All the World's a Stage

A political show in Oakland for a new US Vice Presidential candidate and a Silly Valley Tech Boys crash course

3/27/2024

Broke my lifetime ban of never giving any politician cash by paying $2 to attend the 3/26/2024 US Vice Presidential candidate announcement in Oakland, California for the new “We the People” party of Robert F. Kennedy. I’d never been to a political rally of any kind and thought it might be an historic moment or at least entertaining. When the VP pick was announced, her name did not ring any bells for me. Neither did her face when she appeared. I listened to what Kennedy said about her, watched the slick video about her, and heard her speak. Walked out thinking: interesting pick. Very young but she exceeds the US Constitutional presidential age minimum. She seems smart and closely tracks Kennedy’s core concerns.

She mentioned repeatedly she is “wealthy” leaving me the impression she’d earned her wealth in high tech doing software for law and other businesses. Lawyer and entrepreneur. A daughter of immigrants from China and Ireland. A tough childhood with a father unable to keep employed, living on food stamps. Serious mental and substance abuse in her nuclear family. A mention of St. Mary’s in the Oakland area indicating maybe raised Catholic. A mother of an autistic child. Extremely thin. Maybe a metabolism issue or anorexia? A marathon runner? Ah!, a surfer who surfed with Kennedy. At the candidates’ final waves to the audience in person and online a man appeared at her side so I presumed he was somehow related to her. I thought maybe I missed his introduction.

I’d been in the standing room only area for a couple hours. Happily sat on the floor for a lot of the event. Spent as much time watching the crowd as the speakers. The dance of photographers, reporters, and security people. Spotted the campaign workers loudly clapping in the four corners of the hall and passing out flags, signs, and printed exercise towels. Were those white and blue towels intended to be waved like rally flags at a professional sporting event?

Mostly a Caucasian audience but a mix of people I’d describe as one third each Ds, Rs and independents. Easily over 90% cheered the loudest when anything was mentioned about medical freedom. A crowd wanting the right to say, “NO!” to any injection mandated by law or an employer. Second loudest cheers were for any statements supporting a God-given (i.e. not from the whims of royalty or a bureaucrat), inalienable, and unqualified right to Free Speech. Big cheers erupted for an end to government censorship and its corporate proxies quashing citizens, corporations doing speech under government pressure or payments, and an end to any other kind of corporate influence on our laws and regulations such as President Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 Farewell Address for the dangers from the military-industrial complex which loves to start and continue wars.

I thought the VP pick seems fine. I walked to a late lunch nearby holding a campaign sign and chatted up anyone expressing interest in those candidates and met many like me carrying the signs.

An office worker in a pressed white shirt and tie outside the county courthouse. His eyes went wide when I said she grew up in Oakland and depended on food stamps as a child.

Walking to a restaurant with a couple who knew her at St. Mary’s told me they knew ahead of time the event had been moved from the smaller Scottish Rite Temple to the Kaiser Convention Center as the ticket sales rose. I’d noticed a day or so before the rally tickets for students with i.d. became free. Another rally goer at the restaurant was wearing the most political buttons I’d ever seen on someone. ‘Merica!, he made me smile.

In the nearby BART Lake Merritt station as I waited for a train home I met an older man from, I think, Vietnam or Cambodia who had long not bothered to vote in any recent US Presidential election thinking all the choices were horrid. He said after we’d been chatting on a bench for a few minutes he might now vote for the “We the People” candidates and tell his friends, too, about them.

All I met were curious, polite, and nice but for one woman who shook a small homemade cardboard sign in my face following along with me for a while as I was walking to the political event before it started. For the first time in my life I was wearing a political campaign lapel button. I’d gotten it for free at a July 4, 2023 parade. She was shaking with rage. Demanded to know “HOW can YOU support HIM?!?” Her sign said “BIDEN HARRIS.” I put on an Old South accent and said slowly in my most ladylike manner, “Bless your heart!” with a big smile and did not break my stride.

