Today’s Chronicle front pager—Oakland recovery faces perfect storm: Investors pull back amid concerns about affordability, safety—may shock readers in San Mateo and Concord. But for those of us living in Oakland, it’s merely the latest drumbeat of doom, in a city whose moorings are rotting away with each passing day.

When I read about Oakland’s new Downtown Specific Plan, announced the other day by Sheng Thao, I thought “Super-great. Downtown definitely needs a re-do.”

Sheng Thao is out there assuring us that crime in Oakland is down and we’re once again a safe city, thanks to her vision and guidance.

At the south end of Lakeside Park, someone put up a plaque that reads:

In 2011, the Russian journalist, Alexander Golts, articulated what he called the Golts Principle. He was criticizing a Russian Defense Ministry plan to develop a space defense program, in order to thwart what the Russians considered a planned U.S. attack. (It was to be Russia’s equivalent of Reagan’s “Star Wars” fantasy.) Golts ridiculed the concept, and the Golts Principle was born. It stated: “[T]he more absurd the idea, the more likely it is that the Russian bureaucracy will embrace it. The motive is clear: By adopting impossible goals, bureaucrats can milk the state budget indefinitely.”