Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 2/3/2026

Elder Waxcaps | Warming | Skunk Dumped | Moonset | PHF Contract | Bakewell Lawsuit | Too Nice | Bidet | Poetry Reading | Taxes Filed | Three Logs | Ed Notes | Booby Trap | Yesterday's Catch | Men Produce | Immigration | Country Ready | Big Sur | Housing | Magna Carta | Final Flame | Other Eye | Homeless Son | What a Life | Riots | On The Road | Draft Buffy | Bog Belle | Awards Season | Otis Brothers | Bad Bunny | Lost Souls | Superbowl 19 | Tex Cobb | Spy vs Spy | The Huxleys | Lead Stories | Alex & Noam | Reading Interest | Dead Last | Border Guards | Benedicto | Are Old | The End | Night Sleeper

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UNSEASONABLY WARM AND DRY conditions will build through midweek especially on the coast. Light rain is most likely to return this weekend, mostly focused on the northern half of the area. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A mostly clear 42F this Tuesday morning on the coast. We'll have a mix of fog & sun thru Saturday then chances of light rain begin on Sunday into next week. The rain amounts look scattered & light currently.

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DAISY ALVAREZ: A few nights ago, someone DUMPED this white trash bag at the drive way of Schoenahl Road across from Anderson Valley Way near the CalTrans Station. After investigating it turned out to be the body of a dead skunk! (Still there Monday morning.) I understand it is mating season and there are a lot of skunks all over the valley. But this is NOT ok. Killing, putting in a bag and then dumping on Private Property should not be the solution.

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THE FULL MOON SETTING at 6:47 am, Feb. 2, 2026, Ridgewood Ranch, looking west.

Photo by Monica Huettl

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WE HAVE REVIEWED the extensive contract language in the County’s agreement with Restpadd Inc., a Redding-based Psychiatric Health Facility, to staff and operate the soon to open Psychiatric Health Facility on Whitmore Lane south of Ukiah. The original agreement with Restpadd was signed last May and has been expanded via the consent calendar several times since then. Despite its considerable length (much of which is contractual boilerplate) there are no reporting requirements in the contract, at all. No reports required on staffing levels, patient counts and categories, release records, etc. We are not the only locals with experience with these kinds of contractual arrangements who see ominous parallels with Ortner Management Group (OMG!) who was contracted back in 2016 under highly suspicious circumstances and without any qualifications or experience back in 2016 to provide adult mental health services for Mendocino County only to have their non-performing, non-compliant services contract not-renewed three years later and the contract rewarded to Redwood Community Services without competitive bidding which has had a lucrative monopoly on the services ever since. The Restpadd contract for this fiscal year is now up to $1 million, which sounds very low for what was previously estimated to be a 16 bed, round the clock operation with over 40 estimated staff positions. Perhaps they’re starting slow.

— Mark Scaramella

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THE FAMILY OF THE MAN who died while being arrested near Willits in June has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office and the Willits Police Department. The lawsuit alleges excessive force and failure to provide medical care during the arrest and names multiple deputies and officers. County and city officials declined to comment Monday.

Background:

Pathologist Cites Restraint and Health Issues in Willits Man’s Death During Arrest

Gofundme Launched For Family Of Willits Man Who Died During Arrest

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IS KEVIN EVANS TOO NICE TO BEAT TED WILLIAMS?

by Mark Scaramella

Short answer: Yes.

In Mendocino County, we’ve come to expect empty rhetoric from political candidates, from school boards to Congress. The would-be leadership talks about goals and visions and we-shoulds and we-musts and we-need-tos — totally on rhetorical auto-pilot, and always going way out of their way not to offend anybody or provide specifics.

For example, when Fort Bragg planner/dispensary owner Paula Dieter ran against incumbent Kendall Smith for Fourth District Supervisor in 2008, Ms. Dieter refused to bring up Smith's travel chiseling, even though by then Smith's thefts had been well-documented by several Grand Juries and her transparently false excuses thoroughly debunked.

We suggested to Ms. Dieter — who would have made a fine Supervisor; we’d seen her excellent work as a coast planner — that she had nothing to lose by bringing it up because she was behind in the unofficial polls. (Natch, the local Democratic Party apparatus supported Smith.) Dieter agreed sort of, but thought that bringing up Smith’s bogus travel claims might offend more voters than it would attract. It was certainly easy to imagine Smith's supporters whining about Dieter being “negative” and “divisive,” the inevitable, catch-all pejoratives Mendo Feeb applies to any opinion they don't approve of.

Another Example: When (now judge) Keith Faulder was running against the seriously underqualified Meredith Lintott for DA back in 2007, Faulder circulated a chart comparing his substantial experience to Lintott’s lack of it in almost every category. (The main one being Lintott’s lack of criminal law experience.) Lintott immediately accused Faulder of being a borderline anti-woman misogynist, saying, ridiculously, that Faulder wouldn’t have put out such a comparison chart if Lintott were a man. (Of course Faulder would have.) It worked, the local women’s bloc (including a large contingent of fellow-travelers) voted against Faulder and Lintott won, presaging an four years of incompetence at the top of the DA’s office until David Eyster ousted Lintott in 2010. By then Lintott’s inexperience and incompetence was so obvious that Eyster didn’t need a comparison chart.

So, Mendo elections generally occur on about the same intellectual level as those you remember from 6th grade, or maybe lower (with the noteworthy exception, of course, of the late John Pinches). You’ll never hear a Supervisor candidate these days discuss actual government operations or management, budget priorities, visits to department worksites, Brown Act non-compliance, etc., much less lists of actual documented blunders by the Board or the incumbent (if the candidate is not the incumbent).

The standard highly orchestrated, anodyne Q&A sessions and candidate forums always avoid specific or uncomfortable questions or specific answers. Questions are usually open-ended or generic sure to produce the comforting vacuities everyone involved expects with follow-up or back&forth prohibited.

Back in 2023 even well-informed candidates like Adam Gaska and the outspoken Carrie Shattuck hesitated to complain about Glenn McGourty’s poor record or Madeline Cline’s wine-industry campaign funding and sponsorship. Cline kept her opinions mostly to herself and outspent and out-advertised her opponents and won easily.

You’ll never hear questions like, “How many planning commission meetings have you attended and which decisions did you disagree with?” or, “Have you reviewed the County’s management reporting or lack thereof and, if so, how would you improve it?” or, “Have you read the budget book? What do you think of it?” or “Which recent decisions by the Board did you disagree with and why?”, or, most important, “What specifically do you want to accomplish if you are elected?”

Incumbents have an inherent advantage in these kinds of rhetorical settings because they’ve attended more Board and committee meetings than their opponent (often local candidates pop up having never attended a Board meeting or commented on a local issue), so the incumbent can filibuster with generic bureaucratese and sound like they’re in the know. The political bar is pretty low for Mendo candidates.

Most Supes candidates say nothing to distinguish them from their opponents. I'd contribute to and campaign for anyone who said, “Nobody knows what the hell to do. There's a hole in America's soul that causes millions of US to zone ourselves out…” Etc.

Which brings us to the usual empty rhetoric of recent Fifth District Supervisor candidate, Kevin Evans of Gualala, chair of the GMAC, the Gualala Municipal Advisory Committee. Evans is using the same kind of inoffensive, bland rhetoric as Buffy Bourassa, candidate for Third District Supervisor which we complained about a couple of weeks ago.

https://theava.com/archives/280026

The difference is that Bourassa is running for the empty seat being vacated by lame duck Supervisor John Haschak. So it looks like she’ll probably skate into the position without needing to say anything substantive, But Evans is running against glib incumbent Ted Williams who gets a pass from his ill-informed Coast constituents who care mostly about the ocean and their tourism revenue and seldom express interest in county affairs or discontent with his poor performance.

