AI, Drones, Flock Cameras, Data Centers, Techno Fascists & The Working Class
https://www.facebook.com/SaveMIPublicSchools/posts/pfbid033wLiHqb2c7GHCkiiDTYjSWEQi258pmdtjmJr2sh6NasgTfm59Dn1b18fkBFGNAN2l
This an outrage & SCOE should be ashamed of themselves after approving renewal!! Maybe ABC should mention all the luxury items purchased with our tax dollars! Maybe they should be required to sell off any of the luxury items left to help pay our tax dollars back!!!
Highlands’ bankruptcy filing lists a disputed state claim exceeding $243 million, more than $60 million above the original audit findings.
www.abc10.comNamibia, Beifang, Chinese Imperialism & Labor: After 6 Years Fired Rossing MUN Miners Still Fighting
Hardly Strictly Blues Festival Link To Jesse Wells
https://www.facebook.com/FreedomNews1886/posts/pfbid0EVuFwp48rcSgwk1cV444pzXebLjt722fbjd7QMh1MYq59VskJ1ZBzErzdPpBuCadl
Protests in Santiago, Chile over austerity cuts to public education.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/111683108850412/permalink/29224863723772297/
Billionaires pour money into effort to defeat billionaire tax
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison (worth $17.5 billion) chipped in $15 million; venture investor Vinod Khosla (worth $11.5 billion), $12.6 million; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (worth $37.8 billion), $12.1 million; and Ripple Executive …Chairman Chris Larsen (worth $8.4 billion), $10 million.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/politics/billionaire-tax-fight-has-become-200m-battle/article_31b8898d-bb5a-4ff5-97a0-5921537adea6.html
By Troy Wolverton | Examiner staff writer 9 hrs ago
The Building a Better California PAC formed by Alphabet co-founder and centibillionaire Sergey Brin (seen in March 2025 ) has raised $110.7 million since the end of June.
Evan Agostini, Invision/Associated Press
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If campaign funding is any indication, the state’s billionaires are really opposed to paying a tax on their wealth.
Thanks to a flood of money from the ultrarich in recent weeks, the fight over the billionaire tax being proposed via Proposition 40 is on track to be the second-most expensive ballot battle in state history.
And with Election Day still more than a month away, the brawl could get even pricier.
“The billionaires have the money to spend, so it makes sense that they’re spending it,” said Sarah Hill, a political-science professor at California State University, Fullerton.
Pushed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West to make up for federal cuts to health-care funding — the bulk of which will start taking effect next year — Prop. 40 would impose a one-time tax of up to 5% on the nonproperty wealth of the state’s billionaires.
Propositions 41 and 42 — placed on the ballot by opponents of the tax measure — would nullify Prop. 40 if either passes with more votes.
Through Thursday, the combined contributions to the campaigns for and against those propositions had hit $243.7 million, according to data from the Secretary of State’s office.
That tops the $226 million that was raised for and against Proposition 22, a 2020 measure set working conditions for ride-hail and delivery drivers. That contest previously ranked as the state’s second-priciest ballot-measure battle.
The only ballot fight more expensive was the one over propositions 26 and 27 — a pair of competing sports-gambling measures in 2022 — according to Ballotopedia. The campaigns for and against those measures together raised $571.6 million, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
While the billionaire-tax battle might not reach that level, it’s been gaining ground quickly. Just since the end of June, $103.5 million has been sunk into the tax fight. Of that amount, only about $432,000 went to the pro-tax effort.
Suzanne Jimenez, the chief of staff at SEIU-UHW, said she wasn’t surprised by how much money was flooding into the effort to defeat the billionaire tax. Billionaires seem willing to spend whatever it takes to shoot it down, no matter the consequences, she said.
“I think it just speaks to how really screwed up or how kind of skewed priorities are in this state where billionaires are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars … instead of just paying a very minimal tax to make sure we have a functioning health-care system,” Jimenez said.
Nearly all of the $103 million raised since June 30 by the individual campaigns fighting the billionaire tax or promoting the rival measures came from Building a Better California. That political-action committee, which was formed by Alphabet co-founder and centibillionaire Sergey Brin, itself has raised $110.7 million since the end of June, according to campaign-finance records from the California secretary of state.
The tally of recent contributors to Building a Better California reads like a list of Silicon Valley’s rich and famous — many of them billionaires, according to Forbes magazine.
