Civil rights leader applauds SF DA Boudin for prosecuting law breaking cops.

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.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/man-suing-sfpd-alleging-officers-beat-him-with-batons/

“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.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/DA-Boudin-files-criminal-charges-against-SFPD-15801780.php

Photos – SF Examiner

Rest in Peace. John le Carré, spy chronicler extraordinaire, dies aged 89

It’s a foggy rainy drippy afternoon in San Francisco. Similiar to London where John le Carre set many of his novels.

Throughout my life I have read most of his work. He will be sadly missed.

My favorite amongst John Le Carre’s 25 fiction novels is The Little Drummer Girl, published in 1983.

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

Guardian of London 12.13.2020

John le Carré, who forged thrillers from equal parts of adventure, moral courage and literary flair, has died aged 89.

Le Carré explored the gap between the west’s high-flown rhetoric of freedom and the gritty reality of defending it, in novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager, which gained him critical acclaim and made him a bestseller around the world.

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.”

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.

john-lecarre-vi-12.13.2020.jpg

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.”

john-lecarre-iii-12.13.2020.jpg

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.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/13/john-le-carre-author-of-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-dies-aged-89

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Carr%C3%A9

A walk at the trailhead of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA)

Every Picture Tells a Story – Ongoing Series

Jack and I took a walk near our house where the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), over 40,000 acres in San Francisco and Marin begins.

Photos – Lee Heidhues 12.12.2020

Supreme Court quashes lawsuit filed by Republican diehards to rescue The Loser

Happily the Supreme Court quickly rejected Trump’s latest far fetched attempt to thwart the will of the voters.

Lost in the relief felt by reasonably minded people is the sad fact that two Justices, Samuel Alioto and Clarence Thomas, would have taken the case.

1991 – Then Senate Judiciary Chairman Joe Biden and then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas

Excerpted from New York Times 12.10.2020

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an audacious lawsuit by Texas that had asked the court to throw out the presidential election results in four battleground states captured by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The court, in a brief unsigned order, said Texas lacked standing to pursue the case, saying it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”

The move, coupled with a one-sentence order on Tuesday turning away a similar request from Pennsylvania Republicans, signaled that the court has refused to be drawn into President Trump’s losing campaign to overturn the results of the election last month.

There will continue to be scattered litigation brush fires around the nation from Mr. Trump’s allies, but as a practical matter the Supreme Court’s action puts an end to any prospect that Mr. Trump will win in court what he lost at the polls.

(ORDER LIST: 592 U.S.)
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2020
ORDER IN PENDING CASE
155, ORIG. TEXAS V. PENNSYLVANIA, ET AL.
The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of
complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of
the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially
cognizable interest in the manner in which another State
conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed
as moot.
Statement of Justice Alito, with whom Justice Thomas joins:
In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a
bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original
jurisdiction. See Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. ___
(Feb. 24, 2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting). I would therefore
grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not
grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.

Back in the USSR. Thieves Break Into Russia’s Nuclear War ‘Doomsday’ Jet

The Mad Maxdome

Dr. Strangelove flight of the week.

Back in the USSR. Boys with toys, again.

Excerpted from Popular Mechanics 12.10.2020

Thieves broke into a Russian military Il-80 transport plane and made off with more than three dozen pieces of communications equipment.
The Il-80 is specially designed to carry Russia’s president and general staff during a nuclear war, keeping them safe.
The jet is also designed to allow Russia’s leadership to maintain secure communications with its nuclear forces.

A Russian military aircraft designed to allow the country’s leadership to survive and fight a nuclear war has been crippled, the victim of a particularly brazen burglary. Thieves stole 39 pieces of communications equipment from the Ilyushin Il-80 aircraft, nicknamed “Maxdome” by NATO.

The incident took place at the Beriev Taganrog Aviation Scientific and Technical Complex, outside the Russian city of Rostov. Inspectors noticed an open hatch leading inside the plane and soon discovered the equipment was missing.

The Ilyushin Il-80 strategic airborne command post is a modified Il-86 widebody passenger jet converted for military use. Four airplanes were converted, with one reserved for use by the Russian president. The remaining three planes belong to Special Air Group Rossiya and are meant to carry members of the Russian General Staff.

