Pro Commerce

Wrong on school integration

I was active in the integration of public schools in San Francisco from 1964 to 1972.  We began modestly at the elementary school level, splitting the schools into K-3 4-6 and arranging some busing movement over short distances.

Nothing in San Francisco was extreme in the integration process because the City is so compact.  We made sure that the quality of the schools was raised during that first 8 year period of integration and we actually had some excellent schools (where my children, appropriately went).

Nevertheless, during the ensuing years the proportion of kids who moved to private and parochial schools increased noticeably and the number of white families that left San Francisco exceeded 60%.  They were replaced by Asian, Filipino and some Latino families.

Whether the perception that schools were dangerous was based on reality, I don't know, but the perception was what mattered.

The net effect of integration efforts, I believe were negative.  When I look at the Bay Area school districts that have remained overwhelmingly white, those same schools have remained quite good.  The reverse is true for black integrated public school systems.

Could it have been done differently? Yes.  Could I have known it at the time?  No.

What would have worked was alien to the sensibilities of the prevailing educational establishment (then and now). If we had made the schools entirely meritocratic we could have made integration succeed.  We needed and need now, to have most schools offering "high achieving" classes and make a genuine effort to push black kids into the high achieving classes in their own predominantly black schools.  Then we need to move the black kids in the high achieving classes in the black schools into the appropriate class levels in the non-black schools. 

We would achieve integration based on merit and it would be broadly accepted by students. The white schools would remain fairly safe.  Importantly, in San Francisco, the Asian kids and their parents would wholeheartedly accept it; and over time, white kids might come back to the public schools.

Don't die in San Francisco

I recently sat down with an old friend to draft her obituary.

My friend was a major contributor to the social health of San Francisco and California over the past 50 years.  As an activist and civic leader she is very important to the history of education, art and social services in our region. She made an important difference.

If she and I don't draft and submit her obituary to a city room writer, of both local newspapers, it may not appear.

In San Francisco we rarely have obituaries of important local people in the press any more.

The S.F. Examiner, which has a San Francisco circulation of 180,000 daily, does not have a morgue (the old files of a newspaper) since the paper was de novo a few years ago, using an old newspaper name.  So there is no reference base for the Examiner to write local obituaries.

The S.F. Chronicle, which has a local circulation under 40,000 is going out of business soon, has laid off hundreds of writers and hasn't had an obituary writer for several years.

Hence, important local people have to get their obituaries written by knowledgeable friends and have them submitted to the press.

Jerry Brown and 9 words

Except for nine words, Jerry Brown would have been president of the U.S.

Back in December of 1991 Jerry Brown was running for president, using the most original and exciting tactics ever used in a presidential campaign.  In a moment of flip dialog, with the press present, Jerry said 'If I win the Democratic nomination I will select Jesse Jackson as my vice-presidential running mate.'

By January 1992, the press and the Democratic party opposition had dug up a 1984 remark by Jesse Jackson in which he called New York City 'Hymietown'.

Brown became the leading figure in the Democratic primaries against Bill Clinton and all others by winning in Maine, Colorado, Nevada, Alaska, Vermont, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland and five other states. 

By the time the show-down came in the April New York primaries, one-on-one against Bill Clinton, the 9 words really mattered.  New Yorkers remembered 'Hymietown' and voted 41% to 26%, Clinton over Brown.

Clinton won that year, against an incumbent president because the Republican and Independent voters split their vote giving 19% to Ross Perot.  Clinton won the 1992 election with a minority of the votes, 43% of the total.

Jerry Brown would have been president of the U.S.A except for nine words.

Train stopped

We know that Michael Moore gets everything wrong, because he is a simpleton.  His stupidity should be a clue to some important social changes.  His movies never got: outmoded auto plants to stay open, guns in schools to disappear or George Bush replaced.

Moore's movie Sicko is therefore a clue that socialized medicine came to a halt in America awhile back. The last station on the socialization train line was 'universal health care'.  The train probably stopped when Hillary last tried to get universal medical coverage passed in 1993.

Looking at the past half-century, the last acts of socialism to succeed in America were in the package of Johnson's Great Society. The NeoCon movement was built on the hard social science evidence that most of the Great Society didn't work.

