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INTERIOR HIGH TEMPERATURES will warm up today. Dry and hot weather expected to continue into mid week. Temperatures will then diminish toward the end of the week. Stratus will cover coastal areas for the next several days with clearing expected each afternoon. Locally strong northerly winds expected over the exposed coastal mountains and headlands. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Monday morning I have a foggy 50F. I expect clearing skies later today, then mostly clear & breezy Tuesday & Wednesday. The fog returns later this week.
STRAWBERRY BEAR, LITTLE RIVER
Editor,
https://www.newsweek.com/black-bear-killed-human-woman-california-first-confirmed-1908883
The above link is to a Newsweek story dated June 6th. The first confirmed fatal attack on a human by a black bear happened in Nov. 2023 in Sierra County. The story reports the newly announced results of an investigation into that attack.
Meanwhile in east Little River about a week ago, a young black bear ripped through the redwood back door to my garage to try to get at food stored in my garage fridge. When I went out to investigate all the noise, the bear came running out of the garage and climbed a nearby tree. I shouted and growled at the bear, which came down and moved to the back of the yard. But the bear wouldn't leave despite my banging on the house with a broomstick.
The bear showed no fear, and in fact took a few steps in my direction. I grabbed an electric leaf blower and turned it on, and the whine of that machine persuaded the bear to leave. I could imagine a thought balloon over its head saying “WTF?.” It has not come back since then, but this was not the first time a bear has come and knocked over my garbage cans. I think this bear was a juvenile, but I am no expert on bears.
Meanwhile, I have tried to make the damaged wooden door more bear resistant by putting up chains across it until i can rebuild it. I'm going to put more chain across the garage fridge to keep the bear from knocking it over or prying the door open.
It was most likely the aroma of ripe strawberries in the fridge that attracted the bear. There were many more items in there that bears like, like ham, bacon, butter, eggs, milk and cheese, but all of those were well sealed in packaging. My place is surrounded by woods and shares a boundary with Van Damme State Park.
Black bears are protected under California law; it is a misdemeanor to shoot at one.
Nick Wilson
Albion
LARRY KEITH GANDER age 80, passed away on May 14, 2024 at his home in Grants Pass, Oregon with his devoted wife Cindy by his side. Larry had a very successful 35 year law enforcement career. 7 years with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and 28 years with Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. He served as a Deputy, Sergeant, Lieutenant and as Undersheriff, until his retirement in 2000.
After retiring Larry and Cindy moved to Southern Oregon, where they enjoyed many adventures together and several great trips. Including 2 memorable trips to Scotland, England and Ireland to “trace his roots”. Larry had a love of cars and dogs. After buying his first of 3 Corvettes, he joined the Southern Oregon Corvette Association. Meeting new friends and sharing the experience of owning a corvette. His many Labrador retrievers were a constant source of pleasure for him, competing in hunt tests and field trials over several years. Larry was very proud of his children, stepchildren and grandchildren. They provided him with much pleasure and great memories.
Survivors include his wife of 26 years, Cindy; sons Larry, Jr. and Michael; stepsons Charlie, Jr. and Chris Zanella; sister Debbie (Paul) Rarick; brother David (Janet) Grattan; and 6 grandchildren; Ethan, Mark (Addie) and Hannah Gander; Marshall and Maggie Zanella. Larry will be missed by all his family, friends and former co-workers and mostly by his loving wife, Cindy.
Arrangements are being handled by Stephens Family Chapel, Grants Pass, Oregon.
AV UNIFIED NEWS
Dear Anderson Valley Community,
The 2024 academic year came to a close with a flurry of events to mark the year end, including field day, three graduations, a groundbreaking, and a massive moving of furniture to clear the high school science labs and building in preparation for the remodel that starts Monday. To put it mildly, it was a busy week.
I want to thank all of the people that make these promotion and graduation ceremonies happen. From the planning of the speeches and the rehearsals, to the stage and chair set ups, to the sound system, to the programs, to the parents who decorate the stages, it is no easy production. It was lovely to see so many people come out and celebrate the kids.
I also want to take time and shout out to all of the students at the high school that willingly and happily helped us move furniture out of rooms. With their teamwork and enthusiasm, it took a mere 45 minutes to clear out the remaining items in those rooms. I have done this three times with reconstruction, and by far, this was the easiest move we have had. Staff have been working hard boxing items for months and the last dash can oftentimes be a very upsetting and emotional one. Dennis Johnson and Guy Kephart carried a lot of this lift. A huge thank you to the staff.
At the elementary school, we have parking lot work starting this week and we had scheduled to have new flooring put in as well. The vendor is having a supply issue with the flooring and that work may be delayed until winter break, but I will keep you posted on that. We have been in contract for this work for months, so it was exceptionally disappointing to receive that call on Friday. If they are unable to perform the contract, we will cancel it and rebid it as part of the kitchen remodel.
We received the track plan comments out of DSA and the comments were extensive but doable. Those will go back in in the next couple weeks for final permitting. We are still waiting on the elementary kitchen plans.
The district office is open over the summer and available to answer questions. Summer school starts June 23. If you sign your student up, please make sure they attend. A reminder from Coach Toohey to please make sure your student has an updated sports physical and reports for practice by the posted date in order to be eligible to play. Football starts on July 29 and all other Fall sports on August 12. Coaches are needed too! Email Coach Toohey at jtoohey@avpanthers.org.
If you have a student entering TK, it is important that they have all of their vaccinations prior to registration. Students will not be allowed to start school without the required vaccinations. The only exception is if they have had their first dose within four months, but then it is the parent/ guardian's responsibility to ensure that the second dose is received in order not to interrupt school eligibility.
I would like to thank Cymbre Thomas-Sweet for her amazing work and dedication at the elementary school. The remarkable progress and achievement of that site over the past three years with the staff and students has set a renewed standard for excellence and is greatly appreciated!
Enjoy your vacation! Rest! Relax! Renew!
Sincerely yours,
Louise Simson, Superintendent
AV Unified School District
TAX SHARING IN THE BLIND
by Mark Scaramella
Recently, regular website commenter Sarah Kennedy Owen requested that “somebody” write more about the seemingly lopsided “tax sharing” agreement that the Supervisors approved in the blind on Tuesday. Some have estimated that the deal may involve up to $3 million in lost taxes to the County (property, sales and bed taxes) from the transfer of parcels on the outskirts of Mendo’s incorporated cities over some unknown period of time once after the Local Area Formation Commission figures out which parcels will be “annexed.” But nobody really knows which parcels or how much County money will be lost.
As Acting Auditor-Controller-Treasurer Tax Collector Sara Pierce told the board, figuring out the actual financial impact of the arrangement is too complicated to even take a stab at because 1. Nobody knows which parcels might be affected (conceivably parcels surrounding not only Ukiah, but Willits, Fort Bragg and Point Arena as well). And 2. The particulars of the tax sharing proposal are too convoluted and error prone to even understand, much less calculate and implement.
Remember, this arrangement was cooked up in private “ad hoc” meetings with Supervisors Maureen Mulheren and Dan Gjerde and was never circulated for staff or public comment. Supervisor Hashack was the only supervisor to suggest that the arrangement be further evaluated before anyone voted on it.
But, since Ms. Owen asked (and we suspect by now she may already be sorry she asked), we hereby present the substance of the tax sharing arrangement which Ms. Pierce and her team will be expected to decipher and implement.
Property tax:
“Property Tax Revenue Collection and Distribution.
As of the relevant Annexation Effective Date, the County shall distribute to the Annexor City the County's general fund property tax revenue (County Auditor's Fund Code A0001) generated in the annexation area as follows:
i. Half of the County's portion of the "annual tax increment" (as defined in Revenue and Taxation Code section 96.5 as of the Effective Date) that does not exceed 2% of the property tax revenue in the prior year from the annexation area.
ii. All of the County's portion of the "annual tax increment" that exceeds 2% of the property tax revenue in the prior year from the annexation area, until the total property tax revenue received by the Annexor City equals 15% of the total property tax revenue generated in the annexation area.
iii. Once the total property tax revenue received by the Annexor City equals 15% of the total property tax generated in the annexation area, no additional portion of the County's "annual tax increment" shall be distributed to the Annexor City. In other words, the City's "property tax apportionment factor" (as calculated pursuant to Revenue and Taxation Code section 96.2 as of the Effective Date) in the annexation area shall not exceed 15%.”
Sales Tax:
“Bradley-Burns Sales Tax Revenue Collection and Distribution.
As of the relevant Annexation Effective Date, the Annexor City shall collect all Bradley-Burns Sales Tax in the ATRA (the "ATRA Bradley-Burns Revenue") and shall distribute to the County a share of the ATRA Bradley-Burns Revenue in accordance with this subparagraph (b).
i. From the Annexation Effective Date until the start of the first full Fiscal Year immediately following the Annexation Effective Date, the Annexor City shall distribute to the County 100% of the ATRA Bradley-Burns Revenue.
ii. Thereafter, for each subsequent full Fiscal Year, the amount of ATRA Bradley- Burns Revenue the Annexor City distributes to the County in accordance with this Agreement shall be reduced by 1/15 (one-fifteenth) which the Parties agree shall be rounded to 6.667%. Therefore, for the first full Fiscal Year, the Annexor City shall distribute 93.333% of the ATRA Bradley-Burns Revenue to the County; for the second full year, the Annexor City shall distribute 86.666% of the ATRA Bradley- Burns Revenue to the County; for the third full year, the Annexor City shall distribute 79.999% of the ATRA Bradley-Burns Revenue to the County; and so forth, reducing each subsequent year by 6.667%, until, as of the start of the fifteenth (15th) full Fiscal Year following the Annexation Effective Date, the Annexor City shall no longer distribute ATRA Bradley-Burns Revenue to the County.
iii. For any Distribution under this subparagraph (b), the Annexor City shall distribute the ATRA Bradley-Burns Revenue to the County within thirty (30) days of the Annexor City receiving the ATRA Bradley-Burns Revenue from the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration.”
