There is an old joke about a golfer who didn’t shower after his round of golf, I’ll call him Budd.
Every Saturday, Budd played golf with a group of friends and after their round of golf, he would go directly to the bar while his buddies went to the locker room, showered, and changed, before joining him for a round of drinks. Because they were often alone, Budd and the bartender become quite friendly. One day the bartender asked him,
“Budd, you seem like a meticulous guy, why don’t you shower after your Saturday round? It seems out of character.”
“ Well, Biff, I’ve got a small penis and I’m a little embarrassed to be seen naked in the shower.”
“Oh. does it work?”
“Do you mean, ‘Can I have sex?’ Yeah, sure”
“Uh…How would you like to trade for a dick that looks good in the shower?”

When the Americans invaded in 2001, the Taliban did not control the entirety of the country. Twenty years later, as the US departs, the Taliban control all of Afghanistan A Tweet by Yalda Hakim @BBCYaldaHakim Anchor and Correspondent. Host of BBC World News’ Impact with Yalda Hakim.https://yaldahakimfoundation.org

Fuck right off with your pat answers blaming one party for Afghanistan and exonerating your favorite politician. This is a generational failure, and they’re all to blame — Biden, Bush, Trump, Obama, all of their generals, all of them. A Tweet by Noah Shachtman @NoahShachtman Soon: @RollingStone. Back in the day: @thedailybeast, @Wired, @ForeignPolicy, @BrookingsFP. no************@********il.ch Wherever

What’s happening in Afghanistan currently is a humanitarian crisis. Let’s be clear: there has never been, and will never be, a U.S. military solution in Afghanistan. Our top priority must be providing humanitarian aid & resettlement to Afghan refugees, women, and children. A Tweet by Rep. Barbara Lee @RepBarbaraLee Progressive Democrat representing the #EastBay. Promoting justice for all, peace, & human rights. @ProChoiceCaucus Co-Chair. Washington, DC and Oakland

I’m genuinely shocked that the Taliban took over Afghanistan so quickly. It took the North Vietnamese two years to take South Vietnam after we left, the Taliban have done it as fast as they can drive from provincial capital to the next provincial capital to, now, Kubal. After about 2011, it seemed obvious to me that we were not going to be able to win this war but, judging from my reaction today, I must have still believed the propaganda. I had no idea that, after twenty years, we were leaving with the so-called official Afghan Army comparatively that much worse off than when we got there.

We are constantly told that we have the best military in the world, but, it turns out that we have a military that only looks good in the shower. We may have the most high-tech, best-equipped military in history but we still can’t win a war. We outspend everybody, we even spend more than the next nine nations put together and we haven’t won a war since 1945 (unless you count Korea and Iraq in which, I guess, we weren’t actually trying to win, just to push the enemy back to where they started which we did, and Grenada.) For twenty years – and still counting – we were told we were winning this war and we weren’t. Don’t get me wrong, we can still win battles, we can still kill more of them than they can of us, we just can’t actually win the war.

If that sounds too harsh, if you think it’s a political problem, if you think the military’s hands were tied, whatever, then why didn’t the generals say, “We can’t do what you want without more men, more school teachers, more tanks, more whatever…” But, for twenty years, no general did that, they took the job, all of them. Either they knew they couldn’t win under those conditions and said “Fuck it, it’s a promotion and I’m going to go to work as a lobbyist for Lockheed/Martin anyway.” or they were too stupid to understand the problem. I’m going to go with the second option. I think that our military leadership is a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Our military leadership, probably from about Colonel up, had no idea that the Taliban were winning the war, our military leadership thought they were doing great.

The Taliban got stronger while we were fighting them and nobody seemed to notice. The grunts must have noticed but the brass were so confident that they didn’t listen to them. Nobody even made plans for getting out of Dodge on the outside chance that the Taliban might win. The other analogy that comes to me is that of a narcissist. The military, and probably State Department, leaders were so sure that they were – and still are – right and doing well that they only listened to the Afghan toadies that told them how great they were. Surprisingly, shockingly, actually, we didn’t learn anything from the Vietnam disaster.

Now we are being told that the problem is the Afghan senior leadership which is corrupt. Sure, that’s a factor, but the big problem is that it is our leadership that is corrupt. Our entire military system is corrupt, including Congress, who thinks the answer is to increase the budget by twenty-five million over the existing 778 billion budget. It’s sickening, infuriating, sad, and sort of terrifying. Happy Monday.

pars pro toto/pärz ˌprō ˈtōtō/ 1. a part or aspect of something taken as representative of the whole.” the magical law of pars pro toto” Google’s English dictionary by Oxford Languages.

A couple of days ago, Michele and I joined Mike Iverson on an almost empty Stanford Campus to see a group of stone spheres.