Since July 1, Brin — the world’s fifth-wealthiest person, with $225.4 billion in assets — and John Doerr, the chairman of venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, who is worth $22.7 billion, each contributed $20 million.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison (worth $17.5 billion) chipped in $15 million; venture investor Vinod Khosla (worth $11.5 billion), $12.6 million; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (worth $37.8 billion), $12.1 million; and Ripple Executive Chairman Chris Larsen (worth $8.4 billion), $10 million.
State campaign-finance records show Stripe CEO Patrick Collison (seen in November), who is worth $17.5 billion, has contributed $15 million to the Building a Better California PAC.
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
Other tech and venture billionaires contributing to the campaign over the last three months include Rippling CEO Parker Conrad; Affirm CEO Max Levchin; former Zynga CEO Mark Pincus; venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; and Jed McCaleb, Ripple’s former chief technology officer.
The remaining 17 contributors in recent months include Stewart Resnick, the CEO of agricultural giant The Wonderful Company, who is worth $5.4 billion; Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, whose stock in the company is worth hundreds of millions of dollars; and a collection of investment professionals, including Alfred Lin and Shaun Maguire from blue-chip Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital.
Since it was formed in January, Building a Better California has raised $228.8 million, $200.5 million of which it has already contributed to the anti-Prop. 40 and and pro-Prop. 41 and 42 campaigns.
By comparison, the yes on 22 committee, which was mostly funded by Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash and PostMates, raised $205 million through the entire course of its campaign to promote Prop. 22.
Just by himself, Brin has contributed a total of $102 million to Building a Better California, easily making him its biggest donor.
In an email, Building a Better California spokesperson Abby Lunardini quibbled with the comparison to other ballot battles. The Prop. 22 fight involved one ballot measure instead of three, she noted. Building a Better California’s spending reflects the signature gathering and other efforts to get propositions 41 and 42 on the ballot, she said.
Lunardini declined to comment about the billionaires’ contributions to the campaign against the tax.
SEIU-UHW has provided 99% of the $31.8 million raised to date by the yes on 40 campaign, but only about $172,000 since June 30.
Other than that, the biggest contributions to the pro-tax campaign have come from Hillary Perkins of San Rafael, who donated $100,000; Ross Boucher of San Francisco, who gave $50,000. John O’Farrell of Atherton, Alan Davis of San Francisco and the Oakland-based council of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees union gave $25,000 each.
Billionaire-tax proponents have no illusions about being able to keep up with their opponents’ campaign funding and spending, Jimenez said.
“We don’t have those types of resources,” she said.
Hill said the outcome of a ballot proposition isn’t necessarily determined by how much money is spent for or against it, but it’s better to have more money than less.
By default, voters typically vote against propositions — and campaign spending against a particular measure can help submarine it, Hill said.
“It’s much easier to convince voters to vote no than yes, because if they’re confused or in doubt, they keep the status quo,” she said. “They just say no.”
The spending against the proposition might be starting to make a difference. While polls earlier this year showed strong support for the billionaire tax, more recent ones indicate a much closer contest.
A poll earlier this week from Politico and the UC Berkeley Citrin Center found the race to be a dead heat among likely voters.
It’s unclear just how much of the money raised by the ballot-measure campaign committees — as opposed to Building a Better California — has been spent. The campaigns update their expenditures quarterly, and their next reports likely won’t come out until after the election.
But through the end of June — the most recent period for which they’d disclosed their spending — the campaigns for and against propositions 40, 41 and 42 had collectively spent $138.6 million of the $140.2 million they’d raised.
That’s almost certainly going to go up. In recent weeks, the no on 40 and yes on 42 campaigns, in particular, have been signing advertising contracts with cable and satellite systems and local broadcasters, according to documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission.
In San Diego, those campaigns have already started airing ads on cable channels.
Instead of focusing on a TV-ad blitz, the yes on 40 campaign plans to lean on volunteers and allied organizations such as Indivisible and the Democratic Socialists of America to get the word out about the measure via phone calls, text messages and door-to-door canvassing, Jimenez said.
And she thinks the ad campaign by opponents could backfire. Voters are likely to question just why there are so many antitax ads on the air and wonder who’s behind them, she said.
