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STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 42 this Saturday morning on the coast. Will we see the sun today, maybe ? A chance of showers tomorrow morning then clearing. Foggy mornings & clearing days rule next week's forecast. Maybe a shower next weekend, we'll see ?
CHANCE for light rain and drizzle is forecast for mostly Del Norte and Humboldt Counties late Saturday night and Sunday. Otherwise, dry and stable weather is forecast to continue through most of next week. (NWS)
CLIFTON 'CLIF' WILLIAM LYON
10/19/1951 — 1/20/2026
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to William Henry Lyon Jr. and Elaine Mary Lyon, he was the second to the youngest of his siblings: Jim Lyon, Alice (Hinrichs) and Celia (Engleman). As young children the Lyon family moved from Oklahoma to Riverside in southern California and raised their family.
After having kidney failure along with other health issues under the amazing care of Tidewell Hospice Home in Port Charlotte, Florida, Clif has passed away peacefully. Being a longtime Anderson Valley resident and where Clifton and his wife Jean Lyon, who passed in 2009, raised their five children: Julia (Bloyd), Adam Lyon, Lisabeth (Johnson), Anthony Lyon, and Steven Lyon.
Clif and Jean had moved to Anderson Valley from Riverside, California, bought property in Rancho Navarro and raised their family until Jean had a fatal car accident. Clif took care of her until 2009 when she passed. He then relocated back to southern California where he then took care of his mother who had Alzheimer's until her passing. Lastly, Clif moved to Inglewood, Florida, where he and girlfriend Delores Flannery lived for the last past years, helping take care of Delores’ disabled son, Britton, who Clif loved and treated as a son.
Clif was one of a kind. He was loyal, kind, committed, enjoyed life, could strike up a conversation with anybody, easy going, loved his family, music, fast cars and Harley Davidsons. Clif worked at Bachman Hill school as a maintenance man and at Pardini Logging. He also started a couple businesses himself: C. Lyon Maintenance and a well drilling business. He used to say “Jack of all trades, master of none." He was very talented at almost anything he put his hands on.
Clif leaves behind 18 grandchildren, 5 greatgrandchildren, his sons-in-law Troy Bloyd, Jeremiah Johnson, and daughters-in-law Alexis Lyon, Katherine Lyon and Ziara Lyon, 13 nieces and nephews, and his in-laws Katherine Lyon, Guy Hinrichs, Ken Engleman, John and Leigh Dick, Robert Dick, Thomas and Lisa Dick, Dena Dick (Balding).
Clif's wish was to be brought back to Anderson Valley, California, to be with his wife, Jean, for eternity and in a place that they both loved dearly. There will be a close friends and family gathering in the future at his request. He will be deeply missed and remembered for all that he was.
COME PROTEST PEACEFULLY TODAY, January 31st, 11-12 noon
Main Street, sidewalk in front of Guest House Museum, 343 N. Main St., Fort Bragg, CA
Bring non-perishable food donations for the FB Food Ban; we’ll deliver.
This is a peaceful protest. We're gathering to say NO to the recent killing of Renee Good by ICE, erosion of civil rights and human rights and the loss of critical government functions, NO to unconstitutional deportations, NO to the destruction of social security, NO to authoritarianism, and YES! to democracy & rule of law.
STEPHANI MARCUM:
I had a customer just now ask for a pack of American Spirit gold. He has come in weeks prior, gotten two packs and never said a word. He comes in this morning, I tell him the total, it's like $17 some change, and he says Jesus Christ how in the hell can you sleep at night? I look up at him, and he says I just don't understand how the hell you feel like this is okay. I said, well I don't make the prices. I just work here. He says, well you know that's what the Nazis said at the concentration camps right? We just work here.
Sobriety has given me restraint. So, I used it.
I said, there's absolutely no comparison and I'm not a Nazi. He says, yea that's what they said.
NORMAN LIVES!
Joseph Huckaby writes: I'm so sorry everyone -- I was given false information. I can confirm 100% that Norman de Vall is VERY MUCH ALIVE. Huge apologies. I heard the rumor from Carl (John Terwilliger's old friend) at the Food Bank in FB. He seemed quite sure about it. I deeply apologize for any harm caused by my ListServ email.
FEDERAL COURT UPHOLDS SHERIFF'S AUTHORITY IN CANNABIS RAIDS IN INDIAN COUNTRY
Judge allows lawsuit brought by Round Valley Indian tribes alleging unlawful searches and discriminatory enforcement to proceed
by Elise Cox
A federal judge in the Northern District of California on Thursday affirmed the authority of sheriff’s deputies to enforce criminal laws prohibiting large-scale cannabis cultivation on tribal land.
The ruling marked a victory for Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall, who has repeatedly warned about cartel activity in the northeastern part of the county.
U.S. District Judge Robert Illston issued the decision in a civil lawsuit brought by the Round Valley Indian Tribes against Kendall, Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal and California Highway Patrol Commissioner Sean Duryee. The lawsuit stems from law enforcement raids conducted in the Covelo area on July 22 and 23, 2024.
The tribes alleged the raids violated federal common law, which generally prohibits the enforcement of state regulatory laws on Indian reservations, and infringed on tribal sovereignty.
In an order responding to motions to dismiss filed by the defendants, Illman rejected those claims, but allowed allegations of unlawful searches and discriminatory enforcement to proceed.
The lawsuit was brought by three tribal members whose properties were targeted in the raids. Two of the plaintiffs, Eunice Swearinger, 86, and April James, 48, are grandmothers who use medicinal cannabis to treat conditions including arthritis, injuries from a traffic accident, and a degenerative disc disorder.
Swearinger cultivated cannabis alongside onions, watermelons, and zucchinis on her 2.3-acre trust allotment. James similarly grew cannabis on her 1.25-acre allotment and used it to make medicinal cream.
The third plaintiff, Steve Britton, a rancher, cultivated cannabis on five acres owned by his granddaughter, Mary Mae Azbill McKenna.
No criminal charges have been filed against any of the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit asserts that all three properties qualify as Indian country, where cannabis cultivation is permitted under the tribe’s Compassionate Use Ordinance, enacted by the Tribal Council on August 8, 2006.
The properties are trust allotments — parcels of land that were typically carved out of communal reservation land in the 1887 General Allotment Act and assigned to individuals. Both tribal trust lands and individual trust allotments are considered to be Indian country under federal law.
According to the 85-page complaint filed April 29, 2025, the plaintiffs sought “to protect the civil right of Indians to be free from state regulation and control while engaging in activities on their reservations authorized and licensed by their tribal government.”
States may enforce criminal laws in Indian country only if Congress has allowed it, including under Public Law 280, which authorized states such as Alaska, California, and Oregon to to prosecute most crimes committed in Indian Country.
The tribes argued Public Law 280 does not apply to the cannabis raids because cannabis has been decriminalized in California and enforcement should be treated as regulatory, not criminal. The complaint also alleges the raids were conducted without probable cause and without search warrants, violating the Fourth Amendment. Plaintiffs said hundreds of cannabis plants were destroyed and that the raids caused extensive property damage and “terrorized the community.”
