Pro Commerce

Media fails math test

Why do the media miss important earth shaking news?

I’m thinking about three pieces of news that are very important, yet have not reached the level of public dialog. The first is that the global population explosion ended in the mid 1980’s. I wrote about this in the early 1990’s. The same is true of the Leavitt material about abortion legalization in the 1970’s that resulted in reduced crime rates in the 1990’s. The third is the paper that indicates strong evidence for non-human causes of the current global climate change.

The first two issues have been extensively debated in their respective fields and are now consensus positions. The later is a point in the middle of the debate where consensus is changing. Each of these newsworthy items can be found in one of my blogs: population, abortion and climate.

My hypothesis for the failure of the media is that numbers and statistics are just something that few in the media can understand. Certainly the media editors can’t understand numbers and statistics.

I know that this hypothesis is strong because I made a prediction back in the Spring when the accounting problems of FreddieMac and FannieMae were brought to public attention. I predicted that within two weeks, the NYTimes, the WSJournal or BusinessWeek would publish a summary that explained the accounting issues of these major American financial institutions. It didn’t happen folks.

I don’t think that people who can read numbers and statistics become journalists. Please show me that I’m wrong.

Commerce and coercion

Does Commerce use coercion?

The rigorous description of commerce is: commerce is based on freely chosen associations. Commerce is voluntary transactions with no coercion.

My friends commonly have two problems understanding this description of commerce.

First, commerce is perfectly comfortable paying for coerced labor. This is confusing to many people: commerce pays for coercion, but commerce does not operate with coercion.

Commerce has always made use of slavery and has hired chain gangs. Commerce seems comfortable running prisons and hiring armies. Commerce even hires mercenaries who use coercion. So, commerce is not averse to hiring coercion. The description of commerce, to remain coherent, requires that coercion is delivered to the marketplace for sale to consenting buyers. The actors in the world of coercion almost always do offer coerced labor in the marketplace.

Coercion for sale involves middlemen who create the closed shell around which a voluntary transaction can take place. The management of a prison is offered as a contract in the marketplace. An army is offered for sale in the marketplace, you deal with one Army leader. The same is true for a group of mercenaries; you hire the leader who hires the followers.

The case of slavery is a little different; slavery involves a legal system that delivers the slaves to the marketplace. Think of the ‘Dredd Scott’ decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court ordered the U.S. executive branch to return slaves to the slave states they had run away from because the slaves were marketable property in the states they fled.

We have similar domestic and international laws to this day. The laws are called extradition laws. Most states send people charged with a crime back to the state or country they fled or left.

The exceptions are interesting. Canada and France refuse to extradite people who might be subject to the death penalty in the U.S. The Dredd Scott issues have not disappeared. The laws of the state where the captive fled are important. Canada and France, in this case, oppose the laws of the U.S.

The second problem my friends have with the description of commerce is confusion about the notion of coercion. Going to work at the same Sears store for forty-five years is not coercion. Believing you must go to work in order to have a life style that supports your aging parents, your seven children and a car, is not coercion. Many people have trouble understanding this.

Part of the confusion comes from the 0 to 10 range of behavior we live with: from no coercion 0 -- being a ballet dancer for the New York City Ballet Company -- to total coercion 10 -- prison. The ballet dancer may hate the master choreographer and feel compelled to go to work anyway, but that is not coercion. Even if the dancer believes that the NY City Ballet Company is the only one a “great dancer” could belong to, going to work in conditions the dancer hates is not coercion.

There are many forms of behavior in the middle of the 0 to 10 scale that are coercion, but are not seen as coercion. For example, serving on a jury for $5 a day involves coercion. Enlisting in the Marines for a four year tour of duty involves coercion. Violating parole and spending five more years in prison involves coercion. These three examples are part of the everyday experience that leads to confusion about commerce.

Many people are happy to serve on a jury regardless of the pay and many people consider jury service an honorable civic duty. This is confusing. Serving on a jury is compulsory; failing to do so can result in judicially ordered jail time. No boss in an American corporation has the power of an ordinary municipal court judge who can send you to jail on the spot for disobeying her orders. A judge has coercion; a job, a company and a boss do not have coercion.

Marine Corps officers carry a pistol to shoot deserters, which is still coercion even if you voluntarily signed up with the Marine Corps. Corporate bosses only wish they had that form of coercion available in the workplace.

What we have is a civic duty, reporting for jury duty -- like paying taxes, that many people are proud to offer voluntarily. The reality behind the happy volunteering is that these activities are based on underlying coercion. It is easy to confuse voluntary actions and coercion. We’d like to ignore the coercive element of jury duty and the voluntary act of violating parole.

Loving something you do, like serving on a jury, is what confuses people. For the description of commerce in our first paragraph, the issue is not whether you love something, but whether there is coercion behind it. Serving on a jury is coercion because it is backed up by coercion.

The same confusion applies to joining the Marines. This initial act is voluntary, but ten minutes after you sign-up you serve four years without a choice about leaving or quitting. This is a voluntary act followed by a form of coercion that no employer, boss or corporation ever had or has.