“As people just do a little bit of digging, they see it’s billionaires saying, ‘Hey, don’t tax me.’” she said. “And I think voters are going to see through that.”
Written in part by a pair of UC Berkeley professors, Prop. 40 was designed as a response to last year’s federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Also known as House Resolution 1, that measure — which cut health-care spending nationwide — is expected to cost California about $100 billion over the next five years.
Proponents of Prop. 40 project it will raise a similar amount of money, 90% of which would go toward funding health care in the state. The other 10% would be set aside for education and food-assistance programs.
The measure has the backing not only of SEIU-UHW, but the California Federation of Labor Unions, the state’s Democratic Party and the California Nurses Association.
Opponents of the measure include many of the state’s top-ranking public officials and those running for its top offices, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Treasurer Fiona Ma, and gubernatorial candidates Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton.
It’s also opposed by the California Teachers Association, the California Medical Association, Planned Parenthood, the state Republican Party and an array of business and antitax groups.
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While the state Democratic Party supports Prop. 40, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other top Democratic officials in California have come out against the wealth-tax measure.
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
Such figures and groups have warned that the measure could end up decreasing state revenues in the long run by encouraging billionaires to flee the state.
Brin, for example, reportedly moved to Nevada recently, although it’s unclear whether that will get him out of paying the tax because he would have had to establish full-time residency there by the beginning of this year.
Sponsored by Building a Better California, propositions 41 and 42 were designed as poison pills for the billionaire tax — if Prop. 40 passes, it won’t take effect if either Prop. 41 or Prop. 42 draw more votes.
Prop. 41 would require that any money raised by taxes passed after Jan. 1 of this year would be subject to the so-called Gann spending limit put in place by Proposition 4 in 1979.
Prop. 42 would essentially bar all nonproperty wealth taxes and prohibit the state from applying any such taxes retroactively.
CA billionaires pour money into anti-tax effort.
www.sfexaminer.com…https://www.abridged.org/news/sacramento-schools-funding-dispute/?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=6abfc70e7f9f6700018ed1bb&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawUuQbpleHRuA2FlbQIxMABwZG9mAWJyaWQRMXlRYkRYSUt4TW9YaUp6WjJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEekvKkTwy5M-08cMhfBa1-XO6XQup6wIv1TdDdjc0PyPfJ4-fmFNTaj50jY38_aem_5rTiBYEYy67txAjl7DpE7Q
The Sacramento City Unified School District has sparred with its financial overseers from the Sacramento County Office of Education.
www.abridged.orgUCSF behavioral-health workers call for safety improvements beyond Ward 86
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/public-health/ucsf-social-workers-call-for-better-safety-at-all-clinics/article_c88ca98d-874c-43db-be86-d543c4da6fbf.html
By Natalia Gurevich | Examiner staff writer 4 hrs ago
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UCSF social worker Juliette Suarez, who works at the school’s Division of Trauma Recovery Services, speaks during a Sept. 23 vigil for Alberto Rangel, who was stabbed and killed at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86 in December.
Courtesy Ryan Sin/UPTE
Months after one of their own was stabbed and killed on the job at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86, social workers are calling for more support beyond increased security measures there.
On Sept. 23, dozens of people gathered together outside the hospital to hold a vigil for UCSF social worker Alberto Rangel, who was stabbed and killed last December by a patient who has since been charged with the murder.
Workers said they still feel that the majority of their demands for increased safety and staffing levels have not been met. They said they held the vigil to call attention to those demands, which they recently outlined in a letter sent to UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood.
In the months since the stabbing, UCSF and the San Francisco Department of Public Health have made security changes at the site, such as adding a weapons-detection system at entrances and exits and adding more security staff.
But social workers at other hospital sites, who are represented by the University Professional and Technical Employees union, say that what has been done so far falls short of their demands.
They say the safety issues at Ward 86 are systemic throughout UCSF sites that handle agitated patients who are suffering from behavioral-health or substance-use issues, or others.
“We’re not receiving the same safety upgrades,” said Juliette Suarez, a UCSF social worker who works at UCSF’s Division of Trauma Recovery Services.
Suarez, who represents workers in UPTE’s behavioral-health unit, said that because Ward 86 is in a DPH-run facility, it has received these upgrades due to the department’s proactive actions.
