Category: California

We are informed that the San Francisco police, presumably armed with guns and clad in bulletproof vests, were spectators as a violent attack on a taxpayer occurred. From the New York Times:

In the early hours of Friday morning, the intruder entered through a back door of the stately home in San Francisco’s upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood, yelling, “Where is Nancy?”

Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, was thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., protected by her security detail, but her husband, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, was home. By the time police officers arrived after being dispatched at 2:27 a.m., they found the assailant and Mr. Pelosi wrestling for control of a hammer. The intruder then pulled the hammer away and “violently attacked” Mr. Pelosi with it in front of the officers, said William Scott, San Francisco’s chief of police.

In other words, if we are to believe Pravda, at least for a period of time, the police took no action to stop the crime in progress.

Chief Scott said in a late-afternoon news conference that when the officers arrived, they saw Mr. Pelosi and the suspect, each with a hand on a hammer. They ordered both men to drop the hammer, he said, and the suspect pulled it away and struck Mr. Pelosi “at least once.”

There are multiple officers (plural). One of the guys involved in the struggle is 82 years old. The other one is probably not a prime specimen of physical fitness (see below). Why wouldn’t the police officers have rushed in to take the hammer away instead of waiting for the struggle for hammer possession to be resolved?

More aggressive policing in Los Angeles 30 years ago:

Separately, the attacker is characterized as a “MAGA Trump supporter” on social media. “Pelosi Attack Suspect Was A Psychotic Homeless Addict Estranged From His Pedophile Lover & Their Children” (by Michael Shellenberger, the “lifelong progressive and Democrat” author of San Fransicko) has some photos taken at the attacker’s house in Berkeley, California:

Some excerpts:

DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree. … Neighbors described DePape as a homeless addict with a politics that was, until recently, left-wing, but of secondary importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior. “What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists,” said one of DePape’s neighbors, a woman who only gave her first name, Trish. “They seem very left. They are all about the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay pride.”

The modern American “family” structure is on parade here as well:

A November 27, 2008 article in the Oakland Tribune said Taub and DePape were married with three children. But DePape’s stepfather, Gene, told AP yesterday that Taub was his stepson’s girlfriend, not wife; that David and Taub had two, not three, children together; and that David’s third child was with another woman.

(At least two generations of children growing up without two biological parents.) The family structure evolves to become more complex over time:

Taub was in the news again five years later when she, then 44, married a 20-year-old man, Jamyz Smith, naked, at City Hall in San Francisco. A photo in the December 16, 2013 edition of The San Francisco Chronicle shows DePape, Taub, Smith, and the three children huddled under a blanket watching television together. The caption describes DePape as “a family friend.” … Ryan La Coste, who lives in an apartment directly behind the Taub-DePape house, said that the day after Taub’s wedding to Smith, “There was a huge fight. The guy [Smith] that she married got locked up. And so Taub married somebody else. My understanding was that David [DePape] was the best man to her husband at the wedding.”

Based on Twitter and Facebook, it is primarily Donald Trump who is to blame for this attack and, after Trump, Republicans generally. Let’s assume that this is correct. But why aren’t the San Francisco police at least partly responsible for not stopping what Donald Trump told David DePape to do? The Pelosis pay property tax on their Pacific Heights mansion. Aren’t they entitled to police protection rather than police spectators?

(Note that the disintegration of public safety in San Francisco is not a bad thing from the perspective of the Florida real estate industry or from the perspective of a Florida taxpayer. We would be delighted if everyone who owns a mansion in Pacific Heights (“the most expensive neighborhood in the United States”) sold it and moved to Palm Beach County to start paying property taxes to the school system here.)

“Bill to Ban Sending Unsolicited Lewd Pictures and Videos Signed Into Law”:

After receiving strong bipartisan support in the Legislature, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation earlier today authored by Senator Connie M. Leyva (D-Chino) to establish legal protections for technology users when they receive unsolicited sexually explicit images and videos, also known as ‘cyberflashing.’