The same confusion applies to the sweet young parolee who sells her lover a tab of meth or a joint. She voluntarily offered a sale to a lover … sweet. But once caught, a judge can order her to spend five years back in prison. A voluntary act leads to coercion. It is surprising, but two-thirds of all people released from prison voluntarily go back to prison. All it takes is a voluntary act of parole violation. This is voluntary submission to coercion. It is definitely not part of describing commerce.

The most common example that leads to confusion about commerce and coercion is the classic Company Town. The town owns your house, the local store, the jobs and everything else.

While most company towns in America were built on socialist notions intended to avoid shanty towns and ghettoes, company towns have a bad reputation. One company town that I know well, Crockett California, organized by C&H Sugar Coompany, is much beloved by its residents. In spite of this positive reality and negative literature on the subject, dwellers in company towns were always free to walk away from their jobs, just as the Sears employee can walk away from the job. Having seven children and needy parents is not coercion. It may be onerous to leave, but the forces of inertia are not coercion. The company town is not coercive regardless of the long history of negative literature.

Back to the issue of loving jury duty. Loving an activity does not describe its coercive or non-coercive state.

Many people work hard because of their emotional make-up. My daughter spent years working eighty hour weeks. She is a scientist, working because she loves her lab work. Another friend is a composer who works countless hours to perform her art. Still other friends drive themselves mercilessly at the work they love, technical, intellectual, academic, religious and artistic. Working hard and loving your work does not tell whether the work is coercive or not. In these examples, salary is often involved, but it is not coercion that drives people to work hard.

Many people love being in the Marine Corps and still others choose to live their life in prison. Neither situation keeps the Marine Corps or prison from being coercive once you are in.

The astounding victory of commerce in the current world is that most people work hard and work well even when they don’t love their work. They have been motivated by pay. Commerce has found a variety of human qualities that can be rewarded to produce commercial output.

Commerce is stunningly successful at motivating people and making them productive. About 90 million working Americans are in commerce.

Commerce is in fact the most successful of all motivators. Survey research finds that 60% of salaried workers do their job primarily for the money (or some form of health coverage).

By my calculation that is over 55 million Americans whose work is voluntarily induced by commerce. That compares with:

*less than 40 million who appear to enjoy their salaried commercial work,
*the few million in the arts and sciences who seem to love their work and don’t have salaries and
*the additional few million farmers and self employed who don’t have salaries and may or may not like their work.

The summary of this data is: The majority of American workers are in commerce and they work whether they love their work or not.

Another 20 million Americans are in the non-commercial sector, including prisoners. Most are not in coercive circumstances.

The point is that commerce creates workers at the rate of 4 to 1 over non-commercial work.

Less than 3 million people spend their time in coercive environments, prison, mental institutions and active military. Commerce induces workers to work at about a 30 to 1 ratio over coercion.

Big Month: November 2003

I actually feel sorry for my Lefty Fundamentalist friends and relatives. Not only have they missed the two great historic moments of the past few weeks: the Proclamation of Global Democracy announced at the National Endowment for Democracy and the Moral Outrage of European Anti-Semitism declared in London, but they also missed the high melodrama of President Bush in Baghdad.

Our President flying 15 hours, landing in a 747 without lights, prepared at any moment to turn back, dressed in Army track clothes, enters the Bob Hope dinning room to the words of Ambassador Bremer ‘I’m going to make the Thanksgiving remarks unless there is someone in the room who out ranks me’, wild applause, tears on the President’s face, greeting the crowd, meeting Master Sergeant Johnson, a giant black man, to whom he says “I’m glad we’re both on the same side’….and saying to the crowd that he had just dropped in ‘looking for a warm place’ to have dinner.

Maybe you had to have been a lowly soldier, like I was, for that story to bring tears to your eyes.

Cradle of America

Russell Shorto has written a book on the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam and its influence on the founding of the United States. (Publication is due next spring). Shorto offers a brief précis in the NYTimes op-ed page of Thursday Nov. 27th. Shorto suggests that the American keystones of diversity and tolerance were laid in New Amsterdam. I’m readily willing to accept that idea, I look forward to the evidence.

In my late July blog I reviewed a book and discussed briefly the origins of modernity in Amsterdam from 1590 to 1680. I plan to write a brief history of commerce, for this blog, that locates the origin of modern commerce in Holland of that same period. I now refer to Holland in the 1600's as the Cradle of Modernity.

I am part of the Dutch Revisionist movement. Our movement is not based on a new interpretation of traditional historic evidence, it is based on the work of American and English scholars who learned to read Dutch and found overwhelming and overlooked evidence right before our eyes. The Dutch themselves never seem to have known that the rest of the world didn't know their history.

Report from Colorado

*In Iraq

The Rockies are the Western Edge of the Real America and the Appalachians are the Eastern Edge. The Ocean Coast States seem to have been stuck emotionally in the cold war era, mostly against the United States, on the side of the Soviet Union and the Viet Cong.

