Live Onstage - Me!
On the evening of Sunday May 21 -- at 5:45 pm (strange time), I'll be in conversation with the erudite and charming Michael Krasny, who for many years expertly hosted the morning talk show on KQED-FM. I'll be talking of cabbages and kings, and many other things -- including my books, my love/hate relationship with Hollywood, the new wave of censorship (from the left and right), San Francisco (tech) politics, you name it -- many of the subjects we discuss here.
I don't venture out often these days -- I've been on a stage only once in the last few months. So this will be a good opportunity for us to meet and air our views.
I'm told this Author Series, which is sponsored by the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center, has featured the likes of Adam Hochschild, Isabel Allende and Michael Pollan in the past. And the proceeds from tickets -- which are on sale at seb.org -- go to a good cause.
If you're in the Russian River-Wine Country area of Northern California (or you're planning a weekend getaway), I hope to see you there.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
It turns out everything, when it comes to artificial intelligence. The media is filled with dire warnings that the dystopian future is here now. Here in San Francisco, human car drivers, pedestrians, firefighters and even police officers are forced to dodge errant automated vehicles operated by Waymo, a subsidiary of tech giant Google (company motto: "Don't be evil.").
Meanwhile, today's New York Times is awash in terrifying AI stories. Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, the 75-year-old "godfather" of AI, just quit Google, saying the company is, well, dong evil by frantically trying to stay up with Microsoft -- which recently unveiled its new AI-enhanced search engine -- in the new scientific arms race. Hinton, who was driven to explore technology's brave, new frontier like the sophisticated physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was decades ago, now believes that AI could be even more destructive than nuclear weapons.
International treaties and wise diplomacy have so far prevented a nuclear world war. But robotic research, Hinton points out, can be secretly undertaken by companies or individual scientists. According to Hinton, AI, which is progressing at a truly chilling speed, can eliminate human jobs -- even high-end, creative ones (an artificially-produced song imitating Drake and The Weeknd just went viral, the NYT reported); exponentially escalate surveillance of human activity; and even someday start world wars.
According to today's NYT, that scary future is partly here now: the authoritarian Israeli government is using AI technology to "automate apartheid" and track Palestinians. Scientists at the University of Texas just disclosed they found a a way -- with the help of AI -- to read minds, analyzing the flow of blood to regions of the brain.
What's the solution? Dr. Hinton says socially-minded scientists around the world -- like him -- should place controls on AI research. Right. That self-regulation has worked so well. Hinton himself refused to sign two recent letters of protest against AI research by fellow computer scientists because he didn't want to publicly shame Google.
Self-regulation -- or shame -- doesn't work on tech giants. Their research is driven by capitalist imperatives and overseen by men who are already on the robotic evolutionary scale to universal automation.
Recently, the New York Review of Books covered a spate of new books that urge the elimination of the human race for the good of the planet. These books, which propose that we not reproduce among other "solutions," did make me think. Climate catastrophes, wars that threaten to go nuclear, now the rapid advance of AI... it does seem that we humans are on a death trip and we're determined to take the rest of Earth with us.
But maybe, just maybe, we can still save ourselves?
The AI future: Be scared, very scared
Why “Succession” Succceeds
The HBO show is driven by great writing -- yes, even without the riveting Brian Cox. So as the 11,000-members strong Writers Guild of America gets ready to go on strike against Hollywood producers on Tuesday, let's hear it for the writers of film and TV. As Gore Vidal once observed, the auteur theory of filmmaking -- which gave the director all the creative credit --is a lot of hooey. Without well-written scripts, even the most talented directors -- and actors -- would be lost.
Of course, I'm biased. I'm a book author who just wrote my first screenplay -- and soon will write a fictional serial that was commissioned by a magazine (and I hope will become a movie). Even though I'm not a member of the WGA, I was paid union rates for the script -- and I'm being well paid by the magazine too. I wouldn't be able to keep a roof over my wife's and my head -- or help pay for our younger son's college expenses -- without this money.
Can the streaming giants afford to pay their writers a long-overdue raise? Of course they can. Netflix is now paying its co-chief executive Ted Sarandos over $50 million a year -- a leap of more than 30 percent over his compensation last year.
But I'm also writing this as an avid fan. I watch a lot of movies and TV. And, by the way, I led you astray on the Netflix show The Diplomat -- after a relatively strong beginning, the series has jumped several sharks. Never mind that Keri Russell -- playing the U.S. ambassador to England -- uttered the unforgivably stupid line, "The CIA did not kill Kennedy," the show has veered wildly off-course in a number of ways. And no, Netflix (and Amazon) didn't kill the espionage thriller. But they sure have tried.
Yes, most of what Hollywood (even the UK) churns out each year is brain-dead -- and for that you can partly blame the mediocre or bad screenwriting. But there is recent TV like Succession, C B Strike, Detectorists, W1A, White Lotus, Slow Horses etc --- and all the classic movies you can think of, even a few of the newer ones.
(Btw, if you're looking for a somber UK police procedural, I recommend the new season of Dalgliesh, starrIng the wonderful Bertie Carvel. Streaming on Brit Box/Prime Video.)
Those shows and movies all began with good -- or great -- writing. Share the wealth, Hollywood.
The Roy siblings confer on Succession
Land for the Landless, Houses for the Unhoused
I read two front-page newspaper articles this Sunday morning -- one in the San Francisco Chronicle, the other in the New York Times -- that got me thinking (again) about the outrageous disconnect between the wealthy elite and the poor. In Brazil, the surging Landless Workers Movement -- an organization closely aligned with the leftist president Lula -- has spearheaded the occupation of unused land owned by the rich. Poor farmworkers led by the group plow the land and grow organic produce -- most of Brazil's rice is now grown by such squatters. The landless movement in Brazil has become a beacon to the world's poor and dispossessed.