We are finished with socialism and we are finished with universal government run medical care.

Obesity

The data I have collected for ten years supports the Framingham obesity findings. Social norms for weight are set by peers.

Every single demographic segment has gained weight in the past quarter century in the U.S and several other countries.  The only exception is the social group 'Yuppies.'  Yuppies are defined by their group-wide ambition and their in-group common values.  One value is a 'healthy figure'.

Three cheers for Framingham.   The nature of good science is that it often surprises.

Bovine management

I visited a nearly automated dairy close to Turlock in the Central California Valley last month.  I had heard about the cows that supervise themselves (from Carol) and I went to see them myself.

The dairy is owned by the Wickstrom's. It is well taken care of, beautifully maintained, with 1,800 cows in three sheds. The cows produce 13,000 gallons daily. The stalls, each with one cow in it, open automatically and the cows amble to the milking carousel where they wait behind an automatic gate for their turn.  When the gate rises( as seen in the video on the left), the cows in an orderly and self-maintained line walk one by one onto the carousel.  It takes about five minutes to milk each cow. At the end of the circular ride, the milker drops off.  The cows then back out and slowly return to their stall, which has been cleaned by a river of water while they were gone.  The cows do all of this themselves at their own pace.

The cows seem quite happy and are highly productive. Reportedly, the cows learn in a matter of hours after being placed in their stall how the whole operation functions.  I think we have something to learn here about management.

Pyramid management

I continue as an expert legal witness to work in the area of executive compensation.  During the time I have been working in this field, several decades, executive compensation has grown geometrically. I have been baffled by the causes.

The obvious causes are "good old boy" behavior and interpersonal competition.

But the pattern is too widespread for those to be suitable explanations.

My current theory is that Americans (this is a particularly American issue), with their casual dress at work and work ethic that evolved in hippy times, have very little respect for supervision.  Possibly Americans have less respect for supervision than other national groups.

The consequence is that, the more pyramidal an organization is, the greater salary differences have to be to make supervision work.  Americans respect money and wages, consequently they are induced to accept supervision and respect supervisors because their supervisors are well paid. 

Does that make sense to you?

Steven J. Gould lost

I have yet to meet a person who seems to be as changed by the genetic and evolutionary writings of Steven J. Gould as I have.

In a half dozen books, Gould makes clear, that every generation of children is born into the normal distribution of intelligence. Parental intelligence is not passed on genetically to children.  Each child born to the smartest and dumbest parent is just as likely to have an 110 IQ as a 90.

What confuses people, especially parents, is that children tend to look like one or both of their parents or their grandparents and their siblings.

The reason genes carry the skin color, size, facial attributes of the parents on to the children is that these are tribal markings encoded in the genes by large scale tribal and group evolutionary patterns.

There is plenty of evidence that genes carry tribal markers that emerge as appearance, but there is no evidence that genes carry intelligence.

Gould's lessons on this subject do not seem to have sunk in...at all.

Touch & feel stores

I'm finding more stores that thrive online by having touch and feel stores in retail locations. 

Two examples are Duematernity.com and Gap.com. 

Duematernity is a thriving online business for pregnant moms and their infants with tens of millions of dollars in sales.  They have five small, nay, tiny, stores where they keep inventory on display. Duematernity.com operates with the full appreciation that many shoppers want to see and touch the merchandise and later buy online.

Gap has backed into a similar situation.  It appears that Gap's online sales are now over $billion reaching one third of their total sales.  The newer Gap stores are smaller and getting more and more like touch and feel outlets.

One World Cafe

Two and a half years ago I wrote about a restaurant in Salt Lake City that served free food and asked only for a donation. 

The restaurant is still open, after surviving nearly five years, still very busy and now serves dinner as well as lunch.

Maybe what the hippies started back thirty five years ago in San Francisco makes more sense than it first appeared to.

Laws have to make sense

I have written about a proliferation of stop signs causing people to become scofflaws and ignore stop signs.

There is a very simple and clear example that proves laws have to make sense for them to be generally obeyed.

There is a 45 mph maximum speed limit on the Golden Gate Bridge which is vigorously adhered to by drivers.  There is a 55 mph speed limit on the San Francisco Bay Bridge which is not obeyed by anyone.

