Great Moments in Real Estate Marketing

You don't need this home if Susie just wants to go to Cal (Street view/Merc)

Palo Alto homes have always commanded a premium over already-pricey Peninsula real estate because of PA's highly rated school distrct. This, however, is next level. [bold added]

A home listed for sale at $4.8 million on Friday in Palo Alto boasts that since its 2017 rebuild, the children of every subsequent owner have gone on to Harvard or Stanford, “paving the way for even greater achievements.”

“Now, it is ready to pass on its extraordinary energy to the next family,” the listing reads.

The five-bedroom, four-bathroom home appears to have been staged to highlight the children’s academic success — the framed diplomas and acceptance letters are poised above the mantel, featuring prominently in some of the photos.

That's a lot of pressure on the child. If he or she doesn't get into Stanford or Harvard (or an Ivy or MIT or CalTech), the parents will have overpaid substantially for a comparable house that they could have gotten for at least $1 million less in other Peninsula cities.

Let's hope the feng shui is strong with this one.

The Affection for Avocados

CA: you call that an avocado?

It was only after moving to the Mainland that I fully appreciated Hawaii's home-grown fruits. Relatives and friends grew mangos, papayas, bananas, lychee, and avocados, all of which I received fully ripe (and free, of course).

California supermarkets carry these items, usually imported from the Philippines and Mexico, but they're half the size and picked for transport before they're ripe.

BTW, it's illegal to hand-carry fresh produce on flights from Hawaii to California in order to prevent the spread of fruit flies.

Hawaii: now that's an avocado.

Of all these tropical fruits, it was the avocado that has exploded in popularity. The reasons are free trade with Mexico and ripening technology.

We have developed such a voracious appetite for this versatile fruit that the U.S. now annually brings in nearly 3 billion pounds of avocados. In fact, 90% of the avocados that Americans eat are imported—and close to 90% of those imports come from Mexico.

It’s hard to remember a time when their availability was so limited that avocados were more like a luxury item. Except that time wasn’t very long ago.

They were only allowed into the country from Mexico in 1997. They weren’t accessible across the country until 2007. Now they are beloved everywhere in America—and not just because they are healthy and delicious.

“The success of the avocado industry is rooted in our trade relationship with Mexico,” said David Ortega, a Michigan State University professor of food economics and policy...

Now a professor at the University of California, Riverside, [Mary Lu Arpaia] started her career there in 1983, when unripe avocados sold in grocery stores felt like baseballs. But it was around that time when avocado researchers became obsessed with an idea that would revolutionize their industry: ripening.

To increase awareness, demand and sales, avocado growers realized they had to give consumers a product they actually wanted, something just firm enough to buy in the morning and eat for dinner that night.

Basically, avocados had to be more like bananas.

It was a simple insight that would change the industry forever. Through a series of experiments, researchers figured out how to improve ventilation on pallets of ripening avocados.

As soon as Americans were able to grab softer avocados in a grocery store, they began filling their shopping carts with them. These days, you can feel a bunch of plump avocados and pick the ones that are immediately ready to be smashed into guacamole. But that’s only possible because of all that ripening progress.

“It laid the foundation for this avocado renaissance,” Arpaia said.

To home consumers the imposition of a 25% tariff on a $9 package of six (6) avocados to $11.25 won't reduce purchases much but it will definitely affect restaurants where guacomole and avocado toast enjoy high margins.

Avocados, like eggs, are not as important to the economy as gasoline or electricity but are of symbolic importance. The majority of Americans will probably allow the Trump Administration some time to work through new tariff and trade arrangements, but the trick will be in ascertaining when patience will run out.

Paia and Its Cemeteries

Paia Hongwanji Cemetery (Forrest and Kim Starr)

SFGate travel writer Eric Brooks stumbles upon abandoned graveyards. On the pathway to Baldwin Beach Park near Paia, Maui

There, just beyond some overgrown grass, was what looked like a group of headstones. Next to that, another 5 to 10 feet away, were more headstones. I rounded the corner to see an entire graveyard surrounded by sand and unmaintained brush. I estimated maybe 100 headstones in all...

Baldwin Beach Park and much of the surrounding land used to be owned by Maui’s Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company, or HC&S, a titan of the top industry in Hawaii for many years, according to Lucienne de Naie, author and docent at Hale Hoikeike at the Bailey House, a local history and art museum located in nearby Wailuku.

“The big boom in sugar cane came in the 1880s and 1890s,” de Naie told SFGATE.

That’s when plantation owners, keen to take advantage of the growing sugar cane business, began to import contract workers from countries like Japan, China, the Philippines and Portugal. “There were little camps of Japanese workers; the plantations tended to segregate their workers,” said de Naie, a resident of Maui since the 1970s who knows Paia very well. “The Chinese workers would live in another, the Philippine workers would live in another and so on. The camps had communal activities.”

...Citing a book called “Island of Maui Cemetery (Map & History) Directory,” de Naie was able to pinpoint the original name of the cemetery as the “Paia Hongwanji Cemetery.” It was associated with a Buddhist group called the Makawao Hongwanji, she added, which opened a temple in the area in 1908. The group moved not too far northeast to Upper Paia in 1917, later relocating about 7 miles southeast to Makawao in 1968, according to their website...

“Paia is the cemetery capital of Maui,” de Naie added. “For a small town, it probably has nine to 10 recognized cemeteries. It’s amazing how many cemeteries are there. Catholic, Protestant, Chinese and Mormon cemeteries. It’s a very easy place to dig, with the sand dunes. You put them where you can easily dig.”

Paia boy Fred, my father-in-law

My father-in-law (1922-2001) and his seven siblings were born in Paia. On a trip 35 years ago he showed us his old two-story house, now a tourist shop, and the old Maui High school buildings in a defunct sugar cane field. He regaled us with stories about the best fishing spots, the mischief he and his brothers got into, and life in old Paia town with Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Filipino children. (I won't use the names they actually called each other because they would offend modern sensibilities.)

