Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 10/30/2024

Community Meeting | Rain Coming | Seen Kojoe? | Debate Recording | Trunk or Treat | Ed Notes | Kendall Quotes | One Slurp | Art Walk | Grapeland | Yannis IHSS | Lighthouse Event | Dear America | Manchester Squaredance | Grumpy John | Open Studios | Book Party | Local Events | Rayo Impressed | Gift Workshop | Hendy Fungus | Hawk Talk | Rossi Story | Time Piece | Navarro Grade | Yesterday's Catch | Handguns | Daylight Saving | Cat Training | Zodiacal | Grudge Crow | Homelessness | Bosa Maga | Tulsa Teens | Idiocracy | Traded Willie | Clean Coal | Women Laughing | Dog Soup | Not OK | Beerbohm | Killing People | Journalists First | Lead Stories | Cyber Exercise | Record Profits

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GUSTY SOUTHERLY WINDS will accompany periods of moderate rainfall by the afternoon as a front moves through the region. Rain showers and mountain snow are expected to persist through Friday as the parent low cycles off the PNW coast. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 42F this Wednesday morning on the coast. Rain returns this afternoon & going into Saturday morning. Friday looks have the most rainfall forecast currently. The rest of the weekend & next week is looking dry. Which in my business is a good thing Martha...

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WHERE’S KOJOE?

The Mendocino County Sheriff's Office is currently assisting the Anaheim Police Department in attempting to locate Kojoe (no last name). Kojoe is described as a 59-year-old African American male adult, approximately 5'9" and 170 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes.

Kojoe was last seen in Anaheim, CA on 06/26/24. It is believed Kojoe was going to Yosemite National Park for the weekend and planned to return on 06/29/24. However, Kojoe did not return and has not been heard from since. Family has attempted to contact his cell phone, but the phone goes straight to voicemail.

On 08/16/24, the California Highway Patrol located Kojoe's vehicle (2009 Black Infiniti M35) on State Route Hwy 128 (near Navarro) a few miles east of Paul Dimmick Campground. An initial search of the area was conducted, but Kojoe was not located. Additional searches of the area where Kojoe's vehicle was located have been conducted with Search and Rescue personnel, but did not yield investigative leads and Kojoe remains missing.

Anaheim Police Department is currently investigating leads into the whereabouts of Kojoe.

If anyone has seen Kojoe or has information regarding his whereabouts, please contact the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office at 707-463-4086 or the Tip Line 707-234-2100.

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GAGNON FOR MENDO SCHOOL BOARD

Comptche Trustee Debate - Recording

In case you missed the debate between Jim Gagnon and Michael Schaeffer, from Tuesday.

https://on.soundcloud.com/FcCrVxr7wN6G4Q957

— Marsh/KAKX

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ED NOTES

THE AVA recommends Peskin for mayor of San Francisco. Might as well do some name-dropping here, which I usually avoid doing but feel an odd compulsion to indulge in it here before a captive audience. Ready? I DON'T know Mayor London Breed but she's always struck me as a Frisco version of a cross between Mo Hulheren and Mari Rodin, if that comparison makes any sense. I've been to a couple of comp-ticket ballgames with Dan Lurie, a very likeable dude fer shure, whose mayoral candidacy is mostly funded out of his fathomlessly deep pockets and out of which he's funded some good things for a city that just might be unmanageable. No question of his love for the place. Lurie would be a giant step up from Breed and would probably do ok presiding over the inexorable, slo-mo implosion of the city. If I were voting in San Francisco I'd go for Peskin, a very smart guy whose years of experience as a supervisor and Board Chair has prepared him to make the monster work if anybody can. The late Warren Hinckle called Peskin “the Napoleon of North Beach,” a designation deriving from Peskin's famously prickly personality. Peskin is also a former subscriber to this fine publication in its print incarnation. Met him a couple of times and liked the way he got right to the point in political conversations. Not a thing phony about the guy.

ONE OBSERVER put it this way: “Yes: The billionaires right now are fighting over which neo-liberal candidate they want to see in Room 200, and the progressives seem solidly behind Peskin. Supervisor Dean Preston, in a tight race for re-election and facing a torrent of Big Tech and real estate money, noted: ‘The narrative funded by a bunch of billionaires is that somehow this city was transformed overnight into a place where people hate tenants and artists and only want billionaires to live here’.”

HALLOWEEN seems to have overtaken Christmas in voluptuous outdoor displays. A guy down the street has erected a ten-foot skeleton, and every other house on the block seems festooned with wispy white faux spider webs hanging off their fences and bushes, some with giant spiders pinned to them. (What's scary about spiders and their webs?) Of course there are plenty of the usual creatively carved pumpkins and macabre witch figures. Fortunes are annually spent on this stuff, and seem more elaborate every year. I will always regret handing a tiny trick or treater a potato when he knocked on my door. “Here ya go, Zorro,” I said as the child burst into tears. I tried to make amends by shoveling some cash and a couple of feet of candy into his beggar's bag, but he was still sobbing as his mom led him away, mom shooting me death glares over her shoulder.

IN MARC REISNER'S crucial 1987 book, ‘Cadillac Desert,’ Reisner describes a hugely anticipated water meeting between former Northcoast Congressman, Republican Don Clausen, and California's then-governor, Ronald Reagan. Clausen, described by Reisner as “very persuasive,” went to see Reagan about building a dozen dams on Northcoast rivers, most of them on various forks of the Eel. The congressman, naturally, was representing Big Ag and desert cities like LA, entities always short of tax-subsidized water at artificially low prices. But a minute or so into his pitch, Clausen was stunned to see that Reagan had fallen asleep. If Reagan had manage to stay awake, the Northcoast's rivers would today be entirely fish-free and running due south.

WE ONCE RAN a photo of a purported Boonville baseball team — vintage WW Two — that didn't ring a single bell in the memories of local old timers.

The speculation was that the referenced Boonville is one of the other five Boonvilles spread across our vast land. Semi-pro baseball was once very big in Mendocino County as it was everywhere in the country. Boonville had a pretty good town team in the 1950's while Fort Bragg was a real powerhouse before and after the war. Ukiah's ballpark back in the day was on the site of the present Safeway. The state hospital at Talmage also fielded a strong team composed, I understand, of equal parts inmate and staff. And Indians fielded some strong teams that played Sundays in Covelo, Ukiah and, I understand, Point Arena.

ALLAN MILLETT once sent along a clipping from an Indiana newspaper announcing “Photographer Timothy Briner and Cannery Works, a New York-based nonprofit arts group, recently announced the launch of Boonville USA: The Death and Life of America's small town, an ambitious six-month photographic journey to six different towns named Boonville. According to Briner, ‘Each of the six Boonvilles vary in size, history and geography, which offers a window into where we're headed. My aim is to transport people with photography, and to bring back a sense of time, place and atmosphere that touches something universal and current in the American experience’.”

THERE ARE BOONVILLES in New York, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina and an extinct Boonville in Texas. Did the book ever make it into print?

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SHERIFF KENDALL MAKES STATE NEWS (LA Times excerpts)

California Hails $544 Million In Illegal Weed Seizures. But It's Just A Drop In The Bucket

Two major state programs to combat illegal cannabis recently sent out news releases lauding their collective seizures of some $544 million worth of illicit weed.

But when it comes to reining in California's sprawling black market, experts say it's just a drop in the bucket.

Those in the thick of the fight against illegal pot, like Mendocino County Sheriff Matthew Kendall, can't help but roll their eyes.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love when those guys [state law enforcement officers] show up to help,” he said, “but I would need 50 police officers for 50 days to even begin putting a dent in it.”

. . .

Kendall noted that in Mendocino County's 35-square-mile Round Valley alone there are an estimated 1 million illegal marijuana plants. “The black market is as big and bad as ever,” he said.

. . .