In his ruling, Judge Illman acknowledged that “there is no bright-line rule for distinguishing between criminal and regulatory statutes.” Courts instead apply what he described as “a shorthand test” examining whether the conduct at issue violates state public policy.
Illman concluded that while California has legalized and regulated certain cannabis activities, state public policy still “strictly limits and generally prohibits the large-scale cultivation and possession for sale of cannabis.” He wrote that the intent of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act was to eliminate the illegal market, which the state has deemed dangerous.
“The medical exception for some of the limitations on cannabis possession and cultivation does not render the statutes regulatory in nature,” Illman wrote. “This is a narrow exception to limits on possession and cultivation that does not undermine the public policy of eradicating illegal marijuana operations.”
The ruling allows the lawsuit to proceed on the remaining claims and clarifies that while Public Law does not permit the enforcement of state regulatory laws on tribal land, it does allow enforcement of criminal provisions of California’s Health and Safety Code.
(Mendolocal.news)
GENE STEWART
Gene died at home in Willits on December 12, 2025.
Gene was born in Santa Cruz, CA on March 13, 1934 to Ernestine (Trask) and Francis Stewart.
As a young man, Gene worked as a carpenter’s apprentice in San Francisco. He later served as a soldier in the Army band during the Korean War. After the Army, Gene joined a Marist Seminary. He earned a master’s degree in music from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Gene married Marianne (Lang) in 1965. They had two daughters, Christine and Lauren.
Gene taught high school music and Spanish in Laytonville and Willits from 1970 to 1999. Gene married Carolyn (Jahn Matheny) in Dec. 1980 and became a step-father to her two daughters, Jennifer and Corrine.
Gene will be remembered for his music, his sense of humor, his love of learning, and the care he showed those around him.
A memorial will be held at the Willits Grange on Sunday, March 15, at 2:00.
FORT BRAGG DRONE LIGHTSHOW FOR 4TH OF JULY
A while back I gave public comment to the FB City Council, pointing out that traditional 4th of July fireworks are extremely harmful to animal population both wild and domestic, and that Many Ca. Cities use drone shows to minimize these traumas, several people on this list, and all the local animal orgs I spoke with are in favor, Well Lindy Peters and Marcia Rafanen both got back to me and a community survey was initiated, unfortunately, it received zero publicity, which I find unfortunate, and now I cant get a straight answer if it has been closed, no one seems sure, but here is the link if you want to register your thoughts, it still exists online , and it can’t hurt, I know the CC has big issues on their agenda, but I intend to continue to track the issue and keep the community informed, thank you!!
https://www.city.fortbragg.com/news_detail_T5_R57.php
Chris Skyhawk, [email protected]
Fort Bragg
AMAZON IS BUILDING A NEW DELIVERY CENTER JUST OUTSIDE OF UKIAH
Amazon is constructing a delivery center in Mendocino County, and its location is just north of Ukiah at the Friends of Liberty Industrial Park.
According to site plan documents obtained from the county, Amazon purchased just under 14 acres at the business park. The new facility, which the documents show will cover 59,000 square feet, is being built by Alston Construction, a Sacramento-based contractor. The facility will be at 1775 N. State St. and Masonite Industrial Road.
According to Natalie Banke, Amazon's West Coast public relations manager, the facility should be finished later this year, though she did not give an exact date of completion.
The popular e-commerce company announced in spring 2025 that it would be tripling its delivery stations in rural areas throughout the United States. Amazon said it planned to invest around $4 billion into its rural delivery project to bring quick delivery to customers in less populated areas.
In a press release issued by Amazon last year, the company said, "This investment will also grow our rural delivery network's footprint to more than 200 delivery stations, and we estimate it will create over 100,000 new jobs and driving opportunities through a wide range of full-time, part-time and flexible positions in our buildings and on the roads."
In an interview with The Mendocino Voice, Ross Liberty, the owner of the Friends of Liberty Industrial Park and creator of Factory Pipe, which makes exhaust systems for motorsports vehicles and boats, said that he was originally going to sell the land to Adventist Health, a nonprofit health organization, but the deal did not go through.
"We were working with Adventist Health. They were going to put in a huge hospital there -- probably a $800 million project," Liberty said.
Liberty had been eager to see interest from Adventist Health because of the company's potential to bring a large number of health care jobs to the area. After that deal fell through, Liberty was approached by Amazon with the help of John Lazaro, a local broker at Coldwell Banker Mendo Realty, and Ukiah-based company Selzer Realty Property Management. Lazaro helped coordinate the deal with Amazon and Selzer Realty, and after negotiations near the end of 2024, the lot was officially sold to Amazon in 2025.
"We had it listed with Selzer Realty. They connected with Amazon through a broker, and that's how it goes," Liberty said. "I was happy to make the sale, it was a lot of money, but it wasn't my preferred goal. My preferred goal was jobs for the community."
According to Liberty, Amazon will be opening what is called a "last-mile delivery center," which is a smaller facility compared to Amazon's other fulfillment and sortation centers.
At these facilities, packages arrive from the sortation centers and are scanned and organized into different delivery routes. These packages are then picked up by Amazon delivery drivers or independent contractors, called Amazon Flex drivers.
The Mendocino Voice sent a list of questions to Amazon regarding the number of jobs the delivery center would bring to Ukiah, what those jobs would look like, and how the delivery center could benefit the local community, but Amazon did not respond in time for publication.
However, it was estimated by the city of Redding that its new last-mile delivery center, which will open this year, will hire more than 100 full-time and part-time employees.
Amazon has a long history of labor and wage complaints filed by employees, and various lawsuits have alleged that the company has violated California labor laws and treated workers unfairly.
One of those allegations is a part of a class-action lawsuit, Martinho v. Amazon.com Inc., where the plaintiff alleges Amazon required new hires at delivery centers to attend trainings and onboarding sessions without pay, which violates state wage laws. The case is still pending in federal court.
Ukiah Mayor Susan Sher said in an interview that she does not believe Amazon will be an ethical employer, and is worried for local residents who choose to work at the delivery center.
"I'm very concerned about how our local folks who get jobs there are going to be treated," Sher said. "There'll be certainly a lot of jobs, but if you've read anything about people who work at these fulfillment centers, they're low-pay, dead-end, dangerous jobs for the most part."
Sher has also questioned the vetting process for Amazon's Ukiah project and said she doesn't understand why more reviews weren't done before the deal was completed.
"No public hearing, no public process. The public had no say in this. That's one of the biggest things that bugs me," Sher said. "I just don't see any upside to this at all except, as they said, people want to get their online orders sooner. That's not a reason to subject local people to all the downsides."
The land where Amazon is building its last-mile delivery center is located on the outskirts of northern Ukiah, a region that was going to be annexed as part of a widely contested proposal by the city of Ukiah. However, the Ukiah City Council decided to scale back the amount of land it plans to include in a potential annexation and is currently revising its proposal.