Transient Occupancy Tax
“Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) Revenue Collection and Distribution.
As of the relevant Annexation Effective Date, the Transient Occupancy Tax in the ATRA shall be the rate of the Annexor City. The Annexor City shall collect the Transient Occupancy Tax in the ATRA (the “ATRA TOT Revenue”) and shall distribute to the County a share of the ATRA TOT Revenue in accordance with this subparagraph (c).
i. From the Annexation Effective Date until the start of the first full Fiscal Year immediately following the Annexation Effective Date, the Annexor City shall distribute to the County 100% of the ATRA TOT Revenue.
ii. Thereafter, for each subsequent full Fiscal Year, the amount of ATRA TOT Revenue the Annexor City distributes to the County in accordance with this Agreement shall be reduced by 1/5 (one-fifth) or 20%. Therefore, for the first full Fiscal Year, the Annexor City shall distribute 80% of the ATRA TOT Revenue to the County; for the second full Fiscal Year, the Annexor City shall distribute 60% of the ATRA TOT Revenue to the County; for the third full Fiscal Year, the Annexor City shall distribute 40% of the ATRA TOT Revenue to the County; and for the fourth full Fiscal Year, the Annexor City shall distribute 20% of the ATRA TOT Revenue to the County. As of the start of the fifth full Fiscal Year following the Annexation
Effective Date, the Annexor City shall no longer distribute ATRA TOT Revenue to the County.
iii. For any Distribution under this subparagraph (c), the Annexor City shall distribute ATRA TOT Revenue to the County within thirty (30) days of the Annexor City collecting the ATRA TOT Revenue.”
Clear?
Our interpretation of this impenetrable bureaucratese, as best we can translate from the pseudo-Slovenian, is that the County gives up property tax revenue associated with annexed parcels to the city on day one, gives up sales tax over 15-years, and gives up TOT taxes over a 5-year period. In theory, the County no longer has responsibility for law enforcement or roads in those parcels, but that reduction has no compensating dollar value associated with it.
We have read through the agenda materials attached to the tax sharing proposal including the resolution the Board approved. Nowhere in the proposed arrangement is the alleged rationale for these crazy particulars provided, nor is there any description of benefits to the County other than a theoretical reduction in service area.
The only people who appeared at the Tuesday Board meeting in support of the arrangement were Ukiah officials. Nobody from Willits, Fort Bragg or Point Arena. Of particular potential interest is the wharf area of greater Fort Bragg which is currently under county jurisdiction. This area produces a relatively significant amount of income to the County and seems like one of the first potential annexation areas outside of Ukiah. Curiously, nobody from Fort Bragg showed up to comment on the deal. Technically, the cities can still decline to participate. But since Ukiah is already on board (why wouldn’t they be?), it seems more likely than not that the other cities will sign on — if they can figure out what it may mean to their finances.
This large tax giveaway to the cities is obviously a bad idea on its face. We doubt it would have past any prior Board as not in the best interests of the County. But, at the very least, given the many obvious complications and potential misinterpretations involved, the Board should have formally circulated the proposed agreement among staff and the cities and the public before voting on it. And to the Local Area Formation Commission for analysis and comment. But no. Except for Haschak, the other four Supervisors voted for it basically sight unseen, even after Ms. Pierce told them she was unable to figure out what it might mean to County finances.
ED NOTES
A TEMPERATE ON-LINE assessment of The Huff's two-basin proposal: “Congressman Jared Huffman! You slimeballs need to Stop killing the EEL. This is about to be stopped and put back the way it should be and you are going to go F it up and give rights to people who have no right to the water. None of this water should go south. Stop hating on Humboldt. Let the EEL run free, you bastards. Stop doing the bidding of the people who give you money to do the wrong thing. Just do the right thing.”
THE ECO-MURDER of the Eel began in the early 20th century when Chinese labor hand-dug a mile long tunnel through the ridge separating the Eel River into Potter Valley where a couple of modest turbines generated electricity for the purpose of… wait for it… electrifying Ukiah!
THAT MODEST GOAL was the long and the short of the initial diversion project. No one foresaw, or could have foreseen, how valuable the water from the diversion would become. (Chinese labor, incidentally, also hand-dug the Skunk line tunnels and even the granite cistern at the Anderson Valley hamlet of Navarro, which supplies the households of central Navarro with cold, sweet, no additives, no filters water to this day. Wherever there's a tunnel in Mendocino County, the Chinese dug it, only to be rewarded by insults and persecutions. The legendary Mendo Sheriff, the honorable Doc Standley, prevented a massacre of Chinese at Mendocino by a mob of drunken oafs, whose descendents today drive huge pick-up trucks and wear their baseball hats backwards.)
A HANDFUL of Potter Valley kulak families and Confederate sympathizers initially got free water from the diversion, and their descendents, a group study in grasping, hereditary entitlement, get real cheap water today, as do grape growers in the Ukiah Valley and south into Sonoma County, all of it a latter-day drain on the finite waters of the diverted Eel that pales in comparison to the true owners of almost all of the diverted water, the SoCo Water Agency, which sells the diverted Eel stored at Lake Mendocino to Sonoma County Water District and Marin County at a huge annual profit.
HOW DID SONOMA COUNTY get title to the diverted Eel? To the Eel River water stored at Lake Mendo? SoCo funded most of the construction of Coyote Dam in the middle 1950s, behind which lies the present day lake and summer resort for area tweekers.
MENDO, ripped off then as now, voted 4-1 to give Lake Mendo water to SoCo in perpetuity, the noble and perspicacious supervisor, Joe Scaramella of Point Arena, dissenting. Latter day supervisor, Johnny Pinches of Laytonville, tried to get his fellow supervisors to reconsider the one-way deal with Sonoma County, a one-way deal worth annual millions to Sonoma County, but couldn't even get a second to discuss it. Political Mendocino! Where imagination goes to die.
EVENTUALLY, everyone's favorite utility, PG&E, assumed ownership of the diversion, thus complicating contemporary negotiations about how to macro-manage water management from Potter Valley south to northern Marin, northeast to Lake Pillsbury and Lake County.
CONGRESSMAN HUFFMAN, always frantic to stay in office where he can auto-vote for the murder of Gazan children, has tried to pander to both sides of the diversion issue, assuring the partisans of a fully restored Eel, who fantasize a return of its once lush fishery, that that miracle can be accomplished given more than a century of human damage to the river from multiple sources, a fact Northcoast old timer Ernie Branscomb has pointed out. The congressman simultaneously assures all the downstream diversion beneficiaries that he will keep their cheap water flowing, always a message gratifying to grape growers, the congressman's fave constituents.
WHAT AN HISTORICAL IRONY! A mile-long tunnel the dimensions of a medium-size Caltrans culvert has somehow bred two million dependents!
HUMBOLDT PARTISANS of the Eel are radically out-numbered by downstream interests. Their only real hope for an unfettered river is a major earthquake. Or, as I've previously suggested, a couple sticks of dynamite rafted into the tunnel…
PS. It's worth a trip to Potter Valley to have a look at the diversion, especially the fish ladder at the Eel end of the project. It's an hilarious corkscrew construction that supposedly lifts fish gently from the Eel to the headwaters of the Russian, or vice versa I forget, but any fish that dares enter the contraption is certain to come out the other end a duck. The last time I was there a guy in some kind of state uniform was standing with a clipboard gazing into the water. “Dude! What are you doing?” Answer: “I'm counting fish.”
NO TAXPAYER BAILOUT OF THE PALACE
To the Editor:
Why should we have to pay for the Palace Hotel?
It is true the 133 year old Palace Hotel, which is on the National Register (#79003458), has been allowed to deteriorate due to the neglect of the owners for the last 30 years. That is certainly unfortunate and should be considered some kind of a crime.
Jitu & Paru Ishwar purchased the hotel and property in 2019 and, like their predecessors, have done little to protect or improve the structure. Ishwar’s apparent partners, Guidiville Rancheria and a local restaurant owner, Matt Talbert, seem to all believe the Palace Hotel needs to be demolished and rebuilt.
It is an absolute shame the hotel was allowed to deteriorate so badly, and there is plenty of blame to go around. But, now, in it’s present condition they may be right, and the building must come down and a new structure erected in its place.
Some of your readers may be saying it is too bad what has happened to this treasure, but Jitu Ishwar should be allowed to demolish the building and rebuild after local approval of structural & architectural plans. And you would be correct, so long as he plans to use his own funds to do so. However, my understanding is he wants us to pay for his neglect. I for one believe that is poor use of our tax dollars, and perhaps you do too. One of Ishwar’s partners has applied for a public grant in excess of $6 million to be used for this purpose, and that should be denied.
In summary, Jitu Ishwar should be held accountable and be made to demolish the building at his own expense.
