Property Crime: the Zeitgeist is Changing

There have been two "home invasion" robberies in Foster City in the past five years. Before 2019 your humble blogger remembers that there was another one, the victims being an Asian family. Asians are reputed to keep above-average amounts of cash, jewelry, gold and other valuables in their homes.

When home invasions were first reported decades ago, both perpetrators and victims were of Asian descent, especially since the youthful criminal gangs knew which houses to hit. The knowledge that Asian homes are ripe targets has spread to crime rings of other ethnicities.

Some of the stash recovered (SJ police/Mercury News)

Headline: San Jose--Police arrest three suspects who allegedly stole $1 million in jewelry, cash from Asian families in South Bay.[bold added]

Authorities on Wednesday announced a joint law-enforcement operation that netted the arrests of three suspects who together allegedly stole about $1 million worth of jewelry, designer purses and cash by targeting Asian families living in the South Bay.

The three men struck homes in San Jose, Cupertino, Saratoga, Campbell and Mountain View starting in June 2024, stealing at least 700 items across nearly 80 separate burglaries, San Jose police Chief Paul Joseph said at a news conference. Officials expect the number of robberies associated with this burglary ring to increase as they connect unsolved cases to the suspects...

The three suspects were identified as 25-year-old Alberto Ibarra Vallejo, 28-year-old Gonzalo Valencia Ramos and 46-year-old Jaime Martinez Arroyo. They were arrested Jan. 16 by SJPD officers with the assistance of the Stockton Police SWAT Team, Joseph said; the suspects are residents of Stockton, Hayward and French Camp, he added.

In the arrest operation, authorities uncovered evidence, including hundreds of jewelry pieces, foreign currency, family heirlooms, luxury watches and purses, Joseph said. They also found five firearms, Joseph said, adding that at least three were confirmed to have been stolen...

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said that his office is pursuing the “most serious criminal charges” for the three suspects, adding that they are already facing 72 felony counts of burglary. Rosen dropped the thick complaint packet on the podium with a thud to illustrate “the weight and the seriousness of the crimes that these individuals committed,” he said.

Authorities also said they will seek hate crime enhancements for the suspects’ sentencing because they targeted AAPI communities...

Jail records showed all three suspects in custody Thursday on a no-bail status, with a court date set for Feb. 3.

The suspects are charged with 72 felony counts and have been held without bail. They may also be charged with a hate crime because the victims are Asian while they are not.

Note that there have been no reports of injuries, yet the suspects have had the book (so heavy that it lands with a "thud"!) thrown at them for property crimes. The woke doctrine that property is unimportant appears to be repudiated. I wonder what (or who) has changed the zeitgeist?

The Ultimate DEI Hire

Former President Trump sat for a scheduled interview before the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention, and the fireworks started with the opening question and answer:

Former President Donald Trump attacked Vice President Kamala Harris over her race, baselessly suggesting his election rival only began identifying as a Black woman in recent years.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention. “So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?”

He continued: “I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that, too.”

Following the interview (PBS / YouTube at the bottom of this post), partisans leapt immediately into the fray attacking and defending President Trump's answers to various questions, with the main focus on whether Vice President Harris self-identified as "Black" or "Indian". There are videos supporting both positions, but my own take is that this contretemps will blow over when the Democratic convention begins on August 19th.

Also, the immediate negative reaction to President Trump's statements about Kamala Harris' race was understandable but self-defeating. The great American public, including myself, was unaware of how often she emphasized her Black or Indian heritage to the press, depending on which position was more advantageous. That's no crime, just opportunism.

President Trump made a smart chess move because:

1) It reminded us that Vice President Harris was selected as President Biden's running mate because of her sex and race, the ultimate DEI hire. (There are various speeches by candidate and President Biden declaring this to be the case.) DEI is becoming a dirty word in corporate circles.

2) Both white and black journalists later stated that they were highly offended by this latest example of Trumpian racism. Reporters should grow a pair, because the story isn't about them. Rational voters don't care about TV personalities' feelings, especially if the latter are rich and successful.

3) President Trump wasn't trying to convert the mostly hostile crowd who wasn't intending to vote for him anyway. He was going after the 10-20%, of all races,who are not enthusiastic about identity politics and who are staying silent because they're afraid of being cancelled if they strayed from the dominant narrative.

Let's first see what Kamala Harris does with the naming of her running mate and actually being declared the nominee of the Democratic Party before delving too deep into the dynamics of a Trump-Harris contest.

MEI, not DEI

(Image from Diversio/Linkedin)

There's a new Human Resources acronym to learn about: [bold added]

From tech to tractors, companies are dialing back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Instead, a DEI alternative endorsed by Elon Musk could alter the fate of your next job application.

