Pro Commerce

Failure to file

A monologue by Josh Kornbluth is reviewed in the NYTimes of Dec. 24th and the WSJ on the 26th. The performance is called "Love and Taxes." I saw Kornbluth about ten years ago in his first performances with the title "Red Diaper Baby." That monologue was supposed to be humorous. It referred to Kornbluth's childhood in a communist family.
I found it hard to laugh at a story about people who in the 1960s and 70s were still apologists for Stalin. I left the performance early and made a mental note that Kornbluth was pathetic and off the looney left edge.

His new performance is about the fact that he didn't file income tax returns for seven years and finally got caught with an $80,000 tax bill. A wealthy friend apparently loaned him the money to pay the taxes.

It is not dumb and its not a protest to forget to file your income taxes for seven years.

The problem with this Kornbluth story is my own memory.

Edmund Wilson, the literary critic for the New Yorker, wrote To The Finland Station, a pro Marxist history of communism, published in the early 1940s. Wilson, decades later, wrote a preface retracting his pro-Stalinism. The same Edmund Wilson was caught in the mid-1950s for failing to file income taxes for seven years. He gave no explanation except the one Kornbluth gave: 'I forgot.'

There just seems to be something about the left as exemplified in these two men that combines cowardice, hatred of America and ideological blindness. It all comes out in failure to file income taxes. A strong person would be a tax resister, willing to go to jail for not filing. These are two sneaky wimps of the same breed, hoping to get away with something. They just don't know what.

Organic food in Noe Valley

Noe Valley is the most Lefty part of San Francisco. The politics are very much like Berkeley. The photo on the left is the office of a Ronald Reagan realtor with an office in the middle of Noe Valley on 24th Street. The realtor, Harry Aleo, has a window full of anti-Lefty jokes, news clippings and sentimental old San Francisco photos. Harry calls his neighbors the "Looney Valley Liberals".

The photo on the right is the second organic grocery in San Francisco, Real Foods. The store opened 31 years ago and closed on September 1st, this year. The founder's daughter had run this store and two others most of their 30 year run and sold all three in 2003. The new owners closed the Noe Valley store with no notice to anyone, including suppliers, and said they were going to remodel. There appears to be no activity by the new owners to remodel or re-open the store.

The story has been told in the S.F. Chronicle. The original owner sold the Noe Valley store along with two other Real Food stores, in late spring for $2.7 to Nutraceutical (ticker NUTR)

Nutraceutical, of Park City, Utah, was founded in 1993 with the intention of creating a national organic chain to compete with Whole Foods. Nutraceutical has $125 million in stock market value.

Employees of the Noe Valley store started to organize a labor union in the spring. The sequence of events is not known, but it looks like a dozen of the employees wanted a union primarily for better benefits (read health coverage). The dozen employees was close to the majority of the non-management staff. Total staff was 30.

In Lefty Noe Valley, the employees were getting 100% neighborhood support. Understanding their fate, the owner of Noe Valley Real Foods appears to have promptly sold the whole three grocery chain.

The new Park City owners, fearing that unionization might spread to the two other Real Food stores and to their four other stores in the Bay Area, fired all 30 employees, closed the grocery and nailed it shut.

Now the neighborhood has no organic grocery, and none nearby.

In the three months Real Foods has been closed the neighbors have begun to realize what they lost. Now they have set up a Saturday morning organic outdoor market. I went to it the second Saturday they were open and they had under 900 people come through and 8 sellers. A small operation on a small lot.

You draw your own conclusions about commerce, unions and Lefty neighborhoods from this story.

Day after Xmas

This is the day after Xmas. San Francisco has a wonderful ice skating rink which is constructed every winter. We love it. The newly remodeled Ferry Building is in the background. The photo is on the right.

Just to the left of the ice rink is the Vaillancourt sculpture. (Photo on the left) The sculpture is a remarkable piece of prescient art. When it was built forty years ago it was described as 'a freeway after a collapse.' Well lo and behold, the freeway that was right behind it is now gone. After the 1989 earthquake, the Vaillancourt sculpture survived, but the Embarcadero freeway was badly damaged. The citizens hated the freeway because it blocked a beautiful view in the name of intercity transportation efficiency. San Franciscans prefer a beautiful view over intercity transportation efficiency .

The citizens won this battle and the sculpture became prescient art.

This photo on the right reflects two convivial triumphs.
When Union Square was rebuilt a few years ago, someone had the vision to put a coffee shop on one end of the Square. The coffee shop is first rate and people love it. It has outdoor seating most of the year.

