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I seem to be hearing about privacy a great deal these days on the radio and in conversation. The discussions about privacy appear to focus on a loss of privacy due to federal legislation and corporate data collection.

About 99% of this discussion seems based on a fallacious notion of privacy. Let me state what privacy is. Privacy, to the extent that it ever existed, has a history starting in Greece and running through Western society via common law and the U.S. Constitution. Privacy refers to the physical non-public domain that exists in your personally owned domicile. Got it? That is what privacy is.

Let us explore this concept for a moment. When you step out of your home, you are in public space. Virtually nothing you do from that point on is private. Shopping is public. Buying and selling are public acts. Driving is public and so is the space inside your car because other drivers and pedestrians need to be able to see you and, for safety reasons, try to discern your intentions. Covering the rear side windows is OK but the police can still look inside the car for booze if they have probable cause.

Phone conversations are considered to occur in a private space derived from the earlier idea of sealed envelopes. Postcards are not private nor are their descendants, unencrypted emails, because they are considered “open” communication.

Don’t use politeness as a measure of privacy. It is rude to overhear other people’s conversation at a table next to you; but rudeness is not a genuine invasion of privacy.

If you are in a space for which you don’t have title, such as a friend’s home, you are riding on the friend’s domain of privacy. Similarly, if you rent an apartment or rent a hotel room, you have a contractual form of title and you have your own private space.

The borderlines in the definition of privacy are found in many areas. Going to the toilet in a public space, such as a department store, is not genuinely private (it is also not public although there is a presumption that a toilet conveys privacy). The toilet privacy can only be overridden by concerns about criminality.

Having an estate that is obscured from the public still doesn’t let you hunt on your own property because other notions (the free ranging wildness of animals) override privacy. Similarly, you can’t mistreat your children in a private space because children are presumed to have a future public societal role and they need to be protected.

When you shop on your phone or on the internet from your home, those transactions are public because you are figuratively reaching out of the private space.

With this clarity on the meaning of privacy, most concerns about privacy turn out to be irrelevant.

PostScript (1): to know how Western these notions of privacy are, one needs to stay in a Japanese minshiku (pension). I’ve had my room changed while I was out and when I returned I found that my belongings had all been very neatly moved to the new room. Shocking invasion of privacy to an American. Very thoughtful thing to do for a Japanese.

PostScript (2): In Sweden the laws about private property were changed in the 1970s. Anyone can pass over your land, anytime, and even camp on it, if it doesn’t disturb your peace. I felt very strange camping on the beach of a lake, knowing that I was on private property.

A monologue by Josh Kornbluth is reviewed in the NYTimes of Dec. 24th and the WSJ on the 26th. The performance is called “Love and Taxes.” I saw Kornbluth about ten years ago in his first performances with the title “Red Diaper Baby.” That monologue was supposed to be humorous. It referred to Kornbluth’s childhood in a communist family.
I found it hard to laugh at a story about people who in the 1960s and 70s were still apologists for Stalin. I left the performance early and made a mental note that Kornbluth was pathetic and off the looney left edge.

His new performance is about the fact that he didn’t file income tax returns for seven years and finally got caught with an $80,000 tax bill. A wealthy friend apparently loaned him the money to pay the taxes.

It is not dumb and its not a protest to forget to file your income taxes for seven years.

The problem with this Kornbluth story is my own memory.

Edmund Wilson, the literary critic for the New Yorker, wrote To The Finland Station, a pro Marxist history of communism, published in the early 1940s. Wilson, decades later, wrote a preface retracting his pro-Stalinism. The same Edmund Wilson was caught in the mid-1950s for failing to file income taxes for seven years. He gave no explanation except the one Kornbluth gave: ‘I forgot.’

There just seems to be something about the left as exemplified in these two men that combines cowardice, hatred of America and ideological blindness. It all comes out in failure to file income taxes. A strong person would be a tax resister, willing to go to jail for not filing. These are two sneaky wimps of the same breed, hoping to get away with something. They just don’t know what.

Noe Valley is the most Lefty part of San Francisco. The politics are very much like Berkeley. The photo on the left is the office of a Ronald Reagan realtor with an office in the middle of Noe Valley on 24th Street. The realtor, Harry Aleo, has a window full of anti-Lefty jokes, news clippings and sentimental old San Francisco photos. Harry calls his neighbors the “Looney Valley Liberals”.

The photo on the right is the second organic grocery in San Francisco, Real Foods. The store opened 31 years ago and closed on September 1st, this year. The founder’s daughter had run this store and two others most of their 30 year run and sold all three in 2003. The new owners closed the Noe Valley store with no notice to anyone, including suppliers, and said they were going to remodel. There appears to be no activity by the new owners to remodel or re-open the store.

