Churches are not exempt from obeying strict lockdown measures during The Pandemic.
The ongoing obstinacy of certain religious institutions to flaunt and disregard common sense behavior during The Pandemic is confounding.
No amount of spirituality will protect a citizen, regardless of his/her religious preference from the ravages of Covid-19. These religious institutions which think they are immune need to get serious and Deal with It realistically.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 12.22.2020
“The Constitution,” U.S. District Judge Jesus Bernal of Riverside said, quoting past Supreme Court opinions, “is not a suicide pact.”
San Jose’s Calvary Chapel Pastor Mike McClure (right) with attorney Robert Tyler earlier this year outside of Santa Clara Superior Court in San Jose — McClure is in contempt of court for holidng indoor religious services. On Tuesday county health officials asked the judge Tuesday to issue another contempt order and impose more fines.
The federal judge ruled Gov. Gavin Newsom’s shutdown of indoor worship services in most of California is a valid measure to protect public health and protects religious freedom by allowing outdoor services, unlike the New York restrictions struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Bernal, ordered to review Newsom’s current restrictions under the Supreme Court’s standards, said Monday the governor’s measures — now including a ban on indoor religious services in all counties except Mariposa, Sierra and Alpine — are justified and non-discriminatory.
Harvest Rock Church of Pasadena and Harvest International Ministry, affiliated with 162 California churches, argued that Newsom’s orders violated the constitutional standards set by the high court in its Nov. 25 ruling on the New York case.
After President Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court rejected the reasoning of its May 30 decision allowing an earlier version of Newsom’s limits on indoor worship services and barred New York state from restricting religious activities more tightly than secular businesses. A panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited that ruling Dec. 15 when it ordered Nevada’s governor to remove a 50-person limit on indoor religious services.
San Francisco Archbishop Salvador Cordileone – one of the leading religious figures encouraging disregard of Covid-19 protection measures.
The churches in Bernal’s court said they would appeal his decision to the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco.
Liz Heidhues was out at the World’s Edge along the Pacific to witness the mingling of Jupiter and Saturn for the first time in nearly 400 years. She took many shots to commemorate this historical astrological event.
For some musical accompaniment I am posting a link to the Pink Floyd piece Astronomy Domine from the 1970 double LP Ummagumma
For the first time in centuries, the planets Jupiter and Saturn crossed paths in the night sky Monday, a rare celestial phenomenon made all the more special by falling on the winter solstice.
The notoriously unpredictable Bay Area weather cooperated, and residents were able to spot the glow of the overlapping planets — known to astronomers as a “conjunction”— just after twilight.
It was a highly unusual convergence: the last time Jupiter and Saturn came this close was in 1623, said Andrew Fraknoi, a professor of astronomy at University of San Francisco’s Fromm Institute.
As the planets aligned, Fraknoi said, they appeared as a single, bright point of light in the southwest night sky. While the planets weren’t actually any closer to each other, they looked aligned to earthbound observers.
In the end, the clouds cooperated.
Monday night’s forecast for the Bay Area called for some high clouds to drift in between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., but they failed to obscure the fleeting planetary alignment.
Even after Monday, Jupiter and Saturn will still be visible in the night sky — just moving a little further apart.
The two planets’ next rendezvous won’t occur until 2080, Fraknoi said. After that, they won’t overlap again until the year 2400. Each planet’s unique path and tilt around the sun make the conjunction a rare and irregular event for Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets in our solar system.
Saturn’s comet-filled rings could be observed through a telescope as the planet orbited past Jupiter. But unlike many other celestial events, the conjunction was also visible to the naked eye — no high-powered telescope or camera lens necessary.
“It’s very democratic — easily observable by anyone,” Fraknoi said.
“President Trump accomplished a great deal in four years…”
Yah, Right. Trump accomplished a lot.
Trump Spent four years undermining a Democratic (and I don’t mean the political party) system of government which has survived over 200 years and finished off his reprehensible term in office with an abortive coup d’etat.
Trump’s bizarro antics have been a boon for those in the medical profession who treat high blood pressure, stress and psychological disorders.
All’s I have to say is, “You’re fired!!!!! in 31 days. Good riddance.”
Wall Street Journal editorial 12.20.2020
As his days in office dwindle, he’s making everything about him.
