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Dianne Feinstein, whom I first met at her cabin above Aspen

A family friend, in Hare's reckoning — and, by San Francisco standards, a right-winger

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About this entry

Parts of this entry are out of date. It is published anyway, because an incomplete record that invites correction is more useful than no record at all.

Person

Who this is

Mayor of San Francisco from 1978, having become mayor on the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, and then United States Senator for California from 1992 until her death in 2023.

Jonathan Hare first met her personally at her modest cabin above Aspen — he was there as Pam Alexander's guest. The property sold in 2023 for a reported $32 million after her death.

She chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 2009 to 2015, and sat on it for years either side. Hare presented to her committee staff a number of times during the Resilient Network Systems period, when the company's work sat squarely in that domain.

The record

Where this intersects the work

Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.

The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.

1978–2023

Why he counts her as family rather than as a politician

She had been his favorite politician since the day she became mayor. He was thirteen, and read the whole of it in the Chronicle the morning after the killings.

He came to know Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi reasonably well too, and presented to their staffs and their committees on the Hill dozens of times. But Dianne he thought of as a family friend, on the grounds that they had history — which in his usage means he had been paying attention to her since before she knew he existed.

A fuller account is outstanding; Hare has asked to be reminded to give it.

Hare's accountHare's account, recorded 2026 — source record S-046
2000s

Explaining her to Pat Toomey

Hare told his housemate that Feinstein was his favorite politician. Toomey asked why — he appeared to assume that anyone from San Francisco was some species of communist.

Hare's answer: you have no idea how liberal politicians in San Francisco can be. By the standards of that city she is a right-wing Republican, and the left there regarded her as something close to a turncoat. She was, in his assessment, extremely reasonable, well principled, and notably strong on defense and intelligence.

It is a small exchange and it makes a point this record makes elsewhere in larger form: positions are read relative to the frame they are read in. The same person is a conservative in one taxonomy and a radical in another, and neither reading is wrong — which is the whole reason the Unified Trust Model permits unlimited concurrent taxonomies rather than adjudicating between them.

Hare's accountHare's account, recorded 2026 — source record S-048
2010s

The seat he moved out of

He always flew Virgin, and when they finally got a gate at Reagan National he took a flight she was also on. He had switched up to the first row — had he not, he would have been sitting directly beside her in row two.

She was traveling with a technology executive whose name Hare cannot retrieve, the chief information security or chief privacy officer of either Meta or Yahoo.

Hare's aside on the airport: Reagan National still exists largely because members of Congress wanted somewhere within twenty minutes of their offices.

Hare's accountHare's account, recorded 2026 — source record S-048
The graph

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Provenance

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

The architecture

What this bears on

This record is not biography attached to a technical claim. Each runs into the other: the experiences below produced the mechanisms, and the mechanisms are what those experiences turned out to require.

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This page is the anecdote — the thing that draws you in. The explainers are where the mechanism is set out in full, with the problem it solves and the condition on which it fails.

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What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.

If you were there

Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.

Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.

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