“It's like [state leaders] came to our counties, they sprayed the whole thing with gasoline and lit it on fire,” Kendall said. “Then they start talking about EPIC doing this work that is basically showing up with a garden hose.”

. . .

Because enforcement measures are limited, Mendocino County Sheriff Kendall said the raids conducted by state agencies are like a game of Whac-A-Mole. “We can chop it down and, by golly, it pops up again the next day,” he said.

. . .

Kendall said that if the problem is ever going to be fixed "the architects of these laws — the governor, the legislators" must heed what's being said by “the carpenters, and that's the sheriffs and the police chiefs.”

Full story: https://www.aol.com/news/california-touts-544-million-illegal-100058012.html

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FIRST FRIDAY ART WALK is this Friday November 1st

Art Walk: emphasis on Art and Walk. Ukiah is a very walkable town. Join artists and their hosts for an evening of art, music and refreshments as you stroll from one venue to the next; each showcasing local art and artistry. Held in Historic Downtown Ukiah on the first Friday of each month, the First Friday Art Walk is the perfect way to relax your body, mind and soul. This enjoyable evening begins at 5:00 p.m. and promises to delight your senses; all while enjoying the company of others. For more information contact (707) 391-3664

Event Details:

Date: Friday, November 1, 2024

Time: 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

Locations: Various venues throughout Historic Downtown Ukiah

Contact: Mo Mulheren, Ukiah Valley Networking

Email: ukiahvalleynetworking@gmail.com

Phone: 707-391-3664

For more information on participating venues and artists, please visit artwalkukiah.org or contact Mo Mulheren.

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BILL KIMBERLIN

Anderson Valley from above. When I was a kid it was all apples, timber and sheep. I am fine with the changes here because that is what humans do, we adapt. In some ways it is better now than when I was young. However, I would like to see the trout come back to the Navarro. We need to dam the rivers here as we always did in summer, and take them out in winter. That was why we had trout in abundance, Don't get me started.

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YANNIS CAN DO IT

Hey Y'all!

My name is Yannis Breit-Hofberg and I recently got my IHSS (In Home Services) certification.

I am a caring and friendly hard worker seeking one to three IHSS clients.

I don't have much experience with IHSS, but I am dedicated to learning and have important, useful skills.

I can:

-Clean

-Cook

-Attend Appointments

-Provide Transportation

-Do Various Types of Errands

-Computer/Tech Software and Hardware Education and Troubleshooting

-Much More

I am prepared to expand my caregiving skill-set to include any and all other tasks or services.

Do You Have Questions?

Reach Out To Me.

Phone: (707) 357-6566 (Text and Call Compatibility)

email: command@techyanni.com

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‘DEAR AMERICA’

The Deep Valley Arts Collective is pleased to announce their November group art exhibition titled “Dear America ‘24,” opening at MEDIUM Art Gallery in Ukiah and on display from November 1st through November 23rd, 2024.

“Dear America” will be a gallery exhibition of artwork that explores our country's current state of affairs.

In September, 2020 the Deep Valley Arts Collective held their first exhibition as a fledgling nonprofit arts organization. It was an online exhibition titled ”Dear America” with 12 contributing artists. It was so important to come together as a group during a very strange time, when people needed expression and connection. Now, four years later, with the upcoming election and current issues facing our country, Deep Valley Arts would like to revisit the topic “Dear America” as an in-person exhibition in November. This exhibition can interpret the theme in many ways including exploring wage disparity, high cost of living, environmental concerns such as fire, flood, and access to water, reproductive health, poverty and homelessness, racial discrimination, equity, drug use, division, misinformation, social justice, politics, mental health crises, and more. We are seeking artwork from varied perspectives.

Opening Reception: First Friday Art Walk: Friday, November 1st, 2024, from 5:00-8:00 p.m. Beverages and light refreshments available. Wine provided by Saracina Vineyards.

Community Art Project: Come make your voice heard by creating your own picket sign or writing a letter to America.

Music: Singer/songwriter Stephen Winkle and protest songs by the Raging Grannies, Come support the arts in our community!

Opening reception: Friday, November 1st, 2024, from 5:00-8:00 p.m. info@deepvalleyarts.org - 707-234-8667 518 E. Perkins St., Ukiah Ca 95482

The show runs through Saturday, November 23rd, 2024. MEDIUM Art Gallery is in the Pear Tree Center in Ukiah at 518 E. Perkins Street, next to AT&T. Current gallery hours are Mondays through Saturdays 12-6 p.m.

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R.I.P. JOHN MAYFIELD.

To the Editor:

I remember back when there was a Denny’s restaurant in Ukiah, John would “hold court” in the back of the restaurant. He and his entourage would sit all the way in the back and talk county politics over their Value Slam Breakfasts.

John knew me from my public comment during Board of Supervisor meetings. Occasionally, I would join the group at Denny’s. And I would just listen. I would just shut up listen to John and I would learn from the master himself. I would take mental notes.

Sadly, everything John said about County CEO Carmel Angelo and her power grab was true. Everything John said about the expansion of the Executive Office and their obscenely bloated payroll was true. Everything John said about Carmel Angelo’s Stalin=like purges and wrongful terminations of department heads was true. Everything John said about the mismanagement and deliberate obfuscation of county finances was true. Everything John said about the county’s screwball budget process was true. Everything John said about the county’s over-reliance on a cannabis economy and lack of real economic development was true. Everything John said about the county’s ballooning unfunded pension liability and the “two sets of books” bookkeeping in the Teeter Plan was true.

John Mayfield saw it all. He was grumpy and guff, but county politics would put anyone in a bad mood.

John Sakowicz

Ukiah

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ANDERSON VALLEY OPEN STUDIO ART TOUR

Throughout the Veterans’ Day Weekend, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, Nov. 9, 10 and 11, Anderson Valley artists open their creative spaces for the 22nd annual Anderson Valley Open Studio art tour.

This is a unique opportunity to see where their art is created. This year, 13 artists are showcased featuring: ceramics, jewelry, photography, sculpture, painting, printmaking and collage. Nine studio locations, stretching from Boonville to Navarro, will be open and free to the public from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. A tour map at artistsofandersonvalley.org and signs along Highway 128 will guide the way.

Spend a day experiencing the creative energy of Anderson Valley. No cost for the tour and open to the public with locations along Highway 128 marked by brightly colored signs and banners. Maps will be available at local businesses in Boonville.

For more information, contact (707) 895-3053, and on the web http://www.andersonvalley-artguild.org/ email: andersonvalleyartguild@gmail.com

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THE HISTORY OF UKIAH'S PALACE HOTEL — BOOK PARTY

Historical Society of Mendocino County

Join the Historical Society of Mendocino County and Karen Rifkin to celebrate her new book, ‘The History of Ukiah’s Palace Hotel.’ Author Karen Rifkin will share her research and writing process.

Join us to recount your stories and memories, purchase the book, explore the history and artifacts of the Palace Hotel, and enjoy some refreshments.

Saturday November 16, 2024, 1-3pm

The Historical Society of Mendocino County, 100 S. Dora Street, Ukiah, CA

In July 2023, the historical society unveiled our new research room, where Karen Rifkin eagerly stepped forward as one of our inaugural docents. During her time exploring our collection, she came across the Palace Hotel (Ukiah) archival collection—an exciting find, given her past experience as the kitchen manager, line cook, and sous chef at the Palace Bar & Grill. Discoveries like an original menu and a newspapers article celebrating the restaurant's grand opening stirred many memories, which she generously shared with us.

Inspired by her findings, she delved deeper into its history and uncovered a treasure trove of captivating stories. This journey fueled her determination to write a book about the history of Ukiah’s Palace Hotel. After a year of rigorous research, countless hours in the archive, interviews with former staff and patrons, and meticulous attention to detail, Karen is thrilled to announce the release of her new book!