So I delightfully ask everyone I meet here in Colorado, what Americans think. On the basis of a tiny number, the answer to my key question is: Yes, the United States will be able to stay in Iraq for several years without President Bush loosing either next year’s election or his Congressional lead.

*Kobe Bryant

Among men there is a Secret Pact. We have agreed not to talk to women about it. The core of the pact is: the understanding that women have gained excessive legal power over men and are too easily able to lie and exaggerate. Women are able to use the power of the law to unfairly intimidate and persecute men.

The Secret Pact is the reason for the decade long difference in voting results between men and women. Men look for political candidates they feel will someday right the legal imbalance that favors women.

My male friends in San Francisco think that the Kobe Bryant case is a frame. We don’t think the case will ever make it to trial. In Colorado, based on my tiny sample, the male opinion is that Bryant will go to trial but will be found not guilty.

Drug Coverage

In my Feb 9th blog I talked about the Medicare disaster that is about a decade off. I offered a number of imaginative suggestions.

The main point of this blog is that the Medicare prescription drug bill that just passed is designed to deal with this problem. The bill includes an experimental provision that takes effect in 2010 to have private insurers compete for Medicare services.

This bill, while unimaginative, is nevertheless good policy. It passed because many in Washington know that the time for any particular solution only comes along once and this is the once for Medicare reform and prescription drug coverage. AARP saw the light at the last minute.

The previous blog covered AARP.

AARP power rooms

Many people don’t know how the AARP operates. The D.C. office has several big conference rooms in the headquarters which is a three and a half block walk from Congress. The AARP conference rooms are equipped with large screen TVs. Members of Congress are brought to the conference rooms and a group of fifty of the legislator’s local constituents is offered live to the member of Congress. It is a free focus group for the Congress person who gets to ask constituents their opinion on anything. Congress listens when the AARP speaks.

Powerful lobbying. Among the most powerful in D.C.

New military victory

What was the Department of Defense Bill that the President signed two days ago with little publicity and no Democratic furor?

It was the same issue that drove the Democrats insane about the Homeland Security Bill and what turned the Confederate Army into the Army that defeated 200,000 Iraqi troops in four weeks (actually, the battle began in secret with Special Forces two and a half months before the main battle).

The bill the President signed turned the civilians employed by the Department of Defense from civil service protected bureaucrats with chaotic union representation into a group of conventional employees who can be fired, promoted for merit and represented by one major negotiating union (rather than hundreds).

This all started after we lost the war in Viet Nam. The military introduced a meritocratic promotion system call 'three failed reviews and you're out.' Meaning that officers who didn't get promoted after three reviews were kicked out of the military.

The consequence was that the military, which was a direct descendent from the Confederate Army (because Southerners have made up the bulk of the members for 100 years) came to an end.

The efficiency of the new Army was so startling that the meritocratic advantages are now spreading in government. First to the giant Homeland Security Agency and now back to the civilian military workers.

CSI at the top

The CSI program on television is about a previously unknown group of police officers who collect forensic data at crime scenes. Crime Scene Investigation. The TV show on this subject, that ranks at the top of the Neilsen chart week after week, is set in Las Vegas. A similar show with a different cast, not nearly as popular, is set in Miami.

CSI gets Neilsen ratings of 17 to 18, roughly 21 million households watching every show. This rating is one third higher than all other top rated prime time shows, which are in the 12 to 13 range. For every three people who watch other shows a fourth person joins the group to watch CSI.

What has CSI got? It has three elements that I consider additive. Additive meaning each element has an audience and the three audiences get added together to create the larger total audience.

Element one is a traditional murder mystery. The murder comes with an extra bucket of blood and gore, added on the pretense that it helps forensic understanding when the audience can closely view an arm mutilated by a shark, or to see a body that has been decomposed by a week in the water. Element one would get the program up to a a Neilsen rating of 9-10.

Element two is a large dollop of inter-personal friction. This is the usual melodrama and it adds a few Nielsen points. Melodrama would usually also lose points except for the fact that the inter-personal friction is in a white collar office setting, the kind that most working Americans experience everyday. So a surly and distracted boss becomes a subject of interest to most viewers. Realistic white collar office friction is not common on TV. It adds a significant audience, 2-3 Nielsen points. The total points now are in the 13-14 range. Higher than most programs.

Element three is science of the Sherlock Holmes variety. This brings in the educated reading audience. This group rarely watches TV and when they do they don't admit it. The last time this group admitted watching TV was for Jerry Seinfeld. The total viewership gets pushed to 18 with the addition of this final group that seldom watches TV.

Voila, a successful TV show.

Pathetic Environmental Movement

I declared the end of the Environmental Movement in my October 27th blog. I was just looking at the absence of a grassroots constituency and the failure of the movement to find any successful new sky-is-falling hysterias to rally the troops in the past decade.

Now I see an additional reason. The absence of intelligence, subtlety or sophistication at the intellectual level of the movement. This will take a little reading on your part.

