Opinion

Last week I was having lunch in my favorite corner store/café in Berkeley when a mother came in with two tiny boys, one about four, the other in a stroller. She herself was a compact person, probably under five feet tall, with big brown eyes and long black hair—she looked like she came from one of the indigenous populations of Mexico or Central America. Altogether, they were a handsome and cheerful family group. -more-

Some subscribers have discovered that their personal letters from the Planet editor sometimes end up in Spam. To prevent this from happening to you, put my email address in your contact list right away. If you aren't a subsciber but would like to be, write to subscribe@berkeleydailyplanet.com. It's free, though all it gets you is notification when new or special issues are posted. -more-

Where Are the Black American Men? Ex-H-P CEO Mark Hurd;Libraries and the Proposed Changes;RPP Renewals; Truth Will Out;“Most Americans seem to view those who are mentally ill as a bit less than real human beings”; Jack Bragen on Schizophrenia -more-

In the online BERKELEYSIDE, Aug. 4th, 2010, Frances Dinkelspiel writes of a $2.25 million budget for the city to make over the downtown “Bart Plaza to become an inviting spot.”. A City planner has the audacity to say the Plaza is worn and outdated, and "It is really exciting to think we will have a space people will feel really good about being in and using.… The goal is to create a space that is more welcoming to bigger and more diverse groups of people”. -more-

There are roughly one and a half billion Muslims living on this planet, and it is a very heterogeneous group. It is fragmented and disparate, communal and even tribal in some parts of the Middle East, Pakistan, Africa, and Afghanistan. I know of no other community of this proportion that is politically so disorganized, and communally this incoherent. -more-

Several weeks ago the Express published a front page article ("Factories for the Future...momentum shifts toward preservation of land suitable for light manufacturing" ) describing how Oakland and other East Bay cities are now realizing the value of maintaining their industrial production lands for the important goods, services, and jobs the companies that occupy these lands provide. -more-

Weak links in a chain often break and that's just what happened in the loss of the U.C. theater a decade ago and now Reel Video, both killed off by their parents. -more-