It’s known as MEI, short for merit, excellence and intelligence. As described by Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, who helped popularize the term, MEI means hiring the best candidates for open roles without considering demographics.

The George Floyd riots of 2020 kickstarted the whole Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement, and companies raced to install DEI programs that would diversify their work forces, diversity being typically measured by the number of people they would hire who were not white, straight males.

Four years later the lack of a return--or perhaps even a negative return--on their investment have caused some companies to renounce DEI in favor of merit-based personnel policies.

Your humble blogger finds it important to note that one major organization that wholeheartedly embraces DEI is government, which has few performance metrics and no competition to show whether an alternative might be better.

By the way, expect DEI to be a hot-button topic this election year:

That tension is now in the brightest of spotlights, after President Biden abandoned his re-election bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden picked Harris as his running mate four years ago, after vowing to consider only women for the job. Almost immediately, some political opponents began painting Harris, who is Black and South Asian, as a “DEI hire.”

Fox News:

Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost said on Tuesday that calling Vice President Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, a "DEI hire" was like using a "racial slur."

The race card has already been played, and there's still over three months to go to the election.

No Wonder the Courts Are Clogged

The basis of the lawsuit (Chron photo)

Your humble blogger, a non-lawyer, has viewed with aghast the burgeoning laws and regulations that over his lifetime "growed like Topsy".

And there's no natural brake to this phenomenon. A wrong or injustice is noted, some citizens cry "there ought to be a law", and the legislature responds. Presto, a law is created which governs a human activity that was heretofore outside the legal system's ambit.

Is it any wonder that the courts are backlogged?

A 7 year-old girl handed a drawing to a classmate, a lawsuit resulted, and the case may be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.[bold added]

A California 7-year-old was banned from drawing pictures at school and forced to sit out recess for two weeks for adding “any life” below Black Lives Matter on a picture she drew and gave to a Black friend, punishments that led to a federal lawsuit.

At the core of the case, which could see its way to the Supreme Court, is a simple question: Do first graders have First Amendment rights? ...

What happened at Viejo Elementary School three years ago is undisputed. The student, identified as B.B., drew the picture, which also included four colored-in ovals representing herself and three friends, after a lesson on Martin Luther King, Jr., and gave it to her friend, M.C., who took it home, where her mother saw it.

The mother emailed the school, saying she wouldn’t “tolerate any more messages given to M.C. at school because of her skin color” and that she ‘trust(ed)’ the school would address the issue,” according to court records.

The principal confronted B.B. and told her the drawing was “inappropriate” and “racist” and that she couldn’t draw at school anymore and had to apologize to her friend. When she returned to class, her teachers told her she was not allowed to play at recess for two weeks.

A year after the incident, B.B.’s mother learned of her punishments and later sued the school district and administrators, claiming her daughter’s First Amendment rights were violated. She lost in the district court.

[Defense attorney Caleb] Trotter said he believes the judge erred in the fact that the drawing was not disruptive and then relied on a New York Times article, which was not part of the case record, to deem the “any life” part of the drawing as offensive, associating it with the “all lives matter” controversy.

“Testimony in this case clearly shows neither student knew any of what this meant,” Trotter said. “The school created this situation by introducing these adult topics.”

The legal issue at hand is whether then-7-year-old "B.B." has any free-speech rights, and the District Court ruled against her (really, her parents, who had sued the school district for suspending her). But the school district, IMHO, should never have introduced the Black Lives matter/All Lives matter dispute into a second-grade class, then punished a student for her misunderstanding of the subtleties.

According to the people who are eager to find offensiveness under every rock, "any life" is an allusion to "all lives matter", which reveals the racism of the writer or speaker. For the school district to a) buy into this interpretation and b) punish the 7-year-old for her bad thinking is a gross overstep of in loco parentis. For your humble blogger the removal of identity-politics ideology from public education, especially elementary schools, can't come too soon.

Its Demise is not in Question

In an expected development, the Governor and Legislature closed the upcoming year's California budget deficit by agreeing to a $297.9 billion spending plan.

(Image from the Economist)

In parallel news the slavery reparations bill ("Fund for Reparations and Reparative Justice"), estimated to cost $800 billion, was approved by the Judiciary Committee and moves to the State Assembly for consideration.