The photo was taken from the 8th floor of Macy's on the balcony of The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant with 178 menu items, many of them excellent. The outdoors rooftop view of Union Square and the wildly diverse pure San Francisco restaurant patrons are truly heartwarming.

Two strikes for commercially generated conviviality. Commerce is really good at making people happy.

Security for the Fed?

The Federal Reserve of San Francisco has been undergoing safety construction for several years. The building is almost surrounded by steel and concrete posts to block car bombs from getting too close.

If you know what the Fed really is, you know how insane a terrorist organization would have to be to bomb it. The Fed does absolutely nothing. None of its more than a dozen offices do anything.

The building is filled with economists and their staffs writing reports. So is every other regional Fed. The entire operation of the Fed could be carried out by Alan Greenspan from his home phone. The Fed sets the rates on a queer little line of credit available only to banks. The rate is only symbolic. Nothing changes hands. The Fed also buys Treasury notes. But nothing changes hands and nothing is stored outside of a computer disk.

The Fed contracts with armored car companies to move currency around. But currency is stored in many places.

The Fed does nothing physical. Bombing it would have no effect on American daily life except the physical mess it would make.

Good veggie news

The mad-cow problem is going to get bigger. Two reasons:

First, when Anne Veneman and the cattle industry tell Americans that 'we have nothing to worry about' just a few months after we banned beef imports from Canada for the same reason, the public knows we are being lied to. Just like teenagers who deliberately try drugs because adults lie to them, Americans are going to avoid beef more vigorously because we are being lied to.

Second, in my work on genetically engineered food, I saw several good food studies that made it clear Americans are very anxious about and distrustful of our food supply. Americans will overreact to the mad cow problem.

There is a silver lining.

While I personally feel great sympathy for the sick cows, (I really mean it, after traveling in India, I appreciate bovinity and love cows), we will end up getting more and better vegetarian restaurants in America.

On Tuesday evening I had dinner at a top rated S.F. restaurant, Campton Place. I had a wonderful parsnip soup which could have been vegetarian if the chef had left out the sweetbreads. There was a little guest service of wild mushroom soup with a porcini whip on top that was spectacular. There was no vegetarian entree.

So I asked for a vegetarian entree and the chef made a special creation for me, as any good chef should. The special creation was boring, trite and forgettable. Campton Place is not a top restaurant. It is only a top restaurant for old people, particularly old people from New York. ( New Yorkers are sentimental about food and like heavy sauce on everything.)

The real top restaurants in San Francisco are Masa's followed at a distance by Elizabeth Daniels.

The Campton Place menu, with no vegetarian entree, will be a thing of the past, next year. Every good restaurant will have several vegetarian entrees and three or four high quality veggie restaurants will open up.

I mean vegetarian not ortho-novum, lacto-licky, food-hysterical eateries.

San Francisco's unique Jew anti-Jew relations

My friend Charlotte, in New York, was startled to hear the extent of anti-Semitism from the Left in San Francisco. Charlotte hasn't seen it in New York. I immediately phoned my brother in Seattle to see what has been happening there and he says Seattle Lefties are exactly on the border of anti-Semitism and they could easily cross the line anytime.

San Francisco is the most Lefty city in America, followed by Seattle, Santa Monica and New York. (I've excluded Berkeley and other college towns from my list.) It shouldn't be surprising that San Francisco has gone the furthest into Lefty anti-Semitism.

One consideration that has protected New York and Santa Monica is that both cities have strong and influential Jewish communities. Fear of Jews in those cities might restrain Lefty anti-Semities. That assumption is why I phoned Seattle to check out the situation there. Lefties are strong in Seattle and the Jewish community is small.

Jews are an old community in San Francisco and our power is not highly visible. Jews were among the first settlers. My great-grandfather Jacob Phillips came to San Francisco in 1852. He settled in the biggest nearby city of the time, Petaluma, and rapidly assimilated with the name Jack Phillips. Jack helped form the first synagog in Petaluma. The Jews met in the Masonic Lodge. The Lodge is still in the same place. Jews were so powerful and assimilated in San Francisco in the late 1800s that they founded the Bohemian Club. The Club is now considered the most elite networking club in America by Marxist class analysts. Jews left such an impact on San Francisco, over a century, that their names are on nearly everything in San Francisco from parks, to streets, schools, businesses and countless buildings.