The Anchor Bay candidate moved to the South Coast in 2016 after a career in various Parks and Recreation jobs in Southern California. He says he’s “running to be a steady, reliable voice for the 5th District. Protecting the environment, keeping our roads safe, supporting affordable housing, and making sure local voices are heard should always come first.” … “My slogan is Voice for the People, Vision for the Future.” … “There are many other issues that need to be addressed on the South Coast. I would be honored to be your voice on the Board of Supervisors.”

Mr. Evans doesn’t offer much in the way of the “other issues” he’s talking about “on the south coast” and doesn’t mention the County at all.

According to his candidate website (www.vote4evans.org) Mr. Evans has a “Track Record Of Success: Effective Governance, Professionally & Locally:

• Helped Restore Bower Park [The County did the restoration, not Mr. Evans. His “help” was limited to cheerleading while on the Gualala Municipal Advisory Board.]
• Secured Federal Grant to Rebuild Gualala’s Community Center. [Others were involved; this was not a one-person project.]
• Moved Gualala Streetscape Project Forward. [The Gualala Streetscape Project has been “moving forward” for decades now.]
• Brought Resident Deputy to South Coast. [Sheriff Kendall brought the deputy to the South Coast; Mr. Evans probably was one of many South Coast people who urged and supported the move. Claiming to have done it by himself without even mentioning the Sheriff is a bad sign.]
• Helped Achieve Recognition of Gualala as Census-Designated Place. [“Helped” is a nebulous claim. And achieving “Census-Designated Place” status is not much to crow about.]

Obviously, none of this qualifies as “governance” by any stretch of the imagination. None of it has anything to do with Mendocino County. And it provides nothing as Supervisorial candidate material goes. In other words, Mr. Evans has written his own Whereases in advance, before he’s even been on the ballot — a perfect Mendo candidate.

Mr. Evans seems stuck to his position-free campaign and, based on his lack of name recognition, lack of county experience, laid-back nice-guy style, and general non-incumbency, his vanity candidacy has no perceptible chance of beating incumbent Ted Williams since most of Williams Fifth District constituents are blithely unaware of Williams’ many failings as a Supervisor.

We have covered plenty of Supervisor Williams’ blunders, failures and missteps over his two terms, all of them well-documented and based on the public record, all of which would make good campaign fodder if Evans was a serious candidate, or even if he wanted to make a run to highlight some issues important to him. But so far he’s said very little. When he appeared at the Anderson Valley Community Services Board meeting last month and was asked if he wanted to address the Board, he just whispered, “I’m here to listen.”

And so, year after year, election after election, Mendo attracts inexperienced candidates without the spine to criticize their opponents or their opponent’s record, and the Good Ship Mendo sails obliviously on, aimless, rudderless, captainless, clueless — into the storm.

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CALLING ALL SOLIPSISTS!

The Well Event List

The Well Spiritual Center & Visionary Arts
45004 Albion St., Mendocino Ca.

The Tao is like a Well: used but never used up.
It is like the eternal Void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it. It is older than God.

~Tao Te Ching

All Donation ~ All Welcome

Silence & Stillness Within: a winter evening of poetry reading
Scott Miller, Armand Brint, Mellisa Carr
Sunday February 8 at 4:00pm
$20 suggestion ~ no one turned away

The Well Spiritual Center located in the heart of Mendocino at 45004 Albion Street, off Lansing Street next to the Garden Bakery.

(707) 357-3466 [email protected]

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DEBORAH WHITE:

I worked way too hard yesterday.

First, I finished my taxes and filed them. Since moving to Nevada, I've filed at the first possible day because I get a hefty refund from CalSTRS for my generous pension because I'm not a California resident. While I filed my federal taxes also, I put the payment date as April 15. And if the USA hasn't returned to democracy by then, I won't pay up. I did this last year. The penalties are minimal.

Then I did a "case study" for Mercor, one of those companies that uses humans to evaluate ai. The case study was to see what I would do with prompts and responses. Very tedious work, but there was a stipend.

And then I had tutoring sessions with two of the wonderful Ukiahi girls. Work, yes, but so uplifting. Both are seeing improvement and gaining confidence.

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The year I taught junior high math in Glendale, California, 1969-70, the LA teachers went on strike. I Twas so jealous. I always wanted to picket. When I got to Mendocino College in 1970, it was one of only two community colleges in California that didn't have a full-time faculty union. Helping to get that going was one of the best parts of my career.

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ED NOTES: FLASHBACKS

IN THE DELUGE of unhappy news this week was another airliner crash in Indonesia. The plane was flying from Jakarta to the Borneo city of Pontianak. Pontianak! In the year of living dangerously, 1965, I set out by bus for Pontianak from Kuching, Sarawak, a town in '65 about the size of Ukiah. I knew enough Malay to get around and, being young, stepped into a number of dangerous situations without understanding how dangerous they were. I'd trained myself to sleep on floors because floors were often the available accommodations, especially in the most interesting up-country areas. I spent a lot of time with the Dayaks, infamous as headhunters up through the Japanese occupation of the Borneo states during World War Two. When they initially occupied the Borneo states, the Japanese had sent large patrols by motorboat up the Rajang River to ferret out the British and Australian commandos who were organizing the Dayaks to fight them. Those patrols were wiped out to a man by Dayaks hidden in the impenetrable riverside jungle, armed only with blow guns and poison darts. No known antidote, dead in ten minutes, eternal rest in bunches of death grimaces hanging from Dayak ceilings. I stayed in longhouses where bunches of Japanese heads hung in the common hall, some still with their eyeglasses, but shrunken after years of smoke from carefully tended little shrines beneath them. I stayed in places where 12-year-olds had never seen a white person, and the adults thought I was somehow associated with the British royal family. In '65, and unknown to me and most of the world, the Indonesian generals had begun slaughtering alleged communists, some of whom were involved in trying to beat back the newly formed country of Malaysia, which they accurately regarded as a neo-imperial scheme of the British.

SO I'M ON THE BUS for Pontianak, a backcountry bus with masses of chickens and old ladies spitting betel nut juice on the floor as we jounced along, children remarking on the length of my nose and the hair on my arms. At a place called Bau the bus was stopped, a young Englishman backed by a pair of Gurkhas, all of them armed, told me the border was closed, and that no one was going to Pontianak because it was unsafe, a state of anarchy. I remember him asking me, “Why do you want to go there?” I told him I was curious, that I'd read about the old sultanate and wanted to see what was left of it. He said, “Well, I'm sorry. Not for now and probably not for a long time. It's very bad over there.” I was the only person ordered off the bus, but I suppose my fellow passengers lived in the border area and traveled on. Or they were viewed as anonymously expendable by the authorities. I spent that night on the floor of a Chinese shop house. I could sleep anywhere in those days.