When I have an instinctive negative reaction to policies--in this case to pay big penalties for actions that neither I nor my ancestors had anything to do with--I like to turn to guidance from spiritual leaders to gauge whether I'm off base. This article (What the Bible Says About Reparations for Slavery) is helpful: [bold added]

Any examination of the question must begin with the notion of time and its relation to evil acts. The Bible, in Exodus 34:7 and elsewhere, tells us that God will “visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”

These passages acknowledge that bad acts frequently have consequences that ripple beyond the temporal space of the perpetrator and can create a sphere of responsibility that far exceeds the individual actor. Importantly, the text also indicates that the ripples dissipate after three or four generations. The adverse consequences of nefarious acts don’t continue indefinitely—and, similarly, the desire for vengeance and the right to compensation for such acts can’t endure forever.

Why only three or four generations? This limitation is tied to the duration of emotional memory, including the transmitted personal sense of suffering and injustice. Most people have a vivid awareness of and emotional ties to parents and grandparents—perhaps even to a great-grandparent. Yet no such bonds can plausibly exist beyond that. The Bible is thus establishing a statute of limitations that is tied to the strength of personal memory and, therefore, to a limitation on the personalized rectification of historic wrongs.

Our legal system echoes this biblical teaching. Civil and criminal statutes of limitation generally bring to an end the pursuit of perpetrators for acts that are too distant in time to warrant subjection to judicial processes. Implicitly they also recognize that witnesses, tangible evidence, and raw emotions engendered by wrongful acts have disappeared—no matter how heinous the offenses.

While American slavery remains a powerful and tragic historical event, there are no individuals alive today who have direct personal links to it or even to those who suffered directly as a consequence of it. For all its evil and injustice, slavery is no longer a personal reality in the U.S. It is still a wrong to be righted, but in a collective manner, through national efforts—civil-rights legislation, improvements in education, public services, quality-of-life enhancements for the descendants of slaves, and the like. To its credit, our nation has vigorously pursued such efforts for decades.

The notion that direct compensation should be paid to sixth-, seventh- or eighth-generation descendants of slavery’s victims by similarly distant descendants of those who may have been complicit with slavery is simply unjust. The original actors, perpetrators and victims, are too far removed in time to merit punishment or retribution.

It is appropriate to punish a perpetrator or exact restitution from an individual who may have benefited directly from the acts of the perpetrator. Yet more than 1½ centuries’ distance makes such punishment for slavery incompatible with justice. Similarly, individuals separated by many generations from a vile act suffered by distant ancestors can’t have a justiciable claim for suffering they didn’t endure directly or indirectly.

The above interpretation of Biblical justice doesn't relieve me of my moral responsibility to help the poor and downtrodden. However, it's quite different to use the State's taxing authority to take from Peter to pay Paul --by force, if necessary--when both Peter and Paul and no one they know have any first-hand experience with the injustices perpetrated.

However, there is no point in getting too worked up about reparations. There is zero probability that California can come up with $800 billion, so it's just the timing and manner of reparations' demise that's in question.

O.J.'s Legacy

The 1994 Bronco "chase" (spectrum)

Every newspaper (yes, I still read at least three of them every day) has carried obituaries of O.J. Simpson, who died this Wednesday from cancer at the age of 76. His outstanding career in college and professional football and his subsequent work in film, TV, and advertising alone merited pages, but the big story was his 1994-1995 trial for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan captures that unique, "crazy" period in history:

Our crazy country. The O.J. Simpson case was the beginning of knowing we were crazy and admitting it. It was 30 years ago this June, the murder followed by the Bronco chase, and I find myself wanting to tell those who weren’t there what a sensation it was, what an amazement.

Everyone over 40 this weekend will be saying, “I’ll never forget when I heard the verdict,” and, “Did you watch the Bronco?” The case burned itself into our retinas; everyone in the country was in the path of totality.

As much as anything and more than most, the story was the beginning of the modern media age. It was the beginning of hypercelebrity and marked by the emotionalism of crowds. Crowds ran to California freeway overpasses on June 17, 1994, to see the Ford Bronco containing Simpson roll by, surrounded by police cruisers. They cheered and pumped their arms. They didn’t see it as a tragedy, the story of the beautiful young woman and mother, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her 25-year-old friend, Ron Goldman, who had been brutally stabbed to death. They saw an exciting drama unfolding before their eyes, like Al Capone shooting his way out of a bank heist surrounded by cops. Simpson was a guy everyone liked. So they cheered. And people watching thought: Whoa, what are we seeing, what is this?

Some new kind of fame was being presaged. A close friend of O.J.’s, Los Angeles lawyer and businessman Robert Kardashian, an apparently quiet fellow no one had heard of, was thrust into the case from the beginning. At a news conference he read a public letter from O.J., just before he turned himself in. The letter said he had nothing to do with Nicole’s murder. “I loved her. . . . If we had a problem, it’s because I loved her so much.” It was classic abusive-husband patter.

