When Elon Musk posts a video of San Francisco's urban decay with the caption “Radical left policies lead to annihilation,” he's not just making a political point—he's engaging in a profound form of epistemic gaslighting.
First, I greatly respect the insights and content Mike Brock expresses in his writing. I have tried to decrease all the journals (scientific-medical) and the political subscriptions I get, but I will make an exception and become a paid member to Mike's Notes from the Circus.
With that said, I do have criticisms of this blog or editorial writing; they are constructive.
I try to read a book or a post/blog/editorial from cover to cover. Mike, you impress me with the content of the topics you opine about, but at the same time, you overwhelm me with the amount of content. I wish your articles were shorter or perhaps presented as Part I, II, etc.
I agree with just about everything you have written since I came across "Notes." However, I will insert the "Age" or "Experience" Card in being critical about "The Real Problem with San Francisco." I was born in NY, in the same city where Trump grew up (Jamaica). I went to the U of Rochester in upstate NY, then to the U of Chicago, then to Los Angeles to the County Hospital for internship & residency, and then to San Antonio to care for military during the Vietnam years 1970-72. I have traveled the world, in the 1960s to places like East Germany and then in 1986 after Chernobyl spent six weeks in the USSR. I have been everywhere except Antarctica and Africa. And I have returned to many cities decades later and revisited places of great natural beauty. Why share this with you and your readers?
I have seen in real life the Joni Mitchell lyrics "they turned Paradise into a parking lot." The beauty I once experienced in San Francisco has been lost in great part. It was a place I once thought I would love to live in; the same with Portland, Oregon, and also Florence, Italy, etc.
What you presented with the most emphasis in the SF article is a focus on political views, and in some ways, this has relevance. But what I saw in paradises like Los Angeles and SF is something that two commenters touched upon (Cory and Marilyn). Cities are living entities, and as with all of life, a critical concept is "balance." As a city grows, so do all challenges it faces: traffic, crime, sanitation, housing, and common courtesy.
Distinctly, I recall one morning on my way to the hospital in Culver City. Stopped for a red light on Venice Blvd, the driver in the car in front, rolled down his window and dumped garbage into the street. I could not believe my eyes. I had first visited Los Angeles in 1960; it was pristine. No garbage-cluttered streets; the freeways not littered with trash; people stopped their car when you stepped off the curb into the street. All that was gone. On an intentional detour off the 10 freeway in downtown LA, I took Pico Blvd (it runs all the way West to my desired destination). Within 5 minutes, I was transported into a 3rd world country. Garbage was everywhere, at least ankle high. I could feel anxiety and fear, and I drove as fast as I safely could to get out of this cesspool of human filth.
When I was diagnosed with a usually fatal malignancy in 2018, I had a second opinion consultation at UCSF. I took the train from Nevada City, CA. Each stop was like a garbage dump. Litter everywhere. At one longer stop, a visit to the restroom was disgusting. In SF, I had to take the BART. It was OK but not as clean as the subways in Seoul or those in Moscow. On a bus, my wife and I were exposed to a psychotic man who was threatening everyone on the bus. We could not wait until we got off, only to encounter people urinating in the street and see the squalor of homeless people. Human excrement was nearby.
Mike, it is not just a question of housing but of common sense and decency. Cities, like other living entities, have their limitations. City management (as in the "kid's game" Sim City) is an art. It should not be requisite on builders and realtors whose primary MO is money but on quality of life. A city that has grown beyond the needs that are not being met is akin to a cancer that has metastasized and can no longer maintain its need for energy and thus undergoes necrosis (death). Now, in Oregon, once also pristine like LA, I see the early signs of what man does to beauty- he defiles it. Garbage on the highways; courtesy gone; noise pollution due to excessive traffic and motorcycles with Hollywood mufflers and due to landscapers and their obsession with blowers (yes, I have one too).
