Category: California

A California public school processes today’s grief in a neutral manner

by philg

For parents and students in the East Bay (of San Francisco, California), a reminder from a school bureaucrat, who has stayed entirely “neutral”, to “to follow the example set by Presidents Biden and Obama” (for better readability, not in quote style):

DUSD Community,

In the United States, we have always had a peaceful transition of power between presidents, except for January 6, 2021. President Biden and his administration have demonstrated a high level of professionalism during this transition, just as former President Obama did for President-Elect Donald Trump and each president prior.

The 2024 Presidential election was, for the second time, an extremely divisive election for our country. This election has itself become a point of protest for women, Muslim and Jewish communities, immigrants, and people who care about education, Social Security, Medicare, and a whole list of other issues. There has been a great deal of media coverage regarding the Presidential Inauguration that will take place Monday, January 20, in Washington, D.C.

As educators, we have the incredible opportunity to use the presidential election and the second Trump Inauguration as learning opportunities to help promote social justice [Ed: with taxpayer funds] in a way that actively engages our students. The activities, discussions, and student production that we choose to plan around the inauguration are opportunities to further develop the skills and competencies that we are developing in our Graduate Profile. We need to provide a safe environment for our students during the Presidential Inauguration. I encourage students and staff to reach out to each other and work together on shared, peaceful activities at our school sites. Listening to the Inauguration is an appropriate activity, along with providing the space for students to process Trump’s presidential address. Providing these types of activities is a critical responsibility and opportunity for our educational institutions.

Regardless of the activity, we will stay neutral, share the facts, allow for both sides of an issue to be shared, and create a safe place in our classrooms and at our school sites for discussion to take place. We need to follow the example set by Presidents Biden and Obama and engage in activities that support the peaceful transition of power between Presidents.

In addition, I want to reinforce the importance of maintaining the privacy rights of our students. Under FERPA laws and laws that govern the State of California, our schools will not provide any private student information to ICE (Immigrants and Customs Enforcement) without a formal arrest warrant. Our schools must remain safe and secure for all who attend and work in DUSD.

I thank you in advance for staying in school, remaining respectful, and engaging in meaningful dialogue around the upcoming Presidential Inauguration on Monday, January 20, 2025.

Sincerely,

Chris D. Funk
Superintendent
Dublin Unified School District

In other news, I was just in Berkeley, California, a simple 1.5-hour BART ride from Dublin! The laundry detergent is locked up at Target (along with almost everything you’d find at CVS):

Let’s stroll out of Target, past a few outdoor maskers, and into Pegasus Books, which features a permanent panhandler by the front door. Inside we find empty CD cases for fear that someone without a streaming account will steal the precious CDs themselves:

The Followers of Science (TM) are heavy readers of books about witchcraft:

What if a passion for Hamas rule and Socialism could be combined into a single book?

Some miscellaneous titles:

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Why aren’t all of the houses in fire-prone parts of California made of concrete?

by philg

The news out of Los Angeles isn’t great lately. Here’s a photo of Pacific Palisades:

It looks as though some concrete structures are still standing.

My engineering/planning question for today: Why aren’t all houses in fire-prone parts of California made from concrete? In Florida, after wooden houses didn’t come through hurricanes in good shape people decided to pay an extra 10 percent during construction and build from concrete.

Maybe my assumption that a concrete house is mostly invulnerable to fire is wrong? It’s tough for me to imagine, though, a fire so intense that it would melt concrete and take out a roof supported by concrete or steel beams, especially if the houses themselves weren’t combustible what would be feeding a fire in a neighborhood like the one shown above?

Wooden houses are obviously easier to engineer to withstand earthquakes, but concrete structures can be made just as earthquake-proof, I thought.

As it happens, I’m in Berkeley, California right now. Here’s how the smartest Californians protect themselves against a risk even bigger than fire (University of California, Berkeley Faculty Club):

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California proves Replacement Theory false

by philg

“California’s population is finally increasing — thanks to this demographic” (San Francisco Chronicle, December 2024):

After shrinking during the pandemic and then stagnating for several years, California’s population is finally growing — thanks to immigration from abroad.

Native-born Californians are moving out (“Net domestic migration”) and foreign-born immigrants are moving in, which is further evidence that the Great Replacement conspiracy theory is false.

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A trip to Los Angeles, Sherman Oaks, and Burbank

by philg

Here’s a report on a recent business trip to Sherman Oaks (into LAX and out of BUR).

