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My partner and I were given a house gift by a friend who is working as a consultant in Russia, Nadja.

The most interesting, fascinating gift in many years. So interesting that I gave one as a house gift to my brother and his wife last summer.

The photo on the right is a breadbox. It comes from Siberia, you can get them online. It  keeps bread fresh for more than a week. I say “more than” because I have usually eaten the bread in a week and it is perfectly fresh every day.

The reason the bread, any bread, stays fresh seems to be that the box is a traditional solution; it is make of birch bark.

Disclosure: No one paid for this promotional piece. I just love the breadbox.

History of hate politics

I’ve been in politics since I was 15 years old. I was elected president of the Socialist Party club on my university campus in absentia (and never went to a meeting) and I organized and led a major student protest in 1958 at the University of Chicago. My political career covered the next forty years including being a campaign manager, presidential campaign advance man and legislative analyst. I’ve never stopped being a social activist.

I’m beginning to see a pattern that has been on the political scene since I first arrived. There are hate groups. Those are the best two words for it. There have probably always been hate groups.

The definition of a hate group is: the glue that binds members together is that the ideology (it is always ideological) is a cover for pure and simple personal venom.

These people join together because they have a surplus of personal hate and they find comfort with other people who share their emotion. Ideology is a cover.

The first hate groups I encountered were the anti-civil rights groups. Civil rights people I worked with were always considerate and decent. The opponents I faced, time and again, were vituperous and filled with hate. (I never saw hate as great as the mothers opposed to busing.) I met the same hate in the Black Panthers (much as I liked Huey Newton), the Black Muslims, the anti-porn feminists, the save-the-whale eco-freaks, the anti-Vietnam War resisters, and countless other groups.

Today the hatred is overflowing in the pro-Palestinian world, the anti-Iraq war crowd and the Michael Moore-Barbara Boxer-Howard Dean crowd. The San Francisco Archdiocese published a letter recently complaining about the malicious crowd that harassed the pro-life marchers in San Francisco. I believe it.

People have always told me to listen to right wing radio to find right wing hate. I can’t find it on my radio. I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and they both have a sense of humor, they find interesting quotes that they play on the air and neither shows any sign of venom. So where are the people on the right who are supposed to be so bad? Pat Buchanan is surely one, but he has no following. I’m sure right wing hate groups exist but I don’t encounter them, these days.

In any case, I’m beginning to see the political scene differently. There are policy issues, party issues and partisan battles in which people find identity. The new vista, for me, is the ideologies that cover up hate groups.

Disturbing

I find the following quote disturbing: “Apparently, pro-Israel posters have a short shelf life. About eight days, maximum. That’s how long most BlueStar PR posters and billboards, all of which celebrate Israel, survive at some local bus stops before vandals vent their fury upon them.”

That quote comes from the local Jewish Community newspaper referring to posters in the San Francisco Bay Area.

When you look at some of the posters, you will see why this quote is disturbing. The posters are innocuous, 100% true and graphically sweet.

Check out the posters and see why the S.F. Bay area is the hornets nest of hate.

Have your babies

A week or two back, David Brooks raised the issue of female childbearing misery. The best time to find a man and have children is early. The most successful career is a continuous one with long hours and intense commitment. To conflate, confuse and try to solve the conflict of these two realities is the source of much female misery in our time. (My daughters and female friends included.)

There is one policy that would help: allow women to postpone payments on college loans for each child until the child is five years old. That would allow many women to have children right out of college.

The other change is more significant and cannot be policy. It is a change in the habits of the heart. Women who are strong, ambitious and successful should start taking husbands who are not the main bread winner, but who are loyal, reliable and able to raise children.

This change in habits of the heart will bring a great deal of happiness to many women.

If you are over thirty, successful, self-supporting and content, except for wanting babies, then start looking for a man who meets your needs in dialog, sex and outlook. Add the qualities of loyalty, dependability and comfort with kids. These last three attributes are easy to check and be sure of … they are highly visible, always evident, and never in doubt. Marry the guy, right now, and have kids.

Statistical branching

Do I get to be grumpy on my own blog?

I studied statistics more than a half century ago, I taught it and I worked with numbers for dozens of years in my working life. That is the basis for my grump.

One particular statistical process was awesomely powerful and would make each of our lives better if it were used more often – but I rarely see it used. It is statistical branching for reduction of variance. It is easy to explain. 