John Moon
Ukiah
THE ANSWER IS NO
To the Editor:
The recent Letter to the Editor by board members of the Willits Environmental Center suggests that our Board of Supervisors’ staff minions and County Counsel are attempting to subvert the will of the people of this county. The previous effort to expand the amount of land that cannabis can be grown on was overwhelmingly rejected. Now “creative” re-interpretation of the existing ordinance has magically created yet another cannabis ordinance do over. This smells like big cannabis is again trying to influence or bypass our elected officials. We have been down this road before and the answer is still NO to any size increase in allowable cannabis cultivation areas. Re-interpret that.
Mark Spindler
Ukiah
WHILE ON THE TOPIC OF JOHNNY ROSELLI…
New Johnny Roselli bio is overshadowed by the 1991 “All American Mafioso” the Roselli book by the Ukiah Daily Journal’s own Charles Rappleye. It opens with the discovery of a body stuffed into a 55-gallon drum floating off the coast of Florida. That was Charlie’s first book, and his last was “Herbert Hoover: The Ordeal of the Presidency” in 2017. Both are first-rate. Charlie died of throat cancer a few years ago at age 62.
– Tom Hine
FRED GARDNER NOTES: Not sure where this very belated comment fits on MCT….
The photo of Tony Craver with Pebbles Trippet and Norm Vroman that ran June 2 was taken in 2004, not 1999.
Your correspondent reported at the time:
“The all-day conference was held in the auditorium of the Dana Gray elementary school. It was well organized and well attended (about 250 people). In addition to the doctors’ panel there were patients’ and law-enforcement panels. The district attorneys of Mendocino and Humboldt Counties, Norm Vroman and Paul Gallegos, came out for defining the legal limit of how much marijuana a patient or caregiver can grow in terms of area (100 square feet), not plant numbers.
"Vroman revealed that Ram Dass (who is recovering from a serious stroke and had taken part in the patients’ panel) was his ‘guru,' and that over the years he has read and re-read everything Ram Dass has written… Antonia Lamb introduced Sheriff Tony Craver with a song composed in his honor that rhymed 'cream of the crops' with 'cream of the cops.' Craver joked that Norm Vroman was his guru… Gallegos said it was unusual to be in a crowd where nobody thought he was too lenient.”
WHEN TONY CRAVER WAS IN FORT BRAGG
Editor,
I wanted to share a couple of photos I have of Tony Craver (and staff) from when I was working as Admin. Assistant at the Fort Bragg substation back in the early 1990s.
Tony was a wonderful boss and a good friend. He will be missed.
Rest in peace Tony.
Julie (Shafsky) Paravicini
Fort Bragg
RUSSIAN GULCH BRIDGE DEDICATION
by Carol Dominy
June 9, 1940 - California Governor Culbert Olson and Secretary of State Paul Peek spoke at the dedication ceremony for the new bridge over Russian Gulch. Following the speeches by Governor Olson and Secretary Peek, the Governor’s party had the honor of being the first to drive across the newly constructed bridge. Other motorists waited three more weeks for construction to be completed. The bridge opened to the public on June 30th.
The previous bridge in this location was a timber trestle built in 1911, when automobiles were just starting to become popular on the Mendocino Coast. By 1938, it was clear that the old structure could no longer support the increasing weight of trucks carrying lumber and produce. An inspection by the California Division of Highways, the precursor to today's Caltrans, identified seven coastal bridges, including the one at Russian Gulch, as unsafe.
The construction of the new Russian Gulch Bridge began in October 1939, spearheaded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This New Deal agency, established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was instrumental in providing jobs and revitalizing infrastructure during the Great Depression.
The Russian Gulch Bridge was also a success for Frederick Panhorst, the chief of the bridge section of the California Division of Highways from 1931 until his retirement in 1960. Renowned for his ability to complete challenging projects within budget, Panhorst enlisted the expertise of famed bridge designer Henry E. Kuphal. Together, they created a concrete arch bridge that has been celebrated in engineering circles for its beauty and design. Its spectacular Roman Arch is similar in design to the more famous Bixby Creek Bridge further south, but the Russian Gulch Bridge’s arch is supported only by the two rocky headlands on either side without need for buttresses. In recognition of Panhorst’s contributions, the bridge was renamed the Frederick W. Panhorst Bridge in 1975.
(kelleyhousemuseum.org)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, June 9, 2024
MOLLIE ALLESTAD, Marysville/Ukiah. DUI.
LUIS ARCHUNDIA-MORALES, Willits. Attempted murder, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, battery with serious injury, hit&run resulting in death or injury, child endangerment.
JASMINE BAILEY, Ukiah. Petty theft, controlled substance.
LUIS BARRAGAN, Ukiah. DUI.
RAYMOND GASTON, Klamath Falls/Ukiah. Failure to register, failure to appear.
ALEXIS MARTINEZ-PATINO, Willits. DUI.
KAITLYN MORGAN, Redwood Valley. DUI, suspended license for DUI, probation violation.
JULIO NAJERA-LEON, Ukiah. Controlled substance, parole violation.
STEVEN NOVOA, Ukiah. Violation of domestic violence court order.
CHERRI ROBERTS, Ukiah. County parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)
JOSHUA WAGNER, Redwood Valley. Speed contest.
NOTHING IS AS EFFECTIVE AS DEFEAT
by Charles Bukowski
always carry a notebook with you
wherever you go, he said,
and don’t drink too much, drinking dulls
the sensibilities.
attend readings, note breath pauses,
and when you read
always understate
underplay, the crowd is smarter than you
might think,
and when you write something
don’t send it out right away,
put it in a drawer for two weeks,
then take it out and look
at it, and revise, revise,
REVISE again and again,
tighten lines like bolts holding the span
of a 5 mile bridge,
and keep a notebook by your bed,
you will get thoughts during the night
and these thoughts will vanish and be wasted
unless you notate them.
and don’t drink, any fool can
drink, we are men of
letters.
for a guy who couldn’t write at all
he was about like the rest
of them: he could sure
talk about
it.
ISLAND OF NO WOMEN
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
After a while it was like being in jail. After a while you quit thinking about having a beer because no matter what, the ice chest is empty, the taps are dry and the guards aren’t bartenders.
So you get used to it and eventually your ice cold frothy beer dreams fade away.
And that’s what having no women on the island was like. Eventually. For several weeks it was weird, but by now the fact all the females had snuck out one night and paddled off to some other island was accepted. They were gone. Deal with it.
The men had settled in and were making the best of it, which was pretty good, considering. Oh, some of the nice etiquette stuff was fading away compared to the beginning when if someone sneezed in a big bowl of salad he’d get a punch on the arm or some profanity-laced scolding.
These days no one would much notice sneezing in or on anything, and as for salads, there weren’t any. Or other vegetables.
Mostly the diet was meat. When the parrots and turtles and monkeys had all been devoured the men began an assembly line of dogs and were encouraging them to copulate and produce litters, and thus provide puppies as a key component of their diet.
The older dogs made for good barbecue and the pups and young dogs were amusing. The meat, which they’d hoped would taste just like chicken, was a disappointment. Most of it, especially the pit bulls and Huskies, was tough, stringy and tasted like liver.
Golden Retriever chops and ear flaps were everyone’s favorite until the last Golden Retriever was dispatched and butchered before somebody realized Lulu was female. Oops. So until some chickens flew onto their island, the meals were mostly going to be Cocker Spaniels, labradors and chihuahua kebobs.
The island was good sized, although no one knew how big, as in miles or acres or square feet, because all that math-type knowledge had disappeared even before the women had all sailed off. But there were some big trees in a small forest, a clearing near the cliffs and it rained often enough to keep everyone pretty clean.
They amused themselves playing a game that their ancestors invented years ago. Two teams of however many wanted to play gathered at the clearing and took turns running and throwing and carrying a Pit Bull skull over the field and put it in the other team’s log box. One team wore shirts and the other team didn’t.
Everyone was still able to talk, though vocabularies had shrunk to a few hundred words. Sometimes at night they sang by making pleasant grunting noises around a big fire. There were only a few under the age of 10, and they learned to make slingshots, pick berries and catch fish.
Then the women came back, appearing along the horizon in little boats one afternoon, but not getting near shore until the next day. They all looked great, the way every woman does when you haven’t seen one in a while, and the guys regretted, somewhat, having neglected their own hygiene, diet and etiquette.
The little boats were gondolas and the little boat captains were gondoliers and they were from Italy and certainly hadn’t been neglecting anything related to their looks or fitness. Dressed real nice, if you go for that fancy sparkly stuff on tight gold pants, and pointy red shoes. And stupid looking hats.
The women were giggling and carrying bags when they stepped on shore. The gondolier dudes got off the little boats too, but since they were small and there were only 12 of them, the guys on the island killed ‘em all. They were going to barbecue them but the women had brought along cheese, salami, wine and bread so they fed the gondola pilots to the dogs instead.
A few days later the women realized the leftover gondolier costumes would fit the young men on the island so they tailored the suits just a bit and then taught the kids how to run a little gondola boat.
It was pretty easy, so a few weeks later, running in shifts, everyone got transported off the island and taken to Italy, which is how it came to be that rugby and soccer were invented.
“While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.”
— Virginia Woolf
MITCH CLOGG:
The Washington Post was a lively newspaper, second overall only to the richer New York Times and often bolder and braver than the NYT. It printed things the government warned could get it prosecuted, things that showed enormous wrongs that were being done secretly. It exposed the crimes we know as the Watergate Scandal, our war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam and, to get current, the complex and seemingly endless banditry of the Trump era, now the subject of trials and convictions far and wide. It owns a trove of Pulitzer prizes for its dedication, courage and dogged skills.
