Not only are some cops a danger to people of color and marginalized citizens.
Turns out the cops behind the wheel present a clear and present danger to California’s protected mountain lion population.
The cop who hit the mountain lion needs to be declawed.
Hopefully the mountain lion is alright.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The increasing number of pedestrians, cyclists and now a mountain lion hit by careless drivers is growing to epidemic proportions. Something must be done to stop the carnage on our streets and roadways.
San Francisco Chronicle 11.7.2021
A mountain lion bounding across a suburban highway in San Mateo was struck by an oncoming police patrol vehicle late Saturday, officials said.
It was unclear how badly the animal was wounded. When the officer got out of the vehicle, the mountain lion was gone, San Mateo police said.
The San Mateo officer reported hitting the animal about 10:25 p.m. Saturday on Highway 92 near the Hillsdale Boulevard exit, an area with a mix of suburban homes and open space. He was driving east and the mountain lion was running across the lanes of traffic, heading left to right, according to a department press release.
The officer tried to stop before hitting the mountain lion, and the impact damaged the patrol vehicle, leaving “patches of animal hair,” police said.
Mountain lions live throughout much of California and multiple sightings have been reported this year in the Bay Area.
A mountain lion spotted near an elementary school last month in Sonoma County put several campuses on lockdown while authorities trapped and tranquilized the animal. In late September, residents of Daly City were urged to be cautious outside after a mountain lion was spotted prowling city streets.
Each year Barack Obama provides a list of his favorite books from the preceding year. On the 2020 list is Klara and the Sun. After waiting several weeks for it to become available at the San Francisco Public Library I became thoroughly engrossed from beginning to end.
The story by Nobel Prize winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro is very personal, heartfelt and a warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Something I have thought about since the release of the original Blade Runner in 1982.
40 years later AI has become a part of everyday life. Klara and the Sun tells a story about AI and its relationship with humanity in a very down to earth and thought provoking fashion.
It was well worth the wait for the novel.
Excerpted from The New York Review of Books 10.14.2021
Completed just before the pandemic, the novel Klara and the Sun is eerily prescient, taking place in a future where jobs are in decline, social conflict is on the rise, and children increasingly stay at home, taking virtual classes over their “oblongs.” It depicts isolating times of technologically mediated distances and dwindling material resources.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Enter Kazuo Ishiguro’s eponymous narrator, Klara, a solar-powered robot programmed to be an Artificial Friend (AF) to a human child.
When Klara and the Sun begins, Klara has not yet found her human. Or rather her human has not yet found her: “It’s for the customer to choose the AF,” chides the manager of the store where Klara and other robots are sold, “never the other way round.”
This rebuke comes after Klara refuses, Bartleby-like, to engage yet another interested buyer—a demurral, the manager correctly suspects, based on Klara’s belief that she has already promised herself to a fourteen-year-old girl named Josie. “Children make promises all the time,” the manager informs Klara. “But more often than not, the child never comes back. Or worse, the child comes back and ignores the poor AF who’s waited, and instead chooses another.”
This becomes one of many lessons Klara picks up during her time inside the store. Unlike Ishiguro’s other narrators, who carry the historical trauma of, say, war or fascism, Klara begins as a blank slate. Here are the novel’s opening lines:
When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside—the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists, Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building.
It’s for the customer to choose the Artificial Friend.
Kazuo Ishiguro was a social worker before he was a novelist.
Between 1979 and 1982, he worked at West London Cyrenians, a charity that provided support and accommodations to the homeless. While there he applied, rather on a whim, to a new creative writing program at the University of East Anglia. Upon graduating a year later, Ishiguro returned to Cyrenians. He tried to wake up early and write for ninety minutes before work, but found this increasingly difficult as his job grew more demanding. Luckily an editor at Faber had already bought his first novel. Published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills was a notable success, earning him a Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and a place on Granta’s list of Best Young British Novelists. Then twenty-eight years old, Ishiguro quit his day job in order to write full time.