Meanwhile, here in SF, the Chronicle reports that nearly 1,000 supportive housing units sat empty last year while homeless people were forced to live on the streets. I'll give you another statistic recently cited in Harpers magazine -- there are over 4,000 people without shelter each day in SF, while there are over 60,000 empty housing units in the city. (This does not include all the empty office space in downtown SF.) These empty housing units are owned by wealthy speculators and government agencies.
It's time for the unhoused in San Francisco to rise up like the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil and occupy this unused property. The Moms 4 Housing activist group in Oakland, which has met with some success, has led the way. Housing occupation campaigns have also sprung up in cities like Philadelphia, challenging local governments' sell-off of dilapidated housing property to private developers.
Shelter is a fundamental right, like decent food, healthcare and education. It's a scandal that San Francisco -- a city with more billionaires per capita than any other city in the world -- allows thousands of its citizens to sleep on the streets when they could be housed. Meanwhile, the local media targets the poor and defenseless -- even when recent sensational crimes have turned out to be committed by the privileged, even when the homeless are victims.
It's time for the unhoused in the U.S. to take direct action.
Rising up in Oakland, CA.
The Fall of Tucker Carlson
I want to share with you a group email from someone for whom I have great respect. (I'm not naming him because he didn't give me permission to use his name.) Like him, I've long been dismissive of Tucker Carlson -- even before his Fox News gig -- because of his racism, sexism, anti-immigrant views and preppie conservatism. But, unlike AOC, who just called for his banning from TV, I thought there was a story behind his sudden expulsion as the top-rated host at Fox News.
I suspect that Carlson was not jettisoned by the Murdochs because of a few offensive emails. What bigwig at Fox News is innocent of that charge? (Rupert and Lachlan would have to let go most of the company, starting with themselves.) I think the real reason that Carlson was fired was because he was evolving into a more independent voice on everything from the dominance of the war state -- which goes unchallenged by our media and political elites - to the assassination of President Kennedy. Carlson believes that the CIA was involved in the assassination, the reason that the spy agency has repeatedly flouted the 1992 JFK Records Act and blocked the full release of Kennedy-related documents.
Recently, I was approached by another Fox News host, who declared himself an avid fan of my book "The Devil's Chessboard" -- a dark history of the Cold War-era CIA, including the JFK assassination. Let's see if I'm still invited on the network now that Carlson has been unceremoniously dumped.
Anyway, as my learned friend points out in his email, many left-wing pundits have come to similar conclusions about Carlson's firing. Here's what he wrote:
Lest the following confuse you, I detest Tucker.
Nevertheless ...
Jacob Hornberger (Future of Freedom Foundation) offers the possibility it was Tucker's JFK stuff that was behind his ouster:
"Let me weigh in on another possibility (re Carlson's firing) — that the Pentagon and the CIA may have been the ones who put the quietus on Tucker and possibly signaled to Fox executives that he had to go...
"Last December, Carlson broadcast a program on the assassination of President Kennedy in which he accused the CIA of having participated in the assassination. In doing so, Carlson violated a taboo that has existed within the mainstream media since November 22, 1963, the day that Kennedy was assassinated ... ." https://www.fff.org/.../did-the-cia-and-the-pentagon-put.../
Jonathan Cook at consortiumnews.com offers other possibilities that may have played a role in Tucker's ouster. Inter alia, Cook notes that:
Here is just a taste of some of the highlights of his time with Fox News:
While the rest of the U.S. media ignored a major investigation by the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh, or deflected attention to a crazed, semi-official conspiracy theory involving a rogue crew on a yacht, Carlson dared present evidence that the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipelines — an act of unprecedented industrial and environmental terrorism...
Uniquely among corporate journalists, Carlson gave airtime to the testimony of whistleblowers from the OPCW, the U.N. body monitoring chemical weapons. The testimony confirmed that, under U.S. pressure, the OPCW rigged an investigation into a gas attack in Douma, Syria, to blame Syrian President Bashar Assad and retrospectively provide the pretext for illegal U.S., U.K. and French air strikes...
Carlson recently broke with the corporate media consensus by highlighting the substance of the Pentagon leaks, not least that U.S. soldiers are covertly fighting in Ukraine. He went further, berating fellow journalists for colluding with the White House in helping to track down the leaker and cover up the most significant revelations:
As (Jimmy) Dore (a hard left agitator) tweeted after Carlson’s sacking: “No one else in all of corporate news ever brings on anti-war voices, [and] the one that did just got axed. Doesn’t matter that he’s the most watched show in all of news – much like when MSNBC fired Phil Donohue for his anti-Iraq War coverage when he had #1 show on network.”
Cook follows with:
"But if Carlson’s firing by Murdoch suggests anything, it is that the corporate media had grown increasingly fearful of the extent to which Carlson was becoming a loose cannon and that the kind of independent journalism he hosted and amplified was gaining traction.
"Through a rapid rise in his ratings, Carlson proved that there is an appetite, a big one, for stories that question the consensual narrative imposed by the rest of the corporate media, for stories that actually hold the powerful to account — rather simply claiming to — and for stories that refuse to assume Western meddling around the globe is necessarily a good thing.
"If it was only white fearmongering that drew audiences and propelled network news hosts to the top slot, then Sean Hannity would surely be king of the ratings, not Carlson.
"The reality, the one Carlson confirms, is that there is an audience ready to listen to critical, independent journalism — when it can be found. The job of the corporate media is precisely to stop viewers hearing dissident views, a rule that Carlson played fast and loose with for too long. Now, it seems, he has paid the price."
Let me suggest you click the link to Cook's piece and watch the videos he links to. They're sooo far from what is elsewhere "allowed," it's enormously instructive.
Given Carlson did ask important questions no one else in the MSM asked, and that he featured radical journalists the "legacy" media abjured, it's a tragedy he was a borderline Christofascist-racist.
Tucker Carlson
Four More Years?