And despite being accused of being a bleeding heart liberal, which I am most certainly not, I will say that a lot of the garbage and litter comes from the homeless, and from the immigrant, legal or not, where cleanliness is not part of their native culture. All of us are at fault for this, for putting up with it. When my only home was my sailboat, on a long-distance journey of thousands of miles, I had a crew that mimicked this same attitude. "It's not my freakin' ship." So I fired my crew and found a responsible man and his son for the most arduous part of the voyage. We need to do a better job with (a) city management a la Sim City; (b) not only vet those wishing to come to our country but to have frank discussions about "housekeeping". This land is our land, our house, and the beauty that we extinguish is often gone forever, not unlike the glaciers I used to hike on.. The charm of cities like SF, and Florence has been lost, in large part, due to our taking something for granted (i.e., not tending to our garden).
We, all of us, must be the stewards of this planet, and we must learn the concepts that influence the quantity and quality of our lives and do the same for those who come after us.
You’re right to mourn the loss of beauty. You’re right to demand better stewardship. And I believe we can only recover it by naming all the forces at work—not just the visible decay, but the hidden structures that made decay inevitable. My writing isn’t meant to excuse the decay. It’s meant to help us see clearly enough to repair it with justice, not just with shame.
And to your excellent reply above, I would add to justice the wisdom that experience gives us. A part of the explanation of what has been lost in America is that the level of education in public schools and beyond has faltered. Another decline has been the forfeiture of human-to-human communication and its replacement with glib, superficial and emotionless text via social media apps.
Our younger generations, despite spoken reverence for the elderly, discard the experience of 7-9 decades of life in place of inexperience that misses the perspective granted by time & 'been there, done that.' It is a Kahil Gibran poem or a quote like "Youth is wasted on the young." This is what I have concluded after speaking to family, colleagues, or neighbors who now hold me in contempt for my "senile" views on Trump, the GOP, and MAGA. They miss the conceptual issue of the "degree" of corruption or the extent of incompetence.
I honestly do not feel that the level of education, nor that of the desire to know, is sufficient in the U.S. to overcome the reality of the fascist government of Trump, GOP, and Musk. The story of San Francisco in 2025 is surely not solely about justice, which indeed is being violated throughout the US. I believe the decline of our cities of the quality of our lives is about the loss of LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision), added to the pathologic focus in America on possessions and power. It is greed over good, and no different in my endangered profession of medicine where physician and corporate income have priority over patient outcome. Read the sonnet by Wordsworth (1802): "The World is Too Much With Us Late and Soon."
Life is more than getting and spending. It is not "drill baby drill" or building house upon house or skyscrapers that block the sun and the stars or that incredible view of the iron bridge in Portland. Yes, Mike, I mourn the loss of the appreciation of beauty, as I do the loss of common sense, and the precept of leaving this world a better place than I found it. You are right, and as usual, spot on: I mourn the loss of that which is right and just.
America, through my 82 year old eyes, is in deep guacamole. Our storyline is about whether decadence, born in evil, will not only survive but loom larger due to the citizenry's naïveté and inability to perceive what is presently staring us in the face.
We all just need to walk around mindlessly responding to all societal problems by saying "f*cking neoliberalism". Probably be right more often than Elon and his socialism comments. Maybe even "f*cking billionaires, eh?". Pizza's overcooked.. "f*cking Elon Musk, man".
Hey Mike, "market failure" may be technically accurate, but let's acknowledge that the Bay Area is quite landlocked. Yes, density could be and should be increased, though that will lead to other sizable problems. The no-growth, slow-growth movements there and elsewhere are not benevolent to nonresidents--and they should be--but they were very intentionally designed to avoid over-congestion, not really to increase home values. It feels like you're conflating the issues and ending up missing the target a bit. Lots of liberals and conservatives have believed in slow-growth policies as a way to avoid despoiling urban areas. Rather than lump it all as simply "market failure" you're avoiding naming the real issue of the failure of slow-growth strategies that resist the future vs. smart-growth ones that embrace it. We can do much better with this and name what needs to be named, even if those policies were championed by well-meaning people.