Though Ishiguro has said in more than one interview that working with the homeless influenced his fiction, he has also been careful not to write about his social work directly. This is in part because, as he admitted a few years ago, “I always felt vaguely guilty that I learned so much [then] that helped me in my fiction writing.”
Yet social work is an implicit theme throughout his fiction. From his first novel to his eighth and latest, Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro considers what it means to care for and attend to others, and what happens when that attention gets abused, withdrawn, or distorted. The emotional labor of care—and care institutionalized as labor—forms a repeating central drama around which Ishiguro’s plots turn, regardless of the genre he is writing in.
In The Remains of the Day (1989) and The Unconsoled (1995), the intense devotion of butlers and bellboys to their work eclipses what might have been more meaningful personal relationships with family and lovers. Christopher Banks, the detective in When We Were Orphans (2000), forgoes romantic fulfillment in a misguided commitment to the abstract cause of, as he puts it, “trying to save the world from ruin.”
Ishiguro’s most explicit depiction of the welfare state, in Never Let Me Go (2005), in which young clones briefly act as “carers” before donating their organs to ailing humans, imagines care work to be nihilistic at worst and weakly compensatory at best.
His novels stage the contradictions between society and self, collective labor and individualist pursuits, feeling for a group and feeling for yourself. They are cautionary tales about good intentions. This is no less true of Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro’s first book since he won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The shocking February 2020 shotgun murder of 25 year old black man Ahmaud Arbery by three whites while he was jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood shocked the world.
The accused killers attempted a citizen’s arrest of Arbery and ruthlessly gunned him down in the process.
Arbery’s murder was temporarily lost in the chaos and demonstrations following murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in May 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The ex-cop was convicted and now sits in prison in Minnesota
Now Arbery’s killers are in the Dock in the Glynn County courthouse. It’s shocking that even though the County is 26 percent black, there is only one black person on the jury.
Will Arbery’s family see justice done in Georgia?
Excerpted from The Guardian 11.5.2021
Prosecutors on Friday said the three white men accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia last year placed the 25-year-old Black man under a sustained “attack” and made a series of “assumptions and driveway decisions” that led to shooting him dead.
Ahmaud Arbery – Murdered February 2020
Lawyers played video showing Travis McMichael opening fire three times on Arbery, who was unarmed, as trial gets underway.
During highly charged opening statements in the closely watched trial, now infamous cellphone video of the shooting was played to the court. Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, broke down in tears.
The video shows Travis McMichael opening fire three times on Arbery, who was unarmed, with a Remington 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.
“This was an attack on Mr Arbery for five minutes, and the only thing Mr Arbery did was try to run away,” lead prosecutor Linda Dunikoski told the jury of 11 white members and one Black member.
The three defendants have pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, aggravated assault and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment, in a case thrust into the global spotlight.
Prosecutor Linda Dunikoski argues a Motion during Trial in Brunswick, Georgia
During detailed opening arguments, Dunikoski told the jury Gregory McMichael informed police after the shooting that he called out to Arbery during the pursuit, “Stop or I’ll blow your fucking head off”, and also told police Arbery had been “trapped like a rat” during their five-minute chase.
The shooting happened in February 2020, on a quiet street in rural south Georgia, as McMichael, his father and co-defendant Gregory McMichael and a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, attempted to block Arbery, who was on foot, by pursuing him in two vehicles.
Arbery, who was known to go jogging in the area, was described by prosecutors as “an avid runner”. The jury was told that evidence would show that the McMichaels had wrongly assumed the 25-year-old was attempting a burglary at a house under construction in the Satilla Shores neighbourhood.
Judge Timothy Walmsley swore in the disproportionately white jury on Friday. Although Glynn county, where the court is located, has an African American populationof 26%, the jury pool was whittled down until only one Black person was seated. Defense attorneys struck 11 Black potential jurors, an outcome the judge criticized. Abery’s mother called the imbalance in the jury “devastating”.
