Liz and Lee Heidhues 2.9.2022

Tuesday evening we arrived at Chase Center in high anticipation of seeing the Icelandic icon Björk for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Liz and I went through the obligatory myriad security checks. Once inside we approached an Usher to ask directions to our seats. Instead of directions the Usher, Titus, informed us he was upgrading our seats to sit on the main floor of Chase Center in close proximity to the stage. Amazing! To receive this prize.

Our seats were in Row 1 of a raised section looking directly onto the stage and behind Bjőrk’s three-man technical crew with multiple screens and sound systems. It was not a sellout in all likelihood to the requirement to present proof of vaxxed and boosted.  A good-sized crowd waited in anticipation of the Icelandic muse.  The show started 30 minutes late to allow everyone to be seated. It was worth the wait.

The choreography, the visuals, the music …. Bjőrk.

It is impossible for me, technologically challenged, to describe the visuals, the acoustics, the incredible light acrobatics, the music and Bjőrk. It all synched.

Prior to the Performance, Bjőrk made it abundantly clear to the audience that she preferred we refrain from taking pictures and video, reminding the crowd it is very distracting. Bjőrk’s fans respectfully complied.

The most stunning was a 10-minute piece one hour into the extravaganza. It was a jangled montage of bodies and colors, mostly blood red. It was Dystopian to say the least. A powerful musical creation about the destruction we are wreaking upon the planet, ourselves, and ancient pagan mythologies. The intertwining of the bodies blended themselves into the most bizarre tapestries.

Bjőrk was exotically dressed in a white feathered outfit and dazzling platform shoes as she stomped about the stage in her unique vocal style, whipping her collaboration of vocalists and instrumentalists into an unforgettable performance. The crowd went wild. The applause and screams of the audience rose and fell.

The Performance lasted 1 hour 45 minutes. The entire production was extremely disciplined.

I keep asking myself how Bjőrk has so much creativity. She projected onto the stage an appearance by Swedish 19 year old environmentalist Greta Thunberg who scolded the world – leaders and public – about the future of our endangered planet and the horrors of climate change.

It’s more than Music. Bjőrk. A musical conscience about the strange beauty of Planet Earth and what we are doing in our heedless path of its destruction.  

Accompanied  with her supporting cast of flutists, drummers, and vocalists Bjőrk’s concert “Cornucopia” was a memorable experience!

Björk Guðmundsdóttir OTF (/ˈbjɜːrk/ BYURK; Icelandic: [pjœr̥k ˈkvʏðmʏntsˌtouʰtɪr̥] (listen); born 21 November 1965) is an Icelandic singer, songwriter, composer, record producer and actress. Over her four-decade career, she has developed an eclectic musical style that draws on influences and genres including electronic, pop, jazz, experimental, trip hop, alternative, classical, and avant-garde music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rk

Review: Climate dread fuels Björk’s dazzling ‘Cornucopia’ in San Francisco

Lee Heidhues 2.7.2022

The mainstream media in America continues to beat the drums of Russian aggression in Ukraine and rev up the Cold War anti-Communist hysteria which gripped the USA for decades.

It’s fair to say that American mainstream media is a government vehicle to promote the party line. Particularly when it comes to the Big Power rivalry.

The People’s World definitely has a pro Russian bias. It’s articles are laced with commentary about “Nazis” and “Fascists” governing Ukraine and the Russians are simply upholding their territorial integrity.

The following should be read with a dose of skepticism. Still, it’s worthwhile to read the party line from the other side.

Excerpted from People’s World 2.7.2022

Over the weekend, on Saturday, Americans heard on corporate news media reports that anonymous U.S. government officials confirmed the Russians are “70 percent ready” for an immediate invasion of Ukraine. Only a day later, they heard that the invasion, which had been described as almost a certainty, would come instead in late February when the ground in Ukraine is frozen enough so that Russian tanks won’t sink in the mud.

Also this weekend, more stories appeared in the media about Germany allegedly harming the “unity” of NATO. Germany has continued to refuse to forego Nord Stream 2, a pipeline designed to carry Russian gas to that country at a time when it needs the gas to meet its energy needs.

