Pro Commerce

Democracy for Arabs

I’ve been applying my different perspective on the world to the question of democracy for Arabs.

Of course, I could be a coward and wait a few years to see how democracy in Iraq and Palestine work out.  That would never let the world evaluate the validity or power of my thinking.

I’ll take my chances.  I predict that in both cases, Iraq and Palestine, Arab democracy will work.

My premise is simple and clear. Politics is....

House and Senate reverse roles

Has anyone noticed that the House and Senate have reversed their roles in the past decade?  The House has traditionally been the democratic body, most representative of the American people and the Senate has represented factional and sectional interests.

These roles have been reversed.  The Senate is now the democratic body and the House represents the factional interests that align with political parties.  The House, via the Democrat Party is more subject to the influence of blacks, urban redevelopment, senior citizens, labor unions and government unions.  The House, via the Republicans is more subject to free trade pressures, gun owners, tax reduction and tax reform factions.

The Senate, because it is....

Meritocracy

What would a meritocratic society look like?

In my mind the four most meritocratic societies are the U.S., Israel, Japan and Sweden.

The U.S. pretty much got rid of the last vestiges of the upper class when the Blue Books disappeared in the 1960s.  Israel was dominated by the early settlers until the 1980s when business expanded rapidly.  Japan still had vestiges of the samurai families until the 1970s but now they exist mostly as residual institutions.  Sweden had a strong medieval class structure but has spent fifty years under socialism trying to erase it.

So what can we reasonably say....

Union, Castro, 24th Street and Clement

The most walkable street in San Francisco is Union Street…seven blocks of interesting stores, varied Victorian style architecture, no blank walls with dead spots, good restaurants and plenty of sidewalk life. There are several coffee shops with good seating. Young good-looking heteros and yuppies.

Castro Street is the most sociologically interesting area with the most vital street life … plenty of beautiful men holding hands, kissing and handing out fliers for the election of the emperors and queens of local bars. The stores are for the most part boring, few restaurants, no coffee shops to sit down in and too many smelly bars. There are four long blocks with dreary windows and a surplus of beggars.  The photo on the right shows the daily overflow of the only Starbucks; its tiny because the neighborhood politicos hate Starbucks and conviviality.

Twenty-fourth Street is five blocks of the most boring stores in San Francisco (the one exception is Rabat, a remnant of the Briarpatch.) There are many dead spaces, not a single interesting window and a good supply of beggars. Twenty-fourth Street has the most women of any neighborhood street with more babies and strollers than anywhere else.  Purportedly, many of the women are lesbian.

Clement Street is the most chaotic, bizarre and interesting shopping street from an ethnic perspective.  It is eleven blocks of Asian: Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Korean and Japanese.  Plus Russians.

Why the differences?

Union Street merchants hired an architect planner in the early 1960s and have stuck with the quaint Victorian plan and the strong neighborhood support for retail. (The architect was a friend of mine, Beverly Willis)

Castro Street has two merchant groups with a stranglehold on the neighborhood prohibiting any change.  They hate sober conviviality and ban coffee shops with seating.  Only bars thrive.  Restaurants with liquor licenses are fought against ferociously.  Castro Street is proof that bourgeois small business people can be tragically small-minded.

Twenty-fourth Street is pure Lefty Fundamentalism.  They destroy good businesses (they have put five out of business,) ban interesting businesses, hate cell phones and view hatred of Bush as the only viable reason for retail stores to exist.  I'm not kidding. If you don't hate Bush…don't open a store on 24th St.

Clement Street is pure love of commerce, no rules or regulations.

In spite of

In spite of the Lefty Fundamentalist hatred of commerce, San Francisco will get one of the greatest monuments to commerce ever built, this year. 

Opening in September will be the Westfield Centre at the center of retail downtown, Powell & Market.  It is probably the biggest indoor mall in the United States.  Westfield snuck in to this Trotsky paradise by agreeing to remodel the abandoned and glorious old Emporium.  They then bought all the surrounding property and built a giant mall.  Just recently, Westfield bought the largest adjacent shopping and movie center, the Metreon, from Sony.

My guess is that Westfield had so much demand for space in their main center that they can use the additional space for overflow.

Westfield is an Australian company, now global, founded in the 1950s.  The company runs on pure nepotism.

The Westfield Centre is an idea that will work.  San Francisco is at the transportation hub of a 4 million person metro region with no malls of this size and compactness. Big, compact, exciting and with great depth of merchandise is what succeeds in retail.  It is what people have been demanding of markets from the open markets in West Africa in 1750 to the first 1850s department stores in Philadelphia to the 1950s suburban shopping malls.