Start with a survey questionnaire that has been applied to a group of people designed to match couples. A few years after the matching process, you take the group of questionnaires for couples who didn’t last more than a year and take a separate batch of questionnaires for couples who did last more than a year. What you are trying to find out is the set of questionnaire responses that separates the two groups.

The outcome will not be the crap you get in supermarket magazines, the ten attributes of happy couples. What you get would be clusters of attributes that occur in happy couples.

For example: couples that love dogs, focus on outdoor activities, like parties and love home cooked meals. Couples that love cats, like long walks, romantic movies, sports cars and late night TV. Those are clusters not top ten attributes. Those distinct clusters are much more like real humans.

If statistical branching for reduction of variance were used more often websites would be good at guessing what movies, books, and music we like --- not just websites that make the stupid recommendations we get now.

The math is easy. Variance is the arithmetic difference between two numbers, squared and subtracted. Take two numbers: 4 and 9. The difference is 5. Five squared is 25. 25-5 is 20 – a measure of variance. Two numbers 4 and 6. Two squared is 4 minus 2 is a measure of variance of 2. The process for reduction of variance is to take a whole pile of number combinations and get a sum of all the variance. Then split the pile of numbers into two groups and see if the sum of each group added together is less than the total variance number for the pile. This is done for every possibility, on a computer, and you get a result that looks like branches on a tree.

You follow your answers to the questionnaire out the branches of the tree and when you get to the end of the branch, you will find all the people on the same branch who are like you.

Three cheers for statistical branching for reduction of variance.

Another article in Commentary

This article, by David Gelernter, is so important it will be read by 50% of the graduates of the top fifty universities within five years.

Gelernter is continuing in the tradition of Robert Bellah who introduced the idea of civil religion in America. For Bellah, George Washington became Moses and Lincoln became Jesus. (Bellah: Beyond Belief)

Gelernter says Americanism is a direct lineal descendent of Puritanism. It is a religion of Judeo-Christian origins that has grown to incorporate the American values of democracy, equality, merit and commerce.

Gelernter goes so far as to say that Americanism, the religion, considers Americans the almost chosen people and America the new Israel.

You can hear the Bush 2005 Inaugural in your mind as you read the article.

Ants in the winter

We get ants all over everything in the house, in the rainy season.

I don’t like to kill ants. They are fascinating to watch.

My partner wants the kitchen and the bathroom ant free.

The solution is in the photo to the right. I put sugar water in a small bowl (one cup of water to one teaspoon of white sugar brought to a boil) and the ants go to the sugar water and nowhere else. In the photo they are lined up around the sugar water shoulder to shoulder. The dish is the size of my palm, there are about 150 ants drinking.

Great article

Great article in the January Commentary by Joshua Muravchik on the 2004 presidential campaign. I read the article because I liked his article on the emerging triumph of democracy in yesterday’s the Wall Street Journal (1/25). He is emerging as a public intellectual.

I miss the Teddy White series on the Making of The President from 1960 to 1980. I loved his beautifully written, politics-loving, birds-eye view of the campaigns. Murvachik comes as close as anyone since Teddy.

The interesting point for my readers is a new insight into the animosity that we all felt. The Bush hate was open and palpable. The reaction of the pro-Bush people (me included) was hard to describe. The issue is evident in Muravchik’s polling data. The Bush voters particularly liked the candidate; overwhelmingly voted for him because they liked him personally as honest and sincere.

That means the Bush supporters were offended by the hate Bush campaign. The Bush supporters had no antagonism toward Kerry (except for the Viet Nam vets), they saw the Democrats and Kerry as mean spirited, attacking Bush at a personal level.

 

Gates fails

Today’s Wall Street Journal had the story on the Gates Foundation gift of $650 million in 1999 to a campaign for childhood inoculation.

I have long thought this was a good piece of charitable work. I was wrong.

It looks like the Gates money was ineffective. Sadly ineffective.

In the past five years the program has given 42 million shots for hep B and 12 million shots for childhood related diseases. That is pathetic.

That amount of money should have delivered 500 million shots if done with political skill and effective cooperation with local governments and NGOs. Most governments have every reason to provide inoculation and few reasons not to. The Gates people must have stepped on the wrong toes, gotten a bad reputation and done a few other things wrong.

Some things went badly amiss. Clearly the Gates people don’t know what they are doing. Even worse than not knowing what they are doing, they’ve conned Gates into giving the same amount again for an extension of the same project.