It changed hands. God only knows how the children of Catharine Graham and her father could do it, but they sold out to rich, conservative British propagandists like Rupert Murdoch, who are reshaping it to become a stealth, subtly run organ of the rich and ruthless.
This is an incalculable loss to America and the world. Score one more for the One Percent.
I’ll prepare a future post that talks about publications that are devoted to bringing truthful information to their readers.
“ISRAEL RESCUES 4 HOSTAGES IN MILITARY OPERATION; GAZAN OFFICIALS SAY SCORES ARE KILLED,” reads a New York Times headline from Saturday.
It’s a very odd-looking headline even if you don’t know anything about the propagandistic tactics being employed in it. The first half is very clear, while the second half is unintelligible and reads like some weird kind of riddle or word puzzle.
The New York Times is performing these bizarre, cryptic linguistic gymnastics to discuss the latest Israeli massacre in Gaza which as of this writing has a reported death toll of 236.
Right off the bat we can see something weird in this headline with the use of the word “scores” to describe the number of people reported killed in the massacre. The New York Times article itself says it was reported that “more than 200 people were killed in central Gaza,” so the correct quantifier for the headline would be “hundreds”, not “scores”. This would be like a headline saying “dozens” of people were killed on 9/11 instead of “thousands”; it would technically be correct since the number of people killed were mathematically speaking many many dozens, but it would give readers the wrong impression of the lethality of the incident.
Next, notice the sudden switch mid-headline from active, certain voice to passive, doubtful voice. Four Israeli hostages were definitely rescued by Israel, while Gazan officials are alleging that scores were killed.
Scores of what? Cats? Chickens? Israelis?
Killed by what? Salmonella poisoning? Traffic accidents? Congolese militias?
There’s no way to tell from the headline.
The mass media in general and The New York Times in particular are notorious for their passive language “Palestinian child ceases breathing after encountering bullet” headlines when promoting Israeli information interests, but it really drives the point home when you see it switch from normal human language to something that sounds like a clue The Riddler would leave Batman within the very same headline.
And what’s interesting is that nothing The New York Times editors did here is technically a lie. Every word they meticulously selected for their headline is technically true, but it is shaped in such a way that it draws the reader’s attention away from the fact that Israel just massacred hundreds of human beings.
They could have just as easily written “Israel Kills Hundreds of Palestinians in Central Gaza Attack; 4 Hostages Rescued” and it would have been just as true, but then public attention would have been drawn in the opposite direction. The New York Times never, ever draws public attention in that direction; the slanting only ever goes one way.
We saw something similar the other day from The New York Times when they reported that Israel has been torturing Palestinian prisoners by sodomizing them with hot metal rods — sometimes to death — but buried this information at the very bottom of the article, without mentioning a word of it in the headline or sub-headline.…
THE UNABOMBER, ME AND THE POISONED MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST
by Maxim Loskutoff
On June 10 of last year, Ted Kaczynski, the homegrown terrorist known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his cell in Butner, N.C. Mr. Kaczynski, who had spent 25 years in federal prison for murdering three people and injuring 23 others with mail bombs, had reportedly died by suicide.
The news jarred me. I was writing a novel about Mr. Kaczynski.
One year later, the book is finished and the news has faded, but I’m still untangling the mythologies that surrounded the Unabomber’s life — of the tortured outcast who sought refuge in the American West — from the ones that influenced my own.
I grew up in Missoula, about 80 miles from the Unabomber’s shack in the Montana wilderness and was 11 at the time of his capture. What I remember most from those days is a sense of disturbance. I saw helicopters in the sky and heard the hushed anxiety in my parents’ voices. I didn’t know who the Unabomber was or what he had done, but I could tell it was important — and dark. So much so that my home state was suddenly the center of national attention.
Until then I’d felt about as far from the center as a kid could be. Western Montana in the 1990s was not a place that made the national news, save for an occasional environmental disaster and the annual Testicle Festival — a days-long debauch of fried steer genitals that attracted seedier press. To me, home meant the patchy fields behind the hospital where my soccer team practiced in the spring, the green rattletrap chairlift at the three-run ski hill the school bus brought us to every Friday afternoon, the dismal mall my friends and I wandered in endless loops.
At first I was confused about who the Unabomber actually was. Was he an environmental avenger striking back at timber companies, or a madman blowing up computer rental stores? People seemed to think he was smart. He’d gone to Harvard. I knew what that was. Then I saw his shack. Why would a smart person live that way? And why here?
The sudden media attention hinted at the answers. I heard the words “cabin,” “remote” and “wilderness” repeated on the evening news with an increasingly romantic luster. I began to see how people on the coasts viewed my home state: as a wilderness of possibility. A refuge for ruffians, seekers, dropouts, dreamers and the occasional psychopath. Someplace you could go if things didn’t work out. T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing the slogan “The Last Best Place to Hide” popped up in local souvenir stores.
My life in Montana wasn’t romantic. It was distinctly suburban. I lived two blocks from the local high school. We shopped at Kmart, rented movies at Blockbuster and ate at a pan-Asian fast food place called the Mustard Seed. I listened to Nirvana and wore clothing emblazoned with Michael Jordan. I had never been hunting, and had fished exactly once. Newspaper headlines first alerted me that I lived on the frontier. I wondered what this meant.
Thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau made the idea of the wilderness aspirational, as a place to purify one’s spirit and find one’s true self. Our heroes and outlaws have often played out their destinies there, from Lewis and Clark to Billy the Kid to Kerouac and Cassidy. But the West is a place like any other place. We just use it as a mirror for the dark, untamed aspects of our national character.
Mr. Kaczynski’s story followed this blueprint. He left behind a successful career in academia to test himself in nature. Once there, he became an avatar for a much older myth — of the monster lurking in the woods, terrorizing a complacent society. His postal delivery bombs were a warped modern twist.
Absorbing his story over time, I began to wonder if my purpose lay elsewhere. If Montana was a playground for malcontents with pioneer fantasies, I’d get out, become a screenwriter in Los Angeles, washed clean of my youth.
Mr. Kaczynski’s capture was my first encounter with the poison pit at the center of the American dream. I suddenly felt like a stranger in the only place I’d ever really known.
We are all homeless here. Our manic national ambition makes every horizon a proving ground. To stay in one place doing one thing is to fail.
Propelled by our ambition to remake ourselves, we careen past one another, oblivious to the fact that we’re following a pattern as old as our country.
So it was with Mr. Kaczynski. Homeless and lashing out, confused, pedantic, reactionary, he pretended to have new ideas to mask his old ambitions, cherry-picking from French philosophers, Luddites and environmentalists. But the truth is, he was just trying to justify what he and so many other boys here want — to get away from their parents, transcend their peers and remake society in their own image.
The media got him wrong. In seeking to romanticize Mr. Kaczynski, reporters gave him Thoreau-like qualities — framing him as a philosopher who found purpose in the woods, dark as it was. But his only innovation was a new, cowardly kind of violence. Mr. Kaczynski never really saw Montana, the wilderness or the West itself, as it truly was. For him, its main attribute was its lack of people. He was a twisted embodiment of the dream of the frontier that was poisoned from its inception.
Strangely, Mr. Kaczynski’s mythology seems only to have grown since his death. Young people still spread messages from his manifesto across social media, creating their own story of “Uncle Ted” as a fiery anti-technology prophet. We must hate ourselves, I thought, reading their posts, for the way we seek heroes from the worst among us.
We are all fed myths about our homes, whether it’s Montana as the last best place to hide or New York City as the cultural capital of the world. But these are just stories, often relying on outliers like Mr. Kaczynski. Our hometowns are far more complex than these mythologies, but seeing them as they really are — and loving them in all their tragic beauty — leads us away from destruction and isolation, to community and stewardship, a form of deeper purpose.
I spent my late teens and twenties on the move, anxious and driven and confused. I thought I was searching for purpose and home, but I was rebelling against the very idea. Like a good American boy, I was chasing the American dream: not a house and a two-car garage, but rebellion itself.
Last year, weary from the lonely and grief-stricken years of the pandemic, I moved back to Missoula and began life anew. The three-run ski hill is gone and the town has spread to fill the valley, but there are still towering mountains and looming trees and plenty of places to get lost.
Each day I wake up and try to see Montana for what it is. Golden grass on the dry hills, a big sky that generally runs from gray to darker gray, clear-cuts and abandoned mines and meth-ridden towns and glittering stands of wilderness so stunning they bring me to tears. It’s complicated and beautiful and older than I can possibly imagine. One day, in the marrow of my bones, I hope to know it only as home.
(Maxim Loskutoff is the author of, most recently, the novel “Old King,” about the Unabomber and the American West.)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Everyone (every “world leader” that is) is owned, and owned by the same people. That’s why there will be no nuclear war. When they have you dancing to their tune, you don’t have the time or energy to do what you need to do to live.
Quit being frightened by the big scary shadows being projected on the wall. Prepare to defend yourself, your family, your friends from the imminent collapse of this country. Focus your attention on living – like by gardening and raising chickens.
And when death finally does come knocking at your door – shoot it in the face.