Nice critique. As a former suburban developer that included low and moderate income units in the mix of projects, local opposition exists with attendant restrictions, but it is not readily discernible like it is in an urban environment. NIMBY still seems to rule.
It’s crazy to hear EM bitch about regulation and radical left wing policies, while cashing dozens of billion dollar checks from those very policies and regulations.
As well as calling ppl that need govt benefits and assistance as the parasite class.
Without these programs he wouldn’t exist, he’s a colonizer.
Good analysis. Your focus is on San Fran, but this situation is global and one of the key reasons affordable housing ceases to exist. Urban Planning has been feeding NIMBYism under the guise of community consultation. As communities change - as life changes, urban planning needs to change. A lack of housing creates a lack of people which then limits business potential - negating any perceived advantage of neoliberalism.
It makes sense that property owners would not want housing being built up all around them for the sake of their property values. But what do developers get from a constrained housing market? Don't builders build? That's what they do. So their part in the housing shortage collusion doesn't make sense. Who would be holding them back and wouldn't they be organizing to address the supply side of the demand for more housing, i.e.(for their own job security) vis-'a-vis government regulations and local planning boards?
No critique of the argument. “Socialism” or any leftist policy obviously didn’t cause the problem. But governing a city for decades also means solving problems—even the ones you didn’t create. Moral grandstanding over blame is distraction from failure at this point. If you haven’t fixed it, you own it.
San Francisco is small. It is a peninsula that has Pacific ocean on the west , Golden Gate Bridge on the north and SF Bay on east. Only 7 miles × 7 miles. There isn't a lot of empty real estate. Add the Dot Com frenzy to build office towers (Salesforce Tower for example) that tore whole blocks of buildings at a time to aquire enough property. Low income housing was torn down and/or renovated to market pricing that went to the influx of high paid techies. Everyone else got a new tent or became a super commuter.
Mike, I’ve taken your “Two plus two equals four. There are 24 hours in a day” as a mantra, something to repeat to remind me and to hold on to as a touchstone. Truth may be under assault but truth will always be truth.
First, I greatly respect the insights and content Mike Brock expresses in his writing. I have tried to decrease all the journals (scientific-medical) and the political subscriptions I get, but I will make an exception and become a paid member to Mike's Notes from the Circus.
With that said, I do have criticisms of this blog or editorial writing; they are constructive.
I try to read a book or a post/blog/editorial from cover to cover. Mike, you impress me with the content of the topics you opine about, but at the same time, you overwhelm me with the amount of content. I wish your articles were shorter or perhaps presented as Part I, II, etc.
I agree with just about everything you have written since I came across "Notes." However, I will insert the "Age" or "Experience" Card in being critical about "The Real Problem with San Francisco." I was born in NY, in the same city where Trump grew up (Jamaica). I went to the U of Rochester in upstate NY, then to the U of Chicago, then to Los Angeles to the County Hospital for internship & residency, and then to San Antonio to care for military during the Vietnam years 1970-72. I have traveled the world, in the 1960s to places like East Germany and then in 1986 after Chernobyl spent six weeks in the USSR. I have been everywhere except Antarctica and Africa. And I have returned to many cities decades later and revisited places of great natural beauty. Why share this with you and your readers?
I have seen in real life the Joni Mitchell lyrics "they turned Paradise into a parking lot." The beauty I once experienced in San Francisco has been lost in great part. It was a place I once thought I would love to live in; the same with Portland, Oregon, and also Florence, Italy, etc.
What you presented with the most emphasis in the SF article is a focus on political views, and in some ways, this has relevance. But what I saw in paradises like Los Angeles and SF is something that two commenters touched upon (Cory and Marilyn). Cities are living entities, and as with all of life, a critical concept is "balance." As a city grows, so do all challenges it faces: traffic, crime, sanitation, housing, and common courtesy.