***

The night before I’d read about the last days of Kennedy’s father seeing if I could find clues why he was making his VP announcement in Oakland. Learned how after his father jumped in the 1968 race, President LBJ pulled his name out of the running. That many states did not hold a primary planning instead to use their super delegates to rubber stamp the incumbent US President or when he exited the race unexpectedly planned to vote for his VP, Hubert Humphrey. A campaign season and an election planned by party bosses using party rules to prevent any challengers to their selected figureheads.

Just like in September 2023 when the Democrat National Party, Incorporated’s rules committee (with longtime committee member James Roosevelt III, grandson of FDR) ruled any D candidate campaigning in New Hampshire who got voted August 2024 DNC convention delegates by the “Live Free or Die!” State’s populace would not have any New Hampshire delegate votes because The Party wanted to punish it after daring to keep its first-in-nation primary day. A State with a long tradition of retail politics where candidates have to press a lot of flesh to get any votes. Not a good place for their man in the White House who routinely has his staff “call a lid” at 10 am or so in the morning for the end of his day’s public appearances. Why the lid? What explanation could there be other than daily medications or lack thereof making him unpresentable? A man incapable of readng a teleprompter without serious gaffes.

No difference one iota from old New York City’s Tammany Hall of outrageously corrupt boss politicians, any crime syndicate mafia, or narco-terrorist operating by force and intimidation. Lots of puppet masters pulling strings from dark closets attached to compliant dumb go-along puppets.

In 1968, Humphrey did not bother to debate Kennedy, Sr. He and the Democrat Party likely thought Kennedy was a non-starter when he lost the Oregon primary. But then days later he won the California primary and within hours he was assassinated. Humphrey waltzed into the DNC nomination in August 1968. A DNC challenger McGovern was “outed” four years later in 1972 for having sought psychotherapy in the past. Message loud and clear to anyone challenging party bosses of both the Ds and Rs: challenge us and you’re dead or your political career is ruined.

Kennedy, Jr. talked at his VP announcement about his father campaigning in California in 1968. A tense meeting in Oakland with the Black Panthers and Willie Brown, then a State Assemblyman and future State Speaker and Mayor of San Francisco. Kennedy did not mention Willie being well known in California for having current US VP Kamela Harris as his young mistress while he was still married, nor about his roll as a political mentor for her rise from that sexual relationship to her elected jobs as a lawyer and US Senator.

Instead, he talked about how his father sat through a long day of Willie and others attacking him with vicious verbal jabs. So angrily, all his advisors said he should be a no-show for the second day of the planned meeting. “No,” his father said. I need to listen to them. Let them attack me. What they are saying and feeling is important. The next day Willie and the others all said they would endorse him. They’d clearly appreciated that he had listened to them with full respect wanting to know what they truly thought. Willie became a king maker that day when his endorsement helped push RFK, Sr. to victory in the do-or-die 1968 California primary.

RKF, Sr. displayed in Oakland simple real human decency and courtesy. An adherent to the USA’s Founding Fathers’ idea that Free Speech is required for any functioning republic. Let the marketplace of ideas thrash out what are good or bad ideas. That no political leaders should ever censor political speech of any kind. Sticks and stones can hurt me but words never will, goes the old saying I learned before kindergarten.

I travelled home wondering if Kennedy is angling for Willie Brown’s endorsement. Would Willie throw his ex-mistress under a bus if Kennedy’s Free Speech and medical freedom platform resonates while the Biden-Harris administration has been actively censoring not just political but also medical speech now for over three years as it slowly loses ever more court cases challenging that censoring.

When winds change which sailing ships fight it with magical thinking like boss-politics-will-last-forever. Or turn into the new wind and tack? In 1968, Willie openly torpedoed his Democrat political bosses when he saw Humphrey did not represent the changing times. Most under age 35 or outside California know him only as a historical footnote as the man whose mistress became US VP. I doubt that’s what he wants in his obituary as he enters his 90th year.

***

Got home and looked at the photos I’d taken and surfed online for more information about the new VP candidate, Nicole Shanahan.