The new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, leads a party that has often called for cooperation with rather than confrontation with Russia. Scholz met with President Joe Biden on Monday, who was expected to turn up the pressure on Germany to get in line with Washington’s war message.

The supposedly pending invasion, described as imminent since last December, still fails to materialize.

The media topped this with an even worse scare story coming from U.S. “intelligence”—a claim that as many as 50,000 Ukrainians could die and as many as one million could become refugees flooding into Poland and other countries in Europe when the Russians invade.

As for Ukrainians being killed, the reality ignored by the media is that tens of thousands have already died, but those have been killed by Ukrainian government forces and fascist organizations allied with it attacking people in Eastern Ukraine. There, separatists have been trying to establish two small autonomous republics under the terms of an agreement reached with the Ukrainian government in 2014. Ukraine has reneged on that treaty and instead continues its assaults in the east.

As for refugees, there have been tens of thousands of them already, but they’re not people fleeing a Russian invasion. Instead, they are Russian-speaking Ukrainians fleeing into Russia to escape the Ukrainian military and its allied fascist militias. In order to alleviate that refugee crisis and simultaneously help protect the population in the east, the Russian-speaking Ukrainians have been granted the Russian passports they have demanded. The hope is that this “escape route” will give them the safety and confidence to stay in their homes in Ukraine unless or until it becomes absolutely necessary.

U.S. continues to foment war hysteria in Ukraine crisis

Lee Heidhues 2.6.2022

The California city of Woodside is roaring with its policy that housing cannot be constructed where mountain lions have lived since long before humans occupied the land.

It’s too much to expect the Attorney General, who deals with paperwork and arcane legal doctrine, to admit that humans are destroying the planet and  the Woodside policy is in no way radical.  

Protecting endangered species makes sense in this era of climate change. It’s going to take a lot of tough love to realize limits must be set and the avaricious human race will be forced to change its ways.

I say let’s give a shout out to Woodside and its feline population.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 2.6.2022

 A Jan. 27 memo by the Woodside town planner, Jackie Young, that declared that because the entire town is in a region that is habitat for mountain lions, Woodside would not issue any permits for SB9 construction pending a California Fish and Game Commission ruling as to whether the animal will be listed as an endangered species.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta sternly rebuked the Peninsula town of Woodside on Sunday for using its mountain lion population as an excuse to avoid SB9, the state law that lowers construction barriers in a bid to ease the housing crunch. He said his office would not “stand idly by” and let the policy go forward.

“Woodside declared its entire suburban town a mountain lion sanctuary in a deliberate and transparent attempt to avoid complying with SB9,” Bonta said in reference to the new law that allows lot splits and construction of accessory dwelling units to encourage construction.

“This memorandum is — quite clearly — contrary to the law, and ironically, contrary to the best interests of the mountain lions the town claims to want to protect,” Bonta stated.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/State-attorney-general-threatens-Woodside-for-16837159.php

Lee Heidhues 2.4.2022

A German pollster has taken a look at how German voters are feeling two months after the new Coalition government took office. A partnering of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP).  Voters are disapproving of the new government which is dealing with the Pandemic, a fragile economy and the tension over Ukraine.

What is more intriguing is that by a large majority all spectrums of political thought in Germany oppose weapons being given to Ukraine. The comments of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock earlier in the year that Germans don’t want  to provide  weapons that could be used to kill Russians is shown in the poll results.

The memory of the Nazi regime invading Russia in 1941 and the resultant slaughter on both sides still impacts Germany.

https://www.dw.com/en/why-germany-refuses-weapons-deliveries-to-ukraine/a-60483231

Germany’s stance regarding Ukraine is heresy to American political leadership where the Mainstream Media is beating the drums to take a strong stance against Russia.

The Wall Street Journal has been particularly critical of the German government, labeling them a weak ally and a country which can no longer be depended on to look out for Western interests.