Also known as the FLASH (Forbid Lewd Activity and Sexual Harassment) Act and sponsored by Bumble—the women-first dating and social networking app—SB 53 would create a private right of action against any person over 18 years of age who knows or reasonably should know that the lewd image transmitted is unsolicited.

During its legislative journey, legislators in both the Senate and Assembly signed on in support of the FLASH Act, including Senator Lena A. Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) and Assemblymember Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) as principal coauthors and Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters), Senator Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara), Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine), Assemblymember Luz Rivas (D-San Fernando Valley), Senator Susan Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) and Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) as coauthors.

The article includes a photo of the bill’s author:

The image is a good example of “lewd” by Islamic standards. The woman shows part of her chest, all of her hair, all of her face. Maybe a prostitute would do that in Kabul, but who else? There are a ton of immigrants from Afghanistan to California. Can they now sue if they receive images like the above? If not, why not? I hope that nobody will say that non-Islamic standards of modesty are somehow superior to Islamic standards.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day, everyone! I hope that you’re celebrating with a new land acknowledgment.

Any time that we think about Native Americans we can also think about immigration, a process that certainly did not in any way replace Native Americans on what is today U.S. territory.

We are informed that low-skill migration into an advanced economy makes all native-born residents richer. At the same time, we are informed by low-skill migration into an advanced economy with ever-higher rents can lead to homelessness. See “From violence to homelessness: Colombian migrants’ journey to Silicon Valley” (San Jose Spotlight), for example.

Arias and Castillo, with an 8-year-old daughter and 1 1/2 -year-old son, had no option but to flee their homeland.

Arias and Castillo said they were sent to San Jose by ICE, which funded the trip. Others were led here by dishonest “guides” who claimed there would be resources for them, according to county officials.

It is “dishonest” to say that Californians who have “migrants welcome” signs on their lawns will actually welcome migrants?

With a language barrier and no idea where to find shelter or food, the family became homeless and ended up in Roosevelt Park in San Jose.

The county said many families arrive under a false impression that designated resources and housing are available. County officials have been working with the Colombian consulate on an education campaign.

“For folks who do not have status, there are limitations on what they’re eligible for—in housing or otherwise,” she said. “They should expect long waitlist on just about everything.”

Maybe a city packed with folks who say that they welcome migrants and want to help the unhoused can build some housing for those migrants and the unhoused? “San Jose: City workers urge council to scrap controversial tiny home site for homeless residents” (Mercury News, 9/19):

Following a backlash from neighbors, city workers are recommending that San Jose back down from a proposal to build tiny homes for homeless residents on a controversial piece of land across the street from an elementary school — the latest indication of the daunting difficulties in combating homelessness.

As part of its goal to build more much-needed shelter for the city’s growing homeless population, the San Jose City Council voted this summer to move forward with tiny homes on Noble Avenue near the Penitencia Creek Trail that winds between the Dr. Robert Gross Ponds. But the city employees tasked with vetting the project now want councilmembers to reconsider. Citing “additional associated challenges” with the Noble Avenue site, Deputy City Manager Omar Passons said the location is not feasible.

… Passons’ findings are likely to elicit applause from neighbors who objected to the plan.

San Jose, which has more than 6,700 homeless residents, is leaning heavily on tiny homes as a strategy to mitigate its worsening homelessness crisis.

Nearly 3,500 people have signed a Change.org petition titled “Say NO to the homeless tiny homes on Noble Ave,” citing the need to preserve the “safety and peace of our children.” The site is across the street from Noble Elementary School.

Think of the children!

Speaking of Martha’s Vineyard, here are some members of the Vineyard Poverty Relief Committee walking over the Thames (from last week’s trip to London):

California has some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation. Pre-coronapanic data from the New York Times:

California kids were nearly a year behind Texas kids, adjusted for demographics, even before California urban schools shut down for 1.5 years while Texas schools remained open.

One of the excuses that my California friends give for the poor quality of government services is that the state is starved for property tax revenue due to Proposition 13. Yet in this ranking of states by property tax collected per capita, California is at #14:

In addition to a state income tax that can reach 13.3 percent of income, in other words, California has a robust property tax revenue stream and a total state and local income tax burden of 13.5 percent (Tax Foundation), which is close to the highest in the nation.

