Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Sacramento Court Blocks County's $30 Million Santa Clara RDA Money Grab


It looks like the County isn't going to be buttering its bread with Santa Clara's $30 million.

Sacramento County Superior Court judge Lloyd Connelly granted the San Francisco 49ers' motion to block Santa Clara County from distributing disputed Santa Clara Redevelopment Agency money earmarked for stadium construction. On June 22, 2012, the Santa Clara Redevelopment Successor Agency Oversight Board voted 4-3 on an off-agenda motion to nullify the former RDA's contract with the 49ers to provide $30 million towards the Santa Clara stadium construction project.

Further, the Sacramento judge isn't buying Santa Clara County's inventive argument that contracts aren't enforceable if laws change, and is taking very seriously the Oversight Board's possible violation of California open public meeting law, the Brown Act. 

In his written decision, Judge Connelly explained that the restraining order was based on "a strong likelihood of the petitioner prevailing in this case, particularly on their Brown Act violation and contract termination claims." A hearing is set for July 27, 2012 at 1:30 p.m. and the judge said that he may rule on the merits of the case at that time.

The case, number 34-2012-80001192, can be found at can be found at www.saccourt.ca.gov

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Santa Clara Recognized for Good Governance Leadership


Once upon a time a city clerk's role was reactive: keeping the town records. Today, it's proactive, as city clerks are increasingly asked to drive good government programs and expand public engagement with local governance. It's not an understatement to say that city clerks are town CDOs – Chief Democracy Officers.

Last month the International Institute of Municipal Clerks (IIMC) recognized Santa Clara's leadership through the California Ethics and Democracy Project (CEDP, caethicsproject.com) – which had its start in city in 2007 – and City Clerk Rod Diridon's office with the 2012 Program Excellence in Governance Award.

The award was given at the IIMC's second ethics summit, held in Santa Clara, and is the Institute's highest program honor. Among Santa Clara's achievements are its founding role in the CEDP and the organization's first summit in 2009ß. 

The California Ethics and Democracy Project (CEDP) was created to share expertise, formulate best practices, and create an educational curriculum to teach the skills necessary to implement good government efforts, according to Santa Clara City Clerk and CEDP chair Rod Diridon, Jr. 

The CEDP's accomplishments include The Municipal Clerk Decision Roadmap and 6-Way Test for insuring that programs such as voter registration drives or get-out-the-vote campaigns are executed fairly and without bias. "Santa Clara has some of the best programs in the state, they’re a solid model,” says Diridon. “This collaboration helps us to be even more effective by learning what other communities find successful.”


A version of this story was previously published in the Santa Clara Weekly.

Great Sports Writing Still Alive at Santa Clara WEEKLY

One of my favorite Santa Clara WEEKLY features is Melissa McKenzie's Quakes Corner. And I'm not a sports fan. Melissa really makes the game come alive and reminds us that even in our always-connected, multi-media, anything anywhere age there's still nothing like great sports writing!

Monday, March 5, 2012

Santa Clara Stadium Closer to the Goal Line

Santa Clara County Superior Court rules that stadium financing resolutions are administrative. As "implementations" of Measure J they are not referend-able.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Conspiracy Con 2011: In Xanadu Did Kubla Khan/Satanic Mass Decree…


Douglas D. Dietrich is a striking presence. Part Chinese and Japanese, his face is one that you don't forget. If you sent to central casting for an oriental despot, or a James Bond villain, they'd send in Douglas Dietrich.

When you talk with him privately, Dietrich seems a gentle soul, with the antique gallantry of a bygone age. He's a veteran of Desert Storm and Desert Shield, born in Formosa to a Navy family.

I pick up a sense of betrayal behind his history and I ask about it. He feels his father was mistreated by the VA medical system and that the VA denied medical problems Dietrich suffered from his tours of duty in Iraq. This is hardly improbable.

Dietrich is also a compelling story-teller, and his rococo tales of diabolical practices at the highest levels of military power would stand to make him quite successful as a sci-fi novelist, scriptwriter, or graphic novelist. Except Deitrich doesn't present his dark stories as fiction.

Dietrich covers a lot of ground in his rapid-fire presentation. One minute we're in 12th century Japan, the next in 1945 Okinawa.

"In 1281 Kubla Khan invaded Japan [with]…over 70,000 Mongol marines armed with the Turkish composite crossbow…There was nothing the emperor could do but get down on his knees and pray to the ancestors. and they… answered. " Dun-de-dun-dun. "That was the kamikaze. The winds on that day were 150 mph and every single man on that fleet died. The Japanese told the Americans 'we can do that again.'"

This is a promising start for an Indiana Jones movie. But, instead of Hollywood-brand escapism, the next hour and a half is a whirlwind roundup of – I'm putting this as plainly as possible – satanic occult practices at the San Francisco Presidio army base, with tangential forays into Roswell and Nazi Germany. Before we're done, we'll make pit stops at the Dresden firebombing, the Holocaust, L.Ron Hubbard, and that noted Satanist Sammy Davis Junior.

Dietrich's central focus is Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, who, he says "served most of his time in Vietnam in his satanic chaplaincy…[and]wrote the diabolicon, a series of quatrains that were channeled through Lt. Col Aquino [via] seven demonic spirits."

I wonder what you call it when storytellers fail to distinguish between themselves and their stories. I don't mean to be flippant.

There's a pattern here that suggests something neurological. Conspiracy Con presentations share two characteristics: First, they're vast, unorganized data dumps. Second, individual sentences (the datum) have the outward characteristics of being statements that communicate information, but on examination are empty of content.