Liberty is also an avid member of No Ukiah Annexation, a local organization that has been advocating against the city's proposal to annex unincorporated land.
The Mendocino Voice reached out several times to Julia Krog, director of Mendocino County Planning and Building Services, for comment but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Supervisor Madeline Cline, whose District 1 includes the land where the Amazon facility is being built, also declined to comment.
(BayCityNews)
LEW CHICHESTER (Covelo):
“The Tribe, as the beneficiary of senior-water and fishing rights, will oppose any attempts to retain these dams before the SWRCB or in any other legal forum, and will protect our water and fishing rights.
The Two-Basin Solution is not about radical environmentalism or putting fish above people.”
— Short excerpt from the Round Valley Indian Tribe’s resolution reprinted in yesterday’s AVA. This statement is about as succinct as possible. The various attempts to keep the Potter Valley project, including the two dams on the Eel River and Lake Pillsbury, is not going to happen. Embrace the Two-Basin Solution, learn to live with it.
JON TYSON:
I love the series of photos from Talking Heads tribute band Burning Down the House's February 2025 show at the Philo Grange! There was so much uplifting energy shared back and forth between the band and the community. Let's do it again -- come shake off these dark days of Winter with us.
Ticket sales for Burning Down The House's Saturday, 1/31 show at the Anderson Valley Grange are going strong. We had to turn people away at our show in Elk -- now's the time to get your tickets!
You can get tickets online at [https://bit.ly/avgrange2026], or at Lemon's Market (Philo), Anderson Valley Market (Boonville), and Mendocino Book Company (Ukiah).
Doors open at 6PM with DJ Nazty Nate spinning tunes; the band starts at 7PM. We'll have a big suit and 80s costume contest at set break, so dress up! Ukiah's Patrona restaurant is providing food.
I hope to see you there.
LOCAL EVENTS (today)
MENDO LAND TRUST:
Mendocino Land Trust is stepping into a milestone year in 2026, celebrating 50 years of land conservation in Mendocino County. Our mission grew from protecting a single field in Mendocino Village to an expansive, long-term vision that includes abundant public access to wild places, conserving working lands and legacy farms, and doing our part to help mitigate climate change. Since 1976, we have conserved over 40,000 acres of land in Mendocino County, built 20 miles of trails along our coastal corridor from the Lost Coast to Point Arena, opened five preserves for public access, accepted offers to dedicate numerous public access easements for pocket trails, and completed crucial habitat restoration projects for endangered salmon, pollinators, and their surrounding ecosystems. We have established dedicated funds to protect redwood forests, restore rivers, and help bring folks out onto our trails and open spaces to see for themselves exactly why we do this work. We believe that people will protect what they love, and we are working to make it easier for more people of different abilities to access these beautiful, wild places, because that’s where the love is born.
MLT is looking ahead with renewed energy. And with a fresh, new logo to represent our steadfast dedication to this land, its life, and our unchanging values.
www.Mendocinolandtrust.org
PAUL MODIC:
(Wednesday I read a comment by Frank Hartzell that the “AVA was fading” and I wanted to deny it, but I may be fading too…)
Two days ago in late afternoon I realized that I had neither seen nor talked to anyone all day. Being preoccupied with my little life I hadn’t even noticed but when I did I felt a jolt of isolation and loneliness: did I really need some kind of direct social contact every day?
The next day around four I went uptown specifically to seek some conversation, kind of like the guy who’s got nowhere to go on Thanksgiving and winds up at the community dinner at the Mateel. Within an hour I had three short conversations at the library, which I hadn’t needed to go to as I have many books and books on CD to read and listen to, and another three at Chautauqua Natural Foods though I didn’t need any food, including talking to Tonya for a few minutes in the veggie aisle.
She said she liked my light blue corduroy sports jacket, I replied that it had been my father’s, we talked about family for a few minutes, I mentioned my theory that children should stop blaming their parents once they’ve reached thirty-five, and told her this little story:
Once toward the end of his life my father said one more disparaging thing to me and I said, “Pop, you don’t really like me, do you?”
He paused in thought for a few seconds then said, “No.”
“Well, I don’t really like you, you’re not the kind of person I’d choose to hang out with,” I said, “but you’re my father and I love you and I’m here for you.”
We parted by the broccoli and she thanked me for sharing that story.
(I’ll keep posting, until all this fades away…)
BILLY DOCK AT YORKVILLE
Mendocino County, California - Pomo - 1925
Y’ALL, IT’S DARK OUT THERE
I understand that this is not the place you come for political or cultural commentary. But I at least want to acknowledge that our country is hurting, and that the pain is self-inflicted, which is the worst part about it.
My strategy—help where I can, keep community ties strong, and hoard joy like a Rockefeller hordes gold doubloons. We’re heading into the month of love, so what does that look like to you? Fun, rest, laughter, adventure? Grab someone special and do something you’ve never done before. Or take the opportunity for some solo time and follow your heart down a forest path or to an art exhibit or onto the dance floor. Dancing is a time-honored response to dark times, giving us the joy-doubloons we need to create the change we want to see.
See you out there ~
Torrey & the team at Word of Mouth Mendocino Magazine, www.wordofmouthmendo.com
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, January 30, 2026
JORDAN ALGER, 21, Temecula/Ukiah. DUI-any drug, controlled substance, more than an ounce of pot.
JOHN BOSTICK, 33, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
SAMUEL FINLEY, 43, Ukiah. Suspended license for reckless driving.
NICHOLAS HALVORSEN, 53, Fort Bragg. Elder abuse resulting in great bodily harm or death, criminal threats. (Frequent flyer.)
ANDREW HOLM, 32. Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
JESSE MAPLES, 29, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
JORGE MARTINEZ, 30, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
FRANK ONETO JR., 51, Ukiah. Transient registration.
KAMARA PAGE, 37, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, maintenance of a place for selling, giving or using drugs, failure to appear.
FRANKLIN PATTY, 60, Willits. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, contempt of court, parole violation, offenses while on bail.
ANTHONY STARKS, 29, Rio Dell/Ukiah. Failure to appear.
EMBATTLED RESERVOIR PROJECT IN COLUSA AND GLENN COUNTIES GETS FEDERAL APPROVAL
Critics say initiative ‘fails to respect tribal nations and local economies in the North State’
by Dan Bacher
The U.S. Department of the Interior just approved the Record of Decision, or ROD, for the controversial Sites Reservoir Project that’s slated for the Maxwell community and edges of Glenn County.
The ROD released last week authorizes the Bureau of Reclamation to provide up to 25% of the total cost for the 1.5 million acre-foot off-stream reservoir.…
MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio all Friday night on KNYO and KAKX.
Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is six or eight. If that's too soon, send it any time after that and I'll read it next Friday.
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to approximately 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.
Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. You'll find plenty of other educational amusements there to educate and amuse yourself with until showtime, or any time, such as:
The scene in Doctor Who when The Doctor and Amy take /the/ Vincent Van Gogh to the year 2010 and show him an exhibit of his lasting work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk
All this is just 650 light years from us. Practically across the street. https://boingboing.net/2026/01/26/dying-star-lights-up-the-helix-nebula.html
And one fleet carrier sunk, one destroyer sunk; 21,600 tons of fleet, ahem, tonnage destroyed, 150 aircraft destroyed, 3,400 brave young men wounded or killed, so that eventually these birds could be free to simply sit in the grass and enjoy a lovely day without having to knuckle under to Japanese hegemony. https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=N2boID
Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
THE KOJAK CONUNDRUM
Message to Postmodern California Residents:
Warmest spiritual greetings, I have now received all of the senior social benefits and have been advised that I will be solid for at least the next three years. Otherwise, when the SSA comes in, there will be slightly less than $6,000 in my Chase bank account. I’ve got enough health insurance for a family of four, with zero copay! Partnership of California just sent the membership packet (which I am informed continues to be active, in spite of the fact that I changed residence to Washington, D.C. in order to get all of my social security benefits without the California wackiness of penalizing me because I had over $2,000 in my bank account, even though it was because the Social Security Administration gave me the money in the first place. I have no reason to be in the District of Columbia any further, since President Donald J. Trump had our D.C. Peace Vigil illegally removed for aesthetic reasons. Publisher Bruce Anderson sends me emails urging me to return to Ukiah. No problem. But let’s get real for the first time ever. I could fly back, and even get to Haiku-Spelled-Backwards on a shuttle bus. Where’s the housing? Where am I going? Where am I loved in postmodern California? Anybody know? PEACEOUT
Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]
“BE ALWAYS RESTLESS, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction.”
— Nikos Kazantzakis
ANCIENT HISTORY
by Marilyn Davin
When I was 18 years old I picked up a train schedule near Constance, Germany, where I was a student at an immersive German language program, and made my way 113 miles northeast through the Black Forest to the Dachau concentration camp, the first Nazi concentration camp, which operated from March 1933 to April 1945. Photographs of Dachau today show a comprehensive, visual history of the notorious death camp, but when I walked through its gate from the train station Dachau had the air of a raw, recently abandoned place. Which it was, having been liberated by World War II allies scarcely 20 years earlier. As the product of one of our nation’s best public school systems and the daughter of a U.S. Marines fighter pilot during the war, I knew all about Hitler’s Nazis; but spending a day at the camp among its blackened crematoria and towering piles of prisoners’ discarded shoes put a real face to the estimated 35,000 prisoners who died there.
I don’t recall at the time any mention of the murder of German journalist and historian Carl Albert Fritz Michael Gerlich, who, as a vocal critic of Hitler, was arrested and died on the very ground where I was standing, shot and incinerated at Dachau in 1934. I write this as two independent American journalists, targeted by the authoritarian Donald J. Trump, have been arrested. One of them, former CNN anchor Don Lemon, was arrested after a Minnesota federal magistrate judge refused to sign a complaint against him in connection with a protest inside a church in St. Paul, reportedly enraging Attorney General Pam Bondi. If Bondi is not charged and permanently disbarred for violating her oath to uphold the law, there is no regulation of attorneys in the United States.
Before 1933, Germany had a constitution, the Weimar Constitution, which included fundamental rights including freedom of speech and religion. It ultimately collapsed from within from the twin forces of political instability and the rise of authoritarianism. What followed was the Nazi repression of speech in all its forms under its newly created ministry, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi’s new regime glorified Hitler by featuring his image on postcards, posters, and in the press (Trump memes, anyone?); making radios cheaper so that more Germans could listen to Nazi propaganda; broadcasting Nazi speeches; and organizing large, celebratory Nazi rallies (remember Trump’s military rally?). It was just one year later that journalist Gerlich was arrested, shot, and incinerated at Dachau in 1934.
I learned a lot about Hitler and the Nazis in school, even wrote my first paper at UC Berkeley on the Nuremberg trials. But it was all within an assumed context of relief, relief that understanding and public exposure surely inoculated us from the possibility of it ever happening here; faith in our own constitution and its rule of law would surely protect us from a similar fate. Our complacency and confidence in the rigor of our laws allowed us to miss or take seriously the warning signs of an approaching apocalypse that could topple it all.
Just like the Germans in 1933.
The Nazis used propaganda to promote their ideas and beliefs. Beginning in March 1933, the regime tried to centralize its propaganda efforts in a new ministry led by Joseph Goebbels. This ministry was called the Reich Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda.
The Nazis used a variety of propaganda tools to spread Nazi ideas. Examples of propaganda under the Nazis included: and creating groups, like the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, that fostered Nazi ideals.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
The solution is to get local, get self-dependent, get the common unity back in community by building webs of resilience with your neighbors, get control of your school boards, mayors and sherrif's office, and town councils (the last places we still hold all of the cards), get a garden in your lawn no matter how small, a single tomato plant is better than nothing, get the lost art of bartering back in your mind, get a well (water is your most important resource hands down), get ready, get moving, get doing, and, if so inclined, get God.
'THIS ISN'T AMERICA ANYMORE': THOUSANDS RALLY AGAINST ICE IN SF'S DOLORES PARK
by Olivia Hebert
Students poured into Dolores Park on Friday afternoon, sporting baggy pants, backpacks and protest signs as they joined thousands of workers and organizers for a national day of action demanding Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents be removed from communities nationwide. A drum circle pulsed through the crowd — with maracas shaking and a cowbell clanging — as teens waved signs bearing cheeky slogans like, “We are skipping our lessons to teach you one,” “End the ICE age,” and “Sex is good but have you ever tried f—-ing the system?” Cars passing the park honked in support while chants of “Minnesota to the Bay ICE ICE go away” rippled across the hillside, driven by impassioned local labor and student organizers from a makeshift stage near the base of the park.
The San Francisco rally was held at 1 p.m. and organized by the Bay Area chapter for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in solidarity with mass protests in Minnesota, where students and workers launched a statewide shutdown under the banner of “no work, no school, no shopping” — a call to temporarily halt businesses, classrooms and city life in light of not only the detainment of U.S. citizens and noncitizens at the hands of ICE, but the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by agents deployed in Minneapolis.
“The courage of the people of Minnesota last week, standing up to ICE and getting in the streets in the hundreds of thousands and shutting down the city in a general strike, we’re taking that as the blueprint around the country right now,” PSL organizer Sanika Mahajan, 26, told SFGATE. “They’re not going to stop with Minneapolis, and neither are we.”
Tens of thousands converged to take part in one of many demonstrations happening nationwide on the same day. Mahajan described the rally as part of a broader effort to disrupt daily life in response to escalating federal immigration enforcement.
“There are thousands of businesses closing around the Bay Area and around the country, thousands of people out here,” Mahajan said. “People are fed up. Enough is enough, and it’s time to shut it down.”
