Pro Commerce

1950s redux

A new Cadillac de Ville was the status car in black neighborhoods in the late 1950s.  The Cadillac Escalante seems to play the same role fifty years later.  I can’t resist telling a popular joke from 1959 that I remember vividly.

A Negro walks into a Cadillac dealership, sits in the driver’s seat of a floor model and lights a big cigar.  The car is a bright yellow convertible and the man is wearing a purple hat, green feather in the brim with a deep orange suit and a mauve satin tie. (This clothing description is meant to tell the listener that the man is a pimp.)  When a salesman walks over to ask the question, "How do you like it?"  the man with the purple hat and cigar replies with a question, "Tell me, does this make me look too much like a Jew?"

Returned items

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about returned items.  The article describes a four-year-old service that keeps a database on people who return items at any one of the service’s retail clients.  The article points out that returns are equal to 13% of retail sales.  Returns come from ordinary customers most of the time, but there is plenty of fraud from employees, from people who wear the clothes and return them, and from scammers who buy on sale or switch tags.  Of course, a database would be helpful.

One so-called consumer privacy group has complained about the service. The group clearly doesn’t understand business.  Returns, especially excessive and fraudulent returns, cost consumers money, as I am about to explain with an example.  Prices come down when returns are controlled.

I had a successful client in Los Angeles in the late 1970s.  It was a gigantic wholesale club that had hundreds of thousands of members, many from Lockheed nearby.  Customers were given a clipboard at the entry and the entire store was filled with samples and each sample had a number and a price on it.  The customer wrote down the number of the product they wanted on the clipboard and at the checkout stand all the merchandise was immediately handed to the customer, delivered by automated equipment from the warehouse behind the wall of the checkout stand.

I was hired because the owners wanted to sell the business.  My job was to change the highly personal management of the owners into a standard corporate form.  The prices at my clients' store were much lower than in retail stores because there were no floor sales staff, very small display costs and no shelf re-stocking to do.

One problem, I was startled to find, was that in the back of the sprawling business was another sprawling warehouse made up of many small buildings and containers.  It was the fiefdom of a gentle elderly black man.  It was all the returned items, slowly being sorted for shipping back to the manufacturers for credit.  The returns section was growing steadily and no increase in the number of employees working on it did much to reduce the backlog.

A shipment of returned TVs would have be sorted by manufacturer and put in shipping crates with proper invoices. Almost all businesses have to handle returns this way. Arduous and costly work.

My clients' business was sold and I lost track of my clients who moved to mansions in Hawaii.

A few years later, Price Club emerged on the scene, outgrowing its origins in San Diego.  The founder of Price Club, Sol Price, had been a founder of the “wholesale club” industry. Price Club was a spectacular success and is today known as Costco. 

There are a number of innovations in retail sales that Sol Price introduced in his so called “wholesale clubs” but the most brilliant was the way he learned to handle returns.  By the time Price Club was big enough to be important to manufacturers, Sol Price set up a loading dock policy.

When a truck loaded with Sony TVs backed up to loading dock, it wasn’t allowed to leave until it took all the TVs on the dock regardless of the brand of TV. 

No physical plant was needed to sort or store returns.  Returns went directly to the loading dock where they were constantly forced on all the trucks making deliveries.  A truck delivering boxes of sporting goods, left with an assortment of open boxes of all the returned sporting goods from the previous day. "Take what we give you or don’t expect to unload what you are trying to deliver."

Invoices to the manufacturers were sent out without regard to what was happening on the loading dock and the manufacturers paid according to whatever arrangements they had with Price Club.

Within a few years secondary markets had developed all over the U.S. to re-sell and trade the merchandise that was coming off the Price Club loading docks.

Solving the returns problem was a great contribution of Sol Price for which we all benefit when we get low prices at Costco.

Where is the outrage?

One of the commentators on an earlier blog, which discusses my success in making PG&E disclose their executive compensation, tells me that I have a responsibility to do more to stop outrageous payments to PG&E executives.

I can’t do more.  Not because I wouldn’t like to and not because I don’t have the skill to do more, but because there is no public outrage about excessive executive compensation to draw on.  The fact that the CEO of a public company with rates regulated by the government should get paid $23 million in one year doesn’t seem to bother the public.

The reason is simple.  Every American knows that hundreds of men in their twenties get paid millions of dollars a year to hit, kick and throw a leather ball. A few of these athletes earn more than the $23 million per year of the PG&E CEO. 