Conditions in American jails and prisons are beyong disgusting. Conditions in American penal institutions rival the most vile and cruel incarceration sites anywhere on Planet Earth.
The conditions under which Ghislaine Maxwell have been subjected to the past 16 months make it impossible for her to obtain a fair trial. She is so psychologically and mentally beaten down. Her pre trial imprisonment has been a form of torture.
Her treatment by prison authorities could be considered a crime against humanity.
The Guardian 11.4.2021
The British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell is subjected to such invasive surveillance in jail that it “rivals scenes of Dr Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration” from The Silence of the Lambs, her lawyer has argued in making yet another request for bail pending her trial.
Maxwell is charged in Manhattan federal court for allegedly procuring teenage girls for the disgraced wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein. Opening arguments in Maxwell’s case are scheduled to begin on 29 November.
“Maxwell’s conditions of detention for the past 16 months continue to be reprehensible and utterly inappropriate for [a] woman on the cusp of turning 60 with no criminal record or history of violence. It is unwarranted, unrelenting, and utterly inappropriate,” her lead attorney, Bobbi C Sternheim, wrote in court papers.
“[She] has been subject to physical and emotional abuse by the correction officers, poor and unsanitary living conditions, insufficient nutrition, difficulties reviewing the millions of legal discovery documents in the case against her, and sleep deprivation.”
The lawyer also complained about flashlight checks every 15 minutes at night that were preventing Maxwell from sleeping, hostility from guards and being tracked by surveillance cameras as she walked through the facility.
Sternheim, who has discussed these alleged conditions in prior court papers, has also argued that Maxwell is “over-managed because of the intense criticism” that followed Epstein’s jailhouse suicide in August 2019, weeks after his arrest on sex trafficking charges.
Sternheim has previously invoked The Silence of the Lambs – in which Anthony Hopkins plays an imprisoned serial killer – to describe Maxwell’s jail conditions.
In April, Sternheim said in written arguments to a federal appeals court: “Though she is a model prisoner who poses no danger to society and has done literally nothing to prompt ‘special’ treatment, she is kept in isolation – conditions fitting for Hannibal Lecter but not a 59-year-old woman who poses no threat to anyone.”
Asked for comment, the US Bureau of Prisons said in an email: “For privacy, safety, and security reasons, we decline to comment about the conditions of confinement for any particular inmate.”
They did say that the bureau was “committed to ensuring the safety and security of all inmates in our population, our staff, and the public” and that “additionally, the BoP takes allegations of staff misconduct seriously and consistent with national policy, refers all allegations for investigation, if warranted.
“Incidents of potential criminal activity or misconduct inside BoP facilities are thoroughly investigated for potential administrative discipline or criminal prosecution,” the email also said.
The filings came just before the weeks-long process of selecting a jury began on Thursday in New York.
Maxwell has said she is innocent of charges alleging that she recruited teenagers who were not yet adults for Epstein to sexually abuse from 1994 to 2004, Judge Alison Nathan told 132 prospective jurors.
The judge warned prospective jurors not to discuss the case with anyone or research it, on the internet or anywhere else.
She said the final jury of 12 jurors and six alternates will be asked to render a verdict after a trial expected to last about six weeks based only on evidence they learn about in the courtroom.
It’s comforting to read that the American government is cracking down on the invasive Pegasus spyware technology even when the offender is one of the United States close allies. Israel.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 11.3.2021
US authorities said the NSO Group’s spyware helped authoritarian governments “silence dissent.” The new measures will limit NSO Group’s access to US components and technology.
The technology essentially turned smartphones into spying devices, allowing a user to track a target’s location, read messages, look through photo’s and even secretly turn on the phone’s camera.
“These tools have also enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists outside of their sovereign borders to silence dissent,” the US Commerce Department said in a statement.
Israel ownedNSO Group told AFP news agency it would seek to reverse the move.