FRONTIERS OF WOKENESS: A top cancer charity has apologized for using the word “cervix” instead of trans-friendly “front hole.” The Canadian Cancer Society, which is run by philanthropist Andrea Seale, apologized to the LGBGQ+ community on a webpage dedicated to cervical cancer, under the page's “words matter' section. The non-profit said that “many” non-binary people and transgender men have “mixed feelings” or “feel distanced” from the term “cervix.”
HOW CAN THE GIANTS SPICE THINGS UP AT BORE-ACLE PARK?
Time to tweak a classic design.
by Scott Ostler
Home runs are fun.
The San Francisco Giants discovered that Wednesday, when they bopped three of ’em in Phoenix to bust out of a six-game losing streak.
It is significant that those were road homers. Going into Friday, the Giants had hit 59 home runs this year — just 21 at home and 38 on the road.
Which brings us to our point: The Giants should shrink Oracle Park.
“Again?” wail the traditionalists, crankily.
True, the Giants did snug up their field in 2020, when they moved the bullpens from the field of play to behind the outfield walls. The fence in Triples Alley in right-center was moved in from 404 feet to 399, center field was moved in 8 feet, and left-center 5 feet.
Great. It didn’t have a huge effect, but it did jolt Giants’ management out of its our-field-dimensions-are-sacred mindset. The next tweak won’t be so painful.
Doing another shrink job on Oracle wouldn’t solve all the team’s problems, but here’s what it would do:
Add scoring and excitement to the games, for fans and players. (Players like action, too.)
It also would make the ballpark more attractive to free-agent hitters.
Giants Chairman Greg Johnson recently told Bay Area journalist Tim Kawakami that Oracle’s homer stinginess “makes it a little more difficult to go out there and get the home run hitter.”
You’ve heard the old saying, “Chicks dig the long ball.” You know who else digs the long ball? Long-ball hitters.
Farhan Zaidi, the Giants’ president of baseball operations, told the Chronicle last spring that he can produce stats that show Oracle will impact their stats negatively only “1 or 2%, and not some doomsday scenario.”
“Tell that to my bat,” many hitters would reply.
Logically, for every FA hitter scared away by Oracle’s roominess, a free-agent pitcher should be attracted, but it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way over the years. All that extra grass has become a pain in the glass, as in it renders the hitters’ glass half empty.
Look, offense is down all over Major League Baseball. The needle on MLB’s Fun-o-meter is drooping down toward “BO-ring!”
This season, going into Friday’s games, MLB teams were slashing .240/.311/.388, 1.0 homers per game and 4.3 runs per game. Last season: .248/.320/.414, 1.2 homers, and 4.6 runs. Bad trend, man.
Causes for this trend include more pitchers throwing insane heat, heavier use of bullpens and MLB’s nonstop secret tinkering with the baseballs.
The Giants can’t fix or control any of that stuff. One thing they can do is move in their fences and inject a little more life into their gracefully aging temple of hardball.
Over the years, the organization has taken a weird pride in its ballpark being a tough place from which to launch a home run. Oracle, over the past three seasons, is the third-stingiest HR ballpark in MLB, per the FantasyPros “park factor” metric. Only the soon to be abandoned Coliseum in Oakland and Arizona’s Chase Field are harder homer parks. That distinction feels less and less like something to boast about.
Defenders of the status quo will point out that the Giants, this season and last, though mired in mediocrity, win more often at home than they do on the road. Good point, defenders. I would counter that the Giants’ ballpark dimensions have played a big role in shaping the team’s makeup — a lot of good pitchers, not a lot of power hitters — and the team’s makeup has not resulted in overall success.
The Giants have long prided themselves on being a pitching-first organization. Tim Lincecum, Madison Bumgarner and Matt Cain were the collective face of the post-Bonds era. That style was good for three World Series trophies.
But times change, and so can ballpark dimensions. The Giants moved into their ballpark in 2000, and over the years, management bristled at every suggestion that it bring the park more in line with MLB norms in terms of home run friendliness.
The Giants embraced and romanticized Triples Alley, which is part of the ballpark’s personality. But is Triples Alley good for the team now? Is it fun? For every Giants triple that springs to life in Triples Alley, how many home runs die there?
One charm of baseball is the dimensional quirks of each ballpark. It would be no fun to standardize the fields, and you couldn’t do that, anyway, because weather is a significant factor in home run output, as is altitude.
But having a ballpark that is an extreme outlier in terms of yielding homers is neither charming nor useful to the Giants right now.
How much field-shrinking should the Giants do? That’s hard to say. Do I look like a scientist? They certainly could do some downsizing of Triples Alley, maybe rename it Triples Cul De Sac. Brandon Belt would come back to help with the alterations. LaMonte Wade Jr. would lend a hand.
Tweaking Oracle’s dimensions would not be a magic-wand cure for the Giants’ ills, but it could help, and it would bring a jolt of freshness and liveliness to the old ballpark. All we are saying is give tweak a chance.
(SF Chronicle)
GAZANS RECALL ‘UNIMAGINABLY INTENSE’ ISRAELI BOMBING AROUND HOSTAGE RAID
As the Israeli military freed four hostages, the surrounding area came under heavy fire, generating chaos and panic, eyewitnesses said.
by Bilal Shbair, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon
A day after the Israeli military rescued four hostages held by Hamas militants in Nuseirat, Gazans described an intense bombardment during the raid, followed by chaos in the streets from an operation that killed and wounded scores of Palestinians.
Bayan Abu Amr, 32, was carrying her 18-month-old son Mohammad on the edge of Nuseirat’s main marketplace on Saturday when she was surrounded by the heavy booms of strikes from aircraft, which Israel’s military said targeted militants in an effort to ensure the safe extraction of the hostages and special forces.
“People were rushing like the day of judgment; I did not know where to run,” said Ms. Abu Amr, who was on her way to pay a condolence call to her uncle’s family after two of his sons had died. “Kids were screaming, women were falling down while running.”
Along with other Gazans, she managed to clamber onto a passing pickup truck that was trying to ferry people safely out amid the strikes, she recalled. One girl was separated from her mother in the confusion, while an old man lost his grip and fell off the truck onto the ground, she said.
Ms. Abu Amr finally arrived home with her son hours later, shocked that she was still alive. “I won’t take my son out of the house again,” she said.
To rescue the hostages, Israeli troops entered two residential buildings in which they were being held, according to Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman. Admiral Hagari said there were families living in the apartments, as well as armed Hamas militants guarding the hostages, making it “impossible to reach them without harming the civilians of Gaza.”
The precise death toll remained unclear as health officials sought to gather statistics amid chaotic scenes at hospitals. Gazan health officials reported that more than 200 people were killed in the raid; the Israeli military said it was aware of fewer than 100 casualties, without specifying whether these were dead or wounded or both. Neither side provided a breakdown of combatants versus civilians.
On Sunday, the corridors and hallways of the last major medical center in central Gaza, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, remained “densely crowded” with new patients, after more than 100 dead bodies had been brought there on Saturday, said Khalil Daqran, a hospital official. Most of the bodies had since been buried or claimed by relatives, he added.
The medical facility — already packed before the Israeli rescue mission in nearby Nuseirat — overflowed, said Abdelkarim al-Harazin, 28, a physician working there.
“The bombing was unimaginably intense,” said Dr. al-Harazin. “The whole hospital became one giant emergency room, even as people came looking for their dead relatives.”
When Al-Aqsa became overwhelmed, many of the wounded were sent to a nearby field hospital operated by the International Medical Corps, according to Javed Ali, an official with the aid group.
Diana Abu Shaban, 28, first heard gunfire as she was about to hang laundry near the tent where she was sheltering in Nuseirat. As the assault escalated, she told her daughters to hide before realizing that the frail tent could not protect them. Gathering her children, she sprinted to the nearby Al-Awda medical center in a desperate search for safety.
She said her husband, Saeed, had left earlier that morning for the market, where Palestinian residents said the strikes were particularly intense.
“I heard lots and lots of missiles,” Ms. Abu Shaban said. “I thought my husband would be killed or injured.”
After two hours, the bombing died down and she and her children left the hospital, she said. Later, they discovered that her husband had survived by hiding in a nearby shop.
Abd Al-Rahman Basem al-Masri, 25, who lives on the northern edge of Deir al-Balah, said Saturday had been the worst day he’d witnessed since the start of the war.
Mr. al-Masri said he, his mother and his younger brother had driven back from his uncle’s house and were approaching their home when an airstrike pounded into the ground beside it.
In a video shot by a friend who was also in the car, an expanding cloud of smoke can be seen rising behind the building. “In that moment, I lost hope that we can continue to live here,” Mr. al-Masri said.
Another Gazan who lives in Nuseirat, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said he and more than 10 family members hid inside for hours as heavy airstrikes rattled the neighborhood. He said he had no idea hostages had been held in the area.
After the bombing subsided, he headed out into the devastated market area, where he said he saw the street covered in blood and bodies. Gazans there were cursing not just Israel, but Hamas as well, he said, blaming them for bringing this disaster upon them.
He said neither Israel nor Hamas cared about the destruction as they sought to attack one another. Everyday people, he added, were the victims.
(nytimes.com)
AT AROUND NOON on the 5 September 1936, a pair of fisherman came across a woman floundering her way through a bog in in Cape Breton, on the eastern shores of Nova Scotia. In the background somewhere was her single-engine Percival Vega Gull aircraft, its nose buried deep in the moss and the peat and its tail sticking in the air. Blood streamed down the woman’s face and black peat went up to the waist of her formerly white overalls: “I’m Mrs. Markham,” she told them. “I’ve just flown from England.”