Considering that most CEOs have worked in their industry for more than twenty-five years, that they shoulder the burdens of dealing with employees, managers, unions, legal problems, public stockholders, high powered investors, government agency demands, complex financial requirements, customers and the routines of daily family life, the athletes seem to be the ones who are overpaid.

Public outrage about excessive executive wages seems to have gone the way of hostility to “the rich.”  Evaporated. Most Americans aren’t bothered by someone else’s wealth.

I didn’t make the world the way it is.  If you are unhappy with excessive corporate pay or concentrated wealth, blame in on the relentless success of commerce.

The MFA is the new MBA

“The MFA is the new MBA,” is what a professor of graphic design said to me at Thanksgiving dinner.  Considering that her graduate class has grown from 15 to 45 in one year, she might be right.

The comment makes sense in the context of Virginia Postrel’s book: The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness.  Postrel argues that design and style are the major driving forces in commerce these days.  Think iPod, mountain bike and Swatch.

That being the case, it would make sense to seek a high-level management job with a Masters of Fine Arts.

I want to know how young students learn about this change in direction.  How did they know that an MFA was now the propitious training?

Ultimately commerce is driven by whims, taste and fads.  It will be wonderful when we start getting managers who have refined the appropriate skills involved.

More wimps in America?

I’ve seen many explanations about the Nov. 2nd results -- many theses about the nature of the voting public.  I want to add one more. 

The movement from blue collar and manual work to white collar office work has changed the popular culture that is associated with it.  The Bush states are the blue collar, manual work states.  They clearly support American troops in Iraq.

The blue collar ethic is stunningly described in West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns by Jane Tompkins. (Tompkins is the brilliant and beautiful wife of Stanley Fish.)  Cowboys are the metaphor for blue collar life: stolid, persevering, struggling against nature without book learning. Cowboys faced bad guys whose evil was evident from their opposition to the rule of law.

I have described the popular culture of white collar work as portrayed in the metaphor of the fugitive.  The fugitive is a salaried worker who is driven out of society by an ambiguous evil that has social status and power and shuts off all avenues of help that the fugitive seeks.  The fugitive persists, always maintaining professional ethics.  Finally, when the fugitive has exposed the evil corruption, the fugitive goes back to work without attention.  A wimp. Clark Kent.

White collar workers probably don’t support military action. 

Unfortunately for the future of American world power, commerce is delivering us into the hands of the wimps, effettees and into the demeaning milieu of salaried workers.

Tenure part three

Tenure part two is earlier.

It turns out that my youngest daughter, who is an academic, is in the position of hiring a tenured professor.  She has a few things to say about tenure and why it should be abolished. All the reasons are practical.

It is a bad deal for universities. It is a one-sided contract.  The professor can quit anytime he/she wants, but the university is stuck with every bad choice.  There is no legal retirement age these days, so tenured professors have to be bribed to retire at very high costs to the university.  Bad choices of tenured professors drive away students, drive away good faculty and often fail to do the work they are hired to do.  Hiring of tenured professors becomes a bureaucratic nightmare as every effort is made to weed out poor choices.  Time is wasted, the best professors usually won't wait and the bureaucracy doesn't prevent bad choices.

Tenure sure seems like a bad deal for the university.

Team America

There is a rumor among my friends that a coup has taken place in North Korea. Interesting,

If you have seen the movie Team America you’ll know how it is related to the Kim Jung Il rumor and you will also know that the movie answers a question I asked in an earlier blog: “What happens to celebrities who antagonize a large number of their fans, as the anti-war Hollywood gang did?”

We know that, like sports stars, most fans will continue to follow their sports activity. That doesn’t answer the question.  Michael Jackson is selling fewer records these days, but he sold a hell of a lot long after his celebrity troubles began.

The movie Team America shows the answer: The antagonizing celebrity gets immortalized in a celebrity punishment, forever recorded on a DVD as a fallen hero?  Forever locked in the hell of ridicule. 

That is what happens in Team America.  A masterpiece of attack ridicule.  Such celebrity punishment is best done by fellow celebrities in the chosen field. In this case first rate Hollywood film makers put together one and a half hours of marionettes carrying out the farcical logic of the celebrities being ridiculed. The anti-Iraq war celebrity gang are shown supporting another tyrant, Kim Jung Il, with the appropriate moral consequences.

Team America is the punishment meted out to the many Hollywood celebrities who used their fan based celebrity status to pressure the American government on the proper movie star way to deal with Saddam Hussein.