No matter how fast the editing and how urgent the pumping music, the President Joe Biden reelection video felt canned and lifeless, like American democracy these days. The average age of death in the U.S. is slightly over 77-years-old. Biden is 80, already the oldest man to ever occupy the White House. He will be 86 if he finishes his second term. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pointed out, this understandably puts even more pressure on the woman he highlighted in his video but has seemed to shrink as his vice president. Writes Friedman: "It's no secret that Vice President Kamala Harris has not elevated her stature in the last two-plus years. I don't know what the problem is -- whether she was dealt an impossible set of issues to deal with, or is in over her head, or is contending with a mix of sexism and racism as the first woman of color to serve as vice president."
I would vote for all of the above factors and add one, as someone who has observed Kamala Harris throughout her political career -- which started here in San Francisco -- and once shared a speaking event with her at a house party for Barack Obama's first presidential run. With Harris, I'm afraid there is no there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. She lacks core values and passion and the ability to inspire voters. Joe Biden's approval rating languishes around 42 percent. There's a reason that Harris's rating is even lower. She built her career on being a tough, law and order Democrat as SF district attorney, then California attorney general. Then George Floyd's killing changed all that -- for awhile. Now I guess she's somewhere in the mushy middle on police and justice reform.
So, let's just say that Kamala Harris has done nothing to elevate or energize Joe Biden's creaky reelection bid.
The liberal media have enthused that Biden is not facing any serious opposition from within his own party. Is that really a good thing? The primary season is supposed to be full of contention. That's when the serious issues generally get debated. That's when candidates are supposed to wake up and engage voters. Instead, the left wing of the Democratic Party has fallen silently in line behind Old Joe.
"We need stability -- Biden provides that," says progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York, who knocked off an older, more establishment Democrat to win his Congressional seat. And yet, like most of his progressive colleagues in Congress, Bowman also quietly gripes, "I continue to be frustrated when I see (Biden) moving to the center, because I don't see a real need to do that. It's almost like a pandering to a Republican talking point."
Biden recently dismayed many young climate activists who voted for him in 2020 by approving the big Willow oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska.
Over in the Republican Party, meanwhile, Trump is going noisily at his main challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The voters are riled up, the billionaire GOP donors are confused. The Democratic establishment and media are delighted by all of this rancor. But that's the way primary seasons are SUPPOSED to be in a healthy democracy. Is it really good that the Democratic constituency is lulled to sleep behind Biden? That we not debate our financing of the Ukraine war? Or the taxpayers' bailout of banks and wealthy investors? That the Biden administration not feel compelled to develop a more forceful national plan to counter the abortion and reproductive rights extremists?
That's why I'm supporting the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Compare his nearly two-hour speech to the manufactured reelection announcement of Joe Biden. RFK Jr. persuasively addresses all of the nation's central, most controversial issues. Biden just tries to arouse us with scripted rhetoric and slogans. Bobby delivers a long, detailed, compelling speech. Biden gave us a slick and empty commercial.
Will I vote for Joe Biden in November 2024 if he's the Democratic nominee -- and he lives that long? Of course!!! What choice will I and my fellow Americans have when the Republicans run Trump or the equally noxious DeSantis?
But I long for a rambunctious presidential primary season in BOTH parties. Allowing "Sleepy Joe" to sleepwalk for the next year or so is not good for the Democratic Party or the country.
My Thoughts About RFK Jr.
I’ve known Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for two decades. Back when I was running Salon, I interviewed him over Chinese takeout lunch at New York’s Pace University, where he was teaching environmental law. After the interview, I dropped journalistic protocol and I urged him to run for public office. Bobby had built a solid reputation as an environmental lawyer and activist, helping fishermen and communities clean up the Hudson River, which had been poisoned by General Electric, utilities and other corporate polluters. I immediately liked Bobby – he was smart, passionate, and charismatic, like his uncle and father. But he declined to run for office then, saying his children were still growing up and needed their father. (His own father was assassinated when he was 14.)
Not long after, during the 2004 Democratic Convention, over breakfast at the Parker House -- the old Boston hotel that has played a historic role in the lives of his family -- I told Bobby that I was leaving Salon to write a book called Brothers, about his father’s hidden search for the truth about the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. I remember that Bobby stared down at his breakfast plate while I told him of my book’s subject. He did not endorse my work that morning. “My family always taught us to look forward, not back,” he told me. When I informed him that I’d interviewed the widow of Walter Sheridan, his father’s top investigator, and she confirmed the two men were secretly looking into the JFK assassination, that got Bobby’s attention. But, like his family, he remained quiet about the JFK and RFK assassinations while I did my research, first on Brothers and then on The Devil’s Chessboard. His worst fear, Bobby told me that morning in Boston, was to be politically “marginalized.”
Much has happened since then – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no longer silent about controversial subjects.
Bobby began by learning more about the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers – two national traumas that profoundly changed the course of world events. He read Brothers, which was published in 2007. He read James Douglass’s important JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, which was released the following year. Over an al fresco dinner one summer at a friend’s suburban New York home, Bobby told me that I was “on the right track” when I began researching CIA spymaster Allen Dulles and the Cold War national security establishment as the source of President Kennedy’s violent overthrow for my bookThe Devil’s Chessboard.
Bobby seemed distracted and worried that evening. His estranged wife would kill herself not long afterward, one more Kennedy tragedy.
But he kept going on his often-lonely search for the truth – about the growing depredations of the corporate state, about the killings of his uncle and father, and the “stripmining” of American democracy. It seemed he was the only Kennedy who was brave enough to want to know the truth.
Bobby kept searching – and he began speaking out. I put him in touch with other credible Kennedy assassination researchers, like Lisa Pease, author A Lie Too Big to Fail, about the political murder of his father, and James DiEugenio, who recently coproduced the Oliver Stone documentary, JFK Revisited. Bobby visited Sirhan Sirhan in prison, telling him he knew that he did not fire the shot that killed his father – as Los Angles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who performed the RFK autopsy, and various eyewitnesses also insisted. When a California parole board considered Sirhan’s release in 2021, Bobby wrote a persuasive opinion article in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing for his freedom. (Governor Gavin Newsom later rejected the parole board’s decision to free Sirhan, to his great shame.)
