The man charged with killing a father and two sons on a San Francisco street last month was one of the youths who benefited from the city’s long-standing practice of shielding illegal immigrant juveniles who committed felonies from possible deportation, The Chronicle has learned. Edwin Ramos, now 21, is being held on three counts of [...]
Posts from ‘July, 2008’
Things That Are Burned, And Things That Are Living
The mania for the new bleats from every news source and gaping mouth: the old has failed, let’s find something new, and maybe it will wrap up all of the trendy memes — in self-help books, on talk shows, in politics — into some convenient handle so we can tell people, “Well I believe in [...]
Face Value
You know the score: you’re hanging with some friends, the night is winding down and groups have separated, so a few pull away from the eternal kitchen confab (kitchens are, apparently, the place for candid dialogue in modern society) and plump up the sofa for some video entertainment. “Let’s try a foreign film someone says,” [...]
True Freedom
In times like this, the social contract becomes little more than a flimsy veil, failing to hide the naked power behind it. In theory, we live in a liberal democracy. In practice we are under the thumb of what William Cobbett memorably called “the Thing” – a great, lurking, self-serving power. Today’s Thing is a [...]
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