The Revolution

One of my Lefty friends, in a pseudo-optimistic statement, proclaimed that "Our Revolution will come in the next cycle, in 16 years.”

Sorry, my revolution is here, now. Lefties and Old Europe are missing out on it. It is actually a revolution against them.  They have not defeated Starbucks and McDonalds --- they have just shown the failure of their counter-revolutionary ideology.

This Great Revolution is about the triumph of Commerce and the overthrow of birth status: social class, tribes, tongs, and vestigial systems that held everyone in place: traditional religion, magic, romanticism, spirituality and rural values.

Commerce is grounded on values that were first introduced by traders in Amsterdam in the 1600s.  We celebrate meritocracy, honesty, openness and markets.  We abhor ideology.  We accept change and live in a world of wonder, novelty and personal authenticity. Real people, not effetes nor elites.  The strongest ally of commerce is technology, a subdued and modest version of commerce.

The old ways are falling.  Racism, sexism, ageism, “handicaps” have been defeated by merit, not Lefty ideology. Class arrogance, family connections and “elites” are giving way to merit.  Commerce thrives in open societies and open markets.  Tariffs, closed borders, radical Islam, communism, central planning and high taxes only emiserate the people who endure them.  Commerce destroyed the Iron Curtain and offers black markets, music, and porn CDs to undermine every ideological “Islamic and socialist heaven.”

The revolution is fully underway, hard to see, but historically a beautiful sight for people with imagination, talent and hope.

New Age – No

A week ago in the Wall Street Journal, the left hand column dealt with New Age management exercises that have been introduced at Royal Dutch Shell. The New Age exercises may be the reason why the company is becoming plain old Shell with a greater role for outside directors and a stronger cross-channel board. Shell’s recent public humiliation is attributed to its restating estimated oil reserves. The WSJ article was suggesting that people who didn’t understand the engineering culture that had made Shell great, for over a century, brought the New Age management exercises into management.

I just want to disavow any connection to New Age management. I have taught management and the book I use is Milton Moskowitz’s The Hundred Best Companies to Work For in America. The book makes clear that there are many types of management from severe and intensely competitive work places where you strive and work late or get fired --- to paternalistic mellow work places with nurseries and gardens for each employee. Different employees thrive in different environments.

I have never believed management can be taught. People learn management from jobs they have had or military service. It is totally experiential learning. Personnel issues can be taught.

Teaching communication is irrelevant. Communication is different in each corporate environment. The work place environment is unique. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t apply for the 40+ hours people work at a job. There is no right to free speech, no fair trial and no privacy.

The only two realities of management communication that I know of are standard Emily Post etiquette and honesty. In rare managerial circumstances (life and death environments like submarines, emergency rooms and aircraft carriers) candor may trump honesty.

One model of management, one norm for communication, New Age or anything else, is unrelated to commercial reality.

Thumbs down and thumbs up

I just threw away my copy of The New Republic and read with delight and excitement my latest copy of Commentary.

I subscribed to The New Republic for one reason: the Leon Weiseltier section of book reviews has been an enlightening masterpiece. The rest of the magazine is generally boring political rant, except when Marty Peretz recently said he has known John Kerry for thirty years as a personal dork.

Weiseltier fell out of my favor, earning moral boob status. It is hard to believe that a good mind can be a moral boob so I have been forced by cognitive dissonance theory to down grade his good mind to average. The magazine has lost all of its former luster for me.

Weiseltier a moral boob? Yes. He is a Jew who snuck in his endorsement of Kerry in the last issue without any explanation.

A Jew? President Bush is the first prominent person in two thousand years to help the Jews, to stand up for the Jews, to aggressively fight against anti-Semitism and Leon Weiseltier never explains why he would vote against this first prominent friend of the Jews. That is why I call him a moral boob. He has a responsibility to explain his outrageous insult to a good samaritan.

Thumbs down to The New Republic. I am likely to cancel my subscription if this bad behavior continues.

Thumbs up for the November Commentary. I'm proud to subscribe to Commentary. Two superb articles on the international scene. The End of the Right of Self-Defense? by Andrew C. McCarthy is a gut wrenching discussion of the abomination of the International Court and The Case Against the UN by Joshua Muravchik explains why the Republican Senate needs to abandon the UN and start a decent international organization. The UN, as I have pointed out several times in the past, is the most powerful anti-Semitic force in history, exceeding the influence of Germany and the Third Reich. It has other problems too.

