Pro Commerce

Newspaper of Record

Just in case some readers think I may have exaggerated the current consensus of Israelis' feelings, (in earlier blogs) we now have the statement from our newspaper of record. On 5/28 on the NYTimes editorial page, writer Andres Martinez says the following: “The prevailing Israeli sentiment runs something like this: Take your territories. and let us wall them off so we never have to deal with each other again.”

Martinez goes on to report that the latest Intifada reduced the Palestinian GNP by more than 40% and made Palestinians the largest recipients per capita of UN welfare payments.

I won’t comment on this, since it is inconceivable to me that any group of people on the planet could watch their family, tribe, co-workers and friends deliberately do this to themselves.

Definition of Ostentation

What has happened to the kind of discomfort I felt as young person when I saw gross ostentation? The bright red Rolls Royce is gross ostentation. It screams, "I'm rich, richer than you."

I think that two things have happened to change American attitudes towards gross ostentation.* First is the rapid growth of meritocratic wealth.

We have about two million people who inherited their wealth, the traditionally wealthy who avoid ostentation because the society around them justly views their wealth as undeserved. Most people in the category of inherited wealth are donating and squandering their wealth, since few heirs have the ability to earn it.

Meritocratic wealth is earned by skill, talent, effort and a little luck. There are roughly two million people in this category, also. This group wouldn't generate much envy or opprobrium if they were ostentatious, but the public wouldn't know merit from inheritance. So this group follows in the path of inherited wealth and avoids ostentation. The meritocratic wealthy hide their wealth in gated communities and far away from everyone in the mountains around Aspen or deep in the glitz of Beverly Hills. Some members of the new meritocracy are artists and athletes, showing that this class is ethnically mixed and unlike the traditional, inherited group.

The second change over the past decades has been the arrival of big money winnings in the state lotteries since the mid-1970s, the popularization of Las Vegas, and television shows that give $ millions to contestants. This is the lucky money group.

It is the arrival of this group of chance winners that has changed the dynamics of ostentation. Few people bear a grudge against lucky money, since anyone could be lucky. My guess is that the class of lucky money people is under 100,000.

I think the consequence of these two social changes in the past several decades, merit and luck, is the decline in hostility to ostentation. The arrival of meritocratic money diminished the moral basis for hostility to ostentation. The explosion of lucky money eliminated the antagonism to ostentation and almost created a welcome mat for gross ostentation.

After all, I think that when someone sees a red Rolls they think: Lottery.

Part of my point is made with a late 1950s joke I heard nearly fifty years ago: A black man, a pimp, goes into a Cadillac dealership and sits in the driver's seat of a pink convertible. He lights up a cigar, under his broad-brimmed purple hat. The salesman approaches and asks, "What do ya think?" "I'd take it, 'cept people might think I'm a Jew."

*Such change in attitude has not happened in Japan, India nor Israel.

Two lessons to learn

Two headlines that should teach us lessons but don’t.

One headline, with photos of gas station prices, points out that oil prices are higher today than at any time in our history. I’ve seen posters in 1991 and 2003 anti-war demonstrations that say, “No blood for oil.” So the first lesson we don’t seem to learn is that high gasoline prices are supposed to drive Americans into a frenzy that demands war against some middle-eastern state. I don’t see anyone pushing for a war to drive down gasoline prices or to drive prices up. I also have no idea of what nation the anti-war protesters think we are supposed to attack to get revenge for the price of gasoline at the pump. Clearly there is some lesson America hasn’t learned.

The other headline is about an imminent terrorist threat on a major American site, soon -- now. I’ve seen an endless stream of articles, stories and books about the way the American government had precisely this kind of information in its hands in 2001 and refused to act on the information. The 9/11 Commission has heard from hundreds of people who claim the government had just this kind of information, including testimony from Richard Clarke. So we have obviously failed to learn this lesson. We are supposed to act somehow. Maybe we should ground all airlines, evacuate tall buildings, empty the Pentagon and the White House and look for box cutters on airplane passengers. We are doing a few of those things, but mostly we are just being alert. Clearly there is some lesson America hasn’t learned about dealing with terrorist threats.

(I'm being facetious in this blog -- both groups, anti-war protestors and hindsight geniuses, are out of contact with reality. Reality is here for them to look at right now.)