This is the essay I submitted to the Shell-Economist contest. The Shell planning department that set up this contest was the mother of GBN, Global Business Network, an environmental-business-scenario consulting firm. Die-hard fanatics, but also the main thinkers in the environmental field. My essay, jointly authored with a close friend who writes well, argues that the environment, our own physical characteristics and especially our perceptions of the world are all interactive and constantly evolving. We give examples and offer what I feel to be an intelligent, subtle and sophisticated argument suggesting we, humans, don't know what our environment actually is. We can't know what our environment is with any reliability. The argument is tightly underpinned by contemporary American pragmatic philosophy.

The winner of the contest wrote a piece that is stylistically beautiful: the world from the vantage point of a fungus. The following is the main point of the essay:

"With the advantage of hindsight, I think we can summarize it (the development of human society in the past 20,000 years) as a failed experiment in individualism. The idea of the individual – and there is no fungal equivalent – arose during a period of rapid change in human society. In the abstract, individualism looked defensible, even appealing. The ideal individual was to be educated and enlightened, someone we’d all like to know. However, as a practical matter, the culture of enlightened individualism reformed itself after a brief period into a cult of personal freedom.

"Over the next several centuries, unbridled personal freedom and chance distributions of natural resources led to the creation of certain wealthy and isolated colonies of humans. Their prosperity excited envy and the rest of the world did what they could to emulate them. Large populations of humans moved from a very simple experience of the natural world to the expectation of a lifestyle similar to what the exploiters were enjoying. This clamour for plenitude – for meat in daily diets, for manufactured goods, for personal comfort, for leisure activities – put enormous stress on the biosphere. "

The literary quality of the piece is adult, the perspective is fourth grade marxist. The judges, one of whom I know, must view the public as left-wing ideological fools to commend this childish vision of the environment.

Wells Fargo --- Good Work

Two days ago Wells Fargo Bank lost a computer list of its California credit customers in a burglary of a contractor's office in the East Bay. All the names on the computer are subject to identity theft because the list has names, addresses, social security numbers and probably some demographic data about each customer.

Wells took a number of exemplary actions, that should be noted by all businesses. First, the obvious letter to all affected customers. Second, personal phone calls to all affected customers. Third, a notice to the three credit bureaus to look for suspicious action in any of the accounts of the targeted Wells customers. Fourth, a free one year account with Privacy Guard that allows for direct customer interrogation of their own credit reports. Fifth a dedicated 800 phone number to call with any problems. Sixth, change in the credit account numbers. Seventh, a promise of indemnity against any losses due to identity theft. Finally, Wells has posted a $100,000 reward for the burglar.

The only two things Wells has missed is: a notice to all other customers who are worried and a more appealing reward offer to a burglar snitch than money, a reward such as a new Maserati.

Notice for all Jews

President Bush already sits at the top of the pantheon of friends of the Jews. In 2,000 years, Jews have never had a friend like President George W. Bush. Only a few others in 2,000 years have entered the pantheon at all. The few members of the pantheon are all recent. Members include those who saved thousands of Jews, such as Rauol Wallenberg and Sugihara, Chiune and those who saved individual Jews, such as the saints memorialized in the line of trees at Yad Vashem. The Danes, as a nation, are in the pantheon of friends of the Jews..

President George W. Bush not only publicly supported the Jews when their enemies began indiscriminately killing Jews in September 2000 but adamantly vilified and punished the leader of the enemy camp. To this day he has never hesitated to support the Jews and vilify Arafat, the perverted leader of the enemy camp. President Bush has never spoken to nor met this evil man.

At the same time that President Bush joined the pantheon of friends of the Jews, former President Clinton gave a speech in the Fall of 2000 at Hebrew University calling on the recently victimized Jews of Israel to "be patient." The sub-text that I read into Clinton's indifference to murdered Jews is ' my long time friend Yasir tells me that killing Jews is only a temporary situation that he is trying to fix.'

Now here is my notice to all living and future Jews:

President Bush is the first president of the United States and the first leader of any major nation at any time in history to demand an end to European anti-Semitism.

I suggest that President Bush is no longer at the top of the pantheon of friends of the Jews, he has become the Zeus of the pantheon. I predict that President George W. Bush will become the most beloved figure in Jewish history and will be as important a part of future Passover services as Elijah is today.

Replace the Legislature

The California New Progressive Movement ball is rolling. We citizens have recalled and replaced a highly partisan political governor. The new non-partisan governor is faced with a highly partisan legislature.

Let's replace the legislature. We can replace the California Legislature with a sortition legislature. Sortition refers to a random selection of California citizens, selected just the way juries are selected. Real people chosen to serve three year terms.

Real citizens, just like jurors, will accurately reflect the population of California. The real citizens will serve at the same pay as current legislators and return to their lives, in El Centro and Richmond, after three years. Real citizens chosen to be representatives are just the kind of representative legislature that our founding fathers wanted.

We can have: no partisan infighting, no costly election campaigns, no candidate fund raising. We can have real people doing their job seriously and accurately representing the non-partisan interests of California.

The time is ripe for an initiative to replace the current California Legislature.