MOST TRAVEL was by boat in Sarawak at the time. There were only a few miles of paved road. Living there, as the first wave of Americans were unleashed on the unsuspecting neo-Malaysians, I was agog much of the time at what was still an unvisited part of the world, an area of virtually untouched Asia as it had been before the modern world rushed in. Two sights among all the sights I've never forgotten: I was having a plate of fried rice one late afternoon in a flooded bazaar of about thirty shop houses on the banks of the Mukah River. The flooding had come into the premises to about three feet, but the kitchen remained open for business and all the customers, me included, just went on eating with our flip-flops caressed by the tides. I'd watched a gang of Chinese longshoremen (still called “coolies” in that place at that time) unload a small boat, walking on and off with large, heavy sacks of whatever it was — try that all day in equatorial heat! When they knocked off they sat down around me, pointing at me and laughing, a reaction I still seem to inspire, while they knocked back glasses of brandy after — the faint of heart better not continue reading here — after swallowing live baby mice wrapped in bean sprouts, the mice furnished by the kitchen. Chinese macho!

ANOTHER MEMORABLE OCCASION occurred when I visited the home of what I recall was described as a bomoh, or person with special powers. To demonstrate her gifts she first spun an egg which, being uncooked, flopped over as uncooked eggs do. She then picked up the egg, closed her tiny, bony hand around it, muttered something and voila! — it spun like a top. Mysticism was much in the air. The government was trying to bridge a smallish river near Kuching whose pilings kept slipping away. A rumor began that the authorities had hired a Dayak to take a human head to plant with the foundation, thus ensuring that the structure would stay standing. That rumor was so pervasive that the government had to go on the country-wide radio to deny it, but for a week the night time streets of the town were deserted.

LONG BEFORE this garrulous old coot was a garrulous old coot, he functioned, in exchange for free rent, as building manager at 925 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, a building long ago demolished, and a building then teeming with deadbeats and, ah, unconventional persons, among them a showbiz star of sorts, The Nude Girl On A Swing. An undemanding gig, I should think, and one she performed at a nightclub in nearby North Beach. It was an act as advertised, and an act that packed the place with voyeurs, all male of course. As advertised. Cynthia, nude, swung out of the ceiling as the male audience below twisted themselves in scrambling piles for better views. When she got me and a friend free passes to see the show one night, I remember wondering to myself as I sat with the rest of my pathetic gender gazing upwards, “Only a stone degenerate would be here.” I rationalized the visit, as we all tend to rationalize our more embarrassing moments, by telling people, “Hey, she lives next door to me. I didn't want to insult her by refusing to go.” Cynthia was also a junkie, my first direct experience with a drug addict. (I thought she was just sleepy all the time). About 3am one night, I heard this terrific back and forth yelling, accompanied by thuds and breaking glass coming from Cynthia's apartment, and soon I was pounding on her door with the vague intent to stop some terrible mayhem. I was the manager after all, the in-charge guy. It was time to do my job! The door was suddenly thrown open by a frenzied-looking young man who told me to “Bleep you and mind your own bleeping business.” Cynthia stood behind him crying. I said I was calling the cops, and both of them told me to mind my own bleeping business, with him adding, “You do and I'm coming back to kill you.” The next day I hustled down to the Gun Exchange which, as I dimly recall, was only a block south of Market on either Second or Third Street, where I bought a shotgun and some ammo. Later that same day, after I'd armed up, I looked out my window and there they were, the two lovebirds arm in arm strolling along Stockton Street. They waved up at me, big sarcastic smiles on their stoned faces.

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DEB SILVA WRITES:

I saw this one at a current poster auction. Bidding is underway and the bid is at $4,200.00 with four more days to go.

Here's the description-

This original government-issued poster warns American servicemen of the dangers of contracting venereal diseases while on leave. The image shows an attractive woman engaging with two uniformed soldiers in a bar setting, while the bold headline “Booby Trap” underscores the metaphor of sexual temptation as a hidden threat. With painterly mid-century illustration and dramatic lighting, the poster uses suggestive visual cues typical of military health propaganda—aimed not at moral judgment, but at preventing soldiers from engaging in risky encounters that could compromise operational readiness. During World War II and the early postwar period, venereal disease presented a significant medical concern among troops returning from overseas. In the absence of widespread penicillin use early in the war, infections such as syphilis and gonorrhea caused long periods of lost duty time, medical expense, and potential long-term disability. The U.S. government launched an aggressive public-health campaign targeting servicemen through posters, pamphlets, films, and base-level medical briefings. Messaging often linked sexual encounters with anonymous or casual partners to enemy threats, implying that disease could weaken the fighting force just as effectively as battlefield injuries. Even after the war, the campaign continued as troops returned home, where authorities feared that untreated infections could spread into the civilian population. The artist, signed here as E. Paris, contributed to a number of mid-century health-education and government-issued posters. Though biographical documentation is limited, artists working in this genre commonly produced illustrations for public service campaigns, military publications, and commercial print ateliers, developing a pragmatic style designed to communicate quickly and convincingly to enlisted audiences. This is an Original Vintage Poster, it is not a reproduction. This poster is conservation mounted, linen backed and in excellent condition. There is slight unevenness in the side margins. We guarantee the authenticity of all our posters. This poster is exceptionally rare.

ED NOTE: Hah! In the Marines, c. 1957, they showed us a warning movie that begins with a pair of squared away Marines in full dress blues walking down the street on a sunny day. Two boffo babes driving a pristine convertible pull over and ask the Marines if they “want a ride?” The Marines, in chorus, reply, “We sure do, honey,” and hop in. The very next scene is a Third World guy with his testicles so swollen he's pushing them along in a wheelbarrow! “This can happen to you, Marine!” I have a vague memory of a guy saying loud enough for us all to hear, “It'd be worth it for those two.” General laughter.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, February 2, 2026

RYAN FERTADO, 39, Hopland. Under influence, paraphernalia.

JESSICA MAXFIELD, 33, Willits. Failure to appear.

MATTHEW POTTER, 37, Laytonville. Failure to appear.

SERAH STETSON, 44, Trinidad/Ukiah. Trespassing.

STEPHEN STEWART, 44, Watsonville/Ukiah. DUI-any drug, under influence.

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WOMEN’S BABIES?

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DOUG HOLLAND:

All my life, I’ve stupidly swallowed claims that America must limit immigration, that people desperate to escape their hellhole countries should fill out the right forms and wait in line for five or ten or twenty years while the US immigration and naturalization process moves at its quarter-of-a-snail’s pace.

From that unquestioned assumption springs everything we’re seeing now — immigrants snatched from their workplace, children abducted as they’re walking home from school, decent, ordinary people hauled away for their skin tone or accent, taken to concentration camps to await forced deportations, often to countries they’ve never been to.

What’s being done is reprehensible, and entirely based on lies. The immigrants are not eating the dogs, eating the cats, and there is no “crisis at the border” that couldn’t be solved by simply saying “Welcome to America.”

Borders are silly and imaginary, the reasons for restricting immigration and deporting law-abiding immigrants are bullshit, and the people saying it’s necessary are invariably monsters, so fuck it. Dismantle ICE, blow up the Department of Homeland Security, and replace all their rotten rules and racism and cruelty with the world’s largest welcome mat, stretched from sea to shining sea.

Open the borders. Anyone who wants to come to America will almost certainly be a better American than the Americans born here.

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ARE YOU READY FOR THE COUNTRY

Slipping and sliding
And playing domino
Lefting and then righting
It's not a crime you know
You gotta tell your story, boy
Before it's time to go

Are you ready for the country?
Because it's time to go
Are you ready for the country?
Because it's time to go

I was talkin' to the preacher
Said, "God was on my side."
Then I ran into the hangman
He said, "It's time to die
You gotta tell your story, boy
You know the reason why."