The War on Terrorism

My friend Dee Marquart has made an interesting observation on her website. The War on Terrorism is a great all encompassing metaphor that has replaced the Cold War. The War on Terrorism is ubiquitous and pervasive. This is not a trite or banal observation, in my opinion.

If Dee is correct, and I think she is, that makes The War on Terrorism what I call a tent-pole metaphor. The tent-pole becomes central to all other metaphors. Policy, meaning and general perception are derived from tent-pole metaphors.

If you want to get something done from now on, or communicate an idea, you will need to think about how to fit it under the TWOT metaphor.

Example:Tom Friedman has a candidate idea -- the Patriot Gasoline Tax.

Cancer Fraud by Phone

I just got a phone solicitation for the Cancer Foundation of America. They claim to help cancer victims. They can legally phone me, even though I am on the do-not-call registry, because the registry, created last year by Congress, exempts non-profits.

Their scam is visible on their website. Individuals can’t apply for funding, only doctors can. They don’t even give funding. They offer free products, which they probably get free. Take a look at the cancer helping products they will send to your oncologist, taken directly from their website: ”ADVIL COLD & SINUS 2 CT,CALTRATE + D,CENTRUM VITAMINS,CHILD TOOTHBRUSH,ADULT TOOTHBRUSH,MY DEVOTIONS,TRAUMEX GEL (LIKE BENGAY),SUMMER SUNCARE ASSORTMENT,TOOTHPASTE 8 OZ,COUGH DROP TROPICAL FRUIT,COUGH DROP SUNNY RASPBERRY”

Proposed book

Regular readers are occasionally annoyed that I devote time to attacking Lefty Fundamentalists. I sympathize.

My response is that I used to feel the same way about Stephen J. Gould spending his time criticizing the Creationists and their Evolution-by-Design successors.

Now I’m grateful to Stephen. He knew the material, was an honest and calm advocate and he did a good job that no one else did.

I hope to emulate Stephen, until someone else comes along and does the job.

What I am proposing is the outline of a book, maybe to be called The Final Epitaph of the Left.

The book would show how seven tenets of Lefty Fundamentalism are empirically wrong. The seven tenets are:

1. Equality of income has been a human ideal. It should continue to be.
2. Global commerce is exploitive of workers and the environment.
3. People would not be poor if they were given reasonable financial assistance.
4. Large corporations are generally malevolent and should be constrained.
5. Religion is the opiate of the masses.
6. There are classes in America.
7. The top class protects its interests at others expense.

I’ve tried not to overstate nor understate these tenets. I don’t believe I’ve neglected any.

The goal of the proposed book would be to offer empirical evidence that contradicts each point. The book would be imitating what Gould did to reject Creationism and Evolution-by-Design with solid evidence.

Most Modern people prefer evidence to religion, and the proposed book will rely on the good will of Modern readers in that regard.

1. Equality of income has been a human ideal. It should continue to be.
2. Global commerce is exploitive of workers and the environment. Both of these issues can be treated with one set of empirical evidence.

The evidence is based on a measure of income inequality called the Gini. It will be necessary, in the book, to give an explanation as well as a history of the idea of the Gini measurement. The evidence would be presented verbally, but would be derived from a chart that ranked countries on the left by their Gini number with the lowest Gini (greatest equality of income) on the top and highest Gini number on the bottom (greatest inequality of income). The top of the chart would have Japan and the industrial nations, with the U.S. at the bottom of the major industrial nations and the list would continue on down with the former communist nations all the way at the bottom with Latin American countries, the third world and at the very bottom, the underdeveloped nations. Income inequality is worse as economic development lags.

The empirical evidence is clear that industrial commerce promotes prosperity, creates a middle class and drastically reduces income inequality.

The second column would show the growth rate of physical consumption by country. Wealthy countries are on a downward path, consuming less physical product per capita each year. The third column would show population trends. Again, wealthy countries have declining populations, poor ones are growing too fast. Poverty hurts the environment in many ways.

3. People would not be poor if they were given reasonable financial assistance. There are many cases where this is demonstrably false. I would pick the case of Hawaii, where the native Hawaiians ended up with a great fortune in several foundations dedicated to native Hawaiians. Having massive amounts of money spent on Hawaiian children (more than any government could ever spend) has not increased the test scores in education, the high school graduation rate, nor any other measure of health and success.

