Pro Commerce

San Francisco Mean Spiritedness

Continuing the blog on Oct. 27th about the sources of mean spiritedness in America.

I think San Francisco is more mean spirited than anywhere else I've been in the country. That is why mean spiritedness is so easily detectable here.

San Francisco is more mean spirited because we have the greatest concentration of Lefty Fundamentalists per capita in the world living here. San Francisco just voted by a 9 to 1 margin in favor of former Governor Gray Davis ... a truly incredible political party line vote.

Lefty Fundamentalists are meaner than most people because the basic premise of their religion is that they are smarter than everyone else. Listen to their daily mantra: "George W. Bush is stupid". The Lefty Fundamentalist claim to be not just righter than everyone else, smarter too.

Worse than Berkeley

I was in Salt Lake City visiting family.

Mormon hostility to coffee, alcohol and similar drugs has allowed Salt Lake City to beat Berkeley and San Francisco in do-gooder oppression of commerce.

This photo shows the limits of out door smoking at a Salt Lake City coffee shop. Smoking is not permitted within 25 feet of a business entrance. That leaves this large coffee shop with about 12 feet of outdoor space where smokers can sit. Most coffee shops can't have out-door smoking.

Query? Did you know that none of the second-hand smoke studies done in Japan on Japanese show any harmful effects? How can that be true when American's are so certain that second hand smoke is nearly fatal?

Religious sites

Building a religious space. This is a photo of a garden built by a Mormon to, in my opinion, create a sacred space that communicated his sense of religious awe.

There is a website with more photos. I was interested because I have been to Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, Baldasare Forestiere's Underground Gardens in Fresno and I've followed Paulo Solari'sArcosanti.

Folk art often tries to do what Cathedral's and religious sites (like the Cistine Chapel) do. I find that folk art is usually more effective. I'm highly conscious of this because Japanese create folk art religious sites everywhere. They believe in local, very local, gods.

Folk art works better than institutional art --- because --- individuals have the power to speak across time to each other. A really weird observation that comes from my reading of many ancient (pre-historic) texts that were transcribed from the oral traditions.

Positive Sum

A friend asked me the other night, 'When did we first notice that commerce was not a zero sum game?"

(The illustration on the left doesn't illustrate the point. I looked up zero sum in Google images and this young woman was in the first part of the list.
She is used in a digital game called Zero Sum. She actually illustrates positive sum. In positive sum you get more from the interaction than you expected.)

The answer to the question of when we ("we" meaning the educated population that carries on a large scale dialog over centuries) first recognized that commerce was not a zero sum game, is difficult to answer. Adam Smith understood the concept but didn't say it. The rapid expansion of global frontiers in the 19th Century that was associated with economic growth probably obscured the positive sum reality of commerce.

The term zero-sum came from game theory which developed in WWII. The term was probably a necessary condition to understand positive-sum games.

The main point of this blog is that I don't know the answer. If you have an answer to my friends question --- please write. When was the positive sum nature of commerce first explicated?

What I do know is that few of the people I know and deal with have actually grasped the fact that commerce is a positive sum institution. The few who realize it reject redistribution of income, punitively taxing the rich, increasing the size of government, restricting the WTO and globalization and don't see increasing poverty in the third world as the result of commerce.

Mystic River (cont'd)

Mystic River, in its third week, had revenues of $7.6 million. Pretty good. The peak in sales was reached in the second week and now the revenues are falling.

The numbers are inconclusive as to whether Sean Penn and Tim Robbins drove away viewers. We will have to look for a better test. If the third week had been $4 million or less, it would have been clear that the public was reacting to overly politicized actors.

Mystic River was highly rated by critics and by the public. A highly rated movie can bomb inspite of ratings. This film did OK by Hollywood standards, definitely not good, nor terrible.

Mean spirited

In the past year and a half I have detected a level of mean spiritedness around me that has no parallels in my 60+ years of memory.