Meanwhile, Bobby continued to battle with the corporate giants that pollute the environment and sicken our bodies. In 2018, he was part of a legal team that won a whopping $290 million from Monsanto, proving that Roundup, its weed-killer, was a dangerous carcinogen that lethally sickened a groundsman who had long used the product.
The chemical industry hates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The industry didn’t like President Kennedy either, who invited environmentalist Rachel Carson, author of The Silent Spring, to the White House.) Big Pharma also regards RFK Jr. as an enemy, because he’s accused the drug industry of controlling the FDA and CDC and profiteering from our nation’s public health decline and our chronic diseases.
Has Bobby said some things he needed to walk back? Is he sometimes misinformed? Yes and yes. What public figure constantly in the media spotlight has NOT said things he or she later regretted or had to retract? But RFK Jr. is especially targeted because he’s a Kennedy and he’s courageous.
No, he’s not anti-vax. He wants to make vaccines safer. He’s not a “nutcase,” as many liberals have been led to believe. He wants to protect Americans from corporate ruthlessness. No, he’s not a Trumpie. He says Trump allowed himself to be “rolled” by government bureaucrats and other industry hacks. While Trump crowed about the draining the swamp, Bobby says, he actually made it much worse.
And now, in fact, he’s running against Donald Trump – and yes, Joe Biden, a man he personally knows and likes – for president. Bobby is running because this country is a polarized mess. And the last political leader who could pull together America was his father, Robert Kennedy.
Those who were alive then will always remember the vast swath of Americans who lined the train tracks as RFK’s coffin was carried from New York City to his final resting place, a humble grave near that of his brother in Arlington Cemetery. (I encourage younger people to search out the photos that were taken that day, many of which were collected for the 2018 exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.)
The photos show that a stunning diversity of Americans were pulled together by Senator Kennedy in 1968: working-class whites and blacks, Little League kids, nuns in habits, farmers in overalls, rabbis, middle-class housewives, men in suits. They all bore silent witness to the fallen Kennedy. And young RFK Jr. was on board that train, watching the somber American pageant. Many of those working-class whites would later vote for Alabama Governor George Wallace, a man’s whose stridently racist views were strongly abhorred by RFK. And many of their forgotten heirs flocked to Trump.
Last week, in Boston, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his campaign for president in 2024. I found his long speech powerful and inspirational. It’s the kind of truth-telling that the country desperately needs. I know RFK Jr. is being denounced as a spoiler and worse. I’ll lose friends for even posting something positive about his speech. But I urge you to take the time to listen to him, not just the media spin about him. Yes, the speech is nearly two hours long – as he cracked, after being silenced for so long, he has a LOT to finally say -- but you can listen to it in chunks, at different times.
As Bobby points out, when his father announced his presidential candidacy in March 1968, he was also denounced and politically isolated. The Democratic Party establishment under President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey were adamantly opposed to him. Nearly all the unions and media outlets attacked him for opposing the Vietnam War. Young college rebels had already flocked to the campaign of Senator Gene McCarthy, who regarded RFK contemptuously as a wealthy usurper. That lack of political hope led his father to tell the American people the truth, Bobby said. By the time he was assassinated, Senator Kennedy had won the California primary and was on his way to winning the Democratic nomination.
After you watch the RFK Jr. video, let’s talk. Let me know what you agree with, or dispute. For instance, do you agree with Bobby’s major theme that American democracy has been degraded by the merger of corporate and government power? If you agree with all or most of the following, you might be a Kennedy Democrat …
— The U.S. has been locked into permanent war for decades – wars that mainly profit the military-industrial sector and neocon government bureaucrats and propagandists, who’ve flocked to the Democratic Party.
— Democracy and imperialism are fundamentally contradictory.
— We need to have an intelligent national discussion about Putin’s aggression in Ukraine – is our huge funding of the war escalating the bloodshed or furthering our stated humanitarian goals?
— Pollution is corporate theft – when a corporation despoils nature, it’s an injury to all of us.
— The Covid lockdown that President Trump authorized resulted in a historic shift of wealth to the super rich, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (who also owns the Washington Post).
— The pandemic also aggravated the assault on democracy, stripping away our civil rights, like the right of free speech. “The Constitution was built for hard times.” The Founders knew all about pandemics, after surviving several such outbreaks – but the Constitution made no reference to suspending our liberties because of disease.
— As the wealth gap grows, the American middle class – on which democracy is based – is increasingly hollowed out.
— While the U.S. bombs hospitals, factories, ports and highways, China has been building them. More nations are shifting their economic and political allegiance away from the U.S., which remains locked into increasingly outmoded imperialistic and militaristic modes of thinking.
— The U.S. is the sickest nation in the world, because we spend more money on healthcare than any other nation but have some of the worst health outcomes.
— There are links between the increase of chronic diseases and environmental pollution.
— We have enough money for wars and bailing out banks, but not for food stamps and Medicare. Shouldn’t we be showing the same compassion to the American people?
— RFK Jr. is not the ideal president for normal times – by his own admission, he led a rambunctious youth that lasted into his early 60s. As he remarked, he has so many skeletons in his closet, that if they could all vote, he’d win in a landslide. But these are not normal times. We desperately need a leader who will tell us the truth.
“I’m not safe. Not to the vested interests. But it’s my job to keep you safe.”
Right on.
RFK Jr. announces his presidential campaign
--
Spooked
I watch more than my share of espionage dramas, because I'm obviously fascinated and horrified by the "national security" world. But 95 percent of what Hollywood (and its British partner) turns out is complete bullshit -- spin and propaganda generated by spy industry-friendly hacks like author Ben Macintyre, whose work is the basis for the current limited series A Spy Among Friends (actor Damian Lewis deserves better), among others.