She said UCSF workers at other sites haven’t seen the same level of changes and still grapple with regular safety issues.
“That is pretty commonplace, where staff will be threatened — situations in which clients have had weapons on them when visiting various sites,” she said, describing what she said was the widespread nature of the safety issues. “We’ve also been in situations where there have been weapons used in areas where we have our workers.”
Those weapons can include blades or firearms, she said
Suarez said that since December, workers have been threatened or assaulted at sites other than Ward 86. She said the university’s responses to such reports can vary.
“Our safety decisions are basically being decided by higher-ed management folks, or folks that just don’t have that same perspective or voice as the people doing the work every single day,” she said.
In a statement shared with The Examiner on Friday, the university said it “is taking steps to strengthen safety at UCSF community-based program sites.”
The statement said UCSF has been making security assessments and conducting safety trainings at those sites over the past eight months, which will lead to the implementation of new safety measures.
“We value the contributions of our frontline staff and remain committed to providing a safe environment for them and the clients they serve,” the statement said.
In the letter presented to Hawgood last week — which was signed by all 11 members of the Board of Supervisors, state Sen. Scott Wiener, and Assemblymembers Catherine Stefani and Matt Haney — workers called for more funding for safe-staffing levels in “high-risk behavioral health, outpatient and community settings.”
The letter also called for Hawgood to “address the recruitment and retention crisis among UCSF social workers, including establishing parity for compensation, classification and advancement disparities that cause vacancies and turnover.”
Suarez said the workers haven’t yet received an official response from Hawgood or UCSF leadership, although other communications have been ongoing over the past several months.
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After California Division of Occupational Safety and Health officials conducted an investigation, UCSF and its hospital were fined some $273,000 in June for numerous “serious” safety violations.
A statement UCSF spokesperson Kristen Bole shared with The Examiner earlier this week said the school administration has been working with Cal/OSHA in response to the violations raised during the investigation and will continue until those “concerns” have been resolved.
“UCSF has strengthened workplace safety at Ward 86 by establishing rapid escalation and daily safety huddles, expanding emergency and security training, and redesigning workflows,” the statement said.
Other changes include implementing new reporting and response protocols based on safety concerns raised by employees during meetings and listening sessions over the past several months, it said.
But in the meantime, Suarez said that the university hasn’t been meeting workers’ demands for additional support at other sites.
“The rest of us — the UCSF behavioral-health staff and clinical social workers, who are doing a lot of the same work with the same population, mostly community-based — have our offices off-site from the general,” she said.
Suarez said her own office is in a privately rented building.
“Anything happening in those places hasn’t been equal or equivalent to what people at the general have got,” she said.
In response to Rangel’s death, DPH released a report in April that detailed gaps in safety and security at the clinic.
Among other things, it pointed out the location of the sheriff’s deputy on site at the time of the incident, who was far enough away from the scene of the attack that Ward 86 staff members had to attempt to pull the attacker off of Rangel before the deputy was able to intervene.
According to the report, it took seven minutes after the attack for a code blue — the emergency signal used in hospitals — to be issued.
“Extensive additional security measures have been made to strengthen workplace safety, including enhanced physical security measures, expanded security staffing, increased crisis prevention and response training, and a fundamental change in security structure governance to better connect leadership to frontline staff and their concerns,” the department said in a statement shared with The Examiner.
“We remain fully committed to the safety of our staff, patients, and community,” the statement said.
The department has also been allotted a one-time $7.5 million infusion of city funds and $15 million annually in the city budget to go toward supporting safety and infrastructure improvements at the hospital. Other funding will be dedicated to workplace safety training and de-escalation training for staff as well.
Suarez said safety concerns had long been an issue within the union before last December, but what happened to Rangel has pushed members to begin thinking about tracking when and under what circumstances these incidents occur.
“Usually the safety concerns are handled through the employer,” she said. “We’re just trying to get a better pulse on what’s going on with each other.”
She said that she and her colleagues at other clinics hope that such ongoing conversations will encourage UCSF to advocate more for them as the university’s employees, despite the fact that their sites might be funded separately, through medical grants or other sources.
“Even though we’re UCSF workers, we haven’t seen UCSF step forward with taking on that responsibility to us,” she said.
