A Great SF / Oakland Bay Area Weekend - Society's Changing

I write to report a weekend in the San Francisco Bay Area. On Saturday, I spent most of my time watching the UCLA / USC game at The Balboa Cafe. Then I went over to The Grove -- a great indoor / outdoor cafe on Chestnut and Avila that I discovered for myself when I was taking a screenwriting class at Fort Mason. After that, I went to the home of my good friends Bob and Barbara to help them trim their Christmas Tree. But what I loved about the day so much was how nice everyone was. The holiday and Christmas sprit was certainly in the air. Moreover, it made me very happy to be in the San Francisco Bay Area and to be an Oakland resident.

I write that society here is changing in that I observe the Bay Area's maturing to a level of social interaction that's certainly hyper-integrated, and yet it not only doesn't matter, people actually want to know each other. Heck, maybe it was an planetary alignment, but I don't think so. Bay Area society has moved in this direction slowly over the past 20 years. It may also be a statement of how life in urban America is changing, since people in our country are so mobile.

Toledo Ohio To "Host" Neo - Nazi "White Supremacists" March Again - Why?

I discovered this news on Fox Television. There's also a rather sick individual who has nothing better to do than write a blog entirely devoted to this matter. Anyone holding or participating in "white race" marches is certainly free to do so in America, but let's face it folks. The practice is sick.

The Neo-Nazis are not contributing anything good to America. The time they will spend doing this could be better invested in volunteering at the local humane society, or cooking meals to serve those who can't afford them, or writing a business plan to start a new company.

There's a reason people like Bill Gates go on to establish successful companies like Microsoft, while this group complains about -- nothing really. By contrast, the Bill Gates of the world are far too busy creating things to worry about what someone else looks like.

The Neo Nazi's want someone to give them something. They're too afraid to really get out in America, be a positive force in society, and really help make others happy. Why? Because they don't feel good about themselves.

People like this are dangerous to good humans like you and me. Their hate is so great that they would seek to threaten the very lives of others who don't look like them. The Toledo Police should arrest this group the very moment they make any kind of threat to anyone. As far as I'm concerned this organization is full of criminals. They should be watched at all times of the day and night.

Note. I've never been to Toledo, Ohio, and never plan to go. Moreover, any intelligent person should not waste their time visiting the city.

What does the Toledo Chamber of Commerce think of all this? Is the city's economy so great, it can stand this kind of crap?

According to this news report the very state of Ohio had the largest increase in unemployed workers of any state in America. Toledo has a near 7 percent rate of people out of work and at about $32,000 has a household income below the national average by about $10,000. It's 70 percent white and just over 20 percent black. So the city is mostly poor and Caucasian, which is why the Neo-Nazis are there, claiming "take your city back?"

It just goes to show you how stupid the Neo Nazis are to say to whites "take your city back" when Caucasians are the majority population. But one could never accuse the Neo Nazis of being logical in thought.

So it's no wonder Toledo's a haven for people who hate: they're unhappy with themselves and feel that someone else has what they don't have. (Well, I guess that's true if one considers self-esteem.) I do hope the normal people in that town -- black and white -- ban together and fix that city before it's too late.

The Toledo Regional Growth Partnership is attempting to "sell" that city as a great place for tech workers. They can't even dream of successfully doing that with Neo-Nazis running around. It's a proven fact that tech innovation happen in cities where everyone is welcome and a diverse society is not only expected, but wanted.

That's certainly not Toledo, Ohio. That city has to get with the program.

Why Am I Reading What David Brooks Thinks?

Ok. He has a column on Irag as the begining of "American Skepticism" but why am I being encouraged to read his take? How did his view become "the one." Is this the NY Times PR machine at work? Someone tell me. Please.

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown's Office Behavior Has Not Improved - A Note To Jerry From Zennie

As I was walking along Lakeshore Avenue, preparing for Thanksgiving, I ran into an old co-worker from my days in The City of Oakland and in The Mayor's Office. This person still works for Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown; all I did was try to bring the Super Bowl to Oakland under his watch. Both of also worked for Elihu Harris, who was a much better Mayor than Jerry.

Anyway, I asked how things were going and this person remarked that they were OK, but that was more than could be said for some other workers in Jerry's office.

