Who Cut the Balls Off San Francisco?

by Joe Bob Briggs

MONTREAL—So now San Francisco is banning e-cigarettes, because a City Council member discovered there are still people making personal decisions about what to do with their lives. They’ve been trying to eliminate these people for three decades now, but some individuals just refuse to learn.

It’s been a year or so since I wrote about San Francisco’s ban on the sale of fur in a move that does nothing for animals but destroys businesses that have been established there since the 19th century. Unfortunately I can’t really devote 52 columns a year to cataloguing products banned by San Francisco. In the past they’ve outlawed plastic bags, clove cigarettes, Coke machines, bottled-water machines, people playing stickball in the street, people playing chess in the street, pet stores, goldfish, masked balls, and the practice of letting your dog stick his head halfway out the window while you’re driving. Long ago they banned toys being given away with Happy Meals at McDonald’s. There are several states that have been under sanction by San Francisco at various times, with city employees forbidden from traveling on official business to Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, or my home state of Texas. (Which is fine with me—I don’t really want any bowdlerizing Californians accidentally attending a rodeo and deciding to file animal-cruelty charges at the United Nations.)

It’s illegal to ride a Segway in San Francisco, to package food with Styrofoam, to declaw a cat, or to serve chocolate milk in schools. No one in government is allowed to make any contract with any company that uses tropical hardwood—“Get the rugs out! The floor inspectors are coming over!”—and no school is allowed to offer Junior ROTC because young people who want to follow their families into military service are probably deranged. Don’t try to walk more than eight dogs at a time—even if they’re toy poodles and Chihuahuas—and don’t give your 5-year-old a slingshot for his birthday, because that’s an illegal weapon.

If you asked the high sheriffs of the city exactly what’s going on here, they would give you some version of San Francisco knows better.
“Public scolds don’t care about collateral damage, they’re too busy telling the rest of the world how to behave.”

I’m especially pained by San Francisco becoming an experiment in proto-communist lifestyle engineering, because my love for the city is based on its history of harboring fiercely independent iconoclasts. I consider Ambrose Bierce my mentor, and he flourished there from 1866 to 1899, fighting the corrupt railroad barons, always carrying his Civil War sidearm because his prose was so powerful it could cause lifetime grudges and feuds. (“San Francisco,” wrote Bierce, “is the place where most people were last seen.”) In the ’80s I performed at a punk club called Wolfgang’s owned by impresario Bill Graham, a rock & roll pioneer, and Graham was following in the footsteps of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, patron saint of the Beat movement, whose City Lights bookstore still stands but whose fellow who-gives-a-fuck writing buddies have long since passed on, unaware that their cigarette butts, open whiskey bottles, and crash pads would all violate various ordinances in today’s San Francisco. Carol Doda, another friend of mine from the Wolfgang’s days, was the first nude dancer in the days when it was called go-go dancing, and she survived multiple arrests for showing off what she called her “Twin 44s” before becoming such an icon that the cops backed off and pretty much left her alone at the famous Condor Club. That club was, in turn, a precursor of the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre, where modern pornography and the lap dance were born. There was a period in the late ’80s and early ’90s when I would guest deejay on KFOG, probably the greatest rock station ever, and one day Jerry Fucking Garcia called in on the request line.

In other words, San Francisco was always the place where people didn’t make rules, they broke them. They didn’t ask permission and they didn’t ask forgiveness. It was a safe haven for unconventional lifestyles, unconventional opinions, and unconventional behavior. I wonder what Hunter S. Thompson, a frequent resident, would think of the ordinance against stink bombs, since he loved every kind of explosive device but especially the ones that caused noise and mischief.

Hell, I know what he would think of it. It would inspire him to toss one into the City Council chambers. That would be the place where they sit around debating the effects of Juul electronic cigarettes. Juul is a San Francisco company, so once again the city is eating its young, trying to legislate out of existence a $2 billion local firm that employs 1,500 people. The argument is that young people shouldn’t be vaping, and the little bastards get away with it because Juul products so closely resemble flash drives that they can hide them from clueless teachers. Leave it to San Francisco to deal with an enforcement challenge with a blanket ban—but, of course, life is always more complicated than that, so these are the same faux cigarettes that millions of people use to stop smoking real cigarettes. Public scolds don’t care about collateral damage, they’re too busy telling the rest of the world how to behave.

In some ways San Francisco’s descent into madness is self-correcting, because eventually so many groups will be pointing fingers at so many other groups, demanding lifestyle alterations designed to create healthy specimens of Correct Living, that the whole peninsula will devolve into something resembling the Soviet Union in 1965, if they’re lucky, and Venezuela in 2019 if they’re not. Social engineers are an arrogant lot, and they’ll keep talking and legislating until the last iconoclast has been castrated and jailed. They can’t actually kill him because they outlawed cemeteries

https://www.takimag.com/articl...s-off-san-francisco/

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Who Cut the Balls Off San Francisco?

Leftist democrats.

And they rabidly wish the same for all of the USA.

Public scolds. That is exactly what they are.

They have all turned into busy-body old ladies, worrying about that their neighbors aren't living right.

SF has always been a union town, however that was due to being a hardcore longshoreman union, port towns usually are. Being a libertarian and holding those views was embraced in the West and SF was the urban hot-bed. The last 40-years have seen the City of my family and my youth, devolve into the hole of 'liberal utopia'. The irony is Jim Bob Briggs used to be a fixture in SF newspapers and headlined a number of stand-up shows. Good article.