The mean spiritedness grew as the social recollection of the Twin Tower Jihad Murder receded and the anti-war activitists came out of the closet in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I think the proximate cause of the current wave of insufferable mean spiritedness is the computer. The computer is indirectly to blame because the personal computer made possible the individual gerrymandering that all legislative office holders promptly seized to enshrine themselves.

The direct cause of American political mean spiritedness is: the personally-designed, gerrymandered districts that allow political extremists to get elected and remain in office. The elected political extremists feed the extreme positions of their followers.

The politics of gerrymandering creates mean spiritedness in the elected officials who in turn feed the mean spiritedness of their constiutuency.

Official Death of the Environmental Movement

In the past I have had the job of being the first to announce the end of the Cold War and the end
of the Population Explosion. Now I have the dubious honor of announcing the death of the Environmental Movement.

I am saddened by this loss because I do value clean air, clean water and vast expanses of protected landscape.

The three signs that confirm the death of the environmental movement are:

(1) the long term failure of the Green party to win converts. No growth of the Greens in Europe, Japan and certainly not in America.
(2) The complete failure of the Environmental Movement to improve miles-per-gallon in American automobiles over the last two decades. This single easily understood, environmental issue, has been a notable failure.
(3) The complete dearth of new issues over the past ten years, to energize the public, fill grass-roots coffers or generate political excitement.

The certificate of death gives the cause as ideological rigor mortis. Prominent leaders including Garrett Hardin, Paul Erlich and Barry Commoner all trumpted a Chicken Little the-sky-is-falling escatology. After the sky has failed to fall, the ideology becomes boring.

First we heard Erlich and the Club of Rome raging that resources were nearly exhausted, then the population explosion would destroy life as we knew it, then an impending global climate ice age spelled the end, then the 10% loss of rainforests worldwide meant future horror, we were warned about the end of corral, the end of frogs, cancer from the ozone hole and finally we were told that global warming was imminent and terrifying.

No environmental leader, organization or spokesperson ever confessed to the series of monumental errors. Worse, the ideological priesthood keep blaming their opponents, Republicans and corporate pillagers, for the Environmental Movement's perennial failures.

Case in point: The Republican led American government's failure to ratify the Kyoto Accords is cited as an example of environmental enemies destroying vital lifesaving policy. However, the U.S. and the E.U. supported a Kyoto Accord during negotitations when the accord was to include CO2 trading agreements, a position endorsed by Environmental Defense. The Kyoto Accords would have worked with a CO2 trading provision but the ideologically rigid Environmental Movement decided it was better to loose on principal than win the battle.

Farewell.

The LDM in Salt Lake City

The majority of people who live in Salt Lake City are LDS, the Church of Latter Day Saints. Much of the remaining population, whom I met at Halloween parties, are LDM, the Church of Latter Day Marxists. The LDM are just as religious and just as doctrinaire as their brethern LDS.

The typical party conversation is based on Saint Doonesbury. It goes: 'George Bush is stupid and is run by a gang from Halliburton.'

My main problem with this piece of doctrine is that I want to get in on the action.

I have looked up Halliburton on Yahoo and it is listed as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol: HAL.

The problem with the LDM ideology is that if I had bought and held HAL in the summer before George Bush was elected or even two years later, before the Twin Towers Jihad Murder, I would now have half as much money.

Yes, George Bush and the Twin Towers Jihad Murder have reduced the value of my Halliburton holdings by 50%.

Partisan DNA

Is it in our genes to be so partisan that we can't consider a policy issue in the light of day?

I have been in the fight to ban human genetic engineering for more than five years. I wrote a paper on the subject in 1999 .

Human genetic engineering refers to any modification of the germline (sperm & egg) cells in a human that will be passed on the the rest of the human population.

A bill has passed the House several times, banning human genetic engineering. (Japan and most of Europe already ban human genetic engineering.) The same bill only has 55 votes in the Senate and it needs 60 to pass because the Democrats are solid in threatening the use of a fillibuster to stop it. The 45 Senators who want to permit human genetic engineering are all Democrats. How can that be? What is partisan about this issue?

