The San Francisco Chronicle has some key details:

Video taken of the confrontation showed Woods starting to walk away from police when five officers opened fire with at least 15 rounds. Critics of how police handled the incident say there’s no indication on the videos that Woods was lunging at or otherwise threatening the officers.

 

The district attorney’s office, police and Office of Citizen Complaints are investigating whether the officers either committed a crime or violated department policy. On Monday, Lee asked the federal Justice Department to look into the Woods killing and other police actions.

 

Also on Monday, the Police Officers Association sent the supervisors a strongly worded letter deriding the Woods Day resolution. It cited several police officers and firefighters who were killed on the job, and said the city hadn’t designated a day in their honor.

Unlike N.Y. mayor, leaders don’t try to placate police

The parallels with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s relationship with his police force are plain. In December 2014, when de Blasio spoke at a ceremony for two murdered officers, hundreds of officers turned their backs on him, furious over the mayor’s comments broadly condemning how minorities are treated by police in New York and elsewhere. Union leaders said de Blasio had “blood on his hands.”

A week later, de Blasio criticized their behavior. “Those individuals who took certain actions the last two weeks, they were disrespectful to the families involved. That’s the bottom line,” he said. “They were disrespectful to the families who lost their loved ones. I can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing in the context like that.”

But by May 2015, de Blasio and police union leaders had patched up their relationship with the mayor, with credit given to de Blasio’s handling of the killing of another officer, his support for getting officers new and better bulletproof vests, and his opposition to a proposed ban on police chokeholds.

In San Francisco, by contrast, leaders are taking a much sterner tone, describing police criticism of their actions as ominous and deplorable:

Supervisor David Campos, who authored the Woods Day resolution with Supervisor John Avalos, told his board colleagues, “By standing up to the bullying and intimidation we have seen, you are not only standing up for yourself, for your family, but you are standing up for an entire city.”

 

“We won’t be intimidated by the POA,” board President London Breed said. “This is a victory, but we have so much more work to do.”

That’s from the Chronicle.

Super Bowl may face protests over police killing

Meanwhile, the SF Weekly, the city’s alternative paper, has consistently likened Woods’ shooting to a police execution. It reports activists are considering protests during Super Bowl 50, which will be played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on Feb. 7, as well as disruptions at game-related events:

Something major is afoot, and public officials know it. They’re just not exactly sure what it could be — or where and when it’s coming.

 

Already, marches and demonstrations are planned and advertised on Facebook. But the “real” show — the equivalent of a blocked Bay Bridge or a takeover of a BART train, except seen by a worldwide audience of more than 100 million viewers — is a closely held secret known only by its organizers (if something like that is even in the works).

 

None of the members of black.seed, who organized the Bay Bridge protest, responded to queries from SF Weekly. Organizers from the Mario Woods Coalition, which made Lee do the offstage shuffle, declined to speak with SF Weekly as well.

 

But opportunities abound. Buses ferrying fans to the game could be blocked. The NFL owners’ dinner, in a public place, could be made ugly. …

 

“There’s gonna be some funny s— going on here,” a veteran media consultant speaking on background told SF Weekly. “It makes me sick to see this coming.”

Now back to politics.

It looks like the Cleveland/Los Angeles/Anaheim/St. Louis Rams might return to Los Angeles:

NEW YORK—There has been renewed attention in recent days on the NFL’s potential return to the long-vacant Los Angeles market after the Los Angeles Times reported that St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke had purchased 60 acres of land between the Forum and Hollywood Park.

That prompted speculation that Kroenke could be making preparations to have a stadium built at that site in preparation for a possible relocation of the Rams to Los Angeles. The market has been without a team since the Rams and Raiders left town following the 1994 season, and some owners and others within the league have been increasingly anxious in recent years to find a way to put a franchise — or perhaps two franchises — in Los Angeles again. The Rams’ lease reportedly enables them to leave St. Louis following the 2014 season.

But NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell cautioned Friday, during his annual Super Bowl week news conference, against overreaction to Kroenke’s land purchase.