The article On the Origins of the Mind by David Berlinski is the most brilliant piece I have ever read on the absurdities of genetic, computer and evolutionary biological models of the mind. (I didn’t say human mind --- because I have no evidence that there is any other kind of mind).

If you are a Jew or Israeli American (as I am) you can’t miss Telling the Story of America's Jews by David Gelernter. (I read one of the books he writes about, the Hasia Diner history. It is so bad I never mentioned it to my blog readers. The rest of the article is an outline of what a good history of Jews in Amerirca would be about. Gelernter is a genius who describes the way America is truly the new Israel, just as the Puritans wanted it to be. Did you know that 75% of Americans were Puritans in 1776? I didn't either.

Power versus Wealth

It is axiomatic among Marxists and Lefties that power and wealth are synonyms. If not synonyms, very closely overlapping circles.

This, fortunately, is complete nonsense. There is virtually no overlap between power and wealth. We just had a wonderful demonstration of this reality. Teresa Heinz and John Kerry. She is worth more than a billion dollars and is clearly a person of little or no power. He is a U.S. Senator, ostensibly one of the few hundred most powerful people in the world. But he isn’t any more powerful because of his wife’s money. He is less powerful than many other Senators who have little money.

I have had many wealthy clients, individuals as well as major families in the ranks of America’s top wealthiest. I have never detected even a modicum of power. In one case a daughter of wealth married a governor. Sort of Heinz-Kerry. I suspected the governor picked the woman for her money. Did anyone suspect that of John Kerry?

The most powerful person in America, possibly in the world, is Dick Cheney. He is individually far more powerful than the cumulative top hundred wealthiest people. He has modest wealth. Several million people in the U.S. are wealthier than Dick Cheney.

I couldn’t convince anyone of this fact. So I won’t try. I merely wanted to point out to the cognoscenti that the overlapping circles of power and wealth have a tiny overlapping area. Tiny, if it exists at all.

The reason is that the skills that create money and power are different skills and consequently the networks that people in each category use to exercise their skills are functionally different networks.

Historically people and classes with power have absorbed people with money. One consequence is that the European upper classes survived much longer than they would have otherwise. The bad consequence is that we had one hundred years of poorly managed European corporations. The same is true, to some extent, in Japan.

Instant runoff election report

San Francisco just completed its first instant runoff election. Instant runoff is based on giving the voter a first, second and third rank choice for each office. The result is that a 50% majority is achieved by taking the lowest scoring candidate’s multiple votes and allocating them among the remaining candidates after the lowest scoring candidate is deleted. The tallying can be complex but computers will get better at it as the city gets more experience.

My main report on instant runoff is that it worked. The posted results on election night hardly changed by adding the instant runoff process.  It worked, voters weren’t confused and no one would be able to game the results.

Two photos

The first photo is a mechanical horse in front of a children’s shop in Laurel Village in San Francisco.

The relevance to me is that I repaired these horses during my pre-college summer vacation in 1955.  My father owned a dozen of them and I made the circuit to repair them.  What was the most damaging thing that could be done to these horses?  Answer: pouring Coke down the coin slot. (Read sugar water in a metal machine.) I cleaned it by soaking the entire mechanism in carbon-tetra-chloride.  Did people do such vandalism in the good old days of 1955.  They damn sure did.

The second photo is of a window in a Chinese knick-knack shop near the corner of Grant and California.  This is a sample of ivory netsuke.  These are figures portraying a variety of sex acts.  I never saw these in China, but they are abundant in the Japanese city of Fukaoka.  Who’s confused?  Me.  Japanese figures in a Chinese shop. I presume these sell.  I haven’t checked to see where they are made.

Reminds me that many, if not most, sushi shops in the U.S. are run by Chinese these days.  A friend of mine brought the best bottle of sake he could find in Japan to a friend of his in Sacramento.  The purpose was to give the sake to the friend's sushi chef in Sacramento.  The sushi chef had no idea what the bottle was.  He was Chinese.

Semi-recant

In a post election blog I explained how a 20% increase in voter turnout blurred the final outcome and made a closer election. That was true. I blamed the increased voter turnout on 527 spending. That was probably wrong. So you get a semi-recant.

