There's been growing media coverage of the widely anticipated 12/21/2012 date – which marks the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar, a rare Winter Solstice galactic alignment, and associated New Age predictions – with journalists and skeptics scoffing at doomsday predictions that it will trigger the apocalypse.Read more »

UPDATED A group calling itself the Anti-Colonial Anti-Capitalist 19 (ACAC19), representing 19 demonstrators who were arrested Oct. 6 in downtown San Francisco during a Columbus Day protest that devolved into a violent clash with police officers, says the Twitter account information of two protesters has been subpoenaed by local police or prosecutors.Read more »

A new and unusual coalition of nonprofit, religious, and corporate interests today killed a legislative effort to get more money for Muni through the Transit Impact Development Fee, which was going through its process of being reauthorized every five years and came to the Board of Supervisors today.Read more »

In recent months, I've been exploring the rabbit hole of 2012 prophecy and possibility, a beguiling mixture of myth, spirituality, and hope that humans will finally awaken to the global ecological and economic catastrophes we're creating and make a fundamental shift in our approach, whether that's sparked by cosmic energies or our own earthly intention.Read more »

The University of California Board of Regents today approved the hiring of Columbia University Faculty Dean Nicholas Dirks as the new chancellor of UC Berkeley, a widely lauded selection, but one whose $50,000 pay increase over his predecessor was opposed and criticized by Gov. Jerry Brown and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.Read more »

Over the objections of progressive supervisors and under threats of a lawsuit from nudists and civil liberties advocates, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors today voted 6-5 to outlaw public nudity in the city. Supervisors voting against the ban were David Campos, Christina Olague, John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Jane Kim.Read more »

San Francisco is giving Twitter tax rebates to help grow a business that reduces our communications to 140 characters or less, and now the city's Board of Supervisors has approved the creation of extra-small apartments for the Twitter drones who toil long hours in the company's new mid-Market headquarters, along with their brethren at other tech companies, the target audience for these tiny living spaces.Read more »

A Daily Kos blogger known as Kurykh has posted an interesting and insightful “crash course in San Francisco politics,” in which he correctly identifies the tri-polar dynamic of local politics. Everyone knows the progressives (Ammiano, Avalos, the Guardian) and the so-called moderates (Wiener, Ma, the Chronicle), and so Kurykh dubs the rising third pole (Chiu, Kim, Mayor Lee) “moderate progressives.”Read more »