For most who attended the demonstration in support of the Iranian rebellion tonight in San Francisco's Union Square, it was, as well, an opportunity to connect with friends. But in contrast to the brutality of the Islamic Republic's crackdown on the streets of Tehran, this was a joyous occasion. As we chanted, sometimes in English, sometimes in Farsi, this was the outpouring of a people who have waited thirty years—for many of them, longer than they've been alive—to get their country back. It was a time to celebrate.

I saw a few people in headscarves, a few wrapped in the old flag of Iran from before the Islamic Republic, and a few who covered their faces in fear of who might be collecting identities. They will be returning each night to Union Square, they say, until the United Nations votes to condemn the stolen election.

For me, it was a night filled with irony. I have just, hopefully, completed a master's degree, over thirty years after my first time attending college, at Sacramento City College, in Fall 1976, where some of my fellow students protested the Shah's rule. I learned of secret police and torture then, and did not know then how to reconcile these accounts with mainstream media reports.

I finished my associate's degree in business data processing at American River College, also in Sacramento, the same year the Shah's regime fell. Now, after a bachelor's in mass communication, and a master's in speech communication, I still do not how to reconcile mainstream media reports with the reality they so often fail to report, a reality inconvenient for “authoritative sources.”

Since the Shah was driven from power, flying to the United States ostensibly for medical treatment, I have learned that the United States did not merely, as President Obama recently admitted, “play a role” in the overthrow of the Mossadeq government in 1953, but masterminded a coup d'etat to affirm corporate hegemony over Iranian oil fields.

So it was ironic that this demonstration was held in a square in a center of capitalism, surrounded by such brands as Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Westin, and many others. At the center of the square is a monument to the Spanish American War, a war initiated, not unlike some more recent wars, on fabricated grounds, that constituted a beginning to the U.S. overseas empire.

Though the square gradually emptied at the end of the demonstration, the joy has not dissipated. Not only are these people grateful for the occasion to reconnect with each other, but they expect a secular democracy in their homeland. They believe their moment has come, and they will be brutally crushed if this rebellion fails. It is more than ironic that Obama now says that the Iranian people must select their government and that the U.S must not appear to be “meddling,” for just as I remember the U.S. condemned as the “Great Satan,” having provoked the Islamic revolution in 1979 with its involvement in 1953, it is now inescapably responsible for the present condition of their country. This revolution cannot be allowed to fail.

Reuter's has posted what they claim is the complete text of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech, which was supposed to respond to U.S. President Obama's demand that expansion of settlements in Palestinian territory cease and that Israel accept a two-state solution. But their text is truncated. More complete text is available here. My analysis follows:

First, Netanyahu prioritizes Iran and an economic settlement. This is sheer hypocrisy. If Iran's nuclear program is a threat, then what of Israel's? And it is Israel, with, to mention just two factors, a full-scale blockade of the Gaza Strip and Israel-only access roads criss-crossing the West Bank that is the largest obstacle to Palestinian economic development. And Netanyahu intends to maintain this condition.

He seeks an alliance with Arab entrepreneurs to develop Palestine, and I suspect, an alliance with Arab states against Iran. But Netanyahu blames the 60-year old conflict--a conflict not just with Palestinians, but nearly all Middle Eastern countries--on a "refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own, in their historic homeland," and denies that "continued enmity toward Israel is a product of our presence in Judea, Samaria and Gaza." He claims, "The attacks against us began in the 1920s, escalated into a comprehensive attack in 1948 with the declaration of Israel’s independence, continued with the fedayeen attacks in the 1950s, and climaxed in 1967, on the eve of the six-day war, in an attempt to tighten a noose around the neck of the State of Israel." It is not enough to say that Netanyahu ignores the presence of the Palestinians in the territory prior to "independence." He indulges in sheer fantasy.

Netanyahu claims that Israel has tried withdrawing from the Palestinian territories, saying "We tried to withdraw with an agreement and without an agreement. We tried a partial withdrawal and a full withdrawal. In 2000 and again last year, Israel proposed an almost total withdrawal in exchange for an end to the conflict, and twice our offers were rejected." It is hard to look at a map of Israeli settlements in the West Bank with a network of roads forbidden to Palestinians and to see anything like a withdrawal or to imagine substantial prospects for economic development. Any entrepreneur will see this and Netanyahu acknowledges it when he expects the Palestinians to revise history: "If the Palestinians turn toward peace – in fighting terror, in strengthening governance and the rule of law, in educating their children for peace and in stopping incitement against Israel – we will do our part in making every effort to facilitate freedom of movement and access, and to enable them to develop their economy." And one has to wonder why any Middle Eastern nation should choose an alliance with Israel, which relies on a declining superpower, over an alliance with Iran.

