#sf gate

Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.

The unusual move comes at a moment of growing scrutiny for billionaires and corporations, whose rhetoric about making the world a better place is often overshadowed by their contributions to the very problems they claim to want to solve.

The next Bay Area legends? These celebs are under 40 and making headlines

We decided to look at some of the talented Bay Area folks 40 or under who are putting their mark on the popular culture map.... In the above slideshow, see some of the young people from the Bay Area, or who have lived here at some point, that are making a mark in entertainment and popular culture. 

“I grew up in a home where faith was not an important part of my experience. And when I got to college and people began discussing late at night in the dorm whether God exists, there were lots of challenges to that idea, and I decided I had no need for that.... [A]s I got more into this reductionist mode of thinking that characterizes a lot of the physical and biological sciences, it was even more attractive to just dismiss the concept of anything outside of the natural world.

At one point, one of my patients challenged me, asking me what I believed, and I realized, as I stammered out something about "I don't believe any of this," that it all sounded rather thin in the face of this person's clearly very strong, dedicated belief in God... I decided I'd better investigate this thing called faith so that I could shoot it down more effectively and not have another one of those awkward moments. 

[ I knocked] on the door of a Methodist minister who lived down the street and asked him if he could make any recommendations for somebody who, like me, was looking for some arguments for or against faith. He took a book off his shelf -- "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an atheist [and] set out as I did to convince himself of the correctness of his position and accidentally converted himself. I took the book home, and in the first few pages realized that all of my arguments in favor of atheism were quickly reduced to rubble by the simple logic of this clear-thinking Oxford scholar. I realized, "I've got to start over again here. Everything that I had based my position upon is really flawed to the core.”

The only "Melania" review you need:

Is San Francisco actually on the rise? - SF Gate

For the better part of the previous decade, San Francisco was a frequent punching bag in certain corners of popular media. The likes of Fox News and Joe Rogan would’ve had you believe the city was a lawless, dystopian hellscape, one that would've made an appropriate setting for the latest Batman film. Homelessness, open-air drug use and rampant petty crime were the primary issues destroying the city — so the narrative went — as was the city government’s refusal to do anything about it. It was a dangerous place, and you shouldn’t go there. 

 This description has died down in recent years, especially following the election of Mayor Daniel Lurie, and a concerted public relations effort to frame SF as a city on the rise. But has anything really changed? If so, what? Perhaps more interestingly, how accurate was San Francisco’s reputation to begin with?

 Here at SFGATE, we’ve been actively covering the city since our newsroom’s inception in 1994. Our journalists have captured the pulse of San Francisco, from writing about its most famous faces to its best-known landmarks. We are constantly chronicling the evolution of this city. 

 This past summer, our audience intern, Nathan Kuczmarski, embarked on a central video quest to find out how people perceive San Francisco today. He takes a deep dive into the data and how the numbers align with actual feelings of “safety.” Speaking to experts and San Francisco locals, he found the story Fox News doesn’t want to tell about the city. It’s messy and complex. In the social media age, weighing perception vs. reality is a tall, near-impossible task.  

Sony Bravia "Bouncy Balls" ad from 2005.

More on the ad here.

In case you missed it, and you’re forgiven if you did, former President Donald Trump isn’t happy with the special master he fought so hard for. “Special master” is a fabulous duet of words that should be reserved exclusively for samurai training, BDSM orgies and chess rankings. Alas, “special master” in today’s context gets lumped in with terms such as “Senate parliamentarian” and “Hatch Act” that I have been reluctantly forced to acquaint myself with over the past six years, all because Trump is an asshole who turned America into the No. 1 asshole country in the universe.

And so we come to said special master, Judge Raymond (British accent) Dearie, whose appointment has not stopped the Department of Justice from poring over some of the most sensitive documents they seized earlier this fall from Mar-a-Lago: documents that Trump definitely accidentally absconded from the White House with after his term as President came to an end.