Reason: the Golden Gate Bridge has two way traffic, separated by a few feet. Everyone can see that oncoming traffic will create fewer fatal accidents if it is moving slower.  So everyone drives slower.

The Bay Bridge is five wide lanes in a one way direction.  No risk of on-coming traffic so everyone goes the normal highway speed of 65-70 mph.

What better proof could anyone want? Laws have to make sense for them to be generally obeyed.

Coyote backlash

Back in the early 1970s I helped Margo St. James get Coyote started.  Coyote was the first well known American 'legalize prostitution' organization.  (The LA branch has a website.)  I got Margo her first money, legal status and an office.

The idea that prostitution should be decriminalized made sense to me as it has to many others. I quickly learned that there are three types of prostitution street hookers, whore houses and call girls. There is plenty of law enforcement against street hookers.  It is an off-and-on again type of enforcement, usually driven by political or neighborhood pressure.  Hookers are usually men and women who have short attention spans, like a high level of excitement in their life, and the women usually have pimps to protect them.  Penalties are fairly light for street hooking, and the penalties are considered part of the job.

Whore houses are occasionally raided, but very occasionally when they are unable to bribe local police.  Again, for the prostitutes, the penalties are not severe.

Call girls are virtually never penalized since they are always part of a referral network and each call girl operates on her own. They tend to be competent women and rarely cause problems that bring on political pressure.

Looking at the market as a whole, hookers are 20% of the people involved, whore houses employ 5% of the people and the remaining 75% are call girls.  In terms of dollars involved, hookers get 5%, whore houses 5% and call girls get the remaining 90%.

The consequence of Coyote's activism in San Francisco was to create a backlash.  The anti-prostitution (really anti-hooker) movement got plenty of money, much of it from political and government sources and had a perverse effect on the local prostitution business.

The anti-prostitution group Sage, founded by Norma Hotaling, was able to create hooker sting operations that arrest male clients. The clients, 'Johns,' are tried and sentenced on the first offense to have their names published in the newspaper and spend a day at an anti-prostitution class.

Starting a 'legalize prostitution' movement in San Francisco has meant that we got a perverse backlash. It has meant that both customers and hookers get punished.

The backlash has lasted more than fifteen years, so far, and doesn't seem to be abating.  So much for decriminalization activism.

Income distribution

I've written several blogs on the gini issue: income distribution.  It is not clear what has happened to income distribution in the past three decades.

The bottom 10% of income earners are roughly the same, slightly better off.  The middle income category has gotten bigger and the average has risen, but not as fast as total GNP. The top 20% has done better, with only the top 1% doing really well.

The whole picture can be understood with one historic observation: when the economy grows rapidly, the greatest rewards are given to the top performers.  Later, in slower periods of growth, the rewards flow downward.

One clear piece of evidence comes from the greatest living economist, Gary Becker, who shows, as he has for decades that rewards to education, with income, are very strong.  Who would want it to be otherwise?

Another clear piece of evidence comes from the NBER, the greatest economic analysis institution.  The top income earners are being rewarded for dramatic increases in productivity. Who would want it to be otherwise?

I hope the Becker and NBER references settle the issue for my readers.

Stop reform

This is a major thought piece for a democratic society.

Nearly all efforts at bottom rung reform are wasted and frequently harmful. Most of the reforms are efforts I would have supported.  However, they don't work.

The bottom rung of our society is largely made up of moral failures.  There are probably 3-5 million people in this category.  The category excludes immigrants who occasionally have to start on this rung.

The bottom rung includes people who are moral failures: drunks and druggies who can't work, people who don't want to work but need to, mean people who make up much of our criminal population and people who can't control their emotions who make up much of the remaining prison population.

I do not include the mentally inadequate, the genuinely infirm, the mentally ill nor the physically impaired.  Our society tries to help these four categories stay out of the bottom rung.

I also point out that a few people choose the bottom rung because they prefer it and also point out there are some people on the bottom rung who are "nice people".

Nothing would please me more than the genuine prospect of curing addiction, laziness, lack of personal control and criminal meanness.

However, nearly all efforts at reform are directed at getting people off the bottom rung and it doesn't work.  The "Great Society" was a.........

