Long before Trump there was the 1960’s and, specifically, 1968.

War, assassinations, riots, a Presidential election and the chaotic, violent Democratic convention in Chicago.

In its aftermath the Nixon Justice Department in 1969 charged a number of people with Federal criminal charges. It came to be known as the “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Netflix is bringing the events of 50 years ago to life with a Hollywood “A” list of characters to provide the “Black Lives Matter” generation with a trip down memory lane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven

Vanity Fair 9.13.2020

There are few marriages of artist and repertoire that make more sense than Aaron Sorkin and the Chicago 7. With mouthpieces like the impishly radical Abbie Hoffman and the stately elder liberal Dave Dellinger primed to bite into Sorkin’s dialogue, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and its high water mark of late 1960s counter-culture political theater feels like something the writer-director has been working towards his entire career.

The trial, which initially included eight defendants until Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale (who was actually bound and gagged in the courtroom during the proceedings) had his trial separated from the rest of the group, set out to determine if a collection of anti-war activists conspired to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It quickly became a symbolic conflict between the longhairs (some metaphorical) and the straights.

On Sunday Netflix released the first teaser trailer of this Oscar-primed drama, with a focus on rhythmic editing and Sacha Baron Cohen looking scruffy.

Cohen seems perfect as Hoffman, and elsewhere in the cast is John Carroll Lynch as Dellinger, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale, Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as prosecutor Richard Schultz, Frank Langella as Judge Julius (no relation to Abbie) Hoffman, Mark Rylance as William Kunstler, Michael Keaton as Ramsey Clark, and on and on. Maybe someone will play Phil Ochs. Maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of Pigasus.

It’s obvious why Sorkin and producer Steven Spielberg would want to release this now, during this election year and especially during this time of social upheaval,

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/sacha-baron-cohen-leads-an-all-star-cast-in-first-the-trial-of-the-chicago-7-teaser#intcid=recommendations_vf-trending-legacy_ad85c658-4761-4a8c-9678-19a316598d2e_popular4-1

https://youtu.be/OAaZIfeQzT0

Is Roger Stone serious?  Of course he is.

I am sure he is encouraging Trump.

Media Matters 9.12.2020

Roger Stone urged Trump to consider declaring “martial law” or invoking the Insurrection Act and then using his powers to arrest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, “the Clintons” and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”

During his September 10 appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Stone declared that the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory. He made this assertion on the basis of his entirely unfounded claim that early voting has been marred by widespread voter fraud.

Stone also said federal authorities should seize all Nevada ballots, federal agents and GOP state officials should “physically” block voting, that Trump should nationalize police forces, and that Trump should order widespread arrests.

 Stone is making baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and is urging Donald Trump to consider several draconian measures to stay in power, including having federal authorities seize ballots in Nevada, having FBI agents and Republican state officials “physically” block voting under the pretext of preventing voter fraud, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.

San Francisco is already living through the Pandemic this year and ongoing California wildfires which have blanketed The City in a toxic gray ash and soot.

Today comes the news that another employee in the Medical Examiner’s office has been arrested. In Utah of all places. Justin Volk, 40, has been charged with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute, possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. 

Volk’s arrest threatens hundreds of prosecutions. This is a self-inflicted headache that San Francisco can do without.  

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 9.11.2020

A lab analyst for the San Francisco medical examiner’s office has been arrested and charged in Utah after he was allegedly found with an evidence bag of methamphetamine, a case that’s touched off a sweeping review by the district attorney.

The allegations against Justin Volk, 40, could potentially impact hundreds of criminal cases in San Francisco, as prosecutors work to determine the degree of Volk’s involvement in each case and whether they might be tainted.

An initial assessment shows Volk was involved with 2,500 cases in the past eight years with the M.E.’s office, including 500 death investigations, 1,200 sexual assaults and 800 DUIs.

“When individual law enforcement officers, or staff at the medical examiner’s office engage in serious misconduct or potentially criminal misconduct … it substantially undermines my office’s ability to prosecute cases,” said San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

“This couldn’t have come at a worse time for our office,” Boudin said, noting that the office is short-staffed and facing budget cuts. “We must now clean up a mess that implicates a vast number of old prosecutions.”