San Francisco street life

The photo on the top right is the section of Safeway on Market at Dolores that usually holds a few hundred shopping carts. The area was empty the other morning except for the one cart I found outside. I talked to the manager and got the story. She had gotten 400 new carts before Thanksgiving and another 100 at Christmas. They are stolen by the so called “homeless.” I asked if that meant a loss of 200 carts per month. She said “yes.”

The photo on the bottom right is a pile of throw-aways on the street. The arrow points to an accordion that has been thrown out. A friend of mine on the upper Westside of New York has a piece of art that says “Use an accordion, go to jail.” Blue cities versus Lawrence Welk.

I had a piano in my house for ten years and I had many parties. The piano was only played once, at a party, in that ten-year period. The main place that pianos are still sold in the U. S. is Miami.

Mozilla on both

I now have Firefox and Thunderbird on both my MACs and my PC. Firefox is the browser and Thunderbird is the email program. They are all working, they installed easily and they are small programs by contemporary standards. Both programs picked up my old lists and settings perfectly.

I have kept the MACs because they are very stable and didn’t get viruses even before Mozilla.

I have used Mozilla for two months. It seems to protect the PC from viruses.

Make money

A friend asked: “Hey, I have a question for you - if you wanted to make money just for the sake of making money in the fairly short term (5-10 years), what would you choose: investing in stocks, buying real estate, starting a business, investing in other people's businesses, doing work independently that pays well (consulting hourly), getting a job that pays really well or other?”

My answer is quite different from other people because I have never had an interest in making money. I’ve just consulted on the subject and observed closely.

I have said many times: most people with talent and competence have a choice between (a) doing something socially important and (b) making scads of money. These choices are mutually exclusive. Since the mutually exclusive part is not understood, most people mix up the two and muddle along at both.

Making scads of money, short or long term, is a matter of being with the right people. You all know about Bill Gates, but for every Bill Gates there are three Paul Allens. The loyal buddies who provided important balance, were intensely devoted and competent. These buddies are behind nearly every successful money mogul. You may not be the Bill Gates but you can be the Paul Allen if you align yourself with the right people and make a contribution.

The kind of people you are looking for as associates are ambitious, money oriented, have made money since they were 18 years old and who like you. Work together. That is the secret of making scads of money. It can happen in any field, I have countless examples, including old fields like the railroad industry.

California lost a senator

I suggested, to a friend in D.C., that California only has one senator for the next six years. Barbara Boxer seems to have earned herself pariah status with her Ohio recount and her snarling personal attack on our Secretary of State (I saw it on C-Span). The only Calfiornia senator left is Diane Feinstein.

My friend disabused me. Boxer has been totally ineffective for the past six years with her ideological mean spiritedness. What, he says, is true now is that when she writes a letter to a department, they won’t even bother to read it much less answer.

Barbara Boxer has no reason to get up in the morning. The largest state in the nation is the loser.

Terrorist capitol of U.S.

I’ve complained that the San Francisco Bay Area is the capital of anti-Semitism in the U.S. largely because lefty fundamentalists have been joining the lefty radicals in supporting Arab underdogs.

Now the radical groups have become outright supporters of terrorism. I’m not kidding you. Take a look at Naomi Ragen’s report and photo’s.

The big problem that I worry about is that FBI personnel don’t like living in the Bay Area and they will have trouble doing undercover work here. The FBI will be as incompetent these days as they were in the communist era --- no infiltration, the FBI just sent the communists membership dues so the FBI could be on the newsletter lists.

One World Café

Denise Cerreta opened a unique restaurant in Salt Lake City.  No menu, no prices and no phone number, only donations. It is called the One World Café. It was reviewed in many places but the Utah City Guide has one review that is representative, done when the restaurant was one year old. It is now 18 months old. (Photo of the awkward entrance on right)

The food I ate was excellent. Being a businessman I had to see it as a business. There are roughly fifty seats in seven rooms that used to be massage and acupuncture rooms. The restaurant is next door to a massage college. The lunch crowd, when I was there on a Tuesday at 1:30 was nearly full, young, tattoos, woolen caps, piercings and belly buttons on display. Meals are served from 8am to 8:30pm. A small group comes to breakfast and a small group comes back at 5pm

The kitchen is not a kitchen. There were two standard refrigerators, three steam tables, two hot pots, one pizza oven and a stainless sink for washing the pots and dishes. Six employees all day.

