I received a survey from Dr. Jasper Eshuis, Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, who is doing a community survey about People's Park. It includes questions about whether people support or oppose UC's building plans and related activism. The survey has all the elements of what we call a "push" poll, a survey designed to entrench, rather than discover, attitudes.

Somewhere in the survey it says, "It is important to me that people who are unhoused are helped, but not at the cost of less student housing." It then gave various degrees of support or opposition to that statement without offering the chance to question the question's false assumption - that there is a scarcity of places to situate housing such that we must destroy our parks to do so. -more-

May 2023 have less Trump in the news

May he prove a "flight risk" and be gone from all views

May he flee Mar-a-Lago with the rest of his gang

and seek refuge in Moscow or maybe Pyongyang



Meanwhile, let holiday spirits keep pouring

(though carols of Christmas prove just short of boring)

Enjoy all the cookies and holiday dishes

And welcome a New Year with hope and good wishes -more-

Sadly, there are approximately 1,000 people unhoused in Berkeley who are facing cold nights sleeping outdoors. Many people have disabilities and advancing age and failing health. Can we confirm that an emergency shelter will be open tonight and all week with the upcoming heavy rains? Last night, a blind 59 year old homeless man who grew up In Berkeley was in his wheelchair outside the North Berkeley Senior Center (has excruciating neuropathy in feet). I believe he slept outside because the center initially said they were opening for the Warming Center, but then posted it was closed. -more-

The word "dialogic" refers to the logic of dialogue. Dialogue is more than just two people talking "at" each other – you know, throwing opinions around like candy. "Dialogue" refers to an exchange of ideas. Opinions just come and go. But in dialogue, ideas address each other. Underlying each statement in a dialogue is the (often unspoken) question, "why do you think what you just said is so, or even meaningful, to either of us?" It is the fact that participants can answer that question as their exchange proceeds that drives each dialogue to new and more insightful ideas (about whatever they are talking about). The ethics of that question provide inclusion in mutual reasoning and the building of thought; it enables each participant to reach into the universe of the other, which makes both bigger. It brings people together. The luxury of throwing around opinion-candy leaves one isolated in what just tastes good personally. -more-

Fired Tesla and Twitter workers joined musicians, poets, and labor organizers on Sunday, December 18, 2022, calling for Twitter CEO Elon Musk's removal by painting a huge "Oligarchy" sign with the Twitter logo on 10th Street in San Francisco in front of Twitter's flagship headquarters. Bystanders and passing traffic joined in the painting and songs, which included "Fly Him Past the Moon" and "Sleeping in my Tesla" by local folksingers Hali Hammer and Carol Denney. The protest was sponsored by Laborfest, Code Pink, and the Climate Action Justice Project, and was covered by local news KRON 4. -more-

It’s That Time of Year—or actually it’s the trailing edge of the year, the remains of another year which has come and gone, seemingly in the twinkle of an eye.

For the politically minded, the good news at the national level is that the infamous Red Wave turned out to be a mirage. The bad news is that the Red Menace will be kinda sorta running the House of Representatives for a couple of years, and they could do a fair bit of harm in that time.


(For those of us well past a certain age, it’s beyond ironic that The Repugs have morphed into The Reds, a title formerly owned by lefties of all stripes.)

And of course, 2022 started with a bang with the investigation into the Republican Riot in the previous year. The best you could say about that event is that the hearings about it made for some great TV.

For the politically minded, local chapter, the bad news is the relentless progress of the neo-liberal version of urban renewal, Sacramento style, spearheaded by the likes of Scott Wiener, Nancy Skinner and Buffy Wicks. Evidently the message about what’s happening in downtown San Francisco hasn’t reached Sacto, let alone Berkeley.

It turns out that Manhattanization is still not a good brand. Who knew?

Those Big Ugly Boxes, both the expensive tiny apartments for techniks and their empty former offices, are now a drug on the market, if you believe the aghast stories in the shrinking SF Chronicle.

And along with the annoying things that this gang and their allies are doing, what they aren’t doing is even worse.

Unhoused people are camping everywhere. Citizens of Everywhere believe that’s because the Everywhere City Council has created munificent incentives for Those People to pitch their tents on Everywhere’s streets.

The usual simple questions still have the obvious answers.

To wit: Why are Those People still poor? Because they don’t have enough money.

Why do some of Them act crazy? Because they’re mentally ill and can’t get help.