The structure is currently called the San Francisco Center; I doubt the name will remain.

The truth about capers

Capers are small dark spheres, larger than unground pepper, commonly put in salads, in sauces on salmon and chicken.  The caper is a pickled un-opened bud of the Capparis Spinoza specie. I love them.

What nobody ever told me and can’t be learned from Googling is that eating lots of capers on a salad for a week will give you very bad breath.  Yes, capers cause bad breath.  Really bad.

My breath had a sweet foul odor, like too much beer, after a week of having salads with capers for breakfast.  (My partner told me.) I gave up the capers and the bad breath disappeared.  Be warned. 

Only on this blog does anyone do something as foolish as eating capers on salad every day for breakfast for a week. And admit it.

Home to roost

My San Francisco is a living example that Lefty Fundamentalists hate commerce and are heartless when it comes to the consequences of their malice.

Hatred of commerce has made certain that most successful and popular chain stores can’t open stand-alone stores in San Francisco and often great ones like Prada are chased away.  Our high-end downtown is dead and now our Stonestown shopping center is doomed.

Less than a mile from Stonestown shopping center, in Westlake (just across the county line), we are getting a Home Depot and a dozen new popular chains.  Westlake already has a Trader Joes and a large Cost Plus; both retailers have been poorly treated by San Francisco.  Home Depot has now become the anchor store for retail growth in many parts of the U.S.

So, shoppers, retailers and employees at Stonestown will be punished by Lefty Fundamentalism because a better suburban shopping mall is opening a mile away across the political boundary from arrogant, boorish, selfish Lefty Fundamentalism.

CEO pay

I thought I read a great article in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday about the CEO pay of the top 100 corporations, placing the median pay at $2 million.  I was going to rave about the wonderful rationality of the market and the unfair way that the exceptionally high paid top 20 corporate CEOs were misleading examples.

Then I re-read the article and it says none of what I thought it said.

Turns out the article is...

Backwards

The local San Francisco press and our politico’s have been excited because the Republican National Committee has asked San Francisco to bid on a presidential convention for 2008.  Thirty other cities were also asked to bid, I doubt that any got as excited as San Francisco.

The local excitement has come from two groups: one group can’t understand why the Republicans would consider San Francisco knowing that protest groups would be large here and consequently might harm the Republicans in a presidential campaign.  This group writes to every newspaper and phones all the radio stations.  This group thinks that the protestors will shame the Republicans with their courage, boldness and intelligence.

The second group is opposed to the Republican Convention being in San Francisco because they hate the Republicans so much they consider the Republican presence an insult to the area.

I haven’t heard a word yet that speculates on the most likely reason the Republicans would consider a convention in San Francisco with guaranteed large unruly protests.  It is clear to me that the last convention in New York gave the Republican candidates a 15 point boost in the polls (the Dem’s got no boost) during and after the convention. Reason: the great American electorate thinks protesters are the opposite of what the protesters think they are.  In the public's eyes protesters are cowardly (draft dodgers), childish and incoherent.

Haman is back

Based on two blogs back, I have tried my hand at a cartoon that makes the point that Haman, the evil Persian of the bible in the book of Esther is back with the name Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The face is good, Ahmadinejad does have a satanic face, but I can't get the hockey mask (horror returns) nor the nuclear weapon right.

I hope to see this cartoon improved upon.  I offer it to the public domain.

Too smart by a half

I’ve written about the late Larry Summers several times before.  I accurately predicted Summers’ demise as Harvard President a year ago.

I just want to add two observations to my earlier comments.  First, anti-Semitism is a recent disease of the Left. This disease is particularly virulent against Jewish Lefties at Harvard.  This was one problem for Summers.

Let me deconstruct that last sentence, please.  Harvard has always been proud of its upper-class snootiness.  The British upper-class, the model for Harvard, is anti-Semitic to the core.  Snooty Harvard “does allow Jews, but only because we want the smartest people.”  Jews are expected to know their place and shut-up.  (That is a quote from a real Harvard Alum, who I won’t name.)  Moreover, a Jew who was publicly a conservative would be considered OK at Harvard because “such Jews clearly know their place and aren’t rude.” (More from my anonymous friend.)  As a Lefty Jew, Summers attacked the anti-Semites on the faculty who wanted to divest from Israel.  Wrong thing to do to make friends with anybody at Harvard. A Lefty Jew is just all wrong and being outspoken on Jewish issues is even worse.

