An irreverent inside view of the week’s news in local and state politics
Attack ad goes after Pierluigi Oliverio
As the race to replace outgoing Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager heats up, so too do the campaign attack ads.
In a blistering 42-second video, the Santa Clara County Government Attorneys' Association PAC goes after Democrat Pierluigi Oliverio, who has squabbled with unions in the past, over allegations of sexual harassment that surfaced against him several years ago.
Entitled #HimToo in reference to the #MeToo movement, the ad says, “Trump bragged. Roy Moore denied. City Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio was ‘pleased.'”
Several years ago, the former council member's aide Denelle Fedor filed a lawsuit against the city and Oliverio alleging he made inappropriate advances and comments
toward her. She later dropped Oliverio from the suit.
At the time, Oliverio told this newspaper he was “pleased the plaintiff voluntarily dropped the complaint against me.”
The city ultimately settled with Fedor for $10,000.
Judge orders former councilman to pay county
A judge last week ordered former San Jose Councilman Manh Nguyen to pay Santa Clara County and current Councilman Lan Diep $27,971.04.
After Diep beat incumbent Nguyen by 12 votes in 2016 to win the District 4 Council seat, Nguyen filed a lawsuit alleging that the county elections office mishandled the ballot count despite two recounts suggesting otherwise.
Last year, a judge said Nguyen had failed to show the elections office botched the count. The latest court order directs Nguyen to cover costs the county and Diep incurred because of the suit. Nguyen has appealed the court’s decision about the election loss and that appeal must be resolved before he is forced to pay.
The county is set to recover $26,572.40, while Diep would get $1,398.64.
“There’ s areas on they cal lit a Miracle March. That’ s because it doesn’ t happen that often. Miracles are hard to find. There are plenty of them in the Old Testament, but there aren’ t that many in California when it comes to water. I wouldn’ t be betting what’ s left of your 401 K on any miracles.”
— Bill Patzert, who worked for 35 years as a research scientist and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, on hopes a “Miracle March” will makeup forth estate’ s low rainfall totals over the past several months.
Former Milpitas city manager lodges complaint
Less than a month after Milpitas City Manager Tom Williams resigned, he complained to the state’s political watchdog agency alleging Councilman Anthony Phan misrepresented a $43,000 campaign loan.
Williams’ claims — submitted Oct. 13, 2017 to the Fair Political Practices Commission — echo complaints the agency received earlier from Eric Emmanuele, a former president of the Milpitas police union, and Estrella Kawczynski, a clothing store owner and widow of the late Stan Kawczynski, a former mayor of Sunnyvale.
The main allegation centers on a $43,000 loan Phan says came from himself. Williams and Emmanuele’s complaints say Phan indicated that the loan initially came from his parents. The complaints allege City Clerk Mary Lavelle told Phan he could not do that and that Phan then resubmitted the campaign paperwork indicating the loan came from himself.
Both Phan and Lavelle says this never happened. It’s not clear how either Williams or Emmanuele would know whether this happened. Reached Tuesday, Emmanuele said he could not talk on his city phone about this political issue and said he had already said everything he wanted to say on the subject. Williams did not immediately respond to a voicemail message.
Phan said in an interview that the loan came from his personal savings, which included earnings from business investments.
In the filing, Phan indicates the loan was “incurred” on Sept. 24, 2016, which was less than 90 days from the Nov. 8 election. State law requires that within 90 days of an election, candidate committees must report contributions or loans of more than $1,000 within 24 hours.
Phan says he doesn’t recall the exact date and was never informed he had to fill out any additional forms than what he submitted.
“I can’t say for certain,” he said about the date. “But if that’s the case and I get fined for it, I’m fine. I really think there are bigger issues than that.”
In mid-July, Phan took steps to establish a political action committee titled “Anthony Phan Legal Defense Fund,” the existence of which has not previously been reported.
“The purpose of the ‘Anthony Phan Legal Defense Fund’ is to solicit funds to pay for legal fees and/or costs related to” the investigation by the FPPC, says a letter to the Secretary of State’s office.
“I don’t know what’s going to come out of it. If there are any violations that I did not know about, then I would want to be prepared to address it or challenge it,” Phan said. “So I formed that legal defense fund, one, to defend myself and also, two, so that people who think that it’s going to be an easy political attack on me would want to rethink otherwise, because I would have funds for lawyers to go to court.”
Phan says he has not raised any funds yet, but would depending on what the FPPC finds.
“Oftentimes political adversaries will just turn to the FPPC for these kinds of attacks,” Phan said. “It’s petty and it takes up time and it’s stressful.”
Jay Wierenga, a FPPC spokesman, says he can’t say when exactly the agency might wrap up its probe.
“Investigations take the time they take to be both timely and thorough. You can’t put an artificial end date on that,” Wierenga said in an email. “Anyhow, as of our latest statistics from a year and a half/two years ago, about two-thirds of cases are completed within 180 days and almost 90 percent are completed within a year.”
Musk sent up something else unusual into space
When it comes to spreading the word of mankind around the universe, the Arch Mission Foundation thinks big. REALLY big.
Last week’s Falcon Heavy rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center by Elon Musk and his SpaceX crew not only carried a cherry-red Tesla into space forever. It also brought along a digital surprise created by the Arch Mission Foundation: three closeto-indestructible copies of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, commonly called “The Foundation Trilogy.”
Why, you ask? Because, as the creators’ website explains, Arch (pronounced ark) “exists to help humanity preserve and spread its knowledge across vast distances of time and space. We believe that the purpose of life is to evolve and spread intelligence across the universe.”
And in the event that Earth is totally destroyed by nuclear war or some other catastrophic event, Earthlings will live on for eternity, if only in these three books riding along with that Tesla Roadster and the spacesuited dummy behind the wheel.
So what do we know about Arch and its idea to ride along on Musk’s rocketship? Here’s a bit:
The Arch Foundation was first written about in 2015 by Nova Spivak, a Boston-born entrepreneur and VC who co-founded Bottlenose, an LA-based startup whose software mines the depths of Big Data for emerging trends; a year later, the organization was formally incorporated.
Arch was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series, in which the hero foresees the imminent demise of the galaxy and assembles a group of artisans and engineers to try and preserve humanity’s collective knowledge for future generations.
The non-profit soon attracted a growing community of like minds who have been producing so-called “Archs” designed to carry human knowledge millions of years into the future.
The group aspires to emulate former Earthlings like the ancient Egyptians who successful preserved their cultural legacy by “preserving their data in stone, a very long lasting medium — for example, The Pyramids of Giza. But ironically, despite our higher level of technological attainment, our civilization’s data is far less durable.”
Fearing that our modern-day paper and plastic documents, like DVDs, have a limited shelflife, Arch has looked for a knowledge-bearing platform that can withstand the longterm ravages of “heat, cold, moisture, bacteria and fungus, insects, and electromagnetic radiation.”
Their worry? That “if in extinction level event occurred on Earth, there would be almost no recoverable trace of our civilization’s digital knowledge, after just a few decades. Only a thousand years after such an event, amidst the decaying ruins of our concrete and steel structures, virtually no recoverable knowledge or data would remain.”
The participants are building “Arch Libraries,” such as the one aboard Musk’s Falcon Heavy: “Our first Arch libraries are data crystals that last billions of years,” the founders say on their website: “We plan to use many media types over time however — whatever material is the best available for the goal.”