The story has been told in the S.F. Chronicle. The original owner sold the Noe Valley store along with two other Real Food stores, in late spring for $2.7 to Nutraceutical (ticker NUTR)

Nutraceutical, of Park City, Utah, was founded in 1993 with the intention of creating a national organic chain to compete with Whole Foods. Nutraceutical has $125 million in stock market value.

Employees of the Noe Valley store started to organize a labor union in the spring. The sequence of events is not known, but it looks like a dozen of the employees wanted a union primarily for better benefits (read health coverage). The dozen employees was close to the majority of the non-management staff. Total staff was 30.

In Lefty Noe Valley, the employees were getting 100% neighborhood support. Understanding their fate, the owner of Noe Valley Real Foods appears to have promptly sold the whole three grocery chain.

The new Park City owners, fearing that unionization might spread to the two other Real Food stores and to their four other stores in the Bay Area, fired all 30 employees, closed the grocery and nailed it shut.

Now the neighborhood has no organic grocery, and none nearby.

In the three months Real Foods has been closed the neighbors have begun to realize what they lost. Now they have set up a Saturday morning organic outdoor market. I went to it the second Saturday they were open and they had under 900 people come through and 8 sellers. A small operation on a small lot.

You draw your own conclusions about commerce, unions and Lefty neighborhoods from this story.

This is the day after Xmas. San Francisco has a wonderful ice skating rink which is constructed every winter. We love it. The newly remodeled Ferry Building is in the background. The photo is on the right.

Just to the left of the ice rink is the Vaillancourt sculpture. (Photo on the left) The sculpture is a remarkable piece of prescient art. When it was built forty years ago it was described as ‘a freeway after a collapse.’ Well lo and behold, the freeway that was right behind it is now gone. After the 1989 earthquake, the Vaillancourt sculpture survived, but the Embarcadero freeway was badly damaged. The citizens hated the freeway because it blocked a beautiful view in the name of intercity transportation efficiency. San Franciscans prefer a beautiful view over intercity transportation efficiency .

The citizens won this battle and the sculpture became prescient art.

This photo on the right reflects two convivial triumphs.
When Union Square was rebuilt a few years ago, someone had the vision to put a coffee shop on one end of the Square. The coffee shop is first rate and people love it. It has outdoor seating most of the year.

The photo was taken from the 8th floor of Macy’s on the balcony of The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant with 178 menu items, many of them excellent. The outdoors rooftop view of Union Square and the wildly diverse pure San Francisco restaurant patrons are truly heartwarming.

Two strikes for commercially generated conviviality. Commerce is really good at making people happy.

The Federal Reserve of San Francisco has been undergoing safety construction for several years. The building is almost surrounded by steel and concrete posts to block car bombs from getting too close.

If you know what the Fed really is, you know how insane a terrorist organization would have to be to bomb it. The Fed does absolutely nothing. None of its more than a dozen offices do anything.

The building is filled with economists and their staffs writing reports. So is every other regional Fed. The entire operation of the Fed could be carried out by Alan Greenspan from his home phone. The Fed sets the rates on a queer little line of credit available only to banks. The rate is only symbolic. Nothing changes hands. The Fed also buys Treasury notes. But nothing changes hands and nothing is stored outside of a computer disk.

The Fed contracts with armored car companies to move currency around. But currency is stored in many places.

The Fed does nothing physical. Bombing it would have no effect on American daily life except the physical mess it would make.

The mad-cow problem is going to get bigger. Two reasons:

First, when Anne Veneman and the cattle industry tell Americans that ‘we have nothing to worry about’ just a few months after we banned beef imports from Canada for the same reason, the public knows we are being lied to. Just like teenagers who deliberately try drugs because adults lie to them, Americans are going to avoid beef more vigorously because we are being lied to.

Second, in my work on genetically engineered food, I saw several good food studies that made it clear Americans are very anxious about and distrustful of our food supply. Americans will overreact to the mad cow problem.

There is a silver lining.

While I personally feel great sympathy for the sick cows, (I really mean it, after traveling in India, I appreciate bovinity and love cows), we will end up getting more and better vegetarian restaurants in America.

On Tuesday evening I had dinner at a top rated S.F. restaurant, Campton Place. I had a wonderful parsnip soup which could have been vegetarian if the chef had left out the sweetbreads. There was a little guest service of wild mushroom soup with a porcini whip on top that was spectacular. There was no vegetarian entree.