Are you ready for the country?
Because it's time to go
Are you ready for the country?
Because it's time to go

— Neil Young (1972)

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DOESN’T APPLY TO HOUSING

Editor:

We keep hearing about the need to build more affordable housing in Sonoma County. However, I am not aware of any specific guidance as to exactly what price range constitutes housing that is, in fact, “affordable.” There appears to be a belief that if we simply build more housing, home prices will somehow decline. This belief is probably based on the law of supply and demand — increase supply and demand will be met. However, in terms of housing in California, and especially in desirable places like Sonoma County, this is a misconception. There is, and probably always will be, an essentially infinite demand for housing here. The more we build, the more people will come, and prices will, if anything, continue to rise. Supply-side economics simply doesn’t apply. If we want to help assure that current residents, including those raised here, can buy homes in the area we will need some sort of funding mechanism to help current residents purchase homes here.

Doug Yule

Sebastopol

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MAGNA CARTA 1215

To None shall We sell
Deny or delay right or
Justice.  Right, Donald?

— Jim Luther

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"I HEAR THE RUIN of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.”

— James Joyce

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“WHY IS MY SON BEING LEFT TO DIE ON THE STREETS?”

by Madeline Till (Ms. Till is a psychotherapist)

My husband and I adopted our son, Abraham, as a toddler, believing we could provide him with a good life. Abi, as we called him, was a bright, curious kid who blossomed into a kind and popular teenager, a star student who won a scholarship to the University of Michigan. In his last year of high school, though, he began acting in ways we could not understand.

Abi tore family photographs from the walls and burned them in what he called a “death ritual.” He announced that he was a prophet of God. He stole our cars. Two of our other children were living at home, and all of us woke up every day terrified to find out what had happened in our home overnight. Abi was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but as is often the case, he was unable to perceive that he was ill. Nothing — not psychiatric care, not even police intervention — could convince him he needed help. Then he turned 18. He became an adult in the eyes of the state, and that was the end of our influence.

Now, three years later, Abi drifts from parking garages to homeless shelters, panhandling on sidewalks for a few coins. He won’t come home; he won’t even stop by for food or medicine.

Every few months, he acts out more than usual and he is hospitalized. Doctors administer enough medication to briefly calm him, then label him “stable” and “not a harm to self or others” and discharge him back to the streets, where he is exposed to harsh winter nights without any support — sometimes even without shoes or a jacket.

This is not anonymous urban homelessness. It is local and relational, playing out in full view of his childhood friends, former teachers and soccer coaches. They don’t know how to help him any more than we do.

At one especially dark moment of despair, I found myself wishing he had cancer instead. I know that sounds crazy, and of course it is. As a psychotherapist, I sit with families every day whose children face illness, pain and death. I lost my beautiful 7-year-old niece to a brain-stem tumor. I understand the weight of a cancer diagnosis and I wouldn’t actually wish it on anyone, certainly not my own child. But I have seen how people respond to cancer: with urgency, empathy and effort. When someone has cancer, there are people to turn to, people who really try to help. When the daughter of a woman I know finished treatment, the hospital staff gathered to watch as she rang a bell they keep on hand for such occasions, and everyone erupted into applause.

There is no bell for mentally ill individuals marking their survival through another brutal season of homelessness, wandering the streets untreated, unsheltered and utterly vulnerable.

Since Jan. 1, 2024, Abi has been in hospital emergency rooms at least 20 times. Sometimes we hear about it in time to steel our hearts and go see him. We know that he will have been medicated, and might even be lucid, but we also know that he will soon be discharged — with prescriptions he cannot fill, appointments he cannot organize and instructions he cannot follow — and we will lose him again. At our last visit in November he expressed his confusion: “It’s a conundrum,” he said, the sweet, innocent kid we once knew shining briefly through the disease. “I don’t know where to go, I don’t have a way to get to the pharmacy, I don’t even have a wallet.”

When I questioned the latest social worker assigned to deal with us about his unsafe discharge plan, I was met with a dismissive shrug: “Ma’am, I know how you feel, but there is nothing we can do.”

“You know how I feel?” I shouted, despite bracing myself for this by now predictable interaction. “Do you have a mentally ill, homeless son sleeping in parking lots, who cannot keep himself alive because no one will intervene unless he is actively violent or dying?”

HIPAA rules add a cruel paradox. Doctors ignore us, despite our pleas that the illness makes it impossible for our son to manage his own care. Hospital administrators ignore our urgent emails and calls requesting longer-term treatment. All in the name of protecting Abi’s privacy.

The court in our leafy, upper-middle-class suburb notes offenses such as defiant trespassing or lewdness, and issues summonses that come and go, unheeded. We recently begged for police officers to intervene with Abi, or even to arrest him. A lieutenant responded, “Please forward any further inquiries, communications, etc. through the township attorney’s office.” I’m familiar with bureaucratic stonewalling, but that is a failure of basic humanity.

Some angels do emerge, typically those with the least power. Immigrant shop owners offer our son food or clothing. They often express dismay that this country treats mental illness so poorly. They tell me to send him back to Ethiopia, where we adopted him, because he’ll get better support there.

The irony is unbearable. We adopted our son believing America would keep him safe. Instead, our systems repeatedly release him into danger because technically, on paper, he has rights: rights that do not earn him care, rights that do not protect him, rights that prevent professionals from intervening. As one psychiatrist put it bluntly, my son may “die with his rights on.”

We do not need to return to the large, abusive psychiatric asylums of the past, but the law has swung so far toward individual autonomy that the concept of “do no harm” has all but vanished. If someone is so severely ill that he clearly cannot care for himself, it should be possible for him to be committed. And once committed, it should be possible for him to get actual care, rather than being pushed back out the door by an insurance system that rewards brief stabilization over comprehensive long-term treatment. Being left to die on the street is not freedom.

More than anything else I have ever wanted, I want to stop this revolving door. I want schizophrenia to be treated with the same urgency, seriousness and continuity as any other life-threatening illness.

I want physicians who are determined, and empowered, to pursue real care. I want social workers who engage beyond scripts. I want police officers who don’t shrug. I want judges who understand the futility of issuing summonses to someone who cannot organize his life. Finally, I want hospital discharge plans that lift people up instead of merely pushing them out.

I want my son’s life to be treated as though it is worth saving.

(nytimes.com)

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RIOTS

I’ve watched this city burn twice
in my lifetime
and the most notable event
was the reaction of the
politicians in the
aftermath
as they
proclaimed the injustice of
the system
and demanded a new
deal for the hapless and the
poor.

nothing was corrected last
time.
nothing will be changed this
time.

the poor will remain poor.
the unemployed will remain
so.
the homeless will remain
homeless

and the politicians,
fat upon the land, will thrive
forever.

— Charles Bukowski (1992)

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CALIFORNIA’S GUBERNATORIAL FIELD IS MEDIOCRE. DRAFT BUFFY.

by Joe Mathews

California is in a political mess. None of the declared gubernatorial candidates has run a strong campaign or shown themselves capable of handling the internal challenges and external threats our state faces.

What is to be done? Here’s an idea. Why not identify California’s most capable politician, the person most likely to become a great governor — and draft her into the campaign?

Crazy, I know! But for a year, your lunatic columnist has been asking Californians who know our state best this question: If you could choose anyone in California government to be California’s next governor, whom would you pick?