Like many wonders in my life, great and small, I wouldn’t have known about this if it hadn’t been for Mike. He has been one of the most influential people in my life. I met him when I was a freshman in High School where he introduced me to smoking cigarettes and, maybe fifteen years later, introduced me to smoking pot (we weren’t still in High School). He was my first backpacking buddy, and in 1973, he took me to Death Valley for my first time – camping up a long, rough, dirt road to the Mahogany Campground at 8110 feet, in my new BMW Bavaria I should add – igniting my lifetime love. We listened to classical music together and, when Mike worked in a hi-fi store, spent days listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on different speakers. For a while, Mike worked in a nursery and I was introduced to a new world of plants and especially cactus and succulents. In 1959, Mike told me about a photo show at the Stanford Union where I first saw Ansel Adams and started to fall in love with photography, and last week, he introduced me to a group of stone spheres in the newish Stanford Science and Engineering Quad. The spheres, together, are titled Pars pro Toto and they are terrific.

But first, an aside. Surrounding the new Science and Engineering Quad is sort of a mini-history of Silicon Valley’s second wave and makes a good advertisement for Stanford’s place in that universe.

Bordering the quad on the northeast is the James and Anna Marie Spilker Engineering and Applied Sciences Building which houses the Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory. According to Stanford, James Spilkera Jr. was a central figure in the technical development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and Edward L. Ginzton was the co-founder of Varian Associates.

On the northwest is the Shriram Center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering, named for Ram and Vijay Shriram who contributed $61 million towards the building. BTW, Ram has a hyper-brief, hyper-enigmatic Wikipedia page saying only that he was born 1956/57, then jumping to Early Life which only says Shriram holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Loyola College, Chennai of the University of Madras, and finally, ending under Career, it says He is a founding board member of Google and…He is also on the board of directors of Alphabet (Google), Paperless Post, Yubico, Abacus.AI, Antheia, GoForward, and EasyPost.

To the southwest is the Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment + Energy Building (Y2E2) which, Stanford says, was the first large-scale, mixed-use, high-performance building at Stanford to house cross-disciplinary teams and programs with teaching and research focused on sustainability. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Jerry Yang is the co-founder of Yahoo!, and Akiko Yamazaki, is chairman of the board, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco and co-founder, Wildlife Conservation Network.

Finally, to the southeast, is the Huang engineering building and the Terman Engineering Library. Jensen Huang’s Link-In page says I founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to solve the problem of 3D graphics for the PC. Our invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics, and revolutionized parallel computing. GPU computing went on to ignite modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world…We’re hiring, with openings in every corner of our company – looking for talented, driven, and adventurous people who want to tackle grand challenges that are hard to solve, matter to the world, and bring us joy.

As an aside to the aside, except for Spilker, who was born in Philadelphia, every one of these building eponyms – I tried namesakes but was told by Google that eponyms is a better word, a word, BTW, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard before – came here as immigrants and changed the world. They are Silicon Valley royalty. End asides.

Between these buildings is a rather non-descript quadrangle or Quad, as now seems to be the universal shorthand, that is largely concrete pavers covering the roof over a warren of semi-underground labs that connect the buildings. This expanse of beige is enlivened by Pars pro Toto, twelve stone spheres, ranging in size from sixteen inches to eight feet, a site-specific art installation by Alicja Kwade. Alicja Kwade is a Polish woman artist living in Berlin but who works all over the world. She reminds me a little of Christo in her self-marketing abilities and the power of her art over the landscape. This miniature landscape and these stone spheres remind me both of Christo’s running fence in Marin County and The Umbrellas that he put up on the 5 straddling Tejon Pass.

Like the yellow umbrellas at Tejon pass, which is the only Christo installation I’ve actually seen in person, it is surprising how much presence the spheres have. Even from hundreds of feet away, as we enter the Quad, walking down an unnamed, palm tree colonnade, the spheres stand out. While we were admiring one of the spheres – I think it was Red Fire, a fine-grained, deep rusty red, sedimentary rock formed about 750 to 700 million years ago in what would become northwestern India – a woman approached us to talk about the installation. It turns out that she is on the committee that selects Stanford’s outside art and she was thrilled that we were thrilled. It seems that this is the first of two major art installations that Stanford is installing.

This installation cost was one million dollars which seems like a bargain given that a Jeff Koons’s Rabbit just sold for $91,075,000. It must have taken a good part of the cost to find, quarry, and shape each sphere, each of which comes from a different location. One of the things our impromptu guide especially liked was the artist’s method of locating the spheres. In her Artist Statement, Kwade says The positioning of the globes was determined by chance: The artist threw tiny spheres onto a model of the Stanford Science and Engineering Quad to dictate placement. This gesture implies a higher being playing marbles with these planet-like spheres, creating a new universe. The arrangement also references billiard breaks, a real-world action used to visualize quantum analogs.