So I was pleasingly surprised by the first three episodes of Netflix’s The Diplomat, the latest effort to dramatize the world of geopolitical intrigue. I normally shudder whenever Netflix -- or Amazon or HBO or Hulu — do a spy series. When’s the last honest spy drama you saw? I'm not arguing that The Diplomat is great art or deeply revealing -- it's an entertainment. But, so far, it has held my interest (he raved).
Strongly acted by Keri Russell and the great Rufus Sewell (the British actor who expertly plays Russell's American husband, naturally) and a diverse supporting cast that includes Ato Essandoh, Ali Ahn, and David Gyasi and created by Debora Cahn of Homeland and West Wing, The Diplomat is a cut above most of the predictable espionage fare.
The marriage of Katy and Hal Wyler is troubled and anything but diplomatic. Nonetheless, it's necessary -- like most of international relations. And so far, the Wylers’ take on the fraught relationship between Western powers and the Middle East feels refreshingly real -- or as real as Hollywood gets.
So, if you're looking for something to watch this weekend, I give The Diplomat a solid B.
Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell in The Diplomat
San Fransicko Tech Mayhem!
BRO BLOOD ON THE STREETS! EVIL KNIFE-WIELDING ENTREPRENEUR! HOW THE TECH INDUSTRY HAS TURNED SF INTO A SLASHER MOVIE! The screaming headlines are everywhere these days. The San Francisco Chronicle and the Standard. The scary reports on local TV stations and Fox News. And I have to admit. Though I've lived in San Francisco for over 40 years -- and raised my sons here and started a company here -- I no longer feel safe walking the city's streets. It's not just plush Rincon Hill, where Bob Lee was stabbed to death. It's tony Pacific Heights and, yes, even Seacliff. Anywhere those people hang out. You know who I'm talking about -- tech moguls like Elon Musk and digital investors like Jason Calacanis. Matt Ocko and David Sacks. Yes, they got rid of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin and they immediately blamed the poor and the homeless for Lee's murder. But it turns out they were just trying to dodge the law. It's people like them who ruined San Francisco! Who made it unsafe!
These days, whenever I go into a Walgreens or grab my soy milk latte at Starbucks, I look nervously over my shoulder. You never know when you might bump into someone like billionaire Ron Conway. If you look at them wrong, there's no telling what they might do. They could go off. They could lunge at you with a kitchen knife.
Thank God the media is FINALLY raising the alarm about the tech industry invasion of San Francisco, a once beautiful and peaceful city. These tech billionaires have brought nothing but violence and misery and squalor to SF. It's time we got rid of them and reclaimed San Francisco!
Elon Musk. Be scared, very scared…
Thursday’s OTHER Big Arrest
The militarized FBI arrest of 21-year-old Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira prompted some questions in the questioning mind, like:
-- Is the highly-classified intelligence that Teixeira allegedly leaked to a group of young online gamers REALLY that top-secret? I mean, some of it was already well-known to news consumers -- news stories based on OFFICIAL leaks. Other revelations about U.S. allies were greeted with a shrug by those overseas governments. And most of the leaks were U.S. intelligence assessments of the Ukraine war -- information that SHOULD be known and discussed by the American public, which is enormously funding the war. In fact, that's exactly what Airman Teixeira (who is no whistleblower in the mould of Snowden or Manning) was reportedly trying to do -- raise awareness about the war in his online group and, yes, win his circle's awe and admiration.
-- Is the New York Times, whose hair-on-fire coverage of the leak story dominated its front page for the past week, supposed to LEAD the heavily weaponized national security assault team (that included armored vehicles and surveillance planes) that took unarmed Teixeira into custody? A gaggle of NYT reporters fired questions at Teixeira's mother and stepfather at the family household in Massachusetts just hours before the arrest drama -- which they then breathlessly reported on. Weird. One more sign that our leading media "watchdogs" have become an arm of the deep state.
Another Random SF Street Murder - But Apparently It Wasn’t
Department of I Told You So -- The tragic murder of tech executive Bob Lee on the streets of San Francisco was widely portrayed in the local press (that's you SF Chronicle and SF Standard and TV news shows) and the national media as the latest example of the city's "crazy dystopia," as one tech industry mogul put it. But as I told friends, Lee's stabbing in a pre-dawn hour smelled to me like a personal attack -- not a random killing by a crazed homeless person as it was alleged.
Now it turns out that the primary SFPD suspect in the murder is another tech executive, Nima Momeni, a friend of Lee's who was riding with him in the same car. Will the tech industry -- and the press -- now apologize for accusing San Francisco of descending into wanton violence?
I can just as well accuse the tech industry and its political and media patrons of laying waste to this once beautiful city. As I told San Francisco tech billionaire Ron Conway -- who helped put Ed Lee and then London Breed in the mayor's office -- at a recent tech forum, this broken city is on you. The tech industry and its political puppets evicted thousands of people, aggravated the homeless crisis they love to complain about, and resist paying their fair share of taxes -- public money that could be used to build affordable housing and make this city healthy again.
Will tech billionaires like Michael Moritz -- who bought himself a news daily that rails against the homeless (the Standard) and recently penned a column in the New York Times wailing that San Francisco has gone to the dogs (without taking any responsibility for the mess) -- now take a genuinely progressive direction and back the political leaders and activists who can turn around the city? Don't hold your breath. The tech industry would rather whine about SF -- even when the blood is spilled by one of their own.
Murder suspect Nima Momeni and victim Bob Lee
The Silent Majority Finally Speaks Up
That's what President Nixon used to call them. And the God-fearing, law-abiding good Americans WERE the majority back then -- at least of the electorate, which overwhelmingly reelected Nixon in 1972 over his liberal, antiwar opponent George McGovern. But today's majority is a very different story. We are pro-gun control, pro-reproductive choice, pro-climate crisis measures, pro=taxing billionaires, pro-labor unions, pro-racial diversity, pro-democracy. In other words, the majority is progressive, even if we don't call it that.