4. Large corporations are generally malevolent and should be constrained. The data on this comes from the work of Alice Tepper Marlin. The stock market performance of environmentally-positive and socially responsive corporations is about the same, but not worse than “bad” corporations. The socially responsive corporations do a little better in earnings and stock value. The evidence of economic benefits to socially responsible global corporations is even stronger for international employment practices. The empirical evidence clearly shows that being a socially unresponsive large corporation doesn’t have any rewards in and of itself.

5. Religion is the opiate of the masses. This presumably means that nations with religious populations are more likely to be duped and manipulated by their leaders than non-religious nations. The body count generated by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Saddam Hussein and a few others who governed with secular institutions have done a good job of empirically disproving this tenet.

6. There are classes in America.
7. The top class protects its interests at others expense. The last year the traditional New York Blue Book was published was 1960. That marks a move away from class elites to meritocracy in America. Good studies have been done for twenty years by sociologists. The best was American Elites by Lerner and Nagai. 1800 interviews with the leaders of 10 occupational categories found virtually no social or family interconnections and few political or economic common interests.

Empirical evidence is overwhelming that class has been replaced by merit, with no reliance on old-boy club networks or school ties.

Who would buy this book? I don’t know. Stephen J. Gould seems to have subdued much of the anti-evolution crowd and moved many along to the less absurd Evolution-by-Design stance. Maybe this book could move some lefties out of their religious stance, into a more meaningful dialog.

Façade saving

We’ve been following a building in the first block of Oak, near Van Ness. The first photo was of a hole in the side of the building to remove the heating tanks for the basement level swimming pool. My interest in the pool comes from the early 1960s when I swam in the pool, which was filled from an underground stream that originates near my home on Twin Peaks.

The health department forced the pool operators to use chlorine and regular city water, instead of the free flowing stream, which ended the charm of the pool for me.

Now the building is being replaced and the Greek columned façade has to be retained for historic preservation reasons. The photo shows the five story steel girder construction that is required to hold the façade while the remainder of the building is replaced. (You can click on the photo).

Wrong interpretation

The S.F. Examiner ran a fun article that a number of my friends seem to have noticed. Modern Times Bookstore, on Valencia, is in trouble. Their recent sales are down significantly from last year. We San Franciscans know that Modern Times is the main, if not only, socialist bookstore in town.

The Examiner article considers several (frivolous) reasons for the decline in Modern Times' sales, from gentrification of 20th and Valencia to mainstreaming of lefty books into Borders.

The real reason is straight-forward. There is no intelligent thought on the left, nothing to write a book about.

On the popular side of leftism you have Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore hogging the territory. On the academic side you can’t find anyone left to read The Commodification of Gender Redaction in Global Orientalism.

Farewell Modern Times. I won’t miss you; I don’t miss Stalin, the Rosenbergs or your whole dishonest, failed enterprise.

Bush in 20 years

I have a blasphemous observation.

Based on my visit to Israel, where Bush is considered the best friend the Jews have had in 2,000 years; based on the Gallup poll of Kurds in Iraq where Bush is being considered a messiah; based on talks with foreign aid workers familiar with AIDS in Africa, and based on discussions with educators who are seeing the first hopeful signs of better public education in America … George W. Bush may have more streets and schools named after him, in twenty years, than anyone else in history.

Is that possible? Is that blasphemous?

B-1 travel

I just returned from a middle-east trip and the 12 hour-long flight was anything but pleasant.  I read about U.S. cabinet members making the trip regularly.  I know that Air Force One is comfortable, but not comfortable enough for regular long trips for busy executives.

I’m just wondering whether some B-1 bombers or other large supersonic planes have been modified to make the trip with a small crew and 5-6 passengers.  A trip of 4-5 hours to the middle-east might make more sense.

The wonderful image on this page is a painting by D. Blair and can be found at Blair Art Studios.

Cross-culture

Most of my readers probably have a sense of cultural differences and what it means. I recently heard a comment by a Congressional staffer. (I mention the staffer because Congress has been outrageously self-righteous about American prison antics in Iraq.)

