Vaccine Mandate vs. Climate Change Protestors

An anti-vax mandate protest took place in San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza last Friday at noon.

The crowd of about 200 people were an odd mix.

The gathering was to protest San Francisco's requirement that all city and county employees be vaccinated or possibly lose their jobs.

The historically racist, right-wing San Francisco Fire Department, whose members tend to live outside city limits, has been one of the biggest complainers along with the SF Police Department.

My reaction is to question what part of the term "public safety" they don't understand. Passing on a deadly virus to coworkers and the public at large is NOT public safety.

Maybe we need a T-shirt proclaiming "MY BODY, MY CHOICE TO NOT BE INFECTED BY THE UNVACCINATED."

There was also a professional anti-vaxxer crowd involved, complete with speakers who looked like Fox News blondes, yelling at the crowd, "Do we believe in mandates that take away our freedom?" which responded with a shouted "NO!"

There was a small booth set up advertising another anti-vax mandate rally in Sacramento on September 8th.

Unless you want these people in charge of California government, as they are in Texas and Florida for instance, please vote NO on the recall of Governor Newsom, and make sure you not only mail your ballot in but remind at least three people you know to do the same.

The spectacle of all these well-paid, mostly white protesters claiming personal victimization was surreal, almost as if they had left-wing protest envy and were determined to cast themselves as an Oppressed Minority of Freedom Fighters.

In truth, they are selfish lunatics who have been primed with disinformation by the right-wing rage machine.

If the City and County need to fire some of them, public safety can only improve.

Coincidentally, a protest march from the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue by the group Youth vs. Apocalypse (click here) had just ended at the steps of City Hall.

They were demanding action on climate change, in particular stopping the completion of the Line 3 pipeline which is to transport tar sands shale oil from Alberta to Wisconsin.

Many of them were gobbling down pizza and other treats that were being provided by a small army of older women.

"Who are you people?" I asked them, and one of the ladies pulled her shirt open so I could read the name of her organization. Formed in 2016, it's a group of grandmothers in Berkeley and Oakland who have decided climate change is the most important issue they can work on for their grandchildren (click here for their website).

The juxtaposition of those protesting for a communal good and those protesting for personal entitlement could not have been more stark.

On The Waterfront

Saturday dawned gorgeously in San Francisco after two weeks of winter weather, so we joined thousands of people walking the Embarcadero.

The downtown waterfront is a rotting, glorious wonder, open to all and free for the moment from grotesque high-rise development, but not if ex-mayor Gavin Newsom and his California State Lands Commission has anything to do with it. (Click here for the latest wrinkle where Lands Commission lawyers argued in Superior Court last week that city voters were too stupid to make land use decisions.)

The Ferry Building was restored and retrofitted about 15 years ago and turned into an upscale foodie emporium that I thought would never take off.

Gosh, was I wrong.

The place has organically evolved into a great farmers market with extraordinary vendors and thousands of people shopping and dining on street food. (Roli Roti with their rotisserie chicken and pork sandwiches seemed to have the biggest line above.)

Even the buskers are lovely.

Further along the waterfront, we were serenaded by an erhu player...

...followed by a strikingly handsome acrobat with what sounded like an Australian accent...

...entertaining hundreds of visitors.

Even the crudely touristic Fisherman's Wharf looked beautiful today...

...and my newly skinny Italian-American spouse Tony looked right at home.

New Civic Center Children's Playgrounds

The two childrens' playgrounds in Civic Center Plaza along Larkin Street have been fenced off for the last couple of months for major redesign, and a couple of weeks ago a fence appeared in the middle of the plaza on the long stretch of dirt.

Not that many years ago, there was a beautiful ornamental fountain that ran the entire stretch of the central plaza. This was eventually replaced by a lawn, which was torn out in 2008 for a "Victory Garden," a boneheaded collaboration between celebrity chef Alice Waters and then-Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Since 2008, the space has been a stretch of packed earth, but now it has a kid-friendly play space which was being used today by parents and their children waiting on a rainy morning for the Cherry Blossom Parade to begin.

It seems an odd site to place a playground since there are so many large gatherings in the plaza, from protest marches to parades to outdoor rallies, not to mention all the drug-addled street people who hang out in the neighborhood.

Still, it's a nice design and the little boys crawling around in the cubes under their father's watchful eye looked like they were having a blast.

The Santa Clara Super Bowl in San Francisco

A sculpture trumpeting the 50th Super Bowl has gone up in Civic Center. It is at the long end of the sandy waste which used to be a lawn before Mayor Gavin Newsom had it torn out in 2008 for a bogus Victory Garden for Chez Panisse's Alice Waters.



Mayor Ed Lee's administration has been coming up with similarly misguided ideas in anticipation of Super Bowl 50 (the NFL ditched the Roman numerals this year) to be played February 7th at the new Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara. Lee clumsily announced last August that the homeless "are going to have to leave San Francisco" for two weeks, and there was also a plan to tear down all the overhead Muni wires on Market Street leading to the Embarcadero so the proposed Super Bowl Entertainment Village would be more aesthetically pleasing. Thankfully, that multimillion dollar fiasco was averted when public outcry was strong and immediate.