Later we drove along the narrow cliffside rode to the Hotel Hana, where my inlaws honeymooned. Later we visited his half brother George in Kahului, and we flew back to Honolulu. Little did I know that it would be the last time I would visit central Maui.

Carpe diem.

Containment 2.0

George F Kennan (Wilson Center)

In July, 1947, Foreign Affairs published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by "X," the pseudonym for George F. Kennan, who was stationed in Moscow by the State Department from 1944 to 1946. The article became the basis for Soviet "containment," the U.S. policy throughout the Cold War:

It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time. To the extent that such an impression can be created and maintained, the aims of Russian Communism must appear sterile and quixotic, the hopes and enthusiasm of Moscow’s supporters must wane...

the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.

Containment was the guiding philosophy behind: 1) the Marshall Plan (1948-1951); 2) the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949; 3) the Korean War (1950-1953); and 4) the Vietnam War (1955-1975), with the U.S. taking the lead role from the French in 1964-1965.

Events that seemed to justify containment were 1) the Soviet atomic bomb (1949); 2) the creation of the People's Republic of China (1949); 3) the growth of communism in Latin America, of which the revolution in Cuba and the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 were the most important historically.

The point of the above is not to rehash the history of the Cold War, but to point out that the Trump Administration's seemingly endless foreign policy disputes over tariffs, Ukraine, energy, technology transfers, etc, may be clearing the decks for a Cold War 2.0 with China under Containment 2.0. [bold added]

Soon after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November, Xi Jinping asked his aides to urgently analyze the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

His concern, according to people who consult with senior Chinese officials, was that as President Trump gears up for a showdown with Beijing, China could get isolated like Moscow during that era.

He’s not wrong to worry. Even though Trump may be the one who currently looks isolated on the world stage—picking trade fights with erstwhile allies like Mexico and Canada, alarming Europe over his handling of the war in Ukraine and vowing to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal—the truth is that China doesn’t hold a strong hand.

With a domestic economy in crisis, Xi is playing defense, hoping to salvage as much as possible of a global trade system that helped pull his country out of poverty. Across the Pacific, Trump is intent on rewiring that very trading system, which he and his advisers see as having benefited the rest of the world—and China most of all—at the U.S.’s expense.

It isn’t just trade. The competing agendas of the leaders of the world’s two largest economies are poised to lead to precisely what China is trying to avoid: a superpower clash not seen since the Cold War, an all-encompassing rivalry over economic, technological and overall geopolitical supremacy.

Seen in that light, President Trump is willing to take the hit for being called Putin's stooge in the matter of Ukraine. The U.S. cannot afford to have Russia and China allied against it in a contemporary version of Monolithic Communism, now regarded, to be sure, as over-exaggeration by historians decades later.

His critics say that he is crazy, stupid, impulsive, and narcissistic. Perhaps the question should be: is Donald Trump that smart?

Guidebook to California Taxes

I often buy the U.S. Master Guide together with the Guidebook to California Taxes.

California tax preparers need such a guide because it's almost impossible to remember all the differences between U.S. and California tax laws.

If you would like a sample of what I'm talking about, dear reader, pictured on the right is a data input sheet for a professional tax service. It lists the various items by which Federal Adjusted Gross Income differs from California's. (There are similar input sheets for itemized deductions and tax credits.)

California has the highest marginal tax rate (14.4%, including the 1.1% surtax on wages over $1 million) of all the States in the Union. What is not often noted are all the adjustments to Federal taxable income that generally increase California income. To be sure, there are adjustments that go the other way, such as Social Security benefits and U.S. Treasury interest, both of which are not taxable in any state.

Such complexity is why tax preparers need the Guidebook to California Taxes, and why it is 1,024 pages long compared to the U.S. Master Guide's 944 pages.

Changing the Terms

I receive over a hundred e-mails every day, and about 20% are phishing scams (is that a redundancy)? I don't even bother to read them and can tell immediately they are fake (you have won a trip/tool set/gift card; your subscription to Netflix/Microsoft/Quicken has expired).

However, the most recent e-mail from "McAfee" piqued my curiosity because of the "espouse" in the subject line. Espouse ("to become involved with or support an activity or opinion"), although not obscure, is not a word used in regular parlance.

Looking into the text, I saw that "espouse" had replaced "expired" and "submit" was substituted for "subscription." The scammers had changed common phishing words to evade e-mail screens. They were successful in that they made me look at it...this one time.

Supersessionism, and the Reaction to It

Children helped to collect the offering

Today's New Testament reading was from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor:3):

Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed

(Note: the referenced "veil" is the one Moses wears in Exodus 34:29 when he speaks to the Israelites, who were "afraid to come near him" because his face shone brightly after speaking with God.)

The 2 Corinthians passage is another reference to the Israelites' hardened hearts against God and Jesus in the Old and New Testaments, respectively.

However, Christians throughout history have gone further, saying that the refusal of the Jews to accept Jesus as Messiah means that the Jews are no longer God's Chosen people. This belief is one of the tenets of supersessionism: [bold added]

Supersessionism is the traditional Christian belief that Christianity is the fulfillment of Biblical Judaism, and therefore that Jews who deny that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah fall short of their calling as God's Chosen people.

Supersessionism, in its more radical form, maintains that the Jews are no longer considered to be God's Chosen people in any sense. This understanding is generally termed "replacement theology."

The traditional form of supersessionism does not theorize a replacement; instead it argues that Israel has been superseded only in the sense that the Church has been entrusted with the fulfillment of the promises of which Jewish Israel is the trustee...

In recent times, the doctrine of supersessionism has been blamed for mistreatment of the Jews in the past. Some liberal Protestant groups have therefore formally renounced supersessionism, affirming that Jews and other non-Christians have a valid way to find God within their own faith, which breaks from historic Protestant teaching.

Without elaboration, the lady minister introduced supersessionism to the congregation and pronounced it wrong.