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 2.4.2022

“Where is Olaf Scholz?” That’s a question that has been circulating on social media in Germany since the beginning of the year.

Whether it’s about arms deliveries to Ukraine, the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in China, the debate about introducing a general vaccine mandate to combat the COVID pandemic or measures against galloping inflation figures — the chancellor seems all but invisible, his statements seem vague.

This negatively impacted his approval ratings in the latest survey by pollster Infratest Dimap, in which 1,339 individuals across the country were polled by telephone (876) or online (463) between January 31 and February 2.

Only 43% of respondents said they were satisfied with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. One month ago that figure still stood at 60%.

The majority of respondents side with the German government and oppose arms deliveries to Ukraine, and only 43% are in favor of economic sanctions against Russia. The respondents were split on the question of whether NATO should issue security guarantees to Russia. There is more sympathy with Russia in eastern Germany, the part of the country that until 1990 was the communist East German GDR and a staunch ally of the government in Moscow.

Top photo.  German Foreign Minister Baerbock with US Secretary of State Tony Blinken

https://www.dw.com/en/new-german-government-sees-drop-in-opinion-polls/a-60652398

Lee Heidhues 2.3.2022

The battle for holding San Francisco’s notoriously abusive Police Department is reaching critical mass.  The Chief of Police has summarily withdrawn the Department from the agreement that has given the District Attorney responsibility for investigating police use-of-forces cases.

Why?

The incumbent District Attorney Chesa Boudin is adhering to the letter the terms of the agreement and the cops don’t like it.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association will leave no rhetorical stone unturned and will spend whatever monies it takes to try and unseat Boudin in the June 7 recall.

This unilateral action by the Chief of Police is just one skirmish in the political warfare enveloping San Francisco between the lock ’em up law and order crowd and those who are fighting for progressive justice embodied by Chesa Boudin.

Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle 2.3.3022

San Francisco’s two most powerful law enforcement officials on Thursday deepened a rift that threatens police reform in the city, trading accusations over Police Chief Bill Scott’s move to sever an agreement that makes the District Attorney’s Office the lead investigative agency in police use-of-force cases.

District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Thursday that it was “no coincidence” that Scott made the decision just days before the beginning of a trial in which San Francisco police Officer Terrance Stangel is accused of needlessly beating a man with a baton — the first of a handful of police use-of-force cases Boudin plans to bring in front of juries.

“Chief Scott’s sudden announcement should alarm the public and everyone who has called for police reform in San Francisco and across the country,” said city Public Defender Mano Raju. “We can no longer permit the police to police themselves.”

San Francisco police-reform advocates began pushing for changes years ago, efforts that took on greater urgency after officers’ killing of Mario Woods in the Bayview neighborhood in 2015. A core contention of reformers is that police officers cannot be entrusted to lead investigations into their own colleagues.

Boudin, who ran for district attorney on a promise of police accountability, is pursuing five criminal cases against six police officers, including Stangel.

San Francisco Police Commissioner John Hamasaki said he was outraged by Scott’s decision, arguing that he should have consulted the commission before pulling out of the agreement and that “we would figure out how to fix it.” Instead, Hamasaki said, Scott went public, conveying the message that the case was “brought wrongfully, and that the jurors should view the … prosecution with suspicion.”

Scott maintained that he had the power to pull out of the agreement unilaterally if necessary.

Thomas “Tip” Mazzucco, a former police commissioner and former prosecutor who helped craft the first agreement between police and Boudin’s predecessor, George Gascón, said it was important for the public to have trust in police use-of-force investigations, and said he hoped the agreement could be preserved

“Unfortunately, the key here is that there’s a lack of integrity, and integrity has been lost,” he said. “As prosecutors, we’re held to a much higher standard.”

By design, making the D.A.’s Office the lead investigator makes police officers uncomfortable, said John Alden, the former head of the Independent Investigations Bureau that Gascón began building in 2016 to investigate police shootings, in-custody deaths and serious uses of force. The nature of an investigation, he said, is to withhold information from the person being scrutinized — an unsettling change for a public agency long accustomed to investigating itself.