The answer is, contemporary American politics makes nearly every issue partisan.

What happened is that the subject is too complicated for more than a dozen Senators to understand. So the lobbyists in favor of human genetic engineering cast it as a "Right to Choose" versus "Pro Life" issue and made it partisan. Both parties lined up and saluted.

Of course it isn't a "Right to Choose" issue. That is the whole point. No single person, no small group has the right to change the germline of the human species.

Dr. Hyde and Dr. Grifo

Dr. Jaime Grifo made news recently. He went to China to do his version of the three-parent human.
The article appeared last week.

Grifo takes the egg from a woman too old to fertilize, places the nucleus of her egg in the egg of a younger woman's egg that has been de-nucleated and fertilizes the cell with the older woman's husband's sperm. The fertilized egg is then implanted in the older woman's uterus. You get three parents: the nucleus and sperm of the couple that has the baby and the cytoplasm of the younger woman.

Trouble is, cytoplasm has mitochondrial DNA from a person not involved with the sperm and different from the mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA of the birth mother.

The consequence of the three parents has been, in animal subjects, a high death rate in the first few years of life.

In China the first offspring, twins, both died in utero and the Chinese banned the procedure.

I helped stop Grifo from doing his research in the U.S.

What nobody talks about is that 11 children in New Jersey and 11 children in Sydney were born using this technique in the late 1990's. Nobody has published the data on the survival of these experimental children. Maybe no one has checked.

Good design

Arthur Murray dance schools have been long gone. But, because of good design, one studio, near Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles still remains with the original name on it.

Hiring others to run our lives

I’ve seen three TV programs that seem to have caught a long term trend toward outsourcing our lives.

What do I mean by outsourcing our lives? It means the household unit does less household and personal work while hiring more people outside the household to do the work. Just like corporations hire outside workers to replace entire departments and call it outsourcing.

Obvious household examples over the past three decades are the increase in the number of people who hire tax preparers and accountants for their taxes --- The stunning increase in the number of people who replace cooking at home with meals eaten ‘out’ --- The rising number of house cleaning businesses and commercial laundries. We are outsourcing our lives. With children we have day care and after school care to help us.

The new trends are more personal, we now have weight loss clinics to advise and supervise our eating, we have personal trainers to support and supervise our exercise regimes and we have a whole range of therapists to help cope with family problems, marital problems and make our work lives more tolerable.

The three TV programs that take outsourcing a step farther are: Trading Spaces, Extreme Makeover and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Trading Spaces completely changes the physical environment you live in while keeping you in the same location. Outsource your living environment.

Extreme Makeover is plastic surgery to change your physical encounter with the world. Outsource your personality, in some sense.

Queer Eye is a combination of both. You outsource your lifestyle and get a new one.

TV understands

Mystic River?

The movie Mystic River, starring Sean (Saddam's O.K.) Penn and Tim (I hate America) Robbins gets a Yahoo A- rating from a total of 14 critics. Yahoo viewers give it a B+, which is very good for Yahoo viewers who usually prefer action movies.

So how did Mystic River do at the box office in the first two weeks? Total bomb.

First week $3.0 million. Second week $10.4 million.

How much of this movie's failure is due to the public political abuse that America has taken from Penn and Robbins? I don't have the answer but I will keep looking at business measurements that give clues to the answer.

Norfolk Island Pine

I have seen half a dozen Norfolk Island Pines planted in fairly small spaces.

We need some institution to let every home owner know the problems with planting a cute little Christmas-like tree that will grow too large.

The Norfolk Island Pine in my yard is 80 years old and is 80 feet tall.

It's not "the economy, stupid".

I'm sick of hearing this nonsense. If you know American politics you know every election in the past century. The relevant question is: "Under what circumstances does an incumbent president lose an election?" The answer is: it has only happened twice in the past 70 years. One election was in 1980 when Reagan defeated Carter and one election was in 1992 when Clinton defeated George Bush Senior.