“NSO Group is dismayed by the decision, given that our technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime, and thus we will advocate for this decision to be reversed.”
The technology company has consistently rejected the reporting on its Pegasus software, saying that it has been designed purely for governmental actors to use in the fight against terrorism and crime.
The US Department of Commerce on Wednesday announced export limits on the Israeli software company NSO Group, the developer of infamous Pegasus spyware.
In July 2021, media investigations revealed that Pegasus spyware was used around the world to monitor tens of thousands of human rights activists, journalists, politicians and business executives.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is standing by his vow to hold those accountable who break the law.
DA Boudin’s indictment of San Francisco police officer Kenneth Cha for the manslaughter of Sean Moore is an affirmation that he stands by his principles of equal justice under the law. Regardless of job title and the type of uniform the perpetrator wears.
Chesa Boudin is a beacon of justice in a repressive United States of America.
Excerpted from New York Times 11.2.2021
A San Francisco police officer was charged with voluntary manslaughter for shooting an unarmed man who died three years after being wounded at his home in 2017, the San Francisco district attorney’s office announced on Tuesday.
Sean Moore. Killed by SFPD January 6, 2017
The officer, Kenneth Cha, was charged for shooting Sean Moore after he and his partner, Officer Colin Patino, responded to a call that Mr. Moore was violating a restraining order early on Jan. 6, 2017, according to the district attorney’s office. Mr. Moore died on Jan. 20, 2020, of what the coroner’s report said was “acute intestinal obstruction” because of bullet wounds to his abdomen from the shooting.
In the statement, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Officer Cha “lacked a lawful basis to even arrest” Mr. Moore and that he was unarmed at his home when he was shot by Officer Cha.
“When officers inflict unwarranted violence in flagrant disregard of their training, it denigrates the hard work of other police officers and shatters the trust our community places in law enforcement,” Mr. Boudin said. “Rebuilding that trust requires us to hold those officers who inflict unlawful violence accountable.”
The charges against Officer Cha include voluntary manslaughter, assault with a semiautomatic firearm, enhancements for personal use of a firearm and infliction of great bodily injury, the San Francisco district attorney’s office said in a statement on Tuesday. It is only the second time an on-duty law enforcement officer has been prosecuted for a homicide in San Francisco, the office said. Officer Patino was not charged.
DA Chesa Boudin announces manslaughter charges against SFPD officer Kenneth Cha
The statement said that Mr. Moore’s mother, Cleo Moore, said she was “very happy” to learn of the charges against Officer Cha.
The San Francisco Police Officers Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. It was unclear on Tuesday night if Officer Cha had a lawyer.
A long time ago I lived nearly a year in Amsterdam. I found the Dutch city to be tolerant and conservative. I understand why the generally reserved Dutch have become frustrated with the hordes of dope smoking visitors from around the World.
During my months in Amsterdam I found it to be a truly international City, at least in the center of the metropolis. It was lively and vibrant with a flourishing red light district and a robust night life. With the legalization of marijuana another entertainment lure has been added to Amsterdam’s attraction as a tourist mecca.
Banning pot smoking foreigners is the radical but possible solution to resolve the problem.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 11.2.2021
Authorities in one of Europe’s most visited cities are eyeing a ban on pot for tourists as a way to cut down on rowdy travelers, but critics say such a measure could push the industry underground.
As Amsterdam’s tourism industry slowly begins to recover from the impact of the pandemic, its famous cannabis cafes could be facing a new hurdle, in the form of a ban on foreign tourists.
Earlier this year, the city’s mayor, Femke Halsema, touted a proposal to ban foreign tourists from entering cannabis-serving establishments as a way to reinvent the city’s image. Banning foreigners from cafes, supporters say, would help to stop the influx of rowdy tourists who crowd the city’s streets and annoy some locals.
Along with legal Pot, legalized prostitution is also a feature of Amsterdam
However, following more than a year without much revenue from overseas travelers, cafes fear that such a ban would make recovery even more difficult, driving out legal businesses and creating a platform for street dealers.