Dearie has not been kind to Trump’s lawyers and even tried to force Trump to appear in court under oath. These plans were scuttled by a federal judge Thursday, but the special master’s moves are just one of many signs that the walls are closing in around our beloved Don-Don. The Department of Justice is still actively engaged in a criminal investigation of Trump. One of Trump’s most vocal defenders in the past is currently arguing that the former President’s attempts to ward off the probe may in fact be aiding it. I love it, unironically, when Trump hires people who he assumes will protect him and then they’re like, “Actually, fuck this guy.” And there are so many people like this out there! Fantastic.

Meanwhile, the House Jan. 6 Committee is still in the process of conducting hearings on Trump’s role in the failed insurrection attempt on the U.S. Capitol, hearings that have already resulted in onetime Trump ally Cassidy Hutchinson testifying that Trump actively ordered security not to prevent armed rioters from reaching the Capitol. Meanwhile meanwhile, New York’s attorney general just filed a massive civil suit against Trump and his awful family for committing flagrant acts of real estate fraud. Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is also jumping onto the hogpile, convening a grand jury that may be looking to charge Trump, or at least associates like Rudy Giuliani, with gross election malfeasance in 2020. Any one of these investigations could result in Trump being supremely fucked, but I’d like to use this space now to demand that the “could” part of this no longer apply.

It is time, both procedurally and metaphorically, to fuck Donald Trump. After all, if the guy who defended Trump against presumed white knight Robert Mueller thinks that Trump is in a highly fuckable position, let’s go ahead and take advantage of that.

It’s well past time, really. If you disdain Trump as much as I do, you’ve been on a six-year-long catharsis hunt in which every victory — even the 2020 election! — has felt hollow. I thought Trump was finished when he fired James Comey. I thought he was finished when Mueller was drafted to investigate him. I thought he was finished when he got COVID-19. You get the idea. It’s been an agonizing stretch in which all of us have had to live through Donald Trump being president, Donald Trump violently refusing to stop being president and then Donald Trump threatening to become president again. All Americans deserve a break from his bullshit. We voted Joe Biden into office for this very reason.

And yet, here Trump remains. Still here. Still not officially fucked. For six years, I’ve been waiting for a cavalry that always arrives unarmed. I’ve been counting on Democrats to put Trump’s head on the chopping block when that party’s leaders all share a bizarre reticence to prosecute him because they believe that indicting Trump is an indictment of the American Idyll or something. It’s possible that Trumpism is a fad and will die out on its own. Perhaps as soon as November, when a red wave that the dreaded polls supposedly once foretold fails to materialize. But given the damage that Trump and his cohorts have wrought, it feels wrong, IS wrong, to hope nature takes its course with this movement. I’ve done the hope thing. I did it in 2008. It only got me here, so you’ll excuse me if hope and I aren’t on the best of terms right now.

What I require, and what is there for the taking at last, is action. All of this due diligence has to be for something, and not just for due diligence’s sake. If Democrats want me to have faith in their precious institutions, then what I need is for those institutions to do what the label on the “Institutions” box promises and indict this man. I’m as sick as you are of the “Today would be a good day to charge Donald Trump with high treason” brand tweets that have polluted the internet since his inauguration, but the receipts are flooding in and the excuses have all sunk to the bottom of the sea in a beautiful, idiot boat. Truly, today WOULD be a good day for the hammer to drop. Don’t wait until after the election, when Republicans will have fucked with an election that they have already pledged to fuck with. Don’t gimme some bullshit about how there’ll be another civil war if we dare to prosecute Trump because I already watched the insurrectionists try to start that war and fail miserably. Most of those people thought they were going to a furry convention or something. And don’t put on your law degree and tell me about dangerous precedents and how fluid the definition of “crimedoing” is. I’ve been watching this shitshow for six years now. I know what I’m looking at. I’m looking at robbery, treason, fraud and awful nutrition habits. Everyone knows what went down, what is going down and what Republicans WANT to go down. And I think I’ve had enough of the down parts. Joe Biden may be an underwhelming replacement, but even he had the stones earlier this month to call all this out for what it is:

“Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”