Kardashian, like other O.J. attorneys, would become famous, and the fame would be a lesson to many. After fame comes wealth and power and everyone gives you a good table. It is probably true that none of this was lost on his former wife, Kris, who had been one of Nicole Simpson’s best friends, or on his children, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob. Their show, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” debuted in 2007. They were the first reality-TV family, famous for being famous. They are billionaires now.

“It marked the end of cozy, afternoon soap opera entertainment and ushered in a tabloid culture of Kardashians, Jenners, and lesser beings,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said by email. “Also, it made, for a time, Dominick Dunne the most recognized print reporter in the world.” Dunne’s colorful and breathless reports each month in Vanity Fair covered the case like a blanket—who snubbed whom in the courtroom, who said what at Brentwood’s glittering dinner tables...

If the signal moment was the Bronco chase, it was the court case that would have lasting significance. It was a prime example of how our legal system got bogged down in distractions, inanities, and poor police and legal work. It dragged on nine months. The judge, Lance Ito, also became a celebrity, and apparently liked it. He kept three open computers on his bench. No one had ever seen that before. Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” had a regular sketch, the “Dancing Itos.” There were endless, meandering objections. The prosecutor, Marcia Clark, had to get her hair and makeup done, and a new wardrobe.

And the cast of characters! Kato Kaelin, the house guest who never left. Mark Fuhrman, the police detective who seemed solid on evidence and then was torn apart for having once used racial epithets and was accused of planting evidence.

And the phrases that bubbled up from the courtroom and entered the national consciousness: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

And, of course, the terrible and historic moment when the jury announced its verdict.

The trial felt like it had gone forever but the verdict came in within a day. No one in America did a bit of work from the moment it was announced that the jury had a verdict. Everyone ran to a TV set. From Robert D. McFadden’s O.J. obit in the New York Times: “Even President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office to join his secretaries. In court, cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Oh, no!’ were echoed across the nation as the verdict left many Black people jubilant and many white people aghast.” Exactly true.

A friend wrote Thursday afternoon: “Trial as spectacle has been with us for a long time (think Lizzie Borden), and so have juries doing unusual things. But this seemed to take it to a new level. If memory serves, the volume of the New York Stock Exchange went down to basically nothing for a few minutes as the verdict was announced. That’s real.”

Reaction famously fell almost completely along racial lines. It was one of those 20th-century moments when you realized race is here to stay as an unending factor, an unyielding actor in American life. White and black saw two different realities. Whites: All the evidence points to his guilt, he’s one of the most admired men in America, race isn’t the story here.

Blacks: This is what you do to black men, you railroad them on cooked-up evidence, there’s plenty of room for doubt.

It showed in some new and unforgettable way the divided country. The verdict itself didn’t divide the country; it revealed it, again and not for the last time, as divided. Reaction was called shocking, revelatory. But what it was, was simpler. It was painful. It left you with a tight and mournful feeling in your throat.

Before O.J., American blacks lacked confidence in the legal system. After O.J., everyone lacked confidence in the legal system. It looked cynical, performative, agenda-driven, not on the level.

I would say he got away with murder because I believe he was guilty. But in a way he didn’t get away with it; it stalked him the rest of his life. And that is tragedy, too, because he’d been such a hero, a winner of the Heisman Trophy, a football star, a man of great accomplishment whom everyone admired.

That’s all.

The O.J. case revealed so much and started a new age. Within a few years the internet would become ubiquitous, and at that point the new age would become more so.

I remember going to lunch at a popular bar-restaurant in San Francisco. Instead of the TV being tuned to sports, it showed a slow-moving Ford Bronco being trailed by police cars on an LA freeway. I couldn't hear the sound and had no idea what the fuss was about.

Over the next year, one could not avoid the O.J. Simpson story; it was on all the network news. In their thirst for material reporters unearthed every scrap of information about every character in the drama: the defense team, the prosecution, law enforcement, and witnesses. Many cashed in on their new found fame.

The O.J. Simpson trial showed how much society had regressed in the late 20th century. Tribalism had taken hold; it didn't matter what you did, what group you belonged to determined whether you deserved punishment, facts and evidence be damned. It was okay to exploit the tragedy of a double murder if it meant a lucrative book deal.

The genie was out of the bottle, and there would be no turning back.

An Amusing Interchange

A radio host interviews an NBA head coach about a young player.

Coach: He's more athletic than people give him credit for.

Radio host: You mean he's white.

Coach: I was waiting for you to say it.

