The San Francisco Experience

As awful as 2020 has been been, 1968 was even more momentous with political assassinations, the Viet Nam War, the Prague Spring and Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as well as major civil unrest throughout America. Amidst all these tectonic changes, a major political realignment occurred with segregationist  George Wallace winning four dependably Democrat states. And we even had a mini-Pande...

The 17 mile trail that crosses San Francisco from the Bay in the South East corner of the City to Land's End in its' North West Corner,  cuts right through the heart of our 49 square miles of natural beauty.  It traverses urban gardens, solid neighborhoods, the Presidio, Golden Gate Park and leads you to the dramatic cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The brainchild of Bob Siegel a on...

The Siege of the US Capitol one week ago illustrated how US politics have become militarized under Donald Trump. Militias and their members were a visible presence at the infamous rally beforehand and at the storming of the Capitol. The Million Militia March scheduled for Inauguration Day January 20 will be met by 3000 National Guard troops if it turns violent.  A 7 foot high unscaleable fenc...

Air India initiated a new nonstop flight from San Francisco to Bangalore - 17 hours nonstop - over the North Pole. The crew was all female, Captain, First Officer, Navigator. The new flight will link San Francisco's Silicon Valley and India's Technology powerhouse Bangalore which are already Sister Cities. And the 2.7 million Indian immigrants to the United States are very successful. But China's...

The 25th Amendment permits the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet to declare a President unable to discharge the duties and powers of his office and replace him. Should Vice President Pence and the cabinet remove President Trump in the last 13 days of his term which expires January 20, 2021 ? 

The Covid 19 Pandemic was a Black Swan event unleashed on the world in early 2020. A Black Swan event is an extreme outlier occurrence with a huge impact which is only explainable after the fact.  Do any Black Swans lurk in our future for 2021 ? By nature they are unpredictable and unknowable beforehand, but we will attempt to predict some areas that could produce  black swans in the nex...

DNA genealogical testing is dominated by Ancestry.com and 23 and Me. MIT's Technology Review estimates that 26 million such test kits have been sold by these two companies. While their growth has been explosive, privacy concerns are growing. The sale of genetic data to 3rd parties is especially sensitive. And the open source genealogy website GEDMatch has even fewer privacy safeguards than the Dir...

In 2019 87,00 Californians relocated to Texas. And in 2020 we lost several iconic Bay Area tech companies to the Lone Star state such as Oracle, Hewlett Packard and Palantir. Podcast celebrity Joe Rogan moved to Austin and Tesla founder Elon Musk did likewise. The cost of living in Houston is 65% lower than San Francisco while salaries are 17% less.  Can California stem the flow of this exodu...

When Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021 he will become the 23rd President in history to have Irish roots. 50% of our Presidents have an ancestral link to Ireland - that's quite a high concentration and the story behind it is even more fascinating.  Since 1945, 9 of the 13 Presidents have Irish roots along with 35 million fellow Americans. Talk...

Governor Gavin Newsom, California's 40th Governor could be facing a recall election in the Spring of 2021 in the midst of the Pandemic. Recall signature gatherers have 850,000 of the 1,500,000 qualified signatures they need to trigger a statewide election. They have 90 days to collect the remaining 650,000 signatures.  If he loses, Newsom would be terminated as Governor and a fresh election w...

Chesa Boudin, the 40 year old District Attorney of San Francisco was elected November 2019. He has spent his first 11 months in office radically transforming the criminal justice prosecution priorities for our City. But none of the changes is more controversial than his criminal prosecution of three current and former SF police officers on charges as varied as manslaughter, felony battery and assa...

As the 49 year old's net worth surged to $152 billion last week based on the success of his California companies, Tesla and SpaceEx, he announced he was decamping for Texas.  Seriously ?  Texas ?  California has its' fair share of problems, no doubt,  but isn't  Musk being an ingrate ?  Looks like he is biting the hand that has fed him for the last 25 years becoming t...