In a Friday interview, Boudin said prosecutors are now undergoing a massive and labor-intensive review of cases that Volk had touched over the years and that were prosecuted by the District Attorney’s Office. The highest priority of cases are those still open, he said.

The district attorney said his office has called Volk as a witness in approximately two dozen cases in the past eight years. However, Boudin added, “that number drastically understates the scope of his involvement in cases that the office has investigated and prosecuted.”

Not all of the 2,500 cases in which Volk played a hand resulted in a criminal charge, Boudin said. His office is still trying to determine the amount of those that did.

At least one, he said, involved a person convicted of murder.

Prosecutors will also need to determine how much of a role Volk played in each case that resulted in a conviction — whether other, independent evidence supports the verdict.

Prosecutors rely heavily on the credibility of the witnesses and investigators who help build each case. If that credibility is tarnished, it can have major impacts on the underlying case, including a dismissal.

Volk did not immediately return requests for comment. He’s been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation, said Bill Barnes, a spokesman for City Administrator Naomi Kelly, who oversees the medical examiner’s office.

On Aug. 31, Volk was pulled over on Old Highway 91 in Ivins, Utah, after a sheriff’s deputy recorded him driving 16 mph over the posted speed limit, according to the Sheriff’s Office’s probable cause statement.

Volk told the deputy he was headed back home to San Francisco when the deputy noticed a small backpack on the floor of the passenger seat, a lunchbox on the passenger seat, and a bottle “with what appeared to be urine inside,” the document states.

Volk was asked to step out of the vehicle while a K-9 conducted a search. The dog indicated drugs were present and Volk was placed in handcuffs.

During a search of Volk’s car, deputies retrieved an evidence bag inside a piece of luggage. The evidence bag contained a “large crystal looking item,” as well as some smaller bags of a crystallized substance and another small bag with a white powder substance. A later test confirmed the large crystal item was methamphetamine.

Deputies additionally found a paper from San Francisco medical examiner’s office, and two pipes “usually consistent with smoking methamphetamine.”

A separate bottle contained 14 pills later identified as acetaminophen and hydrocodone.

Washington County, Utah prosecutors have charged Volk with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute, possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. He was booked on Aug. 31 and released that same evening on a $10,000 cash bail, according to sheriff’s officials.

The allegations against Volk are reminiscent of the case against Deborah Madden, a former San Francisco police lab technician whose admission that she skimmed cocaine from the office resulted in the dismissals of hundreds of drug cases. The disclosure additionally led to a temporary closure of the lab in 2010.

Madden was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and ultimately pleaded guilty to misdemeanor cocaine possession. In 2013 she was sentenced to a year of home confinement and a $5,000 fine.

The forensics labs for the medical examiner’s office and San Francisco police are separate entities and handle different types of evidence. The police lab’s work includes evidence involving firearms and DNA samples. The Medical Examiner’s Office conducts investigations involving dead bodies and blood testing for DUI cases.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Lab-worker-SF-Medical-Examiner-s-office-15561019.php

In the 1970’s Shere Hite’s  study of sex “The Hite Report” were an item as men’s sexual awareness was put under the microscope. 

Scrutiny of female – male sex received a through dissection. The long held view that women gained their pleasure through a man was debunked. “The Hite Report” became synonomous with a shift in sexual attitudes and behavior. 

Shere Hite’s work made her the subject of abuse and derision in America.  

Fed up with American misogynist behavior she renounced her American citizenship in 1995.  Shere Hite lived much of her life in Europe where her feminist viewpoint was well received.

Excerpted from The Guardian 9.9.2020

Reviled by Playboy, her 1976 study of 3,500 women challenged male assumptions about sex.

The pioneering feminist Shere Hite, known for her research on female sexuality, has died at the age of 77. She was best known for The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which has sold more than 50m copies since publication in 1976.

