Lee Heidhues 4.9.2023
“SAN FRANCISCO’S SUCH A HARD CITY TO LIVE IN. PEOPLE CYCLE THROUGH EVERY TWO YEARS.”
Talking about my City.
Standing on my front porch in a quiet part of town this evening I heard someone proclaim loudly as he walked by.
Perhaps we’ve been here too long and we fail to realize it.
Does this make us survivors?
Top photo – Distraught cyclist at memorial for fellow cyclist killed by a speeding motorist April 4, 2023
Lee Heidhues 4.7.2023
San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan has been the worst of the worst trying to Destroy JFK Promenade, the Great Walkway and Slow Streets.
Now she is exploiting the death of beloved cyclist Ethan Boyes near her District to call for bike enhancements in the area where he was cut down by an irresponsible motorist on April 4, 2023.
The Supervisor is disparaged by many cyclists for her strenuous well documented opposition to bike lanes and pedestrian car free thoroughfare.
Three years into her four year term Connie Chan wants to make amends.
No way… During her successful election bid in November 2020 Connie stood with environmentalists and received the endorsement of Sunrise Bay Area. A commitment she completely drove away from once safely parked in office.
This is nothing more than a crass political stunt to boost her reelection bid in 2024. Advocates for car free spaces in San Francisco have not forgotten and will never forget or forgive her well documented car centric advocacy.
Articles excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 4.7.2023
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-officials-look-protected-bike-lanes-near-17884950.php
As friends mourned the death of an elite cyclist struck by a car in San Francisco’s Presidio park, Supervisor Connie Chan called for protected bike lanes on roads leading up to the park’s entrance.
“No one should suffer or die from traffic violence,” Chan said in a statement Friday, days after a USA Cycling Champion Ethan Boyes was stuck and killed by a motorist near Inspiration Point — the latest bike fatality to convulse the city.
“We must be proactive in preventing these tragedies from occurring in the first place, Chan continued. “To that end, I have also requested a District 1 Mobility Study to improve traffic safety and transit connectivity in the District, and I am urging SFMTA to explore the possibility of protective bike lanes on Arguello between Geary and the entrance to the Presidio.”
The U.S. Park Police said Friday that they are still investigating what happened. Officers responded to a collision between a cyclist and a vehicle at Arguello Boulevard, south of Washington Boulevard, at about 4 p.m. Tuesday, public information officer Thomas Twiname said. Medics transported the cyclist to a hospital with life-threatening injuries. He was later pronounced dead. The driver was also transported to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.
U.S. Park Police declined to say whether the driver was arrested or whether drugs or alcohol were involved in the collision.
Jean Fraser, CEO of the Presidio Trust, said the organization’s leaders were heartbroken to learn of Boyes’ death.
Sydney Parcell, right, and Wagner Sousa place a track cycling world champion jersey at a memorial where friend Ethan Boyes was fatally struck by a vehicle Tuesday while cycling along Arguello Boulevard in the Presidio of San Francisco. Parcell, who trained with Boyes, remembered the cyclist for his kindness and humor.
Stephen Lam/The Chroniclehttps://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/ethan-boyes-death-adds-s-f-s-bicycle-fatalities-17884671.php
The death of elite cyclist Ethan Boyes this week angered San Francisco’s cycling community, in part, because it marked the latest tragedy in the growing list of bicyclists killed in the city over the past decade.
Since 2010, there have been 34 bike fatalities in San Francisco — with many of them taking place in the city’s northeast quadrant. A motorist struck and killed Boyes Tuesday while he was cycling on a federally owned stretch of Arguello Boulevard south of Washington Boulevard in the Presidio.
Supervisor Catherine Stefani, whose district includes the Presidio, said in a statement to The Chronicle that she was “devastated” by Boyes’ death and that the corridor “needs to be made safer for all those who use it.”
“This senseless act of traffic violence was totally avoidable, and I urge the U.S. Park Police to hold the driver accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” Stefani said.
Bicyclists, for years, have raised safety concerns traveling along Arguello Boulevard and say they often must navigate speeding traffic. Hundreds of cyclists travel along the corridor’s painted bike lanes which stretch from Golden Gate Park to the Presidio.
Top photo:
A mourner bows during a vigil for Ethan Boyes on Friday at the spot where the cyclist was fatally struck by a car Tuesday. Noah Berger/Special to The Chronicle
Lee Heidhues 4.7.2023
I just read about this film opening today and was immediately riveted watching the Trailer.
My first reaction was to think about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which was blown up last September and continues to be the subject of much speculation as to the perpetrators.
But, no, this is a homegrown fictionalization placed in the category of Art imitates Life.
Definitely not your normal American mall movie nonsense.