See, when Jerry took office in late 1998 (unofficially then in 1999 for real), he quickly established a reputation as being a real ass toward his secretaries: yelling at them and throwing tantrums. His top aide and friend Jaques Bargazhi didn't help with alledged exploits featuring in-office advances toward women, and other actions that eventually cost him his job. I thought Jaques departure might make Jerry himself "nicer." Some may have believed the days of Jerry the Tormentor were over.

I don't dislike Jerry. I understand -- as a person who's driven -- that he has high ambitions and wants those around him to share his passion. But he's got to learn to hold how he treats his workers in check. I thought he was better. On a personal note, he can be funny, as he was when he remarked -- as I was having my photo taken by Lake Merritt -- "Getting married?"

But he's not changed how he treats his staffers.

"He's still the same, Zennie," my friend said. "He runs around throwing tantrums and having screaming fits and going up to secretaries and clapping at them in the face when he needs something in a hurry," this person reported. "There's no staff loyalty; they can't stand him."

Jerry, listen up. If you want to win friends and have a great life, stop treating people this way. At the end of your political run, you will have few real friends, a lot of leaches, and nothing to show for all of your years in office. Ultimately, God will remind you of how important those who work for you really are.

In other words, be nice to your people.

Former Powell Aide Wilkerson: President Bush "Aloof" From Foreign Policy Making

(11-28) 15:50 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --


A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that "the president of the United States is all-powerful" and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant.


In an Associated Press interview, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of postwar planning. Underlings exploited Bush's detachment and made poor decisions, Wilkerson said.


Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. He said Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."


On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an impassioned argument within his administration. Abuse of prisoners, and even the deaths of some who had been interrogated in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have bruised the U.S. image abroad and undermined support for the Iraq war.


Cheney's office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued "that the president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases," Wilkerson said.


On the other side were Powell, others at the State Department and top military brass, and occasionally Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, Wilkerson said.


Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: "Donald, don't you understand what you are doing to our image?"


Wilkerson said Bush tried to work out a compromise in 2001 and 2002 that recognized that the war on terrorism was different from past wars and required greater flexibility in handling prisoners who don't belong to an enemy state or follow the rules themselves.


Bush's stated policy, which was heatedly criticized by civil liberties and legal groups at the time, was defensible, Wilkerson said. But it was undermined almost immediately in practice, he said.


In the field, the United States followed the policies of hard-liners who wanted essentially unchecked ability to detain and harshly interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, Wilkerson said.


Wilkerson, who left government with Powell in January, said he is now somewhat estranged from his former boss. He worked for Powell for 16 years. Wilkerson became a surprise critic of the Iraq war-planning effort and other administration decisions this fall, and he has said his Powell did not put him up to it.


On Iraq, Wilkerson said Powell may have had doubts about the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein but was convinced by then-CIA Director George Tenet and others that the intelligence behind the push toward war was sound.


He said Powell now generally believes it was a good idea to remove Saddam from power but may not agree with either the timing or execution of the war.


"What he seems to be saying to me now is the president failed to discipline the process the way he should have and that the president is ultimately responsible for this whole mess," Wilkerson said.


Powell was widely regarded as a dove to Cheney's and Rumsfeld's hawks, but he made a forceful case for war before the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, a month before the invasion. At one point, he said Saddam possessed mobile labs to make weapons of mass destruction, but they have not been found.


Wilkerson said the CIA and other agencies allowed mishandled and bogus information to underpin that speech and the administration case for war.


He said he has almost, but not quite, concluded that Cheney and others in the administration deliberately ignored evidence of bad intelligence and looked only at what supported their case for war.


A newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 said that an al-Qaida military instructor was probably misleading his interrogators about training that the terror group's members received from Iraq on chemical, biological and radiological weapons. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi reportedly recanted his statements in January 2004.


A presidential intelligence commission also has dissected how spy agencies handled an Iraqi refugee who was a German intelligence source. Code-named Curveball, this man, a leading source on Iraq's purported mobile biological weapons labs, was found to be a fabricator and alcoholic.

Find Her! - Missing Woman in Oakland, CA - Dr. Zehra Attari - 55yr Old Pediatrician

Dr. Zehra Attari, a 55 year old pediatrician left her clinic at 2700 International Blvd. in Oakland and is currently missing. Anyone with information contact the police at 510.238.3352.