I talked to Denise. Asked if she knew about a predecessor in 1975 San Francisco, Communion Restaurant, led by an Indian guru, with his followers as staff; she said “no.” Communion, on Folsom, South of Market, about 6th had no menu, no prices, only donations. It lasted a year, served good Indian food --- the guru went back to India. I wrote about it in the Briarpatch Review. The restaurant was a member of the Briarpatch but never sought business advice.

Denise is in business to teach people about food and generosity. She pays wages, gives leftovers to homeless, feeds anyone free and believes that she has two appealing business ideas. (1) Her regulars come often because the food changes so much and (2) people come all day to eat because they can eat the quantity they want and pay what they want.

I told Denise that I estimated her daily flow between 300-400 people based on what I saw. In the 40 minutes I was there, more than 70 people came through. She said “Oh my goodness, I hope it isn’t that high. My chef estimates it at 130 people a day which makes the donations reasonable.”

Denise dear, don't count on human good will, get your numbers straight before you try to expand. I could well be wrong, but I'm usually right about numbers. Numbers and bookkeeping are the language of commerce.

Grand Old nepotism

The New York Times, the Grand Old Lady, is in trouble.

Compared to other dailies the NYTimes circulation is strong, not declining.  But compared to other nationals, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, it is substantially falling behind. Half of the NYTimes circulation is national. The more national gains the more local circulation looses.

I’ll ignore the wrong explanations and get right to the right one: nepotism.  “Junior”, as the CEO of the NYTimes, is properly called, is the fourth generation of his family running the business.  His cousin is in charge of the Times owned Herald Trib in Europe.

This is not the only nepotism in a major U.S. corporation.  One big flop happened at Motorola where the third generation finally got booted upstairs and the company was saved.  At Ford the fourth generation is still mucking around and could bring disaster.  Fidelity is in the third or fourth generation (depending on your definition of grandpa’s role) and I expect no growth.  Fidelity is much like a big bank, inertia will carry it a long way in spite of weak management.

“Junior” the CEO of the NYTimes made the right decision to go national and could make the wrong decision to charge for Internet access unless he does it in a unique and brilliant way. Junior has dismissed criticism of the Times coverage being too liberal and too mean spirited as the function of being an “urban” newspaper. 

No Junior, look at your two competitors.  When you look at the front page of the WSJ or the USA you don’t cringe and say: “the world is going to hell in a hand basket.”  That is what the NYTimes conveys every day.  The daily cringe factor has nothing to do with urban anything and nothing to do with good reporting.  It has to do with the core of lefty bias: pessimism, misery and hopeless ideas of a discarded past.

Junior, turn the paper over to managers based on merit, not genes, and let them create a great corporation.

Meritocracy redux

The NBER, an organization that has been respected for its economic research for more than 2/3^rds of a century, since its founding by one of my heroes, Wesley Mitchell, released a report that is final proof of the meritocratic movement in the United States in the last quarter of the 20^th Century. Here is an exerpt from Slate:

Between 1980 and 2001, the percentage of top executives whose undergraduate degrees came from Ivy League schools fell by nearly a third from 14 percent to 10 percent. Others who paid through the nose for their sheepskins also lost ground. The percentage of top execs who attended private non-Ivy schools (Williams College, Notre Dame, Stanford, etc.) fell from 54 percent in 1980 to 42 percent in 2001. Meanwhile, the proportion of those who attended public universities soared from 32 percent to 48 percent. A similar dynamic was seen in graduate degrees as well: far fewer on a percentage basis from Ivy League schools and far more on a percentage basis from public universities.

If that doesn’t put a nail in the coffin of residual Marxist belief in: an American ruling class, only brain surgery could get rid of it.

A quote from the abstract on the NBER website adds an interesting touch.

Interestingly, the most stable firms the 26 that were in the Fortune 100 in both periods had just as much lifetime employment among executives in 2001 as in 1980.

By my personal count, of the 26 that the NBER found stable on the Fortune 100 list, I would remove six that are no longer in the same business as a result of mergers and buy-outs. That means that in a 20-year period, 80% of the top corporations in America changed or were replaced. That volitility didn't make executives more or less secure in their jobs.

That should put a second nail in the coffin of residual Marxist belief that: there is a dominant monopoly component to American business.

The last point in the NBER report concerns the rapid rise of women in the Fortune 100 corporations. Fortunately I only had one woman friend who believed in the glass ceiling, so I see no need to cite that part of the report.