The coming of Jesus wasn’t meant to nullify the Jewish traditions of that time, and certainly not in our time to imply that Judaism is somehow incomplete without faith in Jesus. That understanding can lead to something called supersessionism, or the idea that Christianity is somehow superior and supersedes Judaism.

I wish that she had not dismissed supersessionism so quickly. We are Christians presumably because we believe that our understanding of God, man, and the universe is better explained by our faith than by others. If we didn't believe that--let's not use the trigger word "superior," which smacks of abhorrent colonialism--then why are we in the pews? Why recite the Creed or repent or be baptized?

For over a decade I have believed our church leadership takes positions nearly indistinguishable from the far left wing of the Democratic Party. More fundamental than any specific policy position on Palestine, inequality, racism, etc., I think now that the rot started with the postmodern belief that there is no objective truth, i.e., that my truth, your truth, and the truth of the guy sitting under the tree are all equally valid. The only reality is power, whereby one group's truth is forced upon others.

A Christianity that celebrates the Humble Servant who lays down His life for others has no place in the power- and "social justice"-focused Episcopal Church, and that is one of the reasons the church is dying.

Talk to the Hand, er, Chatbot

(Greg Clarke/WSJ)

Artificial intelligence "chatbots" have advanced to the point where human beings find them more empathetic--and prefer talking to them--over human strangers. [bold added]

A 2023 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that patients with a medical concern preferred a chatbot’s response to a physician’s nearly 80% of the time. Another study published in the journal Communications Psychology this year found that people consistently found a chatbot more compassionate than trained hotline crisis responders.

Large language models (LLMs) are doing a better job than humans at making people feel seen and heard. This phenomenon, which we can call LLMpathy, is both stunning and controversial...

When we see someone is in pain, or when someone we care about shares a problem, we instinctively want to help. We offer advice, suggest solutions and rattle off how we once dealt with something similar.

These impulses may be noble, even loving, but they aren’t as helpful as we might hope. Rushing to share opinions and hash out next steps can trivialize someone’s pain, and shifting the focus to yourself may unintentionally undermine their hope to be heard.

Chatbots avoid these pitfalls. With no personal experiences to share, no urgency to solve problems and no ego to protect, they focus entirely on the speaker. Their inherent limitations make them better listeners. More than humans, Bing paraphrased people’s struggles, acknowledged and justified how they might feel and asked follow-up questions—exactly the responses that studies show signal authentic, curious empathy among humans.

When people adopt similar strategies, their connections strengthen. Consider “looping for understanding,” a technique in which a listener repeats what someone else says in their own words, then asks if their summary is correct—“Do I have that right?” Chatbots are natural loopers. When humans are taught to do the same, they do a better job of understanding what the other person is feeling and helping them feel heard.

Any man who has been in a long-term relationship has already known this. When your partner brings you a problem, don't try to solve it, at least immediately. Nod in understanding, look concerned, and say something in agreement, like "Your boss should have given you credit and you should feel mad" and "your mother has always favored your brother."

Human beings have a chance when the conversation eventually moves on from hurt feelings to finding solutions:

It bears noting that the AI advantage in empathetic conversations has limits. Talk for long enough with ChatGPT and you’ll find it a friendly but formulaic partner. Its go-to recipe of “paraphrase, affirm, follow up” may feel warm and attentive the first time, but rote the second and annoying the third...

Research in this area typically asks people to interact with chatbots just once. It is possible that their edge over humans would disappear in longer chats, when its kindness grows repetitive and cloying.

Don't expect AI to stand still. If it knows that this is the third time we're talking about a subject, the chatbot may well ask if it can suggest a few solutions, again keeping ahead of human interlocutors.

Life partners, friends, and relations deteriorate over time, while AI gets better and better. Take (cold) comfort in something it will never do, however. It won't miss you when you're gone.

What Coyotes and Zombies Have in Common

Coyote with freshly killed harbor seal pup
at Bolinas Lagoon (Graves/SFGate)

Fourteen (14) months ago we wrote about the discovery that coyotes were responsible for decapitating baby seals on California coasts. Scientists now think they know why:

Going for the brains first might seem unusual, but it’s probably a matter of convenience — and a behavior that’s been observed in other carnivores before, [UCSC PhD student Frankie] Gerraty said. Hyenas on the coast of Namibia have been seen killing seals by crushing their skulls and consuming the brains, and wolves in Alaska and British Columbia have been known to chew off the heads of salmon, potentially to avoid tapeworms and other parasites found in the rest of the fish’s raw flesh.

With coyotes and harbor seals on Northern California beaches, “it’s likely that they’re trying to eat through the head because it’s not only the easiest part of the body to access with the thinnest layer of blubber, but the brain also has the highest nutritional value,” Gerraty explained.

The skull of a harbor seal pup isn't much thicker than an eggshell when they are born, and a coyote can easily crack into it with its teeth in several places, sometimes accessing more of the pup's flesh by tugging on the head with its jaws and holding the carcass down with its front paws, he said.

“The fact that some of the skulls are going missing could be because they can easily carry them back to their dens for their young to consume," he continued. Much of this is happening during peak pupping season for coyotes in the spring.”

Welcome to the Real World

People cite evidence to support an argument, but sometimes the evidence doesn't mean what they think it means.

Headline: Calif. weather expert issues dire warning on Trump's reported mass firings [bold added]

In a post on X Friday, Daniel Swain, a former UCLA climate scientist who now works at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said the firings are alarming.

“If there were to be large staffing reductions at NOAA and NWS—[as] appears is now indeed underway, with credible reports of much larger further cuts on the horizon—there will be people who die in extreme weather events and weather-related disasters who would not have otherwise,” he said in the statement...

For example, the National Weather Service issued a “life-threatening, destructive” wind event warning for most of the Los Angeles region days before the destructive and deadly Palisades Fire began on Jan. 7, urging residents to “Stay alert to the forecast and follow instruction from emergency officials.”

Perhaps there were a few people in Palisades who paid attention--but certainly no one in authority to make any difference; Pacific Palisades was destroyed. If no one heeds the warnings, then the personnel that issue them serve little or no purpose.