In the 1980 election, the GDP grew from $2.56 trillion in 1979 to $2.79 in 1980, a growth rate of 9%. Inflation that year was also 9%.

In the 1992 election, the GDP grew from $5.72 trillion in 1991 to $6.04 in 1992, a growth rate of 5.5%. Inflation was 3%.

So in both elections the outcome couldn't have been due to bad economic growth. Weak, maybe.

It is possible that the reference to the "economy, stupid" is a reference to unemployment which declined from an average of 7.1% during Carter's administration to 6.5 in the year before the election.

For Bush the unemployment rate rose from an average of 5.8% in the three previous Bush years, to 7.1% in the twelve months before the 1992 election.

Neither Gross Domestic Product nor unemployment seems to explain incumbent election outcomes. Marxists need to cry about these numbers. The numbers don't support a Marxist view of the world.

More likely the reason an incumbent lost was political.

Carter entered the election with more than 50 Americans held hostage in Iran and he failed in his military attempt to free them. Reagan won in a landslide.

In Bush v. Clinton, Ross Perot was a third party candidate. Perot got nearly 20 million votes. He drew much more heavily from the Bush vote which ended up at 39 million votes compared to Clinton's 45 million votes. The Democrats were 50% of the registered voters at the time, compared to 38% for the Republicans. We should also remember that Pat Buchanan gave the opening address to the Republican convention and declared that the Republican Party stood firmly opposed to abortion.

Bush lost because of politics.

It's not "the economy," stupid. It's politics.

Lefty salmon dilemma

Lefty fundamentalists have created a dilemma for themselves.

They worry about eating free ranging Pacific Ocean salmon that are often depleted and are definitely endangered in several rivers that matter to Native Americans.

On the otherhand, they worry about eating farmed salmon that imposes an environmental risk of a domestic breed escaping into the wild with rapid-growth genes. The farmed salmon are also a problem with pink coloring added and many lefty fundamentalist magazines claim farmed salmon are grown in self-polluted water.

I'm so glad I love farmed salmon at $4.32 a pound from Safeway. I'm even happier to not be a Lefty Fundamentalist.

Fraud in San Francisco

A parking garage near Fisherman's Wharf has this sign which says in large type: Parking $1.00.
In much smaller type it says the rate is $5.00 per hour, with the first hour reduced if you have a validated ticket. On another wall it says the garage only accepts cash, no checks no credit-cards. (Anchorage at Leavenworth and Beach)

The minor problem for me is that San Franciscans can't do anything about this fraud. We have Terry (K.O.) Hallinan for DA and he will be re-elected in next months election. He has no genuine opposition. K.O. is the most bleeding hearted Lefty Fundamentalist DA in the U.S., maybe in U.S. history.

The serious moral problem is that this fraud is perpetrated on travelers. I have been a traveler all over the world and I have always been treated wonderfully.

Why are Americans so mean spirited to travelers? Why is it OK to cheat travelers?

After pondering this question for forty years I conclude that nobody in America considers him or herself to be a host. We all consider ourselves recent arrivals to a piece of land, town or city. Without the sense of being a host, we don't feel responsible for visitors, unlike most traditional people the world over.

This lack of a "host sense" is somewhat true for me, even though my great grandfather came to San Francisco in 1852. I really should be campaigning to make MY city a warm and caring place for travelers.

Meanwhile, Lefty Fundamentalists, and our DA, campaign to make San Francisco a warm and caring place for the homeless.

IHOP menu item

IHOP new crepes.

IHOP has a new breakfast crepe with scrambled egg, cheese and a choice of bacon, ham with sausage, or a combination. It included toast, with potatoes or fruit.

I tried it. Tastes O.K. My observation is that this breakfast crepe will be a global hit. The second World food. The first World food was pizza.

Double irony

The following image has double irony. It is big city (Santa Monica) pretending to be a small town. It is treating Arnold as just another local former football star who made good.