UCSF workers at other sites concerned about safety as well.
www.sfexaminer.comDorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese American incarceration are turned immersive at OMCA
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2026/10/01/behere-1942-japanese-american-incarceration-oakland-omca-masaki-fujihata
Some 1,800 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from Oakland to camps in 1942. In a …new exhibit, artist Masaki Fujihata explores the Berkeley photographer’s iconic images of those events through augmented reality.
By Momo Chang
Oct. 1, 2026, 8:00 a.m.
Artist Masaki Fujihata holds a tablet used in his augmented reality exhibition "BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration" which opened at Oakland Museum of California, September 18, 2026. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
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In the striking photograph, a young Japanese American girl is dressed in a plaid peacoat and round hat, her face wearing a pleasant expression that could read as a smile.
She and her mother are also wearing paper tags dangling from a string on their lapels, like they are pieces of cargo.
The photo, taken by Dorothea Lange in Hayward of a young Mae Yanagi and her family, captures the moment just before she and her family boarded a bus in May 1942 to be relocated to a concentration camp. The lives of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans were uprooted after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on Japan and, two months later, issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing their roundup and detention.
The image is one of several in the archives of Lange, a longtime Berkeley resident, and another photographer, Russell Lee, that captured the attention of Japanese artist Masaki Fujihata. These images form the raw material for an immersive augmented reality exhibit that opened Sept. 18 at the Oakland Museum of California, titled “BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration.”
Fujihata enlarges the iconic photograph of Yanagi until her eyes take up an entire wall at the entrance of the exhibit. The closeup allows visitors to notice the reflection in her eyes, which appears to show the shadowy figures of several people. One is likely Lange, the photographer. Fujihata suspects the others are government officials and maybe military police, and for him it opened up a new interpretation of Yanagi’s expression. In fact, he notes, her eyes are not smiling at all. “Photography contains the story behind the surface,” he said.
Fujihata stands in front an enlarged detail of Dorothea Lange’s photo of Mae Yanagi and her family just before their forced relocation to prison camps at the entrance to “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” at OMCA. The ghostly reflections of officers or photographers are visible in her eyes. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
The exhibit, open through Dec. 27, uses photos from Lange and Lee that they took under the auspices of the government agency that supervised the roundups, the War Relocation Authority. Several of them were taken in Oakland. Using AR, a visitor can experience the moments just before hundreds of families were taken away to camps.
“This is our first contemporary art exhibition focused on this story,” said Carin Adams, senior art curator at OMCA, which holds Lange’s archives. “It’s the most complex, mediawise, that we have attempted.”
Reporting to 1117 Oak St.
The 1930s was the peak of social documentary photography, with Lange as one of its most famous practitioners. Her most celebrated image is “Migrant Mother,” the Depression-era photo of a mother’s worn look as she holds her infant and her two young children bury their faces in her neck. Lange made that image while working for the Farm Security Administration.
Fujihata’s exploration of Lange’s archives started through UCLA’s Yanai Initiative, where he produced a similar exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, that opened in 2022 to commemorate the events 80 years later.
For the Oakland exhibit, Fujihata explores a particular historical moment that occurred very near the Oakland Museum, at 1117 Oak St., now the home of Alameda County Law Library. This is where many Japanese American residents of the East Bay had to report just before being removed to Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno. From the East Bay alone, thousands of people ended up at Tanforan, including 1,494 people from Oakland, 1,182 from Berkeley, and 1,211 from Hayward.
“Store owners, students, seniors, teachers, community leaders were among those instructed to report to this building, bringing only what they could carry,” Dorothy Lazard, who was for many years the Oakland History Room’s historian and librarian, wrote in a post about that time for the Oakland Public Library.
The people, mostly U.S. citizens, were later shipped off to a wartime concentration camp in Topaz, Utah.
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Baggage of evacuees of Japanese ancestry piled on the sidewalk of Oak Street in Oakland, 1942. Credit: Dorothea Lange/Courtesy of the National Archives
The executive order and ensuing exclusion orders gave people little time to prepare to leave the life as they knew it. The show includes photos that Lange took on the museum side of the street, where there was once a row of Victorian homes. We see piles of luggages in front of two homes, a reminder to viewers that people had to pack up their entire lives into what they could fit in a few bundles and suitcases.