Based on the views of 3,500 women, it challenged male assumptions about sex by revealing that many women were not stimulated by sexual penetration. It also encouraged women to take control of their sex lives. It was dismissed as “anti-male” and dubbed the Hate Report by Playboy.

She added: “I was the only sex researcher at that time who was feminist. I tried to extend the idea of sexual activity to female orgasm and masturbation.”

Hite’s husband, Paul Sullivan, confirmed that she had died at their home in Tottenham, north London, on Wednesday.

Hite was born in the socially conservative US state of Missouri, to her 16-year-old mother, and was raised by her grandparents.

Sustained criticism of her in the US, much of it highly personalised, led Hite to renounce her US citizenship in 1995.

She was married for 14 years to the German pianist Friedrich Höricke before the couple divorced in 1999. She lived all over Europe before settling in north London with her second husband, Paul Sullivan.

The writer Julie Bindel, who interviewed Hite in 2011 and stayed in touch afterwards, told the Guardian she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Bindel said: “Her work was groundbreaking – in many ways she began the real sexual revolution for women in the 1970s after the abject failure of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. In the 60s, women didn’t ever feel that they had the right to sexual pleasure. Shere Hite put women’s sexual pleasure first and foremost for the first time ever.

“She centred women’s experiences as opposed to seeing men as the default position and women as secondary. That really spoke to a lot of women about their own bodies, their own sexual liberation and sexual pleasure.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/10/she-began-the-real-sexual-revolution-for-women-shere-hite-dies-aged-77

Yesterday it was the Blade Runner skyline which transfixed San Francisco.

Today San Francisco is buried under a blanket of dust and ash with a gray, hazy cloud hanging over Land’s End.

Black Lives Matter public art and a homeless encampment are part of the neighborhood mix.

Lee Heidhues  – Photos taken in Land’s End neighborhood. 

All the pundits are rushing to pass judgment on California’s Day of Dystopia. This is one of the best.

Excerpted from Vanity Fair – Joanna Robinson 9.9.2020

“Have you seen the sky…?  It is actually Bladerunner status.” 

Hanging near my desk is a poster I picked up years ago at a Northern California independent bookstore event. It’s a quote from Don DeLillo’s classic 1985 novel White Noise about a mysterious airborne toxic event that ravages the country.

It reads: “California Deserves Whatever It Gets.” (The longer quote, a bit of classic DeLillo snark: “They invented the concept of lifestyles. This alone warrants their doom.”)

I woke up this morning to that text from my housemate, upstairs in our Oakland home. It was 8:30 in the morning, California time, hours after I usually get up to try to work in step with my East Coast colleagues. See, I usually get up with the sun but on this September morning, four years into what we’ve started calling our annual “fire season” in California, there was no sun. Just a dark and sickly orange glow.

“Does it really look like that?” one friend from down south texted. Meanwhile a closer neighbor got a little more reflective: “This level of weirdness definitely sends the mind scrambling for precedent or explanation. The scale of it feels Biblical, or at minimum a Buffy season finale cliffhanger.” It’s true I can only reach for sci-fi/fantasy references. It’s Herbert’s Dune, Tolkien’s Moria, Lucas’s Tatooine, or, yes, Whedon’s Hellmouth . And it could be so much worse. Our homes could be ashes. Our families could be hurt.

But today’s creepily dark orange sky seems to have gotten everyone’s attention—nothing like a #nofilter visual to make people sit up and take notice. Folks from all over are checking in with me in a way they didn’t when the fires were at my door. The bitter irony is that despite the creepy post-apocalyptic images coming out of San Francisco, Oakland, and the rest of the Bay, our air is actually quite nice, cool, and breathable today. A comparatively clean 72. But it’s approaching noon and it feels like midnight.

That’s the sense I have sometimes. That we’re finally paying for our gorgeous views and balmy weather and our extreme wealth and privilege brought here by rushes of gold, towns of tinsel, and valleys of silicon.

Every Picture Tells a Story – Dystopian Edition

The skies above San Francisco are orange, brown and gray.