The last time the Super Bowl was played in the Bay Area was Version XIX in 1985. It was held at Stanford Stadium because the NFL considered Candlestick Park too much of a shithole to host the high rollers. At least the game was good, with the San Francisco 49ers led by coach Bill Walsh and quarterback Joe Montana winning their second Super Bowl together over the Miami Dolphins of the Don Shula/Dan Marino era.

Currently, the 49ers have an idiot owner who recently fired an eccentric, winning coach who was doing amusing things with a charismatic backup quarterback, and the present team is woeful. They also moved out of town to a cursed stadium next to San Jose, which has not particularly endeared them to longstanding San Franciscans. Like Cassandra, I am feeling imminent disaster here, with the recent America's Cup mess as a template. If most of the weather forecasters are correct, February 7th should be smack in the middle of the El Niño storms which are expected to wallop us soon. This could be interesting.

Gay Marriage Evening in the Castro

The US Supreme Court judgment on Friday affirming that marriage is now gender neutral was huge, as was their tentative defense of Obama's healthcare legislation in King v. Burwell the day before.



The US President also sang Amazing Grace acapella Friday afternoon at the Charleston funeral of nine murdered black Christians, and the Confederate flag officially became anathema overnight. It was telling that the South Carolina governor started her defense of flying that flag at the state capitol with "corporate CEOs never mention it as a problem." One week later Wal-Mart is no longer selling Confederate flags, and the governor reversed herself and is calling for it to be taken down. It feels a bit as if we have stepped into a time machine like Rod Taylor and the world speeded up at a completely different rate into the future.



I went to the Castro district on Friday to meet young friends for Happy Hour, and was greeted by a Mock Bishop at the Muni station. "He's been working at this for a very, very long time," the woman above said in an admonishing tone. "I'm also old," I told her, "and have seen it all too, but glad to know I'm looking young enough that I have to be lectured on gay history."



Castro Street from Market to 18th was closed for an impromptu celebration with a stage and a sound system but not a lot of people seemed very interested, except for annoying volunteers from the corrupt HRC organization handing out equality flags...



...and the couple above who brought their own sound system so they could dance a duet in the streets.



There were a ridiculous amount of uniformed San Francisco police offers stationed around 18th and Castro, engaging in their usual practice of talking amongst themselves and completely ignoring those who they are sworn to protect and serve.



I moved to San Francisco in 1974, when the San Francisco Police Department was routinely coming to the Castro neighborhood to bash people's heads in because they were fags and they could get away with it, and have still never seen or heard an official apology for their behavior. The homophobic and racist texts by SFPD officers that were recently released by the US Justice Department indicate not much has changed in that regard, either.



Still, Friday was an authentically joyous moment, and I hugged strangers and friends like Farzad above all evening with the greeting, "Happy Gay Marriage Day!"



The techie gold rush is transforming San Francisco at what passes for lightning speed in this city. Young Minnesota transplant Eric above was apologizing for the disruption and I told him, "Don't worry about it, the place needed some new energy."



"Capitalism is what really needs to change, and I don't see that happening in my lifetime, but I didn't see going from being criminalized for my sexuality to gay marriage in this lifetime either."



It feels like we're living in a science fiction story.

Stop Suing San Francisco, Gavin Newsom

There was a photo-op in front of the San Francisco Ferry Building at lunchtime in anticipation of a meeting between the California Lands Commission and the San Francisco Port Commission. The confab was presumably about the lawsuit the State Commission recently filed against the people of San Francisco for voting to have a say in waterfront height issues with Proposition B. For a very good explanation of the absurdity and ugly backroom deals that led to this lawsuit, click here for a link to former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos' op-ed in this morning's San Franciso Chronicle.



Gavin Newsom is on the California Lands Commimssion and is the public face of the lawsuit. The former San Francisco Mayor and currently useless California Lieutenant Governor currently lives in the Marin Multimillionaire village of Ross. He deserves to be mocked and heckled every time he shows his photogenic face in San Francisco from this point forward. It takes a heaping amount of arrogance and hypocrisy to dun the taxpayers of San Francisco on behalf of waterfront developers, just because they are friends of Brown/Pelosi/Feinstein, the real old powerbrokers in this provincially corrupt city.

Free SF Symphony Concert in Civic Center This Sunday

This Sunday, July 27th at 2 PM, there will be a free concert given by the San Francisco Symphony.



The program includes the Mendelssohn violin concerto played by the baby-faced 24-year-old soloist Benjamin Beilman above left, along with Edwin Outwater conducting a few musical bon-bons by Mozart and Tchaikowsky. If you are thinking of attending, my suggestion is to bring a blanket and/or beach chairs because the hard-packed dirt seating area is uncomfortable.



The quadrangle was a lawn for decades before then-Mayor Gavin Newsom had it ripped out in the summer of 2008 for Alice Water's "Victory Garden," and the grass was never replaced for some reason. Newsom is the binge thinker who gifted the city with a $15 million debt via his embrace of the America's Cup races, gave us the disastrous Ed Lee as his successor "caretaker" Mayor, and is currently suing San Francisco to overturn the recently passed Proposition B. In his role as one of three members of the California State Lands Commission, Newsom doesn't believe voters should have any say in local land use decisions. If his casual destruction of the Civic Center lawn is any indication, he's the one who should be restricted from those kinds of decisions.