Taken to a local farmhouse, the aviator asked for a cup of tea and a phone. She was directed to “a little cubicle that housed an ancient telephone” built on the rocks, “put there in case of shipwrecks,” she recalled. Over the line she told the operator: “I would like the airport notified and could you also ask someone to send a taxi for me?”
Beryl Markham, 33, had just succeeded in becoming the first person to fly non-stop, solo, from Europe to North America. She was also the first woman to fly east-west non-stop, solo across the Atlantic. Heading against the wind and into uncertain weather, it was an audacious achievement, but because she had not reached her intended destination – New York City – she initially considered herself a failure.
Within hours, however, she realized that the world saw it differently. The feat placed her alongside the greats of the golden age of aviation, not least Charles Lindbergh – the first person to fly the Atlantic solo – or Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly the Atlantic (she went east-west, like Lindburgh, with the prevailing winds) or indeed Britain’s Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia in 1930.
Congratulations flooded in from around the world. Earhart told the New York Times: “I’m delighted beyond words that Mrs. Markham should have succeeded in her exploit and has conquered the Atlantic. It was a great flight.” And a day later Markham arrived in New York where she was feted and given a hero’s welcome – including a motorcade through the city and a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. “America,” she announced, “is jolly grand.”
THE SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH COMMUNITY RELATIONS COUNCIL'S BAD GREEK DRAMA TOURS FAIRFAX
As Fairfax Council Ponders A "Peace Proclamation", A JCRC-linked Mini-Mob Re-enacts Aeschylus – and Runs Straight Into A Misdemeanor Charge; Video of Powerful Men Behaving Badly; New CPRA'd JCRC Doc
by Eva Chrystanthe/Marin County Confidential
On Wednesday outside Fairfax's historic Women's Club, the warm, early evening air was suffused with the perfume of redwood trees. The familiar scent was so intoxicatingly nostalgic that it cast the last year's fraught meetings over land and property at Town Council meetings, all held at the Club, in a different light. Who could blame those fighting over who gets to stay in this tiny slice of heaven?
So while the big item on Wednesday's agenda was the watered-down "Peace Proclamation" (a document several steps short of the desired ceasefire resolution already passed in multiple Bay Area cities), it was difficult to view the reception of the proclamation from town residents as being entirely separate from the ongoing rental ordinance fight. That issue had resulted in an effort by certain property owners to recall those councilmembers who had supported the ordinance. And thus ceasefire proponents, many of whom supported rent control, were in the awkward position of accepting the soggy "proclamation", even though the language of it bent over backward to ignore Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians, its many decades of war crimes, and its violations of the very UN Charter that established the state in the first place.
Frank Egger, a former seven-term mayor and a rent control opponent, arrived fresh from a memorial for a longtime local resident, seemingly still wistful from the intensity of that experience. Joe McGarry, a longtime resident, activist, and organizer whose support for rent control put him on Egger's opposing side, had arrived straight from work. Some seismic activity seemed to be happening between the positions these two represented: like many who had fought bitterly over rent control, they had found common cause on support for a ceasefire.
This was a relief, as the news out of Gaza and the surrounding region grew worse by the hour. The same day we were breathing in redwood-scented air in Fairfax, The Times of Israel reported the IDF was dropping white phosphorous on residential buildings in Lebanon, which had previously resulted in wildfires. The redwoods of Fairfax were filtering our air, but the cedars of Lebanon were being destroyed by IDF bombing. The Times of Israel article does not indicate the manufacturer of the white phosphorous, but a December article in The Arkansas Times indicates that the white phosphorous munitions Israel used to burn and kill civilians in Gaza were made right here in the USA.
The Jewish Community Relations Council's ‘Furies’ And the Cycle of Rage and Revenge:
As opposite sides of the rent control issue metaphorically joined hands to push for a ceasefire resolution in Fairfax, there had appeared a common opponent: a vocal group of anti-ceasefire, pro-Israel public speakers. For many of the past month's meetings, this group was alternately shepherded by San Rafael Councilmember Rachel Kertz, a co-Chair of JCRC's BANJO, and by Tiburon Councilmember Holli Thier, who had served on the board of JCRC.
This JCRC-linked party had been entirely female, and had proved immediately contentious by dismissing Jewish speakers who argued for ceasefire, or who stood up for the rights of Palestinians. And they had, along with Kertz and Thier, distinguished themselves as a group through their fear-mongering about Islam. For lack of a better term, I had begun to refer to them in my notes as the eumenides (the furies), the ancient creatures so vengeful that, as Aeschylus wrote it, few dared address their inchoate rage. In this less mythical space, no one on Town Council dared contradict them, and ceasefire proponents listened patiently when they spoke, even as most of their talking points, and much of their rage, seemed scripted.
At the start of this particularly long night, the "furies" were greeted upon arrival at Town Council not by Kertz or Thier, but by Jonathan Mintzer, a Director at the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). According to two attendees, Mintzer provided the group with paper handouts or flyers, although it is not clear from accounts whether he is the person who supplied the group with the printed "Unity Over Division" placards. The women then took the front seats in the room and brought out a collapsible cooler of drinks and a large beach tote filled with snacks which they consumed openly in the front row during the meeting. More seriously, the JCRC-linked group jeered at pro-ceasefire speakers; and as a group, proved generally intimidating to many of the peaceniks. Multiple prominent older Fairfax residents, several of them Jewish, stated that they had never seen behavior like that in a Town Council meeting, with one stating that he felt "embarassed" by the conduct. The word "entitled" was used repeatedly to describe their behavior. But that was perhaps being generous.
Due to the placement of the microphones and cameras at Fairfax Town Council, very little of the group's jeering or hissing of ceasefire advocates is audible on the zoom recording, but a later video I recorded of their harassment of an elderly Jewish activist outside the meeting gives an indication of how hatefully they behaved toward others.
JCRC's Role In Pushing Back on Ceasefire Resolutions and A New CPRA'd Document:
SF JCRC has come under increasing scrutiny since October 7, as progressive Bay Area residents have noted how aggressively they have worked against something as innocuous as mere ceasefire resolutions, and for their work in smearing groups that criticize Israel or defend Palestinians. A CPRA request I submitted to Marin County produced multiple emails showing JCRC leadership pressuring local elected reps not to permit a ceasefire resolution to be agendized. The persistent claim is that such a resolution would promote "divisiveness" but it was more than clear from the Fairfax meeting that the divisiveness was being sown by the JCRC and its linked group. What JCRC seemed to fear most was people in the community citing evidence that supported the Palestinian cause and thus contradicting the propaganda put forward by the JCRC and like-minded organizations like the ADL and AIPAC.
In that sense, the 501(c)3 status the JCRC enjoys seems misleading, as JCRC functions far more actively as a lobbying group than as a traditional nonprofit; lobbying as a central activity is something most would associate with a 501(c)4.
The County's latest CPRA response was delivered on Friday, and included this email showing correspondence between Mintzer and an elected supervisor in Marin County, Mary Sackett of District 1, arguably the most politically powerful district in Marin. Sackett had asked Mintzer to expand a JCRC letter to include the words "anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and all other forms of hate" in order to avoid the appearance of bias.
Mintzer rejected her request, and in response, Sackett, to her credit, asked to have her name removed from the letter.
JCRC was also instrumental in organizing a trip that escorted many California elected reps, including Assemblyman Damon Connolly, to Israel last February, amid an ongoing genocide. Despite repeated requests for his office to publicly disclose the trip, Connolly has not done so, although he did discuss the trip in a largely unpublicized meeting at Congregation Kol Shofar in mid-April. When I called Kol Shofar to inquire about it, Executive Director Gordon Gladstone graciously took my call and explained that the meeting had at least been open to the public. I explained that this was good to hear, but it was of little use since the public had no notice of Connolly's appearance. Gladstone then made a point to note that he didn't know who paid for the trip, or what Connolly's obligation to disclose the payment was, even though I hadn't asked him any questions about payment for the trip. As the kids say: “Huh.”
(It's my understanding that Connolly has still not reached out to the Islamic Center of North Marin to express any condolences for the violent attack they sustained, allegedly at the hands of Connolly's constituent David Margoliash, on March 11, 2024, the first night of Ramadan.)
Who Is Jonathan Mintzer?
Jweekly describes Director Mintzer as the kind of guy a multimillion-dollar operation just sends around to drink a bunch of coffee with local council people:
What Jweekly leaves out is Mintzer's apparent propensity to whip up a pro-Israel crowd into a righteous fury, and then sneak out long before they explode, as apeared to happen in Fairfax on Wednesday night. Several ceasefire advocates stated that they felt uncomfortable with Mintzer's glaring at them while he filmed them from the front of the room, as they were doing nothing noteworthy; merely sitting patiently in their chairs waiting for the meeting to start. Given the violent beatdown on pro-Palestinian activists at UCLA funded by Jessica Seinfeld and Bill Ackman, and new legislation criminalizing mere criticism of the State of Israel, I don't think their anxiety about Mintzer's conduct was necessarily unreasonable. To their credit, the ceasefire advocates didn't make a big deal about it, it was a public place, and there was no expectation of privacy.
Mintzer's Comments Precede Another Hateful Zoom Bomb:
Mintzer was the first speaker on non-agenda public comment, and he used that time to “ask” that Fairfax and other councils organize a training on Jewish identity and anti-semitism for town officials and staff. His tone was testy, which may have been a signal for the group. And then he was gone.