The City I loved is gone. Sad.

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It’s illegal to ride a Segway in San Francisco, to package food with Styrofoam, to declaw a cat, or to serve chocolate milk in schools.

But you can leave your drug paraphenalia on the streets and poop there, too.

But shitting and pissing anywhere and everywhere is perfectly acceptable behavior. Oh, and the needles......

When I was a weeish lad, I had an older neighbor who used to open-carry a pistol whenever he had occasion to visit The City. Yes, open-carry in a holster. The cops would hassle him, but couldn't technically do anything. This was the late '70s.

Never saw him actually shoot, but he claimed he could have an aimed round in the air in less than one second. I believe he probably was that fast.

quote:

Who Cut the Balls Off San Francisco?

Someone named Castro? ()

The City has turned to shit.

Nanny overlords regulating everything and doing everything EXCEPT their jobs.

Used to be a city of eccentrics, now it's a city of extremists.

I have never met a more closed minded lot than the open minded left.

communists all.

Met my wife in the Bay Area, moved there out of college from the midwest/south. San Francisco was a great town, albeit had the normal big city issues none of the nanny state had started, the only thing going on was the emergence of the tech industry, by and large it was a good place to live lots to do, great weather.

Enjoyed living and working there have been back to visit several times. It's a shame all the reported degradation of a city famous for rebellion, openness, and accepting any and all without question or scorn...

Wow. I had no idea about many of the things mentioned in the article.

Present company excepted, I just have hateful thoughts about the SF/Bay Area.

I lived there when there were vast cherry orchards in the valley. Now, I can't stand the stench.

When I was a kid, my uncle would take me to the local VFW Post for kids days, father and son days, etc. My uncle was much older than my father and served with the US Navy in WWI and WWII. Both times he was stationed in the Pacific. I remember one of his circa 1967 VFW conversations with another vet concerning San Francisco. My uncle said if the Navy discovered a seaman engaged in non-hetero sexual activity, that seaman would be mustered out immediately. These seamen would always be mustered out in San Francisco. Because of embarrassment, many would not return home and simply stay in or around San Francisco. I guess that's how San Francisco got to where it is.

I was flown out there for a job interview in '83 or so. It soon became clear they had a software design hurdle for which they were seeking a cheap consultation. Needless to say: I did not get the alleged job. I did not mind. I didn't like the atmosphere in the Bay Area at all. Instead of a laid-back, non-judgemental, anything goes attitude I expected, I found judgemental people that were constantly selling themselves.

Except the Midwestern transplants, one of whom confided to me tried to stay away from the company's headquarters as much as possible.

I think the company in question was history a year later, too. I've always liked to think part of the reason for that was due to the design hurdle for which I did not give them a detailed solution

quote:

In some ways San Francisco’s descent into madness is self-correcting, because eventually so many groups will be pointing fingers at so many other groups, demanding lifestyle alterations designed to create healthy specimens of Correct Living, that the whole peninsula will devolve into something resembling the Soviet Union in 1965, if they’re lucky, and Venezuela in 2019 if they’re not. Social engineers are an arrogant lot, and they’ll keep talking and legislating until the last iconoclast has been castrated and jailed. They can’t actually kill him because they outlawed cemeteries

When you have enough laws, the laws become unenforceable - assuming anyone actually knows what the laws are.

When you weaken the powers of the police and courts enough by arbitrary politically-motivated intervention, the laws become unenforceable - assuming the police and courts still give a damn about the law (Helloooo, Michelle Shocked).

When you have enough people with enough money and enough of a sense of entitlement and the absurd sense of being perfectly safe that goes with it, the laws become unenforceable.

When you have enough people who are transients or homeless, the laws become unenforceable.

When you have enough people who are self-appointed enforcers of the law ("I have a right! to whatever it is I think I want at this moment in time!"), the laws become unenforceable.

When the laws become unenforceable, the Mayor and City Council and County Commission of San Francisco will simply pass more laws.

Can you DIIIG IIIITT!?!?!?

Balls are still intact....but XE just tucks them away now

Harry Calahan would be so disappointed in S.F.

No more guns stores in the city due to a city ordinance that requires gun sellers to video-record all commercial firearms sales, as well as give the Police Department weekly updates on ammunition sales.

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Originally posted by radioman:
No more guns stores in the city due to a city ordinance that requires gun sellers to video-record all commercial firearms sales, as well as give the Police Department weekly updates on ammunition sales.

I know the guys who ran the last store (Highbridge Arms), when they re-opened about 10-years ago, the Business Permitting office and SFPD were getting pressure from the mayor's office and the district supervisor (no surprise) to foot-drag and obstruct all processes, to include issuing dubious permit requirements and far-fetching contingency plans. The SFFD, because nobody in command had ever dealt with a gun shop before, issued a variety of comical requirements regarding the storage and location of ammunition...explosives you know. They vowed to do it all, as they knew as long as they completed the tasks, the city couldn't say no. The beat cops all dropped in, picking up tac-nylon and to shoot the shit. Lots of gays came in to get armed, much to the surprise of the loud voices. What closed them was a bumbling owner, who's understanding of basic daily business practices was very elementary.