Everyone tiptoes around race, even when they're speaking about white guys.

Chino and the Man

San Francisco restauranteur Chino Yang made a rap video decrying rampant burglaries, violence against Asians, and the failure of City leadership. (His Kung Food restaurant has been broken into multiple times.) It would probably only have reached a limited audience until the Chronicle reported that an "extremely powerful" person threatened him. [bold added]

Chino Yang, the rapper and restaurateur whose business was repeatedly burglarized, also stressed in a social media post on Tuesday that he was apologizing to [Mayor London] Breed only after he received threats from an unnamed “extremely powerful” person who he said “has the connection to presidents, senators, all the top elites.”

The Chronicle was unable to reach Yang for comment on Wednesday, but former Mayor Willie Brown and the Rev. Amos Brown, two close allies of Breed, were expected to hold a news conference with other community leaders Thursday touting Yang’s apology and urging him to remove his video.

I can see why the video could damage the Mayor's re-election campaign. Not only does Chino Yang blame London Breed for the City's problems he points out the apparent double-standard between the way blacks and Asians are treated:

You know I'm 100% down with the Black Lives Matter
But what about our grandmother and what about our grandfather
They're getting attacked, they're getting robbed
They're getting killed,
And the DA just drop another murder charge
I'm sick and tired of dealing with the phonyass liberals
They acted like they care but never treated us as their equal
My people have been here for over 200 years
So save your fake sympathy and your crocodile tears

In the video there are images of black-on-Asian violence and blacks committing property crimes, and it's implied (but not stated explicitly) that the criminals are getting off because of their race. Note: the mayor, the district attorney, and the police chief are black.

Asians comprise a third of the City's population, and the video could well peel of some of their support from the leadership. Yes, I can see why a powerful friend of the Mayor would want to censor it.

Talking about Elon's Talking, Again

On Wednesday afternoon I flipped to CNBC to watch Fast Money and Mad Money, the shows that recap the stock market activity for the day. Instead of the expected fare there was Elon Musk being interviewed by Andrew Sorkin, a reporter for NBC/CNBC/MSNBC. I could not look away.



The most widely remarked-upon section of the 93-minute interview occurred when Elon Musk told advertisers who pulled their ads from X (formerly Twitter) to "go f--- yourself," uncensored on live TV.

The expletive was Elon's reaction to alleged anti-Semitism on a Musk tweet and the alleged placement of corporate advertisements next to pro-Nazi statements on X. He is suing those who made those (fraudulent, he says) accusations and heaping opprobrium on advertisers who believe them. I don't want to get into the merits of the claims themselves except to say that, for the moment, I give Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt that neither he nor X are anti-Semitic.

Speaking of the F-word, some of my former business associates said to me decades ago that their goal in life was to amass "F-you" money, that is, a nest egg sufficient enough not to fear telling off an employer before walking out the door. As we noted four months ago, Elon Musk's total investment in X represents 10-15% of his net worth. Losing that amount will hurt him, but not enough to silence him. When we're talking about F-you money, that's what we're talking about.

Don't Hold Them Back Became Let's Give Them an Advantage

Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) received
the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The 2016 film Hidden Figures was based on the true story of African-American women mathematicians who were crucial to the success of NASA's early missions. They had to overcome extreme race and sex discrimination, accompanied by condescending attitudes, to be taken seriously.

By the end of the movie their skill and reputation became so widely known at NASA that John Glenn insisted that the numbers be checked manually by Katherine Johnson, one of the "hidden figures," before his historic flight. She also performs emergency calculations to bring John Glenn home when one of his capsule's heat shields broke loose.

It's a popular theme in fiction and real life: the talents of a person who is discriminated against are so outstanding that the powers-that-be must call on the person to solve an important problem. Anti-discrimination narratives appeal to both the heart and the head: the former because the victims are treated unfairly and the latter because society's potential is unrealized by holding back skilled people.

60 years later the pendulum has shifted too far in the other direction. Anti-discrimination has given way to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas. DEI is especially damaging in the technological contest with China: [bold added]

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported this year that China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, including advanced aircraft engines, electric batteries, machine learning and synthetic biology. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Dan Wang, an expert on China’s technology landscape, wrote that “China now rivals Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in its mastery of the electronics supply chain.” In 2007, the Chinese added less than 4% of the value-added costs of iPhones made in that country. Now it’s more than 25%...

Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken.

Where it once was taken for granted that expanding knowledge was more important than a scientist’s sex or skin color, anyone adhering to that approach in the U.S. now must fend off charges that it is racist, patriarchal, colonial, or a tool of oppression. As a group of 29 scientists and academics contended in a recent paper for the Journal of Controversial Ideas, scientific progress in the West “is being hindered by a new, alarming clash between liberal epistemology and identity-based ideologies.”...