Congressional staffers reacted to media reports that Iraqi citizens consider the prison humiliation to be so horrid that Iraqis want the American perpetrators executed. The staffers came up with the idea that after a perpetrator is found guilty, he/she should be given the choice of the death penalty or being photographed naked with a dog leash on the neck and woman’s panties on the head.

Cross cultural differences?

City of Hate

Returning from Israel, I have started to refer to San Francisco as the City of Hate. Whenever I mention having gone to Israel, I am likely to face a heart filled with hate from the standard San Francisco pc lefty. I usually explain to people that their hearts are filled with hate -- they strongly deny it. Then I mention the names Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and watch their reaction. After they spew out their hatred I suggest a test to see if the hatred really comes from their heart. Many agree to the test. The next question is: “Can you name three good things President Bush has done?” I’d settle for two or even one example. No one has offered any so far.

I don’t want my readers to think I am a hateful person for referring to one of my favorite cities as the City of Hate. I think, that when San Francisco was the City of Love in the mid-60s to the early 70s, San Francisco created revolutions in clothing, food, music, values and business. San Francisco, the gay city, also made great contributions to national and global culture. I think San Francisco, the City of Hate, will make some important contribution to national and international culture. I also think the contribution will be positive

Negative Kindness

We are all indebted to Isaiah Berlin for the concept of negative freedom. He raised the issue that the most desired freedom was freedom from coercion, whether a neighbor’s threat or government power. Such freedom comes from neither natural law nor goodwill.

I want to call attention to negative kindness. Negative kindness is the unintended consequence of positive kindness. We need to be protected from certain kinds of kindness.

Negative kindness is most visible to me in San Francisco because we have an excessively kind population. After twenty years, with one of the highest street people and beggar populations in the U.S., the San Francisco citizens voted twice at 2 to 1 levels to solve the problem (“Solve it any way you can!”). The homeless advocates continue to resist a change.

This positive kindness, which is directed at three thousand street people and beggars, has negative consequences for the nine million tourists who come to the City annually, the two hundred thousand seniors who live here and the 400,000 women in the city every day. These tourists, seniors and women are the ones who can’t use the 26 public French toilets because the street people have moved into them and made them filthy. Tourists and seniors can’t sit on a bench because the city doesn’t provide benches in order to keep the street population from being comfortable. Tourists, seniors and women have to cope with aggressive beggars. Weak and gentle beggars have been driven out of the best begging locations by the meanest toughest beggars (always big black men).

The kindness of homeless friends and advocates also means that much of San Francisco has pee on the streets and shit in the alleys, with men peeing openly while crowds ignore them. There are many more negative consequences of kindness to this tiny, but obnoxious population. There are few obvious benefits of the positive kindness.

Diamond in the intellectual rough

On my recent long airplane ride I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. I had avoided this book because most biologists speculating on pre-history are incompetent.

The book was enjoyable and I read it with pleasure. A few days later I realized the guy is totally dishonest and should have recalled the book and apologized long ago.

Diamond’s concern is that the Americas, Australia and Polynesia were conquered by Europeans with few men and little resistance. He is particularly shocked by Cortez’s few hundred men who defeated the Aztec’s millions of men. A one hour battle. Diamond has an elaborate thesis about the variety of domesticated plants and animals on different continents and the thousand year repercussions of these plants and animals on disease and social organization.

When I got home, and thought about Diamond's book. I came up with two counter examples that totally discredit this guy's thinking.

The British, with a few thousand men, conquered India with tens of millions of people and no disease to help the Brits win. Jared considers the Brits and India to be on the same continent with the same plants and animals.

The Japanese conquered Korea, Mongolia and China, easily, against gigantic numeric odds, when all four countries had the same two thousand year history of domesticated plants and animals.

An honest person would have confronted these glaring counter examples and pulled their idiot book off the market.

Reason for pride in the U.S.A

There are some forms of compassion that are unique to modern America.

I was closely connected to Ed Roberts, the father of the disability-and-independent-living movement. The movement started in Berkeley and spread to all of America before jumping the oceans and moving to many other countries. All this happened in less than twenty years. I’ve written about Ed and how he did it.

The mother of my children, Helen, has taught special education in San Francisco public schools for decades, so I follow the program closely. Helen teaches classes that average six kids with the help of one para-professional.