I wrote a book in the early 1980's with co-author Chick Callenbach. The book is online. Just under 100 pages. Many op-eds have supported this idea and random selection of legislators is increasingly taught in university level political science classes.

Polling Bias Update

It feels good to be right the next day. Today's Chronicle reports that the runoff race survey had a few problems. I reported on the bias that I detected, yesterday.

I'm responsible for one of the survey problems and I can now understand the other problem.

The survey was done with a computer voice giving respondents their choices. "If you plan to vote for Matt Gonzalez for mayor press one, now, on your touch pad." I'm responsible for that.

In 1966, I was doing political polling in San Francisco and tried out the idea of doing interviews by computer. Computers couldn't do a survey in those days but the public didn't know that. I used a tape message and I would manually stop the tape message to allow for the dial response (most phones in those days were rotary so the respondents choice had to be 1 for the first choice or 9 for the second choice). My reason for the pseudo computer experiment was scientific. I wanted each interview to be identical, because I was concerned about interviewer variation and resulting potential bias.

I did about 50 interviews with my pseudo computer and 50 with a real interviewer. I reported, in a published paper, to the Pacific Chapter of the American Public Opinion Research Association that: the response rate was the same for the pseudo-computer and the live interviewer and the results were the same. Which was a positive outcome.

The computer questioning part of the runoff race survey doesn't bother me.

The problem is the surveyor's answer to a question: "....was based on a telephone survey of 1,012 people in San Francisco who indicated they were registered and certain to vote on Dec. 9." That my friends is nonsense.

No question or series of questions gives you "certain to vote" information. The best you can get is a probability of voting. This guy doesn't know what he is talking about and the probability of voting issue is the key flaw with this survey.

My advice: Ignore the survey. There may be bias problems but the technical quality of the survey is too low to worry about the sampling bias problem.

Polling bias

I don't buy the poll in the San Francisco Chronicle that shows Matt Gonzalez ahead in the runoff election on December 9th.

Polls have biases. I called the California polls wrong in August at the beginning of the Arnold race. I pointed out that the polls undercounted people who had not voted in the last election and grossly undercounted the potential turnout in the Central Valley. The polls got more accurate over the second month as they corrected their biases. The Field Poll was correct from the start.

The polls of San Francisco have a bias that is not clear yet. There are several factors at work.

Polls are usually based on calls to random numbers within select geographic prefixes. A high percentage of San Franciscans are now primarily on their cell phones so they don't get into telephone polls. Another group only has a land line in order to have DSL. The remaining people, who have land lines and use them, are an unknown and small part of the population with an unknown voting bias.

The swing district in the coming runoff election is the Sunset. The Sunset is different in many behavioral ways than other parts of San Francisco. I am sure Gonzalez won't get any support there, but DA candidate Harris might get support there. Sunset residents support the police who hate Harris's opponent (Hallinan) more than they dislike Harris. The Chronicle poll showed both Gonzalez and Harris doing well. The election will give me a clue about the emerging bias of telephone polls in San Francisco.

After Nov. 24th when many people will begin the migratation of their land line phone number to their cell phone .... a whole new bias will be introduced, next year, into phone polls.

A lot of people will also be pissed to get unsolicited calls on their cell phones.

Elections next year

My friend who organized and supervised the elections in the Republic of Serbska and in Pristina is now off to organize the local elections in Iraq scheduled for late next Spring.

My friend is a good reminder to the Nattering Nabobs of Negativity that democracy is possible. He organized elections in one country that never existed before, the Republic of Serbska, and organized elections in another country that was 100% Albanian Muslim and had never had an open election. Both countries held their first elections safely and successfully. Rudimentary democracy is working in both places.

Both former Yugoslavic countries were small and Iraq is big, but Iraq has an electoral history dating back eighty years.

November speeches

November 2003 may be remembered for two major speeches: President Bush's radical and awesome declaration that America's calling is to seek human freedom for all and Governor Schwarzenegger's declaration of an end to partisan war in California.

Male threat assessment

I once explained to a female peacenik friend of mine that when men enter any new situation they assess the danger potential.

We do it in an unconscious manner. We check escape routes, potential weapons (just like video games) and we are particularly sensitive to other men. We ask the mental questions: are they stronger than I, are they mentally stable, are they hostile? This threat assessment occurs whether we are walking into a Burger King, getting on a bus or getting off the elevator at our lawyer's office. We do it all the time, below the conscious level.

My female peacenik friend never heard nor understood a word I said. I'll talk more about the moral, mental, historical and political problems with the peace movement in another blog.

Don't kick out the Jews

A fascinating article in the Seattle P-I by Ruslan Tokhchukov who lives nearby in Redmond.

Tokhchukov summarizes: "One hundred years ago, 1 million Jews fled from Tsarist Russia to the United States after a wave of pogrom atrocities. Russia's loss was the United States' gain. The Russian Empire had violently collapsed in just a decade and the United States, which entered the 20th century as a third-rate power, emerged from it as the world's unchallenged superpower.