The U.S. will only find it harder to compete with China if activists and administrators are allowed to bully scientists into caring more about artificial diversity goals than about their work. To quote the 29 authors who stood up for merit, “for science to succeed, it must strive for the non-ideological pursuit of objective truth.”

In the liberal arts and social sciences, the DEI crowd can advocate for individual revealed truths and personal lived experiences. By contrast, those who work in STEM fields believe that there are objective truths, and the goal of science is to discover these truths. I am 100% sure that the mathematicians who worked for NASA would agree.

Chronicle: Affirmative Action in Crime Reporting

Noe Valley and Alamo Square are 2 mi apart.

Muggings don't normally make news, but an outbreak that targets a particular group of victims in a formerly low-crime area of San Francisco does merit the front page: [bold added]

Multiple women walking in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood reported being violently robbed of their smartphones last week, a series of frightening encounters echoing another recent string of similar attacks in Noe Valley.

Three women who spoke to The Chronicle about their encounters described being physically attacked while walking alone near Alamo Square on different nights last week. In each case, thieves forcibly took their cell phones before disappearing in a waiting getaway car, the women said.

At least three assaults and robberies took place during evening hours in the Lower Haight beginning on June 26, the same day similar incidents unfolded during daylight in Noe Valley.

It was unclear if the attacks were carried out by the same group of teenagers that police believe assaulted and robbed at least 11 women in neighborhoods throughout the city last week, including in Noe Valley. Police arrested one juvenile in connection to the Noe Valley attacks but continue to search for up to four others...

Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Catherine Stefani have asked for increased police patrols to counter the assaults in which young thieves appear to be targeting women walking alone with smartphones.

The Painted Ladies on a normal day (Times of India)

Alamo Square is famed for the "Painted Ladies" Victorians on Steiner Street. (Zillow currently values them from $2 million to $5 million.) It's a nice neighborhood with children playing in the park, one of the few areas that resembles "normal" American suburban life. Bad publicity like this ensures that the police will likely catch the culprits soon.

Comments:
1) One victim, Victoria, hesitated to talk about her violent mugging not only because of her fear of retribution by the gang but because

she was hesitant to share her experience, she said, because she does not “want to fuel the narrative that San Francisco is a crime-ridden hellscape,” noting that she had previously felt safe walking alone in the city.

She sounds like one of San Francisco's residents who is worried that her experience would be used to bash San Francisco's political leadership. She's probably right, and good on her to want to sweep her experience under the rug to not damage Progressive policies even more.

2) The police know a lot about the suspects. They're teenagers who operate in a group and drive stolen getaway cars. The police know where they operate, who they target, and what goods they want to steal. But the Chronicle is strangely silent when it comes to further information. (Hint: if the suspects were white males, the Chronicle in other stories would disclose that fact in the first paragraph.)

Democracy dies in darkness, indeed.

Aloha to Affirmative Action

Pre-1995 California's explicit consideration of race would
have admitted a non-white, poor applicant but rejected a
white non-poor applicant of similar achievements. (WSJ video)

Gallons of ink have been spilled (sorry, dear reader, I can't come up with a post-newspaper-age metaphor) over the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action earlier today.

In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard Ccllege

The Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions, eliminating the principal tool the nation’s most selective schools have used to diversify their campuses.

Thursday’s 6-3 decision will force a reworking of admissions criteria throughout American higher education, where for decades the pursuit of diversity has been an article of faith.

A few personal comments:

1) Growing up in melting-pot Hawaii, I hadn't heard the term "affirmative action" until I came to the Mainland.

2) I'm so old that Asian-Americans were viewed as an "underprivileged minority" when I went to college in the 1970's. I could be the beneficiary of affirmative-action policies that began in the late 1960's. (In my defense both my grades and board scores were at least as high as my white roommates'.)

3) I always wondered whether the existence of affirmative action tainted the credibility of Asians' or any other minority individuals' accomplishments. I was happy that Asian-Americans stopped being the beneficiaries of affirmative action, if they ever were, and were evaluated on their own merits by the late 1980's in the Bay Area.

4) I am all in favor of giving special consideration to students who grew up in difficult economic, family, and social environments. And one would have to be blind not to see that black and Hispanic students fall disproportionately into that category. Helping everyone in those circumstances regardless of race, IMHO, is the right policy.

Juneteenth 2023

From the papers of Harlem poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Beinecke Library:

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

Now that Juneteenth is a Federal holiday, let's all of us just celebrate it and forget about the political calculations behind it.