In the recent past, San Francisco has become the epicenter of public anti-Semitism. I would give one reason. We are a Lefty community with an assimilated local Jewish community that doesn't frighten the anti-Semities. In these conditions, the Left automatically becomes anti-Semitic. Lefties hate Starbucks, global commerce, America, big corporations, the elite, the media -- the only thing missing to hate are Jews.

The photo at the right shows how Left San Francisco is. We just had an election where the winner, Newsom, is a liberal Democrat who favors expanded low income housing for the homeless. Many posters against Newsom portrayed him as a fascist Republican. The photo shows a poster in a window of the greediest man in the TV sitcom, the Simpsons, as a supporter of Newsom. The election was two weeks ago; the poster is still up.

The locus of Lefty Jew hate is pretty easy to identity: San Francisco State University.

As an aside, I can testify to the Leftiness of SFState. I was student body president in 1960. (That story will be told some other time.) The Lefty political group that started that year was called Slate. Slate started a year later at UCBerkeley and organized the free speech campaign. My fellow SFState students in 1960 were the ones famously hosed down the stairs of S.F. City Hall while protesting the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The wet students were nearly all from SFState, not Berkeley as the press erroneously assumed at the time.

The first big SFState anti-Semitic act that attracted my attention was in 1996 when a black painter created an official mural for the Associated Student Body organization that had an Israeli flag, swastika and dollar sign prominently on it. I went to see it and photographed the crowd which was virulently anti-Jew. The school never did anything about the mural except take it down during the Summer vacation.

From that time on, S.F State has been a center of anti-Jew hatred. Google 'San Francisco State and swastika' and you'll get 251 entries. Google 'San Francisco State and anti-Semitism' and you'll get 1,850 entries. Palestinians and other Arabs have regular joined a coalition of Lefties in anti-Israel, anti-zionist and anti-Jew riots. It happens almost monthly. The school has gotten into the habit of apologizing publicly. Some of the Google comments by Jews on the hatred they face at SFState are very poignant.

I have two Jewish friends who were professors at SFState. They both quit in the past four years because of the level of anti-Jew hatred in their classes and the absence of support from the faculty or the adminsitration.

SFState anti-Semitic hatred is found throughout the City.

The first peace marches last fall included many groups marching with pro-Palestinian signs and Arafat kafia's and chanting "Palestine from the Jordan to the Sea." There were thousands of people in these anti-Israel groups. When the speakers started, the speakers were even more vocal and called Jews 'Nazi's' in an endless series of tirades.

Most of my peacenik Jewish friends never went to another peace march. The two rabbi's who spoke at the first march never went back to another one. (Michael Lerner, a pro-Palestinian Jew, who spoke at the second big peace march was not allowed back to the third.) There were many signs in the crowd denouncing "the Jew media."

In December last year, two local gay supervisorial candidates were divided on only one issue -- Bevan Dufty was pro-Israel and the other, Eileen Hansen, was anti-Israel. Enough Jews voted to elect Dufty. Two weeks later Dufty joined me at a protest at the Rainbow Grocery Workers Coop which was refusing to stock items from Israel (only Israel, no other countries were banned).

The embargo was formally lifted six months later by a slim majority of the Coop's employee members.

In the late Spring of this year, a women's shelter called San Francisco Women Against Rape became visible following the discovery that interns and volunteers were required to participate in “political education discussions” that included “taking a stance against Zionism.”

In a July 9 email to the S.F. Jewish Bulletin, Nina Jusuf, the center’s executive director, described SFWAR as “an anti-Zionist organization.” Of course Jews didn't know that. There were many Jews among the volunteers and a few among the clients.

Since the City of S.F. funds the women's shelter, the City wrote the 2004 funding contract to ban anti-Zionist training.

This is just a taste of San Francisco Lefty anti-Semitism.

I repeat my opinion. Lefty ideology is inherently anti-Semitic -- the more vigorous the leftism, the more anti-Semitic the adherents. Anti-Semitism, for a thousand years, has portrayed Jews as commercial vampires, business fiends and the elite of global capitalist imperialism.

Holiday English spirit

The NYTimes (Dec. 24) business editors may have run over to BILL CARTER's desk after he wrote the following first paragraph: "In a startlingly quick reversal of strategy, executives at the broadcast networks are disavowing their previous disavowals of reality programming."

That is bold language, but it would be hard to say it better.

The WSJ on the same day headlined the print edition World News column with: "Mad-Cow disease appears to have arrived clangorously in the U.S."

The WSJ ended the same column with: "No Bush pardons are expected this holiday season. With only 11 issued so far, he may go down as one of the least clement of presidents."