America is the most meritocratic society in human history. If you haven't gotten what you believe you deserve, what other country could you go to, and who can you blame?

Commerce meritocracy and diversity

I just checked Google to see if my headline is read.  The answer is no. So I have to put it in the body of text:

Gods of Commerce

I love commerce. Commerce and technology define the "modern world." Both thrive on meritocracy, diversity and openness.

Is that statement clear?

Gods of Commerce is an allusion to the gods of traditional societies who’s worldview we call animistic religion.  Traditional societies commonly have a world view that: rare occurrences, powerful forces (storms, lightning) and unique geographic locations have magical power.  Monotheists (us) tend to call the magical sources of traditional societies gods. 

Japan is a traditional society and we call Shintoism animistic with the word kami translated into English as god.

If there ever were two powerful forces on the planet, commerce and technology take the prize.  Probably more powerful than anything ever known to man.  I personally view commerce as the vehicle on which technology rides so I focus on the vehicle.  The gods of commerce.

It isn’t much in doubt that a technologist, an engineer, wants to work with other people who are chosen on merit, not family, and merit automatically requires diversity because technical skills are not correlated with skin color nor hair style.

 

Openness is the fundamental quality of technology.  Build a bridge without the available knowledge of generations of engineers and you fail.  Books, tables, calculations, equations are all open --- technology is grounded in openness.

The same is true for commerce, but most people haven’t had enough experience with thinking about commerce to know that.

Two cold days

Francis Fukuyama tells about a significant event that I never heard about.

In 2003, the United States was insisting on six-party talks with North Korea.  We succeeded in getting the talks arranged because China forced North Korea to accept the six-party terms. China cut off the North Korean power supplies for two days.

It looks like the North Korean nuclear issue is really the China issue. China is less concerned about nukes and more concerned about maintaining stability in North Korea. Stability triumphs over everything.

Trouble is, the Japanese elite is using the North Korean nukes as a reason for nuclear arming of Japan. The Diet already has close to a majority vote in favor of nukes. China may be playing this game wrong. A nuclear Japan is in nobody’s interest.

Exaggeration or lie?

Some of my friends wonder if I am prejudiced against Arab culture when I suggest that it is a culture of paranoia and pervasive deceit. Decide for yourself.

In 1997 the Palestinian Authority released a census and projection of Palestinian population that put the 1996 population at 3.83 million and projected the Palestinian population to far exceed the population of Israel by 2020 (3 Arabs for every 2 Jews).

If the Israeli authorities checked the figures they didn’t publicly question them. The U.N. and nearly all the vocal nations in the world spend inordinate time attacking Israel; there was no need to provoke new anti-Semitic criticism over an academic discussion of the flawed Arab population data.

This week the correct data was released.

Turns out the 3.83 million Palestinians was really 2.42 million Palestinians. Big difference. The projections to 2020 were even worse. The ratio of Jews to Arabs will be about the same in 2020, 3 Jews for every 2 Arabs west of the Jordan River. The erroneous projection was based on a 4.5 point reproduction rate, which was actually 2.7 at the time and declining.

Most important to me, father of “Social Sorting Theory,” is that the number of people leaving the West Bank and Gaza has been exceeding the number of people moving into the West Bank and Gaza for several decades (except for the one year when the PLO arrived in 1994).

Social Sorting Theory says that all populations and institutions take on the character of the people attracted to come in and the people flowing out. I personally know many people who went to the Palestinian Territories to invest and start businesses in the early 1990’s during the Oslo negotiations. They all left after a short period of time, finding corruption and barbarian tribal vendettas impossible to live with.

The consequence of net population outflow (since 1947) is that all the good people have left and continue leaving in each generation and the people who remain are the subservient, the corrupt overlords and the social monsters.

That is Palestine today. The Palestinians who you know are not representative of the people left behind. There is no future for the people who stayed behind and no hope for them.

Trade deficit --- is it bad?

The Salt Lake Tribune has a business headline: “Trade ‘chasm’ gets deeper.”

Sounds pretty grim.

It could also read “Americans con foreigners to buy more.” 

The relationship between capital investment in the U.S., the trade deficit and the value of the dollar is: CI/TD=$. Read this like the electrical formula: watts/amps=volts.

If the dollar is stable then foreigners can only increase the trade deficit by investing more capital in the U.S. If the dollar is rising then it is because foreigners are increasing their capital investment or the trade deficit is falling and vice versa. A falling dollar means declining investment or growing trade deficit. Simple. 