Gentrify is wrong

Gentrify is wrong

The term gentrification suggests an upward shift in social strata. The term gentrify is applied to low income and ethnic neighborhoods that experience an influx of high salary ‘white’ folks that is then associated with a rise in housing prices.

In looking closely at Venice, California and three neighborhoods in San Francisco, I find that the terminology is wrong. Gentrification is not what is happening. There can be a rapid rise in the average price of homes due to an influx of higher salary newcomers but I don’t find an upward shift in social strata or social-strata related aesthetics.

What I do see instead is that the influx of a small number of newcomers, maybe 2% of the neighborhood, drives up home prices. The newcomers drive up the prices because they create a sense of chic or safety that improves potential new home buyer’s perceptions of the whole neighborhood. They also bring into the neighborhood home speculators who transform dumps and eyesores into appealing marketable homes.

The indigenous neighbors become aware of the increase in the value of their houses and they respond to this stimulus by copying some of the aesthetic changes the newcomers made. Customarily the indigenous neighbors paint the outside of their houses, improve the landscaping, plant street trees and implement a few other very low cost improvements. The neighborhood remains pretty much the same demographically but it looks much more cared for.

What we have is a rising tide phenomenon, where very little change in social composition of a neighborhood results in significant changes in the outward appearance of the neighborhood.

From that point on, the change that occurs is driven by landlords improving their buildings to raise the rent of tenants. A continued pressure to raise average home prices.

Of course none of this happens near a traditional public housing project because the neighbors are mostly tenants not owners.

A new word is needed to replace gentrify. Suggestions?

Central Valley

Either I’m not reading enough political blogs or political bloggers are falling down on the job.

The new governor only has one reasonable strategy to pass legislation in the California legislature, as far as I can see. (I was once a legislative analyst). That is to pressure the Central Valley legislators, roughly one-third of the total legislators, to act as a body and vote with the governor. The motivation for the legislators is that the governor won overwhelming majorities in nearly all Central Valley counties from Shasta in the north to Imperial in the south.

The evidence that the new governor already knows that this is his most viable strategy is that 14 of the 68 people on his transition team are from the Central Valley. Those 14 are not famous, prominent or prestigious like the rest of the 54. They are on the transition team to work out a strategy to get cooperation from their Central Valley peers.

La Times and New Yorker

Do the LA Times and the New Yorker have something in common?

Yes, both of them did unique hit pieces on Republicans last week. The LA Times began an expose' of the new governor of California on Wednesday October 1st and ran it up until the election on October 7th. .

The New Yorker ran a cover of President Bush on a horse with the President wearing horse blinders. The New Yorker with the attack cover was the October 13th issue. It reached the newstands last week.

The anti-Republican hit pieces are the only subject these two print vehicles have in common. The business consequences for the LA Times and the New Yorker are different.

I focus on commerce in this blog. Whether the hit piece on the new governor, in the LA Times had an effect is up to researchers to investigate.

Preliminary data from exit polls suggest Governor Schwarzenegger may have benefited from the hit piece. The proportion of women to men who voted for Arnold and the reverse percentage of men to women who voted in favor of the Recall doesn't appear to have changed over the month prior to the actual election. No gender effect was probably positive, the hit piece was seen as dirty campaigning.

There can be business consequences to partisan hit pieces.

I don't think the New Yorker will be hurt, because the readers of the New Yorker know the magazine is directed at the nattering nabobs of the Upper Westside of Manhattan. No surprises. The same is true for New Yorker advertisers who also know the nature of the readership. The magazine looses money and has lost money for decades.... so it can not be considered a business. Running the New Yorker is a hobby. Rich publishers buy and sell the magazine for social status purposes. Offending a few readers doesn't matter. Only the charitable hobbyist who owns and subsidizes the New Yorker matters.

The same is true for dozens of national magazines from The Nation to the New Republic. If the owners of the New Yorker are part of the nattering nabob set, then the partisan hit piece probably had no consequence.