This week, in which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report came out and Afghanistan’s collapse is accelerating, it was especially comforting to be distracted. Congrats, Stanford.

When California lawmakers tried earlier this year to force local governments to allow four or more homes on land zoned for single-family residences, fierce pushback from suburban communities stopped the plan in its tracks. For many, the long-standing neighborhood template of a home, backyard and garage on a lot was too intrinsic to the California lifestyle to upend. LA Times, October 10, 2019.

Last night, yet another progressive city — Berkeley — concluded exclusionary zoning isn’t progressive. Huge win in our fight to end a system that causes segregation, makes housing unaffordable & worsens climate change. Will SF also be progressive on housing & take this step? A Tweet by California State Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_WienerCA State Senator. Chair, Housing Committee. Former Chair, Legislative LGBTQ Caucus. Housing/transit/climate/criminal justice reform/health. Democrat. San Francisco, California scottwiener.com

During my working life, which every year seems to fade further into the opaque fog of the past, I worked in the homebuilding industry. Every business, everything, really, is subject to the cyclical swings of the economy but homebuilding is more susceptible than most, everything is leveraged but the leverage that makes it possible to buy a house worth way more than a person’s yearly income also works backward. When interest rates change, house prices also change because, to the average person, it is the monthly payment that governs affordability.

Builders build what they think the greatest number of people want (times sales price, very roughly). That often puts builders at odds with what the city and neighbors want and the zoning requires. In California, at least, Merchant Builders spend a lot of time and effort getting the zoning changed.

As an aside, sometime in the mid to late 1970s, I went to the annual Homebuilders Show in Houston. Most of the people at the Show – all the people I knew anyway – were Merchant Builders. Merchant Builders are builders who build buildings, large groups of houses in our case, for sale, and the Convention was probably like every other convention except that we spent a couple of days driving around the suburbs looking at other people’s new houses. That was almost fifty years ago and I still remember four things. It was raining off and on and every time it rained, the construction crews would stop working, get in their cars or trucks to wait for the rain to stop, and then, when the rain did stop, get out of their cars and start working again. When I was a carpenter in California, on the unusual day that it rained, we just went home. In Houston, we went to one upscale project and I was shocked at how big the houses were, how detailed, with the doors and cabinets even being antiqued, how they had no fences – because nobody spent any time outside – and how the Houston suburbs looked like the San Jose suburbs. The latter was the most surprising because Houston had no zoning. End aside.

San Jose had zoning but the developers were always fighting it. I particularly remember, in 1972, we were building a project in what had been known as East San Jose and was now known as North Valley (because East San Jose was considered a barrio, we merchant builders changed the name to North Valley to class it up). We were building a tract near the corner of Capitol and Hostetter and it was zoned to have two gas stations on Capitol, one on each side of Hostetter and we were trying to get the Zoning changed because we didn’t want gas stations next to our houses. I was the General Superintendent at the time but I remember that we did get the zoning changed. At the time, Shappell spent a lot of time changing the Zoning and I was impressed that Houston, without zoning, ended up looking about the same.

A couple of years later, I started my own development/building company with Sam Berland, and several years after that, Sam died. We had just bought a large piece of land known as Haskins Ranch which is a little bit misleading. Haskins was a grading contractor and his ranch was a place out in the boondocks where he could store his equipment. But, by 1979, it was no longer out in the boondocks, it was across the street from the soon-to-be Blackhawk Shopping Center, and Haskins was selling his property to move further out.

When we bought the property, Jimmy Carter was President, Paul Volcker was the Fed Chairman, and the homebuilding business was booming, but inflation was also booming, especially in housing. I remember a conversation with a fellow builder and he said that, according to his banker, less than one percent of Californians could afford an average new California home (the banker still made the loan). It did not seem like a sustainable situation and, maybe the buyers didn’t think so either, but, every weekend, our sales office was full of buyers clamoring for new homes before the price increased again. Sales outpaced production. People were buying new homes faster than we – the collective we, in this case, being the homebuilding industry – could build them. Two months after Volcker took office, the Fed raised interest rates, and then again, and again until interest rates hit twenty-one percent. One weekend the Sales Office was full, crowd control was the problem, and the next weekend, the Sales Office was empty. Now, anybody who hadn’t Closed Escrow wanted their deposit back, the celebrations turned sour, very sour. And we still owned the empty half of Haskins Ranch.