Alden, who helped negotiate an earlier version of the agreement before he left the D.A.’s Office in 2019 to run the Community Police Review Agency in Oakland, said, “It’s inevitable that this conflict was going to happen — there’s just no two ways about it.”

The chief’s decision, though, was applauded Thursday by the head of the union that represents rank-and-file officers, the San Francisco Police Officers Association. Tony Montoya said the move may help to buoy sagging morale among officers, who he said have felt unsupported by the department’s top brass.

“Put it this way: No one’s called me and said it was a bad idea to get out,” Montoya said, adding that an upcoming special meeting where union members planned “to discuss leadership within the SFPD” had been postponed.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-police-chief-D-A-Boudin-widen-rift-on-eve-16830599.php

Top photo – San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin discusses a widening rift with the police department during a news conference Thursday.

Noah Berger/Special to The Chronicle

Lee Heidhues 2.2.2022

Tim Redmond, publisher of 48 Hills, has done a dive into the most recent financial disclosures in the effort to Recall San Francisco’s progressive DA Chesa Boudin.

The Recall campaign hired mercenaries to qualify the measure for the ballot, spending $1,4000,000. Mercenaries, many of them from outside California, were housed, fed and well compensated for each signature.

Absent these mercenaries the DA Recall never would have qualified for the ballot.

This Recall is no mom and pop effort. It is a well orchestrated effort by the most extreme right wing cadres in this country to pull off an electoral coup d’etat.

The most shocking finding. Only $150,000 has been raised by small local contributions. The massive balance are contributions from super wealthy individuals and dark money Political Action Committees  attempting to subvert democracy and bring down San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney.

Mercenary signature gatherer – June 2021

Excerpted from 48 Hills – Tim Redmond – 2.2.2022

The latest financial disclosure forms for this spring’s elections  were filed with the city and the state yesterday, and some of the information is just stunning. Not surprising, I suppose, but stunning.

William Oberndorf, The big GOP donor and support of Mitch McConnell, has now put more than $600,000—including an unusual donation of roughly $300,000 in stock—into the campaign to recall Chesa Boudin.

If you take out all the contributions from the multi-millionaires, the campaign has only raised about $150,000. That wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of paid signature-gathering, which came in at more than $1 million.

The message: Twenty rich people have paid to put this recall on the ballot. (Let’s be serious—for $1 million you can get almost anything on the ballot in San Francisco.) They are pretty much funding the entire campaign.

That money to the recall campaign is all flowing through a separate organization called Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, created to defeat progressives for supervisor in 2020. It’s now by far the primary source of funding for the recall.

In fact, records on filed with the Secretary of State’s Office show that Neighbors—and an affiliated dark-money nonprofit by the same name that doesn’t disclose its donors—made up almost 80 percent of the $1.4 million going into San Franciscans for Public Safety, the main recall group.

And the vast majority of the Neighbors money comes from 20 donors, most of them very rich. Some of them don’t live in San Francisco.

Virtually all of them made their money in tech, venture capital, or real estate.

Top photo: DA Chesa Boudin being sworn into office by Mayor London Breed as his wife Dr. Valerie Block looks on 1.8.2020

Big, big millionaire money is almost entirely funding the Boudin recall

It’s been 10 years since Trayvon Martin was gunned down by a gun toting white man whose defense was “Stand your ground.”

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

Nothing much has changed. Cops and entitled white people continue to gun down black people with impunity. It’s true there is the occasional exception to the rule when the evidence is clear and public outrage is so strident that the killers face the consequences for their horrific acts.

It was all very trendy for white people to march and flount their Black Lives Matter bling and regalia. That was two years ago. The wanton abuse of Black people in America continues unabated.

June 2020 – Marching on JFK Drive in San Francisco after George Floyd murder by a cop.

It’s the exception in America where cops and racism rule.

Excerpted from New York Magazine The Cut – Brittney Cooper 1.31.2022

In 1892, at the height of the lynching crisis, Ida B. Wells proclaimed that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.

When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.”