The online version of both these paragraphs is traditional boring English.

Happy holiday English from two of our three national newspapers.

San Francisco swimming report

The city's swimming pool in North Beach, at Lombard and Mason, has been torn down and everything but the roof is being replaced. The job will take until next summer, roughly a year and a half. The architect is a friend, Paulette Taggert, married to the owner of the William Stout design bookstore.
The reason the whole pool is being redone at a cost of just under $4 million is that one of the two pools in the building was sinking at one end. When I was swimming I could easily see that the water was below the hand rail on the shallow end and a foot over the hand rail at the deep end. I used to swim in this pool every weekday morning on my way to coffee in North Beach at Caffe Malvina. For the time being I am using the U. of San Francisco Koret Center pool. Modern, glossy and filled with yuppies. North Beach was very ordinary folk, including my 65 year old pal Jimmy, Chinese, who one day said the great thing about swimming is that he didn't think.

The other location is at 50 Oak, next to the corner of Van Ness and Market. In the basement of the building, owned for a long time by the Archdioceses, was a swimming pool fed by an underground river. The underground river runs from my current house on the east side of Twin Peaks, joins an underground river near my old 1960s house on the north side of Twin Peaks in the lower Haight, then runs out into the Bay in China Basin. The underground river runs through several miles of sand most of the way, leaving it very clean. I was surprised in 1965 when the Health Department closed the pool and required that it use water from the City Water supply. I loved swimming in a pool fed by an underground river. My office was in the Bank of America diagonally across the street.

Tall Buildings

The quote that caught my eye was "Many of the new towers that now dot the skyline are far bigger than any office buildings Tokyo had before. Improvements in building technology have allowed developers to put up taller buildings that are able to withstand Tokyo's frequent earth quakes" in the Dec. 10th Wall Street Journal.

I was reading the story because the building boom in Tokyo has been obvious for three years. This past summer, my partner and I saw that many of the towers were open. Friends told us that occupancy was filling up the new class A buildings. There were two reasons given: (1) large congruent floor spaces appealed to big Japanese corporations, and (2) the class A quality appealed to global companies looking for new corporate headquarters for their Asian offices.

The comment about improvements in building technology is intriguing. The new buildings in Shanghai, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand are also gigantic. When are we going to get our giant buildings in the U.S.?

I know sentimental San Francisco is never going to go for two-block-wide sixty story towers, no matter how beautiful.

Rothstein and god

Saturday's (Dec. 20th) NY-Times had an article by my hero Ed Rothstein on god and rationality. (Rothstein appears in about three NY-Times' per month). The article is about a complaint from Richard Dawkins that Americans are too religious and need a dose of outspoken atheism.

Arguing with Dawkins isn't my job. Steven J. Gould dissed Dawkins effectively enough for me to ignore anything he says.

Rothstein calls to our attention a book related to the subject of religion. "In his recent book, The Transformation of American Religion (Free Press, $26), the sociologist Alan Wolfe suggests that evangelical Christians in the United States cannot be thought of as they once were. Religion, he argues, has been transformed by American culture to become therapeutic, individualistic and less interested in doctrine than in faith."

I totally admire Alan Wolfe. I interviewed him for my public radio program Social Thought.

I haven't read Wolfe's book, but I will immediately. My own opinion, expressed to friends for the past six months, is that Americans are only religious in a very superficial sense. They say they believe in god and consider themselves religious. It is a weird idea of god and religion.

What Americans (2/3rds of them) do believe in is (1) Norman Vincent Peale's goodie-goodie god who helps make people rich as a reward for positive thinking and (2) occasional church attendance that is presumably good for raising children. The nearly universal American god is found in Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12 step programs, often referred to as "a higher power".

This is a secular god. Something unheard of in the traditional meaning of god or religion. Certainly not the kind of god or religion that is worth killing others for. The kind that has brought bloodshed to the world for millennia.

The ultimate evidence of the abstractness of this god is President (Methodist) Bush's statement that Jews, Christians and Moslems worship the same god. A very abstract god indeed.

Americans believe in a science loving, technology addicted and deeply commercial god. Our god has few restrictions on our behavior, our diet or our thoughts. We celebrate god with a new car, a superb sound system in our church, TV ministers, Xmas shopping and the deep love of mammon. God asks for a little charity and a donation of our time to good works --- and we give it, more than any other people on the planet.

Sounds like a rational god to me.