Why is this interesting? Californians are the folks who like to say that they’ve figured out how government should work!

Happy Juneteeth, everyone! Last year, a reader pointed out that this is a holiday that celebrates white saviors so let’s look at Chesa Boudin, who became the ultimate white savior as the San Francisco District Attorney who wouldn’t prosecute anyone because prosecution is inherently racist. (Comment: “Juneteenth is the ultimate holiday for White Supremacy — it signals that blacks were incapable of independently securing their own freedom. They needed white men to fight other white men to free the hapless blacks from slavery.”)

California friends have been talking about “How San Francisco Became a Failed City” (Atlantic), timed to coincide with Chesa Boudin being recalled. Here are some excerpts from the article:

On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.

A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.

Do we blame Chesa Boudin, though? Why not the Covidcrats that mostly shut down the city with no plans for a restart? It wasn’t Chesa Boudin who made it illegal for a person to be an office worker or for a tourist business to operate. What do the health stats look like when a city follows Science?

San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID.

How about the stats on redistribution of wealth?

About 70 percent of shoplifting cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15 percent did.

Immigrants are working hard in San Francisco’s best-known retail sector:

[Chesa Boudin] has suggested that many drug dealers in San Francisco are themselves vulnerable and in need of protection. “A significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco—perhaps as many as half—are here from Honduras,” he said in a 2020 virtual town hall. “We need to be mindful about the impact our interventions have … Some of these young men have been trafficked here under pain of death. Some of them have had family members in Honduras who have been or will be harmed if they don’t continue to pay off the traffickers.”

The author, who is generally hostile to the direction that San Francisco has taken, follows this paragraph by stressing her agreement with the principle that all migrants must be cherished:

Of course there is good in what Boudin was trying to do. … No one wants immigrants’ relatives to be killed by MS-13.

Being 2SLGBTQQIA+ is not sufficient. A person must be 2SLGBTQQIA+ and of color in order to be selected:

One night in 2021, the [school board] meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee. Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white. “My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”

San Franciscans came up with a good name for the University of Xbox:

In February 2021, [school board] board members agreed that they would avoid the phrase learning loss to describe what was happening to kids locked out of their classrooms. Instead they would use the words learning change. Schools being shut just meant students were “having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” Gabriela López, a member of the board at the time, said. “They are learning more about their families and their cultures.” Framing this as some kind of “deficit” was wrong, the board argued.

New York City collapsed financially and from a quality of life point of view back in the 1970s. But Wall Street generated so much money that eventually NYC got it back together. The city government couldn’t waste every dime. San Francisco also has near-infinite money so presumably it should be able to recover from any missteps (even if the children who were denied a year of education will never fully recover from that).

What does the recovery look like, though? And what are our criteria for determining if a recovery has occurred? No more tents on the sidewalks? No more open-air drug markets?

My prediction is that the current residents of the city never recover from the mess that they’ve made for themselves. They never learn that all of the stuff they’re complaining about is actually stuff that they voted for. What happens is that they get replaced. Not only the Honduran drug dealers mentioned in the article move in, but also young nerds to slave away for the tech companies. The replacement process takes 7 years and then maybe it takes another 3 years for the city government to change. So the things that today’s white Progressives in SF complain about are mostly gone by 2032.

Readers: What do you predict?

(photo: Good Mong Kok Bakery, 2012)

I’m settling into San Diego to serve as a software expert witness at a trial here in federal court. Would anyone like to get together for coffee? If so, comment here or email philg@mit.edu.

Separately, within only a few hours of walking around I was able to get images of all three pillars of 21st century California: the unhoused, marijuana, and the gender-neutral restroom.

Separately, I can’t figure out how real estate works in California. Downtown San Diego alternates between 15-20-story high modern buildings (real estate is valuable) and surface parking lots, auto repair shops, and vacant land (real estate is not valuable). You don’t see this kind of schizophrenia in Manhattan or Boston.