Excerpted from The New York Times 4.6.2023
“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is at its best when it functions as a kind of roughed-up caper movie; it has a degree of suspense and efficiency that are becoming all too rare in the mainstream.
Daniel Goldhaber makes the most of potential complications at the pipeline site: a fraying belt, unexpected visitors, a bloody injury that might leave DNA. These are the sort of tactile details on which heist films thrive.
Discussions of the 2021 book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” inevitably note that it does not really contain instructions for blowing up a pipeline, although its author, Andreas Malm, a Swedish academic who has pressed for radical action on the climate crisis, hardly opposes the idea. He argues that the status quo has grown so dire that activists would be foolish not to turn to sabotage, and that peaceful protest alone is unlikely to achieve results quickly enough.
Movies, though, are more of a show-don’t-tell medium, so the screen version of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” directed by Goldhaber (“Cam”), turns Malm’s ideas into the basis for a propulsive heist thriller. Instead of busting into a vault or a museum, the characters conspire to commit an incendiary act that will wreak havoc on oil prices.
Is the film itself, by having heroes some might call eco-terrorists, playing with fire? It certainly has the veneer of being daring. Then again, given the imagination that movies routinely apply to crimes of all sorts, it scarcely seems fair to object to the depiction just because the target is novel or has real-world implications.
Whether or not it convinces you that eco-terrorism is the way to fight climate change, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is masterfully entertaining propaganda.
While the ethics of what they’re doing gets a bare minimum of lip service, don’t expect too much moral soul-searching on any of their parts.
These activists are either certain of the cause’s righteousness, jacked up on the thrill of doing damage, or a combination of both. Despite that, they’re full-bodied personalities for the most part. If our mad world has taught us anything, it’s that true believers are as human as anyone else, and this movie takes that to heart.
Shot with a gritty immediacy on 16mm film (cinematographer Tehillah De Castro has done notable Bruno Mars and Olivia Rodrigo videos) and energized by Gavin Brivik’s electro-percussive score, “Pipeline” applies styles and attitudes from rebellious 1960s and ’70s films to contemporary concerns. Most effectively, the movie is true to that era’s commitment to credible onscreen behavior.
These people seem real, even if their primary motivations are ideological.
Perhaps more than they intended to, Daniel Goldhaber and the actors make the political personal. That’s a triumph of craft over appetites for destruction.
Lee Heidhues 4.6.2023
Following are my comments in the San Francisco Chronicle about the murder of Bob Lee and the apparent callousness of a citizen who could have offered assistance to a dying man.
“If the media reports are correct, is the fact Bob Lee approached a motorist who opened his door. Saw Bob bleeding. Drove away. So much for helping someone in dire need. I wonder how this Loser feels today. All too Typical American response. Don’t get involved. Pathetic. This is a family newspaper. I can’t say what I really think about the individual who fled the scene.”
You won’t see the graphic photos and video of Bob Lee’s final moments readily available in the local San Francisco media.
The San Francisco Standard linked the following DailyMail.com article complete with video and still photos.
It’s chilling and difficult to watch.
Excerpted from DailyMail.com U.K. 4.6.2023
Lee Heidhues 4.4.2023
We watch the BBC everyday on public television and had come to look forward to Laura Trevelyan’s daily 30 minute presentation.
Laura has been missing from the airwaves the past several weeks with a parade of different announcers handling the assignment.
Today I learned why this top level BBC announcer has not been on the air. It looks like we will never see her, again in a broadcast capacity.
Excerpted from The Guardian 3.16.2023
A BBC journalist whose family made history for publicly apologizing for its ownership of more than 1,000 enslaved African people and paying reparation has quit the broadcaster to campaign for reparative justice full-time.
The decision comes after Trevelyan family apologized for ownership of more than 1,000 enslaved African people
Laura Trevelyan and her family travelled to the Caribbean country of Grenada last month to publicly apologize for their family’s role in slavery and announced £100,000 in reparations.
In November, King Charles was reported to have said he was ready to have “active conversations” about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. His goddaughter, Fiona Compton, who is an artist and daughter of former prime minister of St Lucia Sir John Compton, said the king had spoken to her about the way the subject could be better highlighted and acknowledged.
Trevelyan told the Telegraph: “The coronation of the king and his comments about being ready to talk about the legacy of slavery provide an opening for a wider discussion.”
Trevelyan, who said that the £100,000 donation would be drawn from a pending pension payout from the BBC, said she would be quitting the public broadcaster to become a full-time “roving advocate” on the campaign to secure financial reparations for the Caribbean from former colonial powers.
She also said she wanted to work with other families whose ancestors owned enslaved people in the Caribbean and who wanted to make amends.