Distinctly, I recall one morning on my way to the hospital in Culver City. Stopped for a red light on Venice Blvd, the driver in the car in front, rolled down his window and dumped garbage into the street. I could not believe my eyes. I had first visited Los Angeles in 1960; it was pristine. No garbage-cluttered streets; the freeways not littered with trash; people stopped their car when you stepped off the curb into the street. All that was gone. On an intentional detour off the 10 freeway in downtown LA, I took Pico Blvd (it runs all the way West to my desired destination). Within 5 minutes, I was transported into a 3rd world country. Garbage was everywhere, at least ankle high. I could feel anxiety and fear, and I drove as fast as I safely could to get out of this cesspool of human filth.
When I was diagnosed with a usually fatal malignancy in 2018, I had a second opinion consultation at UCSF. I took the train from Nevada City, CA. Each stop was like a garbage dump. Litter everywhere. At one longer stop, a visit to the restroom was disgusting. In SF, I had to take the BART. It was OK but not as clean as the subways in Seoul or those in Moscow. On a bus, my wife and I were exposed to a psychotic man who was threatening everyone on the bus. We could not wait until we got off, only to encounter people urinating in the street and see the squalor of homeless people. Human excrement was nearby.
Mike, it is not just a question of housing but of common sense and decency. Cities, like other living entities, have their limitations. City management (as in the "kid's game" Sim City) is an art. It should not be requisite on builders and realtors whose primary MO is money but on quality of life. A city that has grown beyond the needs that are not being met is akin to a cancer that has metastasized and can no longer maintain its need for energy and thus undergoes necrosis (death). Now, in Oregon, once also pristine like LA, I see the early signs of what man does to beauty- he defiles it. Garbage on the highways; courtesy gone; noise pollution due to excessive traffic and motorcycles with Hollywood mufflers and due to landscapers and their obsession with blowers (yes, I have one too).
And despite being accused of being a bleeding heart liberal, which I am most certainly not, I will say that a lot of the garbage and litter comes from the homeless, and from the immigrant, legal or not, where cleanliness is not part of their native culture. All of us are at fault for this, for putting up with it. When my only home was my sailboat, on a long-distance journey of thousands of miles, I had a crew that mimicked this same attitude. "It's not my freakin' ship." So I fired my crew and found a responsible man and his son for the most arduous part of the voyage. We need to do a better job with (a) city management a la Sim City; (b) not only vet those wishing to come to our country but to have frank discussions about "housekeeping". This land is our land, our house, and the beauty that we extinguish is often gone forever, not unlike the glaciers I used to hike on.. The charm of cities like SF, and Florence has been lost, in large part, due to our taking something for granted (i.e., not tending to our garden).
We, all of us, must be the stewards of this planet, and we must learn the concepts that influence the quantity and quality of our lives and do the same for those who come after us.
You’re right to mourn the loss of beauty. You’re right to demand better stewardship. And I believe we can only recover it by naming all the forces at work—not just the visible decay, but the hidden structures that made decay inevitable. My writing isn’t meant to excuse the decay. It’s meant to help us see clearly enough to repair it with justice, not just with shame.
And to your excellent reply above, I would add to justice the wisdom that experience gives us. A part of the explanation of what has been lost in America is that the level of education in public schools and beyond has faltered. Another decline has been the forfeiture of human-to-human communication and its replacement with glib, superficial and emotionless text via social media apps.
Our younger generations, despite spoken reverence for the elderly, discard the experience of 7-9 decades of life in place of inexperience that misses the perspective granted by time & 'been there, done that.' It is a Kahil Gibran poem or a quote like "Youth is wasted on the young." This is what I have concluded after speaking to family, colleagues, or neighbors who now hold me in contempt for my "senile" views on Trump, the GOP, and MAGA. They miss the conceptual issue of the "degree" of corruption or the extent of incompetence.
I honestly do not feel that the level of education, nor that of the desire to know, is sufficient in the U.S. to overcome the reality of the fascist government of Trump, GOP, and Musk. The story of San Francisco in 2025 is surely not solely about justice, which indeed is being violated throughout the US. I believe the decline of our cities of the quality of our lives is about the loss of LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision), added to the pathologic focus in America on possessions and power. It is greed over good, and no different in my endangered profession of medicine where physician and corporate income have priority over patient outcome. Read the sonnet by Wordsworth (1802): "The World is Too Much With Us Late and Soon."