Second, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, when Summers got into trouble....

Great fun ahead

It is hard to predict how the world is going to react, in the coming three weeks, to one of the most unusual and outrageous events in history.

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has expressed, before all the world, his hatred of the Jews and his nation’s intention to destroy all Jews with the most invidious weapon of Satan.

Turns out that on March 14th the Jews of the world will celebrate a festival that they have celebrated for 2,000 years about this very subject.  The biblical book of Esther tells the story of Jew-hatred in Iran thousands of years ago.  Esther confronted the evil and defeated it. The festival is Purim.

Jews every year are prepared for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  We curse his name whenever it is mentioned and we get drunk rejoicing in our victory over his evil.

Right out of the bible, evil has reappeared and will again be defeated.  Maybe by a brilliant and beautiful woman again.

Non-voters

I’ve spent over 40 years studying the issue of non-voters and get-out-the-vote efforts.

My early research showed that getting more people to vote on election day was nearly impossible; if you got them to vote it had no effect on the election.  Later research has substantiated that finding. 
There are differential voting patterns.  Berkeley has a very high proportion of the eligible population registered and voting, while Stockton is low on both.

I have never found any characteristics of voters...

Calling all lawyers

If you have skills in international law and have an anti-terrorist bent, there is a lawsuit with your name on it.

The Washington Post reports the following about a new pro-terrorist conference at Georgetown University:

“In 2005 the university's conference center refused to host an anti-terrorism conference sponsored by America's Truth Forum on the grounds that it was "too controversial." So why is free speech and expression of cardinal importance now? Perhaps it is related to the recent $20 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a prominent financier of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.”

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal (Wali Ali to his friends) has the deepest pockets a law firm will ever find.  If the Washington Post says he funds terrorists in Palestine, then there are many victims of Palestinian terrorists and their relatives living in the U.S. 

Get those plaintiffs and sue Wali Ali.  Empty his deep pockets and get luxury hotels and DisneyLand France for your very own.

Is suing an Arab potentate a bad precedent for commerce?  No! Neither the Saudis nor anyone else has a large enough market to invest in without the U.S.  If the choice is no more investments in the U.S. or in U.S companies versus no more funding of terrorists…nearly all the Arab potentates will stop supporting terrorists.

Which raises a deeper question.  Since the world of industrial commerce began several centuries ago, where has the Arab world been? 

Are the millennia of hating their neighbors, centuries of hating the Turks, one century of hating the British, a few decades of hating Jews and the recent hatred of Americans part of a pattern?  Is the pattern one of spending their Arab lifetimes filled with so much hate they don’t have anything else to do with their lives?  Just asking.

Bicycle gold

When I read in the Wall Street Journal that racing bikes weigh 15 lbs by racing requirements and cost $20-$40 thousand dollars, I had to see them. 

The photo on the right is a racer on his bike; the photo on the left is one of the racers in the trials run here in San Francisco, today.

I don’t see the money invested in the bikes. By a rough calculation, I figure that five lbs can be cut off the actual weight of the bike, easily, and five pounds could be added back in the form of 24-karat gold plate and still cost less than $20,000. It would never rust.

Danish issue

I try not to comment on contemporary issues unless I have unique view or uncommon knowledge.

That warrants several miscellaneous comments. My Danish friends are just now realizing, thanks to the cartoon issue, that they are not welcome, with Danish passports, in Islamic countries including Bali. Danes now know what traveling as an Israeli feels like.

Which leads me to suggest that Israel make all Danes whose ancestors were in Denmark in 1944, honorary Israelis.

Which reminds me: Bali, as I suggested in an earlier blog, is doomed. The latest report I heard is that Balinese kids are begging from tourists. That will drive even more tourists away than Islamic bombs.

Isn’t there anyone else out there who can’t stand to read another word about New Orleans? Since no one seems to mention the reality of the situation I will have to state it here: The South, particularly the deep, Mississippi South is a moral and political swamp. Nothing honest, competent or technically functional has come out of the South especially the Mississippi delta. Nothing works down there, especially government.

I clearly have to make a modest exception for Wal Mart (not for those readers who know what Wal Mart really is.) Wal Mart is a small rural store that gobbled up the $30 billion in federal farm subsidies because there were no other stores close to the farmers with the subsidy money. Wal Mart grew and got rich on that $30 billion subsidy. Wal Mart is really a rural government retail store that branched out.