Trannies lead the way

Having coffee in the Castro District most mornings, I am meeting more and more transsexuals.  Its safe to be a public transsexual in the Castro.

Back in the late 1970s I tried to organize post-operation transsexual women to get them to help the pre-op transsexuals.  I completely failed, as none of the post-ops wanted to be visible in any way since they had so successfully fit into their new identities.

Now the world has changed.  Many transsexuals are proud and open about their sexuality and sexual operations are going in both directions (female to male as well as vice versa).

I just notice that being around transsexuals so much these days, both pre and post op, confuses my own sexual leanings.  Being in the Castro around beautiful gay men does that to me too.

Isn't the confusion of sexual leanings that I feel going to be more common with the larger public in the future? And won't that lead to a weakening of the implicitly dualistic male-female gender scene we imagine to be reality?

Bridge music in New York

At the beginning of July the quintessential New York story appeared in the New York Times Sunday paper.

A New York composer, Joseph Bertolozzi, had come up with a brilliant idea in 2004.  He was putting electric sound pickups on every part of the nearby mid-Hudson bridge and then hitting the steel parts of the bridge with various wooden and metal objects (there is a NYTimes video of the story).  He is using the resulting sounds to make a symphony.  He was planning to get a grant for a million or so dollars and finish producing his musical masterpiece.

Trouble is, only in New York could someone think this is an original project and be proud of it.

In 1975, I took a group of people including a dancer (Rosie the Riveter) to tap dance on a wide range of flat steel objects, a few drummers, a composer (Doug Mckecknie), a sound technician (Arnie Lazarus, the inventor of the leading sound pickup of the time, the FRAP) and a photographer (Don Sachs).  Together we made music on a number of prominent statues and objects and ended up spending hours recording the Golden Gate Bridge, upright cable by upright cable.

Doug put the sounds together and created a three minute musical piece from the bridge sounds.  The piece was played on all the local AM radio stations and a few in Los Angeles.

We had a great time; didn't try to raise any money and generated two interesting results.

One result was the creation by David Wills, an illustrator, of a poster and a book cover of the Golden Gate Bridge being played like a harp.

The other was the discovery that inside one upright cable of the bridge was a standing wave.  A standing wave is a physical event that occurs when a wave (sound wave in this case) reverberates forever...perpetual motion.  I was phoned by the Bridge chief engineer to find out which cable had the standing wave so he and his crew could "de-tune it."  Such waves are dangerous for bridges.

Compare New York today to hippy San Francisco.  Serious, big money and egotism versus genuine originality, great fun and camaraderie.

Pope on Bethlehem

The story doesn't seem to have been told. 

For nearly two months in 2002 a group of Palestinian Al Aqsa terrorists were holed up in the Nativity Catholic Church in Bethlehem surrounded by the Israeli forces. The world watched the standoff.  The Israelis, too decent as usual, wouldn't attack the church. The Palestinian terrorists couldn't get out and the Pope in Rome refused to eject these gun toting, hostage holding monsters.  Finally the Pope (Benedict XVI) announced that an agreement had been reached. He would bring them all to Italy.

The Prime Minister, Berlusconi, said: "xxxx you Pope.  This is Italy, you are not bringing any terrorists to Italy."

So the Pope negotiated to bring the terrorists, who by then numbered 13, to the Island of Cyprus where they stayed for three months while the Pope forced five Catholic nations (Spain, Ireland, Poland, Austria, Belgium) and Greece to take the terrorists. 

Where are the thirteen now and why doesn't anyone know this story?  I had it confirmed by an Austrian journalist after I had figured it out for myself.

Court on pricing

Sometimes the legal system is so far out of sync with commercial reality that it can be funny not harmful.

The example of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Leegin Leather versus Kay is just such an instance.  The Court found that anti-trust law is not violated by a producer setting retail prices.  So General Motors could effectively set the price on a specific new auto and no retailer could sell the car for less, without the threat of GM refusing to sell them another car of the same kind, or any cars for that matter.

This is a farce today because there are hundreds of choices other than any specific GM car or any GM car for that matter.  The same is true for almost any product on the market.

The reality is that it wasn't true in the 1950s when Americans were forced to pay the retail price that was exactly what the manufacturer's of every item demanded.  In the 1950s America the wholesale channels were so limited and the number of retail outlets was so sparse that Americans paid an unreasonable part of our disposable income to monopoly producers.

