Like everyone else who went to college, I took Economics 101 and read Adam Smith. I guess I got the wrong idea about the meaning of the “free market”—at least that is what I am learning from the current attempt to bring Nvidia to the Sobrato building in downtown San Jose. Apparently, it means the cost of operating these profitable businesses is passed on to the taxpayers.

I decided the day after the primary votes were counted who I would vote for for mayor in November, and it wasn’t either one of the candidates whose name is printed on the ballot. Nothing since that day has made me change my mind about voting for “none of the above.” In fact, this week’s revelations about both candidates (Reed’s expense scam and Chavez’s letter) and their individual responses to related criticism only strengthen my resolve.

The denizens of San Jose are already known to be among the wealthiest, on average, in the nation. Now, an article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly identifies us as the most highly educated large city in the country, based on the number of college graduates per capita. This is very good news for all of us. I would expect that such statistics would translate into a population that is the most supportive of arts and culture in America, financially and intellectually. However, I am not so sure when I look at the continuing problems of the Rep Theater.

The way the major corporations have been acting the past few years, you would think that they believe themselves to be above the Constitution. Right here in Silicon Valley, the latest corporate scandal—where members of the HP board and Chairwoman Patricia Dunn have apparently been caught red-handed spying on their employees and on journalists—adds a nice new euphemism, “pretexting,” for a couple of common crimes, endemic in American corporate culture, to the list of white-collar conspiratorial activities. Dunn excuses her decision to order the spying by saying she did not know that pretexting (an Orwellian construct if there ever was one) meant any laws would be broken when she hired a firm of investigators to obtain the personal information of the company’s targets. That’s hilarious, given that the defined action of pretexting combines the crimes of fraud and identity theft in a very creative manner. Call it what you want, it’s still a felony and Dunn and anyone else involved should be accorded the prescribed punishment under the law if they are found guilty. As we all know from high school civics, “ignorance of the law is no excuse.”

When I was a kid growing up in the mountains of southern California in the 1960s, one of the most magnificent sights, then common, was to see a full-grown California condor soaring overhead. My father, a professional pilot, and I used to fly alongside the giant birds at 8,000 feet where they would soar in thermals for hours without flapping their wings once. We wondered how they learned to do that. Then, all of a sudden, the condors disappeared—victims of the huge influx of humans greedy for space and resources. It happened so fast. Now, forty years later, these amazing birds are making a very slow return and our state is all the better for it. The unfortunate thing is that the condor’s long-term trip to the nearly-extinct species list didn’t have to happen.

If the above title sounds like one of Juan Miro’s paintings, you get my drift. Surrealism became tangible in San Jose this week with multiple manifestations. At least the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors came to their senses and stopped the concert hall project for the fairgrounds. I guess they finally realized that Kevin Costner’s “if you build it, they will come” rationale to spend himself into bankruptcy in the movie wasn’t a good idea in (sur)real life. The intentions may have been good, but the pie-in-the-sky entertainment-center vision and financial plan were fatally flawed. The unfortunate results, had the concert venue gone ahead per the county’s plans, would have made the problems at the Rep Theater seem like a piece of cake by comparison.

I don’t know about you, but I find the assaults by bands of petition signature-gatherers at the front door of Trader Joe’s or Safeway to be extremely intimidating. Now, I won’t sign any petition until I have read the text of the proposed initiative and have decided to support whatever it is, which means that I don’t sign petitions most of the time. However, refuse one petition, and the signature gatherer will whip out a different petition, and another and another. Often, these people are very aggressive, and I have observed scores of shoppers signing these documents without as much as a thought or question.

Anyone who is a regular reader of Leonard McKay’s columns knows something of our once-idyllic valley before it was paved over and covered with seemingly endless, sprawling housing developments and strip malls. Residents of Santa Clara County have seen the population nearly double to two million since 1970 with no end in sight. With profits to be made, the county is in real danger of losing its remaining open spaces to greedy developers who care nothing about the quality of life of those of us who live here. The Santa Clara County Land Conservation Initiative on the November ballot aims to insure that an adequate amount of our open space remains that way for future generations.

One of the greatest and most memorable pleasures of my youth was learning to swim and dive and spending each summer immersed in the local public pool in my small southern California hometown where the temperature often exceeded 90 degrees. This is probably a very common memory of baby-boomers who grew up in our state. For me, this love of swimming has followed me through life into near-decrepitude and I can’t imagine my life without it. Unfortunately, the youth of our city do not currently have the same opportunity.

With the drone of last week’s grand prix still ringing in my ears (a deafening sound like millions of giant bees on the warpath) I am looking forward to the coming month’s events in downtown San Jose that are of an altogether more low-key variety. Whereas the grand prix may make the biggest noise possible (even drowning out the departing jets from SJC) and attract a lot of commercial hoopla and out-of-towners, it is enduring events like Cinequest and the San Jose Jazz Festival that are really important to the local community and region.

I lost my father a few months ago. As I sat with him and watched him gently drift off to wherever it is souls go, it struck me that time is the great leveler of all things human. Each of us has only so much of it and that’s it; you can’t buy more even if you are Bill Gates and have all the money in the world. But it was what my father didn’t say in his last hours that really taught me something valuable. He didn’t wish he had spent more time at the office, talking on a cell phone or worrying if Osama or George W. would blow up the world.

The panel discussion after the showing of “The Search for the Captain” on Channel 54 Monday night did little to illuminate the matters of public interest directly presented or implied by the film. The panel members tiptoed around the political and selection-process issues related to the Fallon statue rather than confront them, and almost completely ignored the more important wider issues of public art in general. Everyone on the panel, as far as it went, was articulate and intelligent, but rationalizations for some attitudes taken seemed weak, based on faulty logic, or just plain wrongheaded.

One person’s work of art is another’s piece of junk. If you mix politics and public money with this “law” of subjective aesthetics in the production of a commemorative statue, the results can be explosive. The most visible case locally is certainly the controversy over the Fallon statue that was commissioned in 1987 but not put on display until recently. An excellent film on the years-long controversy, “The Search for the Captain,” which focuses on this very issue, will be shown on KTEH Channel 54 on Monday night, July 17, at 9 p.m., followed by a panel discussion at 10 p.m.

The Norcal Scandal’s namesake, the waste disposal company at the center of the controversy, has largely been left out of the discussion lately while the mayor’s part in the deal has taken center stage. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Norcal will have to answer the very serious charges made by the grand jury in court in due course, unless their past history with a similar incident guides us to a different conclusion.

It is clear from yesterday’s special meeting that the only thing the city council can do to the mayor in the wake of his indictment is whack him with a wet noodle, take away his gas allowance, and allow him only bread and water. There is no provision or process in the Charter to remove the mayor from office, and the council apparently cannot now pass an ordinance addressing impeachment and apply it retroactively without violating the mayor’s civil rights. What is also clear is that, if there was such an impeachment procedure in place, the council would now invoke it in light of the mayor’s refusal to resign, and he would be history.

When you come right down to it, $2.6 billion is a lot of money no matter how you cut it (except in Bush’s illegal Iraq war where it would last a mere 10 days). That’s the amount of the new fiscal year’s budget approved by the city council on Tuesday, not without disagreement from some members. LeZotte and Reed voted against accepting the mayor’s budget message, LeZotte and Cortese voted against the overall budget, and LeZotte, Reed and Cortese voted against extending the telephone line charges to fund 911 responders.