Right now the dollar has stopped falling, it is stable, so that means the trade deficit rise is being offset by an increase in capital investment. Expect the U.S. bond market to show strength with bond interest rates falling or the stock market rising or both.

The only exception to my formula is that a country can have inflation, caused by an extreme change in the flow of funds or by wrong-headed monetary policy; neither of which are occurring currently.

 

No more Clark Kent

We have just passed a major milestone in human history.

Humans, as a social animal, have a mechanism for societal learning that we know little about. Humans do learn. We learned to plant seeds and organize ourselves to create and maintain irrigation systems. Those of us who learned this have overwhelmed those who didn’t by shear increase in our numbers.

We learned to build societies that could create and use technology and we have left those humans who didn’t learn it to live in remote and difficult environments. Creating technology requires a belief in “improvement, continual improvement.”

The most significant societal lessons we have learned have been in the past five hundred years in coping with commerce. We first learned that societies following mercantilist economic policies (think of Spain seeking and hording gold), could not keep up with societies that favored trade.

We finally learned in the 1930s that using gold as the standard for currency, which had been done for a millennium, was a bad policy.

We learned in the 1990’s, after a century of geometric population growth, that Thomas Malthus was wrong. Humans will not always consume more natural resources than we can discover and create.

Most recently, with the failure of the Soviet Union and the conversion of China to market policies, we learned the lesson of the whole 20^th Century: that businesses thrive when run by businesspeople and stagnate when run by bureaucrats. Societies that gave responsibility for creating and running businesses to business people have become physically healthier, militarily stronger and the envy of other societies.

This 20^th Century lesson is what I refer to in the first sentence as: “a major milestone in human history.” Think of business as an element in the way a society is organized. What we have learned, with an eighty-year battle that began in Russia in 1917 to create Communism and in 1933 to create Fascism, is that bureaucrats cannot successfully run businesses for long.

I use the metaphor of Superman and Clark Kent. Commerce is Superman, nearly indestructible and able to accomplish super human feats such as creating a middle class and economic abundance. Clark Kent is the bureaucrat who can do little or nothing in his gray suit. The lesson of the 20^th Century was to let Superman take off his Clark Kent identity and be proud of who he is.

Joined the club

In the recent Business Week, I was disappointed to read Laura D’Andrea Tyson’s article on Social Security. Laura has joined the Political Hack’s Club. The PHC has Paul Krugman as chairman. Krugman will write anything his upper Westside Lefty fundamentalists ask him to write. I think of Krugman (whom I used to respect) as Michael Moore with an economists’ brain.

Laura argues, in Business Week, against the Private Social Security idea on the basis that raising the payroll tax by 2% and fiddling with the index calculation would eliminate the problem. Duh? We know that, and we reject a tax increase, the 1950 solution to any problem.

She says nothing about the main reason for the new Social Security proposal, to create more savings and stimulate economic growth. Laura, you should be ashamed. You were part of the 1990’s Democratic attack on Social Security that convinced everyone under 35 that the system would be bankrupt for them. Leave the PHC and discuss the issue of private savings and economic growth.

Bought the book

I read a Jared Diamond commentary on Michael Crichton’s new book State of Fear. I’ve read half a dozen reviews of the book so I know it is based on Crichton’s lecture three years ago at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club about the false hysteria around global warming.

Crichton is an excellent writer and a good scientific mind but not good enough for me to buy his new book. On the other hand I hold Jared Diamond in complete contempt as I explained after reading his Guns, Germs and Steel book last Spring. When I read the Diamond diatribe in a recent Salon issue, in which Diamond acts like a five-year old and says he (Diamond) must be more authoritative because he has sold more copies of a single book than Crichton … I had to run out and buy the Crichton book.

Original intent

I’m in Salt Lake City with my daughter and granddaughters this week.  The subject of the 1950s and drinking came up.  I was there.  I was a teetotaler and I drank a martini for lunch up until 1970.  My business and corporate companions usually drank two martinis for lunch and had two to three more after work.  Social life was centered around “cocktail parties.”  By today’s standards, nearly everyone in America was an alcoholic.

What brings this up is the Andrew Sullivan article in TNR about C.A. Tripp’s book on Abe Lincoln.  The question the book raises is: how homosexual was Abe?  Men regularly slept with each other and wrote loving letters to each other. Navy ships often had bunks for two men.