And we're finally speaking up. That's what worries our Republican minority rulers.
Tennessee legislator Justin Jones was returned to the state Capitol by the Nashville City Council without missing a vote. In Memphis, county commissioners will also soon reinstate Justin Pearson, the other young, black representative thrown out of office by their white Republican colleagues in the Tennessee legislature. Jones's and Pearson's offense? Protesting the legislature's outrageous refusal to pass gun control measures after the latest deadly mass assault, a bloodbath at a Tennessee Christian school.
The Republicans who rule the state legislature in Tennessee accomplished only one thing with their act of overt racism. They turned Jones and Pearson into national heroes. "Power to the people!" Jones exulted when the Nashville City Council voted unanimously to return him to the state Capitol.
Meanwhile, a Texas bro named Matthew Kacsmaryk who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump blocked the FDA from authorizing the abortion pill -- which the federal agency has done for the past 23 years. The ruling not only infuriated most women (and men) as well as the medical establishment and the powerful pharmaceutical industry, it cost the Republican Party another wave of future elections. (Just ask Wisconsin voters, who last week elected an outspoken pro-choice Supreme Court candidate by a landslide margin.)
The smart leaders of the Republican Party know that they're fucked. Not only are they saddled with unpopular policies like their rigid stand on abortion, they still have to deal with criminal leadership. (I'm not talking about Supreme Court "Justice" Clarence Thomas here -- but Trump.) Trump is the demon who won't go away, the psychopath who oddly commands the fervent allegiance of the GOP's base.
As long as Trump is the face of the Republican Party -- and the party embraces policies that repel the majority of Americans -- their electoral prospects wIll continue to decline.
The face of the Republican P{arty. (The other one is Trump’s.)
Men and Women: The Eternal Puzzle
We’ll never “solve” the primal attraction-tension between heterosexual men and women, and believe me, my 1960s-‘70s generation tried. This eternal puzzle came back to me last night, as I watched Casablanca again for the first time in years. The 1942 movie is still wonderful – in some ways more of a delight to me now than ever. I’d forgotten how emotionally vulnerable and haunted that Humphrey Bogart’s hardboiled character (Rick) is --- how he spends most of the movie torn up and bitter about losing Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), the love of his life. At the end of the film classic, of course, Bogart does the right thing, the noble thing – he sacrifices his own well-being for the woman he loves. (The cynical Rick also sides with the right side of history, rejoining the anti-fascist struggle.)
Over 80 years later, the cinematic Bogart remains the deepest, truest template for masculinity. His sexy/ugly, tough/tender dichotomy is what modern men still aim for and what straight women desire. The fact that today’s men – often confused and indecisive – generally fall short of this ideal is a cultural conundrum, as well as a source of great frustration to women, who are besieged with their own contradictions.
What contemporary movie or TV series comes close to the power of Casablanca when it comes to portraying the complicated dance between the sexes? They are few and far between. Men on screen are often dithering fools or violent sadists. Women are victims or cardboard constructions out of some #Me Too fantasy.
I propose the lead characters of the British TV series C. B. Strike as an exception – one of the few dramas to portray the male-female dynamic in a compelling way. The relationship between private detective Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) and his colleague Robin Ellacott (Holliday Grainger) is complex, febrile, fraught, erotic, protective, intelligent, comradely, professional – in other words, it feels REAL. But after five seasons, Strike and Ellacott have still not consummated their relationship – all they’ve managed is a chaste kiss or two on the cheek.
I understand why the two leads – and their creators – have held back. They don’t want to fuck things up. In true noir fashion, both C.B .Strike characters have traumatic back stories. But, still, if this don’t-go-there tension continues (a sixth season of the show, which is based on J. K. Rowling’s crime novels, is being produced), I’ll see it as an artistic copout, a creative surrender to today’s male-female dilemma.
We (straight men and women) desperately need screen models of lovers who maintain their independence while being deeply involved (sexually and otherwise) with each other. Is this really so hard to show on the screen? I suppose it is -- because it’s so hard in real life.
Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca
Tuesday Trifecta
Trump was finally dragged into a courtroom, by brave Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Janet Protasiewicz won a smashing victory in Wisconsin, tipping the state Supreme Court in favor of liberal justices, and allowing them to reverse the state's abortion ban and longtime RepublIcan gerrymandering. And teachers' union organizer Brandon Johnson was swept into the Chicago mayor's office over law and order neoliberal Paul Vallas, promising to significantly increase the city's social spending, paid for with higher taxes on the wealthy. Wow, what a day!
MSNBC pundits have been instructing their liberal viewers not to gloat about Trump's legal travails. Host Joy Reid fretted about black public officials like Bragg and Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis (both of whom were slammed by Trump in his Mar-a-Lago rant last night) leading the campaign to bring the former president to justice.
I get the liberal media gatekeepers' cautionary message. But guess what? The Fox News and MAGA crowd were going to be incensed about Trump's indictment no matter what. (I watched Sean Hannity last night -- he and his guests were in full fulminating mode.) So allow all of us majority Americans to celebrate Terrific Tuesday.
We've been forced to live in THEIR America for years now. A country awash in assault weapons, reproductive rights restrictions, black voter suppression, censorship of books, American history and other educational bans, counter-assaults on climate change laws and Obamacare, political hysteria against trans people, billionaires rigging the tax system and labor laws, etc. In other words, a violent, harsh, stupid, reactionary, polluted, racist, misogynistic, homophobic world imposed on the majority by a WEAPONIZED (I'll take back that word) minority.
So, yes, forgive us as we cheer our victories. They've been a long time coming.
Brandon Johnson declares victory in the Chicago mayoral runoff election.
What Makes a City Worth Living In?