A weighty matter. Pandemic stay at home is fattening up the German population

Germans have gained weight during the nine month Pandemic. Forced to remain sheltered and being unable to exercise has caused a spike in weight gain amongst the food loving Germans.

Beer, bratwurst and bread consumption has spiked amongst the well endowed citizens of Deutschland.

Should a survey be taken amongst the terribly obese American public the findings would undoubtedly be worse.

Deutsche Welle 12.9.2020

A year of lockdowns and working from home appear to be taking their toll on Germans’ waistlines. A new study on health in the country notes an increase in weight gain since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Germans have gained weight since the country went into lockdown in the spring. That’s according to a new study on the state of health in the country published on Wednesday by Germany’s disease agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI).

The report outlines how measures introduced to curb the spread of the deadly coronavirus have also had negative effects on the health of the German populace.

Lubeck, Germany Chocolate Shop

Photo – Lee Heidhues

The study found that from April to August, Germans gained an average of around 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), citing an increase in unhealthy eating, among other changes in daily behavior as a result of pandemic-related restrictions.

The RKI also noted that fewer people visited their doctors, both general practitioners and specialists, during the first lockdown in the spring. Germans have apparently “increasingly abstained from using medical services,” the study’s authors wrote. German hospitals also postponed many elective procedures in order to maintain space for a potential surge in COVID-19 patients.

Some 23,000 people in Germany aged 15 and older were surveyed via telephone from April 2019 to September of this year.

The study did not confirm initial fears that the pandemic or measures to contain it would lead to a rise in psychological disorders.

“No differences were found among the general population in terms of depression symptoms or the support received and provided in the household,” the studies authors said.

However, the RKI emphasized that there was “no unified picture” of the overall health situation in Germany and that further study was necessary.

There was also a decrease in the number of people smoking tobacco, but whether that is tied to the pandemic was unclear.

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-germans-gaining-weight-during-pandemic/a-55880622

It was 40 years ago when The Music Stopped

We were living on 38^th Avenue in San Francisco.

This is the song I heard when I turned on NPR Morning Edition the morning after John Lennon was murdered.

I had a flu and went to bed around 7PM the night before and slept through the night.

I awoke to this…

I knew what happened the moment I heard the song at 7AM and then Bob Edwards came on the air…

All the photos are from the Time Magazine issue I have kept the past 40 years.

Trump crushed. Supremes trash absurd and futile bid to block Biden presidency

It was only one sentence and the Supreme Court Order was a unanimous 9-0.

(ORDER LIST: 592 U.S.)
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2020
ORDER IN PENDING CASE
20A98 KELLY, MIKE, ET AL. V. PENNSYLVANIA, ET AL.
The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice
Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.

Trump’s latest absurd bid to thwart of the 81,000,000 Americans who voted for the Biden-Harris team has been totally smashed.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will take office in 43 days. January 20, 2021 at noon.

Wall Street Journal 12.8.2020

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a last-ditch Republican request to block President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania, dealing another blow to supporters of President Trump who have contested the Nov. 3 election across the country.

The court, in a routine one-sentence order, denied a bid by a Pennsylvania congressman and other Republicans who were pressing an emergency challenge to the state’s vote-by-mail system, enacted by its legislature in 2019.

“The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied,” the order said.

The lawsuit asked that either all the 2.5 million mail-in ballots cast be thrown out, or that the courts erase Mr. Biden’s victory and direct the state’s GOP-controlled legislature to choose the winner of the state’s 20 electoral votes.

As is its custom in emergency orders, the court offered no reasoning in rejecting the challenge. No justice noted a dissent to the Supreme Court’s order.

Mr. Trump has said he believed the Supreme Court would eventually decide the election, and his campaign has pledged to take a case before the justices —three of whom were appointed by Mr. Trump—but it hasn’t done so. The case on Tuesday before the high court didn’t involve the Trump campaign as a litigant.

Fascist thugs and stone cold losers intimidate Michigan chief of elections

The group of nihilistic deplorables who descended on the home of Michigan’s Secretary of State are the absolute worst of the incorrigibles.

It is people like this band of fools that foisted Trump on America.

