Soleil Ho has been the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic since 2019. She had a hard act to follow in replacing her predecessor, Michael Bauer. I give her credit for doing a good job. She liberally expanded the traditional beat of a restaurant critic to include pop-ups, food trucks and little mom-and-pop ethnic eateries. But something she wrote yesterday bothers me.

LaMonte Ford, a homeless person who lives at the Wood Street encampment, makes a poignant plea for dignity and understanding in a lengthy op-ed piece he wrote in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. He portrays the Wood Street “Commons,” as he calls it, as a charming, neighborly community, a sort of Mayberry of West Oakland that features “dinner parties and performances [and] gardens,” where happy residents “shop together, pool [our] resources and try to repurpose” thrown-away stuff they find in the streets. Wood Street dwellers, he tells us, are “artists, activists, chefs, carpenters, teachers, students, and caretakers.”

Get Boudin-ed, or Boudinized: verb; to get run out of office like Chesa Boudin

Give credit to that crusading figure from the 1970s, the Black Panther’s Angela Davis, for introducing a neologism that’s likely to quickly become relevant. Davis long ago faded from the headlines but the Oakland native is still out there, along with her fellow radicals Cat Brooks, Carroll Fife and Pamela Price, breathing new life into a Black Panther ideology that long seemed dead.

Libby Schaaf will soon be history, thank God. She was the worst Mayor Oakland has had in the 35 years I’ve lived here—and we’ve had some horrible ones. Before Schaaf, we had the inconsequential Jean Quan, a one-term embarrassment who once led an anti-police march downtown. Prior to that was Sleepy Ron Dellums, another one-termer, whose idea of a productive day was jogging around Lake Merritt. Before him was the only great mayor of the modern era, Jerry Brown, who for eight years led the effort to revitalize downtown and restore Oakland’s good name. For twenty years before that we had a pair of non-entities, Lionel Wilson and Elihu Harris. And now, of course, we’re about to have another non-entity imposed upon us named Sheng Thao.

Here’s Morgan Freeman on 60 Minutes:

“Mike Wallace: How are we going to get rid of racism?”

“Morgan Freeman: Stop talking about it.”