She was last seen wearing blue pants, a blue sweater and black shoes. She has black hair and brown eyes, is 5 feet 4 and weighs about 135 pounds. The license plate number of her 2001 gray Honda Accord is 4MUH810. Website is http://www.zehraattari.com/

Firms Cater to Interracial Families - It's About Time!!

Products celebrate diverse relationships
Sunday, May 22, 2005
By Michele M. Melendez
Newhouse News Service

Courtney Morrison's birthday card from her parents last year had a cartoon drawing of a white couple on the front, but her mom shaded the man's skin with a brown pencil and curled his hair with a black pen.

Dad is black. Mom is white. Morrison and her sister, Tiffany, are a blend of the two.

Their mother's alteration inspired the sisters to design their own greeting cards, showing a more nuanced American family.

Frustration among biracial and multiracial consumers, who crave products that reflect their cultures and skin tones, has bred a home-grown market in goods from cards to clothes.

"There are all of these children of interracial marriages," said Tiffany Morrison, 37, who, with her sister, 36, launched Mix It Up in Los Angeles in January. "There are things that we need, and now we're creating them."

On the sisters' Web site, www.mix-it-up.net, are a host of black-and-white and color photographs on cards that are blank inside. The selections show the hands of interracial couples wearing wedding rings, holding a rose, clinking champagne flutes, wrapping around a baby with caramel skin.

The 2000 Census was the first to let respondents identify themselves by more than one race, recognizing intermarriage. About 7 million people described themselves as biracial or multiracial, 2.4 percent of the population. And about 6 percent of married couples characterized themselves as interracial.

By many accounts, the mixing is likely to continue.

Billy No, 28, sensed that vibe early. With a Korean-Mexican-French background, he was only a high school sophomore when he began to refer to himself as "blend." Not blended. Just blend.

He soon started making T-shirts and caps with "Blend America" in graffiti style. Eventually, the venture turned into a Web-based company, www.blendamerica.com, selling T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts.

"It's all about community, unifying cultures," said No, of Tempe, Ariz.

Saren Sakurai, 37, of Los Angeles opened his online store to support his Web site, www.halvsie.com, a membership forum for people who are half Japanese. His father is Japanese and his mother is Caucasian, of French and Welsh ancestry.

Sakurai said he activated the site in 2002, after a two-year stay in Japan helping to teach English to schoolchildren. He said the Japanese didn't embrace him as Japanese, as he had expected. Back in the States, he stood between two worlds.

His store sells T-shirts, tote bags, mugs and baby clothes with logos and phrases that point to the multicultural, including: "kiss me; I'm half Japanese," "multiracial," "multiethnic," "blackanese" and "Got rice?" written in Japanese.

The trend has its roots in the ethnic revival of the 1970s, a visible and vocal pride in culture, said Marilyn Halter, history professor at Boston University and author of "Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity."

"Here it is, 30 years later, and there's still so much attention paid to celebrating distinctive heritage," Halter said.

Halter said mainstream companies have fed the multiethnic market, broadening the range of models and actors in advertising. Various goods, including Crayola crayons and Cover Girl cosmetics, have undergone changes in marketing in response to the country's kaleidoscopic skin tone.

Individuals -- and children, in particular, building their sense of identity -- seek reflections of themselves in everyday life, said Nancy McFall Jean, president of the Interracial Family Circle, a nonprofit membership organization in Washington.

"These objects . . . are reaffirming in a lot of ways," Jean said.

And they are created by folks who have yearned for multicultural merchandise.

Mahisha Dellinger, 29, whose father is Creole and mother is black, remembers experimenting in the kitchen, mixing coconut oil and shea butter with store-bought hair conditioners and styling products.

"I couldn't find the right line of product for my hair," she said.

Based in Sacramento, Calif., she started Curls online at www.curls.biz in 2003, and now the products, including a children's line called Curly Q's, are available at selected salons.

Yvette Walker, 43, of Kansas City, Mo., took a longer road to her store. She recalls not being able to find a wedding cake topper with bride and groom figurines that looked like her and her fiancé. She had one custom painted.