The Trevelyan family’s apology and reparation was announced alongside Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission. Caricom, or Caribbean Community, is a group of 15 countries in the region.
Trevelyan said that her future work would entail “advocating for Caricom’s reparatory justice agenda”.
Lee Heidhues 4.5.2023
Every Picture Tells a Story
Trump criminal indictment edition
The media was agog on April 4, 2023. The day of Citizen Donald Trump’s indictment by the Manhattan District Attorney on 34 felony charges.
Television and print journalism provided a cornucopia of historic photos and headlines.
Lee Heidhues 4.4.2023
I was genuinely shocked when I saw this article.
Immediately I asked myself, “Why is it necessary for people to slaughter these peaceful animals which have roamed the earth’s surface long before the selfish human race entered the scene.”
Answer, “It’s not.”
Excerpted from The New York Times 4.4.2023
HELENA, Mont. — An unusually harsh winter that buried Yellowstone National Park under a heavy blanket of snow and ice this year pushed a large portion of the park’s bison herd down to lower elevations and out of the park in search of milder climes and food.
Many were stopped from migrating even farther.
For four months, state and federal officials have sanctioned a hunt of the shaggy, humped animals that delight millions of tourists and are a centerpiece of Native American culture and history.
Buffalo Field Campaign, turned out this year to protest the ban on bison migration out of the park onto federal land in Montana. “They are killing one-quarter of the herd,” said Mike Mease, a founder of the organization. “That is insanity.”
Mr. Mease acknowledged the importance of the eight Indigenous tribal hunt, but he criticized what he said was a powerful commercial influence driving the extent of the hunt.
“They wipe out way too many buffalo,” he said. “No other wildlife is treated this way. This is all directed by the Montana livestock industry.”
Billboards sponsored by two environmental groups, Roam Free Nation and Alliance for the Wild Rockies, showcase concerns, with one featuring a photo of a herd of bison and a hunter, and the headline: “There is no hunt. It’s a slaughter.”
Officials said they had no choice but to approve the lengthy culling of the roughly 6,000-member herd as the animals instinctually cross the park boundary onto other public land primarily to the north in Montana’s Paradise Valley, but also west of the park. It is part of a strategy to prevent them from getting near livestock, because some 60 percent of the bison herd carries a disease, brucellosis, that could infect cattle and cause cows to abort their calves.
But in the last several weeks, the scope of the hunt, conducted mainly by members of eight Indigenous tribes, along with other park control measures, has generated more criticism than previous hunts.
As the culling winds down, the record-breaking number of bison removed from Yellowstone’s herd has climbed to more than 1,530 — including hundreds of pregnant females that would have soon been giving birth. Hundreds more were sent out of the park — some to slaughterhouses and about 285 to a quarantine site where they will be held to determine if they are disease-free. The healthy ones will be sent to homes on Native American lands elsewhere.
Top photo – Lee Heidhues – September 2017
Lee Heidhues 4.3.2023
Check out the reader comments in The Chronicle Conversation in response to the federal magistrate’s Order protecting the unhoused in San Francisco.
Depressing to read all the MAGA intolerance crowd on full throated arrogance display in The Chronicle Conversation bloviating once, again.
San Francisco has been woefully negligent in taking care of its unhoused.
All Mayor London Breed’s carrying on about the unhoused and crime being the ruination of San Francisco is just so much boilerplate pandering.
Now that Mayor Breed and the MAGA crowd no longer have Chesa Boudin to Scapegoat the Judiciary is a convenient alternative.
Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle 4.3.2023
The federal magistrate who prohibited San Francisco in December from removing homeless people from encampments without providing them immediate shelter refused to suspend her order Monday while the city appeals it.
It means “San Francisco can’t use its ordinances to criminalize homelessness,” said John Do, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer for the Coalition on Homelessness, the plaintiff in the case.
City officials argued that the Dec. 23 injunction by U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu had put San Francisco in an ”impossible situation,” as City Attorney David Chiu put it in a court filing. He said some people on the streets have refused shelter, others have obtained shelter beds but still choose to live on the streets and Ryu’s order left the city “powerless to do anything in those situations.”
But Ryu said late Monday that the city had failed to show any improvement in the plight of the homeless in San Francisco, or in the city’s overall treatment of them, since her earlier order.
It is still the case, she said, quoting her previous findings, “that ‘San Francisco does not have enough available shelter beds for all homeless San Franciscans,’ falling short ‘by thousands of beds,’ and that ‘homeless San Franciscans have not been able to voluntarily access shelter beds since April 2020’ because waitlists and same-day lines are closed.”
“Despite the opportunity to finally substantiate (city officials’) position that ‘every homeless person is offered shelter before being displaced by the City,’ none of (their) witnesses stated that San Francisco officials offer shelter to every homeless individual before telling them to vacate public property,” Ryu wrote.