The final data on the election won’t be out for another month. The first reliable total of the San Francisco vote, including absentees and provisionals, showed a 20% increase in the total turnout over the 2000 presidential race. That is the same increase in turnout as in the national race. Since not one penny was spent in San Francisco, nor one finger raised to get out the vote, that suggests voter turnout efforts and the money spent by 527s was irrelevant. San Francisco/no effort vs. nationwide/big effort and money = same results.

Now we old codgers get to put in a word. Something few living people know about.

First you should know that the turnout for an election is about 30% of registered voters for a special election, 40% for a primary, 50% for a general election and 60% for a presidential election. Right off the bat that should tell you that voter interest is the only variable that affects voter turnout.

In 1963 I started a group in San Francisco called Research in Politics. It lasted five years and did a great deal of research. I started it after working a few years as an advance man, legislative aide and campaign manager.

I wanted to know how effective get-out-the–vote efforts were. I enlisted both political parties in a cooperative research endeavor. We focused on two special elections on the premise that special elections have the lowest turnout and would be most susceptible to door-to-door voter turnout efforts.

I designed a 25 precinct Latin Square test for a San Francisco Congressional special election in February 1964 for Democrat Phil Burton and the same design for a special election in March in Modesto for a Republican.

The 25 precincts varied from five with absolutely no voter turnout effort by either party to five precincts with full effort at turnout by both parties. There were two sets of five precincts with heavy effort by only one party and the last five with light effort by both parties.

Result: even with intense efforts (I personally worked hard knocking on doors in five precincts with four friends), absolutely no effect on voter turnout. None, nada. The data was overwhelming and statistically significant.

I reported the results to campaign managers all over the U.S. in a variety of training sessions. Everyone continued and still continues to do voter turnout for one reason: it's something to keep volunteers busy and make them feel useful.

I personally shouldn't have been surprised that the 527 voter turnout effort was probably insignificant.

Inner city work?

An amazing study was released today. A Boston group called Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, set up by Michael Porter of Harvard marketing fame, announced that jobs in inner cities pay about the same as other urban jobs. To add to the shocking report, the study found that in a national sample 77% of the people working in the inner city jobs commute to work. The inner city jobs had a wide range of skill levels from hospital orderly staff to engineers and other professionals.

This tells me two things. That the half century of efforts to create more employment in the inner city is meaningless. It hasn't reduced unemployment in the inner city. It endangers the people who go to the inner city jobs and clearly provides little work for the people who live there.

The people who are unemployed in the inner city are either unqualified for the jobs, don’t want to work or have other types of work that doesn’t get counted in employment data.

I know that the education offered at local community colleges and local state universities in San Francisco is doing little to train inner city dwellers for jobs. My friend Alex asks why people are being forced to read Marx, Adorno and Marcuse when they need job training.

I further know what the market tells me. Last year I bought stock in four profit-making, college level trade skill schools. I tripled my money. I still own two trade school stocks, CECO and COCO, and they are still going up.

Trade skill schools are booming because the demand is great and plenty of people know which skills count. The money wasted in community colleges and local state universities should go for scholarships at profit-making trade schools.

Conspiracy theory

I don’t want my readers to think I am anti-Arab based on an earlier blog.  I simply wanted to call attention to the matter of national character. 

We Americans have a distinct national character, and from the perspective of others we have some disgusting behavioral qualities.  Cultural relativism is a reality.

I have included a photo, on the right, of my son who just recently taught a martial arts class in the West Bank to Palestinians.  This photo was in Al Quds, the largest Palestinian daily newspaper. (My son is in the blue outfit in the center.)

I have mentioned to close friends a conspiracy theory that I have had for several years.  After the Oslo talks ended in September 2000, I read the many reports on the talks and looked at photos.  Several photos show Israeli delegates having a wonderful time with one particular Palestinian. 

When I was in Israel earlier this year I asked several Arabists about this Palestinian man in the Oslo photos who was having a great time with the Israelis.  I asked if he might be the Israelis favorite to succeed or replace Arafat.  The answer was always evasive; I was told that he is a charming man and very tough.  The man is Marwan Barghouti.

Could the Israelis have deliberately put Barghouti in prison to keep him safe until he could be elected Palestinian president, from prison?  I’m not suggesting that the trial against Barghouti was false or spurious.  He is a killer, and the sentence is appropriate.

Fortunately this (possibly real) conspiracy theory won’t get far among the Arab Street that fanatically believes in fantasy conspiracy theories.

Tenure part 2

(A continuation of an earlier blog.) Also, please note there is a good website that lists the main websites on tenure.