Was it pure coincidence that, when there was an item that so agitated the JCRC leadership, the town council's non-agenda public comment was struck by a "zoom-bomb" attack, with unknown callers making viciously anti-LGBTQ, antisemitic, and anti-Black comments via zoom? This had the potential effect of dissuading pro-ceasefire speakers from commenting, as they feared being associated, however irrationally, with the hateful comments.
A CPRA to the County indicates that the zoom-bombers were believed to the linked to a Sonoma County hate group. The same group had targeted meetings in multiple municipalities including Fairfax, San Rafael, and Sausalito. But who benefited from these anonymous callers? San Rafael had subsequently ended zoom access entirely, thus severely limiting the possibility for people to criticize, say, the City's use of Israeli-based surveillance technology, or CM Kertz' behind-the-scenes pushback on a ceasefire resolution at the County level.
There is no shortage of hateful white supremacists, but it's worth asking why there was so little public disclosure or media attention regarding the investigation of the zoom bomb calls. And I was not the only one who noted that, once again, the zoom bomb callers were almost all given their full time to speak, while many of us had been cut off merely for politely bringing up relevant aspects of US foreign policy.
Peace Proclamation Agendized Last, But Peaceniks Are Undeterred, Nearly All Stay Late To Speak:
The Council's watered-down “Peace Proclamation” was last on the agenda's numbered items, which meant it started just after 10:30 pm. The proclamation was read, and Council expressed an interest to hear public comment. The JCRC-linked group lined up first to speak, but they proved incapable of building any argument to match that of the strongest pro-ceasefire public speakers, a group which included Ace Thelin; Two-Term Former Fairfax Mayor Larry Bragman; Joe McGarry; Seven-Term Former Fairfax Mayor Frank Egger; Naomi Shultz; Attorney PJ Feffer; Mark Bell; two Palestinian Americans who used only their first names; and David Glick. (I note that of the ten pro-ceasefire speakers I just listed, at least half are Jewish.)
On the recording, now on youtube, the pro-ceasefire public speakers on the item start with David Glick at 4:12:47. Many who spoke in favor of the peace proclamation still politely pointed out that it was insufficient, and offered cogent arguments and respectful explanations of their positions.
The comments of Mark Bell, a longtime Fairfax resident of Ukrainian-Russian Jewish descent, were powerful enough that I reproduce them nearly in full:
"For the elucidation of part of the audience here, Palestinians have nothing to do with the Holocaust. There was no reason for them to have their lands taken from them, (land that) was promised by the British for fighting the Ottomans. They're the ones who fought and died for it. There's a binding UN resolution for an immediate ceasefire. There's an International Court ruling for an immediate ceasefire. What we have going on is a mass starvation of an unarmed civilian population, indiscriminate use of white phosphorous bombs on the same, and specific targeting of hospitals and medical personnel, aid workers, and reporters. Why is that? What we're looking at is the ethnic cleansing and the genocide of the Palestinian people."
With reference to the JCRC-linked group's insistence that the matter was not a local one, Bell pointed out that we have a responsibility "to tell the federal government that they're breaking the law, they're aiding and abetting a genocide and it has to stop, and we're going to hold them accountable."
Attorney PJ Feffer stated it was "telling" that the opponents to the peace proclamation were not acknowledging how favorable the language was to Israel, and specifically critiqued the proclamation for ignoring Israel's decades-long violations of the 1948 UN resolution. With reference to the anti-ceasefire, pro-Israel group, he stated, "It's very difficult to sit and listen to people lying repeatedly to justify something that is unjustifiable."
(Feffer's comments rhymed with those of a young Palestinian American caller who pointed out that no one who had been opposed to a ceasefire could tell you how many Palestinians had been killed by Israel in 2023 prior to October 7, or how many times Israel had bombed Gaza prior to the post-October 7 onslaught.)
Because of the placement of the microphones, the Fairfax zoom recordings do not capture the jeering from the JCRC-linked group. Unless you were in the room, you would not know how disruptive and contentious they were. This contentious behavior had to be repeatedly addressed by Mayor Coler to little effect during the peace proclamation item, which lasted until approximately 1:00 a.m. As had occurred at the previous week's "Special Meeting", Council did not find it worthwhile to check any of the group's Islamophobic comments. It appeared to be the strategy of the council to simply let them vent.
A JCRC-linked group had harassed a 79-year-old Jewish peace activist, referring to him as a "kapo", as he tried to leave. The JCRC-linked group had formed a kind of gauntlet through which you had to walk to leave through the front door of the Women's Club. I have not yet secured permission from the victim of the harassment to share that part of video, so I am not sharing it at this time.
The video shows one of the many incidents in Marin County where I have either been assaulted or had my camera grabbed merely for making a fairly unobtrusive and completely legal video record of unlawful or unethical conduct, or a video record of an attempt to interview a County official. I have not had that experience while filming in San Francisco or Alameda counties. I will be sharing more of that larger Marin County video record later this month.
Obviously, anyone unlawfully grabbing my phone after I calmly and unobtrusively filmed their harassment of an elder warrants a complaint. And yes, the claim the woman makes is false, but it is demonstrative of the crudeness of this JCRC-linked group.
What should be more concerning is:
- that the police did not apparently feel comfortable dispersing the JCRC-linked crowd that was engaged in harassing ceasefire advocates, and
- the reaction of the person on my left in the video, barely seen, who is Councilmember and former Mayor Chance Cutrano. Cutrano had not merely witnessed without comment the intimidation by the JCRC-linked group throughout a nearly seven-hour meeting, but he had just witnessed their misdemeanor behavior when the woman in the video grabbed my phone in order to block me from filming. Tellingly, his reaction is not to explain to that individual that her conduct is unlawful. Rather, it is to chide me, and further, to let his wealthy and powerful pro-Israel constituent, Michael MackIntosh, harass and berate me with absolutely zero pushback.
Imagine being a slight, 56-year-old female with severe asthma and a long ride home, being physically boxed in by two men — one an elected official and the other his wealthy constituent — both chiding me for filming. When powerful men try to stop you from legally documenting what is actually happening in their town, keep filming. My retreat from an entirely legal and peaceful position, at the behest of two such men, is a failure on my part.
To date, I have received neither explanation nor apology from either Cutrano or Mackintosh. And days later, I still have no apology from Jonathan Mintzer or Tye Gregory of the JCRC, who are apparently working with the group that engaged in the unlawful conduct.
I registered an initial complaint with FPD Officer Carter, and am in process of filling out the rest of the paperwork. As soon as I finished my conversation with Officer Carter, I began the ride home to the East Bay. It was after 1:30 a.m., and I felt rattled enough that I walked the first mile or so before getting on the bicycle. When I was still walking, just steps from Pastori Avenue, a parked white SUV pulled out of a parking lot and raced toward me. It was Michael MackIntosh, who had apparently been waiting for me to walk past. He shouted out his car window, "Do you need help with the bike?" I was nonplussed. MackIntosh arrogantly seemed to want me to respond to him after his abusive behavior, but responding to such a man seemed unwise, so I turned, said nothing, and kept walking.
The Bear or the MackIntosh?
In the choice of Bear or Mackintosh, I chose the Bear, or in this case the Bike, and I got home fine. I cannot say the same thing for the hundreds of Palestinians killed today with the help of US forces in order to rescue four Israeli hostages who would have been returned last year if Israel had not rejected an earlier exchange offer.
The next day I submitted a CPRA for the bodycam of the officers who were on scene last Wednesday. I did that because it's important for the larger community to examine just how much latitude this group of white women, linked to a powerful Bay Area group such as JCRC, were given to menace and intimidate ceasefire advocates. Meanwhile, ceasefire advocates were expected to be infinitely polite, which they fulfilled, as is their nature. Unfortunately, that double standard fits a larger pattern in the County, and across the US.
Marin I-J Coverage Is Misleading, As Usual:
The Marin Independent-Journal published an article on the following day, June 6, which makes no mention of the harassment by the pro-Israel crowd. The article, by Giuseppe Ricapito, declines to report pro-Israel Mark Solomons’ profanity-laced tirade against the Council at the end of the meeting. Rather, it refers to a "shouting match" outside without noting that all of the shouting came from the JCRC-linked group and Solomons.
Marin I-J columnist Dick Spotswood was present throughout the meeting, and is aware that I had to file a police report. He apparently has an article coming out early this week. Although he has my contact information, he has not bothered to reach out to me, nor has he asked to see the video of the harassment of any of the ceasefire advocates.
So once again, we appear to have a situation where the I-J declines to view the relevant video. That, too, is part of a pattern, which I'll be following up on after Spotswood's article runs.
Re: STRAWBERRY BEAR, LITTLE RIVER
Nick, in addition to removing the strawberries and other non-frozen attractants in your fridge, buy a large bottle of Pine Sol and mark your perimeter/property line with it. That’s a cheap, common, and effective deterrent here in the Sierra Nevada. And should your leaf-blower ever lack a charge, the airhorns used on boats typically get them to run off. Good luck.
The concept that the “unfettered river” is ideal is purely a philosophical one, and not a scientific one. Know that. The roots of this concept come from Jean-Jacque Rousseau. In the mid 1800s, Rousseau was able to put together an emerging European faith in the divinity of nature and the noble savage. We live with that today. Rousseau’s hypothesis was that the state of modern man is unnatural as a result of the emergence of agriculture, and property ownership. All human social ills are a result of this.
