Tag: san francisco

See it: Cops Give Shock Answer For Why Public Nudity in Front of Kids at Pride Event is Legal

Blue cities hosted send-off pride events over the weekend as the month of June came to its end. They featured a rally and march, and included notable names like Megan Rapinoe.

Clips of the whole ordeal went viral, as many disturbing moments–most of which depicted nudity and explicit sexual imagery and themes in public–caused alarm amongst X users.

Critics swiftly blasted the nudity at the San Francisco pride event specifically, due to children being in attendance.

“San Francisco pride was the most shocking and disturbing event that I’ve ever witnessed,” Savannah Hernandez posted on X.

“Shame on every parent who brought their child to this event and shame on the city for allowing what could only be described as a giant public orgy.”

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San Francisco opens city’s first $5 million taxpayer-funded free food ‘market’

San Francisco opened its first $5.5 million free food “market”, where approved residents can show a benefits eligibility card, put what they want in their carts, check out to keep track of outgoing inventory, and leave without paying.

The Bayview-Hunters Point facility aims to be a food pantry alternative that replicates the supermarket experience in an area where many grocery stores have come but few have remained due to high crime.

The 4000-square foot District 10 Market is the first of San Francisco’s food empowerment “markets” funded by the San Francisco’s Human Services Agency. Eligible individuals receive a Costo-like benefits card that allows use of the facility once per month. Eligibility is limited to individuals who live within one of three zip codes, be verified social services clients, have dependents under 25 or a qualified food-related illness, and be referred by one of eleven community organizations in the market’s referral network.

Geoffrea Morris, who spearheaded San Francisco’s Food Empowerment Market legislation in 2021 while working for a county supervisor and is a senior consultant for the District 10 Market, explains the program is meant to supplement food stamps that run out towards the end of the month, especially due to rising food costs from inflation.

“This is a supplemental source for food. Food stamps should be the primary source. This is a supplemental source especially close to the end of the month when families are facing the pain, especially with inflation,” Morris told The Center Square.

The facility is designed to closely replicate the supermarket experience, with individuals’ items weighed and scanned upon “check-out” to keep track of inventory and manage supply chains. District 10 Market, which is operating on a $5.5 million grant from San Francisco, uses taxpayer funds to purchase high-quality fresh produce from Rodriguez Brothers Ranch in Watsonville, and largely relies on donations from other grocery stores for its shelf-stable items and toiletries.

“If we didn’t tell you it was free you’d think you’d have to pay,” Morris said.

Morris also detailed how District 10 Market’s referral process is meant to ensure use of wraparound services.

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San Francisco buys vodka shots for homeless alcoholics in taxpayer-funded program

The City of San Francisco is providing free beer and vodka shots to homeless alcoholics at taxpayer expense under a little-known pilot program. 

The “Managed Alcohol Program” operated by San Francisco’s Department of Public Health serves regimented doses of alcohol to voluntary participants with alcohol addiction in an effort to keep the homeless off the streets and relieve the city’s emergency services. Experts say the program can save or extend lives, but critics wonder if the government would be better off funding treatment and sobriety programs instead.

“Established in countries such as Canada and Australia, a managed alcohol program is usually administered by a nurse and trained support staff in a facility such as a homeless shelter or a transitional or permanent home, and is one method to minimize harm for those with alcohol use disorder,” the California Health Care Foundation explains in an 2020 article describing the pilot program. 

“By prescribing limited quantities of alcohol, the model aims to prevent potentially life-threatening effects of alcohol withdrawal, such as seizures and injuries.” 

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Lawmakers in San Francisco Want to Allow Residents to Sue Grocery Stores for Closing

Stores throughout greater San Francisco have been closing for months. Major retailers have ditched the city, as well as pharmacies and grocery stores. All mainly due to crime and theft.

Now lawmakers in the city want to allow residents to sue grocery stores for closing.

This is completely backwards. The city could stop all of the theft tomorrow if they wanted to by simply enforcing the law. Then the stores wouldn’t close in the first place. But that would entail admitting that the left’s policies are wrong and don’t work, so they’re going after the stores.

The New York Post reports:

San Francisco lawmakers want to let city residents sue grocery stores that close

A pair of progressive San Francisco lawmakers are pushing a bill that would allow residents in the crime-ravaged city to sue grocery stores that close up shop if they don’t give six months’ notice.

The proposal by San Francisco Board of Supervisors members Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin would require business to either find a successor grocer or work out a plan with residents in the neighborhood to ensure the availability of supermarket options.