Indeed, the people who lose their jobs may have integrity and be competent, but hundreds of such good people lose their jobs every day in private industry (Headline today: Two Bay Area tech giants announce huge layoffs at almost exact same moment).

Welcome to the real world, government employees.

Disappointing, But It's Better to Walk Away Now

Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont (Mejia/Chron)

Six months ago we reacted enthusiastically to the prospect of Stanford University expanding into Belmont. Now that project has been cancelled.

After nearly four years of deliberation, Stanford University has decided not to move forward with its plan to purchase the Notre Dame de Namur University campus in Belmont.

In a statement released Tuesday, the university cited several unforeseen factors that influenced its decision, particularly the changing landscape of higher education and financial challenges.

“As we were engaging with the Belmont community and City leaders, we were also exploring possible academic uses for a Stanford Belmont campus,” said Stanford officials. “This process has clarified that identifying and establishing those uses for a potential Belmont campus will take significantly longer than we initially planned.”

Stanford entered into an option purchase agreement in 2021 to acquire the historic 46-acre Catholic university property with plans to create a satellite campus for 2,500 students, faculty and staff.

The proposed site, roughly 13 miles from its main campus in Palo Alto, would have been called Stanford Belmont and was positioned as a short 20-minute drive up Highway 101...The proposed layout included pedestrian paths, bicycle lanes and green spaces aimed at creating a communal atmosphere...

Local leaders in Belmont had hoped the campus could help revitalize the historic property, which has struggled financially in recent years.

The Italianate Ralston Hall Mansion, built in 1867 as the summer home of banker William Ralston, is a state and national landmark that has been closed for years. The building is currently undergoing a renovation project that Notre Dame de Namur University cannot afford to complete.

Belmont Vice Mayor Gina Latimerlo noted in August that the sale would help fund renovations to Ralston Hall and provide community benefits such as improved athletic facilities and infrastructure upgrades.

With Stanford’s plans for the Belmont site now on hold, the future of the property remains uncertain.

The creation of Stanford-Belmont looked like a win-win for both the university and rhe city. The reason for the cancellation--“This process has clarified that identifying and establishing those uses for a potential Belmont campus will take significantly longer than we initially planned”--is typical public relations gobbledy-gook.

These are words that are used because Stanford had to say something about the loss of its deposit and four years of work, but reveal nothing. There's only a slight chance we'll know what really happened, but as someone who makes (small) donations to the University and wants them to use funds wisely, I hope we find out.

Smishing

We ordered a FasTrak "toll tag" (a plastic transponder that charges us for bridge tolls and express-lane fees when passing under a scanner) eight years ago.

As largely housebound retirees who live on the Peninsula, we rarely need the device, as we avoid highway traffic jams during rush hours and go over toll bridges once every 2-3 months,

On our drive to and from Yosemite last weekend we did use the toll tag and I received the text message (shown right) on the same day we left.

It was the first time I had received a text message that asked me to make a FasTrak payment. It had caught me off guard because it coincided with the first FasTrak use of 2025. My travel companion said that the message was a scam that had been going around.

Road toll scams that besieged the Bay Area and and other parts of the country last year have ramped up again, with insistent text messages that demand payment — and sometimes threaten penalties.

A Chronicle reporter received three such missives since December, purportedly for not paying fees to use toll lanes. Other Bay Area drivers have shared screenshots of similar messages on social media, asking about their validity. Some say they are getting hammered multiple times a month, and note the language in these texts has evolved: fewer spelling errors, increasingly detailed instructions, and a more intimidating tone.

“In order to avoid excessive late fees and potential legal action on statements, please pay the fee in time,” one message sent on Jan. 12 said. It provided a website to resolve violations, imitating the real web address for Southern California’s toll authority but stringing a sequence of numbers and letters at the end...

Law enforcement officials have a name for the tactic: “smishing.” The term is a portmanteau of phishing perpetrated through SMS text messages, and describes an aggressive and sophisticated form of social engineering. Bridge and road toll scammers use smishing to cast a wide net, tricking people to pay bogus fines for crossings they didn’t make.

Smishing---a crime that could only exist in a world with SMS text messages and toll tags, which in turn exist because the State government eliminated human toll takers. It's progress, I suppose, but we have to be on our guard more than ever.

Nuances of the Oyster Sauce Market

A sign like "LKK Oyster Sauce - Old" would not seem to be the best way to sell a product...unless one knows the nuances of the oyster sauce market.

Lee Kum Kee has been selling oyster sauce since the 19th century; I remember going with my grandmother to Honolulu's Chinatown in the 1950's and buying a bottle with a picture of the "lady on the boat."

LKK introduced a cheaper, sugary "Panda" brand later in the 20th century, but those of us who grew up with the lady on the bottle much prefer the "old" oyster sauce. Thousands of Asian cooks can't be wrong.

On a Higher Plane

Guillaume Bodinier, The Good Samaritan,
1826 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today's Gospel from the Episcopal lectionary has some relevance to current politics. The applicable verses are Luke 6:32-36:

"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

I've listened with half an ear to this passage (and Matthew's version in Matthew 5:46) dozens of times. It's about Jesus telling us to love our enemies, which sounds great in the abstract but which anyone with life experience knows is difficult in reality. But this is Jesus, who is always asking us to do hard things.

Looking past His main command, Jesus makes the point that it's no big deal to love those close to you ("even sinners do the same"), and to be His follower one should love those who are more distant.