So I asked for a vegetarian entree and the chef made a special creation for me, as any good chef should. The special creation was boring, trite and forgettable. Campton Place is not a top restaurant. It is only a top restaurant for old people, particularly old people from New York. ( New Yorkers are sentimental about food and like heavy sauce on everything.)

The real top restaurants in San Francisco are Masa’s followed at a distance by Elizabeth Daniels.

The Campton Place menu, with no vegetarian entree, will be a thing of the past, next year. Every good restaurant will have several vegetarian entrees and three or four high quality veggie restaurants will open up.

I mean vegetarian not ortho-novum, lacto-licky, food-hysterical eateries.

My friend Charlotte, in New York, was startled to hear the extent of anti-Semitism from the Left in San Francisco. Charlotte hasn’t seen it in New York. I immediately phoned my brother in Seattle to see what has been happening there and he says Seattle Lefties are exactly on the border of anti-Semitism and they could easily cross the line anytime.

San Francisco is the most Lefty city in America, followed by Seattle, Santa Monica and New York. (I’ve excluded Berkeley and other college towns from my list.) It shouldn’t be surprising that San Francisco has gone the furthest into Lefty anti-Semitism.

One consideration that has protected New York and Santa Monica is that both cities have strong and influential Jewish communities. Fear of Jews in those cities might restrain Lefty anti-Semities. That assumption is why I phoned Seattle to check out the situation there. Lefties are strong in Seattle and the Jewish community is small.

Jews are an old community in San Francisco and our power is not highly visible. Jews were among the first settlers. My great-grandfather Jacob Phillips came to San Francisco in 1852. He settled in the biggest nearby city of the time, Petaluma, and rapidly assimilated with the name Jack Phillips. Jack helped form the first synagog in Petaluma. The Jews met in the Masonic Lodge. The Lodge is still in the same place. Jews were so powerful and assimilated in San Francisco in the late 1800s that they founded the Bohemian Club. The Club is now considered the most elite networking club in America by Marxist class analysts. Jews left such an impact on San Francisco, over a century, that their names are on nearly everything in San Francisco from parks, to streets, schools, businesses and countless buildings.

In the recent past, San Francisco has become the epicenter of public anti-Semitism. I would give one reason. We are a Lefty community with an assimilated local Jewish community that doesn’t frighten the anti-Semities. In these conditions, the Left automatically becomes anti-Semitic. Lefties hate Starbucks, global commerce, America, big corporations, the elite, the media — the only thing missing to hate are Jews.

The photo at the right shows how Left San Francisco is. We just had an election where the winner, Newsom, is a liberal Democrat who favors expanded low income housing for the homeless. Many posters against Newsom portrayed him as a fascist Republican. The photo shows a poster in a window of the greediest man in the TV sitcom, the Simpsons, as a supporter of Newsom. The election was two weeks ago; the poster is still up.

The locus of Lefty Jew hate is pretty easy to identity: San Francisco State University.

As an aside, I can testify to the Leftiness of SFState. I was student body president in 1960. (That story will be told some other time.) The Lefty political group that started that year was called Slate. Slate started a year later at UCBerkeley and organized the free speech campaign. My fellow SFState students in 1960 were the ones famously hosed down the stairs of S.F. City Hall while protesting the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The wet students were nearly all from SFState, not Berkeley as the press erroneously assumed at the time.

The first big SFState anti-Semitic act that attracted my attention was in 1996 when a black painter created an official mural for the Associated Student Body organization that had an Israeli flag, swastika and dollar sign prominently on it. I went to see it and photographed the crowd which was virulently anti-Jew. The school never did anything about the mural except take it down during the Summer vacation.

From that time on, S.F State has been a center of anti-Jew hatred. Google ‘San Francisco State and swastika’ and you’ll get 251 entries. Google ‘San Francisco State and anti-Semitism’ and you’ll get 1,850 entries. Palestinians and other Arabs have regular joined a coalition of Lefties in anti-Israel, anti-zionist and anti-Jew riots. It happens almost monthly. The school has gotten into the habit of apologizing publicly. Some of the Google comments by Jews on the hatred they face at SFState are very poignant.

I have two Jewish friends who were professors at SFState. They both quit in the past four years because of the level of anti-Jew hatred in their classes and the absence of support from the faculty or the adminsitration.

SFState anti-Semitic hatred is found throughout the City.

The first peace marches last fall included many groups marching with pro-Palestinian signs and Arafat kafia’s and chanting “Palestine from the Jordan to the Sea.” There were thousands of people in these anti-Israel groups. When the speakers started, the speakers were even more vocal and called Jews ‘Nazi’s’ in an endless series of tirades.