Found out a great deal of her “wealth” likely came from a brief marriage with Google Founder Sergei Brin. A flurry of gossiping stories about he said, she said, and unnamed witnesses said about an affair or friendship with Elon Musk. A bunch of stories about her meeting a man at Burning Man 2022 and about a year later having a druid “handfasting” ceremony with him after her divorce from Brin was finalized. If she is seriously Catholic she’d not marry again unless her first marriage is annulled or Brin dies. Mystery solved who was that man with her on the podium.

After the event ended I walked the perimeter of the hall to see what might be interesting. Found the VIP section with chairs and quickly snapped two photos of it simply to show the whole area and a zoom on a “reserved” seat sign. Once home I realized I’d caught in the first row an older Asian lady sitting by two small children in matching clothes. A possible bodyguard and nanny. Right where Shanahan looked when she talked about her mother and children with the most profound look of true love in her eyes.

I love the look in that older lady’s face. She reminds me of a wise and experienced empress who has learned how to see through anyone doing an act at anytime. A fierce defender of her family.

Another photo. Several bags of Chik-fil-A takeout food by the big video camera and teleprompter corral. A statement by some of the audio, visual and lights crew they support Trump?

A photo of a print reporter interviewing an older gentleman. A few photographers with “PRESS” on the back of their black vests. I’d not seen any national or local TV network camera crews. No network satellite trucks outside with any mainstream news company logos. Guess who is being shadow banned!

On my BART train home I noticed only two people not thumbing a cell phone or zoned out with ear buds. Me, as I watched the view go by and observed my fellow passengers, and one young man reading a hard cover book as he sat wearing reflective sunglasses. Many USA citizens today get their news not from the major TV networks or major newspapers but from online alternative sources. Tucker Carlson gets more viewers on his own online broadcast channel for his big interviews than just about all the broadcast TV networks combined get most days. Breaking news cycles are now lightening fast.

I checked my local traditional news about the VP announcement. Most ignored it. Or lazily regurgitated trash talk that Kennedy is merely a whack job anti-vaxxer disdained by most of his blood family. His running will only help the scary-evil-misongenistic-racist-orange-man-bad-Russia-lover Trump. Some sexual innuendo gossip about the new VP candidate. Many news items how Kennedy only wants her for her cash to help his campaign.

***

A good night’s sleep and as the Sun rose I dug down to see who Shanahan might actually be. What makes her tick? I have an advantage having watched for over a decade her ex-husband, that Googler husband’s ex-wife, and her Alleged Affair subject as neighbors and thanks to some flying activities, too. My disadvantage was I stopped reading any celebrity gossip such as from the Vanity Fair magazine in 2018 and threw out my TV in 2021 which is why when her name was mentioned at the Oakland event I had no idea who she was.

So. The first Mr. and Mrs. Sergei and Anne Wojcicki-Brin bought a large piece of land in Los Altos Hills and built a new house with a massive garden. They proceeded to plant a thick perimeter of trees, shrubs, and fencing and quickly became cash cows for some Democratic presidential candidates and every sitting Democratic president. Lots of road blocks when Presidential caravans blasted down the nearby Foothill Expressway to milk the well domesticated local cows… in a State by the time Bill Clinton was US President had Willie Brown on a boss politics gallop amending all sorts of California laws to try to have a Democrat Party (Inc.) Rules Forever-n’-Always Capitol. The only serious opposition to Willie’s plan has been the successful ballot initiative funded by a son of Berkshire Hathaway’s late Charles Munger which curbed some of the worst California-D party election distruct gerrymandered maps. After the next US Census and new election districts maps were drawn, California started sending mail-in ballots to everyone possible. Ask once for an absentee ballot and one could not stop those hitting your mail box year after year. After the 2020 Pandemic hit everyone in the Golden State got permanent mail-in ballots and a bit later during the California Governor Newsom Recall ballots could be printed at home. Guess who’s getting desperate?