Diversity in Appearance But Not in Thought

Tabia Lee (Chron photo)

The director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at De Anza College in Cupertino has been fired. Tabia Lee, a Black woman, had served less than two years on the job. [bold added]

Tabia Lee received a letter in March saying her contract would not be renewed in June because she was uncooperative with colleagues, unwilling to accept constructive criticism and unlikely to change. Lee is a vocal critic of many of today’s diversity and inclusion practices, and many colleagues at the school said she belittled their racial justice initiatives...

Lee said she will fight to keep her job as faculty director of De Anza’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education, which she has carried out remotely since the fall of 2021. Her job description at the public community college of 16,000 students is to promote a “commitment to equity, social justice and multicultural education” and create an “inclusive campus environment” within an “institution-wide transformation.”

Critics said Lee sought to transform the college in the wrong direction. Groups representing Latino and Asian Pacific American employees urged the district’s Board of Trustees to remove her, contending that she subverted anti-racism initiatives by opposing everything from their efforts to gain more say in campus governance to their use of the gender-neutral term “Latinx.” In a letter to the college, Lee cited research suggesting the word has little support among Latinos themselves.

Debates on its merits can fill volumes, but my own take is that the vast majority of community college students have little use for DEI. They come to De Anza, Foothill, and the College of San Mateo to learn practical skills that they can use on the job today.

Racism and social justice may be important to some people, but those are distractions for students who are trying to learn computer programming or accounting or chemistry. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both of whom went to De Anza College, seem to have done just fine without DEI.

Small Town Mess

Kylie Clark (LinkedIn photo)

Two months ago we noted how the Los Gatos City Council censured planning commissioner Kylie Clark for writing to the State that "rich, white, anti-housing men” controlled housing policy in Los Gatos. The ACLU threatened to sue the town for violating Ms. Clark's free-speech rights, and the City Council removed the censure.

Los Gatos caved to the ACLU because its planning commissioner purportedly was speaking as a private citizen.

[Los Gatos Town Attorney Gabrielle] Whelan said the lawsuit would potentially have cost the town upwards of $400,000.

Since Clark identified herself as a planning commissioner in her email to the state but said she was speaking as a private citizen, she is protected from being disciplined by current case law, the ACLU argued.

To this non-attorney it seems disingenuous to claim that she was speaking as a private citizen on a subject (housing) that fell under her purview as a planning commissioner. Where does this stop? Whenever a politician makes a controversial statement, he or she could walk it back by claiming it was a personal opinion as a private citizen.

But there are further complexities. In real life Ms. Clark has a conflict of interest.

Councilmember Matthew Hudes voiced concerns about Clark’s role as assistant manager of advocacy and public policy at West Valley Community Services (WVCS) overlapping with her role on the planning commission. WVCS provides food, housing and support services to low-income and homeless people in South Bay communities including Los Gatos.

Paid advocacy for a social service organization would seem to color (in a manner of speaking) Ms. Clark's opinion.

But here's the best part:

Clark is in a relationship with Councilmember Rob Moore, who chairs the policy committee, and Hudes said it’s not appropriate for Moore to provide feedback.

Los Gatos, home to Netflix, is very wealthy, but it's still a small town of 33,000, and this is a small-town mess of its own making. Whether Los Gatos continues to chew on this problem or not should not make a difference to the rest of the Bay Area.

It Started with Racism, but Ending it Would be Racism

Cardi B (CBC photo)

The bottom story of last year: the decade-long cultural obsession with big butts was ending.

Since admiration of large backsides had racist origins, ending this trend should have been a good thing, but alas, dear reader, you are wrong:

After almost a decade of our cultural obsession with twerking, peach emojis and Brazilian butt lifts, 2022 apparently marked the end of the era of the big booty.

On TikTok, users speculated that Kim Kardashian had her butt implants removed (a procedure she never confirmed having in the first place). Cardi B recently shared that she had her own implants removed and cautioned others against getting butt injections. And the New York Post ran a headline that said "Bye-bye booty" and declared that heroin chic was back.

Some critics swiftly shot back, saying that women's bodies should not be reduced to trends. They also pointed out the inherent racism in declaring that a particular physical attribute that many women of colour have naturally is no longer desirable.

If men say that they like a certain physical attribute of women, they're being sexist or racist or both. If they say they don't like it, they're still being sexist and racist.

Guys, keep your traps shut. This advice is no guarantee you'll stay out of trouble, but it will help.