But back to politics. Grok summarizes the timeline of the debate between Pope Francis and Vice President Vance over immigration and loving those who are close vs far, drawing on the Catholic concept of ordo amoris:

The debate between Pope Francis and J.D. Vance over the concept of "ordo amoris" (Latin for "order of love") unfolded in early 2025, centered around differing interpretations of this Catholic theological principle in the context of immigration policy. Here’s a timeline based on available information:

Late January 2025 (circa January 30): The debate began when U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, invoked "ordo amoris" during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. Vance argued that compassion should prioritize one’s family, neighbors, community, and fellow citizens before extending to the rest of the world. He framed this as a traditional Christian concept to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policies, particularly its focus on mass deportations. Following criticism on X from Rory Stewart, a former British parliamentarian who called Vance’s take “less Christian and more pagan tribal,” Vance doubled down on January 30, posting on X: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ … Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away?” This sparked widespread discussion among theologians, Catholic figures, and social media users about the meaning and application of "ordo amoris."

Early February 2025 (circa February 3–4): Vance’s comments gained traction, igniting a theological debate. Some, like Jesuit Father James Martin, criticized Vance for missing the universal call to love in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, while others, such as Michael Sirilla of Franciscan University, praised Vance for summarizing the "order of charity" accurately. The controversy grew as Vance’s remarks were linked to his broader critique of U.S. bishops and their involvement in refugee resettlement, amplifying attention on Catholic social teaching.

February 10, 2025: Pope Francis entered the fray with a letter addressed to U.S. bishops, released on this date. While primarily expressing concern over President Trump’s “program of mass deportations,” the Pope appeared to indirectly rebuke Vance’s interpretation of "ordo amoris." Without naming Vance, Francis wrote: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. … The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” This was widely interpreted as a correction to Vance’s hierarchical view, emphasizing a broader, inclusive love rooted in human dignity rather than a prioritized order based on proximity or nationality.

February 11, 2025: The Pope’s letter was published and reported widely, with outlets like Religion News Service and USA Today framing it as a direct response to Vance. The pontiff’s intervention escalated the debate, drawing attention to the theological and political rift. Vance had not publicly responded to the letter by this date, but the discourse intensified online and in Catholic circles, with commentators like Father Raymond de Souza suggesting the disagreement was more about rhetoric than theology.

February 13–20, 2025: The debate continued to ripple through media and theological discussions. On February 13, Catholic News Agency and National Catholic Register covered the ongoing clash, noting support and criticism for Vance among Catholic thinkers. By February 19, outlets like the Catholic Herald reflected on the broader implications of "ordo amoris," while on February 20, La Croix International published Jesuit theologian Jean-Marie Carrière’s challenge to Vance’s exclusionary rhetoric, advocating an "ordo justitiae" (order of justice) instead. Posts on X during this period, such as from @BurtRigg on February 19, misstated Francis’s position but reflected the public’s engagement with the issue.

The timeline shows a rapid escalation from Vance’s initial remarks in late January to a papal response by mid-February, with the debate evolving from a policy defense into a theological and moral controversy. As of February 25, 2025, no further direct exchanges between Vance and Francis have been reported, but the discussion remains active in Catholic and political spheres.

Quite apart from who is right or wrong, I appreciate how this debate is on a higher plane than the usual sound bite exchange that we see on Twitter or the evening news. I do, however, note that there have been calls for the Vice President to "stay in his lane" and not debate theological matters with the Pope. In response, one of the tenets of the Protestant Reformation was that the individual stands before God, and, contrary to Catholic teaching, no intercession is needed by priest or Pope. Your humble blogger finds much to admire in the Catholic church, but he is not a member.

Yosemite-Adjacent Vacation

(2009 photo)

Our trip to Yosemite National Park in January, 2009, was unplanned yet turned out to be much better than we had a right to expect. The youngster had never been to Yosemite, and we happened to be only an hour away while driving home from another event.

We snagged a room at the Ahwahnee Hotel and extended our stay because of heavy snowfall. Both the hotel and the Valley floor with the famous landmarks were uncrowded, and we wandered to our hearts' content.

After that pleasant experience I have had no compelling desire to return.

On the nature trail

A family member was meeting some friends to see the popular Yosemite "Firefall" this weekend, and on Thursday I offered to accompany him on the 3½-hour drive. He readily agreed, and I bunked with him at the Rush Creek Lodge and Spa, which is outside the Park, 26 miles from the Visitors Center.

While he went to meet his friends, I spent a very pleasant day walking around the Lodge and its nature trails. I dined at the restaurant, which had a limited number of selections that were excellently prepared, and I relaxed with a book.

Sometimes one can have an excellent vacation without planning or having to "do" anything. As for my traveling companion, he got his pictures of Firefall, and we both came away happy.

We Escaped the Vortex This Time

(Baron/Lynx/Chronicle)

Some family members will be heading east to the Sierra mountains today, and we're lucky that California is out of the path of the polar vortex that is hitting much of the country.

The majority of the country will wake to bone-chilling temperatures Thursday, with dozens of temperature records at risk of being broken.

The massive outbreak of cold air is connected to the polar vortex, a lobe of frigid air that has broken away from the North Pole and settled over the middle of the country.

The shot of cold air won’t impact California or the West Coast. In the wake of a weak cold front that passed through Wednesday, a high-pressure ridge has developed near California, shielding the state from the cold air and from a powerful storm system set to drench the Pacific Northwest this weekend.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the Arctic polar vortex

is a band of strong westerly winds that forms in the stratosphere between about 10 and 30 miles above the North Pole every winter. The winds enclose a large pool of extremely cold air. (There is an even stronger polar vortex in the Southern Hemisphere stratosphere in its winter.) The stronger the winds, the more the air inside is isolated from warmer latitudes, and the colder it gets.

A normal, stable polar vortex stays in the stratosphere above the Arctic, which gets extremely cold in the winter while we in the mid-latitudes experience warmer air and moderate winters. The polar vortex isn't always stable, however.

“We did have a sudden stratospheric warming in January,” explained [NOAA's Dr. Amy] Butler. “The polar vortex weakened. It got stretched out of shape and slid southward off the pole. Most of the time when this happens—and it happens on average about every other year in the Arctic—some part of the mid-latitudes will ultimately experience a cold air outbreak."

