of pettiness, you rewarded us by winning World War II by taking Greenland back, except we gave it to you out of the goodness of our heart,
Matt Taibbi: Which the New York Times fact checked to the nth degree.
Walter Kirn: Well, yeah. I’m not talking about the truth level of Trump's speech. I’m talking about the rhetorical level. This is a way that politicians didn’t used to talk. I mean, you maybe heard it at the club or in a warehouse with people negotiating for goods that have just come in or in some mercantile or commercial fashion. If you don’t sell me your company, something bad is going to happen. I’m not saying you have to do it, but this is how he’s talking now. It’s straight deal making with the world, and it sounds a little goofy, but one of the reasons it sounds goofy is he’s the only one who speaks this language. The rest of them still talk about morals and norms and this and that and try to frame everything and couch it in bigger ideals. And Trump is like, you’re going to give me that because you owe me that, and then I’ll owe you this, and then will you square? Okay. And the rest of them are in some Hegelian progressive dream where the world is moving toward justice. In fact, the world has moved toward naked deal making, which it already probably was supported by, but has now come front and center… Do you need a state department when you talk like that?
Matt Taibbi: Well, right. The whole idea of government in the era before Trump was to give speeches so that you signaled what you really meant and that the public got a slight insight into what the real deal was, if that, and the rest of it was just fluffery and basically filler. Now you have the president of the United States in almost an extemporaneous way, although this one was not extemporaneous. He actually copied almost verbatim remarks that he had given earlier this week at the White House, which is interesting on a number of levels. But he just comes out and says, For years we asked you to give four, you gave two. We said, that’s not enough. You got to give more than the two. Now they’re giving the five. When did we ever hear stuff like that before? We never heard stuff like that
Walter Kirn: Before. That’s my point. It’s like sports or salesmanship or whatever.
Matt Taibbi: And so, a lot of the criticism, there was a lot of criticism about a lot of things, especially about Greenland. I mean, I had to laugh at that little line. All we want is a little thing called Greenland. I mean, that’s a bit of an understatement, but…
Walter Kirn: Have the people of Greenland been muted? How come I’m not seeing them? I’m just seeing the diplomats and the leaders and the Europeans, but I’m not seeing the man on the street in Greenland talking about Trump versus EU. Have you?
Matt Taibbi: No.
Walter Kirn: No. Are they allowed to have a say in it or an opinion about this?
Matt Taibbi: I would imagine there are nine journalists surrounding each one.
Walter Kirn: Not yet. I’m not hearing them.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: Which tells me they’re not sufficiently anti-Trump because if they were, they’d be used in all of the newscasts.
Matt Taibbi: Well, yes. Yeah, right. They would be if they were vociferous about it. I’ve seen sort of conflicting poll numbers about what the actual sentiment is in Greenland, but either way, the main thing that people took away from the speech that we just watched was a Trump pledge not to use force, which everybody interpreted, and this was simultaneous to Trump doing a truth social thing where he’s literally sticking a flag in Greenland. So yeah, he promises not to use force, but whatever…
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we
Stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
It’s time we
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
What a field day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say ‘hooray for our side’
It’s time we
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
We better
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, now, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
— Stephen Stills (1966)
FEDS KILL ICU NURSE IN MINNEAPOLIS
Today, federal immigration agents — including U.S. Border Patrol officers under the Department of Homeland Security — shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti in south Minneapolis during a federal enforcement operation tied to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Authorities say Pretti approached officers with a handgun and resisted attempts to disarm him, prompting an agent to fire “defensive shots.”
Pretti was a 37-year-old registered ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, cared for veterans, and was known by family and colleagues as compassionate and dedicated to helping people.
This is the photograph of the person who lost his life in cold blood at the hands of an ICE ADDICT. Rest in peace
IMPERIAL BOOMERANG
by Chris Hedges
The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing Saturday of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.
(chrishedges.substack.com)
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting
Agents Kill 37-Year-Old Man in Minneapolis
Who Was the Man Shot and Killed by Federal Agents?
What We Know About the 2nd Fatal Shooting by Federal Agents
Gun Activists Bridle at Suggestion That Pistol Justified Killing
Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis
Major Storm Pounds Northeast With Snow and Ice
Major U.S. Public Transit Systems Brace for Storm With Detours and Warnings
NOTHING can be more hopeless than a nation of disillusioned bigots, who have lost the capacity to be rational, and have no longer any outlet but despair for their irrationality. Such a population has no power of self-direction, and little willingness to accept again the kind of direction from without which has been found to lead astray. The springs of action are dried up, and nothing remains but listless drifting. This is part of the price that has to be paid for indulgence in collective hysteria.
― Bertrand Russell, Why Fanaticism Brings Defeat
AFTER EDEN
It was not until our species, Sapiens
We pridefully declare it, came upon
The earth and started in to use its bigger,
Much more pleated brain, and its more complex
Technological contrivances,
And its more labyrinthian social ties,
That any creature lived who could contrive
To regularly control a growing number
Of the other elements and species
Of the world for its own use and pleasure.
And not until our species any creature
Could concoct a consciousness of being
Separate from nature—distant from it,
And even in so many ways opposed
To it—so it could seek to dominate
And use it as no other creature, not
Even earlier forms of hominids,
Justified in the name of pure survival.
And thus began the fatal flaw of hunting.
That revolution in the human story
Was no doubt in the tribal memory
Of ancient Hebrews when they copied down
Their narrative of how the world began.