Most of my peacenik Jewish friends never went to another peace march. The two rabbi’s who spoke at the first march never went back to another one. (Michael Lerner, a pro-Palestinian Jew, who spoke at the second big peace march was not allowed back to the third.) There were many signs in the crowd denouncing “the Jew media.”

In December last year, two local gay supervisorial candidates were divided on only one issue — Bevan Dufty was pro-Israel and the other, Eileen Hansen, was anti-Israel. Enough Jews voted to elect Dufty. Two weeks later Dufty joined me at a protest at the Rainbow Grocery Workers Coop which was refusing to stock items from Israel (only Israel, no other countries were banned).

The embargo was formally lifted six months later by a slim majority of the Coop’s employee members.

In the late Spring of this year, a women’s shelter called San Francisco Women Against Rape became visible following the discovery that interns and volunteers were required to participate in “political education discussions” that included “taking a stance against Zionism.”

In a July 9 email to the S.F. Jewish Bulletin, Nina Jusuf, the center’s executive director, described SFWAR as “an anti-Zionist organization.” Of course Jews didn’t know that. There were many Jews among the volunteers and a few among the clients.

Since the City of S.F. funds the women’s shelter, the City wrote the 2004 funding contract to ban anti-Zionist training.

This is just a taste of San Francisco Lefty anti-Semitism.

I repeat my opinion. Lefty ideology is inherently anti-Semitic — the more vigorous the leftism, the more anti-Semitic the adherents. Anti-Semitism, for a thousand years, has portrayed Jews as commercial vampires, business fiends and the elite of global capitalist imperialism.

The NYTimes (Dec. 24) business editors may have run over to BILL CARTER’s desk after he wrote the following first paragraph: “In a startlingly quick reversal of strategy, executives at the broadcast networks are disavowing their previous disavowals of reality programming.”

That is bold language, but it would be hard to say it better.

The WSJ on the same day headlined the print edition World News column with: “Mad-Cow disease appears to have arrived clangorously in the U.S.”

The WSJ ended the same column with: “No Bush pardons are expected this holiday season. With only 11 issued so far, he may go down as one of the least clement of presidents.”

The online version of both these paragraphs is traditional boring English.

Happy holiday English from two of our three national newspapers.

The city’s swimming pool in North Beach, at Lombard and Mason, has been torn down and everything but the roof is being replaced. The job will take until next summer, roughly a year and a half. The architect is a friend, Paulette Taggert, married to the owner of the William Stout design bookstore.
The reason the whole pool is being redone at a cost of just under $4 million is that one of the two pools in the building was sinking at one end. When I was swimming I could easily see that the water was below the hand rail on the shallow end and a foot over the hand rail at the deep end. I used to swim in this pool every weekday morning on my way to coffee in North Beach at Caffe Malvina. For the time being I am using the U. of San Francisco Koret Center pool. Modern, glossy and filled with yuppies. North Beach was very ordinary folk, including my 65 year old pal Jimmy, Chinese, who one day said the great thing about swimming is that he didn’t think.

The other location is at 50 Oak, next to the corner of Van Ness and Market. In the basement of the building, owned for a long time by the Archdioceses, was a swimming pool fed by an underground river. The underground river runs from my current house on the east side of Twin Peaks, joins an underground river near my old 1960s house on the north side of Twin Peaks in the lower Haight, then runs out into the Bay in China Basin. The underground river runs through several miles of sand most of the way, leaving it very clean. I was surprised in 1965 when the Health Department closed the pool and required that it use water from the City Water supply. I loved swimming in a pool fed by an underground river. My office was in the Bank of America diagonally across the street.

The quote that caught my eye was “Many of the new towers that now dot the skyline are far bigger than any office buildings Tokyo had before. Improvements in building technology have allowed developers to put up taller buildings that are able to withstand Tokyo’s frequent earth quakes” in the Dec. 10th Wall Street Journal.

I was reading the story because the building boom in Tokyo has been obvious for three years. This past summer, my partner and I saw that many of the towers were open. Friends told us that occupancy was filling up the new class A buildings. There were two reasons given: (1) large congruent floor spaces appealed to big Japanese corporations, and (2) the class A quality appealed to global companies looking for new corporate headquarters for their Asian offices.

The comment about improvements in building technology is intriguing. The new buildings in Shanghai, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand are also gigantic. When are we going to get our giant buildings in the U.S.?

I know sentimental San Francisco is never going to go for two-block-wide sixty story towers, no matter how beautiful.