Left fundamentalism redux

Individuals keep asking me whether I consider them Lefty Fundamentalists.  I guess I will have to regularly publish a note about global warming data, anti-PC stocks and the tenets of Lefty Fundamentalism.

Global warming cannot be caused by humans and has only occurred, according to the most reliable data available, in two short 20 year spurts.  The data is easy to read. 

People who invest in non-PC stocks, like WalMart, McDonalds, Haliburton and Starbucks are doing very well in the stock market. If Lefties dislike a company, invest in it. 

Lefty Fundamentalism is a set of beliefs that are common to tens of millions of people...who live in San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, Boston, Manhattan and Europe. Any one of these millions will agree that these are their beliefs.

The tenets of Lefty Fundamentalism are on this blog.  The blog explains why these are religious beliefs.  The data that contradicts the beliefs are strong... almost overwhelming.

Do the arithmetic

A good friend sent me a web page on glaciers and ice sheets. It is based on data from several government and UN sources. The web page sponsor is an environmental non-profit.

Either no one proofread the material or they didn't know arithmetic. I suspect the latter is true of most believers in global warming.

The web page doesn't give data on the portion of the global ice sheet that is in Greenland, but for the combined Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets they claim 30 million cubic kilometers of ice.  Greenland is roughly 2 million square kilometers and Antarctica is about 13 million. Greenland is 15% the size of Antarctica. Greenland is probably less than 4 million cubic kilometers of ice, by using those two numbers.

The image on the right shows the additions and subtractions from the Greenland ice sheet annually. The web page claims that there is a net decrease of 53 cubic kilometers of ice per year in Greenland. They are talking about 53 cubic kilometers out of 4 million cubic kilometers. The idea that anyone could measure 53 cubic kilometers of net ice melt per year (.00001, one hundred thousandths of the total) is absurd. 

The further idea that this incredibly insignificant amount of ice from the net melt of Greenland could create a trend of .005 inch per year rise in the oceans is even more absurd. That would be .5 inch in a century. Half an inch increase in a century in oceans that already vary with tidal action by 45 inches twice a day every day is quite hard to picture as a global danger.

Academic politics

I’ve had some recent contact with university level politics.  It is hard to remember that the politics in the academic world is more unpleasant, vindictive and mean spirited than anywhere in the corporate world or in a real legislative body.

I think there are two reasons academic politics is so vicious.  One is social sorting the other is tenure. 

Social sorting is the way all institutions are created.  They attract a particular group of people, they then screen the sub-population that can enter the institution and finally the ones who don’t feel comfortable leave. The remainder have a few core characteristics in common.

The people who end up in the academic world are the ones who seek security and have traded security for the need to develop political skills for use in a more adventuresome life.

Add to this academic lack of political skills, tenure. Tenure makes things even worse because it means you won’t be fired for bad, evil, mean or any other form of satanic behavior.  Tenure makes academic institutions even more politically demonic.

Trend line

I didn’t know the statistics until I saw them in an article by Mark Steyn in the January New Criterion. The blue states include 16 of the 16 states with the lowest population growth rates, the red states include 25 of the 26 states with the highest population growth.

Previously, I had been comforted by the David Brooks data that the highest population growth is in the fifth ring of suburbs, which are all red, vital, prosperous, hard working and optimistic.  We are in for a long period of pro-American sentiment in America.

Choice

The photo on the right shows an unusual juxtaposition of businesses.  Weight Watchers is next door to a Marine recruiting office.  Both require the customer to make a major life choice.  Losing weight is a commitment of great will power with long term effects.  Joining the Marines can be even more far reaching.  The Marines will hold you to a commitment of several years.  Weight Watchers can have an important change in your life but you can fail any day you want.

Weight Watchers has made me conscious of the importance of the invention of fire.  From the Weight Watcher tables of caloric impact we can see that one cup of carrots cooked have twice the calories of raw carrots, as do tomatoes and celery (veggies we often eat uncooked.)  Many foods are inedible raw and become pure calories when boiled: grains, beans, tubers and soy.  The invention of fire created a plentiful source of calories from the same environment that had few. 

The interaction of the invention of fire and human development must have been fascinating; it created more leisure time.  There may be parallels to the invention of the Sabbath which helped create more inventions by making leisure time a formality.

Borrow your mass-spec?

Roughly a year ago I wrote a blog about a hair pomade that kept me from going bald. It was Charles Antell’s Formula #9.

A reader kindly sent me a spoonful (the product hasn’t been on the market for over fifty years.) It is lanolin with some additive. I ordered a jar of pure lanolin for comparison.