The opposide is true of the LA Times. The hit pieces by the new editor, John S. Carroll, will have serious, harmful consequences for the LA Times. The few thousand cancelled subscriptions are irrelevant.

The biggest problem is that Carroll has been trying to recruit good new talent for the paper. The LA Times, like many big newspapers has had a static to declining readership for several decades and the decline has been rapid in the past two years. Nearly 200,000 readers have left the LA Times.

The paper has also made the mistake of attacking a highly respected leader of the film industry. The film industry has its world capital in Los Angeles.

Carroll's campaign to recruit good new talent has come to an end. The paper has suddenly earned itself a reputation as a partisan tabloid with the demagogic hit pieces that Caroll published last week. The LA Times has tarnished its own reputation for several years into the future.

To understand the consequences imagine a recruiting luncheon that Carroll might schedule with a rising star currently at the Herald Tribune.

Carroll: 'We can offer you a great future as a journalist, high pay and the excitement of living in a vital and important city.'

Young hotshot journalist: 'John, you can kid yourself, but you can't kid me. My friends think you are trying to make the LA Times into a tabloid. That is not for me. You have taken sides with the Democrats in a state that will likely go Republican over the next few years. That doesn't seem like a newspaper with a future especially since the suburbs of LA voted overwhelmingly for the recall and for Arnold. But worst of all, in your much vaunted city, your people are being left out of the excitement. The film industry considers you and your staff to be lepers.'

Carroll: 'Is there anything I can do to change your mind?'

Young hotshot journalist: 'That is your problem, not mine.'

French and France

I'm very humble about my foreign policy relevance. I do write for the Japanese Foreign Policy journal, but I write about America.

So take it for what it's worth, very little: The French government is trying to provoke a public statement by American leaders attacking France as "lazy and irrelevant." This has been a core part of the French strategy of creating an alternate pole in the uni-polar world.

The reason the French government wants to provoke a verbal attack from American leaders is that an American insult to the French is the only way to get the ordinary French citizen to work harder, take shorter vacations, make economic and union reforms.

French popular literature recognizes America as the mega-economy, the monster eating the French lunch. The French hated Disneyland when it opened, hated McDonalds and generally consider America a competitor. Usually America and the American government ignore France, a form of distain.

A public insult from the U.S. would be the kind of recognition that would stimulate a French competitive response.

America should keep quiet about the lazy French.

Report on San Francisco

During the dotcom boom, October was a month with many pedestrians downtown and heavier than usual traffic on San Francisco streets. We've missed that for two years. Now it is back.

I don't know if it is legal to sell live chickens in the City. One of my Yemeni employees, decades ago, was arrested for butchering a lamb in the basement of his restaurant for a Yemeni party.
Live chickens are regularly sold at the UN Plaza market. Its unique to see the Safeway brown bags squirming with a chicken inside. This is a photo of a live pheasant being sold in the back of the UN Plaza Wednesday market.

Last Saturday evening we went to the Foreign Cinema deep in the heart of the Mission District on one of the bad blocks of Mission. Not the worst block. Foreign Cinema is a great place. Beautiful women in short skirts, the jet set crowd, good food and an outdoor foreign film showing. Table cloths and a big crowd.

David Brooks had a piece in the NYTimes the same day about yuppies going to bad neighborhoods as a way to be macho and make up for their truly trite lives. There is some element of that, but it is not all of what is going on.

We walked around the corner to 22nd and Bartlett and sat at an outdoor cafe to listen to a Celtic group: base, violin and guitar. Bohemian crowd. Across the street a group of fifteen had clipped a sheet to the fence to screen a classic film. They used a DVD player with a high powered new model projector, a cord ran 100 feet to a plug in a nearby house. About 60F out. Wonderful easy-going crowd.

More on Cross-Filing

Several questions raised on an earlier blog about the New Cross-Filing.