President Trump accomplished a great deal in four years, but as he leaves office he can’t seem to help reminding Americans why they denied him a second term.
He could focus on the positive, such as the Covid-19 vaccines and his Arab-Israeli peace breakthrough. Instead he’s calling Members of Congress and asking them to object on the House and Senate floor to the results of the Electoral College count.
This won’t change the outcome, but it will put pressure on Republicans to embarrass themselves by indulging Mr. Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the results. We hope the Members ignore his pleas.
Meanwhile, after days of silence over the hack on U.S. government agencies and private companies, Mr. Trump chimed in Saturday to add confusion. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that the evidence clearly points to the Russians for the hack.
But Mr. Trump tweeted that “Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream [media] is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of . . . discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).” Then he linked the hack to a possible “hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA.”
Mr. Pompeo has no incentive to dissemble about Russia’s role, and Americans deserve to know the truth about what happened. Mr. Trump doesn’t want to admit he lost, and he can duck the inauguration if he likes.
But his sore loser routine is beginning to grate even on millions who voted for him.
It’s only a month until arguably the worst President in American history will slither into retirement. Trump has been a conniving loser and con artist for 50 years.
The ultimate political joke in the form of a junk food eating liar will leave a tawdry legacy which will take years to unravel.
Vanity Fair 12.20.2020
“YOU CAN’T REASON WITH HIM AT ALL”: TRUMP SPENDS FINAL DAYS PLOTTING REVENGE AGAINST HIS ENEMIES AND PARDONS FOR EVERYONE ELSE
According to two sources briefed on the conversations, Republicans are privately suggesting to Donald Trump that he should call Biden. Their advice is that Trump doesn’t have to concede. Instead, Trump should tell Biden that he will assist with the transition while he waits for legal challenges to play out. Trump rejected the idea, the sources said.
Trump’s grip on the party is slowly slipping.
On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnellbecame the highest-profile Republican to recognize Biden as president-elect. A former West Wing official told me that more elected Republicans are waiting until January to come out and pressure Trump to step aside. (Congress officially counts the electoral votes on January 6.) “There’s going to be a coordinated effort to say we need peace,” the official said.
Inside the West Wing, officials are aware that the end is near. “They’re packing up,” a former White House official told me.
At the nadir of his 1990 debt crisis, Trump bunkered himself inside Trump Tower for days on end, subsisting on a steady diet of hamburgers and French fries.
Vanity Fair – September 1990
As his real estate empire was collapsing, and his first marriage unraveling, Trump simply refused to accept the reality that his life was in a tailspin. “Do people really think I am in trouble?” Trump askedVanity Fair’s Marie Brenner at the time, to which she replied, “Yes, they think you’re finished.”
One of Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, told Brenner, “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory. If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”
Fast-forward 30 years, and Trump is living out the final days of his presidency in a similar state of denial. “It’s rigged and stolen!” he complained during a phone call with a prominent Republican the day after the Electoral College affirmed Joe Biden as president-elect. “You can’t reason with him at all,” the Republican said.
As Biden’s inauguration approaches, Republicans close to the White House told me Trump could be poised for a final round of norm-shattering actions. One source said Trump has discussed a preemptive-pardon blitz of everyone close to him, so Biden’s Justice Department can’t investigate his administration. (A White House spokesperson declined to comment.)
“Trump doesn’t want his team targeted,” the source said. Another source said Trump wants the Department of Justice to name a special counsel to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden as a way of getting even with Democrats for the Robert Mueller probe. “If Trump is going to leave office, he wants a special counsel, 100%,” the source said.
San Francisco as yet another lock down takes place has some beautiful scenery at a time when fewer people are out and about. The natural splendor of the area can be seen in plain view.
Photos are taken at the Pacific Ocean, Holocaust Memorial at the Legion of Honor and a car free Golden Gate Park along with an aircraft high in the sky.
Americans are too acquiescent in responding to the violent and racist acts perpetrated by Neo-Nazis such as the QAnon, the Proudboys and the Klan.
The Germans, who are well schooled in the evils of Nazism know how to stand up to these despicable deplorables.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 12.16.2020
Survivors of Germany’s Halle synagogue attack are now tracking white supremacist extremists worldwide. Terrorists use online platforms like Twitch, which police are failing to monitor, they say.
