SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 8.23.2026

Currently the blogger is totally immersed in the book “Dangerous Dirty Violent and Young” written by Zayd Dohrn, son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

There’s a long history and the blogger has been digging deep. Discovering details drawing out decades of committed sometimes violent ‘radical‘ political involvement. All with a mission to disrupt the American political system.

The story of Bernardine Dohrn is an apocryphal tale of America in the second half of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn#

Bernardine Rae Dohrn (née Ohrnstein; born January 12, 1942) is a retired American law professor and a former leader of the far-left militant organization Weather Underground in the United States. As a leader of the Weather Underground in the early 1970s, Dohrn was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list for several years. She remained a fugitive, even though she was removed from the list. After coming out of hiding in 1980, Dohrn pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of aggravated battery and bail jumping.

Dohrn became one of the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a radical wing of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in the late 1960s. Dohrn with ten other SDS members associated with the RYM issued, on June 18, 1969, a sixteen-thousand-word manifesto entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”, in New Left Notes. The title came from Bob Dylan‘s song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues“.^[7] The manifesto stated that “the goal [of revolution] is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.”^[8]

The Weather Underground was a radical left militant organization responsible for bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members.^[15]

Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers turned themselves in to authorities in 1980. While some charges relating to their activities with the Weathermen were dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct^[24] (see COINTELPRO), Dohrn pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of aggravated battery and bail jumping^[25] for which she was put on probation.^[26] After refusing to testify against ex-Weatherman Susan Rosenberg in an armed robbery case,^[24] Dohrn was held in contempt of a grand jury^[27] and served seven months in prison.^[28] Shortly after turning themselves in, Dohrn and Ayers became legal guardians of future San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the son of former members of the Weather Underground Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, after the couple were convicted of murder for their roles in a 1981 armored car robbery.^[29]

In 1994, Dohrn said, “I still see myself as a radical.”^[33]

In 2008, Dohrn and Ayers resurfaced into news headlines as presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin publicly denounced the ties between Ayers and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.^[34][35]

In a November 4, 2010, interview, Dohrn described the political “right” in the U.S. as racist, armed, hostile, and “unspeakable”. Referring to the August 28, 2010 Restoring Honor rally which was promoted by Glenn Beck and held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Dorhn said, “You have white people armed, demanding the end to the [Obama] presidency.” She has also asserted that “the real terrorist is the American government, state terrorism unleashed against the world.”^{[36][better source needed]}

Dohrn and Ayers were invited to the June 18, 2026, exclusive Grand Opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago and reportedly seated in the third row.^[37]

Top photo: Bernardine Dohrn (L) and Bill Ayers take in the Obama Presidential Center’s grand opening on Thursday, June 18, 2026. Photo: Justin Kaufmann/Axios

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 8.14.2026

There’s more to life than politics. Thank Goodness.

It’s movie day for the blogger. The New York Times recently published a list of the top crime novels of the 21st century. And followed up on that compendium which, in its opinion, are the best cinematic interpretations of these novels.

The blogger has viewed a number of these films and read several of the books.

Attached below are the ‘Trailers’ for several of these films adapted to the Big Screen.

The blogger is featuring ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the top. It is the shortest in duration and the best of the group with its cover of the Led Zeppelin classic ‘Immigrant Song’ by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Excerpted from The New York Times 8.14.2026

The New York Times Book Review’s recent list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century — as voted by authors, editors, librarians and other book lovers — contained a wide range of thrillers, from serial killer novels to spy fiction. A look at the list, however, makes one commonality abundantly clear: Great thrillers — which are plot-driven by definition — lend themselves well to adaptation. More than half of the titles on the list have been turned into movies or TV shows. Here’s a look at the best.

Top Photo: Josh Brolin in ‘No Country for Old Men‘

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 8.13.2026

Few people remember except those who are interested in human rights and followed America’s lethal involvement in the events which led to the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the vicious aftermath of the democratically elected government in Chile on September 11th, 1973.

Assassination of Orlando Letelier – Wikipedia

On 21 September 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean diplomat and outspoken opponent of dictator Augusto Pinochet, was assassinated in Washington, D.C., United States by a car bomb planted by agents of the Chilean secret police (DINA) as part of Operation Condor. Letelier, who had been living in exile in the U.S., was killed alongside Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies.^[1] Declassified U.S. intelligence documents indicate that Pinochet personally ordered the assassination,^[2] which was intended to eliminate a leading voice of Chilean resistance and disrupt international opposition to his regime.

Excerpted from The Nation – 7.16.2026

At Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC, a small monument marks the spot where former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed by a car bomb planted by agents of the Chilean secret police on the morning of September 21, 1976.

The monument is inscribed with the words “Justice – Peace – Dignity”; every year dozens of friends and colleagues gather at the circle to honor the lives of the two extraordinary people whose conscientious pursuit of those goals were cut short by an act of international terrorism.

This September, the annual gathering will carry a special meaning—and not only because it is the 50th anniversary of the assassination. It comes after a Chilean judge has called new attention to the case of Ronni Karpen Moffitt, finalizing a 15-year judicial effort to bring long-overdue accountability for her death as a victim of the Pinochet regime’s ruthless repression, rather than as collateral damage in the regime’s effort to eliminate its leading international critic, Orlando Letelier. Fifty years after she was murdered, there is finally a degree of justice for Ronni Moffitt, and a significant step toward closure in the infamous Letelier-Moffitt case.

Eventually, the FBI identified two DINA operatives, American-born Michael Townley and Maj. Armando Fernandez Larios, as leading suspects. The US then sought the extradition of DINA’s top two officers, Manuel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza—which General Pinochet personally blocked. A comprehensive CIA review of its own intelligence on the car bombing concluded that there was “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder” and that Pinochet “decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement and, ultimately, to protect his hold on the presidency.”

On June 15, 2026, Chile’s special magistrate for human rights, Judge Paola Plaza, finally issued her verdict.

In her 138-page ruling, Judge Plaza found three former high officials of the Chilean secret police, DINA, guilty for killing Moffitt. Brig. Gen. Pedro Espinoza, DINA’s former deputy director for operations, was sentenced to 15 years; Gen. Raul Iturriaga, a high-ranking officer in DINA’s “Exterior” department, was also sentenced to 15 years, as was retired Brig. Gen. José Zara Holger, also a director in DINA’s international operations division.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ronni-moffitt-orlando-letelier-pinochet-chile-assassination-human-rights-justice

Top photo: Chilean Ambassador to the United States Orlando Letelier during the administration of Salvador Allende