For example here's once-and-future-dentist Lennie Horowitz:

"It is the amount of disinformation and fear that undermines our ability to act …I know for sure that on the spiritual plane they're regulating the church of Satan through the Rothschilds. They're acting through infiltrators. And these infiltrators may not even know themselves that they are acting through MKULTRA. That's the only way I may be able to know that you are mind-controlled."

Or this from galactic historian and UFO abductee Stewart Swerdlow:

"The Illuminati are at the top of their food chain. It doesn't really matter who's in control…It's who allows them to be in control. If everybody takes responsibility for themselves and eliminates the piece of what they're projecting, the illuminati will have no power over you and will disappear from the face of the earth forever."

Or try this from chemtrail theorist Sofia Smallstorm:

When we look at an organization called MITRE, .you go to their website, and their mission is to set the goals and the template for the…IRS….and they contract with operation cloverleaf… and if you google USA today for  May 12…the reporters talk about a thousand particles on the head of a pin….Get those letters and know those individuals. Those are the cross directors of the enemy we have to deal with today."

Or this from self-described former Illuminati witch Doc Marquis (who suffers from the misfortune of an Elmer Fudd-like lisp): 

"Plans are in the making between 2013 and 2018….2012 is the smokescreen [he says "smokescween"]. I have fought over releasing this piece of information. What if on or about December 21st 2012 the usurper in the White House, who is a Muslim, is assassinated by a Jew…Everyone in the world would literally get involved. This is part of what may or may not happen."

Granted, I can't write fast enough to catch all the words, but, if anything, my redacted versions are more comprehensible than the originals.

But while I'm trying to capture this dizzying spectacle of flying information shrapnel, a war is brewing behind the scenes between conspiracist icons anti-vaccine crusader and former dentist Lennie Horowitz and shock-u-mentary maker and catastrophist Anthony Hilder.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Conspiracy Con 2011 - The Live Blog - True Otts and Conspiracy Gaming


My first stop is to catch the tail end of Len Horowitz and Sherri Kane who are ranting about…well, I'm not sure what. Something about "True Ott" and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. "Now that we know that truth about this…we had to ask Brian Hall for extra security. We're not going to stay around for obvious reasons."

Horowitz is a dentist who found he could make a lot more money selling new age cures to the gullible than doing root canals. Unlike most of the people here, he's tan and fit and looks more likely to be shilling for Thigh Master than Rebirthing Ourselves in the Creator's Image.

I'm not even going to try to understand what's going on. So I duck out and stop by Steve Jackson Games where, in my now-softened frame of mind, I part with 40 devalued fiat federal reserve "dollars" for "Illuminati: The Game of Conspiracy."

The card deck features eight illuminati cards – The Bavarian Illuminati, The Gnomes of Zurich, etc. – 83 "group" cards – fast food chains, the FBI, etc. – 15 "special" cards – market manipulation, murphy's law – two black dice (with white dots), and a 16-page instruction book. The object of the game is to control the world. That's about as far as I get.

The more interesting part of the conversation is with a young man named Christopher Gordon, who looks like the host of an MTV music video countdown but who is in real life a mortician. His take on his profession is anything but grim.

Indeed, we're all going to die and Gordon sees his role as supplying a more natural and affordable way to go than the American Way of Death. Before I leave he presses a handful of DVDs on me in hopes that he can persuade me to see the light. One is titled "Henrick Palmgren interviews Michael Tsarion, David Icke PLUS 67 OTHER INTERVIEWS IN 8 DAYS OF AUDIO ON MP3'S."

If nothing else, this cabal promotes a degree of multi-partisanship unseen anywhere else in the political spectrum. I ask: Where else can you find Phyllis Schlafley's Eagle Forum cheek-by-jowl with Democrats Against UN Agenda 21, the MUFON Symposium, and the Green Party?

The next stop is Douglas Dietrich, where I take 2,000 words of notes and wonder about the origins of psychosis. 

Conspiracy Con 2011 - The Live Blog


Dateline: Conspiracy Con, Santa Clara, CA
June 4, 2011 

Ominously, it's raining today. Really raining. Now, heavy rain is an extremely low probability event in Santa Clara in June. And you might be tempted to point to it as evidence of (take your pick):
  1.           Global warming
  2.          The global chemtrail conspiracy
  3.          Project HAARP global weather manipulation conspiracy
Which makes it a perfect note on which to begin live-blogging from Conspiracy Con. That's because it illustrates the predominant fallacies that will be on display for the next 48 hours:

o   Sweeping generalization: It's June and it's raining in Santa Clara. Rain is unusual in June in Santa Clara. Therefore, something unusual is going on.
o   Straw man: Weather manipulation would cause unusual storms. We are having an unusual storm. Therefore the weather is being manipulated.
o   Causal oversimplification: Global warming is the cause of unseasonable weather, rather than a cause.
o   False cause: It's raining. Conspiracy Con is this weekend. Therefore Conspiracy Con caused the rain. 

Actually, the 2010-2011 rainfall year has been – get ready for this – exactly average. And while heavy rain in June is a low-probability event, it's not a zero probability event. In fact, while May 2011 temperatures averaged 7 degrees below normal, so did May 2010 temperatures. And, rainfall for the year at the end of May was slightly below normal.

In other words, today's weather proves exactly…nothing.

So with that note of skepticism, it's time to take a deeper dive into the murky pool that is Conspiracy Con.