Proud Boys rally for Trump in Washington, DC 12.12.2020
When questioned in court, many of the police officers say it simply isn’t their job to investigate the background of the crime. After all, from a narrow legal point of view, this seemed reasonable. The case was clear: There was a confession and a video recording the act — why dig any deeper? “So often I heard them say: It’s not my job to understand the context,” said Talya Feldman, an art student from Colorado who was among the people in the Halle synagogue during the attack.
Feldman. said “Which leads me to ask, well then whose job is it?”
That’s an important question, given that both the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the German domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, agree that far-right extremism currently represents the biggest domestic terrorist threat in their respective countries. According to a Reuters report, a DHS memo from August this year even identified white supremacists and other lone offenders with “personalized ideologies” as posing the greatest threat of deadly violence in the US.
Stephan B.’s trial, which has lasted 25 court days, is due to reach a verdict on Monday.
Like the El Paso shooter, the young German also posted a “manifesto” on an online forum moments before the attack began. The synagogue attack failed, thwarted largely because the door to the courtyard outside the synagogue was locked — a necessary precaution for many Jewish communities in Germany and around the world. In frustration, Stephan B. killed two non-Jewish Germans.
International network of racism and misogyny
The two white supremacists didn’t know each other personally, and there is no evidence that they ever communicated directly. But they shared an ideology and frequented the same online forums and often unmoderated “imageboards,” where a globe-spanning network of young men regularly air racism and misogyny and feed each other’s anger and resentment about society.
The two men had also both publicly expressed their admiration for the mass-murderer of Christchurch, who had killed 51 people in a mosque a few months earlier, in March 2019, who himself had been directly inspired by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people during an attack in 2011.
The sheer frequency of these otherwise “unconnected” attacks mean they are often lost in the ocean of daily news: In the two months between the El Paso shooting and the Halle attack alone, there were two more attacks by young men in Dayton, Ohio, and Baerum, Norway, which together left 10 more people dead.
Here is a tale of one woman’s ongoing public service to keep the environment clean and safe on her block in San Francisco
San Francisco Water Power Sewer newsletter 12.15.2020
Nestled on the bottom of a steep San Francisco hill is ‘Donna’ the drain.
“One time someone dumped wallpaper paste or some kind of white hardened stuff into Donna. I had to scrape it off her grate with a silverware knife. That is the one time I got fed up with the mistaken notion anything can be dumped into a drain.”
Elizabeth Heidues has been a part of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC)’s, Adopt a Drain Program since January 2017. She wants to share her story in the hopes to encourage others to adopt a drain themselves.
“I’ve never owned a car; I bike, I walk or take public transportation. Being in the streets of San Francisco all the time, I’ve encountered clogged drains. I wanted to do something with my growing frustration. It was the perfect way for me to get off on the right foot in the new year.”
“In the calendar’s very first page, in the month of January, there was a written invitation to adopt a drain through SFPUC’s wastewater division. I responded.”
And for Elizabeth, the rest is history.
“My drain has given me a lot to contemplate about managing stormwater. At first, I worked hard to clean up Donna. But once I worked out a system, maintaining her became a lot easier, exclaimed Elizabeth.”
Every drain adopter seems to have a unique reason as to why they named their drain the way they did. Elizabeth considers ‘Donna the drain’ part of the family.
“ I named my drain Donna for two reasons: For one, Donna is situated on a steep hill. When it rains , everything is swept “DOWN-A the Drain”! Since I am half Italian, this pronunciation was perfect for my adopted drain. “DOWN-A the Drain” really describes what happens to the trash that is swept down the gutter with the cascading rain and deposited into Donna. Secondly, I named my drain after my sister Donna, my only sibling. My sister is a native San Franciscan, just like me. Naming a hard-working drain after my sister seemed an appropriate way to honor her grit for living harmoniously off the land and reducing her impact on the planet.”
World traveler Liz with a new found friend at the Berlin Zoo – 2018
Adopt a Drain adopter Liz and her helper, Lee
Elizabeth has a lot of things to say about her drain and takes it personally when she finds discarded face masks and gloves littering the streets.
“Personal Protection Equipment has put a big glitch in our environmental program, and the human impact on the environment has gotten worst. The gloves and masks discarded on our streets are going to be with us for a long time, and while masks are mandatory, people need to start thinking about using re-usable masks.”