The Grocery Protection Act – which is based on a proposal the board approved in 1984 that was vetoed by then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein — comes amid a rash of retail theft fueled by the city’s drug and homelessness crisis that has led to several business closures.

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Secretive Experiment to Shoot Aerosols Into the Sky Over San Francisco to Increase Cloud Cover

A secretive project conducted from the deck of an aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay will shoot trillions of aerosol particles into the sky to increase cloud cover in the name of preventing global warming, and details have been held back to “avoid (a) public backlash.”

The experiment is being dubbed America’s “first outdoor test to limit global warming.”

“The Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement, or CAARE, project is using specially built sprayers to shoot trillions of sea salt particles into the sky in an effort to increase the density — and reflective capacity — of marine clouds,” reports Scientific American.

“The experiment is taking place, when conditions permit, atop the USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum in Alameda, California, and will run through the end of May, according to a weather modification form the team filed with federal regulators.”

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Police Take 4 Hours to Respond to Looting of Walgreens in San Francisco

Underscoring how the problem has become so endemic, police waited four hours before bothering to respond to the looting of a Walgreens in San Francisco, at which point the store was closed anyway.

Video shot by a producer at CBS San Francisco who was shopping with his girlfriend shows a number of black youths wearing masks sweeping through the store, thieving items and throwing them into bags before leaving.

The group didn’t care that they were being recorded by surveillance cameras or the CBS producer filming them on his phone.

“End of the day on Easter Sunday should have been pleasant. Instead I was shocked to see looters taking what they pleased with no regard for the law, or those around them, real-life smash and grab,” he said.

The incident happened at the Walgreens store at 9th and Market Streets at about 4:30pm on Easter Sunday.

However, the police didn’t even bother to respond until over four hours later.

“San Francisco police said in an emailed statement that officers responded at about 8:38 p.m. to a report of a group of people stealing from a business on the 1300 block of Market Street. Officers arrived to find the business was closed and no one was there to report the incident,” reports CBS News.

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Proposition E Would Make It Easier for Police To Surveil San Francisco

On March 5, San Franciscans will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot measure that would decide whether or not to make them into guinea pigs for surveillance experiments by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).

Proposition E purports to streamline the SFPD, with sections on community engagement, recordkeeping, and the department’s vehicle pursuit and use of force policies. But its portion on department use of surveillance technology is troubling.

Under an existing ordinance passed in 2019, the SFPD may only use “surveillance technologies”—like surveillance cameras, automatic license plate readers, or cell site simulators—that have been approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city and county legislative body. The process requires that the SFPD, like any other city or county agency, submit a policy to the board for approval before using any new technology. The 2019 ordinance also banned the use of facial recognition technology.

But Prop E adds a clause stipulating that the SFPD “may acquire and/or use a Surveillance Technology so long as it submits a Surveillance Technology Policy to the Board of Supervisors for approval by ordinance within one year of the use or acquisition, and may continue to use that Surveillance Technology after the end of that year unless the Board adopts an ordinance that disapproves the Policy.”

In other words, the SFPD could roll out an unapproved method of surveillance, and it would have free rein to operate within the city for up to a year before ever having to ask city officials for permission. And until the city passes a statute that specifically forbids it—that is, forbidding a technology that is by that point already in use—then the SFPD can keep using it indefinitely.

“Let’s say the SFPD decides they want to buy a bunch of data on people’s geolocation from data brokers—they could do that,” says Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “They could use drones that are flying at all times above the city. They could use the robot dogs that were piloted at the border. These are all surveillance technologies that the police doesn’t necessarily have right now, and they could acquire it and use it, effectively without any sort of accountability, under this proposition.”

If those scenarios sound implausible, it’s worth noting that they’ve already happened: As Hussain notes, the Department of Homeland Security recently tested robot dogs to help patrol the U.S./Mexico border. And in 2012, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department enlisted civilian aircraft to fly over Compton and surveil the entire area.

Not to mention, federal agencies already routinely purchase people’s cell phone geolocation information and internet metadata without a warrant.

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San Francisco Appoints 1st Noncitizen to Election Commission

The San Francisco Elections Commission has, for what is believed to be the first time in history, appointed someone who isn’t a U.S. citizen—who isn’t legally allowed to vote—to serve as an official.

The officer, Kelly Wong, was sworn in on Feb. 14, local news outlet KQED reported. It said that Ms. Wong, an immigrant rights advocate, is a native of Hong Kong who arrived in the United States in 2019 for graduate studies.