A heroic masked Californian is turned away from the gate at PBI for not being in a sufficiently high-priority boarding group (if there were any justice on this planet, Trump would have lost the recent election and masked passengers would enjoy top priority boarding along with military personnel):

The JetBlue Mint “studio” in their new-configuration planes. The seats are angled and that leaves a little bit of extra space in the first row. They actually put a second seat belt in the suite/studio for a guest (not during takeoff/landing) and the bed ends up being a little wider. My excuse for this luxury is that I needed to get some work done.

Departing east from PBI we flew over a 20-acre estate on Palm Beach that a Democrat judge in New York appraised, in an entirely nonpartisan manner, at $18 million. (A one-acre vacant lot nearby recently sold for $85 million.)

Bold #resistance can begin within moments of stepping off the plane in LAX via access to “Books Banned Elsewhere”:

The streetscape in front of my luxurious Courtyard hotel in Sherman Oaks included $5/gallon gasoline (currently about $3/gallon in Florida), outdoor maskers, and the unhoused:

One is greeted at the Burbank airport by a sign reminding healthy travelers to “wear a mask”:

The airport also features an exhibit on the built-in-Burbank Lockheed P-38 Lightning, which helped the U.S. achieve “peace the old-fashioned way” (as B-17 and B-29 fans like to say) in World War II:

Thanks to United Airlines for getting us to SFO on time in a somewhat newer twin-engine plane.

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A trip to Berkeley, California

by philg

The Election Nakba, in which Donald Trump was elected to a second dictatorship, occurred on November 5, 2024. This post is about a November 14, 2024 journey to Berkeley, California.

BART warns customers that “face coverings [are] required” and 10-20 percent seem to comply:

The gathering on the platform above includes about 16 people. Three are masked. One appeared to be unhoused (obscured behind the person in the gray jacket). One is Islamically covered, but not masked. Within a few steps of the Downtown Berkeley station there were unhoused Californians, outdoor maskers, and Halal food:

We entered the University of California’s art museum and found that most of the exhibit space was restricted to artists who identify as “women”:

To honor Democrats who have fled from X to the safe space of Bluesky (user who posted “there are only two genders” is banned from the platform within 30 seconds), we visited the Free Speech Movement Cafe:

Given that Democrats said that Americans would lose their freedoms and their democracy if Trump were elected (see Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? for some examples), I had expected riots on campus or at least mostly peaceful protests. Surely, these brave souls who tweeted (before fleeing to Bluesky) about #resistance wouldn’t meekly surrender everything that was important to them. Not only did we not encounter any anti-Trump protests, it was difficult to find anti-Trump signs. A handful:

There were far more signs related to masks than to the horrors of a second Trump dictatorship:

The famous campanile has a statute of Abraham Lincoln, whose signature on the Morrill Land Grant Act was important for the founding of UC Berkeley (also a sign at the top regarding the gender ID of certain carillon players). My friend asked a sophomore majoring in environmental sciences what she knew about Abraham Lincoln. The graduate of California public schools knew that Lincoln had been a U.S. president, but not in which century this had occurred nor did she know of any wars or acts with which Lincoln was associated.

Our next stop in search of anti-fascism pro-democracy protests was Sproul Plaza, famous for student activism. We found a couple of Trump-related posters amidst of a sea of unrelated material:

The anti-Israel protest that began just after October 7, 2023 was still in full operation.

End-stage Berkeley feminism is complete covering of the body, except for an eye slit, when in Sproul Plaza:

We wandered back into the commercial district and found that coronapanic level varied by shop.

We found that there was roughly one marijuana store on each block. Examples:

For those who get hungry after consuming a lot of healing cannabis, the good news is that L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is opening soon:

Moe’s Books is still at the center of Berkeley’s intellectual life. The area near the front door is primarily devoted to Queers for Palestine books, e.g., The Queer Arab Glossary (a bestseller in Gaza and the West Bank?):

(The secular Jews whom I know in Berkeley all say that they want Israel to be replaced by a river-to-the-sea country that would be ruled by Arabs and in which Jews, at the discretion of the Arab rulers, might continue to live as a minority group. These Jews-by-birth, none of whom have ever visited Israel, say that they’re “anti-Hamas” but also that Israel and Hamas are equally bad and that Israel should cease to exist as a nation. (Sometimes for fun I ask them “Suppose that you were pro-Hamas. What would Hamas want you to say that is different from what you currently say?”)

Going deeper into the store, we found a lingering commitment to coronapanic:

Some of the featured mid-store books:

Immigration Realities is from the giant brains of Columbia University Press, which starts its description of the book with “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work.”