The critical point for me in Wells’s manifesto for Black self-defense is not her overarching respect for the power of guns.

It is her observation about where the aggression begins. Losing that thread of the argument, about who actually starts the fights, is the reason so much white aggression is seamlessly restyled as the right to “stand one’s ground,” to protect and defend one’s kith and kin. Conversely,

Black self-defense is transposed into an act of unjustified aggression and met with fire and fury by both the state and self-deputized white citizens.

There is an earnestness to Black Lives Matter. A kind of barefaced removing of the gloves and the pugilism.

Perhaps this is an homage to Trayvon Martin, who in his last moments was meandering through his father’s girlfriend’s neighborhood, chatting on the phone with his friend Rachel, unconcerned, as all young people should have the freedom to be, with the monster lurking in the bushes.

To this earnestness, the aggressors, who still are almost always white, have responded with cynicism, obfuscation, and gun sales. George Zimmerman added to the chorus by successfully auctioning for $250,000 the gun he had used to kill Martin.

Top photo – Activist Ieshia Evans in July 2016, in Louisiana. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/REUTERS

The Nazis burned books in 1930’s Germany.

School district in Tennessee doesn’t burn books. It bans them. Political book bannning in 21st century America catches fire as an increasingly intolerant neo-Nazi sentiment spreads its toxicity over the country.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/book-burning

Video link of Josef Goebbels exhorting Nazis to burn books

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/asset/f7811d94-5161-4db1-9f1c-9964c49f4553?t=1498195638

Excerpted from The Tennessean 1.24.2022

A Tennessee school board’s decision to remove Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Maus” from its curriculum has drawn international attention, including coverage from CNN, BBC and Times of Israel.

The McMinn County School Board voted 10-0 to ban the book in a Jan. 10 meeting, citing concerns over “rough” language and a nude drawing of a woman, according to meeting minutes posted to the district website. The book was part of its eighth-grade English language arts curriculum.

The book, written by comic artist Art Spiegelman, is a graphic novel that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland. It follows them through their internment in Auschwitz. Nazis are portrayed as cats, while Jewish people are shown as mice. The novel also includes conversations between Spiegelman and his elderly father as he convinces him to tell his story.

The book was published in 1986, and Spiegelman was awarded a Pulitzer for it in 1992.

“The values of the county are understood,” McMinn County Director of Schools Lee Parkison said during the meeting. “There is some rough, objectionable language in this book.”

School board debates ‘Maus’ removal, defends decision

Eight “curse words” and the nude drawing were at the forefront of the concerns over the book, according to the board minutes.

Board member Tony Allman said he was also concerned about scenes in the book where mice were hung from trees and children were killed. The book also depicts suicide.

“Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” he said. “It is not wise or healthy.”

Instructional supervisor Julie Goodin, a former history teacher, said that she believes the book represents the brutality of the Holocaust.

“There is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history,” she said.

The school board released a statement Thursday afternoon defending its decision, citing the “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide” in the book.

“Taken as a whole, the Board felt this work was simply too adult-oriented for use in our schools,” part of the statement read.

As news spread about the school board’s decision, the US Holocaust Museum posted about “Maus” on Twitter Wednesday.

“Maus has played a vital role in educating about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors,” the post read. “On the eve of International #HolocaustRemembranceDay, it is more important than ever for students to learn this history. Teaching about the Holocaust using books like Maus can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.”

Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee) released a statement Thursday condemning the board’s decision, calling it reminiscent of the Scopes Monkey Trial. The 1925 trial centered on young high school teacher John Thomas Scopes, who was accused of violating state law by teaching evolution.

Cohen, who is Jewish, helped create the Tennessee Holocaust Commission and has been an advocate for Holocaust education in schools and other institutions.

“Art Spiegelman’s novel opens minds to the history of the Nazi genocide we’re remembering on today’s anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in 1945,” Cohen said. “I look forward to seeing the school board decision reversed.”

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2022/01/27/tennessee-school-board-removes-holocaust-mausart-spiegelman/9237260002/