Victory

The California Public Utility Commission voted to accept a modified plan to get Pacific Gas & Electric, our utility, out of bankruptcy. The modified plan accommodates a recommendation that I made a few months ago that will result in $30 million in funding for parks and urban environmentalism.

I was the only person to testify on this matter. The environmental organizations hid in the woodwork. One person, with a good argument, can make a difference.

Celebrating a great holiday

Tis the season to be jolly.

I wrote a book called Simple Living Investments. My book is listed in every Simple Living catalog, which I, consequently, get in the mail. Most of these catalogs are puritanical and give seasonal lectures on 'putting Christ' back in Christmas or 'remembering whose birthday it is.'

Xmas is a synthesis of a pagan winter holiday and Christianity that we celebrate in a uniquely American way. It is about 10% Christian and 30% pagan. It is 60% shopping.

I was helped to understand Xmas by the Japanese who copied the American holiday from the occupation forces and now, every year, give each other white sugar coated sponge cake for Xmas. No one knows why. It is just an additional gift to give for the Japanese who were already a gift giving people.

My favorite Xmas image was one I saw in December 1983 in Tokyo on the Sony building in Ginza --- a Santa nailed to a cross. The Santa was plastic about ten feet tall.

Xmas to me is the quintessential American holiday: the celebration of commerce. I love Xmas and celebrate it with enthusiasm. Buying, buying buying, giving and giving.

Merry Xmas to one and all.

Trial of Saddam Hussein

I happen to have some experience on this matter. So I have a recommendation.

I was in Israel before the Oslo process began and went to a series of public hearings sponsored by Peace Now that included hundreds of Palestinian women testifying about their homes being bulldozed by the Israeli Army.

I got bored after very few women testified, but hundreds were lined up to tell their story. The stories were all the same. The telling of the story was mixed in with a distinctive sound, a high pitched L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L. The sound is made by a rapidly moving tongue. Women do it at a shrill, men at a lower pitch. I've heard a similar sound at Arab weddings and funerals.

The sound seems to move Arabs deeply.

I recommend that the trial of Saddam Hussein be preceded by a month of hearings all over Iraq where hundreds of thousands of people stand in line to testify about the horrors of Saddam. The lines need to be covered by TV and radio because the sound of thousands of people making the L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L sound will permanently alter the Arab world --- for the better. The Arab world has never seen the sight of hundreds of thousands of people making that sound about an Arab tyrant.

I didn't mention that the Palestinian women who I heard in Israel moaning about their homes being bulldozed never once apologized for raising children who murdered Israeli's. Raising murderers was apparently not as serious as having a house razed.

Black questions

Today's NYTimes had the story about President Bush signing the bill authorizing the Smithsonian to create a Black History Museum. There was no Oval Office picture taking, just a gathering on the lawn with the bill's sponsor Congressman John Lewis of Georgia.

I want an explanation. Did Rep. Barbara Lee mess up relations between the White House and the Black Caucus so badly that no member of the Black Caucus will ever be let in the Oval Office again?

Does President Bush feel, as I do, that black Americans deserve better treatment, for moral reasons, but that Political Black America is a moral cesspool that is best ignored? (The President's best friends include several blacks of the anti-Black Caucus persuasion).

Anti-Semitism

A friend of mine who is the Peace Corp director in an African country had the following interesting comment about a brilliant Victor D. Hanson piece on anti-Semitism and the Left.

"This rings very true to me as well. It's always best to have a cheap scape-goat for one's own short-comings. What is interesting here is that I have let our staff know that I am Jewish. We have many conversations on this point, mostly around that it would be best if I converted before the book of revelations comes to be. I have told them in return that I don't see all Jews returning to Israel in our lifetime.

What is also very interesting is that in a country with virtually no Jewish presence - and one in which Israel has done quite a bit of good with training programs, etc., (and probably some not so good things such as providing security training to presidential guards...) that, if not out and out anti-Semitism, there is a firmly held suspicion regarding Jews. I've had quite a few conversations about how such a small tribe could possibly be so powerful. Yet it's something that a simple math lesson does not overcome."

I might add that there is a peculiar kind of anti-Semitism in Japan where there have only been a few thousand jews in Kobe for a century. The Japanese government in the 1930's believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and tried to use Jewish contacts in America (Rabbi Stephen Wise, for instance) to reach F.D.R.

During the heyday of Japanese industrial triumphalism, in the 1980s, there was a pandemic of books about how the Jews ruled the world.

Not to forget, here was a classic best seller in the 1970's called The Jews and Japanese that pointed out the similarities between the two groups especially in business success and the consequent prejudices against the Jews and the Japanese.