Why are they so dirty? Because they don’t have showers.

Why do they sleep in tents? Because they don’t have houses

Etc., etc. etc.

So-called Democratic legislators, who enjoy a super-majority in the state legislature, persist in pushing market-based neo-liberal solutions worthy of my father’s generation of old-timey moderate Republicans: Build a whole bunch of any kind of units and the market will decide what’s needed.

Well, it looks like the market has decided that Those People can damn well sleep in tents on city sidewalks. And it’s evidently not a city’s job to help them move inside, except in dribs and drabs to create photo ops.

No one’s offering cash, treatment, sanitation or shelter in quantities close to matching the number of people who need these obvious solutions, But BTW, let’s get rid of those tedious CEQA regulations to make speculative development easier, okay?

What seemed not to work in the 1970s still doesn’t work now, so maybe it’s time to give up inveighing against it. The Manhattanization of San Francisco (and now Berkeley) is just as dark and dreary as Bruce Brugmann in the seventies SF Bay Guardian warned us it would be. As he (and I) predicted, people don’t like working there anymore—even the techniks I know prefer to work at home in the ‘burbs. The office space vacancy rate in San Francisco is now 27%. (And also as predicted, PG&E is still thuggish, up to no good, as it always was.)

The international situation is no more logical. Loony autocrats rule major nations, perseverating in ancient conflicts.

Hey guys, let’s revive the Russian Empire: It was so much fun the last couple of times, says President Putin.

Let’s just re-think Israel’s tired old democracy into a religion-ruled Utopia, suggests Prime Minister Netanyahu.

At the end of the year, those of us who write about politics among other topics are sometimes expected or at least permitted to make recommendations regarding the perennial question of What is to be Done? Что дѣлать?, a title Lenin lifted from an earlier radical, Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

It's a good question, and as yet no one has really come up with much of an answer. Liberal democracy with free and fair elections seems like a good idea, as do various flavors of socialism. Just how many organizational principles call themselves socialist can be guessed at from the lengthy and dense Wikipedia entry for “democratic socialism”, a rabbit hole down which we will not go today. But it’s discouraging to reflect on how many chief executives at all levels have taken office espousing the highest democratic principles and then gravitated toward autocracy—in recent memory, all the way from people like President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua down to mayors of towns like Berkeley who are in thrall to developers.

I’ve been writing about this for about fifty years, and my ultimate conclusion is the French maxim: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose—“the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing”.

I am reminded of what my girlhood idol, Tom Lehrer, is reputed to have said, that he gave up writing satiric songs when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize. After fifty years of watching people make the same mistakes over and over, it might just be time for me to give up generating admonitory verbiage. -more-

On Monday, December 12, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, the city conducted a “virtual community meeting” about the possible installation of protected bike lanes on Hopkins below Gilman. Along with nearly two hundred other members of the public, I attended the Zoomed event.

For some reason, the city chose to post the meeting via Eventbrite, which meant that to access it, you had to go through Eventbrite, supplying a password to that program—a requirement that flummoxed some would-be participants. I also heard that people couldn’t get in because Eventbrite said it had “closed” the “sales.” Why the Eventbrite gatekeeper?

As with prior virtual community meetings/workshops about installing bike lanes on Hopkins, the city failed to post relevant materials online before the meeting, so members of the public had no opportunity to form a pondered opinion about the options that were presented.

And as with prior virtual Hopkins meetings, this one began with the ritual invocation of the city-approved plans—the Bicycle Plan, the Vision Zero Plan, the Climate Change Plan—plus Councilmember Sophie Hahn’s 2018 referral, that staff and the bike lobby use to legitimate putting bike lanes on Hopkins. As I’ve explained in detail, those documents are problematic.

Add to that the Zoom format—in this case, one in which the hosts—the city, represented by Deputy Director of Public Works for Transportation and Engineering Farid Javandel; and Parisi Consultants—had decided to prevent the members of the public from making themselves visible to each other. I discovered that when I tried in vain to “start” the video. By contrast, Big Brother-like, the hosts allowed their own live images to be fully visible. -more-

On Monday evening, Dec. 12, there was another Berkeley community meeting on the topic of the Hopkins Corridor. This time it was about lower Hopkins, from the Gilman split to San Pablo. But it was actually the same community meeting that we have been subjected to over and over: staff lets us know what it has decided to do, then pretends to want to hear what we think of it. Well, this time we told them, in no uncertain terms.