This country is now reaping the whirlwind of putting such a dangerous, befuddled clown into the White House.

Happily, in 43 days Trump will slither away into the swamp of exile.

Excerpted from Detroit Free Press 12.6.2020

A couple of dozen protesters gathered in front of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s home Saturday night shouting through megaphones against the certification of the election and demanding a forensic audit.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson

A portion of the demonstration was broadcast live on Facebook around 9:30 p.m. The protesters are seen walking up to Benson’s Detroit home, some wearing President Donald Trump paraphernalia and carrying American flags.

“We are over here in the fricking dead of night, man,” Genevieve Peters, who posted the live video, said as she walked to the house. “We are letting her know that we’re not taking this bullshit election, we are not standing down, we are not giving up you are not going to take this election from a man that has earned it completely 100% by a freaking landslide. Let me tell you: This ain’t over.”

Trump falsely claims that he won the election in Michigan when in fact he lost the state by more than 154,000 votes. Rudy Giuliani appeared before the Michigan House Oversight Committee Wednesday during which he spent more than three hours asking questions of witnesses who accompanied him to the hearing as a means to present what the Trump campaign deems to be evidence of fraud, but was largely conspiracy and misinformation.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/12/06/protesters-jocelyn-bensons-home-after-dark-oppose-certification/3850654001/

Oil drilling off Alaskan coast not going to happen, Federal appeals court rules

A Federal Appeals Court in San Francisco has unanimously called a halt to oil drilling off the Alaskan coast on Federal lands. This environmentally catastrophic plan is dead in the water.

The incoming Biden Administration will ensure that another attempt to destroy the environment by the soon to end Trump regime is buried PERMANENTLY.

San Francisco Chronicle 12.7.2020

The ruling is “a huge victory for polar bears and our climate,” said attorney Kristen Monsell of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups challenging the Trump administration’s approval. “This project was a disaster waiting to happen.”

“In the face of a worsening climate crisis, the federal government should not be in the business of approving irresponsible offshore oil development in the Arctic,” said attorney Jeremy Lieb of Earthjustice. “The world cannot afford to develop new oil prospects anywhere, but especially in the Arctic where warming is already taking such a significant toll.”

The Trump administration’s approval of oil drilling off the northeast coast of Alaska, the first offshore drilling project to be entirely in federal waters, was rejected Monday by a federal appeals court, which said the government failed to assess a potential increase in greenhouse gas emissions or describe any plans to protect endangered polar bears.

The Interior Department granted approval in 2018 to Hilcorp Alaska for plans to extract oil from beneath the Beaufort Sea. The company called it the Liberty project and said it hoped to produce 120 million barrels of oil over 15 to 20 years.

The oil would be drilled from a newly constructed nine-acre gravel island, then pumped ashore underwater. Beaufort Bay is home to numerous endangered or threatened species, including six species of whales, three species of seals, sea otters and Pacific walruses, as well as polar bears, but federal officials said none would be threatened by the project.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also said the project would not increase global warming from greenhouse gases, because rejecting it would reduce oil supplies and encourage drilling elsewhere.

But in a suit by conservation groups, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Monday the government’s explanations were unconvincing.

The government offered only “noncommittal assurances” that were “too vague to enforce,” Judge Richard Paez said. He also said the assessment did not mention other potential harm to polar bears, short of extinction, or say what would be done to prevent it.

The project would increase global oil supplies and thus reduce prices, Judge Paez said in the 3-0 ruling ordering officials to take a new look at the plans. “Once prices drop, foreign consumers will buy and consume more oil. … Emissions resulting from the foreign consumption of oil are surely a ‘reasonably foreseeable’ indirect effect of drilling at Liberty,” an effect that federal officials ignored, he said.

In the government’s assessment of potential environmental effects, the Fish and Wildlife Service said polar bears, a threatened species, lived in the area of the drilling project. The agency said the project was not likely to threaten their existence or harm their habitat, but failed to say what it would do to protect them, the court said.

Lawyers for the administration and Hilcorp Alaska did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The company could appeal the ruling even if the incoming Biden administration changes the government’s position in the case.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Oil-drilling-off-Alaskan-coast-not-going-to-15782925.php#photo-20355184

Photos – SF Examiner

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