Where Lefty thinking got left behind

The Bush administration has seen a three year run of intellectual success. President Bush has been intellectually right nearly a dozen times and has destroyed any viable intellectual opposition.

Here is the list of Pres. Bush's correct intellectual positions that come to my mind.

1. Bush came to office refusing to deal with criminal leaders: (1) Yasir Arafat. This has resulted in the U.S. being able to offer a Palestinian State and total support for a unified Israeli government. It has nearly ended Palestinian suicide bombing, humiliated the French & German anti-Israeli foreign policy. It has shut off funding for Hamas.

2. Step one has allowed Bush to financially support the Israeli fence and create a de facto end to the Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

3. Bush came to office refusing to deal with criminal leaders: (2) N. Korea's Kim Jong-il. Kim has begged for direct American negotiation and has allowed the U.S. to demand in return and receive multi-lateral support from China and Russia.

4. Bush had a conference at his ranch on the issue of human genetic engineering. He came down on the right side (Gore and 44 Democrats in the Senate are on the wrong side), no human genetic engineering --- period. Bush has 56 votes in the Senate. Next year the U.N. will pass a global ban based on the U.S. position, the Senate will follow suit.

5. Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Accord. The evidence for human caused global warming (now called global climate change) is weakening every month. The E.U. has refused to support the Kyoto Accord and Russia is likely to kill it. The scientific consensus on global warming is steadily falling apart.

6. Bush enacted three tax cuts in three years. The U.S. economy is doing fine and the argument that only the fear of deficits will keep Congress from going pork-barrel crazy is turning out to be true.

7. The Homeland Security Bill passed with the civil service left out. Homeland Security now uses the military practice of "get promoted or get fired". The agency has a chance to be effective. Inside the beltway this anti-civil service approach is increasingly popular and appreciated.

8. The National Defense policy of a new democracy in the Middle East (Iraq) has kept all Arab nations in-line and is proving to be a powerful policy when coupled with preemptive strikes. The world is seeing a high level of global stability and regional peace patterns in Kashmir and Liberia.

9. The President's demand that all people in the world are entitled to freedom is the most powerful and morally strong vision put forward in American history. Not nearly so prissy, wrong headed and self-righteous as "human rights" (Carter and Clinton).

10. The President was the first leader on the planet to morally condemn European nations for their tolerance of anti-Semitism. He showed similar leadership regarding the U.N conference in Durban two years earlier.

11. In England, two weeks ago, President Bush explained why the Iraqi people are entitled to the "freedom given by the almighty". Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same god. He's right and he said it for the right reasons.

In summary: we no longer hear nonsense about neocons or Leo Strauss, which was absurd to begin with. American policy, for the first time, is coherent, intellectually sound and based on old/deep traditional American values.

Great week

Governor Arnold pulled off his third and most difficult accomplishment. He got rid of the auto tax, driver's licenses for illegals and got the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature to pass his bond and spending cap initiative for the March ballot that will allow him to avoid raising taxes. Three promises kept in three weeks.

Saddam Hussein was captured. This tells us one thing. The world is better off with the U.N. gone. Why? Because in the old U.N. world Saddam Hussein would have used his money to escape to one of many U.N. countries and safety. With the U.S. as the world power willing to use preemptive force, there was no nation for Saddam to run away to. No amount of money to buy him safety.

San Francisco

This is fun. A few weeks ago the streetcar driver of the orange antique on the left, a restored car from Milan, parked at 17th and Castro. He went into the greasy spoon on the right, appropriately called Orphan Andy's. That left the streetcar free to roll backward downhill five blocks, turn a corner and demolish five parked cars. Nobody hurt. Pure San Francisco.

About Spam

Two spammers were arrested on Thursday in North Carolina for sending Spam across Virginia without a return address. A total of four felony charges were posted. One of the men is purportedly the eighth most prolific spammer.

Will this reduce the amount of Spam I get tomorrow, Sunday, the heaviest day for my Spam mailbox?

I contend it will reduce my Spam about 10-20%. The reason is simple. The legal costs of being charged with illegal Spam will discourage anyone who has net profit under $25,000 per year. My guess is that "under $25,000" is a large number of spammers but a small percentage of the Spam.

I will watch as different laws come into force and are enforced. Hopefully Spam will, in the next few years, be a minor problem as it is now with snail mail. Obviously it won't drop below the snail mail level, a frustration level that we have learned to live with.