She was sworn in by Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin during a ceremony at San Francisco City Hall after winning unanimous support from the board.

“This appointment is a milestone for all immigrant and marginalized communities throughout SF,” Ms. Wong wrote in a LinkedIn post on Feb. 15. “Representation matters: thousands of immigrants living in the city hold stakes in politics and there’s no better way to have us be represented than to serve in leadership positions.

“I am deeply committed to ensuring that everyone, regardless of immigration status, has a seat at the table in shaping the future of our city.”

The appointment of a noncitizen to city boards, commissions, and advisory bodies was made possible in 2020 when voters passed a proposal by lawmakers to remove the standing requirement that candidates seeking office hold U.S. citizenship.

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Inside the Far Left Billionaires’ Push to Maintain Control of San Francisco

The far left partisans who dominate San Francisco politics may be throwing stones in a glass house.

Over the last week, as early voting began for the March 5th primary, with hot button issues on the ballot, the New Republic, the Guardian, and Mission Local published nearly identical follow-the-money-style news articles depicting a right-wing power grab. The reporting tracks, in the words of one of the reporters, the “network of interlocking non-profits, dark money groups and political action committees” pushing to “undo” San Francisco’s “progressive policies.”

Supervisor Dean Preston, who has used his perch on the city council to push for abolishing prisons and police, seized upon the news to claim that it confirms a “right wing takeover” of San Francisco. Preston, who is facing reelection, promised to “fight back” against “dystopian conservatives.”

Yet the groups and individuals named as conservative donors, like Michael Moritz and Garry Tan, are virtually all Democratic moderates with a history of donating to liberal causes. The issues these donors have zeroed in on are traditionally associated with political moderates, like restoring algebra to public middle school – the classes were removed by city leftists for racial equity reasons – hiring more police officers in the midst of a crime wave and street addiction crisis, and encouraging new construction to bring down the price of housing.

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San Francisco Boasted They Would Hire Thousands Of Sacked Twitter Employees – It Didn’t Happen

One of the biggest shock events in the history of digital communications took place in April of 2022 when Elon Musk followed through on his promise to purchase Twitter (now known as X).  The buyout took place amid the chaos of covid hype and in the middle of a full spectrum mass censorship campaign organized by Big Tech companies and multiple government agencies and officials.  

In early 2022, it was nearly impossible to make statements regarding certain hot button issues; any information contrary to the establishment narrative about covid vaccines, gender ideology, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the war in Ukraine, or the events of January 6th were treated as radioactive.  Tens of thousands of people lost their social media accounts merely for reprinting the facts.

Musk reactivated many of these accounts (including Zero Hedge’s account) after taking control of the company, and then targeted the root of the censorship regime:  The far-left management as well as the incredible number of activist moderators employed by the website to monitor and silence dissent.  

Not surprisingly, this action triggered a mob of journalists as well as government bureaucrats who threatened investigations into Musk’s takeover while entertaining the possibility of shutting the company down completely.  The government’s collusion with Big Tech to violate the 1st Amendment rights of Americans was exposed and leftists lost one of their biggest online echo chambers. Their veritable monopoly was broken.  Musk also proved that Twitter was a bloated farce after firing over 80% of Twitter staff (more than 6000 people), only for the platform to function just fine without them.  

The woke regime was not done posturing yet, though.  In November of 2022 San Francisco Mayor London Breed attempted to stick it to Musk when she announced that the city would offer 4800 vacant positions to the fired “Tweeps” (Twitter employees).

It’s not surprising that the city government believed thousands of activist managers and censors would find easy homes within the local bureaucracy, but the purpose of the Mayor’s offer was more likely to send a message.  What was the message?  That leftists will be protected from the consequences of their decisions and behavior.  If they are ever made to reap the whirlwind, the hive will respond and ensure that they fail upwards; that they are granted more favors and more benefits to offset what few punishments they might endure.  

It’s the ever present reward for fealty to the leftist cause; no failure is left behind.  At least, in theory…  

Breed had recently attacked Musk in a Bloomberg interview as “the person who got a ton of tax breaks in California and decided to take that money and run,” after he moved Tesla out of California and set up shop in Texas.  Her hostility to the mogul’s business efforts was no secret.  

Riding the wave of anti-Musk sentiment in CA might have seemed valuable at the time and giving reassurance to activists that no one would really suffer consequences made the woke movement feel at ease, but following through on bold claims is not something leftists are known for.  

As it turned out, the mass job offer for fired Tweeps was nothing more than a virtue signal.

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