Mahajan also pointed to past organizing in the region — including efforts to block immigration raids, and shut down ICE offices and court buildings — as proof of what coordinated action can achieve.
“That’s the power of the Bay Area,” Mahajan said. “That’s the power of working people here and around the country, and we know we can do it again.”
Other organizations joined the call to action, including Refuse Fascism, whose members circulated through the crowd with flyers and impassioned speeches via megaphones. Sully, a 19-year-old Oakland resident with the group, said they were drawn to join the rally to encourage people to protest against the federal government’s increasing abuses of power and disregard for human rights.
“It’s going to be the people in power,” Sully said. “We need to mobilize millions in the streets day after day, in massive, sustained protest.”
By noon, well before the scheduled start time, students from high schools, colleges and middle schools across San Francisco and the greater Bay Area had already begun arriving at the park. Students made up a visible share of the rally, many emboldened to make their voices heard after their peers posted calls to action circulate on social media, one post being from Amiko Muscat, 17, a senior at San Francisco’s School of the Arts.
Muscat told SFGATE that she helped mobilize students after watching coverage of the events in Minnesota and feeling frustrated by what she described as online engagement without action.
“Posts are one thing, but getting out in the streets is another,” Muscat said. “When people care deeply about something, they’re going to show up for it.”
For Muscat, Friday marked her first time organizing a protest. She said she initially expected a small turnout from her own school.
“It literally took one post,” Muscat said. “I thought maybe 20 people from my school were going to show up."
Muscat said students from multiple campuses coordinated independently, relaying information through group chats and social media as they walked out of class. She described the student turnout as a collective effort rather than the work of one organizer.
“This wasn’t just me,” she said. “This was everybody.”
She said many students felt compelled to act despite not being directly affected by immigration enforcement themselves. “When you have the privilege to be able to speak up, that’s when you need to,” Muscat said.
Other students echoed that sense of urgency. Sienna Magenau, 17, a student at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, said she and classmates had been learning about recent immigration enforcement actions through a school-based social justice program and decided to attend together to show “youth support.” Meanwhile, Desmond Cimo, 16, a student at Wallenberg High School who was hanging off Dolores Street sign with the slogan, “Abolish ICE,” told SFGATE that he’d joined the walk out with friends from other schools. He encouraged his fellow students to mobilize.
“Be safe and be smart, but do come,” he said. “We need as many people [as possible]. We need to get these fascists out of our f—-ing system.”
Longtime Bay Area resident, Judy, 70, attended the rally wearing an inflatable frog suit inspired by Portland-based ICE protests. She said she felt compelled to attend despite other obligations.
“There’s nothing more important than this,” Judy said. “People are being killed. People are being injured and brutalized. They’re taking away all of our rights .”
Judy, who said she has lived in the Bay Area her entire life, said recent events motivated her to continue protesting.
“This isn’t America anymore,” she said. “Freedom of speech is being squashed. We have to come out.”
(sfgate.com)
"I WITNESSED at least ten beatings in Chicago that were worse than anything I ever saw the Hell’s Angels do; at one point I stood about 20 yards off, while four cops beat a photographer who was rolling around on the sidewalk screaming “Help, Help!” … and all I could do was stand there, constantly watching around me to make sure I had running room if they came after me. A half hour later I was talking about what I’d seen in a bar when I suddenly started crying…the whole week was that way: fear and tension and super-charged emotions, sore legs from running, no sleep, and a sense of disaster pervading it all."
— Hunter S. Thompson ‘Fear and Loathing in America’
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
Empty spaces, what are we living for?
Abandoned places, I guess we know the score
On and on
Does anybody know what we are looking for?
Another hero, another mindless crime
Behind the curtain, in the pantomime
Hold the line
Does anybody want to take it anymore?
The show must go on
The show must go on
Yeah
Inside my heart is breaking
My make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
Whatever happens, I'll leave it all to chance
Another heartache, another failed romance
On and on
Does anybody know what we are living for?
I guess I'm learning (I'm learning), I must be warmer now
I'll soon be turning (turning, turning, turning), 'round the corner now
Outside the dawn is breaking
But inside in the dark I'm aching to be free
The show must go on
The show must go on, yeah, yeah
Ooh, inside my heart is breaking
My make-up may be flaking
But my smile still stays on
Yeah, yeah
Oh, whoa, whoa
Oh, whoa
My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairy tales of yesterday will grow but never die
I can fly, my friends
The show must go on, yeah
The show must go on
I'll face it with a grin
I'm never givin' in
On with the show
Ooh, I'll top the bill, I'll overkill
I have to find the will to carry on
(On with the show, on with the show)
Show
(The show must go on, go on)
— Freddie Mercury & Brian May (1990)
THE NEW YORK TIMES LATEST SNOW JOB: Tisch vs. Mamdani
by Jonah Raskin
The White House sucks and so does the New York Times, the newspaper that a schoolteacher told me years ago was “black and white and red all over.“ The masthead reads, “All the News that’s Fit to Print.” What the masthead doesn’t say is that The Times skews the news, disseminates bullshit like Judith Miller’s stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the use of “barnyard epithet” to describe the word that defendant Dave Dellinger uttered during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. Dave said “bullshit.”
Take a recent story about New York City’s Mayor and its Police Commissioner titled “She’s a Billionaire. He’s a Socialist. Can they get along?” Katherine Rosman, the author of the story, noted that “Mr. Mamdani, 34, is a Muslim whose political identity was shaped by his opposition to Israel,” and that “Ms. Tisch, 44, is Jewish, a supporter of Israel and a member of a prominent billionaire family.”
A Muslim outsider and a Jewish insider, Rosman seemed to be saying. Are there not other, more apt ways to identify the mayor and the commissioner? Rosman describes a meal around the Tisch dining room table where the family feasts on matzo ball soup. Reading about the matzo ball soup at the civilized table I was reminded that film director Martin Scorsese said of New York society, “What always stuck in my head is the brutality behind the manners.” He added that the violence was expressed “through very elaborate etiquette and ritual.” Manners are a cloak for murder.
Can’t get more heart-warming and ethnic than matzo ball soup. Harry, the commissioner’s ten-year-old son, tells his mother that she should accept Mamdani’s offer and remain in the same position she occupied during Eric Adams’ tenure as mayor. “People across the country would be inspired by her and Mr. Mamdani’s ability to transcend their differences,” Harry said. Those are Rosman’s words not the kid’s. No direct quotes. Just a paraphrase. What did he actually say and why not quote a ten-year old?
Rosman writes, “Merryl Tisch, the family matriarch and the chair of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, looked at her daughter and shrugged. ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ she said. “You have your answer.” Kids say the darndest things! How homey. How sweet and how impressive! Wow, a matriarch! Can’t get juicier than that.
The reporter does not give the Mamdani tribe equal space. She offers no description of the Mamdani’s breaking bread or naan together, and there’s not a word about Zohran’s father Mahmood, who might be considered the patriarchy of the tribe, a professor at Columbia University—which caved into Trump— and the author of 14 books including Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (1984,) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (2004 and the magisterial Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (2020).