The background to this issue is long and a bit complicated. But suffice it to say, it is about taking an area that has been called charming and a treasured jewel of the city by just about every fawning politician, and turning it into the nightmare that is Milvia or Telegraph Ave. It would place a two-way cycle track on Hopkins, from near its top to near its bottom, through that treasured jewel of a commercial area just east of Sacramento St., where Monterey Market, Berkeley Hort, Magnani’s, and a host of other shops are located, down to another popular area at San Pablo, where Acme Bread, Kermit Lynch Wines, and Animal Farm pet store are trying to run their businesses.

And in the process, it removes almost all of the parking that currently serves those businesses, the local residents, and the vast number of people who bring their money from other cities to spend it in Berkeley. -more-

Aren't we all "mentally ill" in one way or another?

I can't claim that I am unique for having psychiatric and/or psychological issues. Essentially, all people are walking around with various mental flaws and defects of one kind or another, and don't get treatment for it, or they might deal it in inappropriate ways. I haven't met anyone who is completely healthy in their consciousness. Mental flaws are an integral part of the "human condition." They are part of what gives us personhood. If people were perfect, then what would be the point?

Part of it depends on how the observer defines "mental defect." Making war when your country isn't in jeopardy is certainly not a safe or sane thing to do. Pacifists believe any violence, even in self-defense, is unjustifiable. Some would call pacifism a mental defect, and pacifists would cite that getting violent back toward a violent person doesn't address the problem of violence. -more-

A surge in cases of COVID, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is sickening Americans, overwhelming emergency rooms. This triple threat has been called a “tripledemic” by some heath experts. And new, even more contagious transmissible omicron sub variants called called BQ.1, BQ.1.1.and XBB that are especially adept at infecting people — even if they've been vaccinated or previously infected — are taking over. These subvariants are more capable of avoiding the immunity from current vaccinations or prior infection. And the higher chance of infection increases the possibility of of long COVID. -more-

As I understand economics, prices inflate because the demand for things exceeds the supply. So, how to increase the supply of goods? Get investors to invest in more production, and hire more workers. How to incentivize investors? Lower interest rates so they can borrow affordably. -more-

Winter Solstice is here (across the Northern Hemisphere). The days are short, the weather colder, fuel and energy needs increase. These challenges strike me right now as symbolic, matching the major challenge of this historical moment: the chance we have to turn toward the light represented by solar and other renewable energy sources. -more-

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, commonly known in Iran as the Pasdaran, was created in 1979 by the Islamic Republic’s founding leader, Ayatollah Rouhalla Khomeini, who wanted it to function as a separate armed force from the Iranian military, which was then suspected of loyalty to the deposed Shah. As such, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, was charged with defending, both internally and externally, the Islamic principles of the theocratic regime of the mullahs. -more-

I’ve been attending the Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) meetings for months and following the Turtle Island Monument Project story. Looking over the history of the Turtle Island Monument, sketchy as it is, and the current situation, it looks ever so much like Lucy pulling the football once again, with unstated plans to spend close to a million dollars elsewhere. -more-

Seeking Leaf-Relief

My nomination for one of the world's worst inventions? The leaf-blower.

A few days ago, I saw an all-too-familiar sight: A stocky fellow lugging a loudly sputtering, gas-driven, smoke-spewing leaf-blower down a sidewalk strewn with leaves—in the middle of a windy day.

The leaves didn't disappear, of course, they just relocated to another patch of sidewalk. It looked like an arboreal game of Whack-a-mole. -more-

Worth Noting –

Public Comment Ohlone Park due Jan 2,

Civic Center Planning includes road diet (narrowing MLK Jr Way) give your input in survey

(links below)

There are no scheduled or expected City meetings from December 18, 2022 through January 2, 2023.

Check the City website for announcements and meetings posted on short notice at: https://berkeleyca.gov/

City Council Winter Recess is December 14, 2022 – January 16, 2023.

City of Berkeley Holidays: Monday, December 26, 2022 and Monday, January 2, 2023

Reduced Service Days: Tuesday, December 27 - Wednesday, December 28 - Thursday, December 29 - Friday, December 30

CITY REQUESTS FOR PUBLIC COMMENT:

Ohlone Park Lighting and Restrooms - Public comment deadline is January 2, 2023 -more-