Right around the corner from this important work about how “border walls do not work”, we find the border wall that UC Berkeley installed around what used to be People’s Park:

On the way to a rich neighborhood south of downtown, I found that the Berkeley Playhouse has found one social justice cause to elevate above all others:

A clothing store:

A couple of miscellaneous houses:

A $3 million house features Black Lives Matter sign and alarm system signs on the front fence, plus a car sticker advertising the Black-free private school to which the kids are sent at a cost of $40,000 per year per child:

I Ubered back to San Francisco with a driver who lived in Oakland and said how happy he was that Sheng Thao, the mayor of Oakland, had recently been recalled.

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Department of Government Accountability (DOGA): Silicon Valley Bank and the San Francisco Fed, 1.5 years later

by philg

Our stroll to the first morning of work in San Francisco included the usual sights, e.g., a homeless encampment in the same frame as a self-driving Waymo:

Also, a smashed office building glass door:

It also took us past a Silicon Valley Bank “Experience Center” and the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, notable for supervising SVB right until the bank was seized by regulators in March 2023.

According to ChatGPT, nobody at the San Francisco Fed was fired as a result of this spectacular immolation of taxpayer dollars (somewhere between $15 and $25 billion; the government pretends that didn’t do the bailout with peasant dollars because it made other banks pay, but of course the other banks are where peasants keep their money).

NYT, 2018:

[Mary C.] Daly, who is openly gay, will become the third woman among the 12 presidents of the Fed’s regional banks. As a senior executive at the San Francisco Fed, she has been a leading voice for addressing what she has described as a “diversity crisis” in the economics profession and at the Federal Reserve. At the San Francisco Fed, she pushed successfully to balance the hiring of male and female research assistants.

Her online biography was updated June 2024 and makes no mention of her role in the SVB collapse.

Incredibly, the bank still operates as SVB, though it is now a division of a North Carolina-based bank. SVB still has its DEI presentation online, updated a few months before the bank failed.

If not for the regulatory seizure they would have put 100 percent of employees through DEI training by now. The 5 percent quota for Black leaders didn’t go into effect until 2025:

Circling back to the life of an expert witness, here’s the view of the Ferry Building from the conference room where I was imprisoned:

In response to a reader question about whether ChatGPT can be trusted, Perplexity.ai’s answer:

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Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco

by philg

I finally made it to the Walt Disney Family Museum, smack in the center of San Francisco’s Presidio. Why is it in San Francisco when almost everything that Disney did was in Los Angeles or Orlando? Disney’s only child, Diane Disney Miller (mother of 7!), moved to the Bay Area in the 1980s.

I recommend that you have your Uber or Waymo drop you off at the top of Andy Goldsworthy’s Wood Line. You can then walk downhill through the Wood Line to the Yoda Fountain and from there it is an easy walk to the museum (arrive at the Wood Line about 40 minutes before your timed ticket to the museum).

Lucasfilm is headquartered in the Presidio and everyone is welcome to look at the Yoda fountain. Sadly, it is not inscribed “No, Try Not. Do or Do Not, There Is No Try.”

The museum is in the middle of the Parade Ground:

Getting into the museum costs $25 per adult or is free for those wise enough to refrain from work: an SF resident “receiving Medi-Cal and food assistance can redeem free general admission for themselves and up to three additional guests” (source). I got two free tickets via my Ringling Museum membership.

Back in the 11th century, it seems, Hughes d’Isigny and son Robert moved from France to England and that’s where d’Isigny was anglicized into Disney. The family moved to North America in 1834 (bouncing around Canada, Florida (Orange County, near today’s Walt Disney World), Chicago, and Missouri):

Disney was an ambulance driver in World War I and managed to refrain from writing a tedious novel about the experience:

Disney’s first animated movie company, whose techniques were informed by Animated Cartoons (E.G. Lutz) went bankrupt:

His second company, which featured Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, also essentially failed due to some badly drafted contracts with Universal Pictures, which took over the character. Walt Disney had to #persist through two business failures, essentially, before he could begin building the Mickey-based Disney that we know and love today. The museum does a great job of making it clear just how many false starts there were in what might seem like a steady inexorable rise to greatness.

Speaking of failures, both visitors and staff at the museum refused to accept the idea that simple masks had in any way failed to stop the spread of an aerosol respiratory virus (note also the spectacular autofocus failure of the iPhone 16 Pro Max just when I was relying on it to show that the young slender staffer chose to wear a mask while the older staffer did not):

From the museum’s own web site (11/18/2024), the ideal masked vision:

Here’s Derek Zoolander’s Disneyland, which perhaps needs to be at least three times bigger for non-ant visitors:

The museum covers the shift of EPCOT from actual city to mere theme park, but not the fact that the city phase of EPCOT enabled Disney to have its own county and issue tax-free municipal bonds. Note the underground car infrastructure below.