Around 1,300 people of Japanese descent were ordered to assemble in Berkeley in 1942, at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley’s Pilgrim Hall. Berkeley’s Japanese American community was vibrant. There was a newspaper, the Japanese Women’s Herald, a grocery stores, florists, boarding houses for students attending UC Berkeley and a number of churches, including the Free Methodist Church on Derby and the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple on Oregon Street. Among the most famous residents was artist Chiura Obata, who began teaching at UC in 1932 and who had a studio on Telegraph Avenue.
In Oakland, historic documents show that 1,790 people of Japanese descent lived in the city in 1940, just before the removal order — among the largest Japanese American communities in the state, with homes largely concentrated near Chinatown and West Oakland.
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A sign reading “I am an American” placed in the window of the Wanto Co. store at Eighth and Franklin streets in Oakland, on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. The owner, a University of California graduate, would later be imprisoned by the War Relocation Authority for the duration of the war. Credit: Dorothea Lange/Courtesy of the National Archives
Another famous photo by Lange shows a Japanese American-owned storefront there with the words, “I AM AN AMERICAN” displayed in bold letters. The photo was taken at 8th and Franklin streets, where a Chase bank now resides, in present-day Chinatown.
Just after the war, “the total number of people that returned [to Oakland] was 906,” according to Jonathan van Harmelen, the staff historian at Densho, an educational nonprofit that archives the history of Japanese American incarceration during the war, citing data collected by the War Relocation Authority.
Van Harmelen said this population decline tracks with broader patterns of post-war resettlement. Many people lost their homes and businesses during the war. When they tried to return to the West Coast, some faced hostility. Many young adults resettled in the Midwest and along the East Coast.
These historic events may resonate for visitors to the exhibit today, Adams said, as green card holders and US citizens are being detained, and sometimes disappeared, by ICE, including those who have committed no crimes.
Fujihata wanted to focus on the pivotal moment when people were about to board the bus, a moment that everyone who was forced into the camps shared. Once in the camps, their lives diverged and became more complex, with 10 main camps spread across multiple states away from the coasts, which were deemed exclusion zones. None knew what was to come.
“Some of the people thought the war would end in three months,” Fujihata said. In fact, many families were locked up for three and a half years.
‘Photographs of people at their most vulnerable’
The main exhibit is indoors, featuring massive reproductions of Lange’s photos and a new video by Fujihata of people reading the executive order, filmed in Oakland with East Bay residents.
In an interactive portion of the exhibit, you can take on the role of photographer during this moment in history. Walk up to a table to borrow a replica of the large-format Graflex camera that Lange often used. Wear it around your neck and look down into the viewfinder. You will be transported, via AR, to a scene where people are waiting to board a train in Little Tokyo. You decide what photos to take by pressing a button; there’s an iPhone inside the case, and the photos you take suddenly appear on a nearby wall, drawing attention to the choices you make.
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The inside of the modified graflex camera used in the augmented reality experience in “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” by artist Masaki Fujihata at Oakland Museum of California. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
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A replica of the kind of camera used by Dorothea Lange in her documentation of the forced removal of Japanese Americans for the War Relocation Authority. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
Next to this AR experience are some of Lee’s photos of people waiting to board trains at the Santa Fe train station in Los Angeles, waiting with their luggage. In contrast to many of Lange’s more intimate portraits of families, Lee’s images zoom out to include news photographers and government officials within the frame, highlighting how many were witness to these forced incarcerations.
Fujihata’s exhibit poses some complex questions: What choices did those photographers make at the time? And what choices would you make in their shoes? Would you take photos of the officers enforcing the removals? Or would you take a photo of a child’s face as she sits and waits?
Today, we have phones available at most times, and we can choose document many things. What do we document? What rights do vulnerable subjects have?
Adams, the curator, sees Lange as a “humanist” and notes that her images of the removals were suppressed during the war. “She was living her values as a person and as a photographer that aligned with her view of justice,” Adam said. “But they’re still really complicated images. They’re photographs of people at their most vulnerable.”
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A new multipanel video installation by Fujihata, filmed in Oakland, features East Bay residents reading President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive order that set in motion the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
Outside on the Oak Street Plaza, you can check out an iPad from a staffer at a table. When you look around the plaza through the screen, the space appears populated with dozens of people milling around or sitting with their suitcases. “They are actual humans,” Fujihata said, not AI. Fujihata filmed the scenes in Tokyo during the pandemic, and later in Los Angeles. The actors are everyday people alongside some professional actors. A few of them are elders who lived through the incarceration camps. Others are children or descendants of people who were incarcerated. One of the figures is Fujihata himself.