Eve Mcguire, who works at Coffeeshop Reefer, said that without tourists, a sizable portion of the cafe’s revenue would disappear.
Eve Mcguire doubts foreign tourists will be banned from cannabis-serving establishments
“If they were to ban the tourists, 80% of our customers would be gone,” Mcguire told DW. “And not only this, but Dutch people don’t chill in coffee shops. If you’re Dutch, you buy your weed and you go home. The people that chill in coffee shops are tourists.”
Gary Gallagher, the manager of the Amsterdam Cannabis Museum, told DW that even with newly-eased travel restrictions, the amount of cash flowing in is still only about half of what it was before the pandemic.
He believes that due to the amount of money that the industry brings in, such a ban on foreigners in cafes is unlikely to come into effect. Even if officials manage to push the ban through, he and other critics say it would likely push the cannabis industry underground.
“I think they can change the rules and not the culture. Amsterdam will have this reputation forever,” he said.
“When they closed the coffee shops for [the] corona[virus pandemic], there were drug dealers on every street corner. So a few days later they reversed the move.”
Mcguire agrees that the chances of such a ban are exceptionally slim. “It’s totally a lie,” she said. “They will never ever let that come to pass.”
She is also concerned that enforcing such a law would be difficult, given the number of non-Dutch European Union residents who work in the city.
“People would have to show residency, but you don’t need residency to work here if you’re within the European Union,” said Mcguire.
However, even Mcguire herself found Amsterdam to be more peaceful without the influx of travelers. “It was nice to not hear seven days a week 24/7 people coming in and out. The street never shuts up, I didn’t miss the tourists to be honest,” said Mcguire.
I remember the years Dusty Baker managed the San Francisco Giants. He was a local favorite. One time I was having lunch at Fog City Diner along the Embarcadero, Dusty came in. He’s a very self effacing guy while giving off the aura of royalty.
Patrons in the restaurant greeted Dusty fondly and respectfully. When he was fired by Giants management after the 2002 season it was a genuine loss. Dusty had guided the Giants to the National League pennant and game seven of the World Series.
That didn’t matter. Baseball is a business and Dusty was found to be expendable.
Dusty Baker may be managing the Houston Astros in 2021 but he is still a beloved figure in San Francisco.
Excerpted from The Nation – 11.1.2021
You don’t have to care about baseball to care about Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, whose team is heading to the sixth game in the World Series tomorrow. He is a civil rights hero: a Black Major League Baseball manager who’s taken five teams, in three decades, in both leagues, to the playoffs and/or World Series.
Dusty Baker hoists the American League 2021 championship trophy
And who, in almost all of those years, didn’t have a contract waiting for him at the end of the season.
In 2002, after Baker had won three Manager of the Year awards, the same magazine hired me to do a 10-year appreciation of his tenure. But what I quickly found out was that management was gearing up to fire him. I’m not a sports reporter, obviously—but I had the local scoop of a lifetime, in sports terms. Baker was recovering from prostate cancer, and I was lame enough to believe that would keep the Giants management from firing him.
Is that, maybe, about race? I think so. It’s complicated—like stories about race always are. It’s been a melange of culture clash and bad professional fit and changing white front-office dudes… and yet, when you see it over the course of almost 30 years, it’s hard not to say race had something, maybe, to do with it.
Dusty Baker takes a walk to the pitcher’s mound
He talked openly about race and being a Black manager of a multiracial team. It honestly changed my little white life. Though not at first. In person, he was all bravado—race didn’t matter. “I didn’t even think about that. My attitude is, I’ve got a job to do, and it’s not a matter of black and white.” I asked him about how players tended to separate themselves, by race, in the clubhouse.
“That’s in every job. You hang out with people you have the most in common with.” I gave up. Then he called me on the phone a few weeks later. He talked about his struggles going to the South in the minor leagues—and I’m not even going to share that here, because it still hurts me to read—and also about clubhouse racial politics.