On the flip side of things, Elizabeth has literally found that ‘someone’s trash is another one’s treasure.’
“One time I found an unusually large transparent marble with glittery stuff suspended in it resting on her grate.”
Elizabeth says that while she recognizes that we are in a pandemic, she hopes drain adopters won’t abandon their drain.
“My drain is part of my family; it’s named after my sister after all.”
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is adhering to his vow of seeking equal justice for all regardless of their job title.
Law enforcement is being given the same treatment as would any citizen who commits a criminal act. Wearing a badge does not sanction unlawful conduct.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 12.14.2020
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin filed felony battery and assault charges Monday against a police officer he said unneccesarily and violently beat a Black man in Fisherman’s Wharf last year.
“Growing up in the 1970s in San Francisco seeing police commit violence on Black men and never being held accountable made me feel like being Black meant we were less than,” said Gloria Berry, Chair of the Black Lives Matter San Francisco County Central Committee and member of the DA’s Office’s African American Advisory Board.
“Today I have tears in my eyes to hear that under the Office of the San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, officers are being charged, history is being made, and Black people are finally being seen.”
Terrance Stangel is the third current or former SFPD officer that Boudin has criminally charged in a use-of-force case in the past month as part of his campaign to hold police accountable for wrongdoing. A judge on Monday signed a warrant for the police officer’s arrest.
“Officers responding to a call have a duty to promote public safety — not to turn to violence as a show of authority,” Boudin said in a statement. “This case is an example of an officer unnecessarily escalating a situation and then violently beating a Black man whom he had no legal basis to even arrest.”
According to the DA, victim Dacari Spiers was on a date with his girlfriend at Fisherman’s Wharf on the evening of October 7, 2019, when officers Stangel and Cuahtemoc Martinez responded to a 911 call of a man assaulting a woman.
Prosecutors said the officers were directed to Spiers and his girlfriend, “who were standing close to each other and talking.” Police did not witness any physical violence or unlawful conduct between the two, the DA’s office said.
Much of the incident was captured on police body cameras, prosecutors said, which show police ordering Spiers to turn around without responding to his and his girlfriend’s questions about what he had done.
“Officer Martinez immediately tried to grab Mr. Spiers, who insisted he had not done anything, and officers ignored Mr. Spiers’s girlfriend, who was screaming, ‘No!’ and ‘What did he do?’” officials from the DA’s office stated.
Prosecutors said Stangel struck Spiers from behind with a baton, and struck his legs again multiple times after Martinez took Spiers to the ground. Martinez did not strike Spiers and was not criminally charged.
Stangel was charged with four felonies: battery with serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, assault with force likely to cause great bodily — with an allegation that he did in fact cause great bodily injury — and assault under the color of authority.
In a statement, San Francisco Police Officers Association President Tony Montoya accused Boudin of “headline chasing.”
The charges come after Spiers filed a civil lawsuit claiming excessive use of force and police misconduct against the city. The case is pending in federal court, and the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office has denied nearly every allegation listed in the complaint.
“This officer is going to murder an innocent person if he’s not taken off the street,” said Curtis Briggs, an attorney for Spiers. “It’s very important to prosecute him.”
Spiers estimated he was struck between 10 to 15 times with a baton, including at least once when he was handcuffed, the suit said. Officers additionally kicked and hit him and threw him to the ground without out explanation, according to Spiers’ attorneys.
The incident resulted in a broken leg and wrist — both of which required surgery — and a laceration on his leg that required stitches, the suit states.
The case is being prosecuted by the District Attorney’s Office’s Independent Investigation Bureau, which investigates police shootings and other serious use-of-force incidents. Prosecutors said they will not request Stangel be detained during pretrial proceedings.
On Sunday, his family confirmed he had died of pneumonia at the Royal Cornwall Hospital on Saturday night. “We all deeply grieve his passing,” they wrote in a statement.
His longtime agent Jonny Geller described him as “an undisputed giant of English literature. He defined the cold war era and fearlessly spoke truth to power in the decades that followed … I have lost a mentor, an inspiration and most importantly, a friend. We will not see his like again.”