I’ve never been able to figure out how much money America spends on education for special ed kids. The number $60,000 per kid per year gets kicked around. Now the number is published in Business Week May 31 page 96. America spends $60 billion a year on special ed, 18% of that amount comes from the Federal budget. That is more than the $60,000 per kid per year.

We should be proud of what we are doing. Ordinary kids, even in the most expensive private schools never get half that amount spent on them.

When a special education student gets two to three times as much spent on his/her annual education as the richest kids, Americans are doing something right.

Sell short your MBA

Sell MBA’s short, especially MBA’s based on the case study method.

Henry Mintzberg has a new book out examining the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of a Harvard MBA. The data comes down heavily on the failure side. This is reported in Business Week April 26, 2004 | Up Front.

Those who have taught management (I have) listen when they hear the name Mintzberg. Henry Mintzberg, now at McGill University, did early and reliable empirical work on the theory of management and he remains the leading guru of management.

Half-staff

The giant flag on the corner of Castro and Market is at half staff today. I don't know why and neither did others I talked to this morning.

The flag is black, blue and white with a red heart on it. The flag at this site is usually a rainbow colored one, but several times a month it is this flag, the flag of the SM (Sado-Masochism) sub-community.

I doubt that this public symbol would be used for humor, so I assume the half-staff refers to a prominent community member of who died recently.

Re-read the Iraq Survey

A survey of Iraqi attitudes was published two weeks ago. The survey results were presented in such away that the situation looked grim, one year after our lightening military success. The data says the opposite. I conducted surveys for 20 years and have been an expert witness on the subject for twenty additional years.

The problem is that nobody, with a modicum of intelligence, appears to have looked at the actual survey results. The survey was done by competent Gallup researchers. The published results were erroneously reported.

The key media reported findings were that most Iraqis want American forces to leave immediately.

This is the least relevant finding of the study and gives the worst possible impression.

Demographics is reality in Iraq. The Shia are 65% of the population, Kurds are 17% and the Sunni are 15%. The remaining 3% are miscellaneous. Nearly all the Kurds want us to stay in Iraq: 96%.

On every answer to the questions in the poll, the Kurds responded that they love America…. Absolutely love America for having saved the Kurds. If America leaves now, 94% of the Kurds worry about their future safety. The press made no mention of that.

The Shia give a more nuanced response. Remember, they were massacred by Saddam after the ’91 War when the US didn’t protect them.

Are they glad that Saddam is gone? 92% of the Shia say yes while 57% of the Sunni say yes.

Do they feel they are better off today? 51% of the Shia say yes and 18% no, while 37% of the Sunni say yes and 38% say no. That is an overwhelming yes from the Shia.

Would they feel less safe if America leaves? In both groups Shia and Sunni, 45% say they will be less safe. Do they really want us to leave in that case? I don’t think so.

All in all, was the liberation of Iraq by American forces worth it? 74% of the Shia say the liberation was definitely worth it. The opposite is true of the Sunni, 24% think liberation was worth it.

I can only read this data one way. The bulk of Iraqi’s are grateful to America and American soldiers for freeing them from Saddam and rebuilding their country.

The media, seems to see Iraq entirely from the eyes of Saddam’s former power base, the Sunni.

The Sunni didn’t welcome us, aren’t sure our presence is worth it, but a large group are now worried that we really might leave. They don’t want that to happen.

If anyone finds these survey results reported reliably anywhere else, please let me know.

Return to San Francisco

Dateline: Tel Aviv

This is my last report from Israel. I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon.

My summary:
Israel, and Tel Aviv in particular, will thrive as an international center – intimately connected to the world of ideas and commerce. Both will generate valuable contributions to business and culture, over the next decade, in wonderful ways that we have never seen before from a small country.

Tel Aviv photos

Dateline: Tel Aviv
You can click on each photo for an enlarged view.

This first photo (on the right) is a man walking alone with a talit (prayer shawl) probably going to his synagogue. With anti-Semitism rising in Europe, parts of San Francisco and Berkeley, this is a reminder that the Jewish State exists so that Jews can safely be Jews in at least one place in the world. Someday Tibetans in exile may wish to buy such a place to preserve their history and culture.