A story in today’s NY Times gives a good reason for keeping tenure.  The story describes the Federalist Convention that is going on in DC today. (A close friend of mine, Bob, just gave a talk at the convention.)  The Federalists are a conservative group of lawyers who now number 36,000.  The Federalists are powerful in government and they are particularly powerful on the bench.  They got started in 1981 in reaction to the blatant Lefty Fundamentalism of their law school professors.  Tenured professors no doubt.

So a good thing about tenure is the reaction it created in the form of the Federalists.

The most powerful traditional argument for tenure was meaningful in the early part of the 20th Century.  The argument was that intellectuals needed jobs and the academy was a good place to use their talents. Some of their ideas were considered "radical" in their day.  They were generally wimps and they needed job security.  Their nearly universal ideology was Marxist pacifism.  There were no market jobs for people with those anti-business ideas. They needed tenure.

That reason for tenure is gone. Today's new ideas are not ideological and not inherently pacifist and anti-business. 

There are plenty of jobs in the market place for intellectuals. To start with there is a list of think tanks in the U.S. with more than a thousand high-paying research jobs listed.

How to get rid of tenure?

Congress simply needs to set a date, hypothetically January 1, 2007, and state that anyone who receives tenure after that date is not eligible for any federal grant.  I would love to see the battle on campus.  Administrators and non-tenured faculty would wage a beautiful, vituporous battle to end tenure.

National character

This is a blog that will offend many people.  If you believe, as most Americans do, that all humans are basically alike, you will be offended.

International relations for many centuries have been predicated on the observation that each nation has its own national character.  Reading Herodotus one finds his descriptions of hundreds of peoples in the world reported to him in terms of national character.  All those peoples who have survived are still described in much the same ways (excluding some of the physical fantasies that Herodotus reports).

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, through the work of Franz Boaz and many other anthropologists and linguists, we have come to know the idea of culture as the contemporary version of national character.  Culture describes human character, behavior and worldviews that are deep, pervasive and largely unchanging.

For three decades I have spent considerable time in Japan and I can say unequivocally that I have never been able to get a Japanese to make a dishonest statement.  A Japanese might be evasive or not answer, but never would a Japanese make a dishonest statement.  The borders of the term Japanese are not known to me.  Is a third generation descendent of Japanese grandparents in San Paolo still unable to make a dishonest statement?  I don’t know.

This is preparation and prologue for a statement about the national character of Arabs.  Arabs have no idea what it means to lie.  Ask an Arab a question and the answer, if it can be tested for validity, will not be related to reality, except by chance.  The answer will be designed to save face or create the least friction between the person asking and the Arab answering. 

If the Arab can be shown to have made factually conflicting statements, more false statements will be used to cover the issue.  If this lying to cover up inconsistency doesn’t work, a conspiracy of Americans and Jews will be introduced as an explanation.  (50 years ago the conspiracy was blamed on the British.)

I personally have employed dozens of Arabs; they were good workers and some remain my friends.  But the reader can’t know my experience.  There are two public examples.  One, the leading Arab intellectual in America: Edward Said.  Said, a tenured professor at Columbia University, lied without hesitation in his autobiography about nearly every factual detail of his life. 

The other, the single best known Arab in the world, lied about everything, every day.  Two of his speeches are online without an honest statement in either of them (Arafat at Davos 2001, Ramalah, 2002), see for yourself.  Fortunately the man died yesterday.  But the fact that he always lied and his people never challenged his lies is the best evidence of my contumely about Arabs.  Arabs have no idea what a lie is.

What are the borders of the term Arab?  The term clearly excludes Turks, Persians and Ethiopians.  Does it include Kurds, third generation Arab Americans?  I don’t know.

End tenure

A friend who is a student at Hasting Law School and another student of linguistics at S.F. State University report that nearly all the faculty at both schools were visible and outspoken supporters of the Democratic candidate for president. (I forgot his name already.)

The linguistics part may not be surprising, since prominent linguists Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff are Lefty fanatics. (The KoKo gorilla people have named one of their primates Noam Chimpsky.)

This bad behavior by professors may seem  like a moral problem -- but it isn’t.  Teachers in Kindergarten through 12th grade know that they are not permitted to use their position of power as a teacher to promote personal political views.  University academics follow no such moral restraint.

The reason academics are such moral scofflaws is tenure.  Tenured professors live and teach leftyism as blatant evidence of their tenured immunity.  That leads other academics and academic wannabees who are seeking tenure to become moral scofflaws and preach leftyism themselves.

