San Jose Inside

After a recent trip to Chicago, San Jose City Councilmember Pierluigi Oliverio warmly posed this question at the end of a blog entry: “What cities have you visited that you feel San Jose could learn from and/or adopt best practices from?”

Well, I’ll begin my answer to that question with, “San Francisco,” and mention an upcoming soirée that author and pal Erik Davis is hosting on Nov. 1 at Artists Television Access (ATA) in the Mission District. Davis will lecture and present an evening of obscure films exploring the influence of philosopher, poet and mountain climber Aleister Crowley on 20th/21st-century subcultures, including the music of Led Zeppelin.

Food for Thought

Your proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood—
Whatever it is, I’m against it!

With the approach of every election with state propositions to consider, I start hearing Groucho Marx singing “Whatever it is, I’m Against It” from Horsefeathers in my head. That’s exactly how I feel when I look through the 12 propositions on this year’s ballot. Why are we even being asked to consider most of them?

There’s something profoundly wrong with an economic system that sells homes cheaply then takes them away from young families; that encourages wasteful energy consumption while fuel prices double and ExxonMobil serially breaks corporate profit records ($12bn last quarter). And there’s something immoral about a political order that allows its leaders to invade countries on pretext then fails to hold them accountable; that end-runs international and constitutional principles on torture and incarcerating the innocent while endeavoring to globally spread its values.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to local politics ... Little Saigon is back. After months of relative quiet on the Story Road front, the Vietnamese activists behind the push for the designation have returned with a double whammy.

Well although tonight is the last Presidential debate,  I won’t pay much attention. This one is over except for the huffing and puffing of the talking heads,  the excuses of the consultants, and the dearly needed change in this country. Even Tina Fey has had enough, vowing to go to outer space if Palin wins. 

But there is one Presidential event worthy of comment that occurred 96 years ago yesterday: Teddy Roosevelt was shot.

As we trudge through October, reading about the Great Depression and the Dow, layoffs and 401Ks, we also listen to the Presidential candidates promise that their way will be the way out of the slump we are in.  So who are we to believe? McCain makes promises and slams George W. and his own party for many decisions they have made. Is he part of the problem and now washing his hands of it now that it’s convenient and opportunistic for him? What can John McCain do to get us out of our slump? In the same vein, Obama has no problem pointing out the mistakes of a Republican President and how things would be different with a Democratic President such as himself in the White House.  But can Obama really make changes that will last and get us out of Great Depression, the Sequel?

There’s an organization called CEOs For Cities that has weighed in heavily on the question of how American cities should address their futures.  According to Carol Coletta, the organization’s president, “Many of our communities are built on outdated assumptions.”

“We thought gas would always be cheap and plentiful, we could always grow our way out of congestion and new sources of labor would always be plentiful.  We assumed Americans were willing to abandon a public life, content to live privately in their ever-expanding suburban homes.”

While the economic morass commands the headlines, there is a bright spot in San Jose. Specifically, south San Jose, in Edenvale.

Much of this manufacturing has gone overseas for lower labor and material costs. However, due to the increase in the price of oil, the shipping and logistics costs have made it more sensible to build here vs. China for some companies. Plus, their customers do not have to travel around the globe to visit their outsourced manufacturing facilities—and especially for medical devices, the USA still has better quality.

Ever have one of those days when you can’t get an old tune out of your mind? All day yesterday I kept hearing the Steely Dan song “Black Friday.” Use this weekly open forum to tell us what noises and voices you hear in your head.

350,000 Kids March on Washington

In response to the news that Mother’s Cookies filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, several hundred thousand kids organized a march on Washington in order to demand a bailout of the company that has graced children’s bag lunches with their product for nearly 100 years.

“If we can give $750 billion to fat-cat CEO’s and Wall Street pimps that got us into this mess,” said an attorney hired to represent the children, “then we can certainly see to it that this iconic cookie company stays in business.”

Allow me to bark about a few upcoming events in downtown San Jose the weekend of Oct. 24/25 that will undoubtedly rock the house in more ways than one. And they don’t even involve music. At least not yet.

On Saturday, Oct. 25, the Singularity Summit, the premier academic conference on the concept of The Singularity, will take place at the Montgomery Theater. By now, most technologists have at least heard of this concept, whether they agree with it or not. The Singularity is the theoretical inflection point in the development of history—either magical or apocalyptic or impossible depending on which camp you’re in—where computers catch up to human intelligence, overtake our brain power in terms of processing capability and then never look back. That is, machines will become self-aware and improve their own designs, humans will no longer be driving technological advancement and we can only speculate about what happens afterward. The posthumanism crowd relishes in the positive aspects, while the dystopians rail against it all.

Food for Thought

What number is 10,217,023,029,529? No, it’s not the largest known prime number recently discovered by mathematicians using powerful computers. It was the amount of the gross national debt at the moment I wrote the number and in the meantime it has grown by almost $10 million. If you are like me and have been trying to make sense of all the big numbers being thrown around these days, it’s nearly impossible. Thanks to my good friend Gray Maxwell, a senior US Senate staffer on Capitol Hill, I have a way to bring the enormity of the situation home by casting the numbers in terms of our city and as individual citizens and thinking about what we could buy with that money.

At its recent September meeting, a healthy majority the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce board voted to support Measure B, despite the fact that some members had reservations about the BART tax. A fair question would be: Could they possibly come out against it, when one of their power players has so much at stake? Not only would the employees of Applied Materials benefit greatly from BART, but the company’s CEO, Mike Splinter, even signed on to the measure.

The buzz was that Applied Materials had even threatened to pull out of the Chamber unless the organization supported the BART tax.