The problem is that you can’t make useful judgments across time. Certainly not about subjects that are radically different.

We have a major problem with popular ignorance on this subject.  The Supreme Court and many lower courts have sitting judges who believe in “Original Intent.”  Original intent is the notion that we can try to understand the thinking and motivation of the original writers of a legal document.  In most cases these judges are talking about our Constitution and its Amendments. 

Our founding fathers, at the Constitutional Convention took five liquor breaks every day.  The first break was for rum at 9AM.  Considering the common pains of adult men in 1780, from horrible toothaches, headaches, earaches, infections, adult effects of childhood diseases and common problems like club-foot, they had to drink steadily.  So how do we, today, look at the original intent of these boozed up snooker-heads?

I would consider “original intent” judges to be morally reasonable and intellectually honest if they came to work every day and took five shots of liquor while they do their job. What does the Fifth Amendment look like at 2 in the afternoon after three shots of gin?  There was no Starbucks espresso, Americans drank tea.

California coast

The Oregon Coast is filled with signs telling people to go directly inland and head for higher ground when they feel an earthquake. The signs mention tsunamis as the reason and point 90 degrees to “inland.”

Are we Californians negligent for not having these signs everywhere on our coasts?  Looks to me like we are negligent and the same goes for FEMA regarding all the U.S. Coastline.

This is a good point to remind my readers that we live in the best time in human history. We, meaning American adults.  Not only is the medical care good enough to reduce a wide range of major and trivial physical suffering, but wars with millions of lives lost, are a thing of the past.  We have a tsunami warning system in the Pacific that works. Of course, if you hate George Bush you can’t appreciate modern life.

Not science

I cancelled my subscription to Science Magazine about fifteen years ago. Science is the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I was sick and tired of the good-old-boys-club mentality that was reflected in the magazine’s low level of morality and high level of sentimentality and romanticism.

We have an example of the latter two in the recent issue of Science that gave the Best Science in 2004 to the NASA rover teams for discovering water on Mars. Water on Mars? Yes, it was there three and a half billion years ago.

The Mars rovers were a great technological achievement, but the project is a minor contribution to science. It doesn’t evoke new questions or destroy existing theories. It is minor science.

However, the Mars water discoveries are great emotional consolation for the sentimental and romantic branches of science. Scientists who worry that humans are alone in the universe now can have more hope of finding them. Scientists who want recognition and appreciation for their lifetime of work now have hope that some bacteria have evolved into humans and will send them Intergalactic Nobel Prizes.

Scientists who don’t know the difference between quantum physics and metaphysics can cite water on Mars as a great intellectual bridge to understanding human biological history.

The good-old-boys club of Science, just like the commradarie that comes from thinking there are other human beings somewhere in the universe who appreciate them.

The fact that nearly all known species (99.99%) are able to communicate with their own species doesn’t seem to create much interest among human scientists for reliable communications with other species. The main research on other species is on primates and cetaceans. Cetaceans, so they can work on underwater mines.

Science clearly doesn’t expect other species to teach us much.  Humans have felt the same way about other societies for a long time.  If we consider them inferior to us we have no use for them.

A cute boycott

My Lefty friends are inundating me with email that tells me not to spend “one dime” on inauguration day, Thursday the 20th.

Unfortunately, several of the boycott emails included the standard pre-election hate rap. The hate movement clearly isn’t going away, ever.

If the hate movement hadn’t described itself as such, I would be more reluctant to use the term hate movement.

The cute boycott is what I want to use to call attention to the reality of our lives.

I spend 94% of my total income with credit cards, electronic transfers and a several dozen checks a year. Since the early 1970’s this is a drastic change. Back then, 3% of transactions were on credit cards and the average person wrote 240 checks a year. Very little electronic funds transfer existed for ordinary Americans.

I now spend 3% of my income in cash in the U.S. and 3% in Tokyo and overseas, where credit cards are less widely accepted.

That means that 94% of my total income travels by check and electronic data 260 days a year.

So on January 20th when I am supposed to be boycotting spending, I will still be spending one-third of 1% of my annual income in checks and electronic data transfers. That one third of 1% is roughly twenty times what I would ordinarily spend in cash on any one day.

The money I have most control over is the cash I spend, one twentieth of the money I spend in any one day; the rest is moving merrily along the electronic money highway without any supervision from me, debiting my checking account and debiting my credit card account.