The answer I get most often is Buffy.

Not Buffy Summers, Hollywood’s vampire slayer.

Buffy Wicks, 48, and now in her fourth two-year term as an Assembly member, representing East Bay communities.

In Capitol Weekly’s 2025 survey of California legislators, staffers and lobbyists, Wicks was ranked as the best member of the Assembly by far (with twice as many votes as any other member). She edged out state Sen. Scott Wiener in overall rankings for “Best Member of the Legislature.”

The respect for Wicks reflects the breadth of her skills. She’s got good political instincts (she worked for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns) and displays unusually strong command of technical details (at the Obama White House, she worked on the Affordable Care Act).

What insiders most appreciate is her bravery. She takes on high-conflict issues and complicated problems and brokers compromises between powerful interests that have been deadlocked for years. That’s the sort of thing the best governors do.

The deals she closes break new ground. Her landmark 2022 bill, Assembly Bill 2011, shifted California’s focus from planning new housing to actually building it — by opening commercial land for residential projects. In 2024, she forged a compromise between tech companies and media outlets to fund California journalism.

She’s now at the top of her game. In 2025, she surmounted decades of political gridlock to push through exemptions for certain infill housing projects from the California Environmental Quality Act. She also authored AB1340, for unionizing gig workers and pushed through the Digital Age Assurance Act, improving child safety online.

Despite this legislative mastery, she is not on lists for potential governors. Some might object that she’s not a big enough personality, especially with Donald Trump fighting California. Our past three governors, after all, have been a movie star, a former governor who ran for president three times and a former San Francisco mayor twice elected statewide.

But California doesn’t need another big political celebrity to fight Trump. Gavin Newsom will handle the Trump bashing, and Attorney General Rob Bonta will handle the legal fight.

What California is missing is excellent, focused, creative governance — not just for the benefit of its people but also as an answer to a U.S. regime that uses the state’s failures to justify punishing Californians. A Gov. Wicks is the state’s best bet for that kind of leadership.

There is one problem with my Draft Buffy plan: Wicks herself. She has shown no desire to run for governor, and she has a great job in the Legislature, and big-time momentum for a 2026 agenda that includes innovations to make housing construction faster and cheaper.

Plus, she’s a wife and mother of two young daughters. Becoming governor, in such an ugly time of politics, would make life much harder.

Getting her to run might require Newsom to get off the sidelines of the campaign to succeed him and convince Wicks to run. If I were Newsom, I’d round up Obama, our two U.S. senators and other Democratic players — and then show up at Wicks’ house and refuse to leave until she agreed to run.

Such support for Wicks would be necessary to clear the large field of weak Democratic candidates and avoid electing a Trump-supporting California governor — which would be the most spectacular defeat for freedom and democracy since Paris fell in 1940.

I’m championing Wicks based on political realities and informed opinions of others. I don’t know her personally. And if I alone could choose any new governor, I’d pick a brilliant operator from local government — like state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a former mayor of West Sacramento — to decentralize state authority and funding, and make our cities the most effective governments in the world.

But Wicks is the best person to govern the state we have now. And I take comfort in her experience as a community organizer — in opposing the Iraq war and in Obama’s 2008 campaign — to engage Californians in fighting for the state’s future. If California is going to survive this terrible moment, we, the people, will have to lead the way.

Draft Buffy now.

(Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square and is founder-publisher of the planetary publication Democracy Local.)

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AWARDS SEASON

by James Kunstler

“The world sees you now: not as compassionate warriors, but as spoiled, entitled, reality-denying tyrants in yoga pants, wielding guilt and hysteria like switchblades.” — LHGrey on "X"

The political grandstanding started way back in 1973 when the irascible Marlon Brando stayed home from the Academy Awards but sent an Apache princess, one Sacheen Littlefeather, to the podium to decline his award (Best Actor for The Godfather) on account of the 71-day standoff at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota between federal agents and Oglala Lakota activists who had seized the little town of Wounded Knee.

After that, political “statements” at awards ceremonies of all kinds became modish, then obligatory, and now in the age of Lefty-left Woke Jacobin activism, all you get is one denunciation after another of the monster who lives in their heads: ChrumpChrumpChrump. Cue the audience of fellow “stars” for the also obligatory standing-O, which is really a test to see if any among them dare not join in the hosannahs — so they can be anathemized.

You are seeing sheer ritual performance by performers, the highest perq of stardom being the approbation of their peers, fellow performers — nevermind the lowly gorks out in Flyover Land who “consume” the products of pop culture. This is cliche narcissism-on-parade, of course, and is now so completely institutionalized in the pop culture industries that seemingly all actors, musicians, dancers, mimes, comics, and literary figures must act-out an activist fantasy or face the pretty extreme punishment of being run out of their business.

It’s all fake and pathetic, and the more they do it, the more their various culture industries suffer — to the point now that feature production in Hollywood was down over 16-percent in 2025. It’s dying in a self-reinforcing doom-loop. The reason is no secret, but it is dangerous to speak of it: the management of our “sense-making” institutions — movies being an important one — has been taken over by women (and womanish men) acting out Cluster-B psychodrama fantasies obsessively attacking “the patriarchy” — by which they mean (but cannot say) civilization itself, the thing sedulously built by men.

The latest wrinkle in this tragic saga is the psychodrama over ICE, the men tasked with finding and deporting people who came into the country illegally. The Cluster-B women mis-direct their nurturing instincts to rescue this politically-designated “oppressed minority,” overlooking the fact that not a few of these illegal aliens turn out to be murderous psychopaths. Conveniently, too, the illegal aliens also happen to be a very useful device for the Democratic Party to pad the census and provide illicit votes, all to keep the party in power and sustain its rackets.

President Trump completes the doom-loop circle because he is the mythic figure who prompts all the anxiety behind the “mass formation” phenomenon we are witnessing. Mr. Trump is patriarchy-in-action, so he must be destroyed by the goddess-heroines of show business. The goddess-heroines seem to believe they are ushering-in a Utopia of Nurture in which no oppressed minority will be left behind. That fantasy happens to intersect with the leveling fantasies of Karl Marx and his apostles, the mentors of the obscenely-rich denizens of Hollywood so eager to abolish obscene riches. So, you see how either stupid, or mentally-ill, or both, the people in show business can be.

Last night’s awards extravaganza was the Grammys, for music. The anti-ICE ritual flared in full efflugence with Song of the Year winner Billie Eilish — costumed not to look as a woman but rather like a piece of luggage — bathed in applause for heroically muttering, “Fuck ICE,” after picking up her little golden gramophone statuette. Perfect.

Few musicians can make a dime anymore, and a very few of those few make billions while the rest starve. The record album was the supreme art-form of my generation, and it is long gone. Record labels don’t continue to exist when there are no records. Musical acts don’t get contracts and don’t get paid. Nobody listens to FM radio anymore and so nobody is introduced to new musical talent. Live music on the small club scale is dying because the drinks cost too much. Does anyone still have a quaint old home stereo, a gigantic wall-of-sound, with four-foot-high speakers? All I’ve got is a seven-inch Bluetooth speaker.

The lively arts are dying and the remaining lively artists are assisting with the suicide. Not far in the future, the motion picture might be a dead letter. Technology marches on. Immersion in human experience depicted on a silver screen, using the techniques of dramaturgy, will be supplanted, we’re told, by video games that put you immersively into “a world” where a story is spinning that you can now act-out a role in. You might see how that would entice an awful lot of people to check-out of reality altogether — and if that happens, you might well ask: who is left to run civilization? The answer you get will be: artificial intelligence, AI. Oh, great. But then, is it running civilization for all those pathetic people losing themselves in immersive video games? Or just for AI itself? And where does that take the human race?

