San Francisco

Signature Significance and Tales of ‘The Great Stupid’: San Francisco Is Officially Bat House Woke Crazy!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This story is nearly unbelievable. In fact, my host last night at a modest New Years Eve celebration, a good progressive and reliable Democrat, refused to believe it and insisted what I related was conservative media fake news. It is so embarrassing to the Mad Left, in fact, that the New York Times, among others, has so far refused to report it, and so have many other Axis news sources. The story is this, from the Daily Mail yesterday:

“The mayor of San Francisco discreetly approved a bill to create a fund that may eventually grant each of the city’s eligible black residents $5 million in reparations.  Mayor Daniel Lurie quietly signed the incredibly divisive Reparations Bill just two days before Christmas.  The ordinance establishes a reparations fund, as recommended by the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC) in its 2023 report.  The legislation merely establishes the fund but does not allocate any money to it – setting up the framework for any future contributions, whether they be through the city or privately donated…San Francisco journalist Erica Sandberg was among the first to highlight what Mayor Lurie had done.  Per the 2023 report, every eligible African-American adult in San Francisco should be handed a $5 million lump sum to ‘compensate the affected population for the decades of harm that they have experienced.’ Approximately 50,000 black people live in San Francisco, and the qualifying requirements remain unclear.”

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In San Francisco, the Dumb Rise and Almost Immediate Fall of “Grading for Equity”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments


When I am forced to consider what is considered “right” and “wrong” in California in general and San Francisco particularly, I feel like I have stumbled into a real life Bizarro World. That is the cube-shaped planet in “Superman” comics where brain-damaged mutations of Superman and Lois Lane pursue a topsy-turvy existence constrained by practices and values that are the reverse of what normal Earthlings regard as self-evident.

The latest manifestation of this West Coast insanity is, or was, “Grading for Equity“, a woke education scheme that was scheduled to be imposed this fall at 14 high schools and over 10,000 students. “Grading for Equity” forbids homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that counts are student grades on a final examination, which can be taken as many times as it takes to pass. “Grading for Equity” also de-emphasizes the importance of timely performance, completion of assignments, and consistent attendance, so students turning in assignments late will not be penalized. Not showing up at class will not affect grades either.Students with scores as low as 80 (out of 100) will get an A; a score as low as 21 will be considered sufficient to pass, with a D.

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I Love It! The Perfect Cap on the Unethical, Damning, “Let’s Get Alito!” Flag-Flying Fiasco!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oh, this is too good. If the Ethics God is responsible for this, she’s a genius.

You know that supposed “Stop the Steal”-connected flag that the Alito vacation home had flying over it briefly last summer? The flag that “proved” that the conservative Justice was either a serial mad flag-flyer who had engaged in “the appearance of impropriety” by showing his sympathies for the January 6 Capitol rioters twice, previously with an upside-down U.S. flag, or had wrongly “permitted” his wife to express such sentiments via flag twice, the first time almost four years ago? That flag?

That flag, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, has been displayed along with other historic U.S. flags outside San Francisco’s City Hall for more than half a century. Along with 17 other flags representing different moments in American history, the flag favored by Mrs. Alito (of course the flag conspiracy purveyors are certain that the Supreme Court Justice is lying and that he is the real culprit, just because) appears in the Pavilion of American Flags in Civic Center Plaza.

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Wine For Winos In San Francisco

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

San Francisco spends $5 million a year on a so-called “managed alcohol program,” giving homeless alcoholics beer,wine and shots of vodka to “manage” their addiction. This deranged program has been running for four years without getting much media attention. I suppose so many other things are being mishandled in this rotting city that this one slipped under the radar. The theory underlying program is designed to minimize the amount of alcohol homeless people drink to control their addiction. It would be starnge indeed if this were a legitimate approach, since medical professionals make it very clear that drinking any alcoholic beverage (or mouthwash) makes recovery from alcoholism impossible, and “maintenance drinking” is ultimately a failed and often fatal strategy. Alcoholism is a progressive disease as well, so the longer a drunk is drinking, the more damage alcohol does to his or her body.

In the most woke-ravaged city in North America, nurses typically serve the homeless drunks the the equivalent of of one or two drinks three to four times a day, either a shot of vodka or other liquor, a glass of wine, or 12 nearly a pint of beer. The taxpayers of San Francisco must truly be brainwashed to tolerate seeing their hard-earned dollars going to pay for drinks for winos, killing them slowly at the city’s expense.

The only responsible way to get alcohol addicted street people out of the metaphorical gutter and on the way to recovery and a productive, happy life is to put them in a rehabilitation program, monitor their recovery, and take satisfaction from the relative few who will go on to live addiction-free lives. Giving them just enough alcohol to keep them dependent as their liver fail isn’t merely futile and misguided, it’s cruel.

More Naming Ethics: Oakland’s Airport

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Among the eight posts on Ethics Alarms officially filed under “naming ethics” controversies there are four children (“Hades,” “Adolf,” a suicide in the family…), college buildings, helicopters, a mountain, and a law school. To that select group we now add an airport, and this case looks suspiciously like deliberate mischief if one is conspiratorially inclined.

I am not, of course.

Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland that “There is no there there,” and apparently the Port of Oakland Commission wants to embrace that description. It is preparing to rename the Oakland airport, currently “Oakland International Airport,” to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.” This would seem to intentionally encourage confusion with the better-known (and more heavily used) San Francisco International Airport, just across the bridge and 25 miles away. Before it started falling apart in chunks thanks to being nearly at Grand Zero in The Great Stupid, San Francisco was the glamorous, popular, golden girl on campus and poor Oakland was her fat, homely girlfriend.