“Journey back in time to 1895, when a drunken Vat Berryhill staggered into the card room of the Palace Hotel and fired off a round at W.H. Lyons; to 1921, when Frank Sandelin was arrested for violating the Volstead Act; to 1949, when Walter Sandelin hired Don Clever to paint the Black Bart mural; to 1978, when Pat Kuleto and company spent $3.5 million to bring good food and good times back to the declining hotel; and to the period of 1990-2017, when Eladia Laines and the City of Ukiah spent money, time, and energy in a fruitless, last-ditch effort to resurrect the dying building.

Continue the trip, right up to the present, to 2024, when, after many years of being determined structurally unsound and a danger to public safety, and after going into its final foreclosure in 2019, the Palace Hotel is presently destined for demolition… any day now…or maybe not. It's all there and more, with stories and photos, in the first definitive, chronological accounting of the Palace Hotel and the people and events that shaped its wild and colorful history.

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Beginning Monday, Oct. 28, “The History of Ukiah’s Palace Hotel” will be available for purchase Monday through Friday from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the lobby of the Ukiah Valley Conference Center at 200 S. School St.

To celebrate the book release, the Historical Society of Mendocino County will be hosting a Book Party on Saturday, Nov. 16 at 100 S. Dora St. from 1 to 3 p.m. Everyone is welcome. Please come and recount your stories and memories of the Palace Hotel, explore its history and artifacts, and enjoy some refreshments.

For more information, email Karen at: palacehotelfever@gmail.com.

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Karen Rifkin graduated from Douglass College/Rutgers University with a degree in history/political science; and later moved to Ukiah to raise her family and work at Round Table Pizza.Afterward she became kitchen manager, line cook and sous chef at the Palace Hotel. After working as a massage therapist, she returned to college for her teaching credential and taught middle school students history and English. Some years later she became a feature writer and photographer for the Ukiah Daily Journal.

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LOCAL EVENTS

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WHAT THE OPUS ARTIST SAID ABOUT US…

Rayo Furuta wrote after Sunday afternoon's Opus Chamber Music Concert in Preston Hall, Mendocino:

“It was one of the most generous audiences that I have ever had the pleasure to perform for and it made the experience even more enjoyable. I am profoundly grateful and cannot wait to return in March to perform for this lovely community again!”

Rayofuruta.com

Next Opus Concert; harpist Anna Maria Mendieta and bassoonist Ingrid Tracy presents “The colorful rythums of Spain and Argentina” on November 24th.

Tickets at symphonyoftheredwoods.org

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MAKE A GIFT WORKSHOP

Willits Center for the Arts presents Nancy New Hosting a paint-your-own pottery experience with a variety of bisque ware items including ornaments, kitchenware and other fun items. Bring a kid, grandkids or a date. Make a gift. Perfect for all ages, whether you're a seasoned artist or a first-timer. Walk-ins are welcome 1-4pm on Sunday November 24. Explore our diverse collection of items to glaze. Let your creativity flow and create a handmade gift. Seasonal refreshments will be available including mulled cider, hot cocoa and cookies.

Date: Sunday, November 24, 2024 Time: 1-4pm Location: Willits Center for the Arts, 71 E. Commercial St., Willits, CA 95490 Admission: $40 for adults, $20 for kids, Just show up. All materials included. Some special large items cost extra.

For more information, please contact the Willits Center for the Arts at (707) 459-1726 or visit our website at http://www.willitscenterforthearts.org.

The Willits Center for the Arts is dedicated to promoting and supporting the arts in Mendocino County. Through exhibitions, educational programs, and special events, the Center provides a creative space for artists and audiences to connect and engage with the arts.

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WHITE DOOFUS

Editor:

Your bit tracing the financial shenanigans of The Trees Foundation, Earth First! etc. brings back some memories; I had forgotten about that guy “Shunka.” Then the bit that it meant “white doofus” made me laugh. Of course all direct activists took forest names, in order to make things a little more complicated for arresting officers, I went by “hawk” which would have afforded me no legal protection, since that was just the name by which I was known anyway! But I wasn’t gifted the name in any ceremony with any Medicine Man! I just came to it because I just kept having so many extraordinary experiences with raptors, that could only be described as spiritual. After a particularly intense one; I started to contemplate changing my last name, it took me a few years to do it because I knew it was a strange thing to do, and would attract lots of attention from many quarters. But the experiences just kept piling up, so it seemed obvious I should do it. My birth family was mortified, and did not use it for many years; my adopted son started calling me “Hawk” and that stuck!

To this day I still get a lot of strange reactions, when I first meet people in person they are surprised to see a white man; and Natives just DON’T know what to make of me. (I.e., “Is this guy for real, or just another White Doofus?”) But since my stroke has afforded me a type of strange early retirement I have lots of time to think and just be, I spend a lot of time just being in nature, and I’m increasingly aware that nature is not just a concept, but a singular living, conscious, entity, and she speaks to me a lot! I don't think I’m anything special. I just think I’m being afforded the opportunity to relearn what our ancestors knew, before the unholy alliance of monotheism and capitalism found it in their interest to sever us from our birthright!

As regular AVA readers know; I have not lost my concerns for economic, and political affairs of out county and the World. But I do see the institutions we have created to prop them up as cheap, shallow expressions compared to our REAL power!

Thank you for following the bouncing ball of my philosophical meanderings

Chris Skyhawk (aka White Doofus)

Fort Bragg

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ROSSIS BEAT BACK THE BIG BOYS

by Queena Sook Kim (Wall Street Journal, June 2004)

Emil Rossi became fixated in the late 1960s with the idea that corporate boards were filled with men from “famous” colleges such as Harvard.

So Mr. Rossi, who didn’t attend college, embarked on a career as a corporate gadfly, showing up at annual shareholder meetings and pushing relentlessly for more diversity on corporate boards and other issues. For nearly 40 years he was dismissed by corporate executives, board members and shareholders alike as a crackpot.

“They treated us like lepers,” says Mr. Rossi, now 79 years old, who started taking his sons Nick and Chris along when they were youngsters.

Lately, Mr. Rossi and his sons are extracting what could be called The Revenge of the Gadflies.

In the wake of corporate scandals at Enron Corp., a Worldcom, Inc. (which became MCI) and Tyco International Ltd., corporate gadflies or shareholder activists such as the Rossis finally are getting a taste of victory: their proposals are actually passing now — or at least coming close.

During the 2003 proxy season, 159 shareholder proposals received more than 50% of the votes cast, compared with 54 proposals in 2000, according to Corporate Library, a Portland, Maine, research firm that focuses on corporate governance issues. Among those seeing more success are long-time gadfly Evelyn Y. Davis, who has been advocating the annual election of directors.

There are also far more proposals than in the past: the number rose last year to 668, up 87% from 358 in 2000, according to the Corporate Library. It’s too early to tell how the gadflies will fare this year, although they have had some big victories.

“We’re passing proposals and that’s something we’ve never done before,” says Nick Rossi, 42 years old. “Since Enron and the following scandals, institutional and individual shareholders have suddenly woken up.”

These days, the Rossis are focusing on a resolution calling for a shareholder vote before a company can deploy a takeover defense known as a poison pill. The non-binding proposal has won a majority of the votes cast at rail network operator CSX Corp., defense contractor Raytheon Corp. and Sempra Energy, among other companies.

When they first began proposing the resolution in the mid-1990s, they won the support of just 3% or 4% of shareholders at various companies. The tallies kicked up to about 50% in 2002, a few months after Enron’s collapse. In 2003, the count went up to as much as 60%.

Sometimes, the victories are semi-sweet. Proposals are only recommendations and the board can opt to implement them or not.