That was 1989. Now, interracial couples have options, including www.meltingpotgifts.com, started by an interracial husband-wife team in Trenton, N.J.

Walker's exasperation led her to create New People magazine in 1990, exploring blended culture.

The magazine, online at www.newpeoplemagazine.com, gave rise to an online store in February. Cards, T-shirts, mouse pads and other gift items display different shades of skin together: the interlaced fingers of a black woman and white man, an illustration of a heart-shaped pendant split in half, its two sides representing racially distinct facial features.

Even though Walker and her husband are no longer together, she carries on the New People message: "My sensibilities haven't changed. You should be with whomever you want to be with."

Zennie's Zeitgeist Joins Sports Business Simulations - Film at 11

I got this idea from my friend Craig Newmark, who's blog "Craig's Blog" is a part of his overall set of Craigslist links. After some thought, I determined that since I was so interested in popular culture, and established my company (in part) to meld sports, simulations, and popular culture, and wrote two blogs: one on sports and sports business matters and one on popular culture with a personal bent, and since I was already identified with SBS, and Zennie's Zeitgeist was gaining an audience, it just seemed to make sense.

So, my blog's wrapped in the SBS brand and is a happy new part of the overall traffic count.

"Pat" Morita of "The Karate Kid" Dies - Another Zeitgeist Signpost

And he was a big one, because in my view Morita was the picture of the assention of Asians in American popular culture. He went from playing roles that were somewhat "less than" to one that gained him true respect as an actor: that of "Mr. Miyagi" in "The Karate Kid." How many people loved it when he smoothly beat the crap out of that bully and his so-called martial arts teacher in the second "Kid" film? But far beyond that, Morita became a massive part of American Culture and he served the mantle of icon with dignity. He will be missed but never forgotten.

California Population 33,871,648 : Already Majority Minority, Latinos to Outnumber Whites By 2020

SACRAMENTO — Researchers said Tuesday that aging infrastructure is not the only growing pain the governor and his successors face — by 2020, the state is projected to gain
10 million people who will strain services ranging from education to social programs.

The California Budget Project, an independent think tank that concentrates on concerns of the poor and middle class, released a demographic report that also indicates as the state grows by a third, diversity will increase to the point where Latinos outnumber whites.

In addition, a much greater percentage of the population will be elderly.

He Pulled a Truck With His Penis

I guess The Oakland Tribune has a slow news day. And no way am I posting a photo with this story.

Bay Area grandmaster of Qigong pulls truck with penis
By Grace Rauh, STAFF WRITER

FREMONT — The ancient Greeks worshipped it. Freud said women envy it. And Tuesday, a man pulled a truck with it.
Yes, you read that right.

He pulled a truck with his penis.

Grandmaster Tu Jin-Sheng, best known for his "Iron Crotch," attached himself not once but twice to a rental moving truck and pulled it several yards across a parking lot in Fremont. In lace-up leather boots and a black tank top, the 50-year-old tied a strip of blue fabric around the base of his penis and testicles and tugged to make sure it was on tight. An assistant kicked him hard between the legs before he lashedhimself to the vehicle.

He groaned, grunted and pressed against two men for resistance.

Then, slowly, the truck began to roll forward.

About 20 people, most of whom study Qigong, the ancient Chinese art of movement and breathing to increase energy, gathered for the truck pull in an unassuming office park just off Interstate 880.

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His website doesn't really explain how he excercises at all. Oh well.

Irag Leaders Want US Timetable to Get Out! - Bush Administration Backed Into Corner

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Leaders of Iraq's sharply divided Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis called Monday for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces in the country and said Iraq's opposition had a ``legitimate right'' of resistance.

The final communique, hammered out at the end of three days of negotiations at a preparatory reconciliation conference under the auspices of the Arab League, condemned terrorism, but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if their operations do not target innocent civilians or institutions designed to provide for the welfare of Iraqi citizens.

The participants in Cairo agreed on ``calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, through putting in place an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces ... control the borders and the security situation'' and end terror attacks.

The conference was attended by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish lawmakers, as well as leading Sunni politicians.

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This is the first clear signal that the US should get out. Between calls to get out here, and this one from Iraq itself, the Bush Administration has no real excuse.