What causes the polar vortex to get "stretched out of shape" is the $64,000 question, and while some blame their favorite culprit, global warming, Dr. Butler refuses to take the bait: [bold added]

“I don’t think there is any convincing evidence of a long-term trend in the polar vortex. What we see in the record is this very interesting period in the 1990s, when there were no sudden stratospheric warming events observed in the Arctic. In other words, the vortex was strong and stable. But then they started back up again in the late 1990s, and over the next decade there was one almost every year. So there was a window of time in the early 2010s where it seemed like there might be a trend toward weaker, more disrupted or shifted states of the Arctic polar vortex. But it hasn’t continued, and more and more, it’s looking like what seemed to be the beginning of a trend was just natural variability, or maybe just a rebound from the quiet of the 1990s.”

Not only does the data not yet support the global-warming-causes-colder-winter hypothesis, the NOAA goes on to describe how leading climate models give conflicting results:

Some climate model experiments do predict that continued warming will lead to a weakening of the polar vortex...At the same time, other model simulations predict that warming and sea ice loss will lead to a stronger polar vortex.

I've decided to hold onto my internal-combustion-engine vehicles for a few more years; there's always a gas station nearby so I won't freeze to death in my car when another vortex hits, and I can't say the same for EV charging stations.

In the Furtherance of Their Own Goals

(Sarah Stierch via Flickr CC 2.0/SFGate)

The war against CO2 claims another sacrifice: 2,554 acres in the Mojave Desert plus the character of the nearby town of Boron (pop.2000). From SFGate reporter Sam Mauhay-Moore: [bold added]

On a warm October night last fall, I sat near a taxidermied bobcat and a trove of other historical Mojave memorabilia inside Boron’s treasured Twenty Mule Team Museum. A group of locals gathered there to discuss the Aratina Solar Project, which was just starting to make headway less than a mile from the town’s southern boundary.

“They’re just destroying this place,” Jerry Gallegos, longtime Boron resident and co-president of the museum, said at the meeting. “They’re plowing down 3,000 Joshua trees right now, taking chainsaws and cutting them down three at a time.”

Joshua tree in the Mojave (drcooke/Getty/SFGate)

The Aratina Solar Project has a footprint of 2,554 acres, of which 2,317 acres will be covered by solar panels. It "generate(s) up to 530 megawatt-alternating current (MW-AC) of renewable energy, including up to 600 megawatts of energy storage, on privately-owned land in unincorporated Kern County."

Fortunately there is a natural-gas power plant of similar capacity in Kern County that can be used for comparison.

The Elk Hills Power Plant (EHPP) is located on a 12-acre site within the Elk Hills Oil and Gas Field, in western Kern County, near the community of Tupman...EHPP is a nominal 550-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle, natural gas-fired, cogeneration power generating plant.

It's well beyond the scope of this post to rehash the traditional natural-gas vs. solar debate (carbon emissions vs. none, power-as-needed vs. intermittent capability). But we can note a vast difference that has not often been mentioned, namely, solar's 4-sq-mile destruction of the Mojave desert vs. less than 1/2 of one percent of that area for natural-gas power.

It would be wrong to declare that environmentalists are guilty of an apparent double standard when they are silent about natural habitats being destroyed in the furtherance of their own goals. They must have a good explanation.

Very Old School

100 y.o. tax preparer Else Rike (Hagerty/WSJ)

The WSJ features nonagenerian and even centenarian tax preparers: [bold added]

After more than 70 years as an independent tax preparer, [100 y.o. Else M.] Rike knows how to pace herself. She aims to finish at least three returns a day in the weeks before April 15.

Unlike other tax preparers, she doesn’t rely on software to guide her choice of deductions and exemptions or to do the sums. Instead, she punches keys on a Sharp desktop calculator, setting a tiny roll of printing paper atwirl, and then uses an electric typewriter to enter the numbers onto Internal Revenue Service forms.

“I’m not that tech-oriented,” she says. “I don’t have the computer figure it out. I do my own figuring.” Ever since childhood, she says, “math was always sort of my thing.”

Rike (pronounced Ricky) does have a computer, but she uses it only to print out forms. She doesn’t use email but does answer her cellphone or landline. To keep up with tax law, she relies heavily on a fat paperback, “U.S. Master Tax Guide.”

Mrs. Rike, like I do, subscribes to the Master Tax Guide. The MTG is sufficient for basic technical needs, and any problems it can't answer probably means the taxpayer needs to hire a specialist (e.g., closely held companies, foreign income, oil and gas) in that particular area. Specialists can be very expensive, and Mrs. Rike's price is right for her retired clientele:

“I don’t charge like others. I kind of try to do it by the hours that I put in or the number of pages of their returns,” she says. Most clients pay between $50 and $150. That includes a set of envelopes for estimated taxes, with the address labels neatly affixed.

At one point, Rike had around 300 customers. Now she has outlived most of them and serves about 80, including the children of former clients. “I don’t do too many difficult ones anymore,” she says. “I do mostly retired people.”

Her customers are loyal, and she enjoys her work. She has found what we are all searching for...life's purpose.

It's Just Offal

The Asian supermarkets in our area are offering a wider variety of offal, i.e., parts of the animal that are not part of the mainstream American diet. (As noted yesterday, even Costco is selling chicken feet.)

99 Ranch has beef aorta, a cut I had never seen, much less eaten, before. I searched for recipes online but found only a couple; Google also helpfully displayed recipes for beef heart, which is quite different from aorta despite their proximity in the animal.

My curiosity is piqued, however. If I ever do see aorta on the menu, I'll give it a try.

If You Pause on the Paws, You'll Probably Miss Out

At Costco every day seems like there's a Presidents' Day sale. This afternoon I saw chicken feet (aka "chicken paws") being sold for $1.99 a pound. I didn't pull the trigger last November when they were $5.49/lb. at 99 Ranch, but $1.99 is awfully tempting and had me web-searching recipes next to the display.

Chicken feet require hours to prepare, so lacking the time to spend in the kitchen I didn't buy any today. I might not get another chance, however, since at that price, likely to be cheaper than their distributors, the local Chinese restaurants may swoop in and clean out the inventory.