I plan to write a series of blogs on the reasons to get rid of tenure and outline a way to get rid of it.

This first blog is to point out that tenure has created a political monoculture among academics.  Political monoculture in universities is a direct proof of tenure’s failure to achieve its only goal: intellectual diversity.

As further proof of tenure’s failure, take a look at my list of public intellectuals in the column on the left.  The overwhelming majority of public intellectuals are not in academia.  What do we need tenure for?  Not to help thinkers be publicly creative.  Not to contribute important input to the public dialog. 

Tenure is a total waste.  Tenure is an indefensible waste.

It is time to get rid of tenure.  Tenure has of course been publicly abused.  Tenured Harvard professor  Cornel West, now tenured at Princeton, is a public anti-Semite.  Tenured professor at City College of New York, Leonard Jeffries, is both anti-Semitic and anti-White.  Both professors are blatant in flaunting their tenured immunity.

I could change my mind if I knew a few tenured professors who were fun and had a sense of humor.

Raccoon wars

The raccoons of San Francisco are a politically well-organized group. Our raccoons have gotten legislation on the books that says that when they are a nuisance and are captured in a trap they must be released within one mile of the point of capture. It takes them about 20 minutes to walk back.

About five years ago I built the outdoor fishpond shown on the right. The raccoons promptly ate all the fish. Thus began a long war and I am still losing.

First, I put in a subsurface screen with space for plants. The raccoons tore out the plants and reached under to eat all the fish.

Then I built the steel screen, painted black, around the plants. The raccoons reached under the wooden deck and ate all the fish.

You need the illustration on the right to understand the next steps. (A) Is the waterfall that runs during the day, with a built-in filter. (B) Is the aerator, which runs 24 hours a day.

I decided to electrify the pond. The transformer puts out 40 volts AC with one line into the water. Touch the (D) metal strip with your tail and reach into the water and get a shock. Not enough to hurt a human, but plenty to deter a raccoon.

The raccoons learned to avoid the (D) electric strip, tear out the plants and entice the fish into their mouths. Then I placed (C) an electrified grate on the top.

The last thing the raccoons did was to notice that the electricity was only on when a little red light in the (E) control box was on. They waited until the light went off and ate the fish.

The passing of daylight savings time gave me a clue to what the raccoons were up to; they went by sunlight and didn’t notice I had reset the clock.

For the time being the raccoons are staying away because the electricity is on until well after daybreak.

I still haven’t won the raccoon wars.

Dinner with Iman

There is a plastic container of hummus in the refrigerator this morning, the remains of our Middle Eastern dinner last night.

Iman is in her late 30s. She made dinner for me, my partner and a close friend. Last year Iman worked for the U.S. State Department in Baghdad. She will be returning soon. Her Arabic is perfect, having grown up in a Mediterranean Arab country.

Iman was on a team that spent four months visiting the sites of mass graves that were being opened up. She was recording the available information and interviewing the many people who came to the sites to look for family members. One site had 15,000 people buried alive in it.

Iman relates the story of a BBC crew with a haughty interviewer at a mass grave who tried to interview a frenzied woman who was looking for the remains of her six sons. Iman, who has a slight British accent, imitates the BBC interviewer who said in a slow heavy drawl: “I’m so sorry.”

Iman opened a Human Rights Office and recorded the descriptions of pain, suffering and torture of the people who came to her office. She couldn’t sleep at night. People who had their hands and legs cut off were common.

My prediction was wrong

Let me point out an observation about the election results: you can fly 3,000 miles from northern Idaho to south Florida and not cross a single county that went for Kerry.

I love to admit I’m wrong. That means I’m the kind of person who can learn --- and I do learn. My prediction of a landslide for Bush was wrong.

I’ve been forced to look at the voting data carefully and understand why I was wrong.

There is one incidental and relevant fact that I didn’t comment on. It turns out the popular majority is a poor predictor of the winner because the Electoral College has been changing over 14 years as our demographics change. We now know that a victor from the pure urban states needs greater than a 1% popular victory to win and a victor from the rural states needs a greater than 3% popular victory to win the Electoral College. Within that 4% point spread the Electoral College is a random outcome generator.

My predicted landslide did not happen. The reason relates to a totally new phenomenon that I didn’t take into consideration: 527s. Five-twenty-sevens are the new McCain-Feingold political vehicles that spent nearly half a billion dollars to get out the vote. The Republican 527s succeeded in getting 20% more votes for Bush in 2004 than in 2000 (over 9 million additional votes). The Democrat 527s did nearly as well.