What brought that horrible commercial world to an end in the early 1960s was one store, Cost Plus, that began importing hundreds of inexpensive items. These came at the same time that German Volkswagen offered an alternative auto and Finish  Marimekko offered a better alternative in fabrics and related housewares.

The market exploded with imported goods that weren't under producer's price control and discount retail stores proliferated.

Industrial commerce, the camel that stuck its nose under the tent, destroyed the tent, thank goodness.  Now 47 years later, long after the camels have escaped from the camel corral, our brilliant legal minds, have closed the camel gate.

Forty-five years after the monster of monopoly sales power was destroyed by the import market, the old monster was pronounced harmless by the Supreme Court.

How many other ways have the brilliant legal minds sought to enslave us with their stupid legal theories and succeeded?

Shot into the air

There are three items I can't find on Google or any other search engine.  Maybe you can do it better.

First, I read that every ex-felon costs $1 million a year after they are let out.  Two-thirds of prisoners released return to prison so that could be a reliable fact. One million dollars would compare favorably with keeping felons in prison. It would also commend probation for long periods after they are released. Has a real study been done and who did it?

Second, I regularly see the fact that WalMart saves poor people $2,000 a year in expenses.  What kind of study was done to determine that number?

Lastly: I was awaken by 20 shots fired into the air at 3:30 am recently.  I didn't go back to sleep until I had estimated the physics of the trajectory, which took me more than an hour in my dazed sleep state.

When I got up, I searched online and couldn't find a reliable answer.

So I guessed that the bullets had a muzzle velocity that could be two or three times faster than the speed of sound, 600 mph at sea level, but because the shock wave of the sound barrier would slow the bullets down within a few hundred feet, I assumed they started at roughly 600 mph.  I also estimated that the terminal velocity of the bullets falling back to earth would be slightly faster than a human, which I know to be 140 mph.  So the bullets probably topped out at 160 mph a few seconds after they began falling back to earth.

These crude numbers gave me 7,500 ft as the maximum altitude.  It took about 15 seconds to reach that altitude.  It took 25 seconds to return to earth.  Then there is the Coriolis effect.

Being in the air 40 seconds at my latitude, the 38th parallel, the earth would have moved 5.5 miles to the West. Some of the earth's momentum would have been lost by the bullet.  I have no idea how much.

Check my numbers and tell me the correct numbers.

Commerce is behavioral psych

I've had a bias toward behavioral psychology for a long time because it is a system of thought premised on observing human behavior and testing it. The same has become increasingly true of cultural anthropologists and economists who recently have been doing empirical work

It took awhile for behavioral psychologists to stop doing their research on college students.  That was inherently poor research because college students are usually isolated from the world of responsibility and practical merit...very different from real human conditions.

What attracts me to behavioral psychology is also what makes commerce so fascinating. Commerce is 100% empirical observation of human behavior.  Commerce pays attention to actual human behavior in the form of "what do people buy?", "how much do they pay for it?" "where and when do they buy?."

All of these answers come in the form of revenues and sales receipts.  Looking at a financial statement, especially the income and expense page is the same as reading the data from any scientific experiment.

Commerce is a permanent, ongoing empirical study of how humans really behave.  It has to be fascinating to people, like me, who love to observe people.

Fukuyama

I heard Francis Fukuyama speak the other night.  He is much better as a speaker than he is as a writer.  I assume he speaks about issues often enough that he learns how to answer the implicit questions his audience is asking.

He explains his End of History concept, from his book, by saying that history, in Marxist terms, was a straight line from development through capitalism to communist equality.  By 1990 we knew that the train of history stops at the last station before communism which is capitalism.  Good metaphor to use with Marxists.

He dealt with three objections to his model, two of which I partially agree with.  First is that cultures are radically different and some can never develop full capitalism. I disagree. Capitalism is commerce, which has three sub-categories (trade, industry and clientism).  Some cultures probably can never develop industry which requires meritocracy, openness and diversity.  But they can develop trade and clientism (clientism is a lifelong business relationship between customer and supplier, think dentist). China will be a great trading nation but it can never be industrial...it can only buy industrial factories because family trumps merit and openness has never been heard of in China.