Many here at the AVA, including our dear editor, are Rousseau adherents, whether they know that or not. Karl Marx was as well.
Meaning absolutely NOTHING, George. Just the braying of a wannabe “philosopher”, now long dead.
Harv, you are disparaging your own prophet.
Spend a little time on the Smith River for a taste of less fettered. I am all for restoring the Eel to a wild river. Salmon over wine grapes all day long.
I have spent time by the Smith River. Nice River, in a distinctive watershed. “Restoring the Eel” is a a philosophical statement, not a scientific one. The basis of the philosophy is Rousseau. I have to mention that our perceptions of American Indians are dominated by Rousseau-eon European philosophy as well, along with a strong influence from mostly Spanish centric Europeans.
As has been the inescapable case all through history, everywhere, popular faith based philosophies can become viewed as facts, facts worth fighting for. This is precisely what we see with Environmentalism, and Marxism. We are on a crusade to “save the planet” is in the same vain as Christian Crusaders saving Jerusalem from the infidels. In all these cases, science takes a back seat, and is only selectively used when specific science supports the cause. “Restoring the Eel”, and no that watershed will never be like the Smith, is putting faith in the philosophy that modern human enterprise has screwed up everything, and the planet needs to be saved from it, and that is the only “fact” you need to know.
Mark: I have looked at the County’s property tax sharing agreement, and it looks to me like the cities will only receive a portion of the annual growth for the annexed properties. The annual amount will be one-half of the annual 2% growth, plus all of the annual growth in excess of 2%. Once the cities are receiving 15% of the total property tax for those properties, the allocation will be fixed at that rate. The County will retain its portion of the property tax in effect prior to the annexation (except for a portion of the prior year’s growth increment), and will receive one-half of the annual 2% growth. If I am understanding the agreement correctly, the County should not be hit with an immediate large reduction to property tax revenues, but rather will forfeit a portion in the annual growth of the annexed properties in the current and future years, with a cap of 15%. If I am wrong in my understanding, I would be grateful to hear from anyone who can offer more information.
Re: GAZANS RECALL ‘UNIMAGINABLY INTENSE’ ISRAELI BOMBING AROUND HOSTAGE RAID
I wonder how many of the attendees at the Israeli music festival that Hamas/Palestinians attacked have a similar remembrance? I know at least 1,500 of them don’t – they’re dead. I’m not condoning the ongoing slaughter and displacement of civilians by the Israeli government, but let’s not forget what started this conflict, or that a number of Israeli civilian hostages have been raped, tortured, murdered and more than 100 are still being held.
+1
Agree, mostly, with you two, but will repost this short comment by Thomas Friedman, whose writings help me have at least a little understanding of the big picture of this ongoing, tragic, and complex issue. I posted this comment in response to yesterday’s discussion of the same issue. It will be seen by more folks due to posting it again:
THESE ONGOING TRAGEDIES– THE ONLY SOLUTION
”…I am a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous peoples. If you are for that, whatever your religion, nationality or politics, you’re part of the solution. If you are not for that, you’re part of the problem…”
Thomas L. Friedman
The two state solution seems to make sense, but only if all parties agree to it, in the same way. That might be a stretch.
Agreed, but the solution has become more difficult in recent years. The closest this solution came to fruition was in 2000-2001 with the Camp David Accord, but Yassar Arafat refused to accept it due to the status of East Jerusalem, the finality of the agreement and several other issues, even though the proposed Palestine eventually would have included 92% of the West Bank. Nearly 25 years have passed and positions have hardened on both sides. Even the most liberal Israeli government would not propose such a generous accord now.
One more thing. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, approximately 850,000 Jews were forced from Arab countries. Most of them immigrated to Israel, where they were accepted and where – for the most part – they have integrated into society. Between 1947 and 1949, more than 700,000 Arabs were forced from Israel during the battle for statehood. Most of them immigrated to neighboring Arab states – Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, as well as the Gaza Strip. In all but the latter, they remain refugees to this day; separate and unaccepted by those countries.
October 7th was not the beginning to this conflict, not by a long shot. Any date even remotely resembling a beginning to this conflict would be way before any of us were born, and the people who are currently fighting and dying or just dying.
History supports what you are saying. The conflict also predates Mohammad, and Islam. Tribal conflict is what has defined the ME since pre-history back to the neolithic period. What is interesting to note is just how much of our Western thinking, writing, science, math, engineering, and of course, religions have a root here.
It started when the stupid, guilt-ridden west gave Palestine to a bunch of crossbred Europeans of mixed origins who called (and apparently saw) themselves as the “chosen” ones.
Those settler types have been murdering Palestinians and treating them like trash ever since, going on now about 75 years. Jews were NOT forced out of Palestine. They migrated, of their own accord some to the south and west, some to the north and west of their own accord, not an uncommon human trait. And they intermarried along the way (hell, the story of Ruth and Naomi, in the Bible, describes an instance). How they conclude that they had some “right of return” is simply mind-boggling…one of the evils of religion, especially when it involves imaginary sky gods in general, I guess. I have no particular regard for the christian version of religion, either…all of ’em are based on control of others, with the gods always having human traits, i.e., pure hokum.
STRAWBERRY BEAR, LITTLE RIVER
Live in their habitat, expect them to drop by. Too bad they’re not more vicious, more widespread, and more numerous (‘course then the moron monkeys would exterminate them). With abortion bans and general government immersion into the dangerous nonsense of christianity, they could help with getting the monkey population down to the carrying capacity of its habitat, the number one cause of our existential problem as a species..
To Nick Wilson,
Let’s set the record straight. It is not a misdemeanor to shoot at a Black bear, with rifle or bow, during the hunting season.
Here is the bear hunting season for 2024 from the Ca. Dept. of Fish and Wildlife.
2024 General Season
General bear season opens concurrently with general deer season in the A, B, C, D, X8, X9A, X9B, X10 and X12 deer hunting zones and extends through December 31, 2024. For those portions of zones X1, X2, X3a, X4, X6a, X6b, X7a, and X7b open to bear hunting, the general bear season begins October 12, 2024, and extends through December 31, 2024.
General bear season closes on December 31, 2024, or earlier, if the Department determines that 1,700 bears have been reported taken. This includes bears harvested during the archery season.
2024 Archery Season
Archery bear season in all bear zones opens August 17, 2024, and runs through September 8, 2024.
Not sure about “protected” status for bears in California because that can mean different things, but it’s not a misdemeanor to shoot a bear as long as it is bear season which coincides with deer season.
I was surprised to learn that “front hole” is really a term preferred by some trans people, but the Canadian Cancer Society did not apologize at all. Here are the exact words they used:
Words matter
We recognize that many trans men and non-binary people may have mixed feelings about or feel distanced from words like “cervix.” You may prefer other words, such as “front hole.” We recognize the limitations of the words we’ve used while also acknowledging the need for simplicity. Another reason we use words like “cervix” is to normalize the reality that men can have these body parts too.
https://cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/find-cancer-early/screening-in-lgbtq-communities/trans-man-or-nonbinary-person-assigned-female-at-birth-do-i-need-cervical-cancer-screening
I consider the manufacture of outrage over trans and gay issues to be nothing more than distractions from the much bigger problems that affect all of us
Lots of things to think about in today’s MCT.
First is the “Free Summer Meals for Kids” poster. I think that that concept is about the finest one ever, simply without a downside.
I have talked to both Bruce and Mark many times about the Eel River diversion and, of course, have read their writings here.
It is really too bad that at this point in the discussion that Bruce still does not know the difference between the fish ladder at Cape Horn Dam (Van Arsdale reservoir) and the intake to the diversion tunnel (ALWAYS the Chinese dug diversion tunnel).
This is only one of several misconceptions in today’s article.
As a fifty year resident of Potter Valley, my feelings are fear and outrage that this valley is about to enter a permanent man-made drought after a 100 year development of a unique ecosystem based on its proximity to the Eel River.
A combination of the greed of PG&E and the misguided selfishness of a few Humboldt County fishermen has made this an uphill fight, one that hopefully is not over.
If I had more money, I would offer a reward to anyone who reads more than half of the Marin County Confidential piece.
I am also glad that Beryl. Amelia and Charles had better senses of direction than the author of that otherwise interesting article.
Thank you, Jim, for confirming my sense of direction.
I want everyone to know that the editor is killing me, I guess the truth hurts. He censored 4 of my posts today..
MAGA Marmon
Lemme know when you’re dead
That tiny sound is the smallest violin in the world playing “My Heart Bleeds for You.” I am sure the edited potions won’t be missed.
Sorry, “portions”, not “potions.”
Too out there to print in the AVA! Rein it in MAGA person, not so hasty, not so nasty.
Meanwhile Harvey is disgusted by interracial breeding and is spewing far left hate speech
i don’t give a damn one way or another about interracial breeding or sexual orientation. Besides, Jewish doesn’t denote a race. At best it’s a religion, which is not saying much. Nice try, yuppie boy.
Typical narcissistic boomer stuck so far left that racism seeps from deep.
Typical yuppie response.
Dear AVA:
There are some glitches in your new comment procedure…it seems to freeze up (unresponsive) a lot…and the box one writes in isn’t centered at first.
Thanks for letting us know. Recent “updates” at work. Let’s try something…
Better hurry, it’s killing Marmon.
Now it’s not letting you go back to make changes…