Netanyahu insists that Palestinians should recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." The Palestinians have previously responded to this; a repetition of this demand betrays his insincerity. Lest there be any mistake, he says explicitly, "any demand for resettling Palestinian refugees within Israel undermines Israel’s continued existence as the state of the Jewish people." Palestinians cannot make this recognition; it would be to legitimate the uprooting of Palestinians from the land they held prior to the imposition of the Israeli state. And it would be to condone an apartheid state, with non-Jews as second-class citizens.

In Netanyahu's "vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other." But Israel will remain armed; it will retain control of Palestinian airspace and of Palestinian borders. In essence, the blockade of the Palestinian people continues. Moreover, while Palestinians will accept Israeli settlers, Israel will accept no Palestinians. I do not see "two peoples liv[ing] freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect" here.

U.S. President Barack Obama has set a collision course with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by demanding a cessation to any expansion, including so-called "natural expansion" of settlements in the occupied territories. These settlements, dotted across the West Bank with interconnecting Israeli-use only roads and a considerable expanse of allocated space, are so numerous that the political impossibility of their removal calls into question the viability of any future Palestinian state. Obama, like many presidents before him, has also committed himself to a peace settlement between the Palestinians and Israel.

Netanyahu, whose ruling coalition relies upon right wing parties committed to expanded settlements, cannot concede Obama's demand without exacting a very high price. But all this happens against a background in which it has become clear both to academic and political elites in the U.S. that Israel has exerted too much political influence on U.S. policymaking. To have a colony dictating imperial policy is an intolerable embarrassment, and Obama, who has not merely broken campaign promises, but fully embraced the political mainstream, surely enjoys bipartisan elite support for an apparently tougher line.

So what price will Netanyahu settle for? I'm guessing Jerusalem. In another (at least one of these will be broken) campaign promise, Obama has both said that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," and, through his campaign, called it a "'final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties' as part of 'an agreement that they both can live with.'"

If there is to be a Palestinian state, at least some territory allocated to Israeli settlements will fall under Palestinian control. A halt to expansion is only the beginning of Israeli concessions for peace. And Palestinian jurisdiction over Israeli settlers would logically mean that their crimes against Palestinians, including expropriations of land and acts of violence, could be tried in Palestinian courts. All sides, including an utterly discredited Fatah movement, which itself is sustained only by Israeli and U.S. intransigence towards Hamas, will need to face harsh realities to achieve a settlement.

For Israel, this will mean giving up de facto but illegal jurisdiction over at least some settlements and a token right of return, I'm guessing, paying off heirs of dead Palestinians whose land was expropriated to make way for Israeli proper and allowing those few Palestinian landowners who are still alive to return in some shape or form. For Fatah, it will mean giving up Jerusalem and at least some bits of territory.

It will not be a just settlement. But justice is no longer possible. Justice for the Palestinians would mean rolling back the clock to a time before Israel's existence. It would also mean war crimes trials for that substantial portion of the Israeli population that has participated with the Israeli Defense Forces, as well as in government, in a brutal and illegal occupation. Justice for many Israelis, who played no part in the original expropriations, and for Jews who equate their survival as a people demands the preservation and security of the Israeli state. These are mutually exclusive positions and while my own view leans heavily against Israel, and its continued existence as a state, I also know that this view is outside the range of acceptable political discourse in the United States.

As a first step, many in the U.S. would be entirely happy to cede, as if it was theirs to cede, Jerusalem to Israel. They have merely been waiting for satisfactory circumstances to do so. Extracting painful concessions--a freeze on settlement expansion from the Israelis and Jerusalem from the Palestinians--would create the appearance that Obama is prepared to play hardball with both sides and, for those willing to believe, allow him to once again pretend to be even-handed. Both Israeli and Palestinian governments may fall as a consequence. But the U.S. will have asserted its authority and Obama will have taken a step towards "restoring America's moral [for which, read 'imperial'] standing in the world."

Several mainstream media reports spin the latest unemployment numbers as suggesting that the economy is shedding jobs at a reduced pace. Graphs available on disunitedstates.org reveal a more nuanced picture of more people seeking work, perhaps because more people are having trouble finding it, and fewer hours worked among those who remain employed.

The proportion of the population included in the labor force in April rose marginally to 65.77 percent from 65.65 percent in the previous month, an increase of 0.66 percent. The proportion employed decreased to 59.93 percent, a drop of 0.768 percent from March. The proportion of the population (not the labor force) which the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as unemployed increased to 5.83 percent, an increase of 18.147 percent. The increase from February to March, by contrast, was 12.234 percent.

Funny thing about that. When I was a kid, I heard it was a town in Colorado. But I think even Herb Caen, as he got older and progressively more senile, uttered the ghastly word, and not just once.