Personally, I don’t expect it to work out that way. If I were disposed to investing money in the entertainment business, I’d build a theater for puppet shows. That’s the level our civilization-destroying antics are taking us to, with the Democratic Party leading the way.

(kunstler.com)

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NATE HARTLEY:

These award shows are nothing more than circle jerks for virtue-signaling degenerates. They truly have some gall. For example, Bad Bunny was lecturing us about what it means to be an American, but can barely speak English. What a joke. Americans are tired of being lectured about morals by coke-addicts and morons.

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I blame 99% of the problems this country faces today with the fact that the kids don't know how to read. We pay more in taxes per pupil than any country on earth, yet our kids come out of 8th grade not knowing how to sound out letters and words (phonics) or basic math that I can do in my head.

You see those little freaks like Billie Eilish and some of the others? These are young people who grew up in homes with no books, just screens. They will never know the joy of a boring summer day, sitting outside with a good book and nothing to do but read. Or, as we are now in this part of the world, being snowed in and enjoying the time spent reading all sorts of novels.

Just look at that Freak Show last night - how pathetic those young people are - they are lost souls who have a lot of money that they don't even know how to use. What are they going to do - get more tattoos or badly fitting, ugly, expensive clothes that aren't nearly as nice as what the average office workers used to wear at the beginning of this century.

But back to the Teachers Union devils. They have destroyed our public schools to the point that they are dangerous for children and young people. The teachers are there to promote their Satanic agenda of body mutilation, baby killing and hate. Most of them belong in prison instead of making their 6-figure salaries and benefits we tax-slaves can only dream of. I am glad that most of my grand kids were home schooled to some degree.

The ceremony last night should have been dedicated to Moloch right from the get go to clear up any doubts that people might have as to what it was all about.

This whole country needs an exorcism.

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49ERS-DOLPHINS SUPER BOWL XIX AT STANFORD STADIUM ‘CHANGED EVERYTHING’

by Eric Branch

More than 40 years ago, after Jim Steeg was given his most daunting assignment — host a Super Bowl at spartan Stanford Stadium — the meticulous NFL executive attended at least 10 Stanford football games over a two-year period to prepare for Jan. 20, 1985.

During his trips, Steeg had a routine. At halftime, he’d find a spot on top of the press box and watch the irreverent Stanford band. Steeg observed during a time when the NFL had a local college band perform for its on-field Super Bowl pregame entertainment. And one performance by Stanford’s often-disciplined group of rowdies made it clear to Steeg: The NFL’s nearly two-decade-old pregame tradition had to be scrapped for Super Bowl XIX in Palo Alto.

“They did a tribute to, well, they came out and spelled ‘Coca-Cola,’” Steeg said. “Then they spelled ‘coke.’ And then they brought out a bunch of white balloons and formed a razor blade. So, yeah, I didn’t think that was going to be our pregame show.”

The Super Bowl pregame show never returned to its roots after the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band forced that edit 41 years ago. And that wasn’t the only lasting, born-from-necessity change that came from the first Super Bowl played in the Bay Area, which will host the game for the third time on Sunday when the Seahawks meet the Patriots in Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium.

Forty-one years ago, the San Francisco 49ers’ 38-16 win over the Dolphins was the franchise’s second Super Bowl title, and the game that served as the source of the biggest creative inspiration for Steeg, 75, a retired NFL senior vice president who ran the Super Bowl from 1979 through 2005.

Under Steeg’s watch, the Super Bowl grew from an American sporting event to a global spectacle. During his 26 years, the cost of a 30-second, in-game ad went from $275,000 to $2.5 million and the face value of a ticket soared from $30 to $600. In 2019, Steeg was included on the Athletic’s list of “NFL’s 100 most influential business people of all-time,” one spot ahead of Nike co-founder Phil Knight.

“Now you have two events happening on Super Bowl Sunday — there’s the game and halftime,” former 49ers president Carmen Policy said. “They’re two separate events and our audience changes dramatically during halftime. So it’s staggering.”

Super Bowl XIX was Steeg’s sixth NFL championship game. And in a region that was becoming known world-wide for cutting-edge technology — Apple’s Macintosh was introduced in 1984 — the challenges presented by a venue built in 1921 forced Steeg to innovate.

The potential for a traffic nightmare at a stadium where fans arrived via two one-lane roads? It inspired the explosion of corporate VIP tents, with Steeg hoping to lure attendees to the game hours before kickoff to lessen congestion. The rickety stadium’s drab walls? That marked the advent of industrial-sized Super Bowl banners, flags and other signage. Stanford’s wooden bleachers? That led to sponsored seat cushions — they featured Apple’s rainbow-colored logo in 1985 — which were part of nearly every Super Bowl until 2009.

a remodeled main entrance, new concession stands and a ticket office. The facelift prompted Steeg to hire an architect and decorator that he kept on his Super Bowl staff. Seven years later, they helped create the first “NFL Experience,” a mini theme park in the Super Bowl host city, now called the “Super Bowl Experience,” that will be held at the Moscone Center this week.

The seeds were planted during Steeg’s Bay Area experience that inspired him to begin thinking bigger, acting bolder and spending more. In 1985, a group of local children’s choirs sang the national anthem. The anthem singer four years later: Billy Joel. In 1985, the halftime show was Tops in Blue, an Air Force touring ensemble. The halftime entertainment eight years later: Michael Jackson.

“It was one of the most important games we ever did,” Steeg said. “It changed everything we did. In a lot of ways for me, it gave me more confidence, more independence, about everything. It made me understand that this was more than just 60 minutes of football. … The focus had been on everything that happens on game day. And then it changed.”

Super Bowl XIX was in the Bay Area because then-commissioner Pete Rozelle got his wish. Rozelle attended USF and worked for the school as its sports information director and wanted the big game in the region. Stanford was selected for its seating capacity of more than 84,000, but it lacked the amenities of Candlestick Park and the Oakland Coliseum, which were too small to be considered.

Along with no seatbacks, Stanford Stadium didn’t have lights, luxury suites, on-site locker rooms or a press-box elevator.

“To think that they gave the Super Bowl to a place that didn’t have locker rooms by the field?” said former 49ers safety Tom Holmoe, then in his second NFL season. “That seems crazy to me.”

It was a different time.

Dolphins coach Don Shula, who has the most wins in NFL history, traveled by BART from the Dolphins’ team hotel in Oakland to a Friday morning news conference with 49ers coach Bill Walsh in San Francisco. And Shula wasn’t the only big wig brushing up with commoners. Stanford’s renovated press box was able to accommodate the team owners, the 49ers’ Eddie DeBartolo Jr. and Miami’s Joe Robbie, but many of their fellow multi-millionaires were sitting next to Mike from Millbrae.

Gary Cavalli, who in 1985 had recently left Stanford after serving as its associate athletic director, was excited about the sweet seats he and his wife had scored at the 40-yard line. Two rows in front of them, Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, the son of an oil tycoon, wasn’t as enthused.

“He walks down, he looks at the wooden bench with the Apple seat cushion on it, and he just kind of shakes his head,” Cavalli said. “He turns to his wife, and he says, ‘Never again.’ I’ll never forget that.”