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Artist Masaki Fujihata holds a tablet that uses augmented reality to allow visitors to place themselves inside the moment of forced removal in Oakland in “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” which opened at the Oakland Museum of California September 18, 2026. Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
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The view through an iPad screen of the augmented reality exhibit in OMCA’s Oak Street Plaza, part of “BeHere/1942.” Credit: Carolyn Fong for The Oaklandside
If you look through the iPad out beyond the museum, you’ll see the buses waiting. The moment is a recreation of when families departed to Tanforan on a Thursday on May 7, 1942.
Many are wearing formal clothes; Fujihata had a costume designer find clothing characteristic of the 1940s. The scene is a reenactment, Fujihata said, but “when the public comes here to experience it, they will see it as something that happened in this space.”
He suspects that this part of the exhibit may bring up the deepest reactions, since visitors will be experiencing it so close to where the historical events occurred.
The exhibit also includes a resource area, where people can learn more about this history or take action. A series of postcards directs people to organizations, including Densho and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, which each host collections of photos and historical records. There’s a link to write a letter opposing the Trump administration’s plans to close the National Archives in San Francisco, located in San Bruno. The archives hold historic records dating back to the 1850s.
“The ground you’re standing on is where the events happened 80 years ago,” van Harmelen, who saw the exhibit in Los Angeles, said. “It helps people rethink where they are.”
OMCA has a permanent exhibit dedicated to the history of the Japanese American incarceration experience in the history gallery, called “Sent Away,” and some of Lange’s photos from this time period are featured in the gallery that displays items from the museum’s permanent collection. All of Lange’s photos for the WPA are in the public domain.
Lange continues to inspire new artforms. Poet Tess Taylor studied the archives at OMCA, which includes Lange’s notebooks from the time, and wrote a theatrical production called “Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange.” Pop-up scenes from the play will be staged on October 17 at OMCA’s James Moore Theatre.
More than 40 years after Mae Yanagi and her family were rounded up and forced to live in the camps, President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology and reparations of $20,000.
In Oakland, other events memorialize the Japanese American residents who lost everything they’d built and spent the war incarcerated. The Oakland Asian Cultural Center hosts Day of Remembrance events, as do other Bay Area organizations. Descendents of the incarcerated also commemorate the events through pilgrimages to the actual prison camps, from Tule Lake and Manzanar in California to Rohwer in Arkansas.
Adams said her mother, now 91, was incarcerated at the camp at Tule Lake as a child. She said Fujihata’s view as an outsider, from Japan, gives the public an opportunity to see things in a new light. “He’s offering us a way to see things we wouldn’t have seen without his intense curiosity,” she said.
Some 1,800 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from Oakland in 1942. A new exhibit explores Dorothea Lange’s photos through augmented reality.
www.berkeleyside.orgOdd safety order quietly accepted before fatal Tobu Railway accident
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16930825
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
October 1, 2026 at 16:23 JST
Tobu Railway Co.’s limited express train at Shin-Kanuma Station in Kanuma, Tochigi Prefecture, on Aug. 20 after the …accident (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Photo_Illutration.jpeg
An unannounced shift in command, confusion over safety procedures and a reluctance to challenge orders were factors behind the Tobu Railway Co. accident that killed four workers, a company report said.
Tobu Railway submitted the interim report about the Aug. 20 accident in Kanuma, Tochigi Prefecture, to the Kanto District Transport Bureau of the transport ministry on Sept. 30.
The report is part of the company’s investigation into how a train fatally struck four workers spraying herbicide around the former inbound platform at Shin-Kanuma Station on the Tobu Nikko Line.
A senior manager who was not scheduled to take part in the vegetation-control operation arrived at the site and began directing the start of work and arranging for train lookouts, according to the report.
The manager, who was among the four workers killed, was the overall representative for the project. But he was not listed as a worker on the checklist used at the morning roll call.
Personnel at the site had not been told the manager would be joining them.
The designated work supervisor stepped aside for the more experienced manager and remained behind, taking photographs for company records.
UNPLANNED PRESENCE
Under Tobu Railway rules, the designated supervisor was responsible for assigning train lookouts and designating evacuation points.