Odd how I still have the prejudices I grew up with in San Francisco. I still worry about Los Angeles. Of course, as a kid, I learned that they took all our water. And, of course, I know now that it is wasteful corporate agriculture that takes over 90% of the water. But setting LA and SF off against each other seems like a clever thing for politicians to have done to divert us from that fact.

Hell, I don't even like San Francisco anymore. When I first left the town, I thought every other place I went sucked by comparison. Sacramento was an overgrown hick town. Reno was Redneck Country. And Selma, a little town 15 miles south of Fresno, was where life ended in high school.

San Francisco changed while I was away. And those towns (except Selma, which is still pretty much the same) improved after I left them. For me, San Francisco became a big city, a New York-wannabe; I really don't have anything against it now that I wouldn't have against any big city. But after some bad experiences, I learned my lesson. I no longer have to prove something like those obnoxious young men who ride around in taxis on Friday and Saturday nights proving how slick they are to the young women they're hauling around by being cheap with people who will never earn anything like the amounts they take for granted.

Even the Richmond District, where I grew up, has homeless people. I saw the other day that the Alexandria Theater had closed down. Of course the old drug store--I still remember the orange Rexall sign--across the street (on the same side of Geary) is long gone. So much has changed.

Odd how a little rant about the word, "Frisco," can set me off. I prefer rural environments nowadays. I can always find a parking spot. I never have to excuse myself to get past circle jerk sessions to get in my front door (this happened regularly at the last place I lived in San Francisco). I can walk down the street without trash being blown in my face. Rush hour traffic is something less than the agony of two weeks of constipation compressed into the space of a couple hours, every single damned day, made worse by stupidest and meanest meter maids on the planet, who direct traffic when they aren't eating their young.

I'm glad to be out of the city. Slowly, I'm forgetting my way around. I actually thought that Howard still connected with South Van Ness last night as I made my way to a SF Vegan Drinks get-together. That particular connection has been broken for decades. I wish I could so easily forget so many other unpleasant memories of the place.

It takes about ten years, I notice. After you've lived in San Francisco for that long, you start noticing that the town is going to hell. There aren't a lot of people who have lived there longer and still love it. So I told the people I met at that get-together to enjoy the city while they could. But San Francisco has always been a facade. The architecture around the civic center is a testament to the pretensions of politicians early in the twentieth century that their city should rival the grand cities of Europe. The Palace of Fine Arts was originally built in papier mache.

So much of the city is like that. The glitzy hotels on Nob Hill overlook the rotten core of the Tenderloin, where discarded people waste their lives in prostitution and drugs and wait for meals at the soup kitchens long established there. Occasionally, the police clear Golden Gate Park of homeless encampments--so the homeless can sleep in peoples' stoops and shop entryways instead. Restaurants in Fisherman's Wharf get their fish from anyplace except the long gone San Francisco fishing fleet (docking fees are far too high and stocks of valuable fish are nearly depleted); instead you'll find tacky souvenir shops and tacky shopping--including a shopping center built on a pier. North Beach has been more about strip clubs than Italian restaurants for decades. Motorized cable cars with tires, steering wheels, and internal combustion engines heavily outnumber the real things. The city's storied Victorian houses are of a style imported someplace else like the Greco-Roman pretensions of and around City Hall.

So what, I wonder now, is it that still draws people to San Francisco? What is it they adore? Why are they so thrilled to be there? It is symbol more than substance, I know. Is it the lack of that substance they seek to drown with their obnoxious drunkenness on Friday and Saturday nights? Is it the crushing of an image that leaves the denizens of the Tenderloin and of Sixth Street so far beyond sensation?

I'm glad to be out.

Is it that women just really love to hate men?

To put it another way, why is it that assholes have no trouble finding women, and why is it that I am a "loser" because apparently I'm not enough of an asshole to find a woman? Tracy Clark-Flory rejects an article blaming feminism for men becoming assholes but acknowledges that that both genders have some adapting to do in a 21st century paradigm of male-female relationships.

She doesn't offer a solution. "Nothing in the seduction community," she writes, "seems to prepare a guy to find himself, grow genuine and warranted confidence, or start a real, emotionally rewarding and lasting relationship." So all this is about male self-esteem?

Certainly, I've found it difficult to live up to cultural expectations of how people are to conduct their lives. I just don't have the heart for a "law of the jungle" economic system. I've retreated to academia (currently finishing a master's degree in communication and expecting to continue on towards a PhD) and I'm not pulling in much money at all. So, yes, I guess you could say I'm a "loser."

I can't help but feel that all this is a red herring. Kay Hymowitz, whose article Clark-Flory rejects, writes "that the dating and mating scene is in chaos. SYMs [single young men] of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional."

Ignoring the ageism in Hymowitz's thesis, what that means is that I am still supposed to take the lead in seeking a relationship but that I am a male chauvinist pig if I do so. It also means that women will claim that they should be free to pursue relationships, but that they still feel they are being "forward" if they do so. Finally, it means that I'm still, despite the sheer cruelty and manifest absurdity of this economic system that I have endured my entire adult life, expected to be "financially secure."