"Let's ponder the fate of all once-powerful enemies of the Jewish people: the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Inquisitor Spain, the Russian Tsarist Empire, the Nazi Reich. Did any one of them not suffer a brutal end?"

He points out that the Jews driven out of Spain and Portugal moved first to Holland. -- which became the greatest commercial nation of the 17th century, and then to England -- which became the greatest commercial nation in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Most of Tokhchukov's article concerns the idea that Islam has done a good job of driving out the Jews in the past 50 years and will probably suffer.

Doonesbury Bulletin Board

Followers of this blog know that I am thinking hard about the subject of the body politic. First, I know that the term body politic is wrong. The subject we are discussing operates at many levels (city, state, national) and has different mechanisms in each domain. The correct term will convey the hierarchy of the subject.


Second, there is a communication mechanism built into the body politic and I can only faintly see the outline of this communication mechanism. The three parts I know are: * there are local city networks, with key nodes. San Francisco has about 30 key nodes (people) who can convey the relevant information that directs the body politic. * There are gatekeepers at every level of the body politic, people who have jobs that require paying attention to the concerns of the body politic and acting on it. Gatekeepers choose commencement speakers, for instance. After Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro did a TV spot for Pepsi, she was never invited to give a commencement speech at a respectable university. She had violated a body politic taboo of running for high office and using it for personal and commercial gain.

The third communication mechanism is interesting. Lefty Fundamentalists hold the views of the Nation magazine, but less than 1% read the Nation magazine. Not all Lefty Fundamentalists even read. Some get their opinion clues just from conversation. * But the bulk of Lefty Fundamentalists get their political ideological updates from Doonesbury.

Other people than Lefty Fundamentalists read and enjoy Doonesbury, but others don't make Doonesbury's politics into religious orthodoxy.

Interesting isn't it?

I know many of my readers are offended by the term Lefty Fundamentalist. It is the most neutral term I can find. The alternative, less precise but also less accurate, is Nattering Nabobs of Negativity.

My term Commercial Luddite™ is too broad to apply to Lefty Fundamentalists.

Cranky old men

Its easy to like Joi Ito founder and CEO of Softbank. I like his blog, particularly his comments about cranky old men.

Ito san suggests that cranky old men have hot buttons that are the result of long battles and serious wounds suffered over long periods. I agree 100%.

I would add an observation. We (I'm definitely and proudly a cranky old man) have an ideology detector that becomes erect (the metaphor is intentional, I'm a male remember) whenever we encounter ideological zealots. When we are in a pleasant conversation and a hot button subject comes up at the same time our ideological detector turns red, we get furious. We have been baited, we have been misled, we have been deceived. This pleasant conversational person is a fraud. We have wasted our time carrying on the conversation. What we are really mad about is that we have wasted our time with this person.

How do I know this is true? Because I, like Ito san and other cranky old men, know what our hot buttons are. At a Friday morning coffeeshop conversation, two of my hot button subjects came up. Instead of getting angry, I calmly talked the other members of the conversation through the subject, carefully explaining what I knew and eliciting their information on the subject.

The reason was clear to me. The other people in the conversation openly proved that they weren't ideologues. One was naive, and prefaced his comments with, "I don't know this subject ... I need to understand more about this subject ...etc." I will always be patient and supportive of a naive person.

Another person was knowledgeable, but open and curious and asked penetrating questions, "I didn't know that...that's fascinating, tell me more... what happens in the opposite situations?"etc. Openness and curiousity bring out the best in me. I'm a cranky old man that will buy you an entire meal if you are open and curious, and probably hire you if I have a job available.

Emotional projection

I try to focus on commerce. But I can't be pure. My thinking about commerce often leads to other thoughts.

This is about a four step scale of human perception. My direct observations come from watching friends deal with dates, lovers, political discussions, the world around them and their lives in general.

I have a small number of friends who are, what I call, adult autistic. They don't perceive that other people have feelings and emotions. My friends in this category are able to function in the world because they were carefully taught how to function. They never knew the reasons for their precisely prescribed behavior. None of these people do well in business, though some have had stunning temporary success. Usually a wife or husband carries them through life.

The next group of friends, the largest group, are people who recognize that other people do have feelings and emotions. The second group, however, believes that most other people experience emotions the same way they do. “She must feel heartbroken, I know I would in her shoes.” This group of my friends has many romantics in it. They have abundant sympathy for others.

The third group, I call the novelists. This is a smaller group. They actually perceive emotions and feelings in other people that they themselves don't have. The novelist category includes people who are able to project different emotions into other people. I call these people novelists because they actually could write novels, and in many cases they love reading novels.

My forth category of friends is the smallest. I am proud to have people in this forth category who call me "a friend." I think I am one of them. The people in the forth category recognize that many other people have feelings and emotions that we never have, and couldn't possibly comprehend. Some people we can comprehend but alot of people have feelings and emotions that way beyond our comprehension.

For myself, I am comfortable with a world with large amounts of mutual incomprehension. I don't know how widely this comfort with the "other" extends to my friends.

Do Women Kill Chickens?

