Opinion

There’s bad news today in the Planet’s old neighborhood in south Berkeley. Kenny Warren, nephew of Don Warren who’s been running the very popular Don’s Headquarters barber shop on Shattuck for four decades, was gunned down last night as he stood on the balcony at a friend’s apartment on Emerson, around the corner from the shop.

The gunman is reported to have fired many many rounds of bullets, perhaps as many as 80, from a pair of automatic weapons, the super-lethal variety which make it possible for any fool, without need for target practice, to hit his mark with at least one bullet. Forty shell casings were recovered from the sidewalk alone.

We say “his” mark here because neighbor accounts suggest that the shooter, like his victim, was a young African-American man. This is sad but not surprising. -more-

Don Warren, uncle of Kenneth Warren, who was gunned down on Thursday night next door to Don's HeadQuarters barbershop in Berkeley, said today that a fund for the victim's five children is being established. Don asked anyone who would like to contribute to send an email with contact information to warren.fund@berkeleydailyplanet.com and they will be contacted when the fund has been set up, probably early next week. -more-

Anyone interested in Israel or high tech funding might want to take a look at this piece, which touts an upcoming conference sponsored by U.C. Berkeley's Law School to promote investment in Israeli technology companies. -more-

The giant whoop-de-doo over Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's decision to expand its bioscience research to U.C. Berkeley's Richmond Field Station is mind-boggling. Front page headline in the metro daily! Dog Bites Man--Read It Here!

What's mysterious is why such a fuss was made in the first place with purported consideration of other sites, given that the university already owned this obviously perfect site. The only explanation that makes sense is that it's The Planners' Full Employment Stimulus Program, given that hundreds of thousands of dollars were expended on fancy video-enhanced bids that, rightfully, should never have had a chance.

What if—just what if—the powers that be at the two UC-related players had simply announced that "we own a lovely site down by the bay, and we're putting our new labs there"? Period.

Who could cavil? Just sayin'. -more-

[Editor's Note: This is the second part of a two part series. Part One can be found here.]

Progressive observers treat the Tea Party’s forays into land use planning as the work of paranoid reactionaries. The March-April 2011 issue of Mother Jones ran an article by Stephanie Mencimer that portrayed Tea Partiers as “nutters” whose opposition to increased density and mass transit is rooted in “a hostility to what it sees as elites” and a pro-sprawl, suburban lifestyle. Last December, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Anthony Flint riffed off of Mencimer’s piece in a post on the Atlantic magazine’s “Urban Wonk” blog that decried Tea Party disruption of planning efforts from California to Maine to Florida.

The truth is more complicated. Pace Rosa Koire, to attack smart growth as part of an international plot guided by the U.N.’s Agenda 21 really is to espouse conspiracy theory. To denounce “human-caused global warming” as a myth, as does the East Bay Tea Party, is to indulge in perilous denial. But to claim that land use planning is often run by unresponsive elites is to tap reality. Flint himself intimated as much: “Some might wonder,” he wrote, “whether there’s some truth” to accusations that “planners have draped the public process with the trappings of citizen input, while in fact all the decisions to promote smart growth have been made.”

Some do more than wonder, and they’re not all members or even “fellow travelers” of the Tea Party—for example, longtime Berkeley community activist Doug Buckwald. Speaking at the Dublin open mike, Buckwald assailed Plan Bay Area for discriminating against dissenters from smart growth doctrine. He said that a friend had tried to register for a workshop online at 7:30 am the day that registration opened, only to be told that the meetings were filled, and that she would be placed on a waitlist. She never got a confirmation from MTC, but she did receive letters from Greenbelt Alliance urging her to sign up and hold the line against opponents to the process who were poised to flood into the meetings. -more-

An article by John Blake (a writer for CNN) attempts to create a controversy where there is none and to portray Martin Luther King Jr., as not being accepting of gay people. This is in line with CNN's tendency to be manipulative of public opinion and to do so through casting clouds of doubt in the absence of facts. -more-

Oakland, CA--Saturday, January 28, 2012, Sheila and I joined about 1,500 members of Occupy massed at 14^th and Broadway in downtown Oakland. Occupy Oakland’s announced intention was to march to and occupy a long vacant building “somewhere” in the city to re-create a living, working, and coordinating center for this young “politics on the fly” movement for the rights of the 99%. As you probably know, previous occupations of public space from coast to coast have been destroyed and precluded by Government ordered police actions, making community development, collaboration and participatory mass democracy yet more difficult. -more-

The Mayan prophecy that the world will end in 2012 has spawned hundreds of books, films, plays and satires. Although the public fascination with apocalyptic stories does not necessarily translate into real belief, I admit to secretly subscribing to an alternative vision of a 2012 apocalypse—one where the world is cleansed of tyranny, colonialism, and totalitarianism. -more-

Friends and family who know me well know how I would love to hibernate in winter. I am just not a winter person, and I would never contemplate stepping out of the house on a rainy day, especially these days when my falls have become unpredictable. Last Sunday seemed to be a nice sunny day, but by noon it turned to be a very rainy and wet day. The Jerusalem children’s orchestra of the Edward Said National Conservatory was scheduled to perform at the Cultural Palace in Ramallah, and the next day at the National Theatre in Ramallah. I already made up my mind to go the next day to Jerusalem and avoid the drive through Kalandia where the road ends up more like a river when the heavy rains fall. But alas the last minute the concert in Jerusalem was cancelled because the children from the West Bank were not granted permits. -more-

Is Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, he who roams the nation promoting vicious anti-immigration laws and ordinances a latter day Julius Streicher? -more-

The Curmudgeon Light was shining on the side of the Campanile the other night, my signal from Planet Editor Becky O’Malley that she wanted me to check in after she’d gotten copies of some emails I’d sent to councilmembers.

“Write something satirical, Curmudge,” Becky ordered, referring to the stultifying subject of voter redistricting, the process of redrawing election districts that follows every decennial census. But how can you be funny about something like redistricting? -more-

Thank you for Gar Smith’s excellent and detailed review of Addiction Incorporated (Addiction Incorporated: The Other Insider 1-17-2012 ) at the Shattuck Cinemas.

The tobacco industry’s manipulation of the public, cigarette additives, and the scientific community is still going on, and this movie does a great job of telling whistleblower Victor DeNoble’s insider story of doing research at Philip Morris like the great suspense thriller it is.

But the film leaves out a big part of the tobacco story – the dogged, dedicated citizens, parents, public health professionals, policymakers, teachers, casino workers, truck drivers, musicians and others who continue to fight ordinance by ordinance, city council by city council, for clean air despite the billions the tobacco industry spends to try to thwart common sense public health policy. -more-

For the last several years, Berkeley Budget SOS has attempted to focus our City government on the realities of Berkeley’s financial crisis; unfortunately, our pleas for fiscal reality and transparency have fallen on deaf ears. During 2011, most Berkeley City leaders appear to have remained deluded by the comments of Councilman Laurie Capitelli, who proclaimed “We are in better fiscal shape than virtually any other jurisdiction in the Bay Area and I would suggest even California”. The fallacy of that comment was repeatedly evident last year. The chickens have indeed come home to roost. -more-