I then set about finding a mass spectrometer that would analyze the pomade and the pure lanolin to determine the difference. I never found a mass spectrometer in the Bay Area that I could use.

Do you have one, have access to one, or know of one that can be used for under $200? Readers are asking for a duplicate of the original pomade.

American core religion

I think this signboard on Townsend and 3^rd in San Francisco is the most precise statement of the American religion. I don’t know what translation it is, since the King James has “thy house” rather than “your household” but the difference is insignificant.

This means you can take your possessions with you. This comes from the mouth of Saint Paul.

Why not? Any theology, worth its salt, can accomodate the needs of the times. If you can conceive of an afterlife, why can't you have your possessions with you?

Good old days

It looks like the good old days are back. I mean 1999 and 2000. Those were the good old days here in San Francisco. We had negative unemployment; meaning grandparents were working in their kid’s retail stores and anyone who could write four lines of HTML had a gigantic salary and stock options.

The clue is traffic. Traffic in the streets today, in the middle of winter, is bad. Which is also good since we can soon expect many new yuppie stores and a boom in apartment rentals. Office space demand will soon be growing. In a few years we will have big donors supporting our local non-profits.

The last boom was made up of geeks, lefties and enviros all muddled into one political ball…trying to turn San Francisco into a Cuban version of the workers paradise.

The current boom seems to have a stronger corporate and technical underpinning. Hopefully the new people coming to town will have more moderate politics and more imaginative personal behavior.

Snow boarding

If anyone fails to appreciate the persistence of culture they only need watch and listen to Hannah Teter, the Olympic snow boarder.  She competes in the Winter Games with I-pod earphones visible.

The current snow boarding esthetic of hang-loose comes directly with the snow board.  The snow board  evolved directly from Hawaiian surf boards. Surf boards migrated from Hawaii to the West Coast during WWII.  So now we have “Aloha brudda” in the Italian Alps.  The Hawaiian culture travelled 10,000 miles over 65 years along with the boards. Pretty amazing.

Executive compensation filing

I am not putting my letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission on my blog. It is too dry and has no pictures … but it is on my website. 

The S.E.C. is inviting comments on its proposed executive comp disclosure rules.  I only argue that the S.E.C. needs to make the case for open disclosure clearer for the benefit of all commerce.

Change in communication

Craigslist.org was sued last week for housing discrimination based on the way people list the requirements for roommates.  Saying you only want white, kosher, vegetarian roommates sounds reasonable but it is probably illegal.

I spent several years in the mid 1960s going to San Francisco apartments as a potential renter and being followed a few minutes later by a black or Chinese.  Racial discrimination was rampant.  I stopped working on housing discrimination when it became obvious that the laws weren’t enforced.  They still aren’t, because ....

What is happening to weddings?

In case you missed it, weddings have gone from brides in rainbow muumuus with homemade poetry in the 1970s to elaborate highly videoed, choreographed and expensive events with brides wearing diamond tiaras.

To present a functional theory of this phenomenon three elements need to be explained.  First, the elaborate wedding has nothing to do with marriage per se.  The length of marriage went from 85%  lasting over seven years at the beginning of the 1960s to less than 50% lasting that long by the end of that decade.  It hasn't changed since then.

Second, the exponential growth of elaborate American style wedding ceremonies occurred first in Japan followed by similar wedding practices in various Chinese societies.

Third, the whole wedding ceremony is directed and scripted by the bride and sometimes the women around her.  Men are props in the show.

My explanation for the elaborate explosions of the wedding is based on Social Thought, the view that holds humans organize behavior, language and institutions around core ideas, metaphors and concepts.

What happened between 1960 and today is that women have joined the work force (nearly 70% of all women are in the workplace in industrialized nations) and have become a nearly equal force to men in the commercial world. 

There has been an apparent or perceived decline in the domestic power of women during this same period.  We hear the perennial litany of women having to chose between a job and a family.

Whatever the reality (and I acknowledge the serious problem of the choice between family and job) society has chosen to reestablish the statue of the infinitely powerful and perfect bride.  This is a wildly exaggerated recreation of an image that never existed. Nevertheless the new image of the bride symbolizes the immense power of women in the domestic domain.  The power of women to create this illusionary statue is due to their mastery of their real power in the marketplace.

The elaborate wedding is a reflection of women effectively organizing their lives in the commercial world of jobs and still claiming to be all powerful and perfect in the remnants of the domestic world.   The incredibly expensive wedding.

The elaborate wedding first appeared in Japan because that is the society where women have always been the most powerful members. Japanese women have joined the work force in the same numbers as American women. 