Skating in Boulder

My daughter Laura got me to put on ice skates during Thanksgiving in Boulder. The skates were too small but I refused to be an old man. I was nevertheless.

Right on Michael Crichton

There is a great speech by Michael Crichton about the religious nature of the environmental movement.

He sounds like me except that he hits the end of DDT much harder than I ever did. Environmentalism killed tens of millions of children with the ban on DDT and didn't save any birds. I just remember that a kindly Japanese backwoods doctor, in 1977, had saved some 10% DDT powder and gave me some when it was the only drug that would work for some horrid skin eating microbe.

Thank you Michael C.

San Francisco election

Its not hard to know the politics of San Francisco. I knew early in the most recent campaign (and wrote in my blog) that the telephone poll putting Gonzales ahead was wrong. I drive around the city and talk to many people. San Francisco is a small city. You only need to keep your ears open and do a little statistical calculation.

The photo is a scooter in North Beach dressed up like a South Asian tuk-tuk. The scooter captures the soul of the City. Hip young techie people, high on the exotic beauty of South Asian women. Everyone thinks he/she is an artist, part of Burning Man and part deep ecologist. All this together rolled into a sentimental longing for the good old days of 1934 when unions led a general strike to failure.

What actually happened in the election was sentimental sloppy vs sentimental neat. Both candidates are young, glib and sound like debate champions. They obscure all issues. Gonzales was sentimental sloppy, gaining support everyday by being the Howard Dean, anti-machine, "we'll win through pure righteousness".

Newsom was the old Catholic Irish-Italian voters backed by the Phil Burton mean democratic party machine.

There are roughly 460k registered voters in San Francisco. Over 300k came out to vote in the Gore-Bush presidential election; Gore won easily. That was considered a hot contest. The next hot election was the recall of Governor Davis for which 270k came out to vote; Davis won easily. Then a month later came the local elections and only 180k voters turned out; 40%. Low turn-out, low interest, the citizens had voted a year earlier to end run-off elections but the Democratic Party hijacked the legislation. When the real runoff happened on Tuesday 245k turned out to vote, a third more than in the earlier pseudo election.

In all San Francisco elections about 25% of the voters send in absentee ballots. The absentee ballots usually go for the person who was ahead a few weeks before the election (as they did this time) and they also favor the candidate who mails out the most absentee ballots to likely supporters. This is where sentimental but neat Newsom, won the election.

Newsom mailed out 70k absentee ballots to likely supporters and got back a surplus of 20k votes in his favor which won him the election. Gonzales had the momentum by election day, and actually won on election day, but Newsom had already banked (that is the technical term) his absentee votes.

The poll mentioned in my Nov. 17th blog was right about the District Attorney race, as I mentioned at the time. The cops and firemen held their noses and voted against the alcoholic incompetent K.O. Hallinan, and voted for the the lefty Harris who "couldn't be worse."

The harm of Affirmative Action

I have a unique personal position on the issue of Affirmative Action. From 1955 until the present, I have been an active supporter of black civil rights. Active and effective. When my biography is written (a long way off in the future) I will be given credit for a great deal of the success of affirmative action in the United States. I was on the front lines of affirmative action every day and every year for decades. I still am. Several times, in the black community, I have been thanked and publicly appreciated for my efforts.

Yet, I have changed my opinion on this issue. While I standby my past actions and I still believe that affirmative action is warranted in academia and in corporate employment, I now think that a by-product of affirmative action has created serious harm in the black community and a remedy is needed.

Black leaders have left the black community, have been promoted out of it, and the black community today is bereft of competent leadership.

Black leadership is non-existent.

American Blacks have succeeded in astounding ways. Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Franklin Raines (Fannie Mae), Justice Thomas and Vernon Jordan in public life; professors Thomas Sowell and Henry Louis Gates in academia. Most importantly blacks run Merrill Lynch, Stan O'Neal CEO; American Express, Ken Chenault CEO, Time Warner, Richard Parsons CEO; Aliant Energy, Erroll Davis Jr. CEO and Robert Johnson is the founder and CEO of Black Entertainment. Oprah Winfrey is a signal success as an entrepreneur.

I've not named the numerous black American successes in the arts and sports, because I am focusing on the leadership failure in the black community. I see no leaders in the arts or sports. Certainly no commendable ones.

What I do see in the black neighborhoods in San Francisco and the Bay Area is near disaster. Crime and murder continue at excessive rates, lower than in 1990 but horribly high. Black neighborhoods are blighted, public housing continues to fail and small business is non-existent. The whites I know who are working to help black neighborhoods face abuse and insults by blacks for their efforts. Racist anti-white bigotry is high and seemingly getting higher.