They started it with Eden, where they were given
A garden “to dress it and to keep it,” where
They lived in harmony with “every creature
Of the field and every fowl of the air,”
And foraged from trees “pleasant to the sight
And good for food”—in other words, the earth
Before the advent of the hunt, when we
Survived in general harmony with nature.
But then came the transgressions and we were cast
From paradise and forced to wrest a living
From a cursed earth, where God decreed
That “every moving thing that liveth shall
Be meat for thee” and “the dread of thee shall be
Within every beast upon the earth.”
And thus a new and adversarial role
For humankind was set among the species
He had laid before them in the land.
And this led to the evolution of human
Domination of the Earth and finally
To our ability to end the lives
Of all the fowls of the air, the fishes
Of the sea, and all the species that
The lord has ever put on earth, including
Ours.
— Kirkpatrick Sale (2026)
ICE AND ALL THE REST
“The Coming Trump Crackup”
David Brooks
“Last week Minneapolis’s police chief, Brian O’Hara, said the thing he fears most is the ‘moment where it all explodes.’ I share his worry. If you follow the trajectory of events, it’s pretty clear that we’re headed toward some kind of crackup.
We are in the middle of at least four unravelings: The unraveling of the postwar international order. The unraveling of domestic tranquillity wherever Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents bring down their jackboots. The further unraveling of the democratic order, with attacks on Fed independence and — excuse the pun — trumped-up prosecutions of political opponents. Finally, the unraveling of President Trump’s mind.
Of these four, the unraveling of Trump’s mind is the primary one, leading to all the others. Narcissists sometimes get worse with age, as their remaining inhibitions fall away. The effect is bound to be profound when the narcissist happens to be president of the United States.
Every president I’ve ever covered gets more full of himself the longer he remains in office, and when you start out with Trump-level self-regard, the effect is grandiosity, entitlement, lack of empathy and ferocious overreaction to perceived slights.
Furthermore, over the past year, Trump has been quicker and quicker to resort to violence. In 2025 the U.S. carried out or contributed to 622 overseas bombing missions, killing people in places ranging from Venezuela to Iran, Nigeria and Somalia — not to mention Minneapolis.
The arc of tyranny bends toward degradation. Tyrants generally get drunk on their own power, which progressively reduces restraint, increases entitlement and self-focus and amps up risk taking and overconfidence while escalating social isolation, corruption and defensive paranoia.
… I do know that events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record many cases in which a power-mad leader careening toward tyranny suddenly regained his senses and became more moderate. On the contrary, the normal course of the disease is toward ever-accelerating deterioration and debauchery.
And I do understand why America’s founding fathers spent so much time reading historians like Tacitus and Sallust. Thomas Jefferson called Tacitus the first writer in the world, without a single exception.’ They understood that the lust for power is a primal human impulse and that even all the safeguards they built into the Constitution are no match for this lust when it is not restrained ethically from within.
As John Adams put it in a letter in 1798, ‘We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.’ ”
NEW YORK TIMES
Jan. 23, 2026
I have to say that it is about f’n time David Brooks started to be a small part of the solution instead of a big part of the problem.
You are dead right on that one, Jim. Brooks is an analyst at heart, sees both sides of things, can be wishy washy on important issues. What struck me in this essay was his bold stance, no hesitancy in passing judgement on this one. It especially caught my attention because of that.
“The government you elect is the government you deserve.”
Thomas Jefferson
NEW REPORT LAYS OUT JUST HOW BAD CALIFORNIA’S RECYCLING SYSTEM IS
California, and the rest of the world, need to get the planet’s monkey population down to carrying capacity of its habitat. All the electromobiles and solar panels are just ways for kaputalists to get rich. Those things take energy, too, for mining, transport, manufacturing, recycling, etc. They simply give greedy kaputalists a chance to tell us just how great, and far-seeing they are: total lies is all it amounts to. The scum hope to pull it off, then go hide in their fortresses and count their money, while the rest of us die. The wealthy scum can take their AI and stuff it where the sun don’t shine, too!
Alex Pretti shooting,
what type of idiot brings a 9mm pistol to a peaceful rally, not to bright.
So the guy yesterday goes to the demo with his phone and gun. Yes he was within his rights, he can legally carry his gun but did he think ICE plays by the rules and follows the law? No, they’re murderous thugs like Trump, lawless beasts who shoot first and fight it out in the court for months later, in fact they probably would say it was preemptive self-defense: they probably know they’re monsters and that gun could be pointed at them tomorrow.
Well, Trump thought enough of this gun-toting punk who shot and killed two people at a 2020 protest to invite him to Mar a Lago. A jury found him not guilty. Trump described him as a ‘nice young man.’
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-he-met-kyle-rittenhouse-after-verdict-calls-him-n1284513
Susan and Michael Pretti, the parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, issued a statement:
“We are heartbroken but also very angry,” they said.
“Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact.
“I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed.
“Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded with hatred
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Bob Dylan sums up nicely how I’m feeling today. Thank you, Chuck.
thanks Chuck, just printed that one off to sing in the park…
“Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
Unlike the goons who murdered him. I wonder if all ICE “agents” have the same badge number: OOO, since they seem to have a license to murder. If I, as a state park ranger in California during the late 70s, had acted like them I would still be in prison…or dead.
Question: How does president DJT rate ICE actions in Minneapolis?
Answer: Pretti Good.