How it would work. Suppose you were a Democrat, last year, and you wanted to make sure you got a choice in the General election. You would go to the voting booth in the State election Primary and ask for a Republican ballot. You then could have voted for Riordan over Simon on the Republican ticket and, if we had Cross-Filing last year, Riordan would have won the Republican primary. The General election ballot would have given everyone a choice between Davis and Riordan. The winner, either way, would not have been recalled.

The New Cross-Filing would mean that you couldn't cross file in a Presidential Primary because what you are actually voting for is a slate of delegates to a Party Convention. Party Conventions are considered, by the courts to be non-governmental entities. Political Parties are able to make their own voting rules about delegates to theirown conventions. All Parties want to limit their voters to Party members.

Don't worry about Davis

Davis has a future that most people are overlooking. Rumor has it that the Bush administration is considering offering Davis an Ambassadorship to the U.N. or France.

Sunshine in our future

Today is an historic turning point in the development of democracy. A wonderful turning point.

By my calculation, the first democracy was formed in Holland in the1590s. The second democracy was two centuries later in America. Democracy is only a few centuries young and we are just beginning to create democratic institutions that work. This is pure experimentation.

In yesterday's blog I explained how we are likely to get a return of Cross-Filing in California next year.

Cross-Filing turns out, after being gone for forty years, to have been the root cause of California's half century of good government. California had a government that gave it the best transportation and best education in America, right up to the end of Cross-Filing in 1960. Today California is a mess with a junk bond rating and a government run by stereotypes of the venal politico.

I simply wanted to mention here, the reason we lost Cross-Filing. I can now see the historic process at work that destroyed one great democratic improvement to allow another improvement to emerge.

What happened was that political party conventions, starting in 1952, were covered by the new technology of TV. TV coverage meant that the traditional convention process consisting of dozens of floor votes, each one followed by back room negotiation between candidates and big city bosses, was no longer feasible. The public couldn't stomach back room deal making.

The consequence of TV at the political conventions was the magnification of state primaries and the eclipse of big city bosses. This all happened in less that eight years.

The magnification of state primaries was significant and important by the time of the 1956 convention. Both political parties saw the necessity of winning the California primary with a national candidate, not a favorite son. Winning the California primary with a national candidate was only possible if Cross-Filing was eliminated. That would make the California primary a contest only among party faithful. No favorite son could be allowed to win. So Cross-Filing was defeated by statewide vote.

Sadly, we now know that Cross-Filing was a great step forward in democracy. When it returns next year, the new Cross-Filing it will be designed to not interfere in the National Party Convention primary process. That new design is the result of a California Supreme Court ruling in 1998. All California elected offices will be subject to Cross-Filing but not the specific vote for National Party Convention delegates.

The future of democracy is bright. Democracy needs a lot of improvement. Improvement comes at a snail's pace, relative to one person's lifetime. I am fortunate to have seen this part of this great democratic experiment. We are jointly (my blog readers) fortunate to understand what is happening today.

Body Politic = SFRM

Body Politic is the wrong term. The more accurate and more descriptive term is the Social Fiber Repair Mechanism, SFRM. The SFRM operates at a gut level in most people, definitely not at a conscious level.

I gave the classic example of SFRM in an earlier blog. It occurred when Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco damaged the electoral mechanism by bribing every potential candidate who could run against him not to run. Two weeks before the election, a write in campaign was launched that generated 44,000 write-ins for a candidate whose name was hard to spell: Ammiano. Willie won the run-off as a humiliated man. The electorate proceeded to deal an additional capping blow to the mayor by defeating every one of the mayor's hand picked and well financed supervisorial candidates.

Other non-election actions by SFRM include the 10,000 person riot that occurred when a court announced a trivial prison sentence for a politically heinous murder. SFRM finally solved the whole institutional miscarriage of justice problem with the suicide of Dan White, two years after he got out of prison.

White had served the brief and fraudulently arranged sentence of five years for the double 1st degree murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and the first gay supervisor, Harvey Milk. Dan White was not the suicidal type, he had been an eagle scout, a fireman, a policeman, a city supervisor and was married with two young children. The SFRM got him to take his own life in ways that may never be understood.