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Exhibit A On How Academia And The Public Sector Corrupt Each Other: The Berkeley-Chesa Boudin Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

What is most amazing about this story is how transparent U. Cal at Berkeley is, even proud, about it. Amazing and alarming. The American far left is so confident now that it doesn’t attempt to disguise its most radical and destructive impulses.

Here’s the short version: the most radically progressive city in the country essentially fired its even more progressive district attorney for allowing the city to begin a death spiral into lawlessness. So despite that failure—indeed perhaps because of it— he was just named the founding executive director of the new Criminal Law and Justice Center at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.

The city is San Francisco, and the former DA is Chesa Boudin. Boudin, who has been discussed here before, is really an antimatter prosecutor: he doesn’t believe in prosecution, law enforcement, or laws, really. The son of Sixties radicals, members of the violent Weathermen group, his mission in life is to “dismantle the system,” as they used to say (and are now saying again) on college campuses. Among all the so-called “Soros prosecutors” allowing cities to decline into urban hellscapes where shoplifting is considered a right and police are hesitant to police, Boudin was the worst by far. Imagine what it says about our elite educational institutions that one of them, after seeing him removed for placing his ideological delusions above his duty, said, “Hey! This is the perfect guy to head up our new criminal justice center in our law school!”

It boggles the mind, or would, if we had not already observed the rapid and so-far unimpeded ethics rot in academia. Here’s part of Berkeley’s announcement:

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: San Francisco Homeless Resident Joseph Peterson

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“I just stole to eat.”

 —Joseph Peterson, a homeless man in San Francisco, lamenting the demise of the Whole Foods in his neighborhood and attempting to draw a material distinction between the rampant theft from the store by those seeking to sell what they stole, and his own shoplifting.

And there it is! In such carefully crafted rationalizations lie the seeds of societal rot. Peterson thinks his personal shoplifting—he cops to stealing macaroni and cheese and chicken from the hot food bar at the now closed grocery store a number of times, but believes that his theft is justifiable, unlike those who wanted to sell their heist for cash. Also believing his thefts were justifiable are many of San Francisco’s elected officials. They also believe that the “bad” shoplifters in Peterson’s view are equally justified, and in fact they are. What’s the ethical difference between stealing food to eat it, and stealing food to sell and use the money for other needs? There is none. In both cases, the expense of the food stolen is borne by other city residents, who will have to pay higher prices for their food, unless the prices become so high that they resort to theft as well.

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San Francisco Spin, Brought To You By The Great Stupid: “Since Bob Lee Wasn’t Murdered By A Drug Addict, Homeless Person Or Coddled Criminal, The City Is Safe After All, So There!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It’s come to this.

San Francisco is one of many irrationally woke cities falling apart in chunks because of “social justice” policies that encourage crime, make responsible citizenship difficult, and devastate local businesses. “The City by the Bay” is a particularly depressing case study in the nationwide phenomenon, with the city’s most storied locations marred by human feces, discarded drug paraphernalia, and obstreperously entitled homeless. Meanwhile, businesses are fleeing because shoplifting has become epidemic.

When Bob Lee, the former chief technology officer of Square and one of the founders of Cash App, was stabbed to death ten days ago, his high-profile murder was pointed to by social media critics and conservative pundits as more evidence of San Francisco’s decline as its culture embraces progressive cant over the lessons of civilization. Ah, but this week a rival tech entrepreneur was arrested for the murder, prompting the city’s defenders–and the defenders of its bonkers policies— to launch into one of the most bizarre victory laps ever conceived.

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Ha! And You Thought The Left In New York, Chicago And Portland Had Gone Completely Bonkers…The City Across The Bay Says “Hold My Beer”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The official proposal from San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee, the existence of which itself is evidence of psychosis, is finally out, and The Great Stupid has reached a new benchmark.

In December, Ethics Alarms reported that California’s Task Force to Study and Recommend Reparations Proposals for African Americans was about to submit a recommendation that the state hand over $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California as a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers will be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget. I concluded that “it was just one more indicator of how the entire state had lost its collective mind, that The Great Stupid knows no bounds.” Well, I was right about that, and San Francisco’s panel apparently decided to show the USA that its home state was relatively reasonable.

The committee, after much thought, study and debate, has proposed a one-time payment of $5 million to each black resident of the city deemed eligible as recompense for the “decades of harm they have experienced.” And that’s not all! The committee also proposes cancelling all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households, and supplementing lower-income recipients’ income for the next 250 years. After all, the report points out, “Reparation​ ​must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.​”​

They do not, apparently, have to be feasible, responsible, reasonable or constitutional, but then, the city has been working up to clinical insanity for quite some time. We shouldn’t be too surprised.

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San Francisco: “You’ve Done An Exemplary Job, John, And You’re Out, Because You’re A White Male…” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

You have to hand it to the San Francisco Elections Commission. It was open, transparent and honest, and presented its compensatory racism without shame or obfuscation. This is, however, because in the Bizarro culture of San Francisco, “good” discrimination because of race and gender is nothing to be ashamed of. From the moment that “diversity-equity-inclusion became the latest woke buzz term, this episode was inevitable. The question, after the heads of all rational Americans stop exploding like Krakatoa, is “Now what?”

San Francisco Department of Elections director John Arntz has run the elections for the county and the city for 20 years. The San Francisco Elections Commission praised Arntz for his “incredible leadership,” but voted 4-2 not to renew his contract. Though all twelve election directors signed a letter requesting that Arntz be reappointed, he is now out of a job. Election commissioners were clear that their decision to dismiss him had nothing to do with inadequacies in his effectiveness in performing his duties, but, it was explained, there are more important things than being good at your job.

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