Still, Ms. Davis, who has been a gadfly for 40 years, says some companies are implementing the recommendations now. Lucent Technologies Inc., for instance, took up her proposal this year and recommended that shareholders approve the annual election of directors. The proposal passed and the maker of telecommunications gear adopted it. “Fifteen years ago, that wasn’t happening,” Ms. Davis says.

The success of gadflies — most prefer being called shareholder activists — comes amid a broader push toward shareholder democracy. The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a rule that, in limited situations, would give shareholders representing a least 5% of the voting shares the power to nominate board members, although SEC Chairman William Donaldson is considering a compromise in an effort to satisfy the business community.

It also comes as pension funds and proxy advisory firms are getting more active as well. This year, the California Public Employees Retirement System, or Calpers, the nation’s largest public pension fund, escalated its campaign for better corporate governance by withholding support from directors it says don’t act in the best interests of shareholders at 27 under companies or about 90% of the American companies in its portfolio.

In April, the Institutional Shareholder Services proxy advisory firm recommended that shareholders withhold votes for two nominees at 3M Co.’s board. The reason? The St. Paul, Minnesota, maker of Post-Its and Scotch Tape ignored two previous poison pill proposals that were submitted by Nick Rossi. The proposal won a majority vote in 2002 and 2003.

Gadflies have come a long way since the late John and Lewis Gilbert stepped onto the scene in 1932. That year, Lewis Gilbert attended his first shareholder meeting and was silenced when he tried to ask questions. According to a story he often told, Mr. Gilbert didn’t stay quiet and was thrown out of the meeting.

Mr. Gilbert and his younger brother John are credited with persuading the newly formed SEC to allow a shareholder proposal on to the proxy. The granddaddies of shareholder activists submitted hundreds of proposals but were lucky to get 5% of the vote, says Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library.

For most of his years as an activist, Mr. Rossi appeared destined for the same futile fate. Still, he continued to discuss stocks at the dinner table and at the family-run hardware store in Boonville, California, about 110 miles north of San Francisco, according to son Nick.

In the early 1980s, the elder Mr. Rossi couldn’t even get his proposal on board diversity on to company proxies. With the blessing of the SEC, companies rejected the proposal, saying it related to the “ordinary course of business,” which is grounds for exclusion according to the 1934 law.

Undeterred, Mr. Rossi took to upbraiding board members during the question and answer period. at annual shareholders meetings. “I jumped on them for not having minorities, which apparently embarrassed them,” Mr. Rossi says. When he demanded an apology from the corporate secretary of Portland General Electric after he had cut off one of Mr. Rossi speeches during the 1980s, the executive “just shook his head ‘No’,” the elder Mr. Rossi says. (The company later was bought by Enron.)

The SEC eventually mandated that companies put Mr. Rossi’s proposal and others to a vote in the mid-1980s.

Nick and Chris Rossi have followed in their father’s footsteps. Today, the Rossis own stock in 120 companies listed on their family ledger. With the help of Santa Monica, California, corporate activist John Cheveddon, the Rossis have submitted about 30 proposals this year.

“If they don’t pass, I consider it an exception now,” says Nick Rossi. “Companies look at individual investors like us as gadflies but we’ve reached a point where we’re legitimate.”

(Courtesy, The Wall Street Journal)

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JACK SAUNDERS:

The area of the Navarro River mouth is a very interesting one in the history of Mendocino County roadbuilding, the original grades on both sides to the river being amongst the steepest and most treacherous on the coast. The photo here is cropped from one taken by Roger Sturtevant on 13 Mar 1934 for the Historical American Buildings Survey and available from the Library of Congress. The large house to the east and Fletcher's Inn to the west are the only two buildings of consequence that survived the 1906 earthquake at this place. The road in front of them is the old familiar that goes to the beach. The most interesting aspect, however, is the split road behind that shows the initial portion of the south Navarro grade from two different eras. The bridge furthest behind the Inn was part of the grade as it would have existed as far back as 1885. That grade was as high as 12% in places, saw numerous accidents, and was itself a replacement for an even WORSE one. The newer 100 ft. long bridge closer to the Inn was added in 1922 when the 1885 grade was in the process of being replaced by one that reduced the steepness to no more than about 6% and ran out along the bluff. The work involved steam shovels, a lot of blasting, a three-year mid-project delay owing to a portion of it sliding away, and then more steam shovels and blasting. Even then the road in some parts later wound up being what today we might consider a one-laner. A portion of the 1885 grade and virtually all of the 1920s grade are visible on GoogleEarth. The latter is also partly drivable as it is actually the southern portion of Navarro Bluff Road. It may even be walkable for a good part of the rest, though I wouldn't recommend that and believe State Parks or some other nanny brigade has signed it as unsafe. Believe it or not, at the time the current Navarro River Bridge was opened in 1949 this WAS Highway 1. In 1957 a plan was developed to realign the south grade to what it is today, but work was stalled for several years. A diagram is included here. This new grade, at least the fourth southern approach to the river, was opened in 1960, just 64 years ago. Does anybody remember driving over the 1920s-era road?

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, October 29, 2024

BRITNEY BOULEY, 37, Willits. Unspecified charge.

SHELSON CABADA, 26, Redwood Valley. Battery, criminal threats, resisting.

ROBERT GARDNER II, 37, Ukiah. Controlled substance, failure to appear.

MAGANA MACLOVIO, 24, Ukiah. Attempted murder, probation violation.

MARK MASON, 49, San Francisco/Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-solicitation of lewd act, public nuisance.

ISSA NIAMBELE, 40, Ukiah. “Restr use of fire.”

FREDERICK PEERY, 30, Ukiah. Suspended license for DUI.

RACHEL PIERCE, 27, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, child endangerment.

MIKI SMITH, 59, Branscomb. DUI, leaving scene of accident with property damage, probation violation.

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DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME ENDS SOON. Here’s when to turn back your clock

by Jessica Roy

“Dark at 5 p.m.” season is about to begin. 

Yes, right on the heels of Halloween, daylight saving time comes to an end this weekend. 

You’ll officially set your clock back at 2 a.m. Sunday, so it becomes 1 a.m. again. Daylight saving time ends the first Sunday of November every year.

Two potential silver linings: If you’re an early bird, your mornings are about to get brighter. This week, the sun rises in San Francisco around 7:30 a.m.; starting next week, that shifts to a little after 6:30. And if you enjoy sleeping in, the change can feel like an extra hour of snooze time in those first few days while you adjust. 

Sadly, those silver linings are negated for those of us with small children or pets. And both early birds and night owls will notice the sun setting at 5 p.m. instead of 6. 

On behalf of night owls, I say: Boooooo.

Didn’t I vote to keep daylight saving time?

Yes, Californians, you did. Voters approved a ballot measure in 2018 that could theoretically make daylight saving time permanent in the state. However, making that change would require two-thirds approval by the state Legislature, the governor’s signature and approval by the U.S. Congress, none of which have happened yet, nor seem likely to happen anytime soon. 

Arizona and Hawaii do the opposite: They are on permanent standard time.

When will we go back to daylight saving time?

The clocks “spring forward” one hour the second Sunday in March. In 2025, that will be March 9. 

(sfchronicle.com)

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ZODIAC, THIS AND THAT

I didn't watch the documentary. I've seen so many and they have all been a disappointment in the end.

I believe that Allen's DNA was compared with the DNA that they have been able to obtain from the stamps and envelopes the letters were sent in. They don't have a complete profile, but they do have enough to be able to rule some people out.

I'm attaching a 2018 article that discusses the DNA. Allen isn't named specifically but it would make sense that his DNA was tested because he has been a suspect for such a long time. I think Allen liked the notoriety of being accused and played up to that. Not everything in Graysmith's books is completely accurate.