What is the effect of 527s? The effect is to blur the outcome, to create a closer race without changing the popular voting results.

This blurring effect is visible when you watch a vote count where provisional votes are added to an existing vote total or where absentee votes are added to a vote total. Almost always the added votes merely make the resulting totals closer. There are rare exceptions, very rare.

The exceptions are interesting and to the point. The reason added votes don’t change an outcome is because the additional votes are from the same population as the regular voters and don’t have a significantly different viewpoint.

There are two exceptions that I know of. One is where an unusual last minute event effects the election results (the absentees weren't exposed to the opinion changing event) and the other is where the absentee voters have a uniquely different experience such as absentee military voters in Iraq or Americans in Israel voting absentee.

My Bush landslide prediction was wrong. I now understand that the underlying data was correct but it was washed out by the massive 20% extra voter turnout caused by the novel introduction of 527s that brought along a half a billion dollars of voter turnout money.

Mayor Newsom vs. commerce

Mayor Gavin Newsom lost big in the election yesterday.

Newsom was criticized in many national circles for his grandstanding in January that made gay marriage an issue that clearly generated many pro-Bush voters and got them out to vote.

Newsom watched as his bond and tax increase measures on the local ballot were defeated by narrow margins along with one appointment to the school board who was beaten. Newsom was blamed for the losses because of his picket line grandstanding two weeks ago.

Some people learn from their defeats. We’ll see.

That brings up a related issue. Why are the Baptist Moralists in the same party as the pro-commerce people?

The answer is to ask the reverse question. Why are the anti-commerce people in the wimpy anything-goes-party?

I think the question answers itself. Commerce is not moral therefore it will be most appropriate and comfortable in a political movement that seeks to impose a non-commercially focused moral system. Put another way, commerce has no interest in whether people are married, have children or anything about their sexual activities. So people who have strong moral interests in these matters will feel comfortable around commercial interests and vice versa. The Republican Party is a suitable home for both.

Conversely, Lefties have strong moral reasons for their anti-commerce values. Lefties have moral notions of equality that attack and devalue people who earn a lot of money, abjure successful corporations and value workers far more than capital, investment, entrepreneurialism and managerial genius. A perfect home in the Democratic Party.

S.F. Chronicle

The editor of the S.F. Chronicle, Phil Bronstein, may be leaving San Francisco soon. The problem is that the newspaper is bleeding red ink badly.

The S.F. Chronicle circulation is a fiction. Publicly reported circulation is 450,000; the reality is that that number is an exaggerated figure even for the Sunday edition. The weekday edition is closer to 150,000 and falling.

We have a free daily in San Francisco, the Examiner; in tabloid shape. My guess is that the free Examiner has the same circulation as the 50-cent a copy Chronicle; both have similar advertising revenue but the Examiner has a fraction of the production cost and almost no staff.

The end of the Chronicle has much to do with Craig’s List, the Internet exchange site that has taken away the Chronicle classified advertising.

The Chronicles demise also has to do with the unpleasant Lefty political bias that is in every story. Many people are getting fed up with blatant political bias these days. It seems mean spirited. Maybe New Yorkers can stomach a heavily biased newspaper, San Franciscans and Angelinos can’t.

Politically incorrect portfolio

I won’t deny it. I get pleasure out of tormenting Lefty Fundamentalists about their absurdities. I feel entitled to be a tormentor because my parents and I came from that failed Lefty ideological background. I have realized how wrong I was.

When Lefties bemoan some horrible corporation, I am usually inclined to buy stock in the corporation. I did that with Halliburton last year and my stock is up 70%. Thank you Lefties.

I wondered what would have happened if I had invested in all the companies Lefties consider evil.

I’ve put together a politically incorrect portfolio and checked its performance. My portfolio of evil companies is: Wal-Mart (WMT), Starbucks (SBUX), Citigroup ( C), Halliburton (HAL), Microsoft (MSFT) and McDonalds (MCD). Lefties just hate those companies. The corporate names grate on the Lefty teeth like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Starbucks, Halliburton and McDonalds have done well this year, the other three are a wash. Net result is that since the beginning of this year the Dow Jones Industrial Average is exactly where it was, no growth. My politically incorrect portfolio has grown 25%. I made one dollar for each four dollars I put in ten months ago. Pretty good.