When the internet took off in the academic and then corporate world by the mid-1990’s, suddenly Silicon Valley known for making computer hardware and chips was raking in cash by computer clicks with an avalanche of highly marketable and lucrative personal info data. In the early 1990’s I used the Internet in academia getting one of my grad school’s first email accounts and used the only available search engines. One was called Gopher at U Minnesota and the other called Mosaic at U Champlain-Urbana, the latter run by a student who later started Netscape with a Stanford professor.

Sergei Brin and Larry Page’s simple Internet search engine company, Google, went seemingly overnight from a rented garage on Bay Road in Menlo Park to crushing its competition from AOL, Netscape, and Yahoo. Brin married Anne Wojcicki, the sister of his office’s garage landlady Susan who was a young marketeer for chip making powerhouse Intel. Susan became Google’s marketing manager as employee #16 and then CEO of YouTube after Google bought it. I know personally at least one other under - #16 Googler. I’ve also done business with a few other early employees. That company had no room at the tippy top other than for those 2 boy founders.

A few blocks from the Brins’ Los Altos Hills home is the town of Los Altos where I have my office. Noticed when they set up their tax-dodge family foundation office on First Street near State Street. They/it started buying up every possible building on State Street and some on First Street. Bought a small old house on First Street and opened Bumble Cafe designed for parents with small children. I ate there exactly once to see the scene. It was closed a few years ago and sits vacant.

It was no secret the Brins had young children. But one never sees their faces or names in the news. Many such parents pay massive amounts to scrub the internet of such information. I know a lot of local people whose children and themselves are kidnap targets. Right there on the corner of Main Street/Burke Road of Los Altos and Foothill Expressway was the home of one of the founders of Adobe Software who was kidnapped from his office and held for ransom. He and his family never shut their big gate to the street. They lit up their big old Italianate home on holidays and decided not to live in fear until they sold the home a few years ago and downsized for their elder years. His company co-founder lives a few blocks away in a house no one can see from the street but for a tiny bit of roof.

As if a light switch had turned off, one day every property owner I knew in downtown Los Altos who had standing offers from the Brins or their proxies to buy their properties got the silent treatment. It was around the time of their long separation and then divorce process. Or, were there simply too many new vanity businesses in the many nicely updated storefronts they owned? I rarely saw anyone in their Steinway piano tenant’s showroom. I never bothered to verify who owned the Hiroshi restaurant on Main Street which only has one serving when open, at one table, you eat what the chief serves at an astronomical cost with no menu, a discrete entrance from the back parking lot, and a hard-to-see-the-door front entrance.

Work stopped on a big two story commercial space building they owned on State Street with plans to convert part of it to a family-friendly bowling alley with a hamburger joint and private offices above. The space was finally finished a couple years ago with a fancy restaurant in the expected bowling/hamburger space. A series of a few more short-term vanity businesses downstairs plus a food court which has had a couple of failed vanity business, too.

I watched the first Mrs. Brin’s 23 & Me genetic ancestry business begin. She was photographed for a local newspaper outside her then thriving Bumble business with a bike talking about how she biked to work. Hmm… that’s many miles away to the new-ish 23 & Me designer headquarters building in Sunnyvale. Does her company make more money from processing ancestry customers’ cheek swabs or selling that genetic data to governments, big pharmaceutical companies, and others around the world?

Like Google. Does it make more money selling ads and thru-clicks or by selling personal data on its users to governments and companies?

Or Elon Musk and his car company. Is he really making money selling cars or by parts & service? By collecting data from the cars for use in mapping roads for autonomous cars, pinging buy-me ads to cell phones of those in the cars, and selling people using his cars his Starlink communication services? And what, pray tell, is his tunneling Boring Company doing nowadays?

I noticed when Google signed a contract with “NASA” to have exclusive private aircraft rights to land and park executive planes at the former Moffett Naval Air Station right after the Navy moved out when the Cold War ended. In return, the press release said, for occasionally flying NASA sensors and some cash rent to the USA. Google got effectively a private airport smack in the middle of Silicon Valley with runways long enough to land a 747.