The wedding is a statue of the perfect bride in her reconstructed domestic domain which explains why men are pawns, stage props at the elaborate weddings.

The elaborate wedding is a statement of power on the part of women, who can not control the future of their marriage by power alone, which is why the wedding ceremony has nothing to do with the durability of marriage itself.

The tragedy of reform Judaism

The historic tragedy for Judaism and for the world is that Napoleon released the Jews from the ghettoes of east Europe to become citizens of the Enlightenment at exactly the same time industrial commerce was exploding.

Some Jews merely became participants in industrial commerce.  Less than fifty years later they were to become so successful at assimilation and running businesses, that the Elders of Zion  was written.  The Russian Secret Police wrote and published the book blaming all the ills of industrial commerce on the few successful Jews.  It brought tragedy to millions of Jews from that day forth.  Today, hundreds of millions of Arabs and tens of millions of Europeans are still in the thrall of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and hate Jews.

Many other Jews, after being freed by Napoleon, made an effort to assimilate into the Enlightenment by joining the anti-industrial commerce movement.  The anti-commerce Jews conflated the religion "Judaism" with Marxist-Socialism.  To this day most non-Orthodox Jews (and most Israelis pre-Intifada II) still think Judaism and Marxist-Socialism are the same.  Millions of Jews died in the USSR, a socialist state that they founded, and millions more under the Nazis because of their Marxist beliefs.  Jews have been terrorized wherever they played an active role in creating the Satanic monster of Marxist-Socialism (Cuba, Iraq, Syria, Hungary…etc.)

Jews are slowly, very slowly, coming to realize the disaster that conflating the Talmudic-Torah tradition with anti-commerce has brought them.  Marxist-Socialism has resulted in unending  death and tragedy for the Jews who believed in it and helped promote it.  It may be several centuries before this horrific tragedy of Jewish success in industrial commerce and fanatic Jewish active support of anti-commerce will be overcome.

(Disclaimer: my father was a Reform rabbi and lived his whole live with the belief that Judaism and Lefty Fundamentalism were the same.  Karl Marx, an anti-Semitic apostate, married a Dutch Phillips ancestor of mine.)

North Beach bitterness

On October 18^th 1999, the large four-faced street clock in front of Matteucci’s Jewelry store was knocked over and destroyed by a truck. The clock on Columbus between Vallejo and Green was installed in 1908. Two days after the clock was knocked over, the jeweler who owned Matteucci’s and wound the clock every day, Matteo Ciuffreda, died. Maybe a little poignant.

A rare tourist photo of the clock is below left.

The denizens and shop owners of North Beach raised thousands of dollars to replace and reinstall the clock. The heir to Matteo Ciuffreda took her time about reinstalling it, waiting for the insurance money to replace the clock.

Then she left town. North Beach bitterness.

What took fifty years?

Fifty years ago the entire area of San Francisco known as the Western Addition was demolished by the 1950s agency euphemistically called the Redevelopment Agency.  Known to insiders as the Wipe Out The Colored Neighborhoods Agency. 

The Agency turned part of the area over to groups that promised to develop a Japan Town to replace an authentic Japantown that was wiped out by WWII Internment.

The rest of the Western Addition was turned into public housing built by many non-profits using senior citizen funds and other government subsidies.  After most of the area was built up, Fillmore Street was supposed to be made into a business development strip.

So what happened in fifty years?  Most of the area was vacant for decades and much of it is still empty.  There has never been any business vibrancy except for two tiny spots. On one end is a movie theatre and on the other end was a McDonalds. 

The movie theatre is about to close (for reasons related to anti-trust in a buyout) which has toppled the entire Japan Town.  The main buildings and malls in Japan Town are now on the market.  Two thirds of the businesses in Japan Town never broke even in fifty years. Turn-over was always high.

McDonalds has recently closed.  This is a mystery.  No press coverage.  McDonalds had a good location and a McDonalds almost never closes down.  Could it have been that 24 of the 96 murders in S.F. last year were within a seven block radius of that McDonalds? Could it have helped that the black kids standing around the restaurant were always wearing prison clothes?  Could it just be that Redevelopment never worked?

Could it be that the black community committed suicide? 

The main black reverend in the area, Amos Brown, just filed a complaint about the police dissing him.  The black community is so PC it never made a fuss about losing McDonalds. 

Could it be that black retail business depends on Koreans and other Asian proprietors who are afraid of black neighborhoods and black anti-Asian racism?