And despite San Francisco’s claim that her order prevented the city from keeping its streets safe and clean, Ryu said, since her December injunction, the city has been able to offer “shelter and services” to some encampment residents and to clean areas where encampments are located. That means officials “have found ways to accomplish their public health and safety goals despite the preliminary injunction order,” she said.
The ruling means Ryu’s order will remain in effect during the city’s appeal to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, unless that court grants the city’s request for a stay. Such appeals ordinarily take many months to resolve.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/san-francisco-homeless-sweeps-stay-denied-17876890.php
Top photo – Homeless sleep in plain sight of City Hall
Lee Heidhues 4.2.2023
This is undoubtedly big news in Russia.
A Russian blogger who monitors Putin’s aggression in Ukraine was killed during an explosion at a St. Petersburg cafe, at one time owned by the notorious Wagner Group. The organization which has provided thousands of mercenary conscripts to fight and die in Ukraine.
Predictably the Russian State media is blaming Ukraine for the explosion. An accusation the government in Kyiv emphatically denies.
A detailed New York Times article on the assassination follows the Deutsche Welle report.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 4.2.2023
Vladlen Tatarsky, an influential pro-Russian military blogger, had more than 500,000 followers on Telegram
Well-known Russian military blogger Tatarsky was killed in a blast at a cafe in the Russian city of St. Petersburg on Sunday, Russia’s Interior Ministry said.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote in English online that he believed the attack was domestic terrorism in Russia.
“Spiders are eating each other in a jar.” It’s a Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time Podolyak wrote.
Russian Foreign Ministry condemned the attack in a statement, with spokesperson Maria Zakharova saying bloggers like Tatarsky were regularly threatened by Kyiv.
Zakharova said that the lack of a reaction from western governments “speaks for itself given their ostensible concern for the well-being of journalists and freedom of expression.”
This appeared to be a reference to American journalist Evan Gershkovic, who was arrested and accused of spying earlier this week on charges his employer and the US government have rejected as absurd.
The state Investigative Committee said 19 other people were wounded and that it had opened a murder investigation.
“One person was killed in the incident. He was military correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky,” the Interior Ministry said.
The explosion took place at the Street Food Bar No. 1 cafe that had reportedly at one time belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner mercenary group that is fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, had reportedly invited people to a “patriotic evening” event hosted by Cyber Front Z, a group that refers to itself as “Russia’s information troops.”
“There was a terrorist attack. We took certain security measures, but unfortunately, they were not enough,” the group said on Telegram.
Russia’s TASS news agency quoted a law enforcement source saying the blast was “caused by an improvised explosive device hidden inside a statue given to Tatarsky as a gift.”
It was not immediately clear who was behind the blast. The Interior Ministry said everyone inside the cafe at the time of the incident was being “checked for involvement.”
https://www.dw.com/en/russian-military-blogger-killed-in-st-petersburg-blast/a-65208776
Lee Heidhues 4.1.2023
The following stories will go down in the annals as two of the great miscalls in newspaper history.
That was the mainstream media spin on Thursday morning.
Several hours later. Well. The rest is history.
Excerpted from Associated Press 3.29.2023
NEW YORK (AP) — The Manhattan grand jury investigating hush money paid on Donald Trump’s behalf is scheduled to consider other matters next week before taking a previously scheduled two-week hiatus, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday. That means a vote on whether or not to indict the former president likely wouldn’t come until late April at the earliest.
The break, which was scheduled in advance when the panel was convened in January, coincides with Passover, Easter and spring break for the New York City public school system.
The person who confirmed the grand jury’s schedule was not authorized to speak publicly about secretive grand jury proceedings and did so on condition of anonymity. A message left with the district attorney’s office was not immediately returned.
In a statement released through a lawyer, Trump said: “I HAVE GAINED SO MUCH RESPECT FOR THIS GRAND JURY.”
Excerpted from DailyMail.com 3.29.2023 – Headline
‘This case is going nowhere and Bragg knows it’: Trump’s camp says grand jury month-long hiatus is ‘first step’ in Manhattan DA dropping ‘bogus’ prosecution
Donald Trump’s team is growing increasingly confident that Alvin Bragg will drop his case, and think the grand jury’s month-long break in hearing evidence is the ‘first step’ in the process.
Sources close to Trump told DailyMail.com on Wednesday afternoon that they believe the stall is the first step in a walk-back by Bragg’s office.
‘The case is going nowhere and Bragg knows it,’ said one.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11916411/Manhattan-Trump-grand-jury-set-break-month.html
Top photo – Donald Trump and his accuser, Stormy Daniels
Lee's Perspective 