From a non-existent sunrise through midday when the sky is almost totally dark through sunset.

It is a scene straight from a Sci Fi movie. The atmosphere is well captured in the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049.

Today is a day when life imitates art.

Photos – Liz Heidhues and Lee Heidhues.

Photos at Fort Miley, the Great Highway, the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park, and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

The practical impact will be that people who shoot, kill, and maim animals for bloodthirsty sport will be able to go out and slaughter this endangered wildlife.

There is no humane reason to allow the murder of these grizzlies which have roamed the earth for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

The Senators are facilitating murder. Shame on them all.

The Missoulian 9.8.2020

Another approximately 1,000 grizzly bears roam the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem and recovery area, which covers about 8,900 square miles along the spine of Montana’s Rocky Mountains from the Canadian border south almost to Missoula and Helena. Those bears are considered a distinct population segment from the GYE bears and other recovery areas, and would not be affected by a GYE delisting.

“The science has long proven that the grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has fully recovered,” Daines said on Tuesday. “Delisting the grizzly bear is in the best interest of our communities, public safety, the ecosystem, wildlife, and the grizzly bear itself. Montana has proven they can conserve and manage the species and it’s time to return management to the state.”

Michael Cohen is a convicted perjurer and what he writes about Trump needs to be taken skeptically.  

Cohen was Trump’s “fixer” and enforcer. Before his fall was well regarded by his boss.

His conviction for perjury was the result of lying to Congress to protect Trump.

Trump didn’t care. Cohen’s demise is yet another example of Trump jettisoning people when they are no longer useful.

Even if only 50 percent of what Cohen writes is true in his forthcoming book, the indictment of this horrific man is just another reason to send him packing in 57 days.

Vanity Fair – The Hive 9.6.2020

Early glimpses of Disloyal, the forthcoming memoir by Donald Trump’s former attorney and personal fixer Michael Cohen, feature new allegations of the president’s blunt racism and deep admiration of Vladimir Putin. Describing his former boss as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man,” Cohen—a convicted felon who has lied to Congress—alleges Trump is “guilty of the same crimes” that landed him in federal prison, a three-year sentence he is still serving.

As the Associated Press reported, the White House has capitalized on Cohen’s lack of credibility in denying the claims. “He readily admits to lying routinely but expects people to believe him now so that he can make money from book sales,” White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern said in a statement, calling the memoir “fan fiction.”

In the book, Cohen paints Trump’s “hatred and contempt” of Barack Obama as a full-fledged obsession, beginning long before his own 2016 presidential bid, according to CNN. Noting Trump’s “low opinion of all Black folks,” Cohen recalls him ranting after Obama’s victory in 2008: “Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a s—hole. They are all complete f—ing toilets.”

When South African President Nelson Mandela died in 2013, Trump allegedly said, “Mandela fucked the whole country up. Now it’s a shithole. Fuck Mandela. He was no leader.” (CNN also notes Trump belittled and “fired” an actor playing Obama in a video, which was apparently supposed to air during the 2012 Republican National Convention.)

According to Cohen, per the Washington Post, Trump claimed Obama only got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School because of “fucking affirmative action.” Cohen said that Trump—who, of course, helped fuel the racist birther crusade against Obama—privately described his predecessor as a “Manchurian candidate.” Also, during the 2016 campaign, Trump allegedly told Cohen, “I will never get the Hispanic vote. Like the Blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.”

Michael Cohen – convicted Trump “fixer”

Trump was allegedly enamored by Putin’s all-encompassing power, Cohen writes. In describing Trump’s sycophantic praise of Putin, Cohen said Trump admired the Russian president because he was able “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company—like the Trump Organization, in fact.” Cohen also argues that Trump, who himself expected to lose the 2016 race, cozied up to Putin with a real estate development project in mind, seeing the Russian president as a way to a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow. “The whole idea of patriotism and treason became irrelevant in his mind,” Cohen writes. “Trump was using the campaign to make money for himself: of course he was.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/trumps-obama-obsession-and-putin-admiration-run-deep-in-new-tell-all#intcid=recommendations_vf-trending-legacy_ae97320e-7836-46f3-af95-e983227c6e1d_popular4-1

All those cosmetics which guys and gals apply to improve their looks are not much use during the mask wearing time of Covid-19.