Worst of all, the black community is loosing political power after reaching a peak a few decades ago. In California, former L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley ran for governor and Willie Brown was the all powerful leader of California Democrats. In Congress, the black caucus is now 39 members, the historic peak.

The black caucus will never grow because blacks have reached the peak of their population growth and their electoral turnout remains low. The black caucus and black voters are loosing power because they are a small voiceless fraction of the left leaning powerless Democrats. Black voters and politicians have no will and no ability to shift their support between parties to gain political power. The black caucus is a moral embarrassment. The caucus voted against funding the military in Iraq but demanded American military intervention in Liberia. The black caucus supported the Republican effort for the largest funding of AID's in Africa, then insulted the President who signed the bill.

Al Sharpton is fairly described as a buffoon, Jesse Jackson long ago sold-out to his self-serving interests; Julian Bond and Kwasi Nfume have become Democratic party hacks attacking all successful blacks as Uncle Tom's. Blacks like professor Cornell West are solidly in the Farrakhan public anti-Semite camp that long ago alienated Jews, the strongest supporters of black civil rights.

The remedy for affirmative action that I think is needed, today, is an association of black business leaders who quietly form a national panel that meets privately and discusses ways to communicate with black ministers (the de facto leaders of the black communities). The message from the panel would hopefully be something like: "success in business is possible ---- admire, support and imitate black business successes". "Quiet, determined, hard work leads to success for blacks" George Washington Carver redux.

The American black community is basically conservative, pro-America, intelligent and caring. What the community lacks, in addition to a few honest leaders, is a clear and commonsense message.

Puritanism and Homeland Security

I've been thinking about homeland security. I read about a bust at Kennedy Airport of twenty people who had been successfully smuggling drugs for decades.

My main concern was that these twenty people may have been discovered by some arm of the Homeland Security Agency. I hope it was accidental.

I have since checked and I find that the Homeland Security Agency has a department concerned with "counter narcotics" but Homeland Security hasn't subsumed the Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA is still independent.

This is good news.

Someone wise or someone politically powerful seems to have kept the DEA out of Homeland Security. Puritanism usually wants to lump drug interdiction with terrorist interdiction. Such a combination would be bad.

My reasoning is very simple. I can buy cocaine any day of the week, and heroin users can buy heroin any day. We know that commerce will successfully bring drugs across international borders everyday of every year indefinitely into the future. No DEA will stop, or slow down the relentless power of commerce.

The open channels of drugs coming into the U.S. could be effectively used by terrorists only if the U.S. government gave both groups, drug smugglers and terrorists, a reason for working together, like putting the Homeland Security Agency in charge of the DEA.

Fortunately the Homeland Security and DEA agencies are not merged and the drug smugglers who deal with big money are not likely to have an interest in the small time terrorist smugglers.

Stop my subscription, today!

Dear Rea Hederman, Pubblisher New York Review of Books.

Your December 18th issue of NY Rev came with a Holiday Gift order form. Your Holiday issue was the final offensive act, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I have looked forward to finding the latest NY Rev in my mailbox for many years. I have been excited to read the cover contents, often thrilled to read new writers and warmed by the hope of reading beloved old writers.

Today was the last time the NY Review of Books will enter my mailbox. The idea of sending your magazine as a gift to friends for the holidays is a thing of the past.

What is on the cover and included in this issue that is so offensive?

Mark Danner writes about how he hates American foreign policy, Henry Siegman writes about how he hates the Israeli government, Daniel Mendelsohn is outraged by a stylized kung-fu movie, Jeff Madrick hates all of President Bush’s policies, Gore Vidal’s insanity is a NY Review topic one more time, Anthony Appiah warms to Nelson Mandela who made headlines with his hatred of American foreign policy.

Too much hatred, too little reasonable stimulus. No intelligent debate.

Oh yes, don’t forget the Holiday paen to anti-American, anti-Semite Ezra Pound.

I frankly don’t want the flood tide of Upper West Side hatred mailed to my home in San Francisco. No more, please.

Maybe you didn’t notice that the New York Times has been adding balance lately with writers like David Brooks while you set more type for Tony Judt style hatred. Maybe you’ve also missed the reasonable dialog in Europe that suggests anti-American leftism is archaic, anti-Semitic and dangerous.

In any case. Do your managerial duty. End my subscription now and refund the balance of my subscription fee.