Several hundred students at San Francisco’s Riordan High School displayed a lot of moxie when they walked out of a speech by an anti-abortion propagandist.
These right to life people are the most insidious and reactionary know nothings.
Anti-abortion crusaders, backed by powerful Church leaders such as San Francisco’s Archbishop, want to curtail a woman’s right to control their own bodies and spend their lives foisting their abhorrent political views 24/7.
The pro-Choice movement needs to stand firm and beat down these anti-abortion zealots. It is reassuring that America’s young people appear to be fully aware of what’s at stake and are aggresively making known their point of view. Right here in San Francisco.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 10.22.2021
Hundreds of students at Archbishop Riordan High School staged a walkout Friday during an all-school assembly that featured a prominent antiabortion speaker.
Riordan High School – San Francisco
About five minutes into the presentation, during which staff members patrolled the doors, students at the Catholic high school exited the theater and walked into the gym, since school rules don’t permit them to leave campus. A few dozen of the school’s more than 800 students remained in the theater for the entire presentation.
The school’s argument — that the presentation was in line with Catholic teaching — didn’t sit well with students and parents alike — who said that politically, the issue is much larger than abortion.
Parent Judy Walgren said that if the assembly was really about “Catholic themes of the dignity of human life” and not politics, then “where are the speakers about the death penalty? Where are the speakers about how you should go out into the streets in the Tenderloin and wash the feet of the poor and destitute?”
The speaker, Megan Almon, works with the Life Training Institute, a program that focuses on teaching people who are antiabortion to “persuasively defend their views in the marketplace of ideas,” and sends its speakers to Catholic and Christian schools everywhere, its website says. The Catholic Church’s official stance is also antiabortion.
The assembly comes on the heels of women’s marches across the nation, including one in San Francisco, in support of reproductive rights as conservative states like Texas attempt to restrict abortion rights — timing that was frustrating to Riordan parents and students.
Almon’s speech also follows San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone intensifying his public campaign to convince House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Catholic, to renounce her support of abortion rights. Cordileone, who oversees the diocese’s Catholic schools, including Riordan, is launching $50,000 digital ad in which he asks viewers to pray and fast as a sign of support, calling the effort the Rose and Rosary for Nancy Campaign.
Some Riordan students were particularly upset that Almon was invited to speak during the school’s first year as a co-ed institution — Riordan had previous been an all-boys school.
Riordan students take a walk to protest anti-abortion speaker
Liz and I cycled along Car Free JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park to the de Young Museum on Member Preview Day to view the stunning Patrick Kelly fashion exhibit titled Runway of Love.
His work is both a fashion statement and a political commentary on the racism felt by black people in America
Patrick Kelly was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1954. He perfected his art in America and emigrated to Paris as a young man. He discovered himself and was discovered by the European fashionistas where he became a celebrity in his adopted country.
His potential was cut short when he was diagnosed with AIDS in August 1989 and died four months later on January 1, 1990. Patrick Kelly left an impressive fashion legacy.
His friend and client Gloria Steinem spoke at his memorial service in Paris saying, “Instead of dividing us with gold and jewels, he unified us with buttons and bows.”
Following are photos of Patrick Kelly’s fashion creations taken by Liz and me.
Topped by the Eiffel TowerA patron goes to the heart of the artA long view of the Patrick Kelly exhibit gallery
Patrick Kelly ETE 89, Astro Lisa, Las Vegas Lisa, Baker Lisa, Muscle Lisa and Mississippi Lisa – Invitation to a 1989 Louvre, Paris showing of Patrick Kelly’s ready to wear fashion.Skirt made of glossy bananas – A tribute to Black American performer Josephine BakerPatrick Kelly’s dress of the golliwog doll appropriated American and European racial stereotypes
Patrick Kelly incorporated racial stereotypes such as exaggerated lips
Lee's Perspective 