The beauty industry, along with many sectors of the global economy, is struggling.

Could be the natural look, sans all those chemical laden cosmetics, is the new look.

Wall Street Journal 9.2.2020

The coronavirus pandemic is changing the face of the makeup business, but sales are expected to bounce back once there is a vaccine.

“The pandemic has given women permission to wear less makeup,” said Stephanie Wissink, equity analyst at Jefferies.

In the past, women typically continued to buy small items such as lipstick during an economic downturn. That was even when they couldn’t afford far more expensive luxuries such as vacations. In the industry, this is known as the “lipstick index.” Masks appear to have shifted that behavior.

“The lipstick index has been substituted by the moisturizer index,” Fabrizio Freda, chief executive of Estée Lauder, said on the company’s earnings call.

As more women work from home and wear masks when they go out, their desire for color cosmetics such as lipstick and blush has plummeted. It has accelerated two trends in the industry: a focus on skin care and “try-on” technology.

With no clear end date to coronavirus restrictions in sight, makeup sales are likely to remain depressed and will continue to weigh on the results of beauty companies.

Last week, Ulta Beauty Inc. ULTA 1.04% reported that makeup sales, which accounts for about half of the retailer’s revenue, are still below pre-pandemic levels. It declined to 43% of the retailer’s sales in its fiscal second quarter, down 4 percentage points from last year. Despite weak makeup sales, the company posted better-than-expected profit, as consumers made fewer trips to the store but spent more when they shopped. Ulta said it earned 73 cents a share on sales of $1.2 billion, down 28% from a year ago.

Makeup sales were already softening for about the past two years partly because of some consumers’ increasing preference for a more natural look. According to research firm Mintel,  U.S. retail sales of color cosmetics are projected to be down 10.6% in 2020.

A lack of blockbuster makeup trends—such as contouring, which helped boost industry sales about five years ago—hasn’t given consumers much to get excited about. Now, fewer social occasions, remote work and increased demands for women with children are further curbing interest in products.

On its recent fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call, beauty giant Estée Lauder Cos. also pointed to weaker makeup sales. Estée’s makeup sales fell 61%, because of the impact of Covid-19 on consumer preferences, the company reported.

Ulta’s stock has been volatile. Shares sank to $128.52 on March 18 but rebounded to $252.08 on June 5. On Monday, Ulta shares closed down 2% to $232.18.

Estée Lauder shares sank to $144.38 on March 23 but the stock’s rebound has generally been steady since mid-May. Shares closed Monday down 0.54% to $221.72.

For both stocks, and other beauty companies such as Coty Inc., skin care has been a bright spot. Some consumers have used having more time at home to develop skin-care regimens using face creams, lotions and serums.

Burgeoning online sales have also been a growth driver for many beauty companies. Ulta said e-commerce sales soared more than 200% in its fiscal second quarter. The use of technology that enables consumers to virtually “try on” makeup or take makeup classes is also helping these companies stay engaged with consumers online.

Demand for makeup for the coming holiday season may be soft if social distancing curtails in-person parties and consumers’ spending is reduced. In addition, a generally downbeat outlook for travel may continue to dampen makeup sales at airport duty-free stops for the rest of the year, some analysts say.

The hope is that much of this may abate once the pandemic ends. Certain shifts caused by the pandemic are likely to remain, however, especially if changes such as working from home are permanent.

Consumers’ increased appetite for skin-care products is likely to still grow, says Erinn Murphy, managing director at Piper Sandler & Co. Curbside pick up, where customers buy items online and pick them up outside the store, is poised to continue, too.

Still, this sector relies on touch. So long as health and safety concerns persist, consumers may be less likely to try new brands and experiment with new products, analysts say. Without a vaccine, social occasions and fresh innovation, makeup sales are likely to stay depressed.