Professors, intellectuals and authors don’t seem to count in Rosman’s hierarchy of New York society. Not long ago, the Commissioner attended a funeral for a police officer named Didarul Islam who was shot and killed by a gunman. “The night Didarul was killed, condolence messages poured in from every corner of the world,” she said. “His death united millions in prayer, and there was one refrain that echoed again and again: ‘May God grant him Jannah.’”
Mamdani also attended the funeral, but the biased reporter doesn’t offer a quotation from him, except that she allows that Mamdani praised the commissioner for her understanding of the Muslim faith. The empathy seems to be lodged only on one side. Rosman provides the who, the where, the what and the how of the story but she doesn’t provide the why. Indeed, why is it that a socialist and a police commissioner are apparently working together, supposedly for the good of New York and New Yorkers.
Perhaps they coexist now for the same reason that Joseph Fouché served as the French Minister of Police during the revolution, under liberals and radicals (the Girondists and the Jacobins), and after the revolution, under the rule of Napoleon. Fouché ransacked churches, sent their valuables to the treasury and helped establish the “Cult of Reason.” And then he became the top French cop, created a network of secret police, informers and agent provocateurs. Regimes came and went. Fouché remained powerful. Tisch has also had a long run in public office. She served with the police under de Blasio and Adams and now Mamdani. Politics makes for strange bedfellows.
The New York Times reporter gives Tisch the last word in the article about the billionaire and the Mayor. “I only play to win,” she says. When the annual, end-of-January snowstorm hit New York, Tisch told Mamdani, “you do not need to have a high amount of snow on the shovel; it’s better to take multiple smaller bites at it, lift smaller amounts of snow, and toss it aside. But do not try to go for the big, massive shovelful of snow because regardless of your health, this could cause a heart attack.” One might infer that the Times and indeed all New York mass media wouldn’t mind if Tisch remained in office and if Mamdani suffered a heart attack shoveling snow and was forced to resign.
(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)
“THE WORLD REVEALS ITSELF to those who travel on foot.”
– Werner Herzog
COME AS YOU ARE
Come as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend
As an old enemy
Take your time, hurry up
Choice is yours, don't be late
Take a rest, as a friend
As an old enemy, yeah
Memoria
Memoria
Memoria
Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach
As I want you to be
As a trend, as a friend
As a known enemy, yeah
Memoria
Memoria
Memoria
When I swear that I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
–ria
Memoria
Memoria
Memoria
When I swear that I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
No, I don't have a gun
Memoria
— Kurt Cobain (1992)
MICHAEL BECK, 65, DIES; FIRST TO REPORT SYMPTOMS OF ‘HAVANA SYNDROME’
As an employee with the N.S.A., he claimed he was exposed to a direct-energy device that led to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 45.
by Clay Risen
Michael Beck, the first of scores of federal workers to develop neurological symptoms while serving at U.S. government facilities overseas, a condition that has come to be known as Havana Syndrome and which, Mr. Beck claimed, resulted in his diagnosis of a rare form of Parkinson’s disease when he was 45, died on Saturday in Columbia, Md. He was 65.
His daughter, Regan, said that he died while shopping and that the cause had not been determined.
Havana Syndrome refers to a collection of neurological ailments, including dizziness, headaches and insomnia, that more than 200 government employees began reporting in 2016 after being exposed to what they described as a constant buzzing sound, typically in U.S. government buildings overseas — most notably in Havana, Cuba.
Despite thorough studies by government and academic researchers, no consensus has been reached on the cause of the symptoms.
The case of Mr. Beck, a counterintelligence officer, began much earlier than the others. In 1996, he and another National Security Agency employee, Charles W. Gubete, were sent to what he said was a hostile country, but which he and the government subsequently declined to identify. They were there to evaluate whether the country was installing listening devices in a U.S. facility under construction.
On their second day, they encountered what Mr. Beck later described as a “technical threat” at the site.
The next morning, he recalled to The Guardian, “I woke up and I was really, really groggy. I was not able to wake up routinely. It was not a normal event. I had several cups of coffee, and that didn’t do a thing to get me going.”
The symptoms passed, and Mr. Beck and Mr. Gubete returned to the United States apparently unharmed.
About a decade later, Mr. Beck began experiencing strange ailments. Typically a rapid-fire typist, he found it hard to locate letters on his keyboard. His right arm wouldn’t swing naturally when he walked; his right hand was stiff, and his right leg dragged.
A trip to a neurologist quickly confirmed the worst: Parkinson’s disease. At 45, he was relatively young for such a diagnosis, and the disease did not run in his family.
In 2012, he encountered Mr. Gubete at the N.S.A. headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. Mr. Gubete was 60 but “walking like an old man,” Mr. Beck told The Guardian. “He was slumped over and walking really awkwardly. I went up to him and said, ‘What’s going on?’”
When Mr. Gubete confided that he had also been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Mr. Beck found the coincidence suspicious.
Not long after seeing Mr. Gubete, who died the next year, Mr. Beck read a classified report detailing how the hostile country had developed a direct-energy weapon that could cause debilitating neurological symptoms in its targets.
The report said: “The National Security Agency confirms that there is intelligence information from 2012 associating the hostile country to which Mr. Beck traveled in the late 1990s with a high-powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate, or kill an enemy over time and without leaving evidence.”
“I was sick in the stomach and shocked when I read that report,” Mr. Beck told The Washington Post in 2017. “I am familiar with other things this hostile country does, and it just felt raw and unfair.”
He filed a workers’ compensation claim with the Department of Labor in 2014 that was ultimately denied because the N.S.A. would not support his theory — even though he had managed to get some of the report declassified, and even after he had gotten experts from the C.I.A. to endorse him.
Two years later, government employees began to report experiencing similar neurological symptoms while working in Cuba, Canada, Russia and, in at least one case, Washington, D.C.
The news media and Congress began to pay attention, but studies were inconclusive. One, by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, found evidence to support the direct-energy thesis. Another, by the National Institutes of Health, said no evidence existed to show that such a device was the cause.
Despite his condition and the lack of government aid, Mr. Beck continued to work for the N.S.A. until 2016, when he became too sick to continue.
“Notwithstanding that the government abandoned him, he was still dedicated to the mission,” Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represented Mr. Beck in his workers’ compensation claim, said in a phone interview. “He would have worked for the federal government his whole life.”
John Michael Beck was born on Oct. 17, 1960, in Columbia, Pa., about 80 miles west of Philadelphia. His parents, John C. and Ruth (Zielinski) Beck, worked for the Columbia phone company.
He graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1983 with a degree in the administration of justice, after which he joined the Secret Service. He moved to the N.S.A. in 1987, two years after he married Rita Cicala, who survives him.
Along with her and their daughter, Mr. Beck is survived by their son, Grant; a son from a previous relationship, Ryan Lewis; and two sisters, Deb Holt and Lynne Houck.