This second photo shows the protectors of the Jewish State. These soldiers are young draftees who work on the borders of an Arab sea of hatred and deception. The Arab hatred has kept growing over 100 years from the seeds of envy and vengeance. The envy comes from the very people who sold their land to the Jews in the first place.

The third photo (on the left) shows that children in Tel Aviv walk as free safe human beings. This freedom is also found in Tokyo. To me, this safe childhood is the definition of a civilized society. In the background of this photo is a strange yellow vehicle. It is the local version of a tow truck. It has a side-mounted forklift that picks up cars from the side and puts them on the truck bed. It then drives off to the impound.

The thousands of Palestinians who used to work in Israel, before Palestinians started murdering Jews in buses and at cafes, have been replaced by several hundred thousand immigrants. Chinese immigrants seem to have taken jobs in construction work (as they do in San Francisco) and Philippinos do the health and home care (as these also do in San Francisco). See the fourth photo of a Philippina pushing an elderly woman in a wheel chair.

There are three small photos. One, on the left, shows the typical new building next to an old building – again like Tokyo. Another, right, shows a few of the 50-60 Israeli’s line dancing on Saturday afternoon at the beach. The last is a beggar. Yes there are a few beggars and people are surprisingly (to me) generous.

My overseas Israeli friends will see all the tiny details that will probably make them homesick.

Tokyo-Tel Aviv

Dateline: Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv compared to the greatest city on earth: Tokyo.

Public Life: In both cities a young woman (any woman) can walk alone late at night, a young child can walk to school alone or take a bus across town. Public transportation is excellent, bus seats are velvet and taxis have no barriers between the driver and passengers.

Both cities are defined by their proliferation of cafes (excellent coffee), obedience to pedestrian light signals, general politeness and an absence of perfume on men and women.

The Japanese and Israeli’s love children, openly; love technology, have a relaxed but hard working ethic and you’ll commonly find a new building next to an old building.

Japanese love baseball, most -- Israeli’s love basketball. Tokyo has black crows. Tel Aviv has ravens with beige bodies and black wings. Tel Aviv has skies full of swallows, migrating storks, more dogs and more wild house cats.

In Tel Aviv you find that Israeli’s are overflowing with optimism, enjoy arguing and will gregariously talk to anyone. Shopkeepers joke with customers, the music is relentlessly upbeat, nearly everyone looks you in the eye, many women wear blatantly sexy clothing and gays and lesbians hold hands in public.

Business: Young people brag about the ease of getting projects started, entrepreneurs abound, but equalitarianism means weak management in most large companies.

Come see for yourself.

Shabbat Shalom

Dateline: Tel Aviv

Starting at 3pm on Friday afternoon, for the next 24 hours, Israeli’s say “Shabbat Shalom” to each other. Everyone says it including cab drivers, shopkeepers and my Internet shop staff.

Pretty much everything stops. I’m talking about Tel Aviv. Nearly every store is closed on Friday by 7pm and stays closed until 7pm Saturday. Most reopen with enthusiasm on Saturday evening. All bus service stops. Elevators go on automatic, stopping at every floor or alternate floors, by themselves.

The City has a noticeable change of pace. People walk and go to the beach. Cabs still run. Traffic dwindles.

I have a gut reaction to the rhythm of six days of work and one consensus day of rest - it works.

The consensus is not authoritarian. One of the two lobby elevators in my hotel runs normally on Shabbat. The breakfast is nearly normal without the iced juice drinks and only hot water, on a timer, to make coffee and tea. On the streets and between cities private vans and jitneys run on all the routes with route numbers in the front windows. (They run on these same routes every weekday too.)

The religious in Israel don’t have to pay taxes for public buses to run on the Sabbath. Anyone who wants to work on Shabbat can do so. The jitney trip to Jerusalem worked fine; it took me half the usual time because traffic was so much lighter.

One friend suggested that a country with a big high tech industry really benefits from one day to rest and time to think.

Nightlife

Dateline: Tel Aviv

I suffer for my readers. I spent hours in the din of 100db+ music to report on Tel Aviv nightlife. I went to two bars with a young woman who met her friends there. Both bars were largely hetero crowds.

One bar was an exotic Romanian atmosphere (no you’ve never seen anything like it): Ninotchka. The other was modern sophisticated: Sushi.