Second he says technology can bring about development because it is so pervasive.  Wrong.  Technology is a "good and service package" that is conveyed by the vehicle of commerce.  The extent to which commerce develops determines the extent to which technology will develop.

Lastly, Fukuyama says development requires nationhood with stable government structures.  I partially agree, but there are tribal groups who don't want development (modernity) and no level of statehood is likely to change that. ( Think Chiapas Mexico.)

Secular candidate

I've expressed my gratitude to Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins for reminding secular Americans that they don't like religion. Most Lefties already have Lefty Fundamentalism as their religion, they don't need traditional god centered religions.

What I love is that Lefty heroes, Hillary and Obama attend Senate prayer breakfasts, and never stop shouting Hallelujah and Hosanna on the campaign trail. The same with John the tort lawyer, whatever his name is.

This emerging urban secular divide could well lead us to a secular candidate in the Democratic party and a subsequent splinter party for anti-religious people. 

I will actually predict it, since I know enough people who would join.

Art and commerce

There is a rather spectacular show of contemporary Chinese art in the Atlantic Monthly:  

I consider this first rate world-class art; take a look for yourself.

The lesson that can not be missed, the empirical fact of this art is that commerce creates art. 

Until now, artists and art historians could rationalize the flurry of great art produced by the exuberance of commerce in Northern Italy (Italian Renaissance) the global triumph of commerce in Holland (Dutch Renaissance), the English dominance of global commerce (English Renaissance) and much since then. 

Now the pure case has arrived. China produced virtually no significant art under revolutionary communism.  With the explosion of commerce in China in the late 1980s we finally get a parallel explosion of world class Chinese art.

Hippies on public TV

I don't know about your part of the country, but here in the S.F. Bay Area, every time it is the month for fund raising on our PBS TV station we get music and talk.

The music is provided by 60+ year old men, and occasionally women, singing and playing the songs they had made popular in the 1960-70s.  The audience is old, white and enthusiastic. The pledge phones ring in the dollars.  The whole sentimental experience is brilliantly parodied in the great 2003 movie: A Mighty Wind.

It is clear that PBS in my area is old hippies based on the music.  What about the talk?

The talk comes from Wayne Dyer and Suze Orman.   These two speakers are also sentimental extensions of the hippy era.

Wayne Dyer is an extension, slightly watered down, of Werner Erhard and his est.  Werner, like Wayne, tells us that everything is created in our own heads and we simply need to get our heads right.  Werner put his sch-peal together by attending many workshops in San Francisco and synthesizing them.  Particular credit for Werner's (Werner's real name was Jack Rosenberg) ideas should go to Will Schutz author of Joy.  (Will held these same ideas until shortly before his death when he renounced them.)

I knew Werner who came to me for advice and Will was a client of mine over a long period. Wayne is the current incarnation of Werner.

Suze Orman is continuing a hippy tradition of dealing with personal money issues based on The Seven Laws of Money.  The Seven Laws sold in the tens of thousands to hippies all over America and continues to sell.  Any hippy garage sale will have a copy of The Seven Laws.

Suze even wrote a book called the Laws of Money (she only has five laws). Suze teaches the lessons of money that are simplified versions of any broker's advice.  Mix your stocks and bonds, be cautious, invest in what you know, rely on compounding of interest, get out of debt....blah blah blah. Be optimistic, it will all work out well for you if you have confidence.

The Seven Laws of Money isn't about that (I wrote The Seven Laws), it was more complex, but nevertheless optimistic.  Suze got her start in Berkeley at the Buttercup Cafe, one of my long time clients.  For better or worse Suze Orman is the current incarnation of Michael Phillips.

Cut payments to our enemies

In an earlier blog I argued for the creative use of commerce to deal with some of our major international problems (Iran, Russia...) by cutting the price of oil to $25.

I made a rough estimate that giving all American companies that use 5,000 barrels of oil a year a ten year period free of federal corporate taxes for a 50% reduction in oil use, would cost $100 billion in lost tax revenue.

Looking at the data here and here it is clear that my proposal would cost a maximum of $30 billion per year in lost taxes.  That is less than we currently spend subsidizing agriculture to produce more agriculture than we can consume.