I used to fly at the Moffett Navy Flying Club and spent many evenings in the airport terminal building. I was there before and after NASA-Ames at Moffett moved all its air ops to its facility at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. There while Clinton was President when someone in the airport ops terminal office would always leave on top of his or her desk the cleaning paperwork for Hillary Clinton’s military jet. It was not amusing as a taxpayer to see the paperwork when she would arrive in a separate jet from her husband’s when they were visiting (publicly together) their Silly Valley cash cows or their daughter at Stanford University. As a pilot, I’ve flown in a small owner-operated executive Citation jet and in a government helicopter. Those are a heady experience. Easy to think you are king or queen of the universe. The world at your beck and call.

So. Sergei Brin and his partner Larry Page had a private airport. The local news was full of stories of their big new airliner sized jet parked at Moffett. Anyone could see it often parked at Moffett from Interstate 101. It was dubbed the “Lolita Express” because at that time at least one of them, IIRC, was unmarried and reports were it had a double sized bed aboard. I thought: watch out boys! You are going to fall for a honeytrap at this rate. You do NOT want someone to have that kind of power over you for blackmail purposes.

I watched ever more Google buildings be built on and around Moffett. Many by the US Department of Defense semi-secret buildings at Moffett on NASA-Ames land. During recent Free Speech lawsuits against US government censorship of the internet for news about the pandemic, some political candidates and elected ones, Google was shown in evidence to have actively colluded with US government agencies to suppress Free Speech.

When I was a child, it was well known that NASA was used as a cover story for many Lockheed Missiles & Space contracts with the CIA and US Air Force to build and launch our nation’s first spy satellites: the Corona series. All were designed and built in buildings mostly right next door to Moffett. Ditto Lockheed’s nuclear missiles for US Navy submarines. Lockheed also built and ran the “Blue Cube,” the USA’s spy satellite tracking and control main facility on a corner of Moffett land at interstates 101 and 237. Called the Sunnyvale Air Force Station and then named Onizuka after a NASA astronaut killed by a shoddy rocket O-ring. A facility torn down and relocated only after the Cold War ended. Lockheed has now moved most of its Silicon Valley personnel to be near the Space Force headquarters in Colorado and the military headquarters for Homeland Defense in Florida.

The first US Corona spy satellite rockets were launched beginning in 1959 all painted “NASA” in big letters. Press releases with launch photos saying they were all simple NASA exploration satellites called “Discoverer.” Some carried monkeys in an elaborate cover story. The poor animals often died with no press releases. A couple dozen Corona launches used the “NASA Discoverer” cover story until the CIA leaders realized no one in the US public noticed or cared, and the Soviets had never been fooled.

When Corona satellite imagery was declassified by the 1990’s I bought some of its imagery from the US Geological Survey offices’ map shop in Menlo Park. Those USGS mapping office now are at Moffett Field as are some Google Map offices.

The Coronas’ spent booster rockets in orbit, the Agenas (also built by Lockheed), were used as rendezvous targets for NASA’s manned mid-1960’s Gemini program. The Cold War’s Space Race’s military/spy agency industrial complex is just like today’s info tech/spy industrial complex. And, whadaya know! In the very same physical locale.

One weekend sunny day I sat in my car in downtown Sunnyvale on top of a multi-story garage watching private jets on short final inbound to Moffett. There were so many it was unusual. Normally on such a weekend day I’d only see California Air National Guard planes and helicopters with pilots doing recurrency flying. I pulled out my camera and started taking photos. A neon lime green small jet! I’d never seen that one before. Later that day it was national news a Google founder had a fancy birthday party at or near Moffett. Reports were Elon Musk got on a knee and swore he’d not had an affair with the birthday boy’s(?) or his company co-founder’s(?) wife. I didn’t think anything more about that until I read about Ms. Shanaham’s life story.