Still another SFRM were the statewide riots that followed the jury verdict in the Rodney King case; the case was tried in Simi Valley. An all-white jury in Simi Valley was used to try and find innocent three Los Angeles County police for a beating that was recorded on TV. L.A. County, like most counties, was institutionally incapable of trying its own police. The SFRM finally found a solution: the U.S. Attorney was pressured and a Federal trial was held based on civil rights violations.

Gray Davis will be defeated tomorrow by ten points and Arnold will be elected governor by more than five points, as I predicted in late July. The SFRM is at work.

What Institution was damaged that the SFRM needs to repair it?

It turns out that two institutions were damaged. One was the initiative process. In 1996 the citizens of California voted to reinstate a voting system called Cross-Filing, that had been discontinued after 1960. Cross-Filing was the source of Calfornia's great government because everyone could chose, when they arrived at the polls, which party they wished to vote for in the primary. As a consequence, both parties were forced to elect moderate, middle of the road candidates for all elective offices. When Cross-Filing was originally defeated in 1960, it was replaced by vicious party warfare and extremist party-centered candidates.

Californians, in an election where both political parties condemned the Cross-Filing initiative, instead voted to reinstate Cross-Filing by a two to one margin. The political parties, in revenge, then proceeded to take the election to court and eviscerate the result.

That was damage number one, which was compounded last year by damage number two.

Gray Davis used his Democrat Party funds, raised for use in his General Election campaign, to attack and destroy the only Republican who could have easily defeated him, Richard Riordan. Davis spent Democrat money in the Republican primary, to defeat Riordan and make sure no viable candidate would run against him in the General Election. This insidious tactic had never been used before.

The SFRM is now setting things right. We can expect, with the election of Arnold, that the group of political science academics who put the Cross-Filing initiative on the ballot in 1996, will put it on the ballot again in 2004. As a result more moderate people, like Arnold, can get elected and the Gray Davis form of satanic tricks can't be used again in a primary.

Puritanism

Wino Park closed after less than three years. A victim of Puritanism.

The park was on 6th St. and Minna, the center of San Francisco winos and streetpeople. About 70 feet wide by 125 feet long, with benches, chemical toilets, a basketball hoop, a raised grass area and landscaping. The park was managed and cleaned by park residents, who proudly wore the black embroidered jackets with 6th Street Park on them.

I created the park. The number of stories I could tell are nearly limitless. The reason I mention Wino Park is to remind myself that it closed because of Puritanism and no park like it has ever been build since in the US.

Nearly every day the park was open I was asked, “How many people have you gotten off drugs?”, “How many Park people have gotten jobs?”, “Are the Park people going to detox programs?” Finally, the Puritan elements of the city, in the form of a 100% false scandal expose' by the Hearst Examiner, created too much pressure to keep the Park open. Puritanism closed the park.

My mentor, Peter Sherrill, defined Puritanism as “the fear that somebody, somewhere is having more fun than I am”. The idea that winos sitting around all day, day after day, visiting friends and not working, seemed to evoke that Puritan fear.

PG&E scam

My expert witness testimony against PG&E may be of interest. Pacific Gas and Electric is in bankruptcy. To get out of bankruptcy the company needs the utilities regulator (CPUC; Calif. Public Utilities Commission) to approve a long-term electric rate increase. To win the CPUC’s support in getting out of bankruptcy, PG&E has offered to donate 140,000 plus acres of conservation land to a non-profit with $70 million to take care of the land.
My testimony suggests that the whole proposal by PG&E is a sham.

Homeless churches

For the record. Homeless commonly camp in front of Catholic Churches, a few mainline denominations and in front of no evangelical churches. This pattern has been true since the word homeless entered our vocabulary in 1981.

I know the date of this word, homeless, which came from New York, because I built a park for winos in 1979. The word at the time was streetpeople.