The supervisor told investigators it was his first time overseeing vegetation-control work.
“The manager was more experienced than me, and I felt reassured leaving it to him, so I naturally deferred to him,” the supervisor was quoted as saying.
Seven workers were spraying herbicide when a Spacia X limited express train approached.
The train hit four workers, while the three others had already moved to safety.
NO ESCAPE PLAN
The report found that no evacuation location or warning signal had been agreed upon before the weed-control work began.
Four minutes before the accident, a lookout warned that a train was approaching.
According to the report, the senior manager pointed beneath the platform, and work continued on the track.
Two lookouts later confirmed the approaching train by radio before an evacuation warning was issued using a hand microphone’s buzzer and verbal calls.
The designated supervisor said he did not hear the warning. When he looked up and saw the train nearing, he moved to the top of the platform.
NO ONE SPOKE UP
According to the report, some workers said they did not understand why the manager directed them to walk beneath the platform even though the train was already close.
“I thought I would get scolded if I spoke up, so I entered without saying anything,” one worker said.
Another said: “We had always walked on top of the platform before, but I refrained from saying anything because I thought it would cause trouble if I brought it up.”
The four workers who died remained beside the track, standing still while leaning against the platform.
The train driver said he sounded the horn after seeing a yellow flag indicating that evacuation had been completed.
One of the train lookouts told investigators he never displayed the red flag used to stop an approaching train. The report did not say when the yellow flag was raised.
Tobu Railway said it will establish an independent committee to examine whether its internal controls functioned properly and why the designated chain of command broke down.
“We need to once again sincerely confront our safety management system,” said Koichi Sato, general manager of the company’s facilities department.
(This article was written by Yuji Masuyama and Ayateru Hosozawa.)
An unannounced shift in command, confusion over safety procedures and a reluctance to challenge orders were factors behind the Tobu Railway Co….
www.asahi.comOver 1,000 NNU CNA Nurses From Around the Country March To Purge Palantir & Shut Down ICE
https://youtu.be/mFhIcBnUCKU
Over 1000 NNU CNA nursers from around the country and supporters marched and rallied in
San Francisco on September 30th to eliminate Palantir at all hospitals …and from any contracts
with the government for genocide and murder around the world.
The action against Palantir was joined by nurses in the UK and other healthcare workers around
the world.
Nurses are furious that their patients are being terrorized and billions are being spent for Palantir
while funding for healthcare is being cut.
They also say they want to fight the oligarchy and the threat of fascism which Palantir is helping to
bring in by spying on workers and patients and using their technology with ICE to grab refugees and
immigrants.
Additional Media:
"Purge Palantir" NNU-CNA Demands Stop Destroying Healthcare, Funding ICE & Supporting Wars & Genocide
https://youtu.be/NAsfQV05VCo
CNA SF Kaiser Nurses Protest AI, ICE, Palantir & Staffing Shortage Threatening Patients & Safety
https://youtu.be/UwkfCorJWEo
Defend DACA Nurses! Kaiser CNA-NNU Rally In San Francisco To Protest Termination of DACA Nurse
https://youtu.be/Bt0ZXeZZ0iI
Kaiser nurses to hold one-day picket over AI-use concerns
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/public-health/kaiser-nurses-to-hold-one-day-picket-over-ai-use-concerns/article_2848dce7-8c93-40d1-8e72-ae47495777bc.html
Nurses Have Had Enough! In Palo Alto Action NNU CNA Nurses Demand That Palantir Be Terminated
https://youtu.be/wNfmmzYT7Lg
S.F. CNA NNU nurses demanding Kaiser help colleague who may lose job over delayed DACA renewal
https://missionlocal.org/2026/05/kaiser-nurse-daca-renewal-delay-san-francisco/
Chat Bots, AI, Healthcare, Profiteering & Patients With NUHW Kaiser LCSW Ilana Marcucci-Morris
https://youtu.be/j0CIif4HHDE
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
Bezo’s WP Likes Mamdani’s Suit Stop Bonus Of Teachers Aids $10000 bonuses teach Mamdani a lesson about the teachers union The New York mayor sues to…
www.labormedia.netNNU Nurses Rally At ICE To Demand ICE Be Shutdown & Palantir Be Purged At All Hospitals & For Wars