***

It is a brutal fact in Silicon Valley that many of the software “tech bros” are pasty-faced boys who never mentally grew much beyond the age of two. “Toy! I want it. NOW!!!” They buried themselves in computer screens before they hit puberty when human brains learn how to read body language, especially detailed facial body language. Many as adults are said to be on the autism spectrum but I think many are simply mentally handicapped unable to read complex or subtle body language thanks to critical brain wiring missed during puberty. In negotiations face-to-face they can easily be read and rolled like someone at a poker table with glaringly obvious “tells.” I’ve met a few tech women with the same issues but they are rare.

Most women with integrity can’t put up with those boys for long especially once they boys start acting like an Ottoman sultan who thinks all women on the planet want to be in his harem or his servants. He wants an open marriage while she, especially if of child bearing age, usually does not. Thus, I can easily believe Ms. Shanahan and Mr. Musk might have just established a close friendship made by talking about their autistic offspring and what they could do to help their own children and others like them. Meanwhile, I have lost count of the number of different children, wives and partners Mr. Musk has had and ditto for Mr. Brin, including one who made the cover of Vanity Fair magazine’s April 2014 issue (not Ms. S.).

l’m no Puritan. I believe everyone is entitled to a private life and consenting adults can do what they like with each other. If I see something I don’t like I will simply not look or walk away.

Do US citizens expect their Presidents and VPs to be ideologically the same from birth and sexually squeaky clean? With only one spouse or lover in their lifetime? Never to have made stupid mistakes in retrospect? Nope.

FDR died with his long time mistress in Georgia. JFK was a notorious hound dog as was more than one his brothers. LBJ had longtime “paramours.” Carter was a pincher of women’s rear ends. I got that from a retired federal lawyer who worked with the Secret Service. Just look at the photos with those agents’ wives the first Carter Christmas staff party and none the next year. Reagan’s first wife dumped him in disagreement over his political work as he changed from D to R. Each was smart never saying in public a bad word about the other after divorcing, very good for their two children. Need I bring up which President under oath insisted fellatio is not “sex” or which one has had 3 wives, the middle one a mistress carrying around a wedding gown in a traveling bag trying to get a ring & a date. Or which is accused of showering with his own daughter repeatedly when she was a child and makes beelines to any child to sniff its hair, especially female children approaching them often from behind. Did I need to learn about pedophilia vocabulary from news stories involving “pizza parties” at the White House?

I believe in second chances after true repentance. After nearly a half century in residential real estate work in Silly Valley, I know well how many who got divorced don’t understand exactly why their marriages fell apart when the dust settles. Then, in their old age they are often alone wondering why their children or other family members avoid them. I’ve also seen many successful marriages and I stand back and applaud them for the hard work that takes by two people wanting their family life to be better and striving to get there. Just like everyone running now for US president or vice president. Each pair will have different ideas how to do it and why.

Not sure yet if I will ever put that campaign poster in my front yard or a car window. I want to see first a summer debate season with all candidates at a series of real debates. No canned questions nor well tested focus groups’ canned answers. Spontaneous think-on-your-feet debates for deadly serious issues like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. If I had to place a bet who would win a Shanahan-Harris debate, I’ll bet on the surfing lawyer mom who is clearly a good negotiator having been able to break a pre-nup with her last spouse.

CODA: 4/30/2024. Kennedy announced yesterday he’s on the California’s November ballot. He has it seems ditched his We the People Party for which his California volunteers and staff were begging people at this Oakland event to join by changing their voter registrations to get his new California party on November ballot. No clue how he got himself nominated by the American Independent Party of California other than getting the existing nominee James Bradley to withdraw. Bradley got under 100K votes in California’s March 2024 presidential primary. AIP-California was founded before George Wallace’s 1968 national AIP’s run for US President. After Wallace’s death his national AIP party splintered and its remnants such as the one in California long ago added racial inclusiveness to his state-rights and strict US Constitutional party platform. It’s based in the small community of Freedom near Watsonville [sic, not Vacaville as news says today] just a short drive away from Oakland, California.