tenderfoot
tenderfoot's JournalThe Trial of Chesa Boudin Can a young progressive prosecutor survive a political backlash in SF
“It doesn’t matter that crime is down,” Chesa Boudin has said. “People feel less safe. They want to feel safe.”
The San Francisco surveillance videos that have gone most viral are those that emphasize brazenness and impunity. In June, a reporter at the local ABC affiliate posted on Twitter a cell-phone video taken at a Walgreens in Hayes Valley. A man on a bicycle stands in the middle of an aisle, calmly loading cosmetics into a black garbage bag. He begins with the top shelf, and works his way down to the bottom one, until his bag is full. A few feet away is a Walgreens security guard, who makes no effort to stop the cyclist, choosing instead to film him with his phone. Eventually, the cyclist mounts his bike and rides out, ducking to avoid a half-hearted lunge from the guard. The video crystallizes the subversive, Banksy-ish quality of the San Francisco theft wave. It also supplied a political context—in her post, the reporter, Lyanne Melendez, tagged Boudin.
In his office, Boudin considered, for what must have been the thousandth time, the implications of the Walgreens video, a task to which he brought a yeshiva intensity. “When I watch that video, I think about five questions that people are not asking that I think they should,” he said. “Is he drug addicted, mentally ill, desperate? Is he part of a major retail fencing operation? What’s driving this behavior and is it in any way representative, because it was presented as something symptomatic?” The way the video had been presented suggested that shoplifting had become a raging problem in San Francisco, but, he pointed out, the official data showed that over-all theft was down from the previous year.
Boudin turned to the matter of the security guard: Why, Boudin asked, had he reacted so passively? Boudin said, “If Walgreens has insurance for certain goods or they expect a certain amount of loss, if they would rather not risk lawsuits or escalation to violence—then maybe that’s something we should know about.” He mentioned a fact he often cites when confronted about property crime—that the police make arrests in just two-and-a-half per cent of reported thefts. “Maybe that’s a good thing—maybe that means they’re prioritizing murders,” Boudin said. “But when this particular individual was arrested, and we got the full police history, it turned out that he had been detained by the police previously after another Walgreens incident, and they didn’t arrest him because Walgreens had said they did not want to press charges in that prior case. The police had known who he was for months.”
Boudin paused, seeming to recognize that he was offering an essentially structural explanation for an emotional problem, which was that people thought criminals weren’t being punished and that freaked them out. He said, “From a public political standpoint, what matters more is the ups and downs and if people feel less safe. It doesn’t matter that crime is down. People feel less safe. They want to feel safe.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-trial-of-chesa-boudin
from 2016: 1984 Olympians Mary Decker and Zola Budd discuss 'The Fall'
Turns out the media made them out to be bitter rivals when they weren't...
Will conservative media ever be held responsible for killing off their audience?
https://twitter.com/SykesCharlie/status/1421093736478609412I don't have any data but it seems like there's a rash of COVID hospitalizations and deaths attributed to the bullshit they hear/read on right wing media outlets.
Will there be a point when they finally figure out that they've been lied to all along?
Shoplifting Is Big News; Stealing Millions From Workers Is Not
An alleged “crime surge” at Walgreens drugstores in San Francisco was a hot topic for Bay Area news outlets in the early months of 2021. When Lyanne Melendez, a reporter for the ABC-owned KGO-TV in San Francisco, tweeted out a cellphone video of a brazen shoplifter, it elevated this narrative into a nationwide story. The video purports to show a man apparently filling a garbage bag with items before riding a bicycle out of the store, as two people, one of whom seems to be a store security guard, record him.
FAIR identified 309 published pieces on the 21-second video, using a combination of Nexis and Google advanced search to find every article published by a news outlet, from the video’s publication on June 14 to July 12—a 28-day timeframe.
[snip]
Compare this to another Walgreens-related theft story: the November settlement of a wage theft and labor law violation class-action lawsuit against Walgreens, filed by employees in California for $4.5 million.
A multimillion-dollar settlement coming after a two-year legal struggle, this should have been a national news story, not to mention a major topic in local California outlets. But FAIR was unable to find a single general news outlet that covered the settlement, looking from November 2020 to July 2021, using the same search parameters as the aforementioned shoplifting video.
[snip]
Obviously, the shoplifting video is supposed to represent multiple examples of retail theft, to boost awareness about shoplifting as a larger issue. But the wage theft settlement is also one example of a widespread issue: Employers stealing from their workers is a $15 billion a year problem that gets little attention.
San Francisco is a city that falls far short in caring for the homeless population, with pervasive poverty, particularly among people of color. In that context, to treat an individual stealing a few hundred dollars from a corporation worth $150 billion as infinitely more newsworthy than that same company stealing millions from its employees is to enlist the media on the well-funded side of the class war.
https://fair.org/home/shoplifting-is-big-news-stealing-millions-from-workers-is-not/
Jeff Bezos Is Not My Astronaut
I felt more disdain than wonder watching Richard Branson’s joyride and Jeff Bezos’s soulless flight to the Kámán Line.
Everybody Gets a “For All Mankind” Trophy
There was no ground broken here. In 1903, the Wright Brothers completed the first powered flight. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space. In 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first human on the moon. Those are milestones worthy of celebration. In 2004, Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites carried the first people into space on a privately built spacecraft — a milestone of sorts.
[snip]
Egonauts
In addition to vanity projects for billionaires, these pseudo-events were advertisements, promotions for the brands prominently displayed throughout the breathless television coverage.
[snip]
The Right Stuff
It’s unlikely these projects will attract any venture capital money or support a SPAC. Private space projects might be dressed up as achievements for humanity, but their aim is to return capital to shareholders. And when that’s the criteria, the astronauts and their efforts become limited in scope.
[snip]
Mach-3 Train Wreck or Galactic ATM
Whatever you think of space travel as a human endeavor, space tourism is an awful business. Even assuming all goes well, it makes no sense. These are vanity projects, and the only people that will make money from them will be the early investors … who bail out before impact.
more
https://www.profgalloway.com/jeff-bezos-is-not-my-astronaut/
Check out this Vaxhole/AntiVa...
https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1418210466656972808What a dipshit...
Gunmaker, ordered to hand over documents to Sandy Hook families sends 1000s of "random cartoons"
A gunmaker was ordered to hand over documents to Sandy Hook families. The materials included thousands of "random cartoons."
https://twitter.com/connpost/status/1412819329377255424
https://twitter.com/connpost/status/1412819333613555715
https://twitter.com/connpost/status/1412819336771821570
https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/A-gun-maker-was-ordered-to-hand-over-documents-to-16296757.php
Profile Information
Gender: FemaleHometown: East Coast
Home country: USA
Current location: West Coast
Member since: Tue Sep 3, 2013, 01:59 PM
Number of posts: 8,426