The Castro Theatre is one of the last-standing iconic landmarks that ties San Francisco to its glorious past. The 100-year-old opulent movie theater is a "sacred place," in the words of filmmaker and impresario Marc Huestis, who has organized many LGBTQ events there. But the theater, which has hosted countless current and revival movies over the years as well as film festivals, is a hallowed place for all cinema lovers. The battle over the Castro Theatre's future is coming to a head this month, with key votes before the Board of Supervisors and civic commissions. On one side is Another Planet Entertainment, the current leaseholder, which wants to remove the theater's raked floor and movie seats and make it primarily a concert venue. On the other side are filmmakers and fans -- as well as much of the Castro community -- who want to retain the legendary status of the theater.
I have friends on both sides of the bitter dispute, and I understand their positions. The theater has fallen into disrepair -- under the careless supervision of the Nasser family, which has owned the Castro throughout its long history -- and APE is promising to rehabilitate it. And yes, movie attendance is declining. But, as APE opponents have pointed out, what if the concert strategy fails? Will the converted theater then become another gym?
To avoid this "train wreck" -- in the words of Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who along with Castro district Supervisor Rafael Mandelman is trying mightily to work out a compromise -- the Nasser family should sell the Castro Theatre to the nonprofit conservancy that wants to protect it. This would ensure the survival of one of the few landmarks that still defines San Francisco. So far, the Nasser family has rejected this option. But the city should force them to the negotiating table. The Castro Theatre is bigger than one family's commercial interests.
Everyone who lives in the Bay Area has a Castro Theatre memory. I have several. There was the time we took our aging father Lyle Talbot to the Castro for a screening of his Warner Bros., pre-Code classic, Three on a Match (with a young Bogart, Bette Davis and Joan Blondell) -- when my father reminisced about the making of the film for the rapt audience. There were many such great film revivals (and show biz appearances) at Eddie Muller's Film Noir festivals -- which Eddie has now moved to the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland in protest against APE's plans for the theater. I took my 12-year-old son Joe to the Castro for a big-screen showing of Lawrence of Arabia. He was mesmerized -- and after growing up and making trailers for Eddie's Film Noir festivals, he made his own movie, The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
The premiere of that film – which HAD to take place at the Castro, on May 29, 2019 – is one of the highlights of my life, as it was for many of the electrified 1,400 people who packed the cavernous theater that night. I can’t explain to you how overwhelmed I felt that night – watching Joe address the audience, my “honorary” son Jimmie Fails (the honor is all mine) co-star in the film, remembering all the ups and downs since the two of them made a student film together (the film teacher and kids from that public high school – SF’s School of the Arts -- were sitting in front of us that night) and finally watching Emile Mosseri, the composer of the film’s gorgeous soundtrack, rise from the orchestra pit playing the Castro Theatre’s famed organ, accompanying Mike Marshall on the song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” When he was a kid, Joe heard me playing that treacly song from the city’s hippie past. He brilliantly turned it into a gospel-tinged anthem for Mike Marshall to sing in the movie and live at the premiere. Listen to it now – it will give you goosebumps.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco was a valentine to what makes the city great – and a requiem for what it is losing. The Castro Theatre should not be another civic casualty. San Francisco Supervisors and Commissioners – vote to preserve this sacred place.
Joe Talbot and film co-star Danny "Mr. San Francisco” Glover at the Castro premiere.
Trump and Netanyahu’s Axis of Evil
While the U.S. press remains focused on how Russia targeted the 2016 presidential election, Israel's hacking of American democracy has gone unreported -- until now. Veteran national security reporter James Bamford reveals in a cover story in the April 3-10 issue of The Nation that the Israeli government under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu deflected pressure from the Obama administration and European Union to negotiate a settlement with Palestinians during the 2016 presidential race and instead secretly aided the Trump campaign, tipping off the Republican candidate about the massive theft of Hillary Clinton's and her campaign's emails and otherwise swaying voters.
The Bamford expose has received little attention in the press. The New York Times is more interested in the Biden administration's apparent duplicitous relationship with the shadowy Israeli spyware firm, the NSO Group. But, as Bamford notes, with Trump running again for the White House and Netanyahu again (still) in power, the 2024 election could once more be vulnerable to foreign tampering. With its web of private and official intelligence operators, Israel has become one of the world's main exporters of electronic sabotage -- countless democratic governments and electoral campaigns have fallen victim to its secret subversion. After Trump won the Electoral College vote in 2016, he soon demonstrated that he was “a radical Zionist" -- in the enthusiastic words of his operative Roger Stone -- by recognizing the divided city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and otherwise rejecting the Palestinian cause.
Read The Nation article. Here is one of its eye-popping grafs:
The night before the June 2016 meeting (between Netanyahu and President Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry), Netanyahu and Kerry met for dinner at Rome's Pierluigi, a popular seafood restaurant in Piazza de Ricci, a block from the Tiber River. "What's your plan for the Palestinians?" Kerry asked as the Israeli prime minister began chain-smoking a batch of thick Cuban cigars. "What do you want to happen now?" Netanyahu offered a vague response involving a regional initiative, but Kerry wasn't buying it. "You have no path of return to direct talks with the Palestinians or a channel of talks with the Arab countries. You've hit the glass ceiling. What's your plan?" Kerry asked again. But Netanyahu may well have had one: to use his secret agent, who was perhaps sitting with them at that very table, to help put Donald Trump in the White House.
Thick as thieves: Trump and Netanyahu
Piece of My Heart
Music was more than just music to my generation. It was the soundtrack of our days and our guiding light (and sound). More than film, more than literature, more than even politics -- at least after they killed Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Fred Hampton etc. (They changed the course of history through the barrel of a gun.) I was reminded of this while watching my brother Steve's documentary The Movement and The “Madman,” which showed Pete Seeger singing John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" (John himself was not permitted to stage his bed-in for peace in the U.S.) and Crosby, Stills & Nash singing to huge antiwar rallies in Washington DC and San Francisco.