Language Pushback

We're accustomed to hearing accusations of racism, class-ism, and sexism thrown about in any discussion of housing; what's unusual is that this time there was pushback:

Kylie Clark (LinkedIn photo)

Los Gatos Town Council censured a planning commissioner for using “divisive language” in a letter to the state, in which she said “rich, white, anti-housing men” organized the referendum on the town’s plan for future growth.

Council voted unanimously Feb. 15 to censure Commissioner Kylie Clark, an action that serves as a formal disapproval of her comments.

The City of Los Gatos is 72% white, and the median house value is $1.8 million, so Ms. Clark may well be factually correct that leaders of the housing referendum were rich, white men.

But by describing them as such to the exclusion of other attributes, she is strongly implying that their decision-making is due to their race, class, and sex and not to other factors, for example, environmental considerations, traffic, and infrastructure.

If she had evidence to support her claim, she should have presented it. In its absence, the Town Council was right to call her on it.

MLK Day, 2023

Note: August 28, 2023 will be the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

After re-reading my previous posts on Martin Luther King Day, the great man seems more relevant than ever to this boomer blogger. Unfortunately, his doctrine of non-violent civil disobedience seems increasingly quaint. Today speakers will honor him, all the while willfully ignoring what he called them to do. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

From 2010:

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American original whose stature has only grown since his assassination in 1968. His I Have a Dream speech and Letter from Birmingham Jail are masterpieces of the rhetorical art, replete with religious themes, historical references, and poetic flourishes. Dr. King pushed, pulled, and forced a preoccupied postwar superpower to confront the difference between its glossy self-image and ugly racist reality.

He did this by conveying a vision of an America that was full of hope and was consistent with its founding ideals. He delivered that vision in soaring preacherly cadences that called, if not compelled, his audiences to act. On the holiday of his remembrance Dr. King's wisdom has not dulled with time's passage:

On non-violence:

In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

On the difference between just and unjust laws:

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

On civil disobedience:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

How to effect peaceful change:

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.

Dr. King asked his followers to “purify” themselves, that is, lead blameless lives in accordance with the very principles that they would demand others follow. Walking the talk remains as difficult as it is noble, and it is as relevant to leadership today as it was 60--and 2,000--years ago. © 2023 Stephen Yuen

Terms of the Conversation

Ann Hsu (Chron photo)

Ann Hsu, who was appointed to replace one of the three San Francisco school board members recalled in February, is herself being asked to resign for saying [bold added]

one of the biggest challenges in educating Black and brown students was their “unstable family environments” and “lack of parental encouragement to focus on learning.”

She is accused of making "racist" statements, which fits the definition of racism if she is generalizing individual attributes ("unstable family environments") to every member of a racial group. IMHO, this is no different from saying that blacks are disproportionately poorer than whites, therefore all whites discriminate against all blacks or therefore society should make reparations to all blacks.

Your humble blogger much prefers that society judge, reward, and if necessary punish people based on their individual circumstances.

(Chart from U.S. Census)

However, if the rules of conversation about race mean that we have to look at group properties, then Ann Hsu has plenty of evidence to support her statement. For example the 2020 U.S. Census showed that the overwhelming majority of white (76%) and Asian (87%) children lived in two-parent households, which are only a minority of black households (38%).

The National Center for Education Statistics, a government agency, produced similar numbers in 2016:

In 2016, the percentage of children living with married parents was highest for Asian children (84 percent), followed by White children (73 percent); children of Two of more races, Pacific Islander children, and Hispanic children (57 percent each); and American Indian/Alaska Native children (45 percent). The percentage was lowest for Black children (33 percent).

Because of the high correlation between family stability and educational achievement, it's not a great leap to claim that one is a major cause of the other. (If other factors are key, then propose, quantify, and test them.) Of course, coming from a two-parent household does not guarantee high achievement, while many kids who are raised by a single parent are enormously successful; these statistics mean little when it comes to predicting the outcome for a specific child.

But if people insist on talking about group outcomes--and by implication doling out benefits purely due to membership in a group--then group characteristics, including behavioral tendencies, are fair game.

Ann Hsu should not retract her statement, unless all parties agree to stop making generalizations about race.

It's Everywhere

50 years ago I became friends with a group of evangelical Christians. They were nice people, law-abiding, hard-working, but they had one bee in their bonnet that I had difficulty accepting: they saw the devil in everything.

Thank goodness we're more enlightened today. We now know that systemic racism, not fictional Satan, is everywhere. For example, take a simple package of tea.

White tea, without evidence, is declared to be "more beneficial" than green tea. And note that black tea hasn't even entered the discussion.

On the front of the package "white" has the larger font.

White dominance is easy to see once you look for it.