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Security ambassadors making dent in Oakland crime - San Jose Mercury News : “OAKLAND, Calif.—Oakland officials are crediting the use of so-called "security ambassadors" with helping to clean things up a bit in the city's downtown. Since the eleven ambassadors hit the streets in early February, officials say they've booted out a drug dealer, helped police arrest a purse snatcher and are discouraging youths from hanging around the downtown area. Oakland Deputy Police Chief Dave Kozicki acknowledges the ambassadors are beginning to make a dent in low-level crimes.” -- I've never seen this presence in downtown Oakland. Where are they? And just 11 of them? I'm really in favor of helping people downtown get to know each other. That's the best deterent.

On March 24th , I wrote a short post on Economist and NY Times Columnist Paul Krugman Paul Krugman and created this video below. Today, in the wake of Newsweeks' rather unfortunate April Fools Day article on the Princeton Professor (which presented him as a kind of edgy intellectual but lacked real substance in the discussion of why Krugman is wrong about Obama), I decided to offer this expanded blog post. The problem is that Krugman is really angry that the Obama administration is and has ignored him and this emotion has driven a sloppy intellectual approach, paced by the fact that he's not presented a plan for our troubled banks, all the while taking an aim at the President's plan that has the effectiveness of a drunken sailor at an arcade shooting gallery. Who is Paul Krugman? Professor Krugman is a decorated International Economist, who recently - in 2008 - won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his solid theory on two-country trade. Here Krugman attacked t...

I created this video at the specific request of Tyson Chandler at CNN's iReport. The idea is to give viewers a look at the secret places in your town, so I made this one for Oakland:

Proposal Would Raise West Berkeley Skyline. Category: Front Page News from The Berkeley Daily Planet - Thursday April 02, 2009 : “City planning staff have dropped a bombshell on anxious West Berkeley activists: a proposal that would double the height of new buildings and potentially open the area to office complexes. The staff proposal, if enacted without changes, could mean a West Berkeley skyline studded with 90-foot-tall office towers—a host of buildings as tall as the area’s currently dominant high-rise, the Fantasy Records Building. Even some of the more developer-friendly commissioners had questions after Assistant Planner Claudine Asbagh presented the concepts, which are the latest round of a City Council-mandated effort to ease development rules in the only part of the city zoned for light industry and manufacturing. ” -- And drive the poor out of West Berkeley. What's the deal with Berkeley's planning staff? A drive for more property taxes?

From The Berkeley Daily Planet - Thursday April 02, 2009 The BART strategy is unfolding and it spells a grim future for the Oscar Grant case and potentially even more unrest. The BDP reports that BART lawyers are saying Oscar Grants own actions contributed to his murder. I find that hard to swallow and it's a terrible message to have released into the public given the existence of the cell phone videos. BART continues to make PR blunders one after the other.

I was in Guatemala last summer for a wedding. A friend of mine from high school was getting married to a Guatemalan woman. Her family is fairly well-off. They are also not as dark-complected as your average Guatemalan - an observation that is, of course, less uncomfortable for me to make than for my friend's wife. Driving around Guatemala City, I had noticed that the fashion and cosmetic ads on billboards usually showed women who were also lighter-complected than most of the people walking around the city, as is often the case in the global South. One day my friend was busy, but his just-betrothed had to go to the mall. I offered to drive her. On the way there I pointed to one of the billboards: "Juana," I asked, "who are all these white people on the billboards?" "There are light-complected Guatemalans, you know," she retorted. "Yeah," I said, "and all two hundred of 'em were at your wedding." In some ways I feel...

This phase of work, work, work is not done (and this is part of it) but not yet taking its toll. To make sure that doens't happen, I did two things: 1) I went to the gym and 2), I went out to just relax. The first thing, the gym, I do every day, or try too. I'm working to keep by weight below 200 pounds. I find I feel best at less than 196. Yesterday I was at 198. The second act was just plain going out. I wound up, as they say, at Luka's and ran into my neighbors and their friend who can dance up a storm. So, for the first time in a a while, I danced to some combination of "house" and reggae. Then, once enough sweat was produced to make think of my desire not to sweat a lot, I stopped, and fortunately so did they, and left. That was fun. It's also a blast to do it with people from your hood. Then I wound up at another place called Mua and ran into a couple I generally see at Cafe Ven Kleef. They had a friend in West Oakland who had a story tip f...