But there was rock and folk music that was not explicitly political that was also part of our movement to change America (and the world). This came to mind when I stumbled across this early studio version of Big Brother & the Holding Company's "Piece of My Heart" (written by the great team Jerry Ragavoy and Bert Berns). A slower, rawer, more sinuous version.
What a powerful song! Maybe Big Brother drummer Dave Getz will tell us about how the song was recorded.
Speaking of Big Brother, I'm also reminded of the passage in my book Season of the Witch, in which Alex Reisman -- the younger brother of Nancy, who was married to band guitarist James Gurley -- heard the group play for the first time, at San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom:
Before the show, Alex went backstage with his new wife, Dorothy, and smoked dope with the band in their cramped dressing room. Janis (Joplin) was terrified -- she had never performed with a rock band before, only in coffeehouses with an acoustic guitar. Alex couldn't see what the buzz was all about. "I remember thinking that Janis was not that great looking, especially compared to someone like Grace Slick. Then she went onstage and opened her mouth and I thought, 'I get it.'"
Janis was blasted into air by the band's rocket of sound. "What a rush!" she felt. "A real drug rush. The music went boom, boom, boom and everyone was dancing, and I stood there and clutched the mike, and I got it."
We all got it.
Big Brother & the Holding Company
The Movement and the Madman
"The People United Will Never Be Defeated!" That's what we used to chant in the streets when we protested the U.S. war in Vietnam and other government assaults on humanity. Tonight at 9 pm on PBS my brother, filmmaker Stephen Talbot, will celebrate that people power in his American Experience documentary The Movement and the “The Madman," which shows how well-organized mass protest prevented President Nixon and his foreign policy advisor Henry Kissinger from going nuclear in Vietnam.
Steve, who I've shown here at a Vietnam War march with his girlfriend at the time Susan Heldfond, sat for an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, in which he discusses his documentary, the Movement -- and, yes, his childhood acting career on Leave It to Beaver and other 1960s TV shows.
The message of The Movement and “The Madman" is as current as the mass protest in Israel, which just forced autocratic Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to indefinitely delay his plan to hijack his nation's independent judicial system. The popular uprising of democracy in Israel has created havoc in the country -- even its military -- and forced President Biden to put pressure on Netanyahu's far-right, extremist government.
Here's the key graf from an article in today's NYT:
"Mr. Biden's team also had a more immediate concern. There was an acute awareness, one official said, that Mr. Netanyahu is expected to participate in Mr. Biden's second Summit for Democracy this week. One senior official said the consensus was that it would nave been DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE (my caps added) to have Mr. Netanyahu speak while hundreds of thousands of Israelis were protesting that he was dismantling checks on his government's power." Right.
So people power sometimes works. Watch The Movement and “The Madman" this evening and celebrate it.
Susan Heldfond and Stephen Talbot (foreground) protest the war in Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg’s Last Words
I understand why the New York Times spotlighted the scary aspect of its "exit" interview with Daniel Ellsberg. But the man who bravely leaked the Pentagon Papers and has long fought for nuclear sanity in the world -- and who recently announced that his doctors have given him only months to live -- made it clear that as, "I face the end of my life, I feel joy and gratitude."
I know Berkeley resident Dan -- I've had the good fortune to interview this very smart, deep man and to speak with him over meals. He's best friends with my good friend Peter Dale Scott. (When I was young, I once picked up Dan at the Los Angeles airport -- he was scheduled to speak at a big anti-nuke rally the next day -- and at his request drove him by the RAND Corporation, where he had stolen the Pentagon Papers, to freak out the think tank. But that's a different story.) He's also featured in the powerful documentary "The Movement and the Madman" by my brother Stephen Talbot, which will premiere Tuesday evening on PBS. The documentary shows how the antiwar movement -- democracy in the streets -- stopped President Nixon and his foreign policy advisor Henry Kissinger from pursuing the nuclear "madman" strategy in Vietnam.
So, as "scary" as it is that the U.S. (and now Putin) has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons in the last 70 or so years, human sanity so far has prevailed. And this restraint sometimes was compelled by brave people like Dan Ellsberg and the popular movements that he and those like him have spearheaded.
As I wrote to Dan today, he continues to inspire me. He's made the world a better place, despite it all, even when it doesn't feel that way.
Daniel Ellsberg
JFK vs. the National Security State
As CIA spymaster Allen Dulles reminded us, the truth will set you free. The truth about the Kennedy presidency can't be found in the academic establishment or corporate media, but I've been interviewed in recent weeks about my books Brothers (about Robert Kennedy's quiet search for the truth about Dallas) and The Devil's Chessboard (about the dark power of the national security establishment) by independent-thinking podcasters, radio show hosts, and documentary filmmakers. Bob Dylan knows the truth, as he sang in "Murder Most Foul." Do you?
The reasons that President Kennedy's assassination still matters are simple: He was fighting for world peace and the forces of permanent war killed him. And because any society that is deprived of the truth (and that is what's at stake in the decades-old battle to finally get access to all the JFK records) is doomed to repeat history.
This summer, I will be interviewed on Zoom about the Kennedy assassination for a worldwide audience of Jungian analysts and scholars. As the Canadian host told me, they won't bother with the conspiracy question because the whole world (except the U.S. establishment) knows that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. The therapeutic audience is more interested in exploring what covering up the dark truth does to people. (Carl Jung himself also happened to analyze both the wife and mistress of the sinister Allen Dulles.)
The Trump shadow that still looms over America. That's what happens to a nation that is not allowed to confront the truth about itself.
If you're still wrestling with the truth about JFK and America, this is a good place to start -- David Emory's recent podcast interview with me and James DiEugenio, who coproduced Oliver Stone's important documentary JFK Revisited. We're featured on shows #18 and 19.
(The below photo of President Kennedy captures the terrible moment when he was finally told about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the democratic president of Congo and the hope of national liberation throughout the world. The president was informed by his UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson. The CIA, which engineered Lumumba's assassination, had kept it from Kennedy for three weeks.)