Many of the women I know were strongly against the use of the U.S. military earlier this year. I have been perplexed. Many of these women are intelligent, many are strong people, some can be vicious fighters when they are angry. So why are they blind to the world we live in and so willing to live in their fantasy Camelot?

My memory suggests that this female anti-military wimpiness is recent. In fact, the few women I know who appreciate the necessity of war have the same element in common. They have lived on farms.

Which is why I bring up chickens. Chickens are sold live in Chinatown and Clement Street, almost entirely to Asians. I didn't see any Asians in the San Francisco Peace Marches. The photo on the right is a truck at the Wednesday farmer's market that sells live chickens. Only Asians buying them.

To me the connection is: If you have to kill chickens (and fish) to eat, you can't be living in Camelot. Killing chickens to cook has always helped women in the past to be real human beings, not wimps. Killing chickens was always brutal and messy; it offset the fact that women were seldom in the military.

Business changes in 30 years

The story in the next paragraph leads me to reflect on a change in the business climate in the past thirty years.

"Nathaniel Heatwole, 20, allegedly slipped bags containing the box cutters and other banned items through airport security and hid them on Southwest Airlines planes on Sept. 12 and Sept. 14, and then sent an e-mail describing what he had done on Sept. 15 to the federal Transportation Security Administration, according to an affidavit accompanying a criminal charge."

Many people, including some members of Congress, suggested that Heatwole be sentenced to work for the Homeland Security Agency. This is interesting because in the current business climate it is considered possible that such an event might occur. The example we all have in mind is that software companies hire hackers to test and design computer security systems.

Thirty years ago I was a friend of John Draper known as Captain Crunch. Crunch was the father of the blue and the black box, an electronic sound maker that was used to make free phone calls and manipulate the phone system.

Thirty years ago, I was a foundation president and corporate activist. I had helped Crunch on a number of minor projects. I realized that Crunch could be of great help to the phone company (there was only Ma Bell at the time) as an employee who deeply knew the phone network technology. I approached several of my friends in Pacific Bell about hiring Crunch.

My friends at Pacific Bell made it clear to me that no freak (they were called fone freaks at the time) could possibly fit into a corporate bureaucratic environment.

What was different in the business climate then that made hiring a freak so outrageous?

(1) MaBell was gigantic and the local Pacific Bell division would never take a wild idea to the somber headquarters guys in New York City.

(2) New York Headquarters had barely heard of San Francisco and the Peninsula (where Crunch lived) and certainly couldn't imagine useful technology coming from the Bay Area.

(3) Independent contractor was a nearly unknown term at the time. People who worked for a company were either employees, outside auditors, board members or legal counsel. That was it.

There was simply no conceptual place for Crunch at MaBell.

Today, there are many ways that Nathaniel Heatwole could work for a bureaucracy ranging from independent contractor or individual consultant to employee of an outside consulting firm.

PeopleSoft

The poison pill that PeopleSoft is using to fend off a hostile takeover by Oracle is ingenious and historically noteworthy. (Described in the Nov.11th NY Times and WSJ.)

PeopleSoft is writing agreements with clients which offer 2 to 5 times the amount of the client contract as a refund if changes in PeopleSoft over the coming two to four years result in a decline in service.

We'll see what the Delaware courts have to say. In the past the Delaware courts have ignored the worst and most flagrant poison pills. This is the first poison pill that seems to be in the customer's interest.

The history of poison pills is that it takes a few years before a counter-poison pill strategy emerges or Boards of Directors find them "not in the Boards' interest."

Soros

George Soros referred to our President as Hitler. After 9/11 he made the same reference to Osama bin Laden. Much as I love commerce, I don't think emotional, unthinking statements by rich businessmen are any more significant than emotional, unthinking public statements by actors or film makers.

One of my friends thinks there is something more sinister in Soros's statements about our President; maybe Soros has something to hide and is preempting a regulatory expose of his business practices.

Kroc and Krugman

We are probably going to be living with jokes about the McDonald's contribution to the Public Broadcasting Service for a long time. I have no idea whether it will be the K.R.O.C. Network or whether people will order an NPR burger with fries and a coke.

The automatic creation of a joke classification comes from the declasse' marriage of Kroc and PBS. Like the Grand Ole Opry joining with the NY City Ballet. PBS is the snootiest snoot around and the Big Mac is the most declasse object on the planet.

For those who don't know, back in the Reagan 80's the centralized PBS changed course and gave all its money to the local stations so they could be autonomous and buy programming from each other. The central PBS, both radio and TV are very minor parts of the operation. It was the center that got the giant endowment.

I know that advertising influences news columns in newspapers, TV and magazines. It sure is going to influence PBS. I look forward to the day when NPR is no longer lefty.

By the way. Why is it so hard for editors and managers to know when their medium is left or right biased? All lefties know what is right biased when they read or see it, so do righties know what is left biased. How come the editors and managers get left out of the loop?