Duke disproves Marxist tool

The "hang the white boys" events at Duke University in 2006 is still playing out.  You'll remember that 88 Duke faculty members signed a statement that, in effect, said that the accused gang rapists on the Lacrosse team were guilty.  The evidence rapidly began to show they were completely innocent.

One important lesson from this debacle has not been adequately discussed. The leaders of the Duke Faculty 88 based their guilty 'rich white boys' claims on the theory that is taught widely in Universities and Colleges called: Feminist, Gender, Race and Class Studies.

This theory was the basis for a prompt understanding that the White Lacrosse boys were guilty. The theory was wrong and we should all be aware that the theory was wrong.  The theory teaches that American society is run by a paternal Klan of whites using race and gender to suppress lower classes.

To understand the distribution of this theory by departments, here is the data from Duke: The department with the highest proportion of signatories among the 88 faculty members was African-American Studies, with 80%. Just over 72% of the Women's Studies faculty signed the statement, Cultural Anthropology 60%, Romance studies 44.8%, Literature 41.7%, English 32.2%, Art History 30.7%, and History 25%. All signators were from the Liberal Arts College.

The 88 used a bad theory, made a bad prediction, and were bad people.  I say 'bad people' because they never apologized.

Simpleton

I saw the Michael Moore film Sicko.  It is a perfect Lefty film just as Michael Moore is a perfect Lefty.

I've seen three out of four of Moore's films and they all had the same theme: A simpleton trying to figure out why America is screwed-up on closing auto plants (Roger and Me), high school gun rampages (Columbine) and episodic failures of health care (Sicko). The simpleton's answer: capitalism.

What more is there to say?

4th of July

This is a short video clip of a spontaneous sight in San Francisco. Coming down Market Street from the Southeast at 9:45PM, just as the 4th of July fireworks was ending, we found that traffic was nearly stopped.  It was a clear night, the fireworks from two locations on the North side of the City were visible from Market Street.

People stopped their cars, double and triple parking to see the show. Music and excitement were everywhere. You can see two cloud-burst fireworks just before the end of the clip before I say "wow."

Technology trumps science

We are taught in school that science is the backbone of technology.  Science is purportedly the theory on which new realms of technological development are explored.

This is true in only the most trivial sense.  Technology, in fact leads science.

The reality is that science is the explanatory presentation of technological findings; occasionally science is merely a rationalization for what has been found by technology.... an erroneous rationalization such as Y rays, eugenics and CO2 causes global warming.

Simple example: have you ever heard of theoretical chemistry producing anything of technical value.  Absolutely not, because the mechanisms of chemistry, energy transfer and molecular behavior are not yet accessible to enough technology to yield useful data on which to build scientific theory.

Argue against me. Throw in my face the power of Newton's science.  You'll fail because Newton's science and Copernicus's were based on the technological development of the glass lens.  The glass lens made possible the microscope and the telescope. The telescope was vital in showing the orbits of Jupiter's moons which led to Copernicus.  Galileo's experiments, technical measurements, provided the data Newton used on gravitational models. We still have more technological know how about lenses than we do theory.

Theory about diffraction of light has been segmented since Newton's time because Newton had a wave theory of light based on a two pin hole technology and the prism and Huygens had a particle theory based on one pin hole.  The complexity of lenses and coating is far beyond theory which sometimes catches up.

Hey, remember when theoretically impossible superconducting was found by IBM technologists at 100 degrees higher temperature than science said was possible?

Go back to my blog on the classes Niels Bohr taught at U. of Chicago. Bohr said all theory is based on the discovery of constants.  Constants are always found by technologists.

Commerce can't be punished

B.F. Skinner, a key figure in behavioral psychology, long argued that rewards will change behavior because the direction of change is clear.  Punishment, he claimed, rarely works because it is a general opprobrium that the victim of the punishment is never sure what the punishment was directed at.  (Your father yells at you for spilling your plate on the floor....was he upset with the particular food that fell?  was he in a bad mood?... was spilling food at that time of day or in that place the wrong thing to do?) Punishment is confusing, rewards are directives.

I think commerce fails to respond to punishment but does respond to rewards.