FaceBook will launch a new cryptocurrency the Diem and a financial wallet the Novi to complement it. Target date is early 2021.  It will be backed by the US dollar so it will not be digital in the way that Bitcoin is digital. Further, it will have a governing board and the Diem Association which will include FB and other investors will be based in Switzerland. The strategic objective is to create...

With two new vaccines and their 94% effective rates against Covid 19 pending FDA approval, light is at the end of the tunnel for the Pandemic. But will Americans accept them enthusiastically ? Or will they protest like rejecting the mask mandates and social distancing rules ? The Anti Vaxxer Movement and Vaccine Hesitant Groups are gearing up for a fight. They have shrewdly allied themselves with...

Not even a once in a century global pandemic seems to be able to slow down the rise in California's robust residential real estate market. The median price for a home hit $712,000  and shows little sign of slowing down. Low interest rates and limited supply of new homes seems to be fueling the price rise. At the same time over 650,000 Californians left the state in 2019 because of unaffordabl...

Governor Gavin Newsom will get to name a new US Senator to fill the vacancy left when Kamala Harris becomes Vice President. The Governor appears to be in no rush to name a successor. While he wants to make an historic appointment, he knows that it is fraught with risk. In the last 56 years, two California Governors appointed successors to fill vacant US Senate seats in 1964 and 1990 and in both ca...

Twitter, Facebook and the other big social media companies moved toward a curated speech,  censorship model during the 2020 campaign.  As a result an Alt Tech social media ecosystem has grown up emphasizing the importance of Free Speech in social media. There are now a host of social media companies like Parler that are Free Speech oriented. While they are far smaller than the established players...

November 22,  2020 marks 57 years since the assassination of the 35th President, John F. Kennedy. Yet key documents remain hidden from the public including 300 pages of files on George Joannides, a CIA operative who managed the Cuban student group DRE that Oswald tried to join. And most historians and scholars are reluctant to write the history as so many of the facts of the assassination are as m...

A popular conspiracy theory in right wing circles is that Vice President elect Kamala Harris will soon take over from an incapacitated President elect Joe Biden. When you repeat such a theory you are giving it oxygen some argue, even if your intent is to dismantle and reject it. In today's podcast I will explain how this myth has materialized, its roots in American History and why it is never like...

Pfizer and its' German partner Biontech, announced on Monday November 9, 2020 that their vaccine has a 90% effectiveness rate in preventing Covid 19. This announcement is the first ray of hope that the Covid 19 pandemic which began in China and has swept the globe in 2020 can be stopped, vanquished and extinguished. Public euphoria was best summed up in the stock market as the Dow Jones surged 130...

President Trump, in his 16 minute electoral fraud diatribe from the White House Briefing Room, Thursday November 5 has launched a Conspiracy Theory of a stolen election, before the American people and a global audience. His obvious motivation was anger at seeing his early lead in the election returns slip away in favor of Joe Biden. He has let the conspiracy genie out of the bottle publicly giving...

72 years ago today, November 2, 1948, President Harry Truman defied all expectations and won re-election, when the national polls had him down 6.5% versus Governor Tom Dewey. His come from behind win was a shock to the nation. Not only did he confound the pundits, but the Democrats recaptured the Congress with healthy majorities. How did he do it ? Are there lessons to be learned for Donald Trump...

The gray wolf, one of America's iconic symbols of the Old West, is to lose its' endangered species status. The Trump Administration argues that 45 years of protection has seen its numbers grow six fold to 6000. But conservationists  contend that the wolf is not firmly re-established in America. The Pro and Anti wolf lobbies bring a visceral passion to the subject that some have compared to th...

2020 has been marked by extreme political polarization in the United States, and civilian unrest in most American cities. 56% of Americans polled expect political violence to follow the November 3rd presidential election regardless of who wins. While we have seen political violence in our past - 4 Presidents were assassinated and 18 out of the 45 Presidents were threatened with assassination - our...

Gun sales in June surged to 3.9 million weapons, an 80% increase over the same month last year. More than 20 million new firearms have been purchased in 2020, fueled by national apprehension over the pandemic, unemployment, economic uncertainty, racial tension and political uncertainty.  With more than 400 million weapons already in circulation in this country, there are enough firearms for every...