The absence of luxury suites was obviously an issue. As far as some of the other problems? Two locker rooms near the open end of the stadium were built for $500,000. Without a press box elevator for the media and VIPs, the NFL hired about 30 Stanford students to serve as runners, ferrying items such as bags and camera equipment.

The lack of lights? That required some homework for Steeg before temporary lights were installed at Stanford. In 1982, Steeg attended the Notre Dame-Michigan game, the first night game played at Notre Dame Stadium thanks to temporary lights. In 1984, the NFL also had Stanford play a home night game as a dry run for Super Bowl XIX.

Steeg learned a key lesson from that game. Because of the eucalyptus trees surrounding the stadium, there was little ambient light to illuminate outside areas such as walkways and parking lots. As a result, the league had more outside lighting than they expected to need for the Super Bowl after many fans complained about being in the dark when doing their business.

“All of a sudden, you realized the Port-A-Potties don’t have lights,” Steeg said. “That was a wake-up call with that one.”

Steeg spent nearly four months in Palo Alto in the year leading up to the kickoff in an effort to avoid game-day calamities. But the process he described as “scary” began when the NFL awarded Super Bowl XIX to the Bay Area at its annual league meeting in the winter of 1982. In 1984, Steeg skipped the league meeting, held in Hawaii, for the first and only time because he was so stressed.

In the weeks leading up to the game, however, Steeg felt calm and prepared. As far as others in the NFL office, they weren’t as tranquil when the hometown 49ers reached the Super Bowl by beating the Bears 23-0 in the NFC Championship Game. The issue: The Super Bowl’s economic impact they’d pitched to San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein and Bay Area hoteliers and restaurant owners was muted when only one team had a significant traveling fan base.

The 49ers had no complaints. They spent the week of the game practicing at their own facility in Redwood City and stayed at their same hotel in Burlingame the night before the game.

“The only thing that wasn’t totally normal was a media day we had up at Candlestick,” Holmoe said.

For Hall of Fame safety Ronnie Lott, however, the vibe in the Bay Area was wildly different with 49ers, still in the infancy of their dynasty, playing for their second title at home.

“When you were driving on the street, your neighbors and everybody could touch you and feel you,” said Lott, who won four Super Bowls. “That’s what made that Super Bowl so amazing because you can feel the city. And a lot of places where you go, you don’t feel it. You’re practicing it, but you’re not feeling it. … I think it was even more sentimental than anything I’ve ever done in my life.”

And the game had a profound impact on Steeg. Now retired in Chapel Hill, N.C., he hasn’t attended a Super Bowl since the last one he oversaw in February 2005. But he has written about the 26 that he presided over in a yet-to-be published book that devotes a chapter to each game.

In making pitches to publishers, Steeg has included the chapters on three games. Those include Super Bowl XXV in Tampa, Fla., played shortly after the start of the frst Gulf War, and Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans, played nearly five months after 9/11.

The other chapter, on Super Bowl XIX, is particularly meaningful to Steeg.

During his years of preparation for that game, at a spartan stadium on a campus that was home to a bizarre band, he came to realize a pregame tradition wasn’t going to happen. And he began to imagine, for the first time, just how much was possible.

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THE NIGHT TEX COBB SAVED MY LIFE

The first time I ever brought up the subject of retirement, Randall Cobb had just stopped Earnie Shavers in the eighth round of a fight that ruined appetites all over Detroit. He'd broken Shavers's jaw with a short left uppercut, but before that happened he and Earnie had stood in the middle of the ring 7 1/2 rounds throwing punches. There could have been six or seven that missed, but I didn't see them.

We were sitting in the dressing room; Randall was sucking down Coca-Colas. His face looked exactly the way a face is supposed to look after Earnie Shavers has been beating on it half the night, and the sound of the inevitable throwing up afterward still hung in the air.

The dressing rooms in Detroit have the best acoustics in the world.

He looked over at me with that one eye he could still look out of and said, "You feeling better now?" And, while I'm admitting here that it wasn't Randall who threw up, I would also like to point out that it wasn't Randall who had to watch the fight.

His body was rope-burned and turning black and blue, and the end of his nose was red like he was four days into a bad cold. I said, "I wish you wouldn't fight Earnie Shavers anymore."

"I absolutely promise," he said.

But I meant more than Earnie Shavers, and later that night, back at the hotel, he tried to relieve me of my obligations. He said, "I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but if you can't watch it, then don't."

I took that the wrong way, of course. I'd only known Randall a year then, but it could have just as soon been my own brother in there, as far as not watching went. He said he understood that. "I know it isn't easy watching somebody you love fight Earnie Shavers," he said.

I said, "It'd be a damn sight easier if somebody would keep his hands up."

And that's as much talking we did then about retiring. Randall had made $75,000 or $80,000 for that fight, and he was on the way up. He'd taken Shavers on short notice after Gerry Cooney had backed out of the fight—if Cooney hadn't backed out, by the way, he never would have ended up in the ring with Larry Holmes earlier this year for $10 million. A lot of people saw Randall that night, and liked what they saw.

And a lot of people didn't.

In the bars, they told me Randall couldn't fight at all. Guys still bragging about five amateur fights 20 years ago went out of their way to tell me all the things Randall couldn't do. They said any decent South Philly street fighter would kill him, they said he better get a job driving a truck while he still could.

I never said much back. When they talked about him getting hurt, I thought about it. The difference was, they didn't care.

The first fight he lost was against Ken Norton, a split decision in San Antonio, Texas. He walked into the hardest single punch I've ever seen that night, a straight right hand that Norton threw from the bottom of his heart.

I can close my eyes and still see Randall's face in the half-second after it landed. For that little time, he was lost. He was coming forward when it hit him, and for half a second he stopped.

Then he went back to work, and in the dressing room afterward I heard Norton tell him, "You beat the bleep out of me, man." Norton had fought his best fight since the night he lost his title to Larry Holmes. He'd been braver and stronger than he'd been in four years.

It had been that way with Shavers, too, and later it would be that way against Bernardo Mercardo. I have seen Mercardo quit in his corner when he was winning, but against Randall he stayed there 10 rounds, taking one of the worst body beatings I've ever seen.

We talked about that after every one of them. After Mercardo I said, "You know, you're giving them something out there. You spend the whole round proving they can't hurt you, you throw 150 punches to their 25, and then at the end of the round, just when they're sure you're not human, you pat them on the ass and give them something to come out with in the next round. You're taking away their fear."

"It's a bad habit, all right," he said. And in his next fight, at the bell ending the fourth round against Jeff Shelburg earlier this year—a round in which he landed at least 100 punches—I heard him say this: "Hang in there, Jeff. After this is over we're going to go out and get drunk."

Between Mercardo and Shelburg, of course, there was supposed to be a fight with WBA heavyweight champion Mike Weaver. That fell through in December, when a kid with a tire iron broke his arm. He was standing over my body at the time, fighting off a lot of kids with tire irons and baseball bats.

I was already unconscious—hit five or six times square in the head—and it doesn't take much imagination to figure out what would have happened if he'd left me. And it doesn't matter how good you are in a fight, if you see 25 or 30 people coming at you with bats and crowbars and reinforced iron, you've got to think about leaving.

When I woke up he was shouting, "If he's dead, every one of you is dead, too." And it must have scared them off—it scared me—because the next thing I knew he was picking me up.

He said, "Pete?"