The federal government has established programs to help employees with their symptoms. It also continues to pursue the possibility that a direct-energy device causes Havana Syndrome. Last year, the Department of Defense purchased, through a classified channel, a backpack-size device that it says appears capable of causing neurological damage.
Details about the device are classified, but news media reports have said that some of its components were manufactured in Russia.
(nytimes.com)
"I CAN NO LONGER SIT BACK and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
— Gen. Jack Ripper
On this date in 1964, Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" was released.
LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT
ICE Expands Power of Agents to Arrest People Without Warrants
Calling the Protests in Minnesota an Insurgency Poses Dangers
A Minnesota School District Guards Against ICE, From Dawn to Dusk
Senate Passes Deal to Fund Government and Negotiate ICE Limits
‘A Terrifying Line Is Being Crossed’: Mayor Jacob Frey on the Turmoil in Minneapolis
ONCE, YEARS AGO, I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and — it was the most casual of moments — as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity — the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done though the grass where I stood scarcely trembled. As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: leaves, dust, thrushes and finches, men and women. And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decisions in the years since.
— Mary Oliver, Long Life (2004)
IN TEHRAN
by Raha Nik-Andish
On 8 January I sent a video of the protests in Iran to a friend in England. Then the internet went dark. Reza Pahlavi – the son of the late shah, now living in the US – had called for people to come out into the streets at 8 p.m., in response to the catastrophic economic situation and the strikes that had begun in the bazaars a week earlier.
I live on the top floor of a block of flats in western Tehran. I turned off the lights and watched the city below. It was slowly changing shape. Shops were closing. People were running through the streets. My phone rang. It was a friend. ‘We’re going to Qeytarieh Square,’ he said. ‘Come with us.’
We headed north in a car. Along the way, shopkeepers were pulling down their shutters. When we arrived, I couldn’t believe the size of the crowd. People in wealthy neighbourhoods never usually protested. But economic pressure had erased class distinctions. Discontent had become universal.
The chants were loud: ‘Long live the Shah’; ‘Death to Khamenei.’ Wanting to know what was happening further ahead, I moved forward and got separated from my friends. Sandbags and dirt were piled in the middle of the street. Road signs had been torn down to block the entry of security forces. Someone poured petrol onto a pile of tyres and set it on fire. The flames rose high, lighting up the street.
Across from us stood riot police in full gear, twenty or thirty of them, along with armed plainclothes agents. I looked at the protesters around me. Most of them were very young, perhaps twenty years old: girls and boys dressed in dark clothes, their faces covered by masks. ‘Don’t go into side alleys,’ people warned. ‘You’ll get trapped.’
The police fired tear gas. The chants continued. ‘They’re shooting!’ someone shouted. We all ran. A young woman asked me to look at the back of her neck. She had been hit by pellets.
The sound of gunfire intensified. I could see flashes in the darkness and didn’t understand what they were. (Later, when the internet came back on and videos surfaced on social media, I realised the authorities had been firing directly into the crowd.)
Seeing the young woman who had already been shot was enough for me. I headed back towards my friend’s car. To avoid being identified none of us had our phones. There was no way to be in touch with one another. But my friends were waiting for me.
We drove back to western Tehran, toward Sadeghieh Square. The streets were filled with fire. We tried different routes to avoid the crowds. Near the square, there were so many people the streets were impassable. I got out of the car and ran towards home.
Suddenly I found myself in the middle of violent clash. Plainclothes agents were attacking people with batons. The sound of gunfire didn’t stop. Protesters were trying to flee, carrying the wounded.
A boy was lying at the side of the road with a plainclothes agent sitting on him. The agent’s arm was moving up and down, yet he held no baton. I moved a little closer. He was stabbing the boy with a knife. I ran.
It took me half an hour to get home. I was worried about my family, but the phone and internet weren’t working. I didn’t dare turn on a light. From the window, I watched the gunfire and tear gas below. The city finally fell silent around three in the morning.
People were supposed to return to the streets again at eight the following evening. At dusk, around five o’clock, the shops began closing. The security forces were out in far greater numbers. From my window, I could see riot motorcycles and armoured vehicles with three men in the back, one of them standing behind a mounted machine gun. A few hours later the sound of gunfire was so intense that it felt like a war zone.
On 10 January I went to buy bread. Bakeries are usually places of quiet conversation, but that day anger was visible on people’s faces. The queue was long, and in the course of an hour I witnessed two serious altercations.
The internet was still down. ATMs weren’t working. It was possible to make phone calls but not to send texts. The only incoming messages were from the government:
Following public demand for firm action against those disrupting security, citizens are requested to report any suspicious individuals or elements threatening security by calling 114, 113 or 110.
Dear parents, due to the enemy’s plan to increase open violence and deliberately cause civilian deaths, please remain alert to these plots and avoid being present in streets or gatherings where violence is taking place. Also, inform your children about the consequences of co-operating with terrorist mercenaries, which is considered an act of betrayal against the country – IRGC Intelligence Organisation
Report any suspicious activity.
The people who had been called ‘rioters’ the day before were now labelled ‘terrorists’. Additional warnings were issued: any contact with the outside world or sharing of images would be severely punished.
A few days later, my brother called me. ‘There’s no good news,’ he said. ‘I heard that our cousin has been arrested.’
I live near one of the Islamic Revolutionary Courts, which handle alleged threats to national security. Since the start of the protests, two or three hundred people have been gathering outside the courthouse daily.
A man said that his son, a soldier, had been arrested on his way to the barracks. Judges were issuing verdicts based on interrogation reports: did he take videos? Did he throw stones? Punishment could be a fine, property confiscation, jail time or even a death sentence.
We still have no news of my cousin. We only know that he has been detained.
On 13 January, Iran International television announced that over the course of just two days, twelve thousand people had been killed. They broadcast images from the Kahrizak Medical Forensic Centre, showing bodies piled on top of one another. BBC Persian spoke more cautiously of thousands of deaths. Iranian state television at first announced a figure of two thousand. Two weeks later, some unofficial estimates place the number killed at more than 36,500.
In the absence of reliable information, rumours became a parallel reality. Numbers were whispered in queues, repeated without certainty but with conviction. What everyone knew for sure was that death had entered daily life.
I stopped driving for Snapp!. It didn’t seem safe and I was scared to go back to driving nights. But one day I called a Snapp! car and took it to a café to meet a friend. I asked the driver to turn the radio on. ‘I’ve boycotted radio and television,’ he said. ‘They assume we’re idiots and lie to us.’
His main job was driving an ambulance, he told me, but that didn’t pay enough to survive. He had been on duty on 10 January. ‘Just me alone,’ he said, ‘I transported four hundred bodies to Kahrizak.’
He spoke calmly, almost mechanically. ‘The scenes I saw will stay with me for the rest of my life. Over those two days – 8 and 9 January – they killed so many people that bodies were stored in mosques. We were only operating around the Tehran Bazaar. When they ran out of vehicles, they used hospital ambulances. I can say this comfortably: they killed 100,000 people.’