Will Krugman become a word like Bork? The poor guy has written a book and fifty columns trashing the current economy and we end up getting the fastest GDP and productivity growth in American history (yes, the fastest, because previous GDP growth had inflation problems that deflate the final number for earlier periods).

Krugman is like the psuedo-brave boy standing on the tracks while his friends scream at him to get off the tracks. Krugman expected to jump off the tracks when the 45 mph freight comes by. What he got is the 180 mph Shinkansen.

Easterbrook flap

I just realized what I hadn't realized earlier about the Gregg Easterbrook flap.

Easterbrooke had seen the Mel Gibson Passion movie a week before he saw the Tarantino movie, Kill Bill that led him to make an outrageous anti-Semitic attack on two studio Jews.

The whole public complaint about the Mel Gibson movie is that it will stimulate anti-Semitism. In the case of Gregg Easterbook, it did.

Koizumi

I pointed out on September 4th that the WTO vote in Congress (which hasn't happened yet) and the Japanese vote yesterday were important.

We now have the results of the Japanese national election and something about the future is foretold.

The slide in the LDP power was not surprisingly strong. It was merely a slide. Completely unlike the pacifist anti-LDP rout in 1992 that changed Japanese politics forever.

My interpretation, as a person who hasn't been in Japan for three months and who has few Japanese political friends, is that the voting public was supporting the idea of a two-party state. This was the first time a genuine and consolidated opposition party has arisen. The Japanese seem to like the two-party (American) system better than the multi-party legislature with single-party domination they have had for fifty years.

Again based on 1992, the Japanese are tempering their pacifist alarm at sending Japanese troops to Iraq with their immediate anxiety over a nuclear North Korea. The Japanese can and do openly say: "We need our alliance with America in dealing with North Korea." That reasoning kept the opposition party from getting more votes.

Third World Tour

Back in 1972 I started a business called Third World Tours. The idea caught on in San Francisco and seems to have spread around the world.

The Wall Street Journal had an article on it Wednesday 11/5.

The article reports: "...tour operators around the world are leading visitors to some areas that their local convention and tourism bureau would previously have spurned -- neighborhoods like Anacostia in Washington, D.C., and north Philadelphia."

My Third World Tours, the original wrong-side-of-the-city-tour, grew out of a confluence of three separate forces.

First, I had ridden on a standard Gray Line Tour of San Francisco, with a few drunken friends, in 1964. We did it as a lark.

I never forgot that tour. I was offended that the tour bus stopped at several junky places, including a Chinatown pseudo-temple that Gray Line owned, and encouraged tour passengers to put money in the little temple pond and buy trinkets. It was a foggy night so the driver could get away with telling passengers that we were on Montgomery Street "financial capital of the West" when we were actually on Sansome Street. Everything else I heard from the driver was equally wrong and applied equally well to a bland description of St. Louis as it did to vibrant San Francisco.

I was determine to fix that piece of fraud, some day, if I got the chance.

Second, I got the chance in 1972. I was business manager of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in downtown San Francisco. Third, Gray Line employees went on strike that spring.

At the time, the police department licensed tour operators and the corrupt police only licensed one company: Gray Line.

Being a church, a powerful church with a big endowment, I said fuck the cops, let them try and stop a church from running a tour on Sundays. The cops never said 'boo.'

I hired and trained ten mixed-ethnicity people in their early 20s to be tour guides. I hired a 50-seat bus and did some promotion for Third World Tours directed at our large Sunday congregation. The first tour filled up. We spent three hours driving and stopping in Latino, Black, Lesbian, Gay, Hippy and Chinese neighborhoods.

The tour was a success. I hired a PR person (Nan Hohenstein). By the next Sunday I filled up three buses and the press that came along with us went wild. The story of the Third World Tours was covered in nearly every corner of the world. After a month, I stopped giving radio and press interviews. We were a stunning success.

The bus company I rented from got smart. They sent different drivers every week to learn the pitch and route.

Within two years, the police department had been forced to license 90 different tour companies, all modeled on Third World Tours.

I created this unique tour business because I love cities, I'm a city boy. I hope the spread of my tour idea to the whole planet has been positive.

Beauty and the con artist

An observation of no importance:

What do a beautiful person and a con artist have in common?

In my opinion the answer is: "nearly everything".

I once saw a very beautiful woman in a big Mercedes park in a 'handicap parking space.'  When she got out and walked confidently in my direction, I couldn't help but calling out, "I may think wealth and beauty are handicaps but the rest of the world doesn't."  Yes, I really said that, and she gave me a vicious look.

The subject came up in my mind when remembering an employee who was a beautiful woman. She was lazy, too.  I had to let her go when I found out she was charging my business credit card for art supplies that she sold on the side. 

Of course any employee could be a con artist, but what struck me about this woman was that she expected me to complain about her behavior and forgive her. 

I've known many con artists.  Their usual worldview is that: their charm, glamor or impressiveness will let them talk their way out of nearly any problem they create.  Beautiful people seem to have the same manipulative view of the world around them, too.

Of course I've known a few beautiful people who didn't fit this mold, or I didn't know them well enough to know whether they did.