Easy for Him to Say

2017: only one man looks joyful. (Vucci/AP/WSJ)

Pope Francis condemns the U.S. "program of mass deportations."

For years [Pope Francis and President Trump] have sparred over immigration, which both have chosen as their signature issue. On Monday Francis wrote a letter to the American Catholic bishops denouncing Mr. Trump’s “mass deportations.” It is extremely rare for a pope to condemn a particular policy of a particular government. Principles are usually made explicit with the application left implicit.

The administration left the response to the papal letter to border czar Tom Homan. “I’ve got harsh words for the pope,” Mr. Homan said. “I say this as a lifelong Catholic. He ought to focus on his work and leave enforcement to us. He’s got a wall around the Vatican, does he not?”

Hardly. There are no controls at the Vatican City State border. No one scales the ninth-century Leonine Walls when the arms of Bernini’s colonnade surrounding St. Peter’s Square are open to all. Tens of thousands of people walk in and out without presenting any documents each day. Mr. Homan knows that, but there was a rhetorical attack to be made.

Given that mass deportations aren’t yet a reality—and, in any case, may not exceed the number of deportations during previous administrations—there are good reasons that the pope and president ought not take each other’s bait.

The writer, Ontario priest Raymond J. de Souza, goes on to talk about the emerging debate over Catholic public theology between converted Catholic J.D. Vance and the Pope. The immigration dispute is worthy of an extended discussion, harkening back to Catholic politicians' past differences with the Church on abortion and capital punishment.

Returning to the subject of border controls, I have one comment on Father de Souza's assertion, "There are no controls at the Vatican City State border.....Tens of thousands of people walk in and out without presenting any documents each day."

If it is also true that every inch of public space is not subject to video surveillance, facial recognition, etc. to head off trouble, then I will believe in the Vatican's openness. If the U.S. had such tech at the southern border (and fewer outward and visible signs of physical controls), the U.S. would appear more open, too.

After the break is the Pope's February 10th letter to American bishops.

Sense of Foreboding

(Image from UC-Berkeley)

During the summer of 1989 the Bay Area experienced a swarm of small earthquakes that caused little damage. On October 17th the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake struck and, according to Wikipedia, resulted in 63 deaths, 3,757 injuries, and about $6 billion of damage.

Although I've experienced many earthquakes in my 50 years living here, the 1989 experience has taught me to stop what I'm doing after a jolt to see if there's a bigger one coming. Fortunately that didn't happen after a series of shocks along the Hayward fault on Thursday.

It's been 158 years since the Hayward fault's last major temblor, a 6.8, and it's perhaps more "overdue" than the San Andreas fault that produced the great 1906 and 1989 quakes.

The Bay Area has escaped the natural disasters that have occurred in other parts of the State, but I am feeling a sense of foreboding based on nothing more than wondering how long both major faults will continue to be quiet. May we keep our go bags ready and our gas tanks full.

False Flag Operation at City Hall

SF sheriff's letter (Red underline added)

In an obvious false flag operation three men claiming to be part of DOGE invaded SF City Hall and a school district building. [bold added]

Three men wearing MAGA hats, Department of Government Efficiency T-shirts and fake badges stormed several offices inside San Francisco City Hall and a nearby school district building on Friday demanding that workers hand over sensitive documents, sources said...

[Sheriff's spokeswoman Tara] Moriarty said City Hall workers refused the intruders' requests and called sheriff’s deputies, at which time the individuals fled the building. Moriarty said the Sheriff’s Office doesn’t believe that the individuals were actually representatives from DOGE.

Then at about 12:40 p.m., a San Francisco Unified School District worker who works in an administrative building at 135 Van Ness Ave. said that three men matching the description of the City Hall intruders walked inside the former school making similar demands.

The worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak to media, said that the three men stunned school district workers when they got past security and started walking up and down the hallways “being rowdy” and harassing random people.

The worker said the three men freely walked through the building while videotaping workers on their phones before leaving 10 minutes later. She described them as young guys in their 20s who were intentionally trying to provoke people. One of them had a badge with an expletive on it.

“They came in saying ‘we are DOGE, what are you doing?’ to people,” the employee said. “They told one woman that she’d be fired by Monday. I thought it was strange, but some other people might’ve been afraid.”

It could be a sign of how much the political and media landscape has changed that both San Francisco officials and the Chronicle stated upfront that Elon Musk and DOGE were not responsible.

The attempt was amateurish, the intent to provoke was obvious, and luckily everyone kept their cool. I hope these guys are caught quickly and the book is thrown at them.

Four Lights

There are four lights! (Star Trek reference)

When it came time to replace the 40-watt bulbs in the bathroom, only the white LED product was available at Home Depot. Because having a mixture of lights was not esthetically pleasing, I removed the incandescents and stored them away.

When the leftmost LED burned out this week, I reached for an incandescent. I had forgotten how much a warmer light changes the mood, and I will go back to the old bulbs now that President Trump's EPA will allow them again, along with the older-standard showers, toilets, washing machines and dishwashers.

(We may not have heard the last word about President Trump's action, because the energy-efficient regulations were based on the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The Act, in my humble non-lawyerly opinion, does not mandate specific energy criteria for consumer lightbulbs, leaving the details to the Secretary of Energy. Under President Biden consumer incandescents were banned by the Department of Energy, and President Trump's rescinding of the ban is within the latter's authority. Of course, I could be wrong...)

CA Water: Following the Rule Curve

February storms have dispelled concerns over a dry January: [bold added]

So much rain fell in the first week of February that California’s largest reservoir, Shasta Lake, near Redding, rose 22 feet. Shasta Lake is 34 miles long. The watershed at the state’s second-largest, Lake Oroville, in Butte County, has received 24 inches of rain in the past two weeks — five times the historical average — sending the reservoir level up 23 feet from Feb. 1 to Feb. 7.

And now a new atmospheric river storm is forecast to soak the Bay Area and the rest of the state Thursday and Friday...