He told me about a woman who came to collect her husband’s body. According to those accompanying her, the man had leaned out of a window to see what was happening and was shot in the head. His body fell into the street. His wife and daughter watched as security forces put his body in a black bag and carried it away. The wife ran downstairs. Her husband’s blood was still warm on the pavement. The daughter had stopped speaking.
When the woman came to retrieve her husband’s body, the driver told me, the authorities demanded payment for the bullet. She showed them a cloth soaked in her husband’s blood and said she would bury that – and they could keep the body.
Tehran is in mourning. In this collapsed economy, perhaps the only people who continue to earn an income are sellers of dates, halva and candles – because at mourning ceremonies it is customary to distribute dates and halva, and to burn candles, constantly, in homes and on pavements.
I arranged to meet a friend at a café and took a shared taxi to get there. The woman beside me was muttering blessings (salavat) under her breath. She said she was praying for conditions to improve.
‘Our problem as people is that we throw everything into God’s court,’ the driver said. ‘God gave us the tools for life. The rest must be managed with reason. Nothing gets fixed with prayers and blessings.’
At the café I asked my friend how business was. He owns a women’s clothing store in the bazaar. ‘I closed the shop,’ he said. ‘There are no sales at all. Like you I’ve started driving Snapp! at six in the morning and work until ten at night. Maybe I get two hours of rest in between. I make about 20 million rials a day, 600 million a month. My rent is 280 million rials. Food prices go up every day. How am I supposed to live?’
He said people think America is coming with warships to overthrow the clerics. ‘They’re not coming for that. They’re coming to stop oil exports. Even if we sell oil, they don’t pay cash. They give us Chinese goods. What use are cars to us? We need money, not barter.’
‘If America attacks Iran,’ I said, ‘won’t people be killed?’
‘They don’t kill people. Our own government does. No enemy in our history has done to us what these clerics have done.’
(London Review of Books)
As I drove out of the library parking lot the county coroner’s van was just leaving the senior housing complex and I wondered who died? I followed it down the street hoping it would stop so I could ask but it turned off toward 101North and I abandoned pursuit.
At Chautauqua, Skinny Will was coming out as I was going in and said he’d just learned from a random newspaper a friend had given him that an old friend from Monterey was killed by a shark while surfing last month. She’d been mistaken for a seal in her wetsuit, was dragged underwater twice and cause of death could have been either massive shark bites or drowning. He was still in shock about how she died.
I asked about our mutual friend Justin who tried to go legal, was busted and sued by Fish and Game and had to sell the land he’s had since the seventies at a loss, his paradise out Sprowel Creek with a $175,000 fine looming. (He was responsible for skid roads made on the land in the fifties, which seems unfair but I guess that’s the law.)
“When he was going to go legal I told him it didn’t sound like a good idea,” I said.
“I last talked to him a couple years ago and he was very depressed about it,” Will said. “I’m probably not going to call him again.”
(We talked for a while then Will left for Briceland to buy his weed stash for the year, half a pound of buds for $150.)
Protests in Mendocino and All Over America—
Here’s Why we Americans are in the streets today:
OUTPOURING
A bucket of water tossed on the frozen streets of Minneapolis for the ICE agent to slip on while running at the crowd of protesters;
a river of souls streaming through the avenues, chanting Renee Good’s name, waving posters of her sunflower face;
a tsunami of people all over the world sending money and encouraging notes to the ones buying groceries for the ones who are hiding,
afraid to go to work, or school, or the store; everyone marching together in zero-degree weather, scared
and defiant, weathered activist or new-to-this Gen Z kid— those with nothing to lose, those with everything,
blowing their whistles, following the black SUVs, banging pots and pans outside the Hilton where the agents are trying to sleep,
saying, No, not in my neighborhood, saying, Macbeth shall sleep no more, crying, Murder most foul, sleep no more:
What is this outpouring? Where’d it come from? Will it be enough? Today we’re all Minnesotans, from California to Maine: we’re tired,
hoarse, footsore, at the ragged edge of endurance from getting up before dawn to protect our schools, our neighbors; but there is no stopping this
outpouring of people, in all the states and in every weather while the sky pours snow and sleet all over the blasted heath they are trying to make
of our country. Outpouring of disgust at the mad king and his masked army, a united swell, upsurge, tidal wave of courage and outrage
flooding the streets and highways and byways with humanity declaring itself human in the face of the faceless,
singing “Hold On” in four-part harmony, testimony rising up and flowing forth in faith: a cascade, a deluge, a torrent of love.
ALISON LUTERMAN (THE SUN)
“A federal judge in the Northern District of California on Thursday affirmed the authority of sheriff’s deputies to enforce criminal laws prohibiting large-scale cannabis cultivation on tribal land.
The ruling marked a victory for Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall, who has repeatedly warned about cartel activity in the northeastern part of the county.”
This is kind of a big deal out here. For a decade now there have been large commercial grows of marijuana on various allotments within the boundaries of the Round Valley Indian Reservation. These are grows which have been operating under the assumption that because both the State and the Tribe allow for cultivation for personal use, with the Tribe having a Compassionate Use Ordinance as well as a degree of sovereignty and exemption from enforcement of State regulations, that these grows are somehow “legal.”
The Sheriff thought otherwise, and raided three of these grows in 2024. The Tribe then sued the Sheriff. A Federal Judge just the other day made, which seemed to make sense to me, a determination that these grows were in actuality commercial operations, not for personal use, and a violation of various State criminal statues. Therefore no immunity.
Plus the Compassionate Use Ordinance has been a flagrant fiction for allowing large commercial grows to be established on dozens, if not hundreds, of Trust Allotments on the reservation. These grows are staffed by Spanish speaking individuals, and the product then sold through a maze of criminal connections.
Perhaps the Sheriff just got tired of the BS and posturing, the homicides and kidnappings, and the general criminalization of a once somewhat family friendly place.
I am sure there are lots of individuals, including those growing on Indian land, and the Tribal Council who has facilitated all this descent into a criminal cartel hell, who are bent out of shape. This isn’t over, not by a long shot.
Lew I am extremely tired of the violence trash and general degradation of what was once the most beautiful place any of us had ever seen. Sad times and even worse natives who want the safe beautiful place we once had are shouted down by some folks who are dead set on greed.
It’s time for the sea of passive consumers to awaken and heed the clarion call of a general strike. Amazon and the Big Box Stores seems like a perfect way to start to exert our power to effect the changes we desire to secure our Liberty and Justice. Ironically a man with the last name of “Liberty” just made a deal with Amazon in Ukiah. As far as I can see a mindless devotion to Amazon and Billionaire Bezos is at least part of the problem.
Liberty means taking responsibility for yourself. That includes taking responsibility with who you do business with. There are always choices, not necessarily the best choices, but choices. Home Depot is at the bottom of my list of who to buy from, along with Amazon. Others have a different view. That is a good thing.