At the same time, ABAG which stands for the Association of Bay Area Governments and is in large part funded by the Federal Government was pushing the various cities to increase their density. The cities panicked and started making plans to do just that. Then the local people reacted to what they assumed would be a deterioration of their environment and the cities just sort of ignored ABAG (although they were still willing to take ABAG’s money). But during the brief period when cities were still concerned about following ABAG’s directives of increasing density, we brought an application for a revised project to the City Council in Danville, California. We wanted to change the existing R1 Single Family on large lots to a Planned Unit District – PUD, pronounced P, U, D – with smaller lots and duplexes on the street corners. There was a large contingent of NIMBYs, Not In My Back Yard, fighting it, they were concerned that the revised project would bring in “undesirables” from poorer areas which would hurt their property values and expose their children to the wrong element, especially in their schools. I wouldn’t have worded it that way, but our whole plan was to build less expensive housing to make it more affordable to a wider range of buyers.

On her campaign website, AOC talks about her mother moving 40 minutes north of their family home and the Porto Rican community in the Bronx to Westchester County so Sandy Ocasio could get a better education and we expected our smaller homes, especially the duplexes, to enable a similar result. But, like almost everything about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her move to Westchester was unusual. Most minorities prefer to stay in their communities, something that surprised me then but doesn’t anymore.  Now, here is the kicker, the buyers in the new PUD were roughly the same demographic as the buyers in the bigger, more expensive houses; white, aspiring upper-middle-class, Republicans. The biggest surprise was the buyers of the ten duplexes. There may have been an exception or two, but the buyers were recently divorced women who wanted to keep their kids in the same school district that they had been in pre-divorce or young people wanting to live in the neighborhood they grew up in. All the NIMBYs imagined horrors – and in our case, hopes – of less expensive housing bringing in a different demographic didn’t happen.

That was over forty years ago and, if anything, people are more segregated by race and income than ever. Eliminating the 1 in R1 and allowing an increase in the density of housing in, formally, single-family neighborhoods will increase the housing stock by increasing density but I doubt that it will result in greater diversity.

I always get asked. “Where do you get your confidence?” I think people are well meaning but it is kind of insulting. Because what it means to me is, “You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person, you’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel you’re worth anything?” Mindy Kaling (duh).

This is a strange time. Just as the world was opening, it bogged down, seemingly frozen in aspic*, our plans to go out into the world hanging in limbo. Michele and I were just getting into the habit of seeing people again when the Delta variant raised its ugly head, reinvigorating the waning pandemic and reigniting our fears. We are starting to rethink everything, paralyzed into non-action.

I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time, have more energy, even feeling antsy, but I still don’t know why I am massively anemic. The good news is that the problem doesn’t seem to be with my bone marrow as I do start making red blood cells when I have iron in my system. I’m taking iron pills now but, it seems to me, that is just treating the symptoms. I’m getting another blood test in September and we’ll see what that shows. For now, we are hanging, waiting.

Meanwhile, in our area, the summer weather is spectacular; 80° with soft breezes and blue skies. But, to the north and west of us, summer is a nightmare of fires burning down forests and houses, creating smoke that is making the air toxic as far east as New York. In the morning, I go outside and breathe in the soft air thinking, Well, we lucked out, no fires this year. then I remember this is only the beginning of the fire season.

Rather than travel to National Parks that are filled with unvaccinated people not wearing masks, we are sitting inside watching the Olympics. Watching sports we know little about and will not be able to even remember the winners’ names in a week. Before the Olympics, however, we saw several TV programs that were memorable and even more memorable in the aggregate.

Ugly Delicious is a food program, and to a lesser degree, a travel show, hosted by David Chang. He is a delightful guy and the show is broken down by food category – for lack of a better word – like pizza, tacos, or fried rice. Ugly Delicious, according to Mike Hale in the New York Times, is an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture. If you are interested in food, I would suggest it. Then we saw, Gentrified which follows the Morales’, an extended Mexican family, travails in trying to deal with the gentrification of their neighborhood, Boyle Heights in LA. Finally, late one night, very late, after watching the season finale of Hacks, a generational conflict comedy about a young woman helping revitalize an older woman’s career, we watched the same plot, in Late Night, with Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson.

What I walked away with was a new realization that – to use a gross collective, minorities, that is not even technically correct here, in Silicon Valley, where Europeans are only about a third of the total population – minorities spend a lot of time thinking about White People. Way more time than we – or I, at least – think of them. And they have to because this is a White Culture with White Rules, and White Standards. It seems to me that the difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Conservatives don’t want minorities to be full members of our National Club and Liberals do want those same minorities to be full members, as long as they play by the existing rules, which are our White rules. In reflection, the Olympics enforces that impression. I’m not sure if that is good or bad, but it does seem to be.

* a use of the word which I want to credit the great Denise McCluggage