His peers lined up to pay tribute. Stephen King wrote: “This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit.” Robert Harris said the news had left him “very distressed … one of the great postwar British novelists, and an unforgettable, unique character.” Adrian McKinty described Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as “quite simply the greatest spy novel ever written”, while historian Simon Sebag Montefiore called him “the titan of English literature up there with the greats … in person, captivating and so kind and generous to me and many others.”
Born as David Cornwell in 1931, Le Carré began working for the secret services while studying German in Switzerland at the end of the 1940s. After teaching at Eton he joined the British Foreign Service as an intelligence officer, recruiting, running and looking after spies behind the Iron Curtain from a back office at the MI5 building on London’s Curzon Street. Inspired by his MI5 colleague, the novelist John Bingham, he began publishing thrillers under the pseudonym of John le Carré – despite his publisher’s advice that he opt for two Anglo-Saxon monosyllables such as “Chunk-Smith”.
A spy modelled on Bingham, who was “breathtakingly ordinary … short, fat, and of a quiet disposition”, outwits an East German agent in Le Carré’s 1961 debut, Call for the Dead, the first appearance of his most enduring character, George Smiley. A second novel, 1962’s A Murder of Quality, saw Smiley investigating a killing at a public school and was reviewed positively. (“Very complex, superior whodunnit,” was the Observer’s conclusion.) But a year later, when his third thriller was published, Le Carré’s career surged to a whole new level.
Smiley is only a minor figure in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but this story of a mission to confront East German intelligence is filled with his world-weary cynicism. According to Alec Leamas, the fiftysomething agent who is sent to East Berlin, spies are just “a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives”. Graham Greene hailed it as “the best spy story I have ever read.”
According to Le Carré, the novel’s runaway success left him at first astonished and then conflicted. His manuscript had been approved by the secret service because it was “sheer fiction from start to finish”, he explained in 2013, and so couldn’t possibly represent a breach in security. “This was not, however, the view taken by the world’s press, which with one voice decided that the book was not merely authentic but some kind of revelatory Message From The Other Side, leaving me with nothing to do but sit tight and watch, in a kind of frozen awe, as it climbed the bestseller list and stuck there, while pundit after pundit heralded it as the real thing.”
Smiley moved centre stage in three novels Le Carré published in the 1970s, charting the contest between the portly British agent and his Soviet nemesis, Karla. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he unmasks a mole in the highest echelons of the British secret service, while in The Honourable Schoolboy he goes after a money laundering operation in Asia, before piecing together Karla’s Swiss connections in Smiley’s People. The world of “ferrets” and “lamplighters”, “wranglers” and “pavement artists” was so convincingly drawn that his former colleagues at MI5 and MI6 began to adopt Le Carré’s invented jargon as their own.
As the cold war came to a close, friends would stop him in the street and ask: “Whatever are you going to write now?” But Le Carré’s concerns were always broader than the confrontation between east and west, and he had little patience for the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled any kind of end either for history or the espionage that greased its mechanisms. He tackled the arms trade in 1993 with The Night Manager, big pharma in 2001 with The Constant Gardener and the war on terror in 2004 with Absolute Friends.
Meanwhile, a steady stream of his creations made their way from page to screen. Actors including Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Ralph Fiennes and Gary Oldman relished the subtleties of his characterisation even as audiences applauded the deftness of his plotting.
Le Carré returned to Smiley for the last time in 2017, closing the circle of his career in A Legacy of Spies, which revisits the botched operation at the heart of the novel that made his name. Writing in the Guardian, John Banville hailed his ingenuity and skill, declaring that “not since The Spy has Le Carré exercised his gift as a storyteller so powerfully and to such thrilling effect”.
After decades of being painted as a shadowy, mysterious figure, mainly for his uninterest in publicity or joining the festival circuit, Le Carré surprised the world in 2016 by releasing a memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Detailing his fractured relationship with an abusive, conman father and a lonely upbringing after his mother abandoned him aged five, Le Carré detailed the strange life of a spy-turned-author, being asked to lunches by Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Having spent four decades living in Cornwall, married twice and raising a son, Nicholas, who would write novels himself under the name Nick Harkaway, Le Carré conceeded: “I have been neither a model husband nor a model father, and am not interested in appearing that way.”
The consistent love of his life was writing, “scribbling away like a man in hiding at a poky desk”.
“Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit,” he wrote. “First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.”
Lee's Perspective 