Life is more than getting and spending. It is not "drill baby drill" or building house upon house or skyscrapers that block the sun and the stars or that incredible view of the iron bridge in Portland. Yes, Mike, I mourn the loss of the appreciation of beauty, as I do the loss of common sense, and the precept of leaving this world a better place than I found it. You are right, and as usual, spot on: I mourn the loss of that which is right and just.
America, through my 82 year old eyes, is in deep guacamole. Our storyline is about whether decadence, born in evil, will not only survive but loom larger due to the citizenry's naïveté and inability to perceive what is presently staring us in the face.
We all just need to walk around mindlessly responding to all societal problems by saying "f*cking neoliberalism". Probably be right more often than Elon and his socialism comments. Maybe even "f*cking billionaires, eh?". Pizza's overcooked.. "f*cking Elon Musk, man".
Hey Mike, "market failure" may be technically accurate, but let's acknowledge that the Bay Area is quite landlocked. Yes, density could be and should be increased, though that will lead to other sizable problems. The no-growth, slow-growth movements there and elsewhere are not benevolent to nonresidents--and they should be--but they were very intentionally designed to avoid over-congestion, not really to increase home values. It feels like you're conflating the issues and ending up missing the target a bit. Lots of liberals and conservatives have believed in slow-growth policies as a way to avoid despoiling urban areas. Rather than lump it all as simply "market failure" you're avoiding naming the real issue of the failure of slow-growth strategies that resist the future vs. smart-growth ones that embrace it. We can do much better with this and name what needs to be named, even if those policies were championed by well-meaning people.
Nice critique. As a former suburban developer that included low and moderate income units in the mix of projects, local opposition exists with attendant restrictions, but it is not readily discernible like it is in an urban environment. NIMBY still seems to rule.
It’s crazy to hear EM bitch about regulation and radical left wing policies, while cashing dozens of billion dollar checks from those very policies and regulations.
As well as calling ppl that need govt benefits and assistance as the parasite class.
Without these programs he wouldn’t exist, he’s a colonizer.
You nailed it. And the blame game continues by the greedy ignorami.
Good analysis. Your focus is on San Fran, but this situation is global and one of the key reasons affordable housing ceases to exist. Urban Planning has been feeding NIMBYism under the guise of community consultation. As communities change - as life changes, urban planning needs to change. A lack of housing creates a lack of people which then limits business potential - negating any perceived advantage of neoliberalism.
It makes sense that property owners would not want housing being built up all around them for the sake of their property values. But what do developers get from a constrained housing market? Don't builders build? That's what they do. So their part in the housing shortage collusion doesn't make sense. Who would be holding them back and wouldn't they be organizing to address the supply side of the demand for more housing, i.e.(for their own job security) vis-'a-vis government regulations and local planning boards?
You said Satan was a man. Can you please cite your sources?
No critique of the argument. “Socialism” or any leftist policy obviously didn’t cause the problem. But governing a city for decades also means solving problems—even the ones you didn’t create. Moral grandstanding over blame is distraction from failure at this point. If you haven’t fixed it, you own it.
San Francisco is small. It is a peninsula that has Pacific ocean on the west , Golden Gate Bridge on the north and SF Bay on east. Only 7 miles × 7 miles. There isn't a lot of empty real estate. Add the Dot Com frenzy to build office towers (Salesforce Tower for example) that tore whole blocks of buildings at a time to aquire enough property. Low income housing was torn down and/or renovated to market pricing that went to the influx of high paid techies. Everyone else got a new tent or became a super commuter.
Mike, I’ve taken your “Two plus two equals four. There are 24 hours in a day” as a mantra, something to repeat to remind me and to hold on to as a touchstone. Truth may be under assault but truth will always be truth.
What neoliberalism prevents is a living wage for all who work. How about “trickle up” as an operating principle?