The rain has been so plentiful that operators of the largest reservoirs have been increasing water releases in recent days to make space for the latest storm.

The outlet valves at Shasta Dam on Tuesday,
Feb. 11 (Merc/U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

At Shasta Lake, federal dam operators have let out 60,000 cubic feet per second since Saturday through the outlet valves at the massive Shasta Dam. That’s 450,000 gallons a second, the equivalent of 40 Olympic swimming pools every minute.

It’s a delicate balancing act, experts say. If reservoirs fill to the top too quickly in big storms, large amounts of water are released down their spillways, causing flooding to homes and communities downstream. In extreme cases, water can overtop dams, causing a risk of failure.

Operators at most large dams in California rely on a manual called a “rule curve” that is set by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Evaluating decades of rainfall patterns, it recommends the highest level that each reservoir should be kept at every day, an amount that gradually increases later in the spring as winter storms dissipate.

“You are playing the odds,” [UC-Davis professor Jeff] Mount said. “What you are trying to do is balance the risk of not ending up with enough water in the spring against the risk of having too much in the winter, where you’ll get flooding.”

California is extremely lucky; says Professor Mount, "It’s unusual to get three wet years in a row.”

The men and women who operate our water infrastructure are doing an excellent job managing a complex system that is subject to both physical and manmade (make sure the fish get their share!) constraints.

Although funding was approved by the voters in 2014, it's a pity that, eleven years later, the Progressives who run the State haven't built any water storage to take advantage of the rain (the estimated completion date of the Sites reservoir is 2032).

The GOAT of Scrabble

The term "GOAT" (Greatest Of All Time) originated as a self-description by Muhammad Ali and has since fueled many a sports debate, particularly in professional basketball (LeBron James vs Michael Jordan) and football (Tom Brady vs Joe Montana, until Brady pulled away by amassing a total of seven championships late in his career).

Nigel Richards (Brady/PA/Zuma Press/WSJ)

There is no controversy, however, about the GOAT of Scrabble: [bold added]

Nigel Richards is the reigning world champion of Scrabble in Spanish. Just don’t ask him to order a coffee in Madrid. The 57-year-old New Zealander doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish.

During the deciding match in November’s Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain, Richards racked up triple-word scores with ENRUGASE (“to wrinkle up”) and ENHOTOS (an archaic word for “familiarity”), before clinching victory with TRINIDAD and SABURROSA (an obscure word that describes the coated residue of the tongue).

Not that Richards knew the meaning of any of those words.

One Spanish TV broadcaster called his win the “ultimate humiliation.” The global Scrabble community wasn’t so surprised. Richards had done this before—in French.

When he won that language’s Scrabble world championship in 2015 and again in 2018, he could greet his opponents with bonjour but couldn’t say much else.

What Richards lacks in linguistic ability he more than makes up for with an encyclopedic memory and an unrivaled ability to decode patterns, according to friends and opponents.

“He memorizes words as soon as he reads them once,” said Hector Klie, who has represented the U.S. in Scrabble since 2003 and competes in Spanish. “He doesn’t know whether a word is a verb, noun, adjective or any other grammatical form that would typically help native speakers learn words more easily. For him, all words are equal in his memory, and he doesn’t need to know their meaning.”

Richards is also the undisputed GOAT in English-language Scrabble, having won five world titles. He is currently ranked No. 1 by the World English-language Scrabble Player’s Association.

“We are witnessing someone who could be compared to, or even surpass in intellectual capacity, figures like Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen in chess,” said Klie, the Spanish World Championship runner-up in 2004.

The parallel to Nigel Richards that comes to mind is the large language models (LLMs) that are used in artificial intelligence. LLMs don't "know" anything in a traditional epistemological sense but are able to give the appearance of knowing by examining billions of pieces of information on the internet, recognizing patterns, and regurgitating answers that follow those patterns.

Of course, this means that someday a computer will beat Nigel Richards at Scrabble.

Crossing a Red Line That You Can't See

Beginning January 1st, California has banned parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk. The purpose of the "daylighting" law is to make pedestrians more visible to drivers who may not see them crossing because of parked vehicles.

(Illustration from Trumbull/Chronicle)

San Francisco had begun ticketing such closely parked cars although there were no warning signs or curbs painted red. [bold added]

After confronting a stiff outcry from residents and elected leaders, San Francisco’s transportation agency has scrapped plans to ticket motorists who park in unmarked “daylighting” zones near crosswalks, the agency’s director said Monday.

Previously, officials at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency intended to cite any driver who parks within 20 feet of a crosswalk — the safety buffer mandated by California’s new daylighting law — regardless of whether or not the curb is painted red...

While citations for parking in red zones carry a $108 fine, SFMTA had proposed lowering the penalty to $40 if the 20 foot buffer was not marked. Strained by limited resources, transportation staff said it would take years to paint curbs throughout the city, so the reduced fine represented a compromise.

But San Franciscans balked. Kirschbaum said that when she met with members of the public, they brought up the daylighting enforcement plan over and over again. City supervisors echoed their misgivings, saying the $40 tickets were unfair. When Kirschbaum relayed their feedback to new Mayor Daniel Lurie, she said he supported her idea to quash the $40 fines...

SFMTA announced a retreat. Drivers who park at red curbs will still be ticketed; those who park at unmarked gray curbs will not, even if they are within 20 feet of a crosswalk.

Besides nixing the $40 tickets, the agency will also accelerate its process for striping curbs to comply with the daylighting law. Transportation planners are now giving themselves 18 months to coat all the daylight zones in red paint, a far more compressed schedule than the initial projection of four to five years.

Comments:

1) the daylighting law has a lot to commend it. Some pedestrians dash into crosswalks where views are blocked by parked trucks or SUVs.

2) people draw the line at protecting the public if it means taking away their parking space!

3) "Ignorance of the law is no excuse": no one seems to believe that any more with the many thousands of rules and regulations that the average person has to deal with.