Actual night life confirms all the stories I’ve heard. Big crowds, all-night and joyful. The streets are filled with walkers – single and in crowds at 2am.

Surprises: A wide age distribution. The bars had men and women of all ages from 21 to 65. People talk to each other- actively. People talk across age lines.

The music was upbeat. As the evening progressed the DJ upped the amps and the beat. The music was new to me. A strong beat. A mixture of Mariachi, Klezmer and Arabian belly dance. A wild sound that made the tightly packed crowd wiggle and squirm.

Hippies

Dateline: Tel Aviv

As reported to me by young people that I’ve been interviewing:

About 80% of young Israeli’s go to Goa (the beach area in Western India) and southern Thailand after their military service. The object is to “chill out” and recover.

The returning Israeli’s have some hippy qualities. I see people practicing yoga on the beaches and in many health clubs. I’m told that mediation and Buddhism are popular. (When are Alan Lew and Norman Fischer coming here?)

I see a proliferation of hippy style craft shops, cafes and boutiques in old industrial buildings. There is a big outdoor three-day music, dance and camping event this weekend in parks in the northern part of the country.

What I see supports what I hear.

In case you missed

Dateline: Tel Aviv

One of the items that many readers may not have known about is the current problem of Israeli defense: Gazan's and Hizbollah's firing of missiles into Israel.

This has been going on for several years with little serious damage. However the danger will increase over time especially after a genuine Israeli pull out from Gaza.

The technical solution is being tested in the United States. It is apparently a laser fired at the incoming rocket that burns them up. Check the source.

Social Innovations

Dateline: Tel Aviv

The reason I came to Israel was to see the institutional inventions that I expect Israeli's to generate. The main piece of the puzzle is now in place. For the first time in 3,000 years Jews are politically unified in Israel. Everyone agrees on the fence and the permanent separation from Palestinians. There is a deep feeling of consensus on that point.

Israel is already a society who's major export is R&D (research and development) in many tech and medical fields. Israel in peace time (now is such a time of relative peace) can grow faster than any other country in history (over 10% per annum). Israel should be creating new institutions. After a 1,000 year period of shtetle status quo, Jews are ready to explode with social invention.

So far I have only found five such innovations to report on. Multi-person-casualty procedures, In-vitro-fertilization morals, medical charity, Cinematheque and Azure. I will cover Azure later.

Multi-person casualty procedures weren't required in the past two weeks, so I haven't seen them. Fortunately. When a mass murder of civilians occurs TV covers the scene and covers the nearest admitting hospital. The whole live event is on TV so that the hundreds of emergency personnel involved can make individual decisions and act with the greatest possible speed. (Phones would be unreliable as everyone is phoning everyone. Every Israeli, reports to me, losing a friend or family member in a mass murder).
Lives are saved as a result. We desperately need this procedure in the U.S. but we will only get it after enough people have died needlessly.

I'm told, but have not confirmed, that Israel is the location for many of the in-vitro-fertilizations for Europeans and for most Middle Easterners. Israel has the most IVFs per capita in the world.

Many IVFs result in twins, some in triplets. The Israeli medical establishment decided to ban the birth of triplets resulting from IVF, and the responsibility to make sure that such births don't happen is laid on the IVF team. Triplets are socially and economically destructive for most families. This is good moral policy. IVF creates the problem, the medical teams doing IVF should be responsible for the outcomes.

Israeli's often tell me how much they love their medical system. They say it spontaneously. Medical care is free and comprehensive.

In Jerusalem I found a charity called Yad (hand of) Sarah. This group provides medical equipment free to everyone. Walkers, oxygen generators, hospital beds at home --- everything. They even install handles in bathrooms. All equipment gets returned and re-cycled. In the U.S. some equipment is rented, most is sold to users who give them or throw them away.

Lia Van Leer, in Jerusalem, created Cinematheque for film lovers. It is a nice movie theater --- you pay less than $100 per year to join. Six days a week, year round, from 1pm to 1am the theater shows new and old films continuously. The monthly list of films is mailed to members. See as many films as you want.

This last innovation occurs in a society that already overflows with music, symphonies, live theater, art museums, ubiquitous galleries and fashion boutiques.