A good example is the auto industry.  The U.S. government set CAFE auto gas mileage standards in 1975.  CAFE was effectively a punishment.  If the auto industry didn't meet the legal requirements the individual car maker's would have been punished.

The American auto makers saw the 1975 CAFE standards in terms of a zero sum game.  The market was largely divided among the three of them.  So they first focused their industrial efforts at reducing the punishment by changing the law...which they did by 1986.  Then they focused on getting through a loop-hole in the punishment which excluded "light trucks".  A large part of the American car market was built on "light trucks" whence came the SUV.  Punishment didn't work.

The German auto makers, being good Germans, accepted the punishment and kept their cars the same while improving their gasoline consumption to the 1986 standard automobile CAFE requirements.

The Japanese took the punishment as an opportunity. For the Japanese companies it was a reward.  Toyota and Honda, already had cars that met the CAFE standards of 1975 and proceeded to improve the low and mid-priced cars in terms of quality and excellence.  They saw the market as vastly greater than the American auto companies.  The Japanese were right.  They never got punished and they doubled their market penetration..ultimately coming to dominate the American market.

Commerce responds best to rewards...probably never responds to punishment, (except by leaving the city, state or country).

Musical taste for tickets

I have heard a lot of moaning and wailing about young audiences lacking interest in classical music.  I hear the same thing in jazz circles.

It would appear to me that the problem is the high cost of tickets to classical music performances and jazz venues.  Lower the cost of tickets below $30 and the young audiences might become interested.

There is a good online site that has already got a third of a million young users in ten cities. It is Goldstar Events, which gets discounted ticket, online, for local performances. Their motto is 'tickets for the price of a movie.'

Airlines fill seats for coming weekends with discount tickets.  Music venues could do the same thing, with last minute discount prices offered online.  Is any music venue doing this?

Change in wind

I feel a change in the wind.  I give thanks to  Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for their prominent attacks on God.

It has been an ill wind in San Francisco for several years, with Lefties spewing hatred of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld at the drop of a hat.

That hatred seems to be dissipating over the past several months.  I think the reason Lefty hate is dissipating is because the Lefty antipathy toward the concept of God is in conflict with the over zealous boasting of their heroes Obama, Hillary and Edwards about the presidential candidate's claim to God.  Obama went so far as to claim that the Right was trying to steal Obama's god.

To understand why a re-awakening of the Lefty secular antipathy to God is reducing their esteem for the Lefty presidential candidates and the whole Lefty world it helps to understand my model of Social Thought.

Social Thought argues that our world view is hierarchical.  Picture a eucalyptus tree that has grown five trunks from the cut-off trunk of an earlier tree.  Those five trunks are the core view of the world out of which many branches grow.  (I use this upside down hierarchical image of a tree because a tree can be understood to grow in a soil that is "the milieu" from which humans and trees grow.)

One of these five trunks is the "lefty" trunk from which all the ideas of Leftism grow into branches.  Another trunk is the secular trunk from which ideas about the evils of god and religion grow into branches.

What has happened is that Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris (I'm ignoring Daniel Dennet because I don't think his books are readable) have reminded Lefties that they have a whole body of belief that censures God and religion. When the Lefty is sitting on the anti-god branch he looks over at the Lefty political branch and sees his heroes Obama, Hillary and Edwards singing Hallelujahs to God at the top of their voice.  Suddenly, the whole Lefty political trunk begins to shrink.

The fresh breeze I'm feeling in San Francisco is the Lefties, loosing their zeal for the Democratic Party presidential candidates and the whole cluster of hate Bush views they held so recently.

Tradition has a problem

Tradition is a vague multi-facited concept.  When I think of "tradition" I think of church weddings, elaborate funerals, the Roman Catholic Church, strict teacher-student classrooms, military parades, social class distinctions, gentleman farmers and 'respect for the old ways'.

Tradition has a problem in the modern commercial world.  The world of commerce is too appealing for tradition to stand a chance.  Commerce offers innumerable new pleasures, great opportunity for merit, the wonders of techology, the wonders of travel, freedom and the miracles of medicine.

The world of commerce exists in comparison to tradition.  The more time passes the more individuals chose the world of commerce in their own lives and the more it permeates their receptivity to novelty, excitement and modernity.

Tradition survives as sentimentality.