But I'm not even meeting women who are both available and interesting. I just hear about women who have given up on relationships because they feel they're only attracted to men who will abuse them, people who are into polyamory, and people who apparently have had enough "vanilla" sex that they need some "kink" to "spice it up."

On the rare occasions I find a woman whom I might just have enough in common with to get together with, she just wants to be "friends." Which of course means that my problems finding a relationship are not her problems. After all, she's already found somebody else, and her problem is solved.

Clark-Flory ignores entirely the problem of "nice guys." Hymowitz writes:

[T]he female preference for jerks and “assholes,” as they’re also widely known, lies behind women’s age-old lament, “What happened to all the nice guys?” [From Craigslist, "Recovering Nice Guy's"] answer: “You did. You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.” Women, he says, are actually not attracted to men who hold doors for them, give them hinted-for Christmas gifts, or listen to their sorrows. Such a man, our Recovering Nice Guy continues, probably “came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he’d have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be.”

Clark-Flory wants men and women not to "make this a war between the sexes." But if we can understand that human beings have relationship needs (they're right there on Maslow's triangle just above physiological and safety needs), then an emotional violence is being done here. To me.

And it is a violence that Salon.com's Broadsheet denies. The writers there uniformly insist that women want "nice guys."

I'm still waiting.

Just as food is necessary to sustain a body, love is necessary to sustain a soul. I have suffered alone long enough. If women truly want nice guys, and they're truly into equality, then it's well past time for one to reach out to me.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has been controversial for some time even amongst vegans and animal rights activists for its ads which treat women as meat, but there has also been a campaign supported by the meat industry denouncing PETA for killing animals.

It is certainly clear that PETA shows a lot more female skin than male skin in its ads, apparently to attract especially the attention of a particular age group within a particular gender. But what is even more disturbing is to see reliable evidence, at least in Virginia in 2006, backing claims that PETA kills many more animals than it finds homes for.

Animal rights activists, presumably including PETA, criticize speciesism, which values humans more highly than animals. Accordingly, a correct conclusion to fears that no-kill shelters may drive animals insane is to refrain from keeping animals in captivity. It is to understand that humans neither have the right nor the righteousness to decide for animals whether they should live or die. And it is to understand that humans have neither the right nor the righteousness to decide for animals the conditions of their existence.

It appears, however, that PETA has drawn the opposite conclusion. PETA will assume the authority to decide these matters for animals, presumably because it believes that humans have a greater mental capacity than animals and an ability to weigh their potential suffering against their will to live. But such an assumption is inherently speciesist; it is to take on the role of a god. And at least in the case of PETA in Virginia in 2006, it is to rationalize a genocide.

Since Barack Obama repudiated the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, effectively denying the truth of Wright's criticisms, I have warned that Obama was playing what, in "Message to the Grassroots", Malcolm X called a "house negro" to what he called a "field negro." Al Qaeda later echoed my criticism; I do not know if they had read my blog.

So fast forward a few months, in which we have seen Obama choose a series of regressive advisors and cabinet members, leading Glenn Greenwald to write, "It was [progressives'] own desires, their eagerness to see what they wanted to see rather than what reality offered." Obama has reaffirmed signing statements but promised not to abuse them. He chose to have the Supreme Court dismiss a challenge rather than face a review of Bush's claimed authority to indefinitely detain legal US residents as "enemy combatants," even as he chose to stop using the term, "enemy combatant." His Iraqi puppet Nouri al-Maliki has now explained after a much-lauded agreement to withdraw all US troops, that some will stay, even as Obama has promoted an Afghan surge despite the fact that US troops contribute to insecurity rather than to security.

Obama's policies are looking a lot like Bush's, even if they appear to be put forth with the bit more intelligence we should expect of a former law professor. That facade of intelligence is fading fast as his advisors now pretend that the fundamentals of the economy are sound as if they had not mocked similar words from the Bush administration and from ex-candidate John McCain and as they appear powerless to prevent AIG from paying out $165 million in bonuses to those who bear some responsibility for the financial part of the economic mess we're in.

Even as I have applauded Gore Vidal for saying that in the United States, we have a one-party system, "the property party," with "two right wings," even as I have criticized the limited differences between the Democratic and Republican factions, with the Democrats having enabled Bush administration policies even after voters handed them control of Congress in 2006 with an explicit mandate to end the Iraq War, I must confess disappointment.

I told you so. I was not wrong. I just wish I were.

My analysis of the latest employment numbers, tailored to avoid certain distortions, reveals that while the number of people employed, as a proportion of population, continued to drop, those who still have their jobs are working a little longer (not seasonally adjusted). There has been little change in the rate at which people are included or excluded from the labor force.