I said, "Any time you're ready to leave . . .” They'd broken one of my hips and the leg attached to it wouldn't move. I said, "Randall, this leg won't move."

He said, "We don't have time for that leg not to move." And somehow he got me in the truck and drove me to the hospital. He never said anything about his arm.

On the way, we talked things over. There was blood and swelling everywhere. It was a lot like a dressing room. I said, "You know, we could have planned this better."

He said that Gen. George Pickett had planned it better at Gettysburg.

There is one other thing he said that night that stays in my mind. It was when the place was filling up with baseball bats and tire irons, and all of a sudden you could see how many of them there were, and what they meant to do, and how bad the night was going to turn out.

He leaned over to me and said, "I hope that's the softball team."

He lost his first chance with Weaver over that, and his second chance when Weaver hurt his back, and his third chance when he got cut in training a few days before the fight.

And I was sure he would beat Weaver, but the fight scared me. I was in Knoxville the night Weaver took the title from John Tate, and 10 minutes after Weaver had knocked him out, they brought Tate out of the ring, hidden in the middle of 10 or 15 of his people.

Tate's eyes were open, he seemed to be talking, but then I looked down and saw the toes of his shoes dragging along the floor. John Tate was never the same after that fight, and I wasn't interested in seeing Randall prove he could take the same shots and beat Weaver anyway. And that's what he would have done.

And that's what he'll do against Holmes. He'll take the jabs and the right hands, and then he'll throw jabs and right hands back, mostly to the body. Two and three punches to one. And in the eighth or ninth round, I think Larry Holmes will lose his title.

And Randall probably will be cut, and I'll be throwing up in the dressing room, and the guys still bragging about five amateur fights from 20 years ago will turn away from the television set at the bar and tell each other he still can't fight.

I guess it doesn't need to be pointed out here that the damage a punch does comes partly when it lands and partly later, when it accumulates with the other punches. The accumulation goes on as long as you keep getting hit, and sometimes it catches up with you and sometimes it doesn't.

I don't want to be there if it ever catches up with Randall Cobb. I remember that fractured moment when he was lost after Norton hit him with the right hand, and the only thing that saves me from that moment is remembering that half a second later he was all right.

I don't want to be there to see him lost again, but I will be if it happens. As long as he wants to fight, I'll be there. Not because he didn't leave me one night last December, not because he needs me there—he doesn't.

I'll be there because it can't be as bad watching him fight as it would be, being too afraid to watch.

— Pete Dexter

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ALDOUS

Some background on Aldous Huxley -- he was a member of the infamous British Huxley family. His paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist and staunch eugenicist. The belief in eugenics passed down through the generations.

The brother of Aldous Huxley was Julian Huxley, who was a founding member of the UN and also a staunch eugenicist.

In psychological terms, belief in and activities surrounding eugenics often indicate that such persons are severe Cluster-B personalities… perhaps Psychopaths.

This was a disturbed family, despite their intellectual prowess.

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LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

Trump, in an Escalation, Calls for Republicans to ‘Nationalize’ Elections

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Here’s What to Know About the Partial Government Shutdown

Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks End of Protection for Haitians in U.S.

Clintons Capitulate on House Epstein Inquiry, Agreeing to Testify

Gaza Crossing to Egypt Reopens in Step Forward for Fragile Cease-Fire

Conservative Group to Stage Alternate Halftime Show With Kid Rock

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JEFFREY ST. CLAIR:

Someone asked me today what Alex Cockburn would have thought about Chomsky's appalling relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. It's impossible to say, really. Alex and Noam were friends and Alex was intensely loyal to his friends. Given Cockburn's writings on sex panics, I'd guess that he would have been more unnerved (rightly or wrongly, wrongly in my view) about Epstein's role as a Zionist hardliner (and probable Israeli agent) than Noam's bizarre dismissal of Epstein's, by then widely-known, predilection for sex-trafficking and pedophilia. At the very least, Noam's ties to Epstein were evidence of seriously bad judgment, intellectual and moral, from someone who usually made such considered and thoroughly reasoned decisions. At least that's how it appears on this misty morning in the Oregon country…

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DISSECTING THE BELIEF THAT THE US SHOULD FORCIBLY REMOVE TYRANNICAL GOVERNMENTS

The United States is the very last government on earth who has any business engaging in humanitarian interventionism. Literally dead last.

by Caitlin Johnstone

“Government X does bad things” and “therefore the US should forcibly overthrow Government X” are two completely different claims. Propagandists keep acting like they’re the same claim and like the second claim naturally follows the first, and I’m seeing far too many people accepting this manipulation without question.

They are not the same claim. They’re entirely unrelated. It should not be necessary to explain this to grown adults, but here we are.

Even if we accept as fact all the claims about how badly the US-targeted government is behaving, and even if we ignore the obvious fact that unilateral US regime change wars are against international law, there is still no valid reason to accept that a government doing bad things justifies US regime change interventionism.

Just because a foreign government has done bad things does not mean it would be good if another government took military action to overthrow them. This is uniquely true of the United States, who is quantifiably the single most tyrannical government on earth, and whose regime change interventionism reliably causes more death, suffering and abuse than its proponents claimed they were trying to stop.

The United States is the very last government on earth who has any business engaging in humanitarian interventionism. Literally dead last. No other government has been responsible for more catastrophic military actions justified under humanitarian pretenses than Washington and its network of allies and proxies.

Most of the violence, chaos and instability we’ve seen in the middle east in recent decades has been the fallout from prior western interventionism under the leadership of the United States. Dropping a Jewish ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization, installing puppet regimes, setting up military bases, invading Iraq, backing the Saudi genocide in Yemen, deliberately fomenting violent uprisings in Libya and Syria, and countless other interventions have kept the middle east from following the rest of humanity into a state of relative peace and stability after the second world war.

“Therefore the US should forcibly overthrow Government X” also doesn’t naturally follow from “Government X does bad things” because the US generally doesn’t overthrow governments who do bad things. A majority of the world’s dictatorships are armed and supported by the United States.

There are many, many tyrannical governments in our world whose abuses you hardly ever hear about, because they are not enemies of the US empire. You don’t hear western media and western governments constantly shrieking about the mass atrocities of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other tyrannical Gulf state monarchies, for example, because they are aligned with the global interests of the US hegemon.

This shows that the US never actually attacks countries to stop their governments from doing bad things. That might be the excuse, but it’s never the reason. The governments targeted by the United States do tend to be more authoritarian than the western liberal ideal because if they weren’t controlling their country with an iron fist they would have already folded to US efforts to absorb them into the imperial power umbrella a long time ago, but that’s never the real reason for targeting them.

The real reason is global hegemony. The US never attacks foreign governments because they are doing bad things, it only ever attacks them for being disobedient and failing to kiss the imperial ring.

It is therefore crazy and stupid to pretend “Government X does bad things” should naturally give rise to the expectation that the US should forcibly overthrow that government. The US never deposes foreign governments for doing bad things, and when it does depose them it reliably leads to far more chaos, suffering and destruction than if it had just minded its own affairs.

Propagandists rely on repetition, echo chambers, information dominance and narrative distortion to manipulate our minds. But they also rely on our own lack of basic critical thinking skills. A little robust examination of our underlying assumptions goes a long way.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

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BENEDICTO: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

— Edward Abbey

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WHEN YOU ARE OLD

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

— William Butler Yeats (1891)

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"THE END of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

— T.S. Eliot

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