Visitors are given a trigger warning, though it was unclear to me what the triggering content might be. Certainly, Song of the South clips were not played.

The trigger warning was repeated before a few signs that mentioned Squaw Valley Ski Resort, home of the 1960 Winter Olympics in which Disney provided some entertainment (in a victory for Native Americans, the resort was renamed Palisades Tahoe, thus removing all references to the existence of Native Americans other than the word “Tahoe” itself, which is a corruption of a Washo word for “lake”).

Nerds will appreciate the preserved multiplane camera, in which cels could be placed at different distances from the lens for more realistic perspective during camera motion.

What else is nearby? The Officers’ Club is now a free museum with a permanent exhibit devoted to the Native Americans who apparently won’t be getting any of their land back:

A temporary exhibit is up right now relating to the setting aside of the U.S. Constitution because politicians and bureaucrats declared an emergency and decided that it would be expedient to intern Japanese-Americans:

(Similar reasoning, of course, was applied in 2020 when the First Amendment right to assemble was tossed in favor of Science-dictated lockdowns.)

We didn’t leave by Waymo in an exciting rush of spinning LIDAR, but it would have been nice to!

Note Alcatraz in the background. If the U.S. government ever decides that it needs to reduce the amount of deficit spending/money printing that it does on the Cheat Our Way to Prosperity Plan maybe this island can be sold to a mid-level NVIDIA employee for $1 billion for use as a private home.

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A true artist can sell his crack for $1 million

by philg

I hadn’t ever noticed this before, but on a recent visit to the de Young Museum in San Francisco, I noticed that they’d purchased Andy Goldsworthy’s crack for what was, no doubt, a significant sum:

Speaking of the museum, they acknowledge that they’re on someone else’s land:

Native Americans are welcome to return to their land for $20 per person, $30 for parking, and $35 for the special exhibit of 100-year-old work that “challenged gender norms”:

It was great to see the Pavia tapestries again (see Could robots weave better tapestries than humans ever have?), especially with the added bonus of Californians wearing their 3-cent surgical masks against an aerosol virus (one of them with the mask over a beard):

The museum reminds us that it is critical to consider the victimhood category of an artist (“women”, “of color”, and “LGBTQ+” are the choices):

Then they organize an activity centered around a sculpture by Louise Nevelson, who rejected and resisted being categorized as a “woman artist” (“I’m not a feminist. I’m an artist who happens to be a woman.”).

Here’s a work that Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus might have been able to steal and that would look great in any house:

I’ll cover the gift shop book selection in another post….

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Grafitti Drone countermeasures?

by philg

On a recent trip to San Francisco, a local friend took us to Andy Goldsworthy’s Spire in the Presidio:

We had just come from a parking lot where quite a few cars were virtuously marked:

Our friend said “What we need is a drone to paint the Spire sculpture in the Palestinian flag colors.”

Let’s suppose that residents of the U.S. with a lot of community spirit did build some drones that could paint the sides of building with huge messages such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”, “#Resist”, and “Trump is a Nazi.” It is much easier to build a spray-painting drone than a scrubbing drone, I think. How could cities and building owners defend against virtuous painting drone owners/operators?

(Though moderately rich by average American standards and blessed with a garage at home, our friend who lives in SF drives a 22-year-old car for fear that anything nicer will attract thieves.)

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California vote counting vs. Florida post-hurricane power restoration

by philg

It’s five full days (about 120 hours) after the Election 2024 Nakba. The folks in California who say that they know how governments should operate have counted 72 percent of their presidential ballots (New York Times):

Let’s compare this to the numbers in Power restoration after Hurricane Milton. Recall that Milton was a Category 3 storm that hit Sarasota, St. Pete, and Tampa, knocking out power to 4 million “customers” (a household of 3 people would be just one customer). I didn’t stay organized to capture a number for how many were still out exactly five days after the hurricane made landfall, but four days afterward roughly 500,000 customers were still out, which means that more than 87 percent had been restored. Six days following landfall, roughly 190,000 customers were out from the original 4 million affected.

So.. Ron DeSantis-led Florida restored power after a Category 3 hurricane at a much faster pace than California has been able to count votes. (Florida also did count votes, but there aren’t any interesting statistics from that process because it took just a few hours.)

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