Additionally, Bryan Hartnell was taken to an auto parts store where Allen worked in Petaluma in an effort to identify Zodiac. Hartnell said it wasn't Allen. Attaching an article for that, too. I highlighted the pertinent paragraph on the second page of the article. Butch Carlstedt was the Sonoma Sheriff's detective who took Hartnell to the parts store. Butch retired to Point Arena and still lives there as far as I know.

(Deb Silva)

Attached:

PS. ZODE ADD-ONS

More on Allen.

In 1968 Allen was fired from a teaching job at Valley Springs Elementary in Valley Springs CA for molesting a young girl. This was before any Zodiac murders.

After the Zodiac murders, in 1974, Allen was arrested in Santa Rosa CA for molesting a young boy. He was tried and convicted and sent to Atascadero State Hospital for two years.

Allen was a chomo both before and after the Zodiac murders. It would be very unusual for a child molester to become a serial killer and then go back to simple child molesting. Crimes escalate not regress. None of the Zodiac killings were sexual. None of the Zodiac victims were children. The two different types of crimes just don't mesh well as profilers will tell you. However, the Vallejo Police Department continued to investigate Allen even after his death in 1992.

Here's a web page with tons of info on Allen, be sure to look at all the links: https://zodiackiller.com/AllenFile.html

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ZODIAC OR HALLOWEEN... you decide

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IF YOU THINK YOU CAN HOLD A GRUDGE, CONSIDER THE CROW

by Thomas Fuler

Over and over, the crows attacked Lisa Joyce as she ran screaming down a Vancouver street.

They dive bombed, landing on her head and taking off again eight times by Ms. Joyce’s count. With hundreds of people gathered outdoors to watch fireworks that July evening, Ms. Joyce wondered why she had been singled out.

“I’m not a fraidy-cat, I’m not generally nervous of wildlife,” said Ms. Joyce, whose crow encounters grew so frequent this past summer that she changed her commute to work to avoid the birds.

“But it was so relentless,” she said, “and quite terrifying.”

Ms. Joyce is far from alone in fearing the wrath of the crow. CrowTrax, a website started eight years ago by Jim O’Leary, a Vancouver resident, has since received more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks in the leafy city, where crows are relatively abundant. And such encounters stretch well beyond the Pacific Northwest.

A Los Angeles resident, Neil Dave, described crows attacking his house, slamming their beaks against his glass door to the point where he was afraid it would shatter. Jim Ru, an artist in Brunswick, Maine, said crows destroyed the wiper blades of dozens of cars in the parking lot of his senior living apartment complex. Nothing seemed to dissuade them.

Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.

They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.

Attacks by aggrieved crows can become the stuff of horror films, with lives being seemingly transformed into the Hitchcockian nightmare of “The Birds.”

Gene Carter, a computer specialist in Seattle, was followed by crows that lurked outside his windows for the better part of a year.

“The crows would stare at me in the kitchen,” he said in an interview. “If I got up and moved around the house, they would find any place where they could perch and scream at me. If I walked out to my car they would dive bomb me. They would get within an inch of my head.”

Mr. Carter knows precisely what set off the attacks. One day in his backyard, he saw crows encroaching on a robin’s nest and launched a rake into the air.

But he never imagined that the crows’ revenge would last so long. The mob learned to identify the bus he took on his way home from work, Mr. Carter said. “They were waiting for me at the bus stop every single day,” he said. “My house was three or four blocks away and they would dive bomb me all the way home.”

The harassment stopped only when Mr. Carter moved.

Experts say the majority of crow attacks occur in the spring and early summer, when protective parents are watching over their young and defending their nests from possible encroachers. But in other cases, the reason for an attack is not so clear.

When crows stalked her in July, Ms. Joyce noticed on a local Facebook group that several other women in her neighborhood were also being divebombed — and that they all had long blond hair.

“I wondered if there was a connection,” Ms. Joyce said. “Do they have a beef with a fair-haired person?”

The Ogre and the Veep

On a slate-gray Sunday morning last month, a man in an ogre mask trudged across the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle. He passed prospective students and their parents, who paused their tour of the school to gawk at this person stalking the grounds looking like an actor in a low-budget Halloween thriller.

The character in the mask was John Marzluff, a professor who has spent his career studying human-crow interaction. Dr. Marzluff has developed a high regard for the birds’ intelligence. He describes crows as “flying monkeys,” because of their aptitude as well as their large brains relative to their size.

How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.

His estimate is based on an experiment that he began in 2006 on the Washington campus. Dr. Marzluff captured seven crows with a net while wearing that ogre mask. The birds were soon set free, but, Dr. Marzluff says, the episode traumatized the crows and other members of the murder that witnessed it.

To test how long the campus’s birds would hold onto their grudge, Dr. Marzluff or his research assistants would put on the ogre mask periodically and walk around campus, recording how many crows let out aggressive caws, a sound that experts call scolding. The number of scolding crows crescendoed around seven years into the experiment, when around half the crows he encountered cawed vociferously.

Over the next decade, according to data Dr. Marzluff has collected but not yet published, the numbers of grudge-holding crows gradually tapered off.

During his September walk, Dr. Marzluff recorded in his notebook that he had encountered 16 crows. And for the first time since the experiment began, they all ignored him.

Christian Blum, a cognitive scientist specializing in animal behavior at the University of Vienna, conducted a similar multiyear experiment partly inspired by Dr. Marzluff’s work, using ravens, which are cousins to crows in the corvid family.

“They are also excellent grudge holders,” Dr. Blum said of ravens.

In the study, which ran from 2011 to 2015, Dr. Blum and his colleagues wore a mask and carried a dead raven past an aviary filled with live ravens. They then donned a different mask, a control, and walked through without the dead raven.

Just as in Dr. Marzluff’s experiment, the ravens scolded the “dangerous” mask — even without any dead raven present — with much higher frequency than they did the control. And the scolding lasted for the duration of the experiment, suggesting that ravens’ grudges were also very long lasting.

“If you really get under their skin they can hold a grudge for a very long time,” Dr. Blum said.

Dr. Marzluff’s experiment on the Washington campus also had a control mask, and the way the crows interacted with it — scolding the wrong mask — might offer hints as to what happened to the fair-haired Ms. Joyce and other blond women in Vancouver.

Dr. Marzluff’s control was a mask of Dick Cheney, the former vice president. Although it was scolded far fewer times than the ogre mask, there were still a small number of crows that cawed at it, which he interpreted as a potential susceptibility to mistaken identity.

This resonates for Lynne Peeples, a blond-haired science writer in Seattle. Around a decade ago, she was jogging around a lake near her home when a crow divebombed her. She felt a sharp peck on the top of her head.

As she continued her run, she saw a man with a long blond ponytail running after and kicking ducks and other birds at the water’s edge. The man seemed to be suffering a mental health episode and Ms. Peeples wondered if the crow that attacked her had mistaken her for him.

Mistaken identity or not, the crow attacks persisted. On the same day she was pecked near the lake, Ms. Peeples was dining outside in the courtyard of her apartment. Crows took turns swooping down on her, narrowly missing her head and forcing her to move inside.

Similar attacks followed. “For the next couple years, every time I saw a crow I was scared I would be attacked,” Ms. Peeples said.

Murder, Inc.

Faced with the terrifying prospect of being stalked for very long periods of time, victims of corvid attacks struggle with the right way to respond.

Back in Vancouver, there is little that crow victims can do. Angela Crampton, an environmental specialist with the municipal government, says the city is proud of its thriving bird population, which includes crows, partly because it is a measure of the city’s ecology.

“There’s a subculture of crow appreciation here,” she said.

Ms. Crampton says the city’s main message is of “coexistence” and that the authorities do not remove crow nests or trim trees with the goal of reducing attacks.

This “live with it” message is frustrating to Ruben Jimenez, a resident who last spring moved into an apartment with a large balcony. Mr. Jimenez planted basil, lavender and candytuft, but nearly every time he would walk onto his balcony to tend to the plants he was attacked.