It’s probably inevitable that at least one team will come to L.A.. Also inevitable would be some sort of taxpayer subsidy.

Big time sports teams in the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA argue that they bring profits and prestige to local areas. But numerous studies, such as those by Stanford University professor Roger Noll, show that local areas get no benefit from the subsidies. The money that fans give to a sports team just is taken from other types of entertainment, such as movies and personal recreation.

There’s no economic benefit. Rather, the tax increases to subsidize the teams distort the local economy to benefit billionaire owners and millionaire players. The local politicians benefit by hobnobbing with sports stars.

Consider Seahawks owner Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is worth $15.8 billion. Yet in 2002, he cajoled local taxpayers into coughing up “$390 million of the $560 million construction cost.” Why can’t Richie Rich pay for his own stadium?

A new Reason video discusses how the NFL sacks taxpayers for about $1 billion a year, despite revenues of $9 billion:

Thirty years on, the 1984 Super Bowl best is remembered for Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial. It included references to Big Brother and Orwell’s “1984” novel, the repressive Soviet Union during a tense part of the Cold War and the approaching 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

But it mainly took aim at IBM, whose PC in 1981 had eclipsed the Apple II as the most popular personal computer. The commercial announced the Macintosh, the graphics-oriented PC that revolutionized computing, then and since.

The Mac ripped off technology developed by Xerox PARC. But Xerox by then was a lumbering, gigantic copier company that didn’t know what it had. And IBM was the global computing giant that seemed like a monolith.

IBM in the end itself couldn’t compete with such “IBM clone” competitors as Compaq and HP (since merged), Dell and others. IBM eventually sold its PC division to Lenovo, a company ironically in the land formerly run by top commie Mao Zedong, himself one of the biggest of the Big Brothers.

Big Big Brother

It also turned today the ultimate, Big Big Brother, with its “garden of pure ideology” and “information purification,” to quote the ad, ended up being the U.S. government.

And as in the novel “1984” and the “1984” Apple commercial, the U.S. government, as we learned last summer with the revelations about the NSA, spies on absolutely everything done by everybody. Ironically, its major snooping apparat is the very Internet that has done so much to free people’s thinking. The Fourth Amendment and privacy have been completely obliterated.

It’s also a little more than ironic that this occurred under the regime of President Obama, formerly a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. In his 2007 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” which I read, he even pledged to restore our civil rights after the depredations of the then regnant Bush administration.

Fortunately, unlike in “1984” the novel, the Internet now is so vast that Big Brother’s functionaries can’t keep track of every subversive thought. And it works both ways. The Internet lets us look back at Big Brother. To reuse a phrase I coined the other day:

“If the Government Abyss gazes long at you, you will gaze back at the Government Abyss.”

Our current politicians were youngsters before the age of social media. But that will change. We’ll be able to read Candidate X’s un-politically correct rantings in high school. And remember, what is P.C., by definition, changes by the year. So Candidate X, will discover that 15 years later he really was anti-P.C., and therefore will not be allowed to advance up the apparat ziggurat of Big Brother.

Won’t that be fun?

That’s why there’s great hope for the future. It’s why 2014 really didn’t turn out like “1984.”

“We shall prevail,” Big Brother proclaims in the TV ad. No they won’t.

Enjoy the Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, here’s what’s really going on, from the Daily Mail:

America is set for the coldest month of the century as weather forecasters predict yet another freezing blast of Arctic air – putting Super Bowl Sunday in jeopardy.

Teams have been warned to stay on high alert for changes to the scheduling of the first Super Bowl to be played in an open-air stadium.

Temperatures have already hit record lows, at times making parts of the U.S. colder than the North Pole, and are expected to plunge in the coming days.

Disneyland’s fantasies pale in comparison to those of Gov. Jerry Brown, ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Democratic supermajority in the California Legislature and radical environmentalists concerning non-existent “warming.”

I hope the Super Bowl is played as scheduled. But it would be ironic if New York/New Jersey, with a concentration of global “warming” enthusiasts almost as thick as those in California, were the location of the first snowed-out Super Bowl.