If I am in anyway representative of American spenders, and I know that I am fairly close to the norm, then the total spending on Thursday the 20th, if half of all Americans joined the boycott, would drop by $25 million.

Considering that total American spending on Thursday January 20th will be $30 billion, it is hard to imagine that anyone could notice the boycott even if they tried very hard.

If Lefties could actually become simple livers then the boycott would turn into a real decline in consumer spending. Otherwise, the reality is that Lefties will eat just as much and buy just as much; only they will spread their spending over a few days rather than during the one day boycott.

Ineffectiveness creates cuteness in kittens and boycotts.

Science?

This week’s Annals of Internal Medicine reports few or no reliable studies on weight loss. The one reliable study by Weight Watchers shows modest losses over six months, usually regained.

I’ve quoted my oldest daughter in earlier blogs, that you can’t lose weight so better not put it on in the first place.

I’ve never seen a half way decent weight loss study. How can a society as large and supposedly scientific as ours go on so long with only a single reliable study?

I wish Steven J. Gould were still alive so I wouldn’t have to keep making these points about science in the public media.

Gould always started his essays with some obscure fact and a description of the context of that fact. I just go for the jugular.

The article that raised my ire was Even Einstein Had His Off Days By SIMON SINGH in the NYTimes last Sunday. Singh tells us that Einstein was a genius but he wasn’t always right. Einstein firmly believed in a steady state universe. When scientific theory, later in Einstein’s life, got a consensus on the big bang theory, Einstein reluctantly admitted he had been wrong. So Einstein became a humble genius.

I’m not kidding you. The New York Times.

What has genius, right and wrong and humility got to do with science? Singh clearly believes there is an absolute reality and genius is about finding it.

Mr. Singh, science is premised on the absence of a reality. Only the testable world exists and all tests are susceptible to rejection in the long term. The big bang theory could well have been disproved three months ago for all we know. It has no inherent truth; it just explains a great deal of data and is excellent for making predictions.

The most popular universe theory these days is multi-dimensional string theory and the big bang almost disappears in string theory.

I wish Steven and his Harvard chair were here to ridicule the New York Times for publishing that article.

On the otherhand, many scientists may think like Singh, that science is about genius discovering reality. Dozens of Nobel winners had the arrogance to sign newspaper ads telling Americans that John Kerry was the best candidate for president.

Freest country?

Every once and awhile we get a list of the economically freest countries from a rightwing think tank. We had one this week that does the usual: rank Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong at the top.

What ideological nonsense. I have probably consulted with more start-up small businesses than any other living human. I have consulted in many countries. No place, except Israel comes close to the United States as a good place to start a business.

Why? Because real, new and innovative businesses always start outside the law. To get started you need a society that has relatively weak law enforcement. That describes the U.S., that is particularly true for large cities.

Real businesses start out without records, without a license, without paying taxes and with no OSHA inspections. As they grow they become legit.

Three examples: the first tofu machines (from Japan) in the U.S. couldn’t be licensed by local health agencies because they had never seen them before. The tofu business in the U.S. started in garages and ghettoes as outlaws.

Mrs. Fields cookies started as places where stoned dopers went for chocolate chip cookies and fudge. Little shops and apartments in “bad” neighborhoods.

The founders of Apple computers started out making and selling blue and black boxes, illegal hand assembled electronic devices that cheated the phone companies.



The metaphor of new businesses is the garage start-up. Rightly so.

Give me a democratic country that loves business, has plenty of “bad” neighborhoods, plenty of social outcasts and weak law enforcement and I’ll show you the place to start a business.

I-5 metaphor

Arthur Laffer had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal early this week. I would give you the date but the WSJ online is always missing something.

Laffer did a good job of explaining the trade deficit and the recent decline of the dollar. He got one thing wrong. He gives the Fed credit for keeping inflation near zero.

Wrong Arthur. The Fed doesn’t control inflation, never did. It can only make inflation worse. Look at our stagflation during the time 1976-83 that Japan had none. Our Fed tried to control it. Japan just deflated the yen and had no inflation.

Arthur used a metaphor I love. Referring to investments in third world markets as being as risky as crossing the I-5 drunk and blindfolded at rush hour.

The I-5 is a six to eight lane freeway that runs the length of California with heavy traffic and trucks going 65-80 mph. You can’t cross it on foot at any time, sober or not. The metaphor stands alone as “crossing the I-5 on foot”.