“They would swoop down and come for me,” Mr. Jimenez said. “It was serious. I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking about it.”

His wife enjoyed ribbing him about it — a 6-foot-3, 230-pound man afraid of a few birds. (The crows did not harass her for some reason.)

Mr. Jimenez hung shiny tinsel, put reflective tape on his window and even placed a fake owl on the balcony, its head bobbling in the wind. Nothing worked.

He thought about how local crows were handled when he was growing up in the Dominican Republic. A man at his neighborhood church periodically toured the grounds with a pellet gun and culled the birds perched on the building.

“I was calling my dad when I was getting attacked and I was explaining that I cannot shoot crows in Canada,” Mr. Jimenez said. “He was laughing and saying, ‘What if the crows fly into your house? Then you have to move out?’”

Others who have been harassed by crows in Vancouver have come to an accommodation with the birds. Often it’s in the form of what they describe as a bribe.

A decade ago, Jill Bennett, a radio host in Vancouver, was relentlessly attacked by crows as she was walking her dog. She escaped by ducking into a parking garage.

“I had never done anything mean or violent toward the crows,” Ms. Bennett said.

When it happened again, Ms. Bennett began keeping kibble and peanuts in her purse, dispensing the snacks as she took her walks.

A pair of crows took to following her, a sort of protective entourage.

When a third crow with distinctive feathering divebombed Ms. Bennett this past summer, the entourage went on the offensive, chasing away the interloping crow.

Ms. Bennett compares her crow feeding to a mafia-style shakedown. It’s protection money, she says, the price of knowing you will not be attacked from the sky.

“I call it the crow tax,” she said.

(NY Times)

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49ERS’ NICK BOSA SHOWED US WHO HE IS. AND IT AIN’T COLIN KAEPERNICK

by Scott Ostler

On a day when Donald Trump and his supporting cast ratcheted up their hate and racism — and humor! — to new levels at a rally in New York, Nick Bosa joined the party.

The vaunted edge rusher of the San Francisco 49ers wasn’t at the Madison Square Garden rally Sunday, he was busy shredding the Dallas Cowboys’ offensive line like it was the U.S. Constitution in Trump’s little hands.

So Bosa missed the fun at the rally, where many speakers, along with the Trumpster himself, put on what the New York Times generously called “a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.”

Bosa probably didn’t even get to watch the fun on TV, but he was feeling the spirit, and put a perfect “cap” on the day by photobombing a live postgame TV interview. He leaned over teammate Brock Purdy’s shoulder, grinned and tapped his (Bosa’s) white MAGA baseball hat.

(As we learn more of Mr. Trump’s nebulous plans, MAGA becomes the acronym for “Make America Go Away.”)

And so we saw in real time the arc of Bosa’s growth and personal development in the Bay Area.

Quick review: Before the 2019 draft, Bosa scrubbed his social media posts, which had drawn criticism. As he said when he did it, “There is a chance I might end up in San Francisco.”

He did! At his first news conference he got out ahead of the criticism.

“I’m sorry if I hurt anybody,” Bosa said. “I definitely didn’t intend for that to be the case. I think me being here is even better for me as a person, because I don’t think there’s anywhere, any city, that you could really be in that would help you grow as much as this one will. I’m going to be surrounded with people of all different kinds, so I’m going to grow as a person. I’m going to be on my own. I’m going to grow up, I’m gonna learn a lot of new things. It’s exciting.”

Such growth. So exciting. Eight years ago Bosa was tweeting that Colin Kaepernick was a “clown” for taking a knee in protests during the national anthem. Since then, Bosa has learned that free speech can be fun.

I expect Trump, if he’s true to his values, to take to his pulpit and tell the NFL team owners, “Get the son of a bitch off the field right now! Out! He’s fired! He’s fired!”

That’s how Trump, at a rally in 2017, suggested that NFL owners treat conscientious protesters like Kaepernick. And, by golly, they did! They blackballed Kaepernick, who never got another NFL job.

Trump won’t do that, of course. Instead, he’ll probably promise to appoint Bosa his Secretary of Defense.

The 49ers and the NFL should also refrain from reprimanding, fining or suspending Bosa. Free speech is free speech, whether you’re protesting police brutality or campaigning for a guy who wants to grant police officers “one rough hour, and I mean really rough” to knock some sense into the heads of “criminal suspects.”

The MAGA folks are staunch defenders of free speech, after all, and they vow to lock up anyone who says they aren’t.

Having pulled off his stunt on national television, Bosa declined to elaborate on his political statement to reporters ready to ask him about it, and perhaps even his “growth.”

“I’m not going to talk too much about it too much,” Bosa said, “but I think it’s an important time.”

Bosa couldn’t be at that rally in New York, but he could show his solidarity. Oh, what a show it was! Almost 30 speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who brought the crowd to the brink of laughter by calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

The comedian’s set was such a disaster that Trump gave Hinchcliffe relief by gingerly tossing him rolls of paper towels. You can’t blame the MAGAs for trying, but when it comes to comedians, their bench is thin. The only pinch-hitter available Sunday was Rudy Giuliani.

To help narrow the chasm-like humor gap between the left and right, and to ease the national debt, Trump is proposing a tariff on all jokes delivered by non-MAGA comedians.

Speaking of San Francisco, the same comic saluted San Francisco as “one of the most demented cities.” I’m no native, only three decades in the Bay Area, but hearing that from Hinchcliffe, I felt a twinge of pride.

Bosa’s political statement Sunday — brief, powerful, humorless clowning — isn’t likely to distract the 49ers or disrupt team chemistry. By all accounts, he gets along with his teammates, and is considered a leader. He gives the team an inspirational pep talk every week. He does his job. He even cooperates with the media, some of whom might be jailed within a week if Trump is elected.

Many of Bosa’s teammates might be offended by his support for a candidate whose policies and promises are frightening to anyone who is not a white male billionaire. But athletes have a way of putting politics and personal differences aside in the pursuit of team goals. In Kaepernick’s final season, when outside haters tried to portray the quarterback as a team-wrecker, the 49ers players voted him their most inspirational teammate.

Bosa won’t get that honor. But if this is a crisis for the 49ers, it will pass quickly, especially if Bosa explains that he was just trying out a Halloween costume — as a bozo, if not the Bozo. As Trump’s rally demonstrated, there can be only one.

(SF Chronicle)

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TEENAGERS AT A PARTY in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1947.

Photographed by Nina Leen. Credit: sebcolorisation

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The public is shallower than you can imagine. They need to be told calming lies and to be nannied about. They need to be reassured that they are “safe” and “free” and told what to do. Idiocracy is here.

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HERE'S HOPING

Editor:

Most people, like me, have had a problem distinguishing wishes from good judgment. I remember several skirmishes where my expectations collided with common sense (traumatic moments) when I heard something I did not want to hear. My first semi-adult confrontation with disappointment was when the San Francisco Giants traded Willie Mays to the New York Mets. No one could mention the Bay Area team’s name without me ranting about them for the next 10 years. Nearly half the nation is about to face a crisis like that. I hope we are more mature than I was.

Tom Fantulin

Fort Bragg

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Bill Brandt -- Coal-Miner’s Bath, Chester-le-Street, Durham, North Carolina, 1937

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WOMEN LAUGHING

by Susan Faludi

When Gretchen Whitmer ran for Michigan governor in 2018, a debate coach advised her to draw a smiley face at the top of her notes, so that at the podium she'd remember not to frown. Instead, she jotted down a reference to a raunchy joke about a menstruating woman and her horny boyfriend — the punch line ends with "Shark Week" — because it reliably made her laugh. “If you can turn off the volume and just watch and see who looks like they're having the most fun,” she explained, “they're almost always the one who wins.” She got a shark tattoo on her shoulder as a permanent reminder “to keep a sense of humor and to be a happy warrior.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has been following that advice. Her high-wattage beams and peals of laughter, her sartorial mash-ups of Chuck Taylors and pearls, and her campaign's convention theme of “joy” all telegraph a happy-warrior candidacy. “I have my mother's laugh,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. “I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laughed from the belly. They laughed!” And she has no plans to tone it down. “You know, I'm never going to be…” she said… and then laughed. “That's just, I'm not that person.”

Laughter is not part of Donald Trump's demeanor. Maybe he's not good at it. The comedian-magician Penn Jillette, who was a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice, which Trump hosted, said the former president was “someone who has never laughed sincerely and never made a joke.” Trump would laugh “in a bully way,” Jillette said. “‘Ha-ha, you look kinda fat, Joe!’ He'll do that. But he won't laugh at himself.”

Reddit forums have been devoted to the search for a single video of Trump genuinely laughing. This quest has uncovered the occasional smirk or snigger, but little suggesting joy or even amusement. At a 2019 campaign rally in Florida, Trump chortled — after an audience member yelled, “Shoot ‘em!” in response to his musings on how to stop migrants from coming across the border. And he got off a laugh during a 2016 speech after a dog barked and he said, “What was that?” — and an audience member answered, “Hillary!” Pretty funny.

Side by side on the debate stage last month, Trump's eternal frown and Harris's frequent bemusement made for split-screen tragedy-and-comedy masks. No wonder her happiness makes him unhappy. “I call her Laffin' Kamala,” Trump said. “You ever watch her laugh? She's crazy.” As with all of Trump's riffs, he's got this one on auto-replay. “Have you heard her laugh? That is the laugh of a crazy person. That is the laugh of a crazy— the laugh of a lunatic.”

Harris's lightheartedness runs afoul of a seemingly bedrock political principle that women in the spotlight have fun at their peril and should under no circumstances laugh. France is banning hijabs, the Taliban is forbidding singing by women, and MAGA Republicans are coming up with a female comportment restriction of their own: Thou shalt not laugh in public while politicking.

Conservative social media sites feature mixtapes of Harris's “evil” and “creepy” laugh. Trump surrogates pile on with their own assertions that she “cackles like an insane woman.” Our adversaries in China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are all going to “laugh at Kamala Harris because that's what she does half the time anyway,” Sean Hannity told Republican senator Lindsey Graham on Fox News. “She giggles away her time. I don't think they'll take her seriously because I don't think she's a serious person.”

A friend of mine in Tucson sent me campaign literature left on her doorstep in late September: “KAMALA'S LAUGHING… BUT ARIZONANS ARE NOT! VOTE EARLY AND STOP CACKLING KAMALA.” Of course, the candidate they're trying to stop is competent Kamala. They're levying the charge of levity at her real sin: seriousness.

The mirth moratorium didn't start yesterday. In 2016 Hillary Clinton's “cackle” was the mother of all memes on the right-wing Web, which peddled paraphernalia of Clinton as a wicked cachinnating witch (“IF THE SHOE FITS… CACKLE!” read a T-shirt emblazoned with a broom-riding Hillary; the package of a Hillary Clinton Laughing Pen proclaimed, “It's actually HILLARY'S VOICE!” and, “Mouth really Moves!”) and churned out an endless stream of montages: “Hillary Clinton Laughing for 10 Hours”; “Hillary Clinton Laughing Off Questions Since 2007”; “Every Hillary Clinton Laugh Ever.”

The Running-While-Laughing offense falls into the category of damned if you do, damned if you don't. Clinton was also condemned for her earnest wonkery, for being too much of a “serious person.” It's a bind familiar to feminists, who have always been accused of being “humorless” and “kill-joys.” (Q: "How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?” A: “That's not funny!”) until they are caught having a guffaw, especially at the expense of the opposite sex. Men covet women's laughter at their jokes and dread being laughed at by women. “It could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny,” Christopher Hitchens posited in an infamous 2007 essay on women's lack of wit. Men, he argued, want women “as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit.” The story was titled “Why Women Aren't Funny,” and its message seemed to be: if we let women be humorous, it will be the ruin of us. It was illustrated with a photo of a sourpuss beefy babushka, glowering from her lace-curtained window. (Pretty funny.) She looks uncannily like Donald Trump on the debate stage.

Republican female candidates are sometimes allowed a comic moment, as long as it's in a bully way. (In one ad, Marjorie Taylor Greene blasted to smithereens a “SOCIALIST” Prius. In another Joni Ernst promised to cut pork on Capitol Hill the way she castrates hogs: “Let's make 'em squeal!”) Still, they rarely get to laugh.

Harris's laughter is most often a response to a situation that strikes her as ridiculous. It's spontaneous, not cruel, though it does usually suggest she's above the absurdity she's observing. Her laugh acts as a form of authority. She's also the one having the most fun.

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SOUTH DAKOTA, CA. 1895…

Sioux Indians preparing to slaughter a dog to make soup…

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‘WE ARE NOT OK’

by Selma Dabbagh

It’s happening again. Different territory, different people, but still friends, the messages going to Lebanon, to the women writers who contributed pieces to an anthology I edited during lockdown: are they OK? ‘No, we are not OK. Nobody here is OK.’

A friend in London tells me her family in Beirut are in a constant state of terror and anxiety. Others say that their family farm has been destroyed, that all their relatives have been displaced, that Israel has bombed the roads, that it’s a scorched earth policy, that the tactics used against Gaza this time last year are starting in Lebanon. Again, ambulances and health workers are being targeted. More than a million people have been displaced from the south to Beirut, where many are sheltered in schools.

The al-Jazeera journalist Imran Khan wrote on 27 October that he is ‘still processing the attack on the compound where journalists were staying in Southern Lebanon. Three killed and several injured … it was just dumb luck that our team stayed in a different part of the hill.’ ‘First they came for the journalists,’ says a demonstration placard, drawing on Martin Niemöller’s poem, which I first saw translated into Arabic and pinned on an Egyptian activist’s wall in Cairo in the 1990s. ‘We don’t know what happened after that,’ it concludes.

‘Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history,’ the UN Security Council was told earlier this month. My friend Ghassan Abu Sitta, who this time last year was working as a war surgeon at al-Shifa Hospital, is now in Beirut doing the same. On 26 October he wrote that his friend and colleague, Dr. Mohammad Obaid, had been arrested at al-Awda Hospital in Jabaliya. ‘He exemplifies all that is noble, heroic and dignified in medicine as a tool for resisting the genocide,’ Ghassan wrote, ‘staying in Northern Gaza for over a year’ and returning to work ‘after he was shot by a sniper inside the hospital at the end of 2023. He embodies all that is great in our people.’

On 15 October, Oxfam and 37 other humanitarian organizations released an urgent joint statement:

The Israeli forces’ assault on Gaza has escalated to a horrifying level of atrocity. Northern Gaza is being wiped off the map. Under the guise of ‘evacuation’, Israeli forces have ordered the forced displacement of an estimated 400,000 Palestinians trapped in northern Gaza, including Gaza City. This is not an evacuation – this is forced displacement under gunfire. Since 1 October, no food has been allowed into the area, and civilians are being starved and bombed in their homes and their tents.

‘Global leaders have both a legal and moral duty to act now,’ the statement concludes, with reference to the ruling nine months ago by the International Court of Justice that Israel should ‘take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope’ of the Genocide Convention. The intent to destroy a people in whole or in part is often difficult to prove in cases of genocide, but when it comes to Israel’s leaders there are reams of official statements and interviews elucidating the desire to do exactly that.

Over a million people have protested in London this year and a majority of the British population think the Israeli prime minister should be arrested for war crimes, yet the UK government continues to prostrate itself before Israel.

As a permanent member of the Security Council, the UK could, following the military invasion by one member state (Israel) of the sovereign territory of another (Lebanon), explore the options of the UN exercising its Chapter VII powers, which include economic and military sanctions and the use of force against Israel. Instead, Britain endorses arms exports to the aggressor, despite legal challenges and civil servants resigning in protest because Israel is ‘perpetrating war crimes in plain sight’.

Arms are not policed, but anti-apartheid activists are: Mandla Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson, barred from entering the UK to conduct a tour in solidarity with Palestinian groups, was given no proper reason for the visa refusal, according to Roshan Dadoo of the South African Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Committee. The information presented by the UK authorities had been ‘quite out of the ordinary’. ‘This kind of censorship,’ she said, ‘goes against any kind of freedom of expression or human rights or any pretense of the Labour Party’s international solidarity which they had offered to us during our struggle.’

‘Today I woke up with both my eyes closed.’ My friend Marwa’s voice is slow in the note she leaves. She is in the south of Gaza, in a tent, ‘with, I think, a pus infection, but for me I can understand when this happens to me that I don’t want to see anything. It’s psychosomatic … Here everything is the same. We are in the same cycle of expectation and frustration … The north is very, very tense. My mother [in Gaza City] is OK. This week, her voice is weak, waiting for us. Everything is very, very expensive. One kilo of sugar costs almost 130 shekels – no, thirty Jordanian dinars [£32].’

Four thousand international journalists are accredited by Israel. They could cover the war on Gaza if they were allowed to, but very few do. The only way in is a ‘deep embed’ with Israeli forces. The 19-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad was one of the few still reporting from north Gaza. Patchy internet meant it would take him hours to upload footage from his phone. An Israeli officer threatened him, ordering him to desist: ‘Listen, if you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next and turn your family into [ …] This is your last warning.’ He shared the message with a friend before an airstrike killed him on 5 October. He had taken the precaution of moving away from his family for their protection. The pieces of his body were gathered into plastic bags for burial.

At the British Library on 14 October, Naomi Klein described Hamad’s killing. She was speaking at a ceremony to award Arundhati Roy and Alaa Abd el-Fattah this year’s PEN Pinter Prize for writers who have sought (in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech) to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. Abd el-Fattah was due for release from Egyptian prison at the end of September. PEN’s invitation to Klein included the caveat: ‘Given the state of the world and the targeting by governments of both Alaa and Arundhati, it’s possible that both will be able to join us in person, but also that neither will.’

Roy managed to attend the event in person, but Abd el-Fattah’s sentence was arbitrarily extended until at least 2027. Roy spoke of her ‘friends and comrades in prison in India, lawyers, academics, students, journalists’, and the ‘thousands incarcerated in Kashmir’. She spoke of the atrocities committed by the US or its proxies in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Afghanistan before turning to the atrocities now being committed by Israel with American and British support:

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another … The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed … No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide.

Roy and Klein are among the thousand writers who have announced a ‘mass boycott of Israeli publishers complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people’.

The following evening at the Royal Geographic Society, the Palestinian human rights lawyer Raji Sourani delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture (the talk was supported by the LRB, among others; I was Sourani’s interlocutor). ‘We want no more than the rule of law,’ he said. ‘We have no right to just be good victims.’

Sourani lives by his belief that individuals should either speak up or shut up. He has spoken out against the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and spent years in Israeli prisons, where he was tortured. ‘I know what it feels like when fifty times a day you just want to die.’ He estimated that between 17,000 and 21,000 Palestinians are currently being detained – mostly incommunicado – by Israel. Many of these arrests or disappearances happen as Palestinians try to traverse the Gaza Strip. There are accounts of extreme torture, degradation and rape. The Palestine Centre for Human Rights, of which Sourani is the director, continues to report on such abuses, even though all three of its offices in Gaza have been bombed. Sourani’s home was hit by an airstrike a year ago. He, his wife and son were rescued from the rubble.

In July, the International Court of Justice issued a groundbreaking advisory opinion:

Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime, annexation and use of natural resources … Israel’s legislation and measures violate the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. The ICJ mandated Israel to end its occupation, dismantle its settlements, provide full reparations to Palestinian victims and facilitate the return of displaced people.

Sourani praised the lawyers who created the international legal system after the Second World War. Among those continuing their legacy are the group of 39 independent experts who advised the UN in September, urging states to ‘take meaningful steps … that would ensure compliance with the ICJ opinion’. They warned: ‘The world stands upon the edge of a knife. Either we travel collectively towards a future of just peace and lawfulness – or hurtle towards anarchy and dystopia, and a world where might makes right.’

Marwa’s colleague K in Jabaliya in the north of Gaza had told me that there were ‘daily attacks, unfortunately’. The food situation was slightly better, although there was no fresh food available. She moved to Gaza City with, I presume, the eleven children in her care, leaving her father and brother in Jabaliya. When I asked her to describe her situation, she replied: ‘I can say there are no words to express what is happening, unfortunately.’ On 28 October, as the Knesset was passing a bill to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from operating in Israel, I heard that her brother has since been taken by Israeli forces.

(London Review of Books)

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MAX BEERBOHM CARTOON from 100 years ago

(Bruce McEwen)

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YOUR TAX DOLLAR AT WORK

An Israeli strike on a residential building in northern Gaza killed dozens of people early Tuesday, the territory’s emergency service said, in the latest attack to cause mass casualties in the area since Israel renewed its offensive against Hamas in the north.

The Palestinian Civil Defense, the emergency service, said at least 55 people were killed in the strike in the town of Beit Lahia. Gaza’s health ministry said at least 93 people were dead, including 25 children. The Israeli military said in a statement that it was “aware of reports that civilians were harmed” in the town and was looking into the details.

Israeli airstrikes on Monday killed at least 60 people in the Bekaa Valley, in eastern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, in what appeared to be the deadliest barrage of strikes in the area since the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah escalated last month.

At least 58 others were injured in the attacks, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, which reported the death toll. Most of the airstrikes were concentrated in the Baalbek district, a patchwork of farmlands and villages in the valley that is home to a city of the same name. Hezbollah holds sway in parts of the district, one of Lebanon’s most underdeveloped regions, which borders Syria.

— NYT

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LEAD STORIES, WEDNESDAY'S NYT

Harris’s Mission: Disqualify Trump, but Extend a Hand to His Voters

Trump and His Allies Link Biden’s ‘Garbage’ Comment to 2016 ‘Deplorables’ Remark

The New Threat to Brazil’s Forests: Chemicals

Automatic Refunds for Significant Flight Disruptions: New Airline Rule Goes Into Effect

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UH, OH, AGAIN: HOMELAND SECURITY ROLE IN BIZARRE ELECTION DAY "TABLETOP EXERCISE" DENIED

Organizers of a Election Day cyber exercise suddenly repudiate their own announcement of Homeland Security involvement. What gives? Plus, a peek at new DHS FOIA material

by Matt Taibbi and James Rushmore

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, has been the subject of multiple Racket stories in recent years. A year ago, we followed up a House Weaponization of Government Committee repor with Twitter Files documents detailing the Homeland Security agency’s help forming the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford, which mass-flagged social media content in the last presidential election.

Now, a week before another presidential vote, the agency again stepped in it, in a seeming effort to quell conspiracy theories that are almost certain to achieve the opposite.

CISA went unintentionally viral in recent weeks when its participation in a “large scale” cybersecurity exercise on Election Day in Atlanta was announced by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). When Kentucky Senator Rand Paul sent DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas a WTF letter, CISA said the event was canceled. Now, despite both DHS and CISA being listed as “pivotal organizations” at the event, with the Election Day exercise scheduled to be led by a CISA official named Klint Walker, the organizers, i.e. the people who wrote the brochure below, are reportedly telling reporters DHS